Comment by fortran_user

Searle seemed to reject the Chinese Room as mis-framed, with the his point better summarized as, he wrote, 'syntax does not create semantics': a purely 'syntactic' computer, limited to 'mechanical' symbol manipulation, does not 'understand' without assignments of linguistic roles to the syntax. He continued that with 'physics doesn't create syntax', meaning that even syntactic roles require a normative interpretation for what counts as what (discrete signs, valid composite signs, errors). That finally ensues, in his book The Construction of Social Reality, in computation being 'observer relative', along with the CR being a poor starting point: " …the really deep problem is that syntax is essentially an observer-relative notion…..For the purposes of the original [Chinese Room] argument I was simply assuming that the syntactical characterization of the computer was unproblematic. But that is a mistake. There is no way you could discover that something is intrinsically a digital computer because the characterization of it as a digital computer is always relative to an observer who assigns a syntactical interpretation to the purely physical features of the system." (Philosophy in a New Century p. 94). Unfortunately Searle didn't, or couldn't, elaborate on 'the really deep problem', and this final perspective on observer-relativity is missed by many readers. As observer-relative, computation would appear to be one of Searle's social realities, but he doesn't ever say that, it's a bridge too far. Finally, 'consciousness' per se is also not the focus, it's more about intentionality and the interdependence of syntax with semantics/meaning. Intentionality is a kind of consciousness; they are not identical.