h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... or "Why I think Searle is wrong" to be a bit more humble.

Would you accept that a suitably programmed computer with a sufficiently lifelike robot, could (in theory), pass a perfectly ordinary life without anyone ever realising that it was a robot (a sort of high-tech Turing test)? (Disregarding the obvious technical issues). If so, then you'd agree that the only thing Searle's argument shows is that the computer doesn't have "qualia", or in other words there isn't anything which it's like to be a computer (to borrow a phrase from Chalmers). But it doesn't even show that! Searle's argument is not a proof in the sense that I'd accept (I'm a mathematician), it is a sort of vague piece of rhetoric at best. All it shows is that an individual part of a complex system doesn't understand what the system understands, which isn't at all surprising! Does your brain itself understand what "you" understand? In what sense does it understand it? Etc.

If you don't think the aforementioned robot could work, what exactly in Searle's argument makes you think that?

You're exactly right. I read a brilliant exposition by Hofstadter in Le Ton Beau de Marot on the subject, and here is his argument. Searle tempts you into a logical fallacy: you map the linguistic aspects of your consciousness onto the human in the system, while the linguistic aspect of your consciousness is actually the entire system.

If that isn't enough, consider that the list of symbols would have to be incredibly long, if not infinite, and the time it would take to process those symbols in human work-hours would probably be so much greater than a human life span that the outsiders would have to conclude that the person wasn't any sort of native speaker.

I think that this entry should be a little more balanced: Searle & Dennett have been acting like children towards each other and towards their professional colleagues in this debate, and that fact and both the hard AI/soft AI points of view need to be presented. I think Hofstadter makes an excellent source for balance . . .

Kathy

Indeed, Hofstadter states the logical fallacy much more clearly than me (which is why he's paid the big bucks and I'm not ). I agree with you that Searle & Dennett have been acting like children, in fact the whole consciousness community is being pretty childish, it's probably partly because it gives them lots of publicity if they slag each other off which makes their books sell better. The evolutionists are doing the same thing. Hardly professional academic behaviour. I haven't read much on this debate for a while (mostly because of the childish behaviour you mentioned). I bought a book by Chalmers recently which you might find interesting though, and the beginning of an article by Noam Chomsky (entitled Language as a Natural Object) is also very interesting.

One of my friends (see the link to Ina C. Roy on my homepage) had Searle as her dissertation advisor for a year, and his behavior is similar towards his graduate students. She also got away with telling Dennett he was an idiot (he'd said something to deserve it) because he ignored her as a female junior faculty member (this is a woman with a PhD & an MD, one of 8 people in the world to have that distinction!)

Kathy