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Feser's blog post about his paper, and some interesting comments: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/05/aristotle-searle-and-computation-in.html http://edwar

Feser's blog post about his paper, and some interesting comments: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/05/aristotle-searle-and-computation-in.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/05/aristotle-searle-and...

SilasX 10y ago
Don't think it's going to be of much interest to HN readers: >Yet, a powerful objection has been raised by John Searle, who argues that computational features are observer-relative, rather than intrinsic to natural processes. If Searle is right, then computation is not a natural kind, but rather a kind of human artifact, and is therefore unavailable for purposes of scientific explanation. >In this paper, I argue that Searle’s objection has not been, and cannot be, successfully rebutted by his naturalist critics. Computation inaccessible to science? Searle being correct about computation? Waterfalls play chess, as viewed by the right observers?
- cgio 10y ago
  Do you refute Searle by just asking? Waterfalls play chess regardless the observer? Do my 4 apples compute their sum just by virtue of being 4?
  - eggy 10y ago
    The quote made by a poster referencing another party's paper on Searle about being not natural, an artifact of the observer, raises some cautions to me even if I get the drift. I think man is part of nature, is nature, and therefore arguments couched from the 'supernatural' perspective are faulty from the get go. Take the hexagonal pattern of honeycombs. Nobody really knows yet how bees actually pull it off. There are hypotheses about the pheromone or chemical trail fading, and circle-walking they carry out with the hexagaonal shape being an emergent property. The hexagonal shape also happens to be one of the 'Close Packing' methods, HCP, or Hexagonal Close Packing. I am re-reading Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe by Andrew Ilachinski published in 2001. I am on the chapter about possibly defining a new physics, "Information Physics", section 12.4 to be exact. Paraphrasing a bit, the term 'primordial information', or the notion that information exists independently of the semantics used to ascribe meaning to it. That "all observables found in nature are essentially 'data structures' that the universe uses to encode information with." It goes on to remark that all computations are inherently physical processes (slide rule, electrons in computers) and that information is possibly more than just a concept, but one of the fundamental units woven into the very fabric of the universe. I have become less of a reductionist as I get older, and I have been following Complexity Science since the 1980s/90s. I am starting to lean towards 'information' as not being just a concept, but something real and physical no matter how it is encoded or contained. I guess from a superficial point this puts me at odds with Searle, or the indirect quote of his works. I'll have to read Searle; I've only learned of him via second-hand quotes, and his counters with Daniel Dennett.
    - cgio 10y ago
      I deeply appreciate your detailed response. Back to bees, they are natural and honeymaking is natural too, but only bees make honey. Something being natural does not imply some sort of universality in the form of natural law. Computation has a universal interpretation appeal to us, but it might also do so in the context of our observational reference frame.
- kragen 10y ago
  Searle's conclusions are certainly shockingly counterintuitive, which challenges us to do a good enough job of formalizing what we mean by computation, or more specifically universal computation, that we can rebut it. Do you remember the controversy about whether Matthew Cook's proof† of the computational universality of elementary CA rule 110? There wasn't consensus on whether the infinitely-repeating background pattern 00010011011111 was a valid precondition. The entire field of fully homomorphic encryption involves programming a computation to be executed on a machine whose owner is (conjectured to be) computationally incapable of understanding what the computation does without the decryption key. If the decryption key is erased, does the computation still take place? What if you just erase 16 bits of the decryption key? Different answers are obviously correct to different people. At the most basic level, you can view an N-bit AND operation as an N-bit OR operation by inverting your interpretation of the voltage levels, or an M-bit operation where M < N by ignoring some of the bits as noise. And both of these reinterpretations are actually useful and used on a daily basis by programmers and hardware designers. You can solve any NP-complete problem with a SAT solver, by transforming the problem instance to a SAT instance, solving it with the SAT solver, and then transforming it back. With the dramatic recent progress in SAT solvers, this is actually the most efficient way to solve some hard computational problems, although SMT solvers are more popular for most problems. If you are observing just the SAT-solving part of the computation, you can't tell whether the problem being solved is a Hamiltonian cycle problem, a TSP problem, or what. At the end of the process, the interpretation of the SAT solver result is in some sense "in the eye of the beholder", even if the beholder uses another computer program to transform it into a form they prefer beholding. Certainly it is possible to do computation with vortices interacting in water, and as you see above, there's legitimately some amount of interpretive latitude about exactly which computation is being carried out, at least in some cases. How wide should we consider that latitude to be? Should it be so wide that we should consider a natural waterfall to be playing a game of chess, or indeed any possible game of chess? That seems shocking and counterintuitive — but if not, we should come up with a good explanation of why not. †Note that Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order providing prior restraint of the publication of Cook's proof, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Never sign a contract with Wolfram!
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Is their anything in Searle's argument that is specific to information and computing? I mean chairs for example are just piles of atoms, and don't really exist without some observer interpreting them as chairs. (This by the way is a non-rhetorical question. I disagree with Searle on this point, but he his too smart not have a good response to this line of criticism).

SilasX 10y ago

Don't think it's going to be of much interest to HN readers: >Yet, a powerful objection has been raised by John Searle, who argues that computational features are observer-relative, rather than intrinsic to natural processes. If Searle is right, then computation is not a natural kind, but rather a kind of human artifact, and is therefore unavailable for purposes of scientific explanation. >In this paper, I argue that Searle’s objection has not been, and cannot be, successfully rebutted by his naturalist critics. Computation inaccessible to science? Searle being correct about computation? Waterfalls play chess, as viewed by the right observers?

cgio 10y ago
Do you refute Searle by just asking? Waterfalls play chess regardless the observer? Do my 4 apples compute their sum just by virtue of being 4?
- eggy 10y ago
  The quote made by a poster referencing another party's paper on Searle about being not natural, an artifact of the observer, raises some cautions to me even if I get the drift. I think man is part of nature, is nature, and therefore arguments couched from the 'supernatural' perspective are faulty from the get go. Take the hexagonal pattern of honeycombs. Nobody really knows yet how bees actually pull it off. There are hypotheses about the pheromone or chemical trail fading, and circle-walking they carry out with the hexagaonal shape being an emergent property. The hexagonal shape also happens to be one of the 'Close Packing' methods, HCP, or Hexagonal Close Packing. I am re-reading Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe by Andrew Ilachinski published in 2001. I am on the chapter about possibly defining a new physics, "Information Physics", section 12.4 to be exact. Paraphrasing a bit, the term 'primordial information', or the notion that information exists independently of the semantics used to ascribe meaning to it. That "all observables found in nature are essentially 'data structures' that the universe uses to encode information with." It goes on to remark that all computations are inherently physical processes (slide rule, electrons in computers) and that information is possibly more than just a concept, but one of the fundamental units woven into the very fabric of the universe. I have become less of a reductionist as I get older, and I have been following Complexity Science since the 1980s/90s. I am starting to lean towards 'information' as not being just a concept, but something real and physical no matter how it is encoded or contained. I guess from a superficial point this puts me at odds with Searle, or the indirect quote of his works. I'll have to read Searle; I've only learned of him via second-hand quotes, and his counters with Daniel Dennett.
  - cgio 10y ago
    I deeply appreciate your detailed response. Back to bees, they are natural and honeymaking is natural too, but only bees make honey. Something being natural does not imply some sort of universality in the form of natural law. Computation has a universal interpretation appeal to us, but it might also do so in the context of our observational reference frame.
kragen 10y ago
Searle's conclusions are certainly shockingly counterintuitive, which challenges us to do a good enough job of formalizing what we mean by computation, or more specifically universal computation, that we can rebut it. Do you remember the controversy about whether Matthew Cook's proof† of the computational universality of elementary CA rule 110? There wasn't consensus on whether the infinitely-repeating background pattern 00010011011111 was a valid precondition. The entire field of fully homomorphic encryption involves programming a computation to be executed on a machine whose owner is (conjectured to be) computationally incapable of understanding what the computation does without the decryption key. If the decryption key is erased, does the computation still take place? What if you just erase 16 bits of the decryption key? Different answers are obviously correct to different people. At the most basic level, you can view an N-bit AND operation as an N-bit OR operation by inverting your interpretation of the voltage levels, or an M-bit operation where M < N by ignoring some of the bits as noise. And both of these reinterpretations are actually useful and used on a daily basis by programmers and hardware designers. You can solve any NP-complete problem with a SAT solver, by transforming the problem instance to a SAT instance, solving it with the SAT solver, and then transforming it back. With the dramatic recent progress in SAT solvers, this is actually the most efficient way to solve some hard computational problems, although SMT solvers are more popular for most problems. If you are observing just the SAT-solving part of the computation, you can't tell whether the problem being solved is a Hamiltonian cycle problem, a TSP problem, or what. At the end of the process, the interpretation of the SAT solver result is in some sense "in the eye of the beholder", even if the beholder uses another computer program to transform it into a form they prefer beholding. Certainly it is possible to do computation with vortices interacting in water, and as you see above, there's legitimately some amount of interpretive latitude about exactly which computation is being carried out, at least in some cases. How wide should we consider that latitude to be? Should it be so wide that we should consider a natural waterfall to be playing a game of chess, or indeed any possible game of chess? That seems shocking and counterintuitive — but if not, we should come up with a good explanation of why not. †Note that Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order providing prior restraint of the publication of Cook's proof, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Never sign a contract with Wolfram!
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Is their anything in Searle's argument that is specific to information and computing? I mean chairs for example are just piles of atoms, and don't really exist without some observer interpreting them as chairs. (This by the way is a non-rhetorical question. I disagree with Searle on this point, but he his too smart not have a good response to this line of criticism).