14 ms·

John Searle has died

146 points by sgustard 1y ago

toomuchtodo 1y ago
https://archive.today/41HwM https://archive.today/41HwM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle
kmoser 1y ago
> Professor Searle concluded that psychological states could never be attributed to computer programs, and that it was wrong to compare the brain to hardware or the mind to software. Gotta agree here. The brain is a chemical computer with a gazillion inputs that are stimulated in manifold ways by the world around it, and is constantly changing states while you are alive; a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. The two are vastly different entities that are similar in only the most abstract ways.
- levocardia 1y ago
  Searle had an even stronger version of that belief, though: he believed that a full computational simulation of all of those gazillion inputs, being stimulated in all those manifold ways, would still not be conscious and not have a 'mind' in the human sense. The NYT obituary quotes him comparing a computer simulation of a building fire against the actual building going up in flames.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - block_dagger 1y ago
    When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.
    - voidhorse 1y ago
      But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism) The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.
      - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        > The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it. And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        Roger Penrose would be another.
      - ozy 1y ago
        Maybe consciousness is exactly like simulated fire. It does a lot inside the simulation, but is nothing on the outside.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Unless you can show an example of how we can compute something that is not Turing computable, there is no justification for the inverse, as the inverse would require something in the brain to be capable of interactions that can not be simulated. And we've no evidence to suggest either that the brain can do something not Turing computable or of the presence of something in the brain that can't be simulated.
- cannonpr 1y ago
  I think the statement above and yours both seem to ignore “Turing complete” systems, which would indicate that a computer is entirely capable of simulating the brain, perhaps not before the heat death of the universe, that’s yet to be proven and depends a lot on what the brain is really doing underneath in terms of crunching.
  - voidhorse 1y ago
    This depends on the assumption that all brain activity is the process of realizing computable functions. I'm not really aware of any strong philosophical or neurological positions that has established this beyond dispute. Not to resurrect vitalism or something but we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems. Even so, I think there's some reason to think that the highly complex social historical process of human development might complicate things a bit more than just brute force "simulate enough neurons". Worse, whose brain exactly do you simulate? We are all different. How do we determine which minute differences in neural architecture matter?
    - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      > we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems. Or even more fundamentally, that physics captures all physical phenomena, which it doesn't. The methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects while also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality.
      - sgt101 1y ago
        >also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality. Ok - I get that bit. I have always thought that physics is a description of the universe as observed and of course the description could be misleading in some way. >the methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects Can you share the aspects of reality that physics ignores? What parts of reality are unquantifiable and not structural?
- DaveZale 1y ago
  Yes. I took an introneuroscience course a few years ago. Even to understand what is happening in one neuron during one input from one dendrite requires differential equations. And there are postive and negative inputs and modulations... it is bewildering! And how many billions of neurons with hundreds of interactions with surrounding neurons? And bundles of them, many still unknown?
  - throwaway78940 1y ago
    Searle was known for the Chinese Room experiment, whicb demonstrated language in its translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary.
    - sgt101 1y ago
      >translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary I don't understand, could you explain what you mean? I looked up enclitic - it seems to mean the shortening of a word by emphasizing another word, I can't understand why this would apply to the judgements of an intermediary
    - subjectivationx 1y ago
      Searle also has almost 20 books, most written after 1980 and the Chinese room. None that I have read are pop science NYT best seller types. I suspect that is why most people only know the Chinese room. His depth of thought was much more than the Chinese Room.
  - p1esk 1y ago
    Do you need differential equations to understand what’s happening in a transistor?
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. This depends entirely on how it's configured. Right now we've chosen to set up LLMs as verbally acute Skinner boxes, but there's not reason you can't set up a computer system to be processing input or doing self-maintenance (ie sleep) all the time.
- p1esk 1y ago
  So you’re saying a brain is a computer, right?
  - kmoser 1y ago
    In the sense that it can perform computations, yes. But the underlying mechanisms are vastly different from a modern digital computer, making them extremely different devices that are alike in only a vague sense.
    - sgt101 1y ago
      I have always wondered if we would be capable of writing down the mechanisms that power our thoughts. I think that this was one of the ideas that bubbled up from reading Godel Escher Bach many years ago. Is it possible for us to express the machine that makes us using the outputs of that machine in the way that it's not possible to write second order logic using first order logic. Of course, also there are processes that are not expressible as computations, but those of these that I know about seem very very distant from human thought, and it seems very very improbable that they could be implemented with a brain. I also think that these are not observed in our universe so far.
- vidarh 1y ago
  Unless human brains exceeds the Turing computable, they're still computationally equivalent, and we have no indication exceeding the Turing computable is even possible.
  - kmoser 1y ago
    A Turing machine operates serially on a fixed set of instructions. A human brain operates in parallel on inputs that are constantly changing. The underlying mechanism is completely different. The human brain is far, far more than a mere computation device. Efforts to reproduce a human brain in a computer are currently at the level of a cargo cult: we're simulating the mechanical operations, without a deep understanding of the underlying processes which are just as important. I'm not saying we won't get better at it, but so far we're nowhere near producing a brain in a computer.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      Any Turing complete computational device is computationally equivalent to any other, irrespective of whether it carries out the computation serially or in parallel or on a fixed set of instructions or an infinite set. Unless you can demonstrate that the human brain can compute a function - any function - that exceeds the Turing computable, there is no evidence to even suggest it is possible for a brain not to be computationally equivalent to a computer.
      - kmoser 1y ago
        I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's highly improbable to ever come close to fruition, since if you want to be completely accurate in your computations, you'd have to model the physical effects of every single atom in the brain and how they affect each other, in realtime (physically, chemically, electrically, etc.). Not only would that be computationally expensive, but you'd also need to know the complete set of rules for doing so, which includes how things interact at the quantum level.
        vidarh 1y ago
- lxgr 1y ago
  That's a quantitative distinction at most, since computationally both are equivalent (as both can simulate each other's basic components). And what's a few orders of magnitudes in implementation efficiency among philosophers?
- tim333 1y ago
  They have similar functions though. You can replace bits with cochlear implants and artificial retinas that take over some of the processing. I find the arguments that psychological states are real if the processing uses synapses to provide electrical signals but not if it uses transistors to provide electrical signals is lacking in evidence.
ggm 1y ago
> Informed once that the listing of an introductory philosophy course featured pictures of René Descartes, David Hume and himself, Professor Searle replied, “Who are those other two guys?” (the article)
jfengel 1y ago
Oh, bad timing. AI is currently in a remarkable state, where it passes the Turing test but is still not fully AGI. It's very close to the Chinese Room, which I had always dismissed as misleading. It's a great opportunity to investigate a former pure thought experiment. He'd have loved to see where it went.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  I'm generally against LLM recreations of dead people but AI John Searle could be pretty entertaining.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    I'm reminded of how the AIs in Her created a replica of Alan Watts to help them wrestle with some major philosophical problems as they evolved.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    Indeed, Necromancy is ethically fraught
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  > AI is currently in a remarkable state, where it passes the Turing test but is still not fully AGI. Appealing to the Turing test suggests a misunderstanding of Searle's arguments. It doesn't matter how well computational methods can simulate the appearance of intelligence. What matters is whether we are dealing with intelligence. Since semantics/intentionality is what is most essential to intelligence, and computation as defined by computer science is a purely abstract syntactic process, it follows that intelligence is not essentially computational. > It's very close to the Chinese Room, which I had always dismissed as misleading. Why is it misleading? And how would LLMs change anything? Nothing essential has changed. All LLMs introduce is scale.
  - Zarathruster 1y ago
    I came to say this, thank you for sparing me the effort. From my experience with him, he'd heard (and had a response to) nearly any objection you could imagine. He might've had fun playing with LLMs, but I doubt he'd have found them philosophically interesting in any way.
gennarro 1y ago
If you are wondering, it’s not the Doc guy with a similar name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls (But he was a PhD)
mellosouls 1y ago
Non-paywalled obit: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-obituary https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-ob... His most famous argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- tasty_freeze 1y ago
  I find the Chinese room argument to be nearly toothless. The human running around inside the room doing the translation work simply by looking up transformation rules in a huge rulebook may produce an accurate translation, but that human still doesn't know a lick of Chinese. Ergo (they claim) computers might simulate consciousness, but will never be conscious. But is the Searle room, the human is the equivalent of, say, ATP in the human brain. ATP powers my brain while I'm speaking English, but ATP doesn't know how to speak English just like the human in the Searle room doesn't know how to speak Chinese.
  - slowmovintarget 1y ago
    There is no translation going on in that thought experiment, though. There is text processing. That is, the man in the room receives Chinese text through a slot in the door. He uses a book of complex instructions that tells him what to do with that text, and he produces more Chinese text as a response according to those instructions. Neither the man, nor the room "understand" Chinese. It is the same for the computer and its software. Jeffery Hinton has sad "but the system understands Chinese." I don't think that's a true statement, because at no point is the "system" dealing with semantic context of the input. It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something. Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.
    - randallsquared 1y ago
      > It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something. That's not at all clear! > Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument. All of that is called into question with some LLM output. It's hard to understand how some of that could be produced without some emergency model of the world.
nextworddev 1y ago
Obviously a meat brain is incomparable to a LLM - they are different types of intelligence. Any sane person wouldn't claim a LLM to be conscious in the meat brain sense, but it may be conscious in a LLM way, like the duration of time where matrix multiplications are firing inside GPUs.
- nurettin 1y ago
  It just aligns generated words according to the input. It is missing individual agency and self sufficiency which is a hallmark of consciousness. We sometimes confuse the responses with actual thought because neural networks solved language so utterly and completely.
  - cma 1y ago
    > It is missing individual agency and self sufficiency which is a hallmark of consciousness. You can be completely paralyzed and completely concious.
    - nurettin 1y ago
      Yes, and you have individual agency while completely paralyzed.
      - cma 1y ago
        Self sufficiency was one of his conditions.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      Yes, but you can't be completely suspended with no sensory input or output, not even internally (i.e. hunger, inner pains, etc), and no desires, and still be conscious.
      - cma 1y ago
        > no sensory input or output Multimodal LLMs get input from cameras and text and generate output. They undergo reinforcement learning with some analogy to pain/pleasure and they express desires. I don't think they are conscious but I don't think they necessarily fail these proposed preconditions, unless you meant while they are suspended.
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
Oh, I've always wanted to debate him about the chinese room. I disagree with him, passionately. And that's the most fun debate to have. Especially when it's someone who is actually really skilled and knowledgeable and nuanced! Maybe I should look up some of my other heroes and heretics while I have the chance. I mean, you don't need to cold e-mail them a challenge. Sometimes they're already known to be at events and such, after all!
- siglesias 1y ago
  Searle has written responses to dozens of replies to the Chinese Room. It's likely that you can find his rebuttals to your objection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the Chinese Room, or deeper in a source in the bibliography. Is your rebuttal listed here? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room
  - danielbarla 1y ago
    > In response to this, Searle argues that it makes no difference. He suggests a variation on the brain simulator scenario: suppose that in the room the man has a huge set of valves and water pipes, in the same arrangement as the neurons in a native Chinese speaker’s brain. The program now tells the man which valves to open in response to input. Searle claims that it is obvious that there would be no understanding of Chinese. I mean, I guess all arguments eventually boil down to something which is "obvious" to one person to mean A, and "obvious" to me to mean B.
    - IanCal 1y ago
      Same. I feel the Chinese room argument is a nice thing to clarify thinking. Two systems, one feels intuitively like it understands, one doesn’t. But the two systems are functionally identical. Therefore either my concept of “understanding” is broken, my intuition is wrong, or the concept as a whole is not useful at the edges. I think it’s the last one. If a bunch of valves can’t understand but a bunch of chemicals and electrical signals can if it’s in someone’s head then I am simply applying “does it seem like biology” as part of the definition and can therefore ignore it entirely when considering machines or programs. Searle seems to just go the other way and I don’t under Why.
bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
> It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits". Wiki
- sgustard 1y ago
  But she also claims he "was innocent and falsely accused": https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    She could feel that the 2016 allegations specifically were unfounded while acknowledging the previous pattern of misconduct. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/04/10/earlier-complaints-professor-accused-harassment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/04/10/earlier...
  - pryce 1y ago
    This is a curious case of one accused academic writing to a second accused academic about the status of a third accused academic, being published widely by the second of the three accused academics in a post explicitly concerned with allegations of (sexual) misconduct against academics in general. I'm very certain that issues of justice are complicated, and that allegations of misconduct are not always correct and that allegations in and of themselves must not be immediately treated as substantiated; yet surely, if it is justice we are interested in, we must be careful to ensure our fact-seeking methods do not not unduly rely on testimonies of those accused to the detriment of all other lines of inquiry. I understand in McGinn's case that actual documents of the harassment are available, and I think that if some academics believe they need to push back against allegations of sexual harrassment they consider wrongful, a person with documented harassment is profoundly inappropriate to be spearheading that.
rahimnathwani 1y ago
I learned about Searle's death a few weeks ago, from this article: https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ It includes a letter that starts: I am Jennifer Hudin, John Searle’s secretary of 40 years. I am writing to tell you that John died last week on the 17th of September. The last two years of his life were hellish. HIs daughter–in-law, Andrea (Tom’s wife) took him to Tampa in 2024 and put him in a nursing home from which he never returned. She emptied his house in Berkeley and put it on the rental market. And no one was allowed to contact John, even to send him a birthday card on his birthday. It is for us, those who cared about John, deeply sad. I'm surprised to see the NYT obituary published nearly a month after his death. I would have thought he'd be included in their stack of pre-written obituaries, meaning it could be updated and published within a day or two.
- blast 1y ago
  I found the delay puzzling too. But the NYT obit does link to https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ near the end.
  - masfuerte 1y ago
    The Times in the UK publishes obituaries of very well-known public figures within a day or two. Notable but lesser known people (such as Searle) await a quiet day and it can take as long as six months. Space is the constraint, not the availability of the obituary. I guess the NYT is the same.
- pfortuny 1y ago
  Wow, what a terrible way to be treated. Thank you for the quote.
  - asah 1y ago
    There's a lot more to this y'all aren't seeing. Difficult family situation you shouldn't judge.
jrflowers 1y ago
It is not very often that you hear about somebody raising the cost of rent for everyone in an entire city by ~28% in a single year[0]. He will certainly be remembered. 0. https://www.academia.edu/30805094/The_Success_and_Failure_of_Strong_Rent_Control_in_the_City_of_Berkeley_1978_to_1995 https://www.academia.edu/30805094/The_Success_and_Failure_of...
- emil-lp 1y ago
  Searle famously argued that the treatment of landlords in Berkeley was comparable to the treatment of black people in the south ...
  - internet_points 1y ago
    oh wow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Political_activity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Political_activity
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    I personally struggle to imagine what it would be like to have an untouchable philosophy professor that does not see the difference between purchasing a seventeen unit apartment building in Berkeley, California and being born black in the south. Sadly I was not there in the twenty five to twenty nine years between him making that argument and his departure from the university to experience that
    - netdevphoenix 1y ago
      "Departure" is a very generous euphemism for "being kicked for taking advantage of his students". His contributions to the philosophy of mind are great and will be felt in Computer Science, especially with the current LLM tech but let's not skirt around the subject.
viccis 1y ago
[flagged]
ofrzeta 1y ago
Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence | John Searle | Talks at Google (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg
Zarathruster 1y ago
Of all the things I studied at Berkeley, the Philosophy of Mind class he taught is the one I think back on most often. The subject matter has only grown in relevance with time. In general, I think he's spectacularly misunderstood. For instance: he believed that it was entirely possible to create conscious artificial beings (at least in principle). So why do so many people misunderstand the Chinese Room argument to be saying the opposite? My theory is that most people encounter his ideas from secondary sources that subtly misrepresent his argument. At the risk of following in their footsteps, I'll try to very succinctly summarize my understanding. He doesn't argue that consciousness can only emerge from biological neurons. His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. The Chinese Room argument might mislead people into thinking it's an epistemology claim ("knowing" the Chinese language) when it's really an ontology claim (consciousness and its objective, independent mode of existence). If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  This is true of many philosophers. Once you read the source materials, you realize the depth of the material.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  > His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. No, his argument is that consciousness can't be instantiated purely in software, that it requires specialized hardware. Language is irrelevant, it was only an example. But his belief, which he articulates very explicitly in the article, is that you couldn't create a machine consciousness by running even a perfect simulation of a biological brain on a digital computer, neuron for neuron and synapse for synapse. He likens this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building. Instead, he believes that you could create a machine consciousness by building a brain of electronic neurons, with condensers for every biological dendrite, or whatever the right electric circuit you'd pick. He believed that this is somehow different than a simulation, with no clear reason whatsoever as to why. His ideas are very much muddy, and while he accuses others of supporting cartesian dualism when they think the brain and the mind can be separated, that you can "run" the mind on a different substrate, it is in fact obvious he held dualistic notions where there is something obviously special about the mind-brain interaction that is not purely computational.
cess11 1y ago
Well, at least it's a good reason to re-read his infamous exchange with Derrida. When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read. Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience. There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.
tananan 1y ago
What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really idealistic. There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system. You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy. None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard. When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.
dvt 1y ago
As someone that studied philosophy, his work is cited often and is absolutely instrumental in modern theory of mind. His work has seen a resurgence recently due to the explosion of LLMs. I've read 2 or 3 of his books, and he was a brilliant mind with clear & concise arguments. I met many of his collaborators at UCLA, but sadly never the man himself. Either way, his work has had a profound effect on me and my understanding of the world. Rest in peace.
stared 1y ago
John Searle is one of those thinkers I disagree with, yet his ideas were fruitful — providing plenty of fuel for discussion. In particular, much of Daniel Dennett’s work begins with rebuttals of Searle’s claims, showing that they are inconsistent or meaningless. As in a story by Stanisław Lem — we all know there are no dragons, but it’s all about the beauty of the proofs. The same goes for "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel — one of the most cited essays in the philosophy of mind. I had heard numerous references to it and finally expected to read an insightful masterpiece. Yet it turned out to be slightly tautological: that to experience, you need to be. Personally, I think the word be is a philosopher’s snake oil, or a "lockpick word" — it can be used anywhere, but remains fuzzy even in its intended use; vide E-Prime, an attempt to write English without "be": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.
- deleted 1y ago
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netdevphoenix 1y ago
He brought so many unique contributions to the field. Top 10 in philosophy of mind imo. Sad that he chose to tarnish his legacy by preying on his students for decades. I find the lack of discussion in here around his misconduct very telling. There is so much to learn here regarding the way we revere bright minds like his that might not have the brightest of morals
RLAIF 1y ago
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draw_down 1y ago
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fortran_user 1y ago
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.
- Zarathruster 1y ago
  I'd quibble with some of this, but overall I agree: the Chinese Room has a lot of features that really aren't ideal and easily lead to misinterpretation. I also didn't love the "observer-relative" vs. "observer-independent" terminology. The concepts seem to map pretty closely to "objective" vs. "subjective" and I feel like he might've confused fewer people if he'd used them instead (unless there's some crucial distinction that I'm missing). Then again, it might've ended up confusing things even more when we get to the ontology of consciousness (which exists objectively, but is experienced subjectively), so maybe it was the right move.

146 points by sgustard 1y ago

https://archive.today/41HwM https://archive.today/41HwM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle

kmoser 1y ago

> Professor Searle concluded that psychological states could never be attributed to computer programs, and that it was wrong to compare the brain to hardware or the mind to software. Gotta agree here. The brain is a chemical computer with a gazillion inputs that are stimulated in manifold ways by the world around it, and is constantly changing states while you are alive; a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. The two are vastly different entities that are similar in only the most abstract ways.

levocardia 1y ago
Searle had an even stronger version of that belief, though: he believed that a full computational simulation of all of those gazillion inputs, being stimulated in all those manifold ways, would still not be conscious and not have a 'mind' in the human sense. The NYT obituary quotes him comparing a computer simulation of a building fire against the actual building going up in flames.
- deleted 1y ago
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- block_dagger 1y ago
  When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.
  - voidhorse 1y ago
    But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism) The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.
    - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      > The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it. And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Roger Penrose would be another.
    - ozy 1y ago
      Maybe consciousness is exactly like simulated fire. It does a lot inside the simulation, but is nothing on the outside.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      Unless you can show an example of how we can compute something that is not Turing computable, there is no justification for the inverse, as the inverse would require something in the brain to be capable of interactions that can not be simulated. And we've no evidence to suggest either that the brain can do something not Turing computable or of the presence of something in the brain that can't be simulated.
cannonpr 1y ago
I think the statement above and yours both seem to ignore “Turing complete” systems, which would indicate that a computer is entirely capable of simulating the brain, perhaps not before the heat death of the universe, that’s yet to be proven and depends a lot on what the brain is really doing underneath in terms of crunching.
- voidhorse 1y ago
  This depends on the assumption that all brain activity is the process of realizing computable functions. I'm not really aware of any strong philosophical or neurological positions that has established this beyond dispute. Not to resurrect vitalism or something but we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems. Even so, I think there's some reason to think that the highly complex social historical process of human development might complicate things a bit more than just brute force "simulate enough neurons". Worse, whose brain exactly do you simulate? We are all different. How do we determine which minute differences in neural architecture matter?
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    > we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems. Or even more fundamentally, that physics captures all physical phenomena, which it doesn't. The methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects while also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality.
    - sgt101 1y ago
      >also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality. Ok - I get that bit. I have always thought that physics is a description of the universe as observed and of course the description could be misleading in some way. >the methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects Can you share the aspects of reality that physics ignores? What parts of reality are unquantifiable and not structural?
DaveZale 1y ago
Yes. I took an introneuroscience course a few years ago. Even to understand what is happening in one neuron during one input from one dendrite requires differential equations. And there are postive and negative inputs and modulations... it is bewildering! And how many billions of neurons with hundreds of interactions with surrounding neurons? And bundles of them, many still unknown?
- throwaway78940 1y ago
  Searle was known for the Chinese Room experiment, whicb demonstrated language in its translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary.
  - sgt101 1y ago
    >translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary I don't understand, could you explain what you mean? I looked up enclitic - it seems to mean the shortening of a word by emphasizing another word, I can't understand why this would apply to the judgements of an intermediary
  - subjectivationx 1y ago
    Searle also has almost 20 books, most written after 1980 and the Chinese room. None that I have read are pop science NYT best seller types. I suspect that is why most people only know the Chinese room. His depth of thought was much more than the Chinese Room.
- p1esk 1y ago
  Do you need differential equations to understand what’s happening in a transistor?
anigbrowl 1y ago
a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. This depends entirely on how it's configured. Right now we've chosen to set up LLMs as verbally acute Skinner boxes, but there's not reason you can't set up a computer system to be processing input or doing self-maintenance (ie sleep) all the time.
p1esk 1y ago
So you’re saying a brain is a computer, right?
- kmoser 1y ago
  In the sense that it can perform computations, yes. But the underlying mechanisms are vastly different from a modern digital computer, making them extremely different devices that are alike in only a vague sense.
  - sgt101 1y ago
    I have always wondered if we would be capable of writing down the mechanisms that power our thoughts. I think that this was one of the ideas that bubbled up from reading Godel Escher Bach many years ago. Is it possible for us to express the machine that makes us using the outputs of that machine in the way that it's not possible to write second order logic using first order logic. Of course, also there are processes that are not expressible as computations, but those of these that I know about seem very very distant from human thought, and it seems very very improbable that they could be implemented with a brain. I also think that these are not observed in our universe so far.
vidarh 1y ago
Unless human brains exceeds the Turing computable, they're still computationally equivalent, and we have no indication exceeding the Turing computable is even possible.
- kmoser 1y ago
  A Turing machine operates serially on a fixed set of instructions. A human brain operates in parallel on inputs that are constantly changing. The underlying mechanism is completely different. The human brain is far, far more than a mere computation device. Efforts to reproduce a human brain in a computer are currently at the level of a cargo cult: we're simulating the mechanical operations, without a deep understanding of the underlying processes which are just as important. I'm not saying we won't get better at it, but so far we're nowhere near producing a brain in a computer.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    Any Turing complete computational device is computationally equivalent to any other, irrespective of whether it carries out the computation serially or in parallel or on a fixed set of instructions or an infinite set. Unless you can demonstrate that the human brain can compute a function - any function - that exceeds the Turing computable, there is no evidence to even suggest it is possible for a brain not to be computationally equivalent to a computer.
    - kmoser 1y ago
      I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's highly improbable to ever come close to fruition, since if you want to be completely accurate in your computations, you'd have to model the physical effects of every single atom in the brain and how they affect each other, in realtime (physically, chemically, electrically, etc.). Not only would that be computationally expensive, but you'd also need to know the complete set of rules for doing so, which includes how things interact at the quantum level.
      - vidarh 1y ago
lxgr 1y ago
That's a quantitative distinction at most, since computationally both are equivalent (as both can simulate each other's basic components). And what's a few orders of magnitudes in implementation efficiency among philosophers?
tim333 1y ago
They have similar functions though. You can replace bits with cochlear implants and artificial retinas that take over some of the processing. I find the arguments that psychological states are real if the processing uses synapses to provide electrical signals but not if it uses transistors to provide electrical signals is lacking in evidence.

ggm 1y ago

> Informed once that the listing of an introductory philosophy course featured pictures of René Descartes, David Hume and himself, Professor Searle replied, “Who are those other two guys?” (the article)

jfengel 1y ago

Oh, bad timing. AI is currently in a remarkable state, where it passes the Turing test but is still not fully AGI. It's very close to the Chinese Room, which I had always dismissed as misleading. It's a great opportunity to investigate a former pure thought experiment. He'd have loved to see where it went.

anigbrowl 1y ago
I'm generally against LLM recreations of dead people but AI John Searle could be pretty entertaining.
- bitwize 1y ago
  I'm reminded of how the AIs in Her created a replica of Alan Watts to help them wrestle with some major philosophical problems as they evolved.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  Indeed, Necromancy is ethically fraught
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
> AI is currently in a remarkable state, where it passes the Turing test but is still not fully AGI. Appealing to the Turing test suggests a misunderstanding of Searle's arguments. It doesn't matter how well computational methods can simulate the appearance of intelligence. What matters is whether we are dealing with intelligence. Since semantics/intentionality is what is most essential to intelligence, and computation as defined by computer science is a purely abstract syntactic process, it follows that intelligence is not essentially computational. > It's very close to the Chinese Room, which I had always dismissed as misleading. Why is it misleading? And how would LLMs change anything? Nothing essential has changed. All LLMs introduce is scale.
- Zarathruster 1y ago
  I came to say this, thank you for sparing me the effort. From my experience with him, he'd heard (and had a response to) nearly any objection you could imagine. He might've had fun playing with LLMs, but I doubt he'd have found them philosophically interesting in any way.

gennarro 1y ago

If you are wondering, it’s not the Doc guy with a similar name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Searls (But he was a PhD)

mellosouls 1y ago

Non-paywalled obit: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-obituary https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-ob... His most famous argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

tasty_freeze 1y ago
I find the Chinese room argument to be nearly toothless. The human running around inside the room doing the translation work simply by looking up transformation rules in a huge rulebook may produce an accurate translation, but that human still doesn't know a lick of Chinese. Ergo (they claim) computers might simulate consciousness, but will never be conscious. But is the Searle room, the human is the equivalent of, say, ATP in the human brain. ATP powers my brain while I'm speaking English, but ATP doesn't know how to speak English just like the human in the Searle room doesn't know how to speak Chinese.
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  There is no translation going on in that thought experiment, though. There is text processing. That is, the man in the room receives Chinese text through a slot in the door. He uses a book of complex instructions that tells him what to do with that text, and he produces more Chinese text as a response according to those instructions. Neither the man, nor the room "understand" Chinese. It is the same for the computer and its software. Jeffery Hinton has sad "but the system understands Chinese." I don't think that's a true statement, because at no point is the "system" dealing with semantic context of the input. It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something. Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.
  - randallsquared 1y ago
    > It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something. That's not at all clear! > Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument. All of that is called into question with some LLM output. It's hard to understand how some of that could be produced without some emergency model of the world.

nextworddev 1y ago

Obviously a meat brain is incomparable to a LLM - they are different types of intelligence. Any sane person wouldn't claim a LLM to be conscious in the meat brain sense, but it may be conscious in a LLM way, like the duration of time where matrix multiplications are firing inside GPUs.

nurettin 1y ago
It just aligns generated words according to the input. It is missing individual agency and self sufficiency which is a hallmark of consciousness. We sometimes confuse the responses with actual thought because neural networks solved language so utterly and completely.
- cma 1y ago
  > It is missing individual agency and self sufficiency which is a hallmark of consciousness. You can be completely paralyzed and completely concious.
  - nurettin 1y ago
    Yes, and you have individual agency while completely paralyzed.
    - cma 1y ago
      Self sufficiency was one of his conditions.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Yes, but you can't be completely suspended with no sensory input or output, not even internally (i.e. hunger, inner pains, etc), and no desires, and still be conscious.
    - cma 1y ago
      > no sensory input or output Multimodal LLMs get input from cameras and text and generate output. They undergo reinforcement learning with some analogy to pain/pleasure and they express desires. I don't think they are conscious but I don't think they necessarily fail these proposed preconditions, unless you meant while they are suspended.

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

Oh, I've always wanted to debate him about the chinese room. I disagree with him, passionately. And that's the most fun debate to have. Especially when it's someone who is actually really skilled and knowledgeable and nuanced! Maybe I should look up some of my other heroes and heretics while I have the chance. I mean, you don't need to cold e-mail them a challenge. Sometimes they're already known to be at events and such, after all!

siglesias 1y ago
Searle has written responses to dozens of replies to the Chinese Room. It's likely that you can find his rebuttals to your objection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the Chinese Room, or deeper in a source in the bibliography. Is your rebuttal listed here? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room
- danielbarla 1y ago
  > In response to this, Searle argues that it makes no difference. He suggests a variation on the brain simulator scenario: suppose that in the room the man has a huge set of valves and water pipes, in the same arrangement as the neurons in a native Chinese speaker’s brain. The program now tells the man which valves to open in response to input. Searle claims that it is obvious that there would be no understanding of Chinese. I mean, I guess all arguments eventually boil down to something which is "obvious" to one person to mean A, and "obvious" to me to mean B.
  - IanCal 1y ago
    Same. I feel the Chinese room argument is a nice thing to clarify thinking. Two systems, one feels intuitively like it understands, one doesn’t. But the two systems are functionally identical. Therefore either my concept of “understanding” is broken, my intuition is wrong, or the concept as a whole is not useful at the edges. I think it’s the last one. If a bunch of valves can’t understand but a bunch of chemicals and electrical signals can if it’s in someone’s head then I am simply applying “does it seem like biology” as part of the definition and can therefore ignore it entirely when considering machines or programs. Searle seems to just go the other way and I don’t under Why.

bfkwlfkjf 1y ago

> It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits". Wiki

sgustard 1y ago
But she also claims he "was innocent and falsely accused": https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/
- jrflowers 1y ago
  She could feel that the 2016 allegations specifically were unfounded while acknowledging the previous pattern of misconduct. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/04/10/earlier-complaints-professor-accused-harassment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/04/10/earlier...
- pryce 1y ago
  This is a curious case of one accused academic writing to a second accused academic about the status of a third accused academic, being published widely by the second of the three accused academics in a post explicitly concerned with allegations of (sexual) misconduct against academics in general. I'm very certain that issues of justice are complicated, and that allegations of misconduct are not always correct and that allegations in and of themselves must not be immediately treated as substantiated; yet surely, if it is justice we are interested in, we must be careful to ensure our fact-seeking methods do not not unduly rely on testimonies of those accused to the detriment of all other lines of inquiry. I understand in McGinn's case that actual documents of the harassment are available, and I think that if some academics believe they need to push back against allegations of sexual harrassment they consider wrongful, a person with documented harassment is profoundly inappropriate to be spearheading that.

rahimnathwani 1y ago

I learned about Searle's death a few weeks ago, from this article: https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ It includes a letter that starts: I am Jennifer Hudin, John Searle’s secretary of 40 years. I am writing to tell you that John died last week on the 17th of September. The last two years of his life were hellish. HIs daughter–in-law, Andrea (Tom’s wife) took him to Tampa in 2024 and put him in a nursing home from which he never returned. She emptied his house in Berkeley and put it on the rental market. And no one was allowed to contact John, even to send him a birthday card on his birthday. It is for us, those who cared about John, deeply sad. I'm surprised to see the NYT obituary published nearly a month after his death. I would have thought he'd be included in their stack of pre-written obituaries, meaning it could be updated and published within a day or two.

blast 1y ago
I found the delay puzzling too. But the NYT obit does link to https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/ near the end.
- masfuerte 1y ago
  The Times in the UK publishes obituaries of very well-known public figures within a day or two. Notable but lesser known people (such as Searle) await a quiet day and it can take as long as six months. Space is the constraint, not the availability of the obituary. I guess the NYT is the same.
pfortuny 1y ago
Wow, what a terrible way to be treated. Thank you for the quote.
- asah 1y ago
  There's a lot more to this y'all aren't seeing. Difficult family situation you shouldn't judge.

jrflowers 1y ago

It is not very often that you hear about somebody raising the cost of rent for everyone in an entire city by ~28% in a single year[0]. He will certainly be remembered. 0. https://www.academia.edu/30805094/The_Success_and_Failure_of_Strong_Rent_Control_in_the_City_of_Berkeley_1978_to_1995 https://www.academia.edu/30805094/The_Success_and_Failure_of...

emil-lp 1y ago
Searle famously argued that the treatment of landlords in Berkeley was comparable to the treatment of black people in the south ...
- internet_points 1y ago
  oh wow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Political_activity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Political_activity
- jrflowers 1y ago
  I personally struggle to imagine what it would be like to have an untouchable philosophy professor that does not see the difference between purchasing a seventeen unit apartment building in Berkeley, California and being born black in the south. Sadly I was not there in the twenty five to twenty nine years between him making that argument and his departure from the university to experience that
  - netdevphoenix 1y ago
    "Departure" is a very generous euphemism for "being kicked for taking advantage of his students". His contributions to the philosophy of mind are great and will be felt in Computer Science, especially with the current LLM tech but let's not skirt around the subject.

viccis 1y ago

[flagged]

ofrzeta 1y ago

Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence | John Searle | Talks at Google (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg

Zarathruster 1y ago

Of all the things I studied at Berkeley, the Philosophy of Mind class he taught is the one I think back on most often. The subject matter has only grown in relevance with time. In general, I think he's spectacularly misunderstood. For instance: he believed that it was entirely possible to create conscious artificial beings (at least in principle). So why do so many people misunderstand the Chinese Room argument to be saying the opposite? My theory is that most people encounter his ideas from secondary sources that subtly misrepresent his argument. At the risk of following in their footsteps, I'll try to very succinctly summarize my understanding. He doesn't argue that consciousness can only emerge from biological neurons. His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. The Chinese Room argument might mislead people into thinking it's an epistemology claim ("knowing" the Chinese language) when it's really an ontology claim (consciousness and its objective, independent mode of existence). If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.

dr_dshiv 1y ago
This is true of many philosophers. Once you read the source materials, you realize the depth of the material.
tsimionescu 1y ago
> His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. No, his argument is that consciousness can't be instantiated purely in software, that it requires specialized hardware. Language is irrelevant, it was only an example. But his belief, which he articulates very explicitly in the article, is that you couldn't create a machine consciousness by running even a perfect simulation of a biological brain on a digital computer, neuron for neuron and synapse for synapse. He likens this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building. Instead, he believes that you could create a machine consciousness by building a brain of electronic neurons, with condensers for every biological dendrite, or whatever the right electric circuit you'd pick. He believed that this is somehow different than a simulation, with no clear reason whatsoever as to why. His ideas are very much muddy, and while he accuses others of supporting cartesian dualism when they think the brain and the mind can be separated, that you can "run" the mind on a different substrate, it is in fact obvious he held dualistic notions where there is something obviously special about the mind-brain interaction that is not purely computational.

cess11 1y ago

Well, at least it's a good reason to re-read his infamous exchange with Derrida. When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read. Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience. There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.

tananan 1y ago

What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really idealistic. There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system. You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy. None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard. When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.

dvt 1y ago

As someone that studied philosophy, his work is cited often and is absolutely instrumental in modern theory of mind. His work has seen a resurgence recently due to the explosion of LLMs. I've read 2 or 3 of his books, and he was a brilliant mind with clear & concise arguments. I met many of his collaborators at UCLA, but sadly never the man himself. Either way, his work has had a profound effect on me and my understanding of the world. Rest in peace.

stared 1y ago

John Searle is one of those thinkers I disagree with, yet his ideas were fruitful — providing plenty of fuel for discussion. In particular, much of Daniel Dennett’s work begins with rebuttals of Searle’s claims, showing that they are inconsistent or meaningless. As in a story by Stanisław Lem — we all know there are no dragons, but it’s all about the beauty of the proofs. The same goes for "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel — one of the most cited essays in the philosophy of mind. I had heard numerous references to it and finally expected to read an insightful masterpiece. Yet it turned out to be slightly tautological: that to experience, you need to be. Personally, I think the word be is a philosopher’s snake oil, or a "lockpick word" — it can be used anywhere, but remains fuzzy even in its intended use; vide E-Prime, an attempt to write English without "be": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.

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netdevphoenix 1y ago

He brought so many unique contributions to the field. Top 10 in philosophy of mind imo. Sad that he chose to tarnish his legacy by preying on his students for decades. I find the lack of discussion in here around his misconduct very telling. There is so much to learn here regarding the way we revere bright minds like his that might not have the brightest of morals

RLAIF 1y ago

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draw_down 1y ago

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fortran_user 1y ago

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.

Zarathruster 1y ago
I'd quibble with some of this, but overall I agree: the Chinese Room has a lot of features that really aren't ideal and easily lead to misinterpretation. I also didn't love the "observer-relative" vs. "observer-independent" terminology. The concepts seem to map pretty closely to "objective" vs. "subjective" and I feel like he might've confused fewer people if he'd used them instead (unless there's some crucial distinction that I'm missing). Then again, it might've ended up confusing things even more when we get to the ontology of consciousness (which exists objectively, but is experienced subjectively), so maybe it was the right move.