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> 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

> 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.

mjburgess 1y ago
> this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building > with no clear reason whatsoever as to why It's not clear to me how you can understand that fire has particular causal powers (to burn, and so on) that are not instantiated in a simulation of fire; and yet not understand the same for biological processes. The world is a particular set of causal relationships. "Computational" descriptions do not have a causal semantics, so aren't about properties had in the world. The program itself has no causal semantics, it's about numbers. A program which computes the fibonacci sequence describes equally-well the growth of a sunflower's seeds and the agglomeration of galactic matter in certain galaxies. A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described. A simulation of fire is, by definition, not on fire -- that is fire. A simulation is a game to help us think about the world: the ability to derive some descriptive statements about a system without instantiating the properties of that system is a trivial thing, and it is always disappointing at how easily it fools our species. You can move beads of wood around and compute the temperature of the sun -- this means nothing.
- mattclarkdotnet 1y ago
  Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    > Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. What we mean by a simulation is, by definition, a certain kind of "inference game" we play (eg., with beads and chalk) that help us think about the world. By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. If the claim is that an electrical device can implement the actual properties of biological intelligence, then the claim is not about a simulation. It's that by manufacturing some electrical system, plugging various devices into it, and so on -- that this physical object has non-simulated properties. Searle, and most other scientific naturalists who appreciate the world is real -- are not ruling out that it could be possible to manufacture a device with the real properties of intelligence. It's just that merely by, eg., implementing the fibonacci sequence, you havent done anything. A computation description doesnt imply any implementation properties. Further, when one looks at the properties of these electronic systems and the kinds of causal realtions they have with their environments via their devices, one finds very many reasons to suppose that they do not implement the relevant properties. Just as much as when one looks at a film strip under a microscope, one discovers that the picture on the screen was an illusion. Animals are very easily fooled, apes most of all -- living as we do in our own imaginations half the time. Science begins when you suspend this fantasy way of relating to the world, look it its actual properties. If your world view requires equivocating between fantasy and reality, then sure, anything goes. This is a high price to pay to cling on to the idea that the film is real, and there's a train racing towards you in your cinema seat.
    - mlsu 1y ago
      > By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?
jll29 1y ago
Hardware and software are of course equivalent, as every computer science (but not every philosopher) knows. D.R. Hofstadter posited that we can extract/separate the software from the hardware it runs on (the program-brain dichotomy), whereas Searle believed that these were not two layers but consciousness was in effect a property of the hardware. And from that, as you say, follows that you may re-create the property if your replica hardware is close enough to the real brain. IMHO, philosophers should be rated by the debate their ideas create, and by that, Searle was part of the top group.
dvt 1y ago
> 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 His views are perfectly consistent with non-dualism and if you think his views are muddy, that doesn't mean they are (they are definitively not muddy, per a large consensus). For the record, I am a substance dualist, and his arguments against dualism are pretty interesting, precisely because he argues that you can build something that functions in a different way than symbol manipulation while still doing something that looks like symbol manipulation (but also has this special property called consciousness, kind of like our brains). Is this true? I don't know (I, of course, would argue "no"), but it does seem at least somewhat plausible and there's no obvious counter-argument.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  I don't see how his views can be made sense of without dualism. He believed very much in this concept of qualia as some special property, and in the logical coherence of the concept of p-zombies, beings that would exactly like a conscious being but without having qualia. This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property, one that the physical world acts upon but which can't itself act back upon it (as otherwise, there would obviously have to be some kind of meaningful physical difference between the being that possesses it and the being that doesn't).
  - dvt 1y ago
    > This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property It does make sense, and there's work being done on this front, (Penrose & Hameroff's Orch OR comes to mind). We obviously don't know exactly what such a mechanism would look like, but the theory itself is not inconsistent. Also, there's all kinds of p-zombies, so we likely need some specificity here.
Zarathruster 1y ago
> 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. It's by no means irrelevant- the syntax vs. semantics distinction at the core of his argument makes little sense if we leave out language: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema Side note: while the Chinese Room put him on the map, he had as much to say about Philosophy of Language as he did of Mind. It was of more than passing interest to him. > 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. I've never heard him say any such thing, nor read any word he's written attesting to this belief. If you have a source then by all means provide it. I have, however, heard him say the following: 1. The structure and arrangement of neurons in the human nervous system creates consciousness. 2. The exact causal mechanism for this is phenomenon is unknown. 3. If we were to engineer a set of circumstances such that the causal mechanism for consciousness (whatever it may be) were present, we would have to conclude that the resulting entity- be it biological, mechanical, etc., is conscious. He didn't have anything definitive to say about the causal mechanism of consciousness, and indeed he didn't see that as his job. That was to be an exercise left to the neuroscientists, or in his preferred terminology, "brain stabbers." He was confident only in his assertion that it couldn't be caused by mere symbol manipulation. > 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. He believed that consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, much like an ice cube is just water in a state of frozenness. He explains why this isn't just warmed over property dualism: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/propertydualism.pdf https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper...
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  > It's by no means irrelevant- the syntax vs. semantics distinction at the core of his argument makes little sense if we leave out language: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema The Chinese room is an argument caked in notions of language, but it is in fact about consciousness more broadly. Syntax and semantics are not merely linguistic concepts, though they originate in that area. And while Searle may have been interested in language as well, that is not what this particular argument is mainly about (the title of the article is Minds, Brains, and Programs - the first hint that it's not about language). > I've never heard him say any such thing, nor read any word he's written attesting to this belief. If you have a source then by all means provide it. He said both things in the paper that introduced the Chinese room concept, as an answer to the potential rebuttals. Here is a quote about the brain that would be run in software: > 3. The Brain Simulator reply (MIT and Berkley) > [...] The problem with the brain simulator is that it is simulating the wrong things about the brain. As long as it simulates only the formal structure of the sequence of neuron firings at the synapses, it won't have simulated what matters about the brain, namely its causal properties, its ability to produce intentional states. And that the formal properties are not sufficient for the causal properties is shown by the water pipe example: we can have all the formal properties carved off from the relevant neurobiological causal properties. And here is the bit about creating a real electrical brain, that he considers could be conscious: > "Yes, but could an artifact, a man-made machine, think?" > Assuming it is possible to produce artificially a machine with a nervous system, neurons with axons and dendrites, and all the rest of it, sufficiently like ours, again the answer to the question seems to be obviously, yes. If you can exactly duplicate the causes, you could duplicate the effects. And indeed it might be possible to produce consciousness, intentionality, and all the rest of it using some other sorts of chemical principles than those that human beings use. > He believed that consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, much like an ice cube is just water in a state of frozenness. He explains why this isn't just warmed over property dualism: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper... I don't find this paper convincing. He admits at every step that materialism makes more sense, and then he asserts that still, consciousness is not ontologically the same thing as the neurobiological states/phenomena that create it. He admits that usually being causally reducible means being ontologically reducible as well, but he claims this is not necessarily the case, without giving any other example or explanation as to what justifies this distinction. I am simply not convinced.
xtiansimon 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…“ The confusion is very interesting to me, maybe because I’m a complete neophyte on the subject. That said, I’ve often wondered if consciousness is necessarily _embodied_ or emerged from pure presence into language & body. Maybe the confusion is intentional?
sharts 1y ago
I remember the guy saying that disembodied AI couldn’t possibly understand meaning. We see this now with LLMs. They just generate text. They get more accurate over time. But how can they understand a concept such as “soft” or “sharp” without actual sensory data with which to understand the concept and varying degrees of “softness” or “sharpness.” The fact is that they can’t. Humans aren’t symbol manipulation machines. They are metaphor machines. And metaphors we care about require a physical basis on one side of that comparison to have any real fundamental understanding of the other side. Yes, you can approach human intelligence almost perfectly with AI software. But that’s not consciousness. There is no first person subjective experience there to give rise to mental features.
- lostmsu 1y ago
  > I remember the guy saying that disembodied AI couldn’t possibly understand meaning. This is not a theory (or is one, but false) according to Popper as far as I understand, because the only way to check understanding that I know of is to ask questions, and LLMs passes it. So in order to satisfy falsifiability another test must be devised.
  - pegasus 1y ago
    I think the claim would be that an LLM would only ever pass a strict subset of the questions testing a particular understanding. As we gather more and more text to feed these models, finding those questions will necessarily require more and more out-of-the-box thinking... or a (un)lucky draw. Giveaways will always be lurking just beyond the inference horizon, ready to yet again deflate our high hopes of having finally created a machine which actually understands our everyday world. I find this thesis very plausible. LLMs inhabit the world of language, not our human everyday world, so their understanding of it will always be second-hand. An approximation of our own understanding of that world, itself imperfect, but at least aiming for the real thing. The part about overcoming this limitation by instantiating the system in hardware I find less convincing, but I think I know where he comes from with that as well: by giving it hardware sensors, the machine would not have to simulate the world outside as well - on top of the inner one. The inner world can more easily be imagined as finite, at least. Many people seem to take this as a given, actually, but there's no good reason to expect that it is. Plank limits from QM are often brought up as an argument for digital physics, but in fact they are only a limit on our knowledge of the world, not on the physical systems themselves.
hnfong 1y ago
Maybe it's because it's not trendy to believe in woowoo such as spirits and non-physical things, it's very common for dualists to accuse others of the same... It's quite sad that people don't take the idea of consciousness being fundamental more seriously, given that's the only thing people actually deal with 100% of the time. As for Searle, I think his argument is basically an appeal to common-sensical thinking, instead of anything based on common assumptions and logic. As an outsider, it feels very much that modern day philosophy is follows some kind of social media influencer logic, where you get respect for putting forward arguments that people agree with, instead of arguments that are non-intuitive yet rigorous and make people rethink their priors. I mean, even today, here, you'd get similar arguments about "AI can never think because {reason that applies to humans as well}"... I suspect it's almost ingrained to the human psyche to feel this way.

mjburgess 1y ago

> this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building > with no clear reason whatsoever as to why It's not clear to me how you can understand that fire has particular causal powers (to burn, and so on) that are not instantiated in a simulation of fire; and yet not understand the same for biological processes. The world is a particular set of causal relationships. "Computational" descriptions do not have a causal semantics, so aren't about properties had in the world. The program itself has no causal semantics, it's about numbers. A program which computes the fibonacci sequence describes equally-well the growth of a sunflower's seeds and the agglomeration of galactic matter in certain galaxies. A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described. A simulation of fire is, by definition, not on fire -- that is fire. A simulation is a game to help us think about the world: the ability to derive some descriptive statements about a system without instantiating the properties of that system is a trivial thing, and it is always disappointing at how easily it fools our species. You can move beads of wood around and compute the temperature of the sun -- this means nothing.

mattclarkdotnet 1y ago
Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
- mjburgess 1y ago
  > Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. What we mean by a simulation is, by definition, a certain kind of "inference game" we play (eg., with beads and chalk) that help us think about the world. By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. If the claim is that an electrical device can implement the actual properties of biological intelligence, then the claim is not about a simulation. It's that by manufacturing some electrical system, plugging various devices into it, and so on -- that this physical object has non-simulated properties. Searle, and most other scientific naturalists who appreciate the world is real -- are not ruling out that it could be possible to manufacture a device with the real properties of intelligence. It's just that merely by, eg., implementing the fibonacci sequence, you havent done anything. A computation description doesnt imply any implementation properties. Further, when one looks at the properties of these electronic systems and the kinds of causal realtions they have with their environments via their devices, one finds very many reasons to suppose that they do not implement the relevant properties. Just as much as when one looks at a film strip under a microscope, one discovers that the picture on the screen was an illusion. Animals are very easily fooled, apes most of all -- living as we do in our own imaginations half the time. Science begins when you suspend this fantasy way of relating to the world, look it its actual properties. If your world view requires equivocating between fantasy and reality, then sure, anything goes. This is a high price to pay to cling on to the idea that the film is real, and there's a train racing towards you in your cinema seat.
  - mlsu 1y ago
    > By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?

jll29 1y ago

Hardware and software are of course equivalent, as every computer science (but not every philosopher) knows. D.R. Hofstadter posited that we can extract/separate the software from the hardware it runs on (the program-brain dichotomy), whereas Searle believed that these were not two layers but consciousness was in effect a property of the hardware. And from that, as you say, follows that you may re-create the property if your replica hardware is close enough to the real brain. IMHO, philosophers should be rated by the debate their ideas create, and by that, Searle was part of the top group.

dvt 1y ago

> 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 His views are perfectly consistent with non-dualism and if you think his views are muddy, that doesn't mean they are (they are definitively not muddy, per a large consensus). For the record, I am a substance dualist, and his arguments against dualism are pretty interesting, precisely because he argues that you can build something that functions in a different way than symbol manipulation while still doing something that looks like symbol manipulation (but also has this special property called consciousness, kind of like our brains). Is this true? I don't know (I, of course, would argue "no"), but it does seem at least somewhat plausible and there's no obvious counter-argument.

tsimionescu 1y ago
I don't see how his views can be made sense of without dualism. He believed very much in this concept of qualia as some special property, and in the logical coherence of the concept of p-zombies, beings that would exactly like a conscious being but without having qualia. This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property, one that the physical world acts upon but which can't itself act back upon it (as otherwise, there would obviously have to be some kind of meaningful physical difference between the being that possesses it and the being that doesn't).
- dvt 1y ago
  > This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property It does make sense, and there's work being done on this front, (Penrose & Hameroff's Orch OR comes to mind). We obviously don't know exactly what such a mechanism would look like, but the theory itself is not inconsistent. Also, there's all kinds of p-zombies, so we likely need some specificity here.

Zarathruster 1y ago

> 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. It's by no means irrelevant- the syntax vs. semantics distinction at the core of his argument makes little sense if we leave out language: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema Side note: while the Chinese Room put him on the map, he had as much to say about Philosophy of Language as he did of Mind. It was of more than passing interest to him. > 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. I've never heard him say any such thing, nor read any word he's written attesting to this belief. If you have a source then by all means provide it. I have, however, heard him say the following: 1. The structure and arrangement of neurons in the human nervous system creates consciousness. 2. The exact causal mechanism for this is phenomenon is unknown. 3. If we were to engineer a set of circumstances such that the causal mechanism for consciousness (whatever it may be) were present, we would have to conclude that the resulting entity- be it biological, mechanical, etc., is conscious. He didn't have anything definitive to say about the causal mechanism of consciousness, and indeed he didn't see that as his job. That was to be an exercise left to the neuroscientists, or in his preferred terminology, "brain stabbers." He was confident only in his assertion that it couldn't be caused by mere symbol manipulation. > 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. He believed that consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, much like an ice cube is just water in a state of frozenness. He explains why this isn't just warmed over property dualism: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/propertydualism.pdf https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper...

tsimionescu 1y ago
> It's by no means irrelevant- the syntax vs. semantics distinction at the core of his argument makes little sense if we leave out language: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SyntSema The Chinese room is an argument caked in notions of language, but it is in fact about consciousness more broadly. Syntax and semantics are not merely linguistic concepts, though they originate in that area. And while Searle may have been interested in language as well, that is not what this particular argument is mainly about (the title of the article is Minds, Brains, and Programs - the first hint that it's not about language). > I've never heard him say any such thing, nor read any word he's written attesting to this belief. If you have a source then by all means provide it. He said both things in the paper that introduced the Chinese room concept, as an answer to the potential rebuttals. Here is a quote about the brain that would be run in software: > 3. The Brain Simulator reply (MIT and Berkley) > [...] The problem with the brain simulator is that it is simulating the wrong things about the brain. As long as it simulates only the formal structure of the sequence of neuron firings at the synapses, it won't have simulated what matters about the brain, namely its causal properties, its ability to produce intentional states. And that the formal properties are not sufficient for the causal properties is shown by the water pipe example: we can have all the formal properties carved off from the relevant neurobiological causal properties. And here is the bit about creating a real electrical brain, that he considers could be conscious: > "Yes, but could an artifact, a man-made machine, think?" > Assuming it is possible to produce artificially a machine with a nervous system, neurons with axons and dendrites, and all the rest of it, sufficiently like ours, again the answer to the question seems to be obviously, yes. If you can exactly duplicate the causes, you could duplicate the effects. And indeed it might be possible to produce consciousness, intentionality, and all the rest of it using some other sorts of chemical principles than those that human beings use. > He believed that consciousness is an emergent state of the brain, much like an ice cube is just water in a state of frozenness. He explains why this isn't just warmed over property dualism: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/proper... I don't find this paper convincing. He admits at every step that materialism makes more sense, and then he asserts that still, consciousness is not ontologically the same thing as the neurobiological states/phenomena that create it. He admits that usually being causally reducible means being ontologically reducible as well, but he claims this is not necessarily the case, without giving any other example or explanation as to what justifies this distinction. I am simply not convinced.

xtiansimon 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…“ The confusion is very interesting to me, maybe because I’m a complete neophyte on the subject. That said, I’ve often wondered if consciousness is necessarily _embodied_ or emerged from pure presence into language & body. Maybe the confusion is intentional?

sharts 1y ago

I remember the guy saying that disembodied AI couldn’t possibly understand meaning. We see this now with LLMs. They just generate text. They get more accurate over time. But how can they understand a concept such as “soft” or “sharp” without actual sensory data with which to understand the concept and varying degrees of “softness” or “sharpness.” The fact is that they can’t. Humans aren’t symbol manipulation machines. They are metaphor machines. And metaphors we care about require a physical basis on one side of that comparison to have any real fundamental understanding of the other side. Yes, you can approach human intelligence almost perfectly with AI software. But that’s not consciousness. There is no first person subjective experience there to give rise to mental features.

lostmsu 1y ago
> I remember the guy saying that disembodied AI couldn’t possibly understand meaning. This is not a theory (or is one, but false) according to Popper as far as I understand, because the only way to check understanding that I know of is to ask questions, and LLMs passes it. So in order to satisfy falsifiability another test must be devised.
- pegasus 1y ago
  I think the claim would be that an LLM would only ever pass a strict subset of the questions testing a particular understanding. As we gather more and more text to feed these models, finding those questions will necessarily require more and more out-of-the-box thinking... or a (un)lucky draw. Giveaways will always be lurking just beyond the inference horizon, ready to yet again deflate our high hopes of having finally created a machine which actually understands our everyday world. I find this thesis very plausible. LLMs inhabit the world of language, not our human everyday world, so their understanding of it will always be second-hand. An approximation of our own understanding of that world, itself imperfect, but at least aiming for the real thing. The part about overcoming this limitation by instantiating the system in hardware I find less convincing, but I think I know where he comes from with that as well: by giving it hardware sensors, the machine would not have to simulate the world outside as well - on top of the inner one. The inner world can more easily be imagined as finite, at least. Many people seem to take this as a given, actually, but there's no good reason to expect that it is. Plank limits from QM are often brought up as an argument for digital physics, but in fact they are only a limit on our knowledge of the world, not on the physical systems themselves.

hnfong 1y ago

Maybe it's because it's not trendy to believe in woowoo such as spirits and non-physical things, it's very common for dualists to accuse others of the same... It's quite sad that people don't take the idea of consciousness being fundamental more seriously, given that's the only thing people actually deal with 100% of the time. As for Searle, I think his argument is basically an appeal to common-sensical thinking, instead of anything based on common assumptions and logic. As an outsider, it feels very much that modern day philosophy is follows some kind of social media influencer logic, where you get respect for putting forward arguments that people agree with, instead of arguments that are non-intuitive yet rigorous and make people rethink their priors. I mean, even today, here, you'd get similar arguments about "AI can never think because {reason that applies to humans as well}"... I suspect it's almost ingrained to the human psyche to feel this way.