> 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.

> 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.

> 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

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/proper...

>> “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?

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.

Sorry, I've reread this a few times and I'm not sure which part of Searle's argument you think I mischaracterized. Could you clarify? For emphasis:

> "consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language" (mine)

> "we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else" (Searle)

I get that the mapping isn't 1:1 but if you think the loss of precision is significant, I'd like to know where.

> Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to me to have proven anything; it's merely made an accurate analogy for how a computer works. So, if "semantics" and "understanding" can live in <processor, program, state> tuples, then the Chinese Room as a system can have semantics and understanding, as can computers; and if "semantics" and "understanding" cannot live in <processor, program, state> tuples, then neither the Chinese Room nor computers can have understanding.

There's a lot of debate on this point elsewhere in the thread, but Searle's response to this particular objection is here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SystRepl

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.

There's a lot more to this y'all aren't seeing. Difficult family situation you shouldn't judge.

> 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.

Something that would resemble 'John Searle's thoughtful response'...

You're absolutely right!

I don't think John Searle would agree.

Indeed, Necromancy is ethically fraught

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.

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.

"At least they don't have true consciousness, but only a simulated one", I tell myself calmly as I watch the nanobots devour the entirety of human civilization.

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.

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?

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.

Do you need differential equations to understand what’s happening in a transistor?

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.

Not sure I'd use those criteria, nor have I heard them described as hallmarks of consciousness (though I'm open, if you'll elaborate). I think the existence of qualia, of a subjective inner life, would be both necessary and sufficient.

Most concisely: could we ask, "What is it like to be Claude?" If there's no "what it's like," then there's no consciousness.

Otherwise yeah, agreed on LLMs.

> It is missing individual agency and self sufficiency which is a hallmark of consciousness.

You can be completely paralyzed and completely concious.

oh wow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Political_activity

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

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.

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...