On 28 July 2014 04:51, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 4:40 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > > https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness >> > > As the inventor of the Chinese Room, the single stupidest thought > exparament in the history of the world, I don't understand how anyone can > still take anything this clown says seriously. >
I think he falls into the same camp as Fred Hoyle - someone who manages to get something completely wrong (in Hoyle's case one of the biggest things imaginable) but in a way that still stimulates a lot of very useful thought. (I have a copy of Nigel Calder's "Violent Universe" somewhere and I think one of the chapters is called "Prove Fredf Wrong") As mentioned, his Chinese Room is thoroughly demolished by Dennett and Hofstadter, but then one has to bear in mind that they are working from an eliminativist perspective (there is a TED talk by Dennett on the same web page as Searle called "The illusion of consciousness" :-) so *perhaps* they didn't actually do such a good job - not everyone here agrees with the eliminativist approach, after all. Basically their response (iirc) was the "systems response" - the entire system of room plus lookup table, or whatever it is, understands Chinese, even though the person in the room doesn't. Actually the Chinese room reminds me of the MGA. The CR seeks to show that you can't have consciousness arising from the manipulation of symbols, because consciousness has to be "about something" (as Brent often points out) and whatever a computer does is "just" the movement of electrons around circuits, "syntax without semantics". The MGA seems to show (I think) that you don't even need the electrons, that manipulating matter generally can't be "about something". Unless I got that wrong. (Bu with luck wrong enough to stimulate some intelligent responses... :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
