Tag: John Searle

What It Is Like to Create a Picture

Mark Davis1 Comment

I invoked Nagel’s ”What Is It Like to Be Bat?” in a brief blurb I recently wrote about a children’s book. Nagel’s essay came to mind because I was rereading PMS Hacker’s “IS THERE ANYTHING IT IS LIKE TO BE A BAT?,” which is shrilly capitalized in this online version. Hacker, as always, is ready with Wittgenstein for some final comments after having worked through the weird conceptual structures that attend to ideas like “what is it like to be something.”

In preparation, Hacker works his way through the transitive and intransitive concepts of consciousness (being conscious of something versus simply being awake and aware), then through how we talk about and conceive of phenomenal relationships between experiences and descriptions of the objects of those experiences. He ultimately dismisses all this “qualia” discussion in philosophy of mind:

None of this is mysterious, surprising or baffling. Nor is it the key to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness. For there are no mysteries — only empirical ignorance and conceptual mystification.

There is an interesting fissure in Hacker’s argument, I think, and it is exemplified by exactly the line of reasoning that he borrows from Wittgenstein and that dovetails with W’s notion of private language. The concern is with the objects of experience when using abstract references like “this,” “that,” and “thus”:

One would like to say ‘I see red thus,’ ‘I hear the note that you strike thus,’ ‘I feel sorrow thus,’ or even ‘This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad,’ etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises.

… Read the rest

Functional Information Analysis and the Chinese Room

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

I’ve been considering the implications of a new scientific law, the law of increasing functional information, in terms of how it can be applied to our thinking about various ideas. At first glance, the law says little new about the physical world. We already know about much of the various levels of the functions that are described in the paper, from star formation up through the evolution of human behavior. But there may be another way of thinking about it. A quote from Margaret Bowdon on Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument shows how it might help:

The inherent procedural consequences of any computer program give it a toehold in semantics, where the semantics in question is not denotational, but causal.

So here we have an attack on the underlying assumption that what human understanding amounts to involves semantics and meaning that a robot or computational procedure can never have. If we expand Bowdon’s claim about how meaning comes about to include some of Searle’s other quotes like the room can never know what a hamburger is in Chinese just by processing the relevant symbols, we can enlarge that toehold by including all the functional engagements that are part of the experience of coexisting with and consuming hamburgers in a Chinese-language environment.

Semantics and intentionality and meaning—all these folk concepts we use to express how we are aware and conscious—collapse into function with the impetus driven by this new law. Meaning is an inherent feature of function, we just mystify it a great deal. In fact, a part of the semantics associated with the Chinese Room is embedded in the transfer rules that are used for translation. Whoever developed those rules understood Chinese well-enough to code them up accurately and that represents functional information increase.… Read the rest