[Wittrs] Re: Searle's Revised Argument -- We're not in Syntax anymore!
- From: "gabuddabout" <gabuddabout@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 00:19:09 -0000
I read your responses to the summary eight points and found them a disaster.
Stuart writes:
"His assertion that the biological nature
of the brain is paramount is being assumed here, not demonstrated, as is his
assumption as to what "intentionality" is.
This again points up his inherently mysterian concept of mind, a concept that
while explicitly denying dualism finally hinges on it because of a commitment
to a fundamental irreducibility of
mind to its constituents, even while he persists in agreeing that brains do
what he wants to say computers can never do."
How would a demonstration of the biological nature of the brain go for you?
How does your notion of intentionality, perhaps, differ from Searle's?
Your assertion that Searle is a mysterian is unsupported. Just because there
is an explanatory gap, and NCCs will be found inductively, with eventually
greater inductive strength as we get clearer as to the mechanisms of the brain
which cause consciousness, doesn't by itself amount to mysterianism. If it
does, then everyone has to be a mysterian except eliminativists, who are
incoherent or so pragmatic they don't mind waffling in the way Searle found
them to. The system repliers either mean what Searle does by nonS/H system
properties or they don't. And if not, then their strong AI is subject to the
CRA because no amount of formal programming adds brute causality QUA program.
That his conception hinges on dualism is mere assertion, on one hand, and when
you attempted to argue for it, you had to mischaracterize Searle in order to do
so.
Remember that Searle's position is consistent with causal reduction. Remember
the piston/butter story. I'll never forget how hastily you once said I got the
story backward. But you've been quite the Sid Caesar over the years.
Also remember that you always waffle between describing the action of
potentially complex, layered computer programs as if they are brute physical
properties of the machine which are not defined in terms of the formal
properties of actual programs, on one hand, while wanting to call such
potentially complex devices computers.
In the sense in which you mean things, your position is not inconsistent with
Searle's.
You will deny it. But you strain credibility.
Cheers,
Budd
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