[lit-ideas] The Ghost In The Machine
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 19:51:01 -0400 (EDT)
-- or Popper on the machine in the ghost.
Haugeland: Machines Can't Think
R. Paul quotes from D. McEvoy:
>>If this accurately reflects Searle's view (or if Searle thinks machines
>>can have 'intentionality') then ...
and aims at the protasis:
"Searle does not believe that machines 'think,' or that they can have
intentional states. Quite the opposite . ... 'Intentionality,' is a
Medieval concept introduced into modern
philosophy in 1874 by Franz Brentano, in Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint CPsychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt). ... Intentionality
concerns the directedness or ‘aboutness’ of 'many, if not all,' conscious
states. No state of a machine has such a relation to
anything else; this would seem to entail, more broadly, that machines
can't think."
For the record [Grice's record, if you will], Haugeland and Grice wrote on
this while they both shared a department (well, the philosophy department,
at UC/Berkeley). And there is stuff on this on what I now call "Grice
Notes" (a pun, on Grace Note, intended) -- as deposited at the Bancroft
Library,
UC/Berkeley.
R. Paul is right (why wouldn't he) that Searle indeed opposes the view
ascribed by McEvoy above.
With Haugeland and Grice, Searle may said to belong to the
"Machines-Can't-Think" school of philosophy that thrived at Berkeley for some
time.
Haugeland does not credit Grice much, but they did some joint work
together, even on Hume (quandaries on personal identity).
A good point made by Searle is a direct application of Grice's distinction
between
'mean'
as in
"That rainbow means that it has previously rained'
and
'mean'
as in
"She means that it is raining _ropes_ -- by her French expression , 'il
pleut des cordes' --".
So, if you press 'print' on a computer, and a computer does print what you
'told' him [computers are masculine in Italian -- 'calcolatore'] to print,
this does not mean that by 'printing' the computer is _meaning-nn_ that he
understood you. Only perhaps he is _meaning-n_ that. Or not.
As Grice also noted, there is a distinction between a computer and a
machine. He specially disliked computers on the basis of the weak word spell
checkers, which would not recognise his 'pirot' or, worse, expressions such as
the Cricket idiom 'sticky wicket'.
The distinction between a machine and a computer is owed to Ryle -- who
predated Turing (not mentioned by R. Paul) but postdated Brentando (indeed
mentioned by R. Paul).
Ryle was amused by Descartes's 'ghost in the machine', where 'ghost' is not
necessarily metaphorical (as neither is 'machine' -- "a bright phrase by a
philosopher who was mostly wrong").
Cheers,
Speranza
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