[Wittrs] Searle's CRA and its Implications
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:03:05 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Joseph Polanik <jPolanik@...> wrote:
> SWM wrote:
> >Joseph Polanik wrote:
>
> >For the record, the argument which I have made before and with which I
> >think Dennett is in accord based on that text, goes rather like this:
> >1) If you think consciousness cannot be broken down to non-conscious
> >constituents, then you are a Cartesian Dualist.
>
> >2) The only way to think that the CR implies that no similarly
> >constituted system can be conscious is to think that consciousness
> >cannot be broken down to non-conscious constituents.
>
> >3) Searle thinks that the CR implies that no system with the same kind
> >of consitutents as the CR can be conscious.
>
> >4) Therefore Searle is a Cartesian Dualist.
>
> >http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wittrs/message/4550
>
> >you may want to bear in mind that my position is not premised on
> >Dennett's claims since I came to it after reading Searle, but before
> >reading Dennett.
> okay, so this is *your* argument based on reading Searle. so, when asked
> for your basis for saying this or that, you should be able to cite
> Searle rather than Dennett.
>
Joe, I have done so many, many times both here and on prior lists. However, in
this thread we have been talking about Dennett's position vis a vis Searle's
argument.
Searle's CRA is well known, of course, though he has presented it over the
years in multiple and often varying iterations. In generic terms, however, it
goes like this:
1) Minds (consciousness) have (has) semantics.
2) Computers consist exclusively of syntax.
3) Syntax does not constitute and is not sufficient for semantics.
4) Therefore computers cannot have minds (be conscious)
The third premise is grounded in his Chinese Room (CR) thought experiment
which, he says, demonstrates that no matter how you cut it, the CR (a proxy for
any computer) cannot be said to really understand Chinese (because
understanding anything, including Chinese, involves being aware of meaning,
i.e., getting the semantics). Without understanding you don't have
consciousness, and so forth.
You can google Searle's CRA anytime you like to find various versions of this
argument, including supports for it and attacks on it (and we have often done
just that and placed links to the results on this and earlier lists).
My response to the CRA is that, while #1 and #2 are unassailable if we agree to
accept the meanings of the terms as Searle presents them (which we can for
argument's sake), he is certainly mistaken on #3 because the CR does not
demonstrate that as he claims.
I go on to argue that the only reason one would think it does demonstrate that
is if one presumes, from the outset, that there is something about what
consciousness is that excludes what he calls syntax (not always clear, as we've
seen from other discussions!), from being a cause of it.
If one doesn't make that assumption (an assumption made easier by his later
claim that syntax is all in the mind of an observer and has no natural place in
the world, i.e., that it's not a "natural kind" and thus entirely without
causal power), what you have are physical processes going on in the machine
just as you have physical processes going on in brains. In both cases you have
physical events only in brains we associate them with the occurrence of
consciousness while in computers we don't. But is that a strong enough reason,
alone, to think that computer operations lack the causal powers that brain
operations are presumed to have?
If the processes going on in brains are enough to produce consciousness, why
should such processes in computers not be (at least, in principle)?
Thus, if Searle says brains cause consciousness (as he does), then there is no
reason computers cannot do so, as well, UNLESS consciousness is some kind of
special phenomenon, something different from all other outcomes of physical
processes in the universe such that only brains (or something capable of the
unknown thing brains do) can do it. And Searle does say this when he argues
that brains have some unknown (but possibly discoverable) causal capacity that
computers lack.
But on what basis does he think computers lack it? Well, it's back to the CR
where, if you look inside it, all you see going on are obviously mindless rote
physical processes. But if you look in brains you don't see consciousness
either, just rote physical processes, too (which we ASSUME are in some way
associated with minds). That is, we assume that brain processes are different
and Searle makes his case based on THAT assumption!
But my point is that the only reason to think that consciousness is not to be
found in anything like the CR is to presume that we have to "see" it somewhere
inside the machine for it to actually be there (even if we admit that we don't
see it inside brains either)! But the only reason to think THAT is to think
that consciousness cannot be constituted by these kinds of things (rote
physical processes), i.e., that it cannot be constituted by things that are not
like it (because they are not, themselves, conscious).
And this presumption is the suppressed premise that Searle draws on to arrive
at a general conclusion from the specific case of the CR, which is all that the
CRA amounts to.
His conclusion is that if the constituents of the CR cannot produce
consciousness in the CR, they cannot do so anywhere else either (in any other
configuration, i.e., in any other "R"). He gets there by presuming that there
is something about consciousness (i.e., it is not reducible to what isn't like
itself in type) that prevents it from being constituted by the constituents of
the CR which are merely physical events performing certain syntactical
operations.
And it is THIS assumption that implies the notion that consciousness is
irreducible, i.e., that it is ontologically basic.
But then Searle runs afoul of this whole logical apparatus he has built up when
he asserts that brains cause consciousness for now he is in self-contradiction,
because he has asserted computers can't do it since they are only mindless
physical processes, or he is claiming that, whatever the consciousness that
brains cause is, it is itself ontologically basic at the instant of its genesis
and not reducible.
Either way he is stuck in a dualist mode of thinking because he is saying
either that:
1) Brains cause something ontologically separate (dualism) from themselves; or
2) Computers can't cause consciousness because consciousness is ontologically
separate (dualism) from the constituent elements of computers.
But since Searle insists that he is not dualist, he is in contradiction once he
claims that the CRA is valid since the only way he can get to the CRA's
conclusion is to accept either #1 or #2 above.
> in (2) and (3), you're a little vague on which meaning of implies you
> are invoking. for each of those statements, are you using 'implies' to
> mean 'logically entails a conclusion' or to mean 'logically requires a
> presumption' or something else?
"logically requires"
Searle's argument is a logical one. Note the syllogistic form he gives it. My
response above directly addresses that syllogistic claim. (By the way, there is
no difference between "logically entails a conclusion" and "logically requires
a presumption". The latter merely notes that there is a suppressed premise in
the argument that enables the conclusion to be reached. A suppressed premise,
of course, is something that is unstated but which is included in the series of
steps needed to reach the conclusion. What is suppressed in the CRA is #2 above
since Searle never really addresses the issue raised by #1 head-on, at least in
what I've read of his arguments.)
>
> hopefully, you can clarify those points while I comment on (1).
>
> (1) is dubious.
>
> it seems to me that anyone who is not a reductive physicalist believes
> that consciousness cannot be broken down to non-conscious constituents;
THAT is merely to assert what seems intutively clear to many of us. But being
intuitive is no guarantee of being right. Anyway, it doesn't matter what anyone
believes or what the majority believe. What matters is if something is right or
not.
So what is "Cartesian dualism"? Earlier you wanted to say it is to embrace the
whole (or bulk) of Descartes' philosophy. But that isn't how the term is used
in philosophical circles. Rather it is used to denote the case where someone
shares the view of minds first articulated in western philosophy by Descartes,
to wit, that it is a separate and self-subsisting something (he used the term
"substance" as you often note) that stands apart, as observer, from the
physical phenomena of the world. From this picture Descartes developed a
complex story about how minds interact with the rest of the universe, given
their separateness. But many different stories are possible. The important
question is whether minds are really what he presumed, a separate something
coexisting with the physical phenomena of the rest of the universe.
My first premise merely states what it means to be a Cartesian dualist in this
philosophical sense, i.e., it is NOT to subcribe to Descartes' entire doctrine.
It's to hold the same picture of mind and the world that he did.
> and, that would include emergent physicalists, property dualists,
> panpsychists among others; so, unless you can show that all of these
> positions are logically equivalent to Cartesian (interactive substance)
> dualism, premise (1) is false.
>
> Joe
>
>
THAT is completely wrong. Premise 1 is about what it means to be a Cartesian
dualist and nothing more than that. Many distinct doctrines are possible but
there are only three basic possibilities:
1) The universe consists entirely of whatever it is that underlies physicality
and nothing more.
2) The universe consists entirely of whatever it is that underlies what we call
mind and nothing more.
3) The universe consists of at least two basics, that which underlies mind and
that which underlies the physical, which somehow co-exist.
The doctrines you mention, and others, are all variations on these themes (many
of the variations in dualism, at least, being driven by arguments over how
co-existence is possible, i.e., the mind-body problem).
However, as I have frequently tried to point out, none of the above three
claims can be successfully argued for in any definitive way because, being of a
metaphysical kind, they are all equally compatible with the way things are as
we find them. That, indeed, is their point: to account for the world as it is.
Wittgenstein aimed to direct us away from such inquiries because, as he noted,
they hinge on linguistic applications that are extracted from their real world
contexts, e.g., look at how taking a term like "substance" out of its everyday
contexts leads us to think about the universe in a certain way, a way that's no
longer compatible with modern physics theory and can thus mislead or, at least,
prompt us to step away from physics into a realm of discourse that can go
nowhere.
While we can recognize that there are underlying metaphysical pictures
(sometimes we have one or the other or both simultaneously, say), it pays to
also recognize that that is all they are so why argue about them?
And that, of course, is the point I have been making about Dennett's model,
i.e., that it is not an argument FOR one of these pictures over the others but,
rather, it's an argument that consciousness CAN be explained in terms of one of
them (the one most consistent with modern scientific perspectives), in which
case we don't need to invoke a different one (which may be less consistent or
require unscientific add-ons) to explain the presence of minds in the universe.
None of this prevents anyone (including you) from being a dualist or an
idealist, say. It merely enables those who aren't to proceed by relying on a
picture that is neither of these two.
SWM
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