12/13/21

This book is worth it for chapter 2 alone, where the author presents his Chinese Room thought-experiment. ( )

In this short book, Searle stakes out possibly the weirdest and (I think) least tenable ground available in the philosophy of mind. I'll start from the point where he ends. Searle ultimately concludes that free will is an illusion, and that our actions are determined by the mechanistic/probabilistic laws of physics. This is an eminently sensible conclusion, but I can't figure out how he squares it with his earlier theses: namely, (a) that strong-AI is in principle impossible (Chapter 2), and (b) that there is a radical discontinuity between the objects of the hard sciences and the objects of the social sciences (Chapter 5).

If the universe is mechanistic, then we are indistinguishable from machines. Isn't that proof that machines may have the capacity for consciousness and subjectivity? And doesn't that lead us to the strong-AI position?

Likewise, if the the objects of social science are radically discontinuous from the objects of natural science, what is the nature of that discontinuity, if it isn't free will? If there is no free will, then a reduction of social science to physical science is possible in principle, though computationally intractable.

I want answers to these objections, and Searle doesn't provide them.

http://www.trivigo.com/arnsearle.htm ( )