Comment by kmoser

>Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.

Whooha! If it's not physical what is it? How does something that's not physical interact with the universe and how does the universe interact with it? Where does the energy come from and go? Why would that process not be a physical process like any other?

I'd say understanding and cognition are at this point fully explainable mechanistically. (I am very excited to live in a time where I was able to change my mind on this!)

Where we haven't made any headway on is on the connection between that and subjective experience/qualia. I feel like much of the (in my mind) strange conclusions of the Chinese Room are about that and not really about "pure" cognition.

Simulated fire would burn down simulated building

That's debatable, but it is also irrelevant, as the key to the argument here is that computation is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality vis-a-vis the physical devices we use to simulate computation and call "computers" - while semantics or intentionality are essential to human intelligence. And no amount of syntax can somehow magically transmute into semantics.

Do you believe that there are things that are not physical? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And no, "science can't explain x hence metaphysical" is not a valid response.

But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism)

The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.

Isn't that besides the point? The point is that something would actually burn down.

> we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems.

Or even more fundamentally, that physics captures all physical phenomena, which it doesn't. The methods of physics intentionally ignore certain aspects of reality and focus on quantifiable and structural aspects while also drawing on layers of abstractions where it is easy to mistakenly attribute features of these abstractions to reality.

I have always wondered if we would be capable of writing down the mechanisms that power our thoughts. I think that this was one of the ideas that bubbled up from reading Godel Escher Bach many years ago. Is it possible for us to express the machine that makes us using the outputs of that machine in the way that it's not possible to write second order logic using first order logic.

Of course, also there are processes that are not expressible as computations, but those of these that I know about seem very very distant from human thought, and it seems very very improbable that they could be implemented with a brain. I also think that these are not observed in our universe so far.

Searle also has almost 20 books, most written after 1980 and the Chinese room. None that I have read are pop science NYT best seller types. I suspect that is why most people only know the Chinese room. His depth of thought was much more than the Chinese Room.

>translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary

I don't understand, could you explain what you mean?

I looked up enclitic - it seems to mean the shortening of a word by emphasizing another word, I can't understand why this would apply to the judgements of an intermediary