MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

I didn't downvote you (I am not much of a downvoter), but frankly, your comment (the first one) is exactly the sort of thing that can be legitimately downvoted as "not contributing to the discussion". You launched into a vehement philosophical critique that can't possibly be hashed out in a comment thread. Do you want people to start posting 20-page book reviews right here and now? And nothing you said is particulary earth-shatteringly new to anyone. It's just that none of us - not me, certainly - is going to solve or prove unsolvable the secret of consciousness in a HN comment.

Searle's whole Chinese Room argument is based on the notion that a Turing-test-passable system for processing Chinese input and responding with syntactically correct Chinese output can be engineered, but the man inside the room won't know what he's doing. This is flawed in two ways.

First, it assumes the man in the room can't learn anything about the system he's manipulating and eventually draw inferences about its grammar, which I think is bogus. Now true, you could sit in the box for a long time and not learn how to speak Chinese because you haven't learned the sounds that are associated with various Chinese characters. But eventually, after sufficient practice, you'd be able to read and write Chinese effectively, and I argue that you'd be able to derive the semantics by inference. I am arguing this on general principle, though having spent some time studying Chinese from books but not speaking much of it, I'm going to throw in 2 cents worth of empirical experience as well.

The other objection is a deeper one, made via a reductio ad absurdum; if a person can't learn Chinese this way, does an English speaker really understand English? Sure, s/he has all the appearance of comprehension and can conduct a conversation in person or via the written word, but how do we know the person isn't just mindlessly manipulating a set of rules that has been internalized since youth? Indeed, given the lack of critical thinking some people exhibit, there might even be some truth to this! but this is the heart of the problem - there's nothing about the Chinese Room argument that can't be restated as an English Room argument and used to deny the sentience of a native English speaker. And now we've come right back to Cartesian arguments about whether there is some particular seat of consciousness within the brain, some part that is more vital than others and which comprises the brain's 'driver's seat' - whether that's the pineal gland (Descartes), the corpus callosum, the anterior hippocampal gyrus (Jaynes) or what-have-you.

Putting this in the context of thermostatic beliefs, I see Searle's point about the thermostat not really believing anything...but then if I believe 'it is too hot/cold in here' am I having a real belief or is this just a convenient abstraction of my aggregate levels of cellular ATP and physical work levels to keep my body functioning, making my brain little more than the thermostat for my organs which is where 'the real action' of consciousness is taking place.

Essentially, I'm abstracting Doug Hofstadter's elaborate refutation of Searle on Godel Escher Bach; I'm with Hofstadter and Dennett in being a materialist proponent of strong AI, and think Searle's argument is isomorphic to the 'god of the gaps' argument made by intelligent design proponents.

I haven't read Nagel's new book yet, and I'll give it a whirl, but since these arguments are essentially philosophical rather than empirical I don't anticipate any sudden conversions. In turn, I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

On the thermostat, I get the impression McCarthy was being a bit obtuse just to goad Searle a little. What he was illustrating is that simple systems can exhibit apparent intentionality while remaining simple. A steam governor or a thermostat are great examples. Living creatures, like the Aplysia californica snail studied by Eric Kandel, make use of analogously pretty damn simple mechanisms for reasonably sophisticated behaviour. Following this line of research, we've created remarkably effective systems like the 'syntax-only' Google Translate system, and IBM's Watson.

The questions posed by Nagel and Searle are interesting ones. Qualia is really difficult to account for - it makes sense for a materialistic system to have 'distinct placeholders' for different experiences, but why should they 'feel like' anything? Precisely because they propose a non-materialistic solution, they're difficult ones to explore - and so it's not really surprising that their own attempt to illustrate their perspective haven't been that convincing to materialists. The Chinese Room thought experiment is only convincing if you start out assuming the only thing that can 'think' is the person doing the card shuffling, which begs the question. See Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas for a good exploration of the argument.

If you're interested in sophisticated explanations of conscious experience and semantics from a materialist's perspective, Hofstadter and Sander's 'Surfaces and Essences' and Minsky's 'Society of Mind' and 'Emotion Machine' are great. Dennett's 'Intentional Stance' is also relevant - discussing how we can sensibly talk about material systems as having intention. Bear in mind that dualism is the more 'natural thought' in historical terms, and even hardcore materialists lapse into dualist terms easily. Researchers are rightly suspicious of unexamined assumptions. When it comes to science of the mind we have a history of novel, unnatural thoughts that are also very flawed (like Behaviourism), but critically, materialism (and Behaviourism) have both been productive.

One thing you can comfortably say about the progress of science is that at any point we're going to be partly wrong. Materialists are actively investigating and testing ideas, which meets my definition of 'real science'. Even if researchers are wrong on an important point, it doesn't make their work worthless, so you should probably hold back on the character assassination. Brain injury's effect on subjective experience and behaviour suggests to me that pure mechanism is important to experience, which is why materialism is my 'default hypothesis'.

If you want to ask hard questions, then go back and look at your assertions. What does 'really doing' semantics entail? How can the 'void' between semantic and syntactic systems be accounted for? Or, if we can't currently explain it, what can we do to investigate it?

Au contraire.

Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.)

Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "intention".

> I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Thanks. I'll buy it and read it.