Searle’s Chinese room argument is one of the best-known thought experiments in analytic philosophy. The point of the argument as I remember it (you can google it) is that computers can’t think because they lack intentionality. I read it when Searle published in Brain and Behavioral Science back in the Jurassic Era and thought to myself: So what? It’s not that I thought that computers really could thing, someday, maybe – because I didn’t – but that Searle’s argument didn’t so much as hint at any of the techniques used in AI or computational linguistics. It was simply irrelevant to what investigators were actually doing.
That’s what I mean by cheap criticism.
But then it seems to me that, for example, Dan Dennett’s staunch defense of the possibility of computers thinking is cheap in the same way. I’m sure he’s read some of the technical literature, but he doesn’t seem to have taken any of those ideas on board. He’s not internalized them. Whatever his faith in machine thought is based on, it’s not based on the techniques investigators on the matter have been using or on extrapolations from those techniques. That makes his faith as empty as Searle’s doubt.
So, if these guys aren’t arguing about specific techniques, what ARE they arguing about? Inanimate vs. animate matter? Because it sure can’t be spirit vs. matter, or can it?
No comments:
Post a Comment