🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec13.173023.8592@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:

>>It's about consciousness.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
>>Searle phrases it in terms of intentionality, but that's because he
>>thinks that consciousness is required for intentionality (see his
>>1990 BBS paper).  This has caused no end of confusion.
>>
>Let's not confuse things with agendas here, Dave. M,B,&P was about
>understanding (in the sense of understanding one's language.
>The new book (and the 1990 article) is explicitly about consciousness.
>If you want to argue that the former is, for Searle, part and parcel
>of the latter, that's fine. I've been working very hard here, however,
>to separate people's opinion of the CR from those about the new book.
>In the end, the consciousness question is the important one, I think.

The later book only makes explicit the view which is implicit earlier.
A careful reading of Searle's earlier work makes it clear that
consciousness is the real issue (the first-person viewpoint is what
counts for real thinking).  Phrasing the argument in terms of
understanding confused things, because the claim (*) "The CR doesn't
understand" is actually a combination of two claims, (1) "The CR isn't
conscious", and (2) "no understanding without consciousness".  Many AI
people have attacked (*) without taking a position on (1), effectively
by questioning (2), although of course this is all implicit.  But (2)
is at best a side issue -- the real issue for "strong AI" is (1), and
the debate would have been clearer if things had been phrased that way
all along.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."