Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence | John Searle | Talks at Google

John Searle on "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence"

…values via some mechanical process, and the man in the room acts as a kind of stack machine. You are right, Searle isn't making an argument about the translation of sentences. (translating them to what?) He is making an argument about how the mechanism of computation cannot capture semantic content. He explains this in the google video very well: link to this video And all of the... let's call them "structural" critiques are moot. Searle's point is that computer systems cannot understand semantic content because they are syntactic processing machines. And he shows this with his argument. The opposite view is that computers can understand semantic content. (so there is understanding and there is meanin…

…have such misunderstandings) ----------- If you happen to be interested anytime, you can start with some very introductory resources I bothered to look up for you (most are video, they are easy to consume): + Donald Hoffman - computational theory of mind, someone closer to HN's demographic ( link ) + John Searl is good speaker so try his talk ( link to this video ) + Some thought experiments (remember that thought experiments are not highlighters of issue, not complete arguments) link + If you want to know what a complete technical work looks like, here's one I've been reading: link + Not agreed upon but a fun one to not include - about: what is philosophy: link + Science vs philosophy sort of…

There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil ( link to this video ). Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at it and conclude that it has consciousness."

Your points are all good. But they have nothing to do with meaning, or with semantics. Cellular automata are lookup tables, and Wolfram and others proved some cellular automata rules are Turing complete computers. link My point was merely about the equivalence of computational mechanisms, not about lookup tables per se. And by corollary, that the computational complexity is equivalent regardless of the computational mechanism. (I think we agree on this point.) Searle's Room is a just to explain that what computers are doing is syntactic. Searle would posit that passing a Turing test in any amount of time is irrelevant to determining consciousness. It's a story we hypothetical use to "measu…

Searle would have us interpret this as the company taking the intelligence of the humans, refining and repackaging it. link to this video