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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cogent and hard-hitting, June 24, 2002
This review is from: Minds, Brains and Science (1984 Reith Lectures) (Paperback)
Searle is an interesting philosopher for me to read, because I was trained in neurobiology, and Searle is a philosopher who thinks like a neurobiologist. On the other hand, I am a neurobiologist who thinks like a philosopher. Although the book discusses several classical problems such as the problem of freedom and free will, the mind-body problem, right and wrong, etc., for me the two most interesting chapters were the one on the mind-body problem, and the one on cognitive psychology. Here Searle proposes a thorough-going biological and physical explanation that, as a neurobiolgist, I've always liked myself. You really need to read these two chapters to understand all the details, of course, but I'll briefly summarize his idea, and you can decide if it makes sense to you. Basically, Searle says there really is no mind-body problem. This dichotomy occured because philosophy completely misunderstood the entire issue. There is no mind-body problem, because the mind depends on the brain, and on the neural workings of the brain, and there is no reason even to say that consciousness itself is separate from the brain itself. Searle points out that we explain the properties of normal matter, such as a steel ball, which has mass, weight, is impenetrable, is magnetic, and so on, by reference to its atomic and molecular properties. There is no reason to posit any intevening layer of "rules" or theory. It's the same with the mind-body problem. Mind depends on neurons. All our behavior depends on neurons. There is no reason to posit this intermediate entity of consciousness or of mind which is separate from the underlying biology. There is no doubt that consciousness exists, but there's nothing special about it, and although Searle doesn't claim it can be reduced to neural functions yet, he leaves no doubt that classical views about the mind and consciousness are fundamentally flawed. Anyway, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view, and would like to make a point of my own. I've studied the brain, and when you see people with tiny, focal, strokes in the language area of the brain who have no detectable impairment except they can no longer use articles or conjunctions in their speech, or people with temporal lobe damage who can easily name an object when you show it to them, but who can't tell you its function, and vice versa, where there are people who have temporal lobe damage in an adjacent area with exactly the reverse syndrome--they can tell you what its for but can't name the object--in other words, the naming function and the definition function seem to be separate in the temporal lobe, and the two areas must communicate in order to be able to do both, or at least the information is stored separately and you need access to both--you very quickly get the idea that if it's not in the brain, it's not anywhere. There are legions of other neurological cases where people have lost very specific or general functions depending on the source and extent of the damage to the brain. Furthermore, it's becoming clearer as a result of research that there is no single part of the brain that gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness relates to different functions located in different parts of the brain being integrated in time through a finely controlled and switched system of neural communications pathways. Thus, consciousness is not a unitary entity at all, although it might seem so to our own introspective minds. More accurately, it is a unified process that occurs through the integration of diverse brain areas and brain functions. Anyway, Searle's biological reductionism and determism isn't very different from how neuroscientists think, and I give him credit for being willing to discuss the subject in those terms and propose such a radical solution (from the standpoint of most philosophers) to the mind-body problem.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Concise, Clear and Important, May 30, 2004
Dealing with some of the problems in philosophy that persist, even in our "post-modern" times, this book by John Searle of the U.C. at Berkely provides a quick, easily read survey of some of the issues about minds, bodies and artificial intelligence that are of special relevance today. Searle is especially keen to restore a commonsense view of things and so his philosophy seems particularly down-to-earth with regard to some of the knottier problems.
His notion that consciousness (the stuff of minds) is to brains as digestion is to the stomach (a function of it) and that there are various orders of explanation that can be invoked for the same phenomenon go a long way toward enabling those who are stuck in the mind-body conundrum to get beyond it. In some ways he offers an updating of Wittgenstein who, similarly, offered a way of getting beyond such "problems" though Wittgenstein reduced it all to a matter of how we talk while Searle wants to say that this only answers the question in part. Unlike Wittgenstein, who dismissed the idea of theoretical explanations superceding ordinary language, Searle wants to reaffirm the importance of such explanations, and to offer a way to develop them. In many ways his proposals make quite a bit of sense.
However, I remain struck by his argument against the possibility of what he terms the claims of "strong artificial intelligence" proponents. He describes this view (page 28) as "saying that the mind is to the brain as the program is to the computer hardware" and elaborates by noting that "on this view, any physical system . . . that had the right program with the right inputs and outputs would have a mind in exactly the same sense that you and I have minds." Thus, "strong AI," as he repeatedly terms it, is the view that minds are in no way unique to creatures like us (with organic brains like ours) but are merely the function of the right sort of programs on the right kind of hardware operating in the right sort of way. That is, inorganic machines, like digital computers, can be made to have minds like ours (with the same kinds of features ours have).
Searle is very much opposed to this view and in this book brings to bear his most famous argument against it: the Chinese Room thought experiment. In a nutshell it holds that a computer, insofar as it is no different from someone inside a sealed room following purely formal rules in responding to written questions submitted in Chinese (a language he doesn't know) who appears to be responding AS THOUGH HE KNEW CHINESE, so too, can that computer appear to have intelligence, to understand its inputs, without really doing so.
His core argument against "strong AI" is that this is ALL a computer can do, but that simulation in this way is not what we mean by intelligence at all. In fact, he rightly notes, when we think of intelligence, we think of understanding, what he variously calls intentionality and/or meaning (semantic content). But the computer modelled on his Chinese Room evidences no understanding but only a rote process of mechanically producing certain squiggles, according to some pre-established rules that look like they reflect an understanding.
The crux of this is a syllogistic argument he also reproduces in this book:
1) Brains cause minds.
2) Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.
3) Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical, structure.
4) Minds have mental contents; specifically they have semantic contents.
On the basis of the above he offers a number of conclusions but his first is telling: "No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a computer a mind. Programs in short are not minds, and they are not sufficient by themselves for having minds."
While thinking highly of Searle's work, I believe his Chinese Room argument is deeply flawed. I can't offer a full account here for reasons of space, but the point is that, while he has correctly noted that the kind of intelligence we have (and that we might be interested in recreating on a computer) is a conscious intelligence, his argument that computers can never offer a medium for recreating this hinges on a mistake. He says in point #2 that "Syntax is not sufficient for semantics." He amplifies this by noting that this is "a conceptual truth," i.e., it is true by definition. "It just articulates our distinction between what is purely formal and what has content," he adds. But the fact that the two notions are conceptually different does not entail a claim that one type of thing cannot give rise to another.
Searle wants to say that computers can never provide an adequate platform for the phenomena of consciousness on this basis but his argument doesn't demonstrate this. In fact, despite all his efforts with the Chinese Room thought experiment, one can still envision a complex of computer-driven programs that replicate all the various functionalities we find in our own minds which, if combined in the layered and integrated way they are in humans, can presumably yield the kind of consciousness we have. Of course, this is not to say this CAN be done technically, only that Searle's argument that it can't be founders on the meaning of the term "sufficient" that he uses in the second step of his argument. He wants us to accept that though step #2 arises from a purely conceptual claim, it can be construed to have an empirical implication. In this I think he errs.
All of this said, however, I want to add that this is a very fine book. It is concise, clear, and profound in its thinking. Searle is certainly right in his recognition about what "intelligence" is, as far as he takes it, which may be about as far as a philosopher can. The rest is up to the scientific workers in the field, those who are experimenting with and designing new ways to operationalize minds in machines.
SWM
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A captivating book, January 2, 2002
This review is from: Minds, Brains and Science (1984 Reith Lectures) (Paperback)
How can we reconcile our perspective as "conscious, free, mindful, rational" creatures in an impersonal universe composed entirely of "mindless, meaningless" physical particles? How, indeed, can we suppose that these ineffable mental states which compose consiousness can affect material things and yet elude physical description? It's easy enough to imagine a meaningless universe of particle soup. But adding consiousness to the mix often seems like the dreaded "nomological dangler" - what Ockham's Razor attempts to sever from a complicated theory. John Searle attempts to solve these questions and more in this intruiging book for the non-technician such as myself. I found his ideas concerning the consciousness problem intriguing, lucid and very well formulated. These constituted the first lecture and helped him take on computer-affectionate behaviorists and cognitive scientists in the second and third. In the fourth and fifth lectures, Searle reflects on the nature of action and the difficulties inherent in the social sciences. These build up to his last lecture where he confronts the freedom of will problem. Unfortunately, he makes this problem devastatingly clear without presenting a solution to my satisfaction. The nature of action forces one to believe that we are not walking somnabulists or marionettes. But the physical sciences haunts us yet with the prospect of determinism (or indeterminism, which is equally devastating for free will). The author ends the lecture with a ponderous question mark. At least he's honest!
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