In Reason, Ken Silber reviews On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Mind: A Brief Introduction by John Searle.
Interesting review, but Silber seems to accept some very weak arguments on the way to concluding that mechanistic claims about mind are "overstated."
Take this passage about Searle's famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment:
A man who understands no Chinese is placed in a room with a wall slot through which he receives questions written in Chinese. Following a rule book, he replies to the questions with other Chinese symbols. To an outside observer, he seems to understand Chinese. But in fact, he has no idea what the questions or answers are about.
[Searle's point is] that a computer manipulates symbols but attaches no meaning to them; it understands nothing. Searle revisits the Chinese Room in Mind: A Brief Introduction. He rebuts the common counterargument that it is the overall system—man, room, rule book—that understands Chinese. The point is the same, he contends, even if the man is in an open field and has memorized the rule book.
Yet, clearly, Searle's hypothetical man in the field is demonstrating some kind of understanding of written Chinese. Granted, it's not the standard sort of understanding a competent speaker of Chinese would have. But then that's only because Searle's man in the field hasn't been given the appropriate rule book--the book that provides instructions about what to do in the world when confronted with strings of Chinese symbols having such-and-such syntactical properties. A man who could perform the corresponding, rule-based tasks would "understand" written Chinese in the relevant way.1
I think all of Searle's arguments against even standard AI claims (and I don't necessarily agree with the strong AI program) are like his Chinese Room argument: intuitively gripping at first, but easily turned aside with even cursory analysis.
Unfortunately, Silber gives Searle a free pass like this at every turn. The reason for such abdication becomes pretty clear toward the end of the review, when Silber says:
[These books] are thought-provoking and, no less important, anxiety-reducing. [They] serve to combat public fears and forestall a possible backlash against science and technology. Humans can be part of the natural world without being mere machines, and without being outdone by our own machines.
This pretty clearly suggests that Silber's critical judgment has been softened by your garden variety existential angst, which in turn leaves him prone to accept a more soothing ontology. Like so many others, then, Silber has let taste play too active a role in his epistemology.
Sad to say, reality isn't therapeutic, and that we are anxious or fearful about being "mere machines" won't make us machines any less. Then again, if humans are an example of the kinds of thing a machine can be, maybe there isn't anything "mere" about it.
NOTES
1 For example, a man in a field has memorized my book of instructions. Upon reading the string of Chinese symbols that translates as "Go fly a kite and I will give you 1000 yuan," he proceeds to fly a kite for a time and then return with an outstretched hand. In what sense does he fail to "understand" the Chinese sentence?
UPDATE: Ken Silber and I continue the discussion in the comments. If you're interested, scroll down and read on...
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