| > If I create a robot with an optical camera that detects if there is a large object near itself and uses an arm to open a door if so, the system works (or doesn't work) regardless of any meaning that is ascribed to its computations by an observer. Whether the system "works" or "doesn't work" is dependent on what the machine was designed to do, which is not an objective physical fact about the machine. Perhaps the machine was not meant to open the door when an object is detected, but to close it instead, or to do something else entirely; only the designer would be able to tell you one way or the other. The same is true for all computation, and that is Searle's point. > A computer (the theoretical model) is, be definition, something that can perform coherent reasoning without any special internal state. Computers don't actually engage in reasoning, though, for the same reason. A machine is just a physical process, and physical processes do not have determinate semantic content. Ross and Feser then argue that because thoughts do have determinate semantic content, they are necessarily immaterial, and I think they are correct. (This argument is unrelated to qualia; I don't think qualia are fundamental to reason itself.) |
This property of determinacy seems ill defined as well. It's basically defined from the assumption that the human mind is immaterial. If a machine and a human both arrive at the same result when posed a question (say, they both produce some sound that you interpret as meaning '42'), by what measure can you claim that one had semantic meaning and the other did not?
The idea of cognitivism is that there is no fundamental difference (even though of course it is very likely that the process by which this particular machine arrived at that result is different from the process by which the human did).
If I stand by a door and open it when big objects come into my field of view, how is that different from a machine doing the same?
And then, if I had a Machine that could converse and act just like a human (including describing its feelings and internal sensations) while doing nothing fundamentally different from our current PCs, by what measure would you say that this machine is 'simualting' a mind and is not in fact a mind in itself? (though of course it would be a different mind than a human would have).