John Searle Quotes on Mind
John Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment (Minds, Brains, and Programs, 1980) became the most discussed argument in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. A monolingual English speaker following a rule-book to manipulate Chinese characters in response to Chinese inputs would, Searle argues, satisfy the Turing test for understanding Chinese without actually understanding any Chinese — and so the computational manipulation of formal symbols cannot be sufficient for genuine understanding, no matter how elaborate. The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) and the broader biological naturalism Searle has defended since hold that consciousness is a biological phenomenon caused by neurobiological processes — irreducibly subjective, intrinsically intentional, and not reducible to computational organization.
Quotes
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“There is a difference between simulating a phenomenon and duplicating it.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Consciousness is a real biological phenomenon, not an illusion to be explained away.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“The Chinese Room shows that no formal program, by itself, is enough to constitute understanding.”
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“Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).”
One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of -
“The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.”
A statement of the author’s “connection principle. | Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696. -
“Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.”
The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness. -
“The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.”
Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind(1983) | P. 166. -
“Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly .”
The Storm Over the University(December 6, 1990) -
“I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all about the hard problems of consciousness simply evaporate.”
"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)