John Searle

Like, I want to find a book about consciousness.

And I actually found, like, now I recall it, like a... collected works or like some sort of meta work by John Searle of all.

So that was my sort of first foray into sort of philosophy.

And then I read more like then in it and so on.

Meeting AI proponents on their own terms, here is why AGI will never be realized, according to me, with some serious assistance from Dreyfus and Fjelland, not to mention a bunch of other people I'm leaving out of this for the sake of brevity.

Philosopher John Searle, roboticist Rodney Brooks, etc.

Oh, I'm getting all tingly.

Is this my Simon Newcomb moment? No, I already had that about the damn submarine.

He's the creator of the MicroSci Cognitive Architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness.

Last week, we talked about the Institute's mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on Searle's Chinese room.

This week, we are going to talk about how to know if something is conscious, the role of memory, what Yosha thinks of integrated information theory, applying the Turing test to LLMs, and whether they're entitled to rights, substrate independence, or the portability of consciousness from one platform to another, the possibility of making a conscious AI, and the geopolitics of doing so.

So let's get right back into the interview with Yosha Bach.

But still, this doesn't mean that it's not the most promising avenue to take.

The proponents of biological naturalism do not have biology to support them.

You know, biological naturalism, the position that, for instance, is right now, is presented by Arnold Sess in the past by people like John Searle, is the idea that only biological brains have the necessary and sufficient properties to produce consciousness.

But what evidence does exist for this? There is virtually none.

Yeah

... that it's been around for a long time, I think John Searle was the person who first used it in, in the sense that we, we now think of it as, as biological naturalism.

And this is, this is the claim, and it's only a claim, that properties of living systems are necessary but may not be sufficient for, for consciousness.

And I do think this is, like, what...

But it's gonna run into these philosophical problems with qualia and things like that I need to...

But, you know, he sees that as really his role as philosopher who has read all this philosophical literature, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, John Searle, et cetera, that would rule out the brain being literally the same as the mind and hence...

Well, we're making a little jump.

I think he says he's a type of functionalist.

The Chinese room argument questions whether computers can truly think.

Philosopher John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment imagines a person who doesn't understand Chinese locked in a room with instructions for manipulating Chinese characters.

From outside, the responses seem fluent, but inside, there's no comprehension, only rule following.

Searle's point is that computers could be operating in the same way, processing inputs and outputs without any real understanding.