Searle's argument against AI and emergent properties--part 5

Are you really saying that there is no such thing as abstraction?

You might consider what I have said here in a more general way than just with regard to Searle's argument. It might seem that I am arguing that everything is physical and that abstraction does not exist. In a way, I am. How we describe this, however, depends on semantics. Stated one way, I could be viewed as saying that there is no such thing as "abstraction" and that everything is physical. Stated another way I could be viewed as saying that everything is abstraction and that the "physical" is just a special case of abstraction, special only in that it appears at a particularly low level of nature.

This may be hard to accept. It may be "obvious," for example, that an abstract concept such as "money" is somehow qualitatively different to heat. Heat seems to relate only to the physics world whereas "money" seems to depend on the subjectivity of human minds. Heat, however, only exists because of the particular way in which matter behaves. Human minds are associated with brains, which are also made of matter. While the concept of "money" may be viewed as "subjective" to us, to some entity outside of humanity, and outside our ideas of economics it would just be viewed as an emergent property of societies, which are just an emergent property of groups of minds, which are just an emergent property of single minds, which are just an emergent property of brains, which are just an emergent property of molecules and so on. Considering "money" as "subjective" merely means that when brains change, the physical, economic properties change. The appearance of such "subjectivity," if we regard it as a profound idea, only comes about because we award ourselves a special place in the taxonomy of things. This even applies for concepts such as "beautiful." It may seem that this is somehow a "non-physical" property, but it is an emergent property of matter, just as your mind or your brain are. The fact that you can have one idea of "beautiful" and someone else can have another merely means that two different properties are involved which should ideally be given different names. Human language is not constructed for philosophical utility and we do not give separate names to our different ideas of "beautiful". This may lead us to think that the "subjectivity" of the concept somehow makes it "non-physical." We could even understand "beautiful" as a property without having to assume a separate concept of "beautiful" for everyone. If we had the time we should be able to construct some general, over-arching description of what is going on when something is being considered beautiful and which applies to all brains: your particular concept of "beautiful" would be a special case of this.

Conclusion

I have argued against Searle's view that it makes no sense to say that we can presume that other humans are conscious because of similar physical processes in their brains, while dismissing a suitably programmed computer as a likely candidate for consciousness. My argument is based on the idea that saying that two systems have the same physical underpinnings is subjective and that this becomes obvious when we try to formalize our idea of what it means to say that two systems are exhibiting the same properties. Searle regards behaviour in itself as irrelevant for deciding if a system is conscious, but we should view behaviour as important because it is a strong indicator of how contrived a description of some emergent property would need to be so that that property is a candidate for consciousness and the system shares it with human brains.

Even if I am right, there is a still a debate to be had here. The issue of measure complicates matters, though I discuss this in another series of articles [6,7,8,9,10]. None of this proves that computers are conscious, nor does it refute Searle's Chinese room argument [5], or prove that strong AI [1] is a coherent, well-defined or valid position. What I have hopefully done is give some clarification to the particular part of this debate that is about the "difference" between simulated and real processes.

References

[1] Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains and computers. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:417-457.

[2] Searle, J. R. (1997). The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: The New York Review of Books.

[3] Searle, J. R. (2002). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. (9th Printing, Originally Published: 1994. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press).

[4] Ibid. Chapter 1, pp22.

[5] Ibid. Chapter 2, pp45.

[6] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2007). Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value, Part 1: Substrate Dependence. Retrieved 12 September 2007 from http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate1.pdf. (Also at http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate1.htm).

[7] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2007). Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value, Part 1: Substrate Dependence. Retrieved 13 September 2007 from http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/minds-substrate-measure-and-value-part.... (A copy of the article in Reference [7]. Includes reader criticism of the article).

[8] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2007). Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value, Part 2: Extra Information About Substrate Dependence. Retrieved 3 November 2007 from http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate2.pdf. (Also at http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate2.htm).

[9] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2007). Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value, Part 2: Extra Information About Substrate Dependence. Retrieved 10 November 2007 from http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/extra-information-about-substrate-depe.... (A copy of the article in Reference [9]. Includes reader criticism of the article).

[10] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2008). Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value, Part 3: The Problem of Arbitrariness of Interpretation. Retrieved 11 May 2008 from http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate3.pdf. (Also at http://www.paul-almond.com/Substrate3.htm).

[11] Web Reference: Almond, P. (2008). Against the Supernatural as a Profound Idea. Retrieved 1 November 2008 from http://www.paul-almond.com/Supernatural.pdf. (Also at http://www.paul-almond.com/Supernatural.htm).

[12] Egan, G. (1994). Permutation City. London: Millennium. (Fiction).

[13] Ballantyne, T. (2004). Recursion. London: Tor UK. (Fiction).