John Searle on Consciousness and Human Civilization

Two talks given in 2014 at Indiana University. I've never heard him talk directly about computation and software before (12:59). It's really interesting. I hope Douglas Hofstadter was in the audience. See What is Formal Logic? I wish George Ellis had heard it too. See Why is Physics So Difficult?

23:06 He points out that syntactic structure is observer-relative: it requires someone to interpret the machine state as representing some formal structure in a certain context, and this context is almost always ignored.

My comment: 

54:05 It's interesting that he returns to molecules and their observer-independent reality to explain by analogy his position on consciousness as a physical effect. The thing is that most of the particular properties of water are not reducible to properties of the molecules alone, but only in terms some of higher-level organisation. I think the observer-independent existence of molecules is not that far from the idea of an observer-independent syntax. The existence of molecules of water is a very complex web of theory and observations, none of which are immediately subjects of perception because they all require a context of knowing what the apparatus is supposed to be measuring. 

On the logical structure of Human civilization:


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