Searle on Consciousness

He starts (4:03) talking about the difference between epistemically objective and subjective claims. I was thinking about human experience and the idea that we share certain common experience on account of our being human beings in common situations. This is ultimately what we mean when we make claims about the existence of qualia, which Searle calls ontologically subjective claims (the immediate subjective experience of seeing a colour, for example). We say the qualia "exist" because we have plenty of epistemic justification for believing there is some common shared experience to seeing colours. We usually get this justification through sharing linguistic representations of the experience. The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is to try to explain the ontological foundation of these qualia (38:48). Some people think that an explanation of this needs to be given in terms of physics. I wrote in 2010 that this is not so, because physics as an empirical science actually presupposes consciousness and so consciousness is non-local and a condition of observation, like space and time. I have never received any criticism of that writing, except from Julian Barbour who just said it was fun!

Recently I wrote some more about this problem of interpretation of machines and other processes as computational actions and I decided to try to explain it in terms of the ideas of Searle and Popper. Unfortunately that means that to understand what I wrote you have to first understand something of Searle's and Popper's ideas too, and that is apparently asking too much of people. That seems a pity to me. I suppose the sheer amount of bullshit philosophy that has been published in the last century or so is to blame. A lot of people now think all philosophy is bullshit.  What Searle is saying here (19:25) about the necessity of interpretation of a system as performing a computation is beyond the understanding of people like Larry Paulson at Cambridge, as it was beyond the understanding of Church and Kleene in the 1930s. The argument Searle makes fun of at 21:51 is in essence the same argument that is presented to all Computer Science undergraduates when they are taught proofs of the undecidability of the halting problem.

So the problem goes beyond just philosophy into mathematics, computation and quantum physics too. The result is we have nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence instead of genuine understanding of the most basic necessities of human existence. Isn't that a bit of a shame? 

53:04 The question as to how a physical system creates consciousness. Searle says that consciousness is not the same as an epiphenomenon like liquidity of water which is reducible to the properties of the constituent molecules. He is happy to admit that it is irreducible because it has this subjective ontological content which we directly experience (because it just is what we call experience!) But he has made an assumption in his discussion of how to investigate consciousness as a neurological phenomena that consciousness is created by the individual human neurology. The whole idea of looking for the neurological correlates of consciousness is based on the assumption that an individual's consciousness is a product of their own neurons and nothing else. But that is an hypothesis, and we even have direct evidence that this is not necessarily the case. See Today's Adventures into Neurology.

The question I address in my essay is what is the essential difference, physically, between the kind of physical system that is a cognizant human being who has conscious experiences and a digital computer. This is the same question that Roger Penrose treats of in his book The Emperor's New Mind.  I might make it into a book called The Emperor's New Physics.

See John Searle's Chinese Room Argument. 

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