> Professor Searle concluded that psychological states could never be attributed to computer programs, and that it was wrong to compare the brain to hardware or the mind to software.
Gotta agree here. The brain is a chemical computer with a gazillion inputs that are stimulated in manifold ways by the world around it, and is constantly changing states while you are alive; a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. The two are vastly different entities that are similar in only the most abstract ways.
They have similar functions though. You can replace bits with cochlear implants and artificial retinas that take over some of the processing. I find the arguments that psychological states are real if the processing uses synapses to provide electrical signals but not if it uses transistors to provide electrical signals is lacking in evidence.
> Informed once that the listing of an introductory philosophy course featured pictures of René Descartes, David Hume and himself, Professor Searle replied, “Who are those other two guys?” (the article)
Oh, bad timing. AI is currently in a remarkable state, where it passes the Turing test but is still not fully AGI. It's very close to the Chinese Room, which I had always dismissed as misleading. It's a great opportunity to investigate a former pure thought experiment. He'd have loved to see where it went.
Obviously a meat brain is incomparable to a LLM - they are different types of intelligence. Any sane person wouldn't claim a LLM to be conscious in the meat brain sense, but it may be conscious in a LLM way, like the duration of time where matrix multiplications are firing inside GPUs.
Oh, I've always wanted to debate him about the chinese room.
I disagree with him, passionately.
And that's the most fun debate to have. Especially when it's someone who is actually really skilled and knowledgeable and nuanced!
Maybe I should look up some of my other heroes and heretics while I have the chance. I mean, you don't need to cold e-mail them a challenge. Sometimes they're already known to be at events and such, after all!
> It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits".
I am Jennifer Hudin, John Searle’s secretary of 40 years. I am writing to tell you that John died last week on the 17th of September. The last two years of his life were hellish. HIs daughter–in-law, Andrea (Tom’s wife) took him to Tampa in 2024 and put him in a nursing home from which he never returned. She emptied his house in Berkeley and put it on the rental market. And no one was allowed to contact John, even to send him a birthday card on his birthday.
It is for us, those who cared about John, deeply sad.
I'm surprised to see the NYT obituary published nearly a month after his death. I would have thought he'd be included in their stack of pre-written obituaries, meaning it could be updated and published within a day or two.
Well, that was incredibly depressing. Maybe I can lighten things with a funny (to me) anecdote.
There are many people who know a lot about a little. There are also those who know a little about a lot. Searle was one of those rare people who knew a lot about a lot. Many a cocky undergraduate sauntered into his classroom thinking they'd come prepared with some new fact that he hadn't yet heard, some new line of attack he hadn't prepared for. Nearly always, they were disappointed.
But you know what he knew absolutely nothing about? Chinese. When it came time to deliver his lecture on the Chinese Room, he'd reach up and draw some incomprehensible mess of squigglies and say "suppose this is an actual Chinese character." Seriously. After decades of teaching about this thought experiment, for which he'd become famous (infamous?), he hadn't bothered to teach himself even a single character to use for illustration purposes.
Anyway, I thought it was funny. My heart goes out to Jennifer Hudin, who was indispensable, and all who were close to him.
It is not very often that you hear about somebody raising the cost of rent for everyone in an entire city by ~28% in a single year[0]. He will certainly be remembered.
Of all the things I studied at Berkeley, the Philosophy of Mind class he taught is the one I think back on most often. The subject matter has only grown in relevance with time.
In general, I think he's spectacularly misunderstood. For instance: he believed that it was entirely possible to create conscious artificial beings (at least in principle). So why do so many people misunderstand the Chinese Room argument to be saying the opposite? My theory is that most people encounter his ideas from secondary sources that subtly misrepresent his argument.
At the risk of following in their footsteps, I'll try to very succinctly summarize my understanding. He doesn't argue that consciousness can only emerge from biological neurons. His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. The Chinese Room argument might mislead people into thinking it's an epistemology claim ("knowing" the Chinese language) when it's really an ontology claim (consciousness and its objective, independent mode of existence).
If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.
I also remember a course from him decades ago, but I'm not sure this memorial post is the place for my take. Instead, let me attempt to re-tell a joke I heard back then...
John Searle and George Lakoff walk into a bar.
Searle exclaims, "What do you know!"
The bar replies sardonically, "You wouldn't believe it."
Lakoff sighs, "This is 0.8 drinks with Lotfi Zadeh..."
Well, at least it's a good reason to re-read his infamous exchange with Derrida.
When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read.
Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience.
There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.
What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really idealistic.
There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system.
You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy.
None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard.
When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.
As someone that studied philosophy, his work is cited often and is absolutely instrumental in modern theory of mind. His work has seen a resurgence recently due to the explosion of LLMs. I've read 2 or 3 of his books, and he was a brilliant mind with clear & concise arguments. I met many of his collaborators at UCLA, but sadly never the man himself. Either way, his work has had a profound effect on me and my understanding of the world.
John Searle is one of those thinkers I disagree with, yet his ideas were fruitful — providing plenty of fuel for discussion. In particular, much of Daniel Dennett’s work begins with rebuttals of Searle’s claims, showing that they are inconsistent or meaningless. As in a story by Stanisław Lem — we all know there are no dragons, but it’s all about the beauty of the proofs.
The same goes for "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel — one of the most cited essays in the philosophy of mind. I had heard numerous references to it and finally expected to read an insightful masterpiece. Yet it turned out to be slightly tautological: that to experience, you need to be. Personally, I think the word be is a philosopher’s snake oil, or a "lockpick word" — it can be used anywhere, but remains fuzzy even in its intended use; vide E-Prime, an attempt to write English without "be": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.
He brought so many unique contributions to the field. Top 10 in philosophy of mind imo. Sad that he chose to tarnish his legacy by preying on his students for decades. I find the lack of discussion in here around his misconduct very telling. There is so much to learn here regarding the way we revere bright minds like his that might not have the brightest of morals
Searle seemed to reject the Chinese Room as mis-framed, with the his point better summarized as, he wrote, 'syntax does not create semantics': a purely 'syntactic' computer, limited to 'mechanical' symbol manipulation, does not 'understand' without assignments of linguistic roles to the syntax. He continued that with 'physics doesn't create syntax', meaning that even syntactic roles require a normative interpretation for what counts as what (discrete signs, valid composite signs, errors). That finally ensues, in his book The Construction of Social Reality, in computation being 'observer relative', along with the CR being a poor starting point:
" …the really deep problem is that syntax is essentially an observer-relative notion…..For the purposes of the original [Chinese Room] argument I was simply assuming that the syntactical characterization of the computer was unproblematic. But that is a mistake. There is no way you could discover that something is intrinsically a digital computer because the characterization of it as a digital computer is always relative to an observer who assigns a syntactical interpretation to the purely physical features of the system." (Philosophy in a New Century p. 94). Unfortunately Searle didn't, or couldn't, elaborate on 'the really deep problem', and this final perspective on observer-relativity is missed by many readers. As observer-relative, computation would appear to be one of Searle's social realities, but he doesn't ever say that, it's a bridge too far. Finally, 'consciousness' per se is also not the focus, it's more about intentionality and the interdependence of syntax with semantics/meaning. Intentionality is a kind of consciousness; they are not identical.
26 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle
Gotta agree here. The brain is a chemical computer with a gazillion inputs that are stimulated in manifold ways by the world around it, and is constantly changing states while you are alive; a computer is a digital processor that works work with raw data, and tends to be entirely static when no processing is happening. The two are vastly different entities that are similar in only the most abstract ways.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-ob...
His most famous argument:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Maybe I should look up some of my other heroes and heretics while I have the chance. I mean, you don't need to cold e-mail them a challenge. Sometimes they're already known to be at events and such, after all!
Wiki
It includes a letter that starts:
I'm surprised to see the NYT obituary published nearly a month after his death. I would have thought he'd be included in their stack of pre-written obituaries, meaning it could be updated and published within a day or two.There are many people who know a lot about a little. There are also those who know a little about a lot. Searle was one of those rare people who knew a lot about a lot. Many a cocky undergraduate sauntered into his classroom thinking they'd come prepared with some new fact that he hadn't yet heard, some new line of attack he hadn't prepared for. Nearly always, they were disappointed.
But you know what he knew absolutely nothing about? Chinese. When it came time to deliver his lecture on the Chinese Room, he'd reach up and draw some incomprehensible mess of squigglies and say "suppose this is an actual Chinese character." Seriously. After decades of teaching about this thought experiment, for which he'd become famous (infamous?), he hadn't bothered to teach himself even a single character to use for illustration purposes.
Anyway, I thought it was funny. My heart goes out to Jennifer Hudin, who was indispensable, and all who were close to him.
0. https://www.academia.edu/30805094/The_Success_and_Failure_of...
In general, I think he's spectacularly misunderstood. For instance: he believed that it was entirely possible to create conscious artificial beings (at least in principle). So why do so many people misunderstand the Chinese Room argument to be saying the opposite? My theory is that most people encounter his ideas from secondary sources that subtly misrepresent his argument.
At the risk of following in their footsteps, I'll try to very succinctly summarize my understanding. He doesn't argue that consciousness can only emerge from biological neurons. His argument is much narrower: consciousness can't be instantiated purely in language. The Chinese Room argument might mislead people into thinking it's an epistemology claim ("knowing" the Chinese language) when it's really an ontology claim (consciousness and its objective, independent mode of existence).
If you think you disagree with him (as I once did), please consider the possibility that you've only been exposed to an ersatz characterization of his argument.
John Searle and George Lakoff walk into a bar.
Searle exclaims, "What do you know!"
The bar replies sardonically, "You wouldn't believe it."
Lakoff sighs, "This is 0.8 drinks with Lotfi Zadeh..."
When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read.
Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience.
There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.
There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system.
You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy.
None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard.
When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.
Rest in peace.
The same goes for "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel — one of the most cited essays in the philosophy of mind. I had heard numerous references to it and finally expected to read an insightful masterpiece. Yet it turned out to be slightly tautological: that to experience, you need to be. Personally, I think the word be is a philosopher’s snake oil, or a "lockpick word" — it can be used anywhere, but remains fuzzy even in its intended use; vide E-Prime, an attempt to write English without "be": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.