Jul 4
"The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-catastrophic phenomenon."
- John Searle
seen from Australia
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seen from Bulgaria
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
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seen from Poland
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"The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-catastrophic phenomenon."
- John Searle
Do you think humanoid robots will become advanced enough for Hatsune Miku to pilot one and experience life like we do? Would she even want to do that?
miku fun fact #286
we don't know for certain, but, if people robots (not like the ones made by that weird car salesman but better ones) were even better (more blue) and stronger (more blue), miku would probably at least consider it for the purpose of performing, but human life is so different from robot life there's really no way to tell whether she would want to experience life as a human
Oh, hey, the Chinese room! I got that reference!
With all the A.I. slop I have to see every day, I have been reminded of something I learned years and years ago when I studied philosophy.
—
Imagine a person locked in a windowless room. They have a desk, a chair, and a thick book with instructions. Their work is simple. They get a piece of paper with strange markings through a chute in the wall. They then have to find the markings from the paper in the book and copy the correct 'answer symbols' onto the back of the paper. The finished work disappears back into the chute.
The strange symbols are Chinese. The answers in the book are also Chinese. To a person outside of the room, it seems as if whoever is inside understands the language. They always return the paper with the correct response after all.
But they don't.
The person inside the room doesn't even know which language they're reading/writing, or if it even is a language. To them, it's all just nonsense symbols. They could spend a hundred years inside that room and would never learn a single word.
This is John Searle's Chinese Room Argument.
No program can ever really learn anything. They can become faster at their task. Get a bigger memory. But they will always be mindless.
It is all artifice without intelligence.
«En esa oposición entre la metodología de la investigación limitada a los hechos observables y la que usa los hechos observables como claves para leyes subyacentes, y ocultas, la revolución de Chomsky es doblemente interesante: en primer lugar, en el dominio de la lingüística, ha precipitado un conflicto, que es ejemplo de un conflicto más amplio; y en segundo lugar, Chomsky ha usado sus resultados sobre el lenguaje para intentar desarrollar conclusiones generales antibehavioristas y antiempiristas sobre la naturaleza de la mente humana, cuyo alcance supera los límites del de la lingüística.»
John Searle: La revolución de Chomsky en lingüística. Editorial Anagrama, pág. 8. Madrid, 1974
TGO
@bocadosdefilosofia
@dies-irae-1
started the searle & magee talk about wittgenstein and, beyond my thoughts on how magee is the most insufferable wrong-opinioned boomer who has to have the last word on everything, i can't stop thinking about one little part:
searle, summarizing wittgenstein on private language, says:
"obeying the rules (of language) is a social practice. it's something we learn in society. society just has ways of making people and training people to conform to rules."
in the context of language, of course the first thing i thought of is the pushback against other modes of language, but specifically about the co-opting of black language by (gay?) whites. pushing against the rules is a way of indicating a refusal to conform; forcibly adopting nonconformist language into the conforming framework of whiteness dismantles the pushback, and makes the nonconforming conform.
In 2003 I was a philosophy student and I dreamed of having an academic career, so in my second year of college I published my first text in a student magazine called Čemu. It was called Determinism and Free Will.
The problem of free will still haunts me from time to time throughout my life, as a curse and as an unsolved personal issue.
Last night, after a long time, I got an urge to read a text on free will. Among the books from my student years I found John Searle’s lecture The Freedom of the Will in his book Minds, Brains and Science.
He writes:
“We can’t act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system. (...) For reasons I don’t really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour. For that reason, I believe, neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behaviour is unfree.”
It was comforting to read such a powerful statement, that nothing will convince us that our behaviour is unfree.
The rest of the night I spent reading how John Searle sexually harassed, assaulted, and retaliated against female students at UC Berkeley.
Merry Christmas!
Zagreb, 25 December 2021
John Searle Enters the Matrix