[ExI] Searle and AI

[Damien Broderick]

On 12/27/2009 10:32 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote:

> I was led to think that Searle believes that conscious AI is impossible (due to certain people saying things like "Strong AI of the sort that Searle refutes"), but in "Why I Am Not a Property Dualist", he says:
>
> "Maybe someday we will be able to create conscious artifacts, in which case subjective states of consciousness will be ‘physical’ features of those artifacts"
>
> and
>
> "Consciousness is thus an ordinary feature of certain biological systems, in the same way that photosynthesis, digestion, and lactation are ordinary features of biological systems"

Yes, and this is what his more careless disciples (and foes) seem to 
overlook. It's why John Clark's repeated wailing about Darwin misses the 
point. Searle knows perfectly well that consciousness is a feature of 
evolved systems (and so far only of them); he is arguing that current 
computational designs lack some critical feature of evolved intentional 
systems. We don't know that this is wrong. The wonderfully named Dr. 
Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of 
Surrey and author of Quantum Evolution, argues ( 
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/ ) that certain quantum fields and 
interactions are crucial to the function of mind. If that turns out to 
be right, it's possible that only entirely novel kinds of AIs will 
experience initiative and qualia, etc. And if that is the case, the 
standard reply to the Chinese Room asserting that the room as a whole 
has consciousness will be falsified, since such an arrangement would 
lack the requisite entanglements, etc, that have been installed in human 
embodied brains by... yes, Mr. Darwin's friend, evolution by natural 
selection of gene variants.

Damien Broderick