<< You wrote of Searle:
> Rather Searle attacks AI because he thinks of if as
> exactly the opposite of a brain-based account -- he
> thinks of it as a "brains are irrelevant" account.
OK, but that's a position he *imputes* to his
opponents. Some of 'em hold it, I'm sure, but I'm
also sure some of 'em don't. (Now who does and who
doesn't I can't say, but aren't software neural
networks an attempt to model actual physical systems
in the brain?) >>
I have kept out of this, since I wrote on it for years until I got bored with it, but I thought I would say that S is or was probably right that most functionalists thought that brains were irrelevant. Connectionism, the neural net theory, has a tenuosu relation to classical functionalism, since some of the connectionists hypothesis they are modeling how the human brain works; classical functioanlism, what Haugeland called GOFAI, Good Old Fashioned AI, uses top-down nonconnectionsits algorims. Anyway, even if the connectionists happen to be right, Searlea nd the GOFAI crowd would agree that if a connectionsit program models thought anbd the human brain, that's a happy coincidence, what the connectionis want is to model thought.
Incidentally, long ago I wrote a paper attacking the idae that brains were irrelevant but defending functionalism. It is entitled Who's Afraid of Multiple Realizability, and it is in The Symbolic & Connectionist Paradigms, John Dinsmore ed, 1992. I think it's a fine paper and its argument is still correct that is, functionalism is true and brains matter.
In my personal opinion, Searle is full of hot air and the Chinese Room argument is ridiculous. It's just a way of expressing his intuition, which I do not share, taht there must be more than to thinking than the total set of input-output relations, the causal connections taht produce them, the internal states they cause. If someday we were to get a Cognitiuve Code that did foi thinking what Watson and Crick did for genetics, Searle would say, and the Chinese Room Argument would imply, taht it told us nothing about thinking. So what does that tell you about Searle? Have fun talking about him. I did my time with this stuff.
--Justin Schwartz (a reformed philosopher of mind)