Curtiss Leung wrote:
>
> Now, why he holds this view but then goes out of his
> way to attack everyone else's effort to advance a
> brain based account of mind
If I remember, Searle is a non-reductive physicalist/materialist, meaning that the mind is nothing but the brain but the brain cannot wholly explain the mind and its contents.
> but I thought I would say that S is or was probably right that most
> functionalists thought that brains were irrelevant.
Maybe at one time when the functionalists thought that the only criterion for possessing a mind is that it pass the Turing test. Dennett gave the example of how a thermostat can be said to have a mind.
> 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.
I thought Searle was trying to refute the Chomskyian view that semantics arises solely out of syntax. Searle thinks with others like Penrose and Mcguinn that there is something (??) about intentionality that makes it irruducible to syntax and computational processes. I think Penrose even goes so far to call it a 'ghost in the machine'. I studied with Kim Sterelny for awhile, I liked his Representational Theory Of Mind, though a bit too genetic determinist for me. Anyone read his book? I think he is or was a Marxist.
Sam Pawlett