Jay Richards

You can picture yourself eating a chocolate ice cream sundae: John Searle’s Chinese Room scenario is the most famous argument against the “strong AI” presumption that computation-writ-large-and-fast will become consciousness: … His argument shows that computers work at the level of syntax, whereas human agents work at the level of meaning: … I still find Searle’s argument persuasive, despite decades of attempts by other philosophers to poke holes in it. But there’s another, shorter and more intuitive argument against a materialist account of the mind. It has to do with intentional states. Michael Egnor and others have offered versions of this argument here at Mind Matters and elsewhere but I’d like to boil it down to its bare bones. Then Read More ›