What many see as an inflated ego I see as someone having a lot of fun and eager to explain why they are having a lot of fun, but I can understand the slipperiness in the interpretation.
D'ya think his influence is mainly because he's got the best-sounding appeals to most folks' basic intuitions about consciousness? Chinese boxes and all that?
Sure, some of the things he says sound like common sense. "Of course a room can't be 'conscious'! It's just a room! Consciousness is more than that! Duh!!" But he seems to just take consciousness as this mystical undefined thing that is simply not allowed to be present in anything besides a human brain.
I once had the opportunity to debate a Searlean at close quarters. He was a philosophy professor who should have known better.
I got him down to the level of action potentials and ion exchange membranes in the brain, and got him to admit that there was nothing else there. At this point Searle's contention that computers can't be conscious because there's nothing but bits looks like the completely silly bit of vitalism/spiritualism it is.
The philosopher retreated to the position that "he didn't know what Searle would say about that argument", which sidestepped the point: I wanted to know what he, as a by now surly Searlean, would say about it.
One cannot be both a materialist about human consciousness and deny the possibility of conscious entities that are inorganic, although there are still good arguments as to why computers as we know them today will never achieve that state.
Hofstadter is all ego. This doesn't bother me because, (a), he reminds me of me and I love that.
And (b), he really does investigate math and memory and consciousness and logic by looking into a mirror. His ego is his biggest test subject. And he's an excellent observer of it, and writes well and insightfully about it. That's what's good about his books.
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What many see as an inflated ego I see as someone having a lot of fun and eager to explain why they are having a lot of fun, but I can understand the slipperiness in the interpretation.
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All couples, then.
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I got him down to the level of action potentials and ion exchange membranes in the brain, and got him to admit that there was nothing else there. At this point Searle's contention that computers can't be conscious because there's nothing but bits looks like the completely silly bit of vitalism/spiritualism it is.
The philosopher retreated to the position that "he didn't know what Searle would say about that argument", which sidestepped the point: I wanted to know what he, as a by now surly Searlean, would say about it.
One cannot be both a materialist about human consciousness and deny the possibility of conscious entities that are inorganic, although there are still good arguments as to why computers as we know them today will never achieve that state.
Reply
And (b), he really does investigate math and memory and consciousness and logic by looking into a mirror. His ego is his biggest test subject. And he's an excellent observer of it, and writes well and insightfully about it. That's what's good about his books.
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