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.low in the Chinese room.Behavior, in this bland sense, includes all intersubjectively observableSearle has apparently confused a claim about the underivability ofinternal processes and events (such as the behavior of your gut orsemantics from syntax with a claim about the underivability of theyour RNA).No one complains that models in science only account forconsciousness of semantics from syntax.For Searle, the idea of genuinethe "behavior" of hurricanes or gall bladders or solar systems.Whatunderstanding, genuine "semanticity" as he often calls it, is inextric-else is there about these phenomena for science to account for? This isable from the idea of consciousness.He does not so much as considerwhat makes the causal powers Searle imagines so mysterious: theythe possibility of unconscious semanticity.have, by his own admission, no telltale effect on behavior (internal orThe problems of consciousness are serious and perplexing, for AIexternal) unlike the causal powers I take so seriously: the powersand for everyone else.The question of whether a machine could berequired to guide a body through life, seeing, hearing, acting, talking,conscious is one I have addressed at length before (Brainstorms, chap-deciding, investigating, and so on.It is at least misleading to call suchters 8-11; Hofstadter and Dennett 1981; Dennett 1982b, 1985a, forth-a thoroughly cognitivist and (for example) anti-Skinnerian doctrine ascoming e) and will address in more detail in the future.This is not themine behaviorism, but Searle insists on using the term in this way.time or place for a full-scale discussion.For the moment, let us just 336The Intentional StanceFast Thinking 337note that Searle's case, such as it is, does not hinge at all on the veryconsidered essential to it, then the program is not a purely formalsimple argument about the formality of programs and the underiv-object at all (and is arguably eligible for patent protection), and with-ability of semantics from syntax but on deep-seated intuitions mostout some details of embodiment being fixed by the internal seman-people have about consciousness and its apparent unrealizability intics of the machine language in which the program is ultimatelymachines.written a program is not even a syntactic object, but just a pattern ofSearle's treatment of that case, moreover, invites us to regress to amarks as inert as wallpaper.Cartesian vantage point.(Searle's fury is never fiercer than when aFinally, an implication of the arguments in chapter 8 is that Searle'scritic calls him a dualist, for he insists that he is a thoroughly modernproposition 3 is false, given what he means by "minds have mentalmaterialist; but among his chief supporters, who take themselves tocontents." There is no such thing as intrinsic intentionalitybe agreeing with him, are modern-day Cartesians such as Eccles andespecially if this is viewed, as Searle can now be seen to require, as aPuccetti.) Searle proclaims that somehow and he has nothing to sayproperty to which the subject has conscious, privileged access.about the details the biochemistry of the human brain ensures thatno human beings are zombies.This is reassuring, but mystifying.How does the biochemistry create such a happy effect? By a won-drous causal power indeed; it is the very same causal power Des-cartes imputed to immaterial souls, and Searle has made it no lesswondrous or mysterious or incoherent in the end by assuring usthat it is all somehow just a matter of biochemistry.Finally, to respond for the record to Searle's challenge: What do Ithink is wrong with Searle's very simple argument, aside from itsbeing a red herring? Consider once more hisProposition 2.Syntax is neither equivalent to nor sufficient by itself forsemantics.This may still be held true, if we make the simple mistake of talkingabout syntax on the shelf, an unimplemented program.But embodied,running syntax the "right program" on a suitably fast machine issufficient for derived intentionality, and that is the only kind of seman-tics there is, as I argued in chapter 8 (see also the discussion ofsyntactic and semantic engines in chapter 3).So I reject, with argu-ments, Searle's proposition 2.In fact, the same considerations show that there is also somethingamiss with his proposition 1: Programs are purely formal (i.e., syn-tactic).Whether a program is to be identified by its purely formalcharacteristics is a hotly contested issue in the law these days.Canyou patent a program, or merely copyright it? A host of interestinglawsuits swarm around the question of whether programs that do thesame things in the world count as the same program even though theyare, at some level of description, syntactically different.If details of"embodiment" are included in the specification of a program, and are Mid-Term Examination:10Compare and ContrastQ.Compare and contrast the views of the following philosophers on thefundamental status of attributions of intentionality: Quine, Sellars, Chis-holm, Putnam, Davidson, Bennett, Fodor, Stich, and Dennett.A.It would be strange, and distressing, if the "major differences"between these philosophical theorists turned out to be all that ma-jor if, in particular, it turned out that one side in each controversywas flat wrong about something important (as contrasted, say, withhaving put rather too much emphasis on one aspect of the truth).Itwould be distressing because it just shouldn't be the case that a groupof such smart people might read and discuss the same books, work inthe same (Anglo-American) tradition, be familiar with roughly thesame evidence, endorse the same methodology, and yet some ofthem utterly fail to comprehend the significance of it all, in spite oftheir colleagues' wisest efforts at enlightening them
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