by Zarathruster | 2025-10-13 23:25:38+00:00
> I think this muddies the water unnecessarily. Computation is not language, even though we typically write software in so called programming languages. But the computation itself is something different from the linguistic-like description of software. The computation is the set of states, and the relationships between them, that a computer goes through.

In hindsight, choosing the word "language" was probably more distracting than helpful. We could get into a debate about whether computation is essentially another form of language-like syntactic manipulation, but it does share a key feature with language: observer-relative ontology. @mjburgess has already made this case with you at length, and I don't think I could improve on what's already been written, so I'll just leave it at that.

> I should have been clearer - I meant that he admits that materialism makes more sense than idealism or property dualism, but I realize that this comes off as suggesting it makes more sense than his own position, which of course he does not.

I'm not sure that I saw this specific claim made, but it's not especially important. What's more important is understanding what his objection to materialism is, such that you can a)agree with it or b)articulate why you think he's wrong. That said, it isn't the main focus of this paper, so the argument is very compressed. It also rests on the assumption that you believe that consciousness is real (i.e. not an illusion), and given the rest of your comment, I'm not sure that you do.

> Both you and he seem to find a single example of a phenomenon that is causally reducible to some constituent part, but that is not ontological reducible to that constitutent part - consciousness

Yes, although to be clear, I'm mainly interested in correctly articulating the viewpoint expressed in the paper. My own views don't perfectly overlap with Searle's

> (he would add intentionality, I think, given the introduction, but it's not clear to me this is even a meaningfully separatable concept from consciousness)

I doubt he'd add it as a discrete entry because, as you correctly observe, intentionality is inseparable from consciousness (but the reverse is not true)

> And you both claim that this is the case because of this special feature of "first person ontology", which is a different thing than "third person ontology" - which seems to me to simply be dualism by another name.

Ok good, this is directly interacting with the paper's thesis: why he's not a (property) dualist. He's trying to thread the needle between materialism and dualism. His main objection to property dualism is that consciousness doesn't exist "over and above" the brain, on which it is utterly dependent. This is probably his tightest phrasing of his position:

> The property dualist means that in addition to all the neurobiological features of the brain, there is an extra, distinct, non physical feature of the brain; whereas I mean that consciousness is a state the brain can be in, in the way that liquidity and solidity are states that water can be in.

Does his defense work for you? Honestly I wouldn't blame you if you said no. He spends a full third of the paper complaining about the English language (this is a theme) and how it prevents him from cleanly describing his position. I get it, even if I find it a little exhausting, especially when the stakes are starting to feel kinda low.

> I think it's entirely possible to reject the notion of a meaningful first person ontology completely.

On first reading, this sounds like you might be rejecting the idea of consciousness entirely. Or do you think it's possible to have a 'trivial' first person ontology?

> It's very possible that the appearance of a first person narrative that we experience is a retroactive illusion we create that uses our models of how other people function on ourselves. That is, we are simple computers that manipulate symbols in our brains, that generate memories of their recent state as being a "conscious experience", which is just what we invented as a model of why other animals and physical phenomena more broadly behave the way they do (since we intuitively assign emotions and intentions to things like clouds and fires and mountains, to explain their behavior).

I'm not sure where to start with this, so I'll just pick a spot. You seem to deny that "conscious experience" is a real thing (which is equivalent to "what it's like to be a zombie") but we nonetheless have hallucinated memories of experiences which, to be clear, we did not have because we don't really have conscious experiences at all. But how do we replay those memories without consciousness? Do we just have fake memories about remembering fake memories? And where do the fake fake fake memories get played, in light of the fact that we have no inner lives except in retrospect?