Thinking Outside of the Box (Optional 7)

**Thinking Outside of the Box (Optional 7)** is an optional chamber in *The Turing Test*

## Summary

Thinking outside of the Box is an achievement earned after completing Optional Puzzle 7.

There are a number of pages scattered around the room. Starting from the right as you enter the door, they read as follows:

*John Searle and I have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind. For Searle, it is all really quite simple. There are these bedrock, time-tested intuitions we all have about consciousness, and any theory that challenges them is just preposterous. I, on the contrary, think that the persistent problem of consciousness is going to remain a mystery until we find some such dead obvious intuition and show that, in spite of first appearances, it is false! One of us is dead wrong, and the stakes are high. Searle sees my position as “a form of intellectual pathology”; no one should be surprised to learn that the feeling is mutual.*

*For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993). Searle debated me furiously in the pages of the NYRB back in 1982, when Douglas Hofstadter and I first exposed the cute tricks that make the Chinese Room “work.” That was the last time Searle addressed any of my specific criticisms until now. Now he trots out the Chinese Room yet one more time and has the audacity to ask “Now why does Dennett not face the actual argument as I have stated it? Why does he not tell us which of the three premises he rejects in the Chinese Room Argument?”*

*Well, because I have already done so, in great detail, in several of the articles he has never deigned to answer. For instance, in “Fast Thinking” (way back in The Intentional Stance, 1987) I explicitly quoted his entire three premise argument and showed exactly why all three of them are false, when given the interpretation they need for the argument to go through! Why didn’t I repeat that 1987 article in my 1991 book? Because, unlike Searle, I had gone on to other things. I did, however, cite my 1987 article prominently in a footnote (p. 436), and noted that Searle’s only response to it had been simply to declare, without argument, that the points offered there were irrelevant. The pattern continues; now he both ignores that challenge and goes on to misrepresent the further criticisms of the Chinese Room that I offered in the book under review, but perhaps he has forgotten what I actually wrote in the four years it has taken him to write his review.*

*But enough about the Chinese Room. What do I have to offer on my side? I have my candidate for the fatally false intuition, and it is indeed the very intuition Searle invites the reader to share with him, the conviction that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about that feeling—you know, the feeling of pain that is the effect of the stimulus and the cause of the dispositions to react—the quale, the “intrinsic” content of the subjective state. How could anyone deny that!? Just watch—but you have to pay close attention. I develop my destructive arguments against this intuition by showing how an objective science of consciousness is possible after all, and how Searle’s proposed “first-person” alternative leads to self-contradiction and paradox at every turning. This is the “deepest mistake” in my book, according to Searle, and he sets out to “expose” it. The trouble is that the objective scientific method I describe (under the alarming name of heterophenomenology) is nothing I invented; it is in fact exactly the method tacitly endorsed and relied upon by every scientist working on consciousness, including Crick, Edelman, and Rosenfield. They have no truck with Searle’s “intrinsic” content and “ontological subjectivity”; they know better.*

*\**

*I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives.[...] Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness.*

*He says correctly that when I wrote my review I took his book to be his definitive statement of his position on the Chinese room and did not consult his earlier works. (In fact I did not know that he had produced a total of seven published attacks on this one short argument of mine until I saw his letter). He now claims to have refuted all three premises of the argument in 1987. But I have just reread the relevant chapter of his book and find he did nothing of the sort, nor did he even make a serious effort to attack the premises. Rather he misstates my position as being about consciousness rather than about semantics. He thinks that I am only concerned to show that the man in the Chinese Room does not consciously understand Chinese, but I am in fact showing that he does not understand Chinese at all, because the syntax of the program is not sufficient for the understanding of the semantics of a language, whether conscious or unconscious. Furthermore he presupposes a kind of behaviorism. He assumes that a system that behaves as if it had mental states, must have mental states. But that kind of behaviorism is precisely what is challenged by the argument. So I have to confess that I don’t find that the weakness of his arguments in his recent book is helped by his 1987 arguments.*

*to perform" (her italics). This statement is quoted by Hartree ( 1949) who adds: "This does not imply that it may not be possible to construct electronic equipment which will 'think for itself,' or in which, in biological terms, one could set up a conditioned reflex, which would serve as a basis for 'learning.' Whether this is possible in principle or not is a stimulating and exciting question, suggested by some of these recent developments But it did not seem that the machines constructed or projected at the time had this property."*

*The nervous system is certainly not a discrete-state machine. A small error in the information about the size of a nervous impulse impinging on a neuron, may make a large difference to the size of the outgoing impulse. It may be argued that, this being so, one cannot expect to be able to mimic the behaviour of the nervous system with a discrete-state system.*

*\**

*Searle: Thought experiments are important because a lot of the time you can't carry out the actual experiment and this is true not only in philosophy but in science as well. So when Einstein said "imagine that you're sitting on a beam of light going into outer space", well, that's a thought experiment. He wasn't going to say, "Let's get on a beam of light". Of course you miss the point if you say, "well, we'd fall off" or "it would be too cold". So, thought experiments are always useful, and you test your concepts by imagining what it would be like if such and such were the case. Well, in this particular case I imagined what it would be like if I followed a program for answering questions in Chinese and giving back answers in Chinese, even though I don't understand a word of Chinese. And that was a very useful thought experiment because it enables us to see that computation by itself isn't thinking.*

*Consciousness exists only insofar as it is experience by a human or animal subject. OK, now grant me that consciousness is a genuine biological phenomenon. Well, all the same it's somewhat different from other biological phenomena because it only exists insofar as it is experienced. However, that does give it an interesting status. You can't refute the existence of consciousness by showing that it's just an illusion because the illusion/reality distinction rests on the differencce between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. But where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to me that I'm conscious, then I am conscious. You can't make the illusion/reality distinction for the very existence of consciousness the way you can for sunsets and rainbows becayse the distinction is between how things conciously seem and how they really are. Conciousness is a biological property like disgestion or photosynthesis. Now why isn't that screamingly obvious to anybody who's had an education? And I think the answer is these twin traditions. On the one hand there's God, the soul and immortality that says it's really not part of the physical world, and then there is the almost as bad tradition of scientific materialism that says it's not a part of the physical world. They both make the same mistake, they refuse to take consciousness on its own terms as a biological phenomenon like digestion, or photosynthesis, or mitosis, or any other biological phenomenon.*

*\**

*I now proceed to consider opinions opposed to my own.*
The Theological Objection

*Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.*

*"Heads in the Sand" Objection*

*The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so."*

*The Mathematical Objection*

*There are a number of results of mathematical logic which can be used to show that there are limitations to the powers of discrete-state machines. The best known of these results is known as Godel's theorem ( 1931 ) and shows that in any sufficiently powerful logical system statements can be formulated which can neither be proved nor disproved within the system, unless possibly the system itself is inconsistent.*

*The Argument from Consciousness*

*This argument is very, well expressed in Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. "Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants."*

*Arguments from Various Disabilities*

*These arguments take the form, "I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X." Numerous features X are suggested in this connexion I offer a selection:*

*Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new.*

*Lady Lovelace's Objection*

*Our most detailed information of Babbage's Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace ( 1842). In it she states, "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform" (her italics). This statement is quoted by Hartree ( 1949) who adds: "This does not imply that it may not be possible to construct electronic equipment which will 'think for itself,' or in which, in biological terms, one could set up a conditioned reflex, which would serve as a basis for 'learning.' Whether this is possible in principle or not is a stimulating and exciting question, suggested by some of these recent developments But it did not seem that the machines constructed or projected at the time had this property."*

*Argument from Continuity in the Nervous System*

*The nervous system is certainly not a discrete-state machine. A small error in the information about the size of a nervous impulse impinging on a neuron, may make a large difference to the size of the outgoing impulse. It may be argued that, this being so, one cannot expect to be able to mimic the behaviour of the nervous system with a discrete-state system.*

*\**

*And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.*

*\**

*I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" ... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"*

*The question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavour that we wish to include. We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant. The "witnesses" can brag, if they consider it advisable, as much as they please about their charms, strength or heroism, but the interrogator cannot demand practical demonstrations.*

*The game may perhaps be criticised on the ground that the odds are weighted too heavily against the machine. If the man were to try and pretend to be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He would be given away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic. May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection.*

*It might be urged that when playing the "imitation game" the best strategy for the machine may possibly be something other than imitation of the behaviour of a man. This may be, but I think it is unlikely that there is any great effect of this kind. In any case there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man.*

1. ↑ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/ncc375/turing/turing.html
3. ↑ https://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/john-searle-it-upsets-me-when-i-read-the-nonsense-written-by-my-contemporaries/
4. ↑ https://biblehub.com/genesis/2-7.htm
’The Mystery of Consciousness’: An Exchange, 1‘The Mystery of Consciousness’: An Exchange, 2‘The Mystery of Consciousness’: An Exchange, 3Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 4.5Searle: it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries..., 1Searle: it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries..., 2Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 3Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 4Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 5King James Bible - Genesis 2:7Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 1Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, 2