Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Minds, Brains and Programs 375from this system. He merely insists that some systems have intentionality by virtue oftheir "causal powers" and that some don't. He vacillates about what those powers are dueto. Sometimes it seems that the brain is composed of "the right stuff," but other times itseems to be something else. It is whatever seems convenient at the moment-now it is theslippery essence that distinguishes "form" from "content," now another essence thatseparates syntax from semantics, and so on.To the Systems-Reply advocates, Searle offers the thought that the human beingin the room (whom we shall from now on refer to as "Searle's demon") should simplymemorize, or incorporate all the material on the "bits of paper." As if a human beingcould, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, do this. The program on those "bitsof paper" embodies the entire mind and character of something as complex in its abilityto respond to written material as a human being is, by virtue of being able to pass theTuring test. Could any human being simply "swallow up" the entire description ofanother human being's mind? We find it hard enough to memorize a written paragraph;but Searle envisions the demon as having absorbed what in all likelihood would amountto millions, if not billions, of pages densely covered with abstract symbols-and moreoverhaving all of this information available, whenever needed, with no retrieval problems.This unlikely aspect of the scenario is all lightly described, and it is not part of Searle'skey argument to convince the reader that it makes sense. In fact, quite the contrary a keypart of his argument is in glossing over these questions of orders of magnitude, forotherwise a skeptical reader will realize that nearly all of the understanding must lie inthe billions of symbols on paper, and practically none of it in the demon. The fact that thedemon is animate is an irrelevant-indeed, misleading-side issue that Searle has mistakenfor a very significant fact.We can back up this argument by exhibiting Searle's own espousal of the SystemsReply. To do so, we should first like to place Searle's thought experiment in a broadercontext. In particular, we would like to show how Searle's setup is just one of a largefamily of related thought experiments, several of which are the topics of other selectionsin this book. Each member of this family of thought experiments is defined by aparticular choice of "knob settings" on a thought-experiment generator. Its purpose is tocreate-in your mind's eye-various sorts of imaginary simulations of human mentalactivity. Each different thought experiment is an "intuition pump" (Dennett's term) thatmagnifies one facet or other of the issue, tending to push the reader toward certainconclusions. We see approximately five knobs of interest, although it is possible thatsomeone else could come up with more.