What you are describing sounds like "panpsychism" - Searle rejects this view as absurd, most notably in his exchange with "neo-dualist" David Chalmers: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/05/15/consciousness-and-the-p hilosophers-an-exchange/

See also the recent work of Galen Strawson and Steven Shaviro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtDgCQ5vehE

http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Claremont2010.pdf

Also, gotta love the Searle/Derrida debacle from the early '70s. Poor guy.

I really loved this kind of thing, now I find it a bit frustrating because the arguments are often so poorly thought out.

For example, he claims there is no "spread out" consciousness, at about the half way point in the clip. Utter nonsense. I can point to _many_ examples, but my goto one it the beast I have been wrestling with for the past few months. It ( for it is legion, yet it is also one ) is the sugar ant. I have studied individual ants, for they are friendly critters. There is not much to them. Yet, the sum of them is a formidable opponent, capable of subtle strategy and long term planning. Try getting rid of them without napalming your house, and you'll quickly come to the same conclusion.

But what of the brain itself? I had a client who did foundational work with NMRI and as he said, "they looked and looked for a little homunculus in there, but none was to be found". So where is consciousness in the brain? Spread out of course amongst a number of subsystems.

I would challenge this man to present even ONE example of the isolated, individual consciousness he seems to assume exists. It doesn't.

I think zurf pointed you to the right debate there. Nicely done, zurf.

Oscar Wildcat, I think you've misunderstood the point. You can debate the particulars of sugar ants, but Searle was rejecting that every last thing in the universe has an amount of consciousness like it has an amount of mass.

OK, I read a good deal of the first link, before once again I threw my hands up and said "This man is sleepwalking".

The best I can say is that I'm glad he has choosen to move beyond his predecessors, who firmly believes man was the only entity with consciousness, and has extended that to !some! animals. I'd like to know which ones. Probably dogs, he sounds like a dog owner. But not horses or rabbits, or tigers for that matter? Seriously, that is such a stupid statement I was actually kind of shocked to hear it come from an educated person.

I challenge him, and by extension the rest of you, to produce _one_ example of a quantized, individuated example of consciousness. That's the basis of this claim he is making, and it's entirely contradicted by physical evidence.

Also, because you are "that guy" you are uniquely positioned to appreciate my next comment. Photons have no mass, yet there are an abundance of them slamming into your eyeball right now. Now who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

Oscar Wildcat, ants are vicious bastards and you know it. Race-warring, slave-keeping, factory farming little shits.

Don't get me wrong ants are great but ant society is a dystopian nightmare for anyone who isn't an ant (and plenty who are).

A thing to keep in mind about about Searle's criticism of strong AI is that he's totally open to the idea that a machine could theoretically be intelligent (the brain being an example of a machine, if nothing else) - but not DIGITAL machines, which are really good at certain kinds of mathematical calculation but far too limited for something complex like that.

I'd agree on that point, if only on thermodynamic grounds. Semiconductive silicon systems takes quite a bit of energy to get things moving relative to semiconductive carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen systems. Consider your laptop computer. It's maybe burning 50 watts bucking a strong headwind. That gets you microsoft windows. Now consider your brain. It's about 20/40 watts at most. That gets you, well, You.

It may be possible to implement consciousness in silicon, but the power required to run the device will likely make the resulting machine impractical to build.

You could for example build your laptop processor out of vacuum tubes, or relays for that matter....with about 500 megawatts I think you could do all the gates. The smallest commercial nuclear reactor currently running can just about cover that. Same logic applies to the brain.

Fine, Oscar. That was a good point, and not even a 'that guy' point, really. But I wasn't saying that everything had mass.

The rest of what you're sayin' ..... I'm not even sure what you're sayin'. Did you misunderstand the whole argument, or are you ready to argue that a guppy has consciousness, or a bacterium or an electron?

Seconded on that point at least. To quote old Shakey Bill,

"If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!"

To be fair, I always got the sense that Searle's view (which he calls biological naturalism) is really materialist: its 99.9% "materialism" with 0.1% "???? irreducible qualitativeness we don't understand yet"

So its not so much that materialism is "defeated" but that every version of reductive materialist philosophy of mind in the 20th century has stumbled to really account for the phenomena of intentionality and qualitative consciousness.

His critique is rather convincing the more you learn about the history of artificial intelligence and our failures to really comprehend what a machine with a "mind" means. (see Chalmers on philosophical zombies)

He is not really wanting to defeat materialism but rather suggesting that we should rethink what materialism means, and that traditional versions of materialism that are reductive just don't work, so we need to think about the possibility of non-reductive materialism.

Donald Davidson's "anomalous monism" would fit the bill, but Searle rejects that as well for reasons I can't quite recall.

Meme, you should watch the video, because you're 100% in agreement with it.

I'll do you an ever bigger one.

He's looking for consciousness, I've never even seen evidence for the reality of a coffee table. Particles can't know if they're arranged as a table or a couch or a person. That takes consciousness. If you burn your couch, you can watch it leave existence, but the matter and energy within it does not, it transforms into heat and ash. The brain is like a couch, the universe doesn't see it. If consciousness exists, it is an error between the senses and physics so recognized as itself, giving rise to the perception of all the other composite false-objects.

Nagarjuna ruined me for Western metaphysics loooooong ago.

Did watch, incidentally!

Yes, the brain is much like a couch. Every once in a while you can fish under the cushions and find something valuable, but mostly it's gonna be lint, the occasional bubble gum wrapper and crusty pennies.

Oscar Wildcat, that's from the Bible. Suck mah dick!

Don't try to fuckin' Shakespeare me.

Come on, Fhqwhgads. I see you jockin' me.
Tryin' to play like you know me.


Man, Fhqwhgads
You're just making yourself look worse, y'know
I mean, everybody's just gonna feel sorry for ya
I mean, I do.

You're doing it wrong.

What has happened here!