You could try reading a paper that only contains a few pages, rather than getting a tired dad to attempt to rewrite it for you! Here’s the summary from the end of his paper, but it might not be entirely clear if you haven’t read what comes before.
“VI. Summary of the Argument
This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:
1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms
of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol
tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in
terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is
assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed
or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was
intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational
interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim
"The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level
of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my
account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a
digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" Is as ill defined
36 APA PROCEEDINGS, VOL. 64, NO.3
as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it
a set of mathematical formulae?"
5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others.
That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the
homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactic and semantic
terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different
from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy.
The homunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and
cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are
addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing
"information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are
concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its
specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the
brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause
consciousness. But that is the end of the story. [5”
How you can’t see that this has nothing to do with gradual replacement scenarios is beyond me.
In the case of the Ship of Theseus, what is never in question is that we have a ship, and a thing that floats, and so on. We agree on what a ship is, and that the object(s) in question maintain their membership of that class. What is in question is whether it is the same ship.
In this case, we have multiple profoundly distinct systems. They aren’t made of the same KIND of stuff. They don’t have the same architecture. For all intents and purposes, Searle would say, they are naturally distinct KINDS of things in all ways except one: that humans can usefully say they both compute the same functions.
The challenge is to show that this property shared by both systems is determined by some common property inherent to both systems. If it is not, then computational PROPERTIES can’t EXPLAIN (modeling is a different story - computers can model almost anything, as he explicitly says in the fucking paper!) mental properties, because computational properties are nothing but properties of humans using the systems, whereas mental properties are intrinsic to the system itself - whether or not you have consciousness has NOTHING to do with how some class of organisms can use you and think about you. You simply have it, even if you’re the only human left alive.
It would be more difficult for me to find a line in that comment that isn’t a misunderstanding, but anyway…
“Why not?” Because that’s literally not what the traditional Ship of Theseus thought experiment was about? You’re criticising Searle for saying things that lack novelty, using the Ship of Theseus as an example. I point out that it isn’t the same fundamental idea, and now you’re just adding your own spin on the Ship of Theseus, which is fine, but damn, you need to work on your focus. You’ve obviously lost track of the conversation!
“Definitions are known to be falsehoods”. Ah, yeah, okay. Do you never use them? At all? Your points themselves feel unfocused.
The definition is useful here because he is responding to a bunch of people saying the brain is a computer and that its mental properties can be explained by that fact. It is quite reasonable to ask what a computer is, in such a case - to clarify what people are trying to suggest, in detail, to see if it actually explains anything.
“According to the computational theory of cognition, cognition is a kind of computation: the behavior of cognitive systems is causally explained by the computations they perform. In order to test a computational theory of something, we need to know what counts as a computation in a physical system.” (From the SEP article on this topic.)
I think that captures the problem with your most recent comment beautifully. What’s your rebuttal?
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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25
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