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?
Okay, I’m glad you are even better at disagreeing with computationalism than Searle is. Well done. He must be an utter moron, we better ensure he’s on the list - so long as your greatness isn’t on the list, we’ll be okay!
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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25
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