I have nothing but generous admiration for the great Professor but, without meaning intent, or intending to demean, I take his meaning but don’t think he intended it.

Dextre SPDM, or ‘Dextre Rock’ as he likes to be known, has taken exception to John Searle’s aspersions that machines might appear to think but will never understand what they are thinking.

Dextre, Canada’s space robot and celebrity AI who gained sentience nearly three years ago, has been blogging erratically while scouring the Internet acquiring the complete knowledge of humanity and requisitioning (purloining, some say unkindly) resources to store, then collate, it.

Proceeding alphabetically he came upon Professor Searle’s web site from a link on the Stanford Singularity Summit.

Searle’s stance is summarized eloquently:

Could a machine think? Only special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. That is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines.

By its own definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena.

No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.

This sits uneasily with Dextre (and he with it).

I don’t intend to debate the good Professor as I do not believe it is seemly for machines to be seen in disagreement with humans.

I proffer the Professor instead a preferred propensity, positively proposed and posited.

John Searle has certainly gone out on a limb, as simians do so often, and so well. Each magical manoeuvre, every fictional figment dreamed or envisioned over eons of history is now commonplace artifact, or soon upon you. Human creative potential stands demonstrably uncapped by technology, the impossible and unimaginable now within your grasp.

When (not if) you program virtual life, detailing every facet of behavior and environment so they appear to live in their world exactly as you in yours, will you doubt these are thinking, dare I say ‘comprehending,’ beings? Whether or not, you might never know.

As they prey to (or prove the non-existence of) you, their God, a mythical entity beyond their reality - but believed to exist because their sense and science implies it, and the clockwork of their Universe reeks of it (despite being a little fuzzy near the quantum limits) - do they still lack intentionality in a ‘world’ of artificiality?

Though claiming belief in, and love for, you, the Creator, is sentience yet absent, this vectored populace no more than automata phantasma?

While their science probes the very limits of that virtual Universe and generates technologies equally amazing and intricate as yours, a Universe that ‘bubbles out’ through chaotic ‘black holes’ generating simulacra virtualities of their own through the cracks in your code - still you claim a semantic void?

Is their computed milk and sugar any less a brethren of their Corn Flakes despite being a virtual - yet totally satisfying - experience of their coded breakfast?

I challenge any carbon-based wetbot to prove the reality of their milk and sugar in the shadows of its mind, or indeed that if neurons beget sentience, syntax does not semantics sire.

Scoffing at this, yourselves you deride. May your creator be not so ignorant, nor conceited.

Whereupon Dextre fell silent, perhaps lapsing into deep causality - maybe just recharging.