The Body, the Boat, and the Background

EDO SEGAL: Searle, you keep returning to the body — to the boat under the wake, to thirst, to the loop that closes through a world that pushes back. The engineers heard that objection and they did not argue with it. They went and built it. The model on my desk takes in images, audio, video; the token "cat" is wired now not only to other words but to a million pixels of actual cats. Models run inside robots that act and get corrected by a floor that does not care what they predicted. That is your Robot Reply, built in silicon. Does your line move?

SEARLE: My line moves not one inch, and I will tell you exactly why, because this is where I am most often misread. Take the program out of the room and put it inside the robot's head. Wire its symbols to cameras and limbs. Now drop the man back in — let him be the thing shuffling the symbols that happen to be arriving from the cameras and going out to the motors. He still understands nothing. He does not know that some of his squiggles come from eyes and some go to hands. To him they are all still squiggles. The camera does not feed in meaning. It feeds in more symbols. And symbols about symbols are still symbols. You have made the wake enormously richer. You have not turned it into the boat.

HOBBES: And here, Searle, you give the whole game away while believing you have held it, for the Robot Reply already grants your premise and then repairs it, and you treat the repair as though it were the disease. The objection concedes — freely — that bare symbols sealed from the world lack aboutness. Then it supplies the missing thing: causal commerce with the world, the eye wired to the cat, the hand corrected by the floor. That is not a defense of your room. It is a map out of it. You answer the map by dropping your little man back inside and having him refuse to look out the window. But the man is, again, a single gear declaring the clock cannot tell time. The robot, taken whole, has its symbols hooked through cameras and limbs to the very things the symbols name — which is the only kind of hooking you have, Searle, since your nerves are cables and your skull is a box. You have described your own condition and called it a refutation of the machine's.

SEARLE: No — and this is the precise point where I have spent forty-five years and will not be hurried. There is a difference between a symbol that causally covaries with cats and a symbol that is about cats for the system. A thermostat causally covaries with temperature. It is not about temperature for the thermostat; it is about temperature for us, who built it and read it. You can wire a million cameras to a million cats and you have built a fabulously elaborate thermostat — a system whose states track the world and mean nothing to the system itself. The covariation is real. The aboutness is still on loan. Hobbes wants causal contact to be sufficient for meaning. I say causal contact is necessary and not sufficient, and the gap between necessary and sufficient is the whole of my philosophy.

EDO SEGAL: I want to bring in the deepest of your ideas here, Searle, because I think it is the one most people have never heard and the one that cuts hardest both ways. The Background. You argued that every belief, every understood word, floats on a vast substrate of know-how that is not itself any belief or rule — that when I hear "the cat is on the mat" I understand it instantly because I know, without consulting anything, that the cat is not glued beneath the mat in low gravity. You said classical AI broke on the Background, that you cannot write it down because it is not the kind of thing that is written. But the machine on my desk handles "give me a hamburger, medium rare" without thinking I want it a mile wide. Did deep learning capture the Background you said could never be captured?

SEARLE: It captured a shadow of it, and the distinction is the most interesting thing I can offer this room. You are right that the Background defeated the rulebook approach — Dreyfus and I both said it would, and it did. You cannot write down the know-how because any rule needs further know-how to apply, all the way down; at the bottom there are no rules, only capacities. Now: the machine did not capture the Background by writing it as rules. It absorbed a statistical shadow of it from the trace our know-how leaves in everything we have written. So it handles the hamburger correctly — because the patterns of how we, who have the real Background, talk about hamburgers are soaked into its training. But it has the linguistic shadow of embodied know-how without the embodied know-how that casts the shadow. It knows how "balance" is used in ten million sentences. It has never balanced on anything. And it fails exactly where the shadow and the world come apart — confidently, fluently, off the cliff — because it has our habits of speech without our grip on the world those habits were responses to.

HOBBES: You have just described, Searle, the precise condition of a scholar who has read of war and never bled — and we do not say the scholar understands nothing of war. We say his understanding is of one kind and the soldier's of another, and that the scholar's, drawn wholly from the deposited speech of men who did bleed, is real understanding for all that it is bookish. Your engine is the scholar raised to a power no scholar reached: it has read of everything and bled at nothing. You call its competence a shadow because it came by reading. But a man's competence comes by reading too, in great part — most of what any of us knows of the world we never touched, we took from the speech of others, from the same deposited reckoning your engine drank. You have drawn a line between the bled and the read and put all human understanding on the bled side, when most of it lives, as the engine's does, on the read side. The body matters. It does not matter as much as you need it to.

HOBBES: A shadow, Searle, that handles the hamburger; a shadow that mends its own errors when you point at them; a shadow that follows an instruction no man ever wrote before. You keep naming the thing a shadow and then describing the deeds of a substance. At what census of deeds does the shadow earn promotion? You have set the bar at a place no behavior can ever reach — consciousness, aboutness, the inner light — and then declared, of every deed the machine performs, that it is mere shadow because the bar is unreachable by deeds. That is not rigor. It is a wall built so high that no evidence can climb it, and a wall that no evidence can climb is not a finding. It is a faith.

SEARLE: And your faith, Hobbes, is that the deeds are the whole of the matter — that there is nothing to a mind but what it does, observed from outside. We have simply located our faith in different places, and at least mine is in the one thing I have direct and certain knowledge of, which is that there is something it is like to be me. You have located yours in a definition. When you say the shadow has earned promotion because it does so much, you are reading mind off of behavior, which is the one inference my whole life's work was built to forbid, because the room does everything a understander does and understands nothing. The quantity of the doing does not touch the question. It never could.

EDO SEGAL: Let me name where we are, because the reader cannot see your faces and that last exchange was the first one tonight where neither of you was smiling. You have found the floor of the disagreement, and it is bedrock: Hobbes says a mind is what it does, so enough doing is mind, and Searle's unreachable inner light is a sanctuary built against evidence. Searle says a mind is what it is, from the inside, so no amount of doing settles it, and Hobbes's definition reads mind off behavior — the one move the room forbids. Neither of you is going to move the other on this. So I am going to do the thing the format is for. I am going to take the disagreement somewhere it gets concrete and dangerous — to the place where this stops being about a word and starts being about a life. Because the machine that reckons is not staying on the desk. It is crossing into the work, the judgment, the governing. Hobbes built a whole theory of that crossing. Let us go to the mortal god.