1. Rachel Walsh
21 May 2010
R. Rose: Q240
SP 5
Minds, Brains, and Programs…And Searle: A Reply
John Searle is a very opinionated man, and his paper Minds, Brains, and
Programs has provoked many responses since being written in 1980. Disregarding
my personal views on the minds to programs analogy and on Searle himself, I find
his main argument – that the brain contains some sort of specific, biological
causation that leads to intentionality – well supported by his replies. However, I
think that Searle, for as much as he preaches about causation, is not trying hard
enough to find the right type of causation. He is too focused on the structure of the
brain and not giving enough importance to the controlling of a physical body playing
a part in intentionality as well.
Despite some weaknesses, though, I found that the main ideas of Searle’s
original thought experiment and its successive replies to make a good case for
biological causation giving rise to intentionality. First off, all the systems he
mentions – the Chinese room, the homunculus robot, the water pipes – all operate
pretty similarly to the brain, even though in real-life I highly doubt the Chinese room
would pass the Turing test solely due to it being impossible for a human to work fast
enough. Besides that, all the contents of the Chinese room, including the human
himself, can be seen as only one neuron in a string of synapses that finally produces
and output. His strongest point is made within the systems reply; if the

2. requirements for intentionality were simply being able to execute a formal program,
then we would have to concede that systems like the stomach, thermostats, and
other electronics also have intentionality because they too operate on the same kind
of input-output system (Searle 9). Despite this functional similarity though, none of
the systems would be said to have intentionality, a point on which Searle and I agree.
However, that is the length to which we agree. Searle says the reason for
these systems’ lack of intentionality is due to them not having biological causation; I
say it is because they simply do not have the right kind of causation. As J.A. Fodor
states in his reply to Searle, “It would, of course, be a fallacy to argue from the fact
that this causal linkage fails to reconstruct perception to the conclusion that no
causal linkage would succeed,” (Fodor 1980). One failed type of causation is not
enough proof that biological causation is the only way to produce “hopes, fears, and
dreams,” (Searle 10). After all, animals have biological brains like ours, yet we do
not think of them as having hopes and dreams the like we do, but we would also be
unlikely to deny that animals are conscious beings. Even the same internal set-up
for the same type of causation does not give the same results.
So, what does this mean for producing machine intentionality? I believe that
Searle has put too much focus on the brain and not enough focus on the body as a
whole. After all, the brain is not the only part of the nervous system; it relies on
multiple types of input from all the senses in order to learn about the world. Searle
forgets that a human baby, at birth, is very much like some of these computers. To
babies, words mean nothing, sounds mean nothing, and shapes mean nothing; no
semantic value for syntax exists; yet it is created by the body interacting with the

3. world. As a child observes more of the world, connections in the brain are both
created and destroyed as need be. Without a body, the brain would have no way of
wiring itself, you could say. Fodor makes another good point in his reply, saying
“Notice, by the way, that even passing the Turing test requires doing more than just
manipulating symbols. A device that can’t run a typewriter can’t play the game,”
(Fodor 1980). Brains need bodies for intentionality.
For all of our differences, I agree with Searle in saying that a mind is not the
result of the running of a single program. However, unlike Searle, I do not think that
biological causation is the only way to intentionality. After all, animal intentionality
is not the same as human intentionality despite having similar – if not the exact
same – biological causation. Just having a biological brain is also not enough;
without a body with which one can learn about the world and how it functions, the
brain is unable to develop a program for surviving at all. Just because a man in a
room doing what a brain does has no understanding of the information he is
processing does not mean that the case for machine intentionality is closed; it just
means that we have to look harder for a different causation. As Daniel Dennett
stated in his own reply to Minds, Brains, and Programs, “It is just as mysterious if we
peer into the synapse-filled jungles of the brain and wonder where consciousness is
hiding,” (Dennett 1980). Hopefully, when peering into the brain of a machine
someday, we will be able to recognize that consciousness when we find it.

4. Works Cited
Dennett, Daniel. (1980). The milk of human intentionality. The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 3 (3), 428-430.
Fodor, J. A. (1980). Searle on what only brains can do. The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 3 (3), 431.
Searle, John R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 3 (3), 417-424.