An interesting question and answer section follows the talk starting at minute 51 which can be appreciated without listening to the entire talk.

I don't buy it. I'm only 30 minutes into the video, but it sounds like Searle is making logical fallacies, with gobbledegook sprinkled in between. I had to look up his Chinese room thought experiment on wikipedia; it's a straw man argument. The system in his thought experiment is a program using a look-up table to pass the Turing test. While at least at face value it seems such a system would not qualify as consciousness, there are ways a program can reach a result besides looking it up in a table. His thought experiment doesn't show his look-up table to be the only way to pass the Turing test, and it doesn't address the consciousness of alternative ways of passing the test. And it doesn't follow that the non-consciousness of a look-up table precludes consciousness for other methods.

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Searle rocks.

Even if you don't like the CRE, he's written some of the best overviews of the Philosophy of Mind there is.

Lol at Robert Hecht Nielson. I met him a couple times when I was at UCSD. He's kinda full of himself.

Following on sineral's comment there's an aspect that's always bothered me and that's to say why is the look-up table necessarily not conscious. If the input/output of the Chinese room is functionally identical to having someone that 'understands' Chinese inside the room than how does it immediately follow that the room doesn't understand Chinese.

There's a sort of unexplained axiom that understanding and consciousness go beyond the simple, functional input/output of the system that I don't see as being self explanatory. They go back to the qualitative experience of consciousness (qualia) that can't be refuted but doesn't necessarily have to be taken seriously if it doesn't affect the functionality of a conscious system. I take the same issue with the zombie argument.

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