When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.
There's also no "magic" involved in transmuting syntax into semantics, merely a subjective observer applying semantics to it.
> You could equally make the statement that thought is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality.
This is what makes no sense, as I am not merely posing arbitrary definitions, but identifying characteristic features of human intelligence. Do you deny semantics and intentionality are features of the human mind?
> There's also no "magic" involved in transmuting syntax into semantics, merely a subjective observer applying semantics to it.
I have no idea what this means. The point is that computation as we understand it in computer science is purely syntactic (this was also Searle's argument). Indeed, it is modeled on the mechanical operations human computers used to perform without understanding. This property is precisely what makes computation - thus understood - mechanizable. Because it is purely syntactic and an entirely abstract model, two things follow:
1. Computation is not an objectively real phenomenon that computers are performing. Rather, physical devices are used to simulate computation. Searle calls computation "observer relative". There is nothing special about electronics, as we can simulate computation using wooden gears that operate mechanically or water flow or whatever. But human intelligence is objectively real and exists concretely, and so it cannot be a matter of mere simulation or something merely abstract (it is incoherent and self-refuting to deny this for what should be obvious reasons).
2. Because intentionality and the capacity for semantics are features of human intelligence, and computation is purely syntactic, there is no room in computation for intelligence. It is an entirely wrong basis for understanding intelligence and in a categorical sense. It's like trying to find out what arrangement of LEGO bricks can produce the number π. Syntax has no "aboutness" as that is the province of intentionality and semantics. To deny this is to deny that human beings are intelligent, which would render the question of intelligence meaningless and frankly mystifying.
I deny they are anything more than computation. And so your original argument was begging the question and so logically unsound.
> The point is that computation as we understand it in computer science is purely syntactic
Then the brain is also purely syntactic unless you can demonstrate that the brain carries out operations that exceeds the Turing computable, because unless that is the case the brain and a digital computer are computationally equivalent.
As long as your argument does not address this fundamental issue, you can talk about "aboutness" or whatever else you want all day long - it will have no relevance.
(And if anything is question begging - you didn't demonstrate what was question begging in my post - it's your amateurish reductionism and denial of the evidence.)
No.
I could jam a yardstick into the ground and tell you that it's now a sundial calculating the time of day. Is this really, objectively true? Of course not. It's true to me, because I deem it so, but this is not a fact of the universe. If I drop dead, all meaning attributed to this yardstick is lost.
Now, thoughts. At the moment I'm visualizing a banana. This is objectively true: in my mind's eye, there it is. I'm not shuffling symbols around. I'm not pondering the abstract notion of bananas, I'm experiencing the concretion of one specific imaginary banana. There is no "depends on how you look at it." There's nothing to debate.
> There's also no "magic" involved in transmuting syntax into semantics, merely a subjective observer applying semantics to it.
There's no "magic" because this isn't a thing. You can't transmute syntax into semantics any more than you can transmute the knowledge of Algebra into the sensation of a cool breeze on a hot summer day. This is a category error.
None of what you wrote is remotely relevant to what I wrote.
> There's no "magic" because this isn't a thing. You can't transmute syntax into semantics any more than you can transmute the knowledge of Algebra into the sensation of a cool breeze on a hot summer day. This is a category error.
We "transmute" syntax into semantics every time we interpret a given syntax as having semantics.
There is no inherent semantics. Semantics is a function of the meaning we assign to a given syntax.
The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.
And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
Whooha! If it's not physical what is it? How does something that's not physical interact with the universe and how does the universe interact with it? Where does the energy come from and go? Why would that process not be a physical process like any other?
Where we haven't made any headway on is on the connection between that and subjective experience/qualia. I feel like much of the (in my mind) strange conclusions of the Chinese Room are about that and not really about "pure" cognition.
To be fair to Searle, I don't think he advanced this as an agument, but more of an illustration of his belief that thinking was indeed a physical process specific to brains.
¹https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.mind...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentional...