"Cognition is Recognition"

Hello everyone,

I'm going to return to Hayles for a moment.  I brought up this passage in class because I found it particularly confusing:

What evidence is there that computers can function as cognizers, that is, as agents capable of intensionality, the "aboutness" that makes a subject (or an agent) capable of referring to something outside of itself? Recalling John Searle's Chinese room analogy, we may also add the requirement that in some way the computer must understand what it is about in order to be considered a cognizer in the strong sense.⁸ Here I turn to the research program of Douglas Hofstadter, who in collaboration [End Page 102]with several generations of graduate students has devoted himself to investigating this issue.

 

This passage implies a two-part definition of cognizer: a cognizer is intenSional, capable of referring to something outside of itself.  The second is that it must "understand what it is about."  I followed the "Chinese Room" to Wikipedia, where I found a very relevant/interesting summary of the thought experiement by John Searle, which boils down to: if a person is translating a language they do not know via an analog program, but are translating it in a  way that their translation is understandable by someone who does know the language, does the translator understand?  Searle wants us to say, "of course not!"  It's not a real response.  Others disagree (see page).

The trouble seems to hinge on what differentiates a reaction from a (legitimate) response.  Chemicals can have reactions.  Systems can be stimulated.  When does thinking start? I actually run into this issue a lot in my research on the philosophy the animal-human divide and plant consciousness.  My intuition feels that consciousness must be a sliding scale without a sort of theoretical Rubicon past which something is aware and before which it is a pile of minerals.  Emergence might provide a possible answer... 

One example from my research: in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida examines the history of the philosophy of the animal, and explicitly references the problems of response.  I am still figuring out what he means, but I thought I'd repeat a particularly great example from Porphyry, a Neoplatonist writing about ethical vegetarianism in the Roman Empire:

"It is reported that even some voiceless animals readily respond to their masters, more so than a human friend would.  A lamprey which belonged to the Roman Crassus would come to him when called by name, and had such an effect on him that he mourned when it died, though he had earlier bourne with modertion the loss of three children" (qtd. in Derrida, 85). 

Yep, folks, your parasitic mouthless fish is capable of response. 

We love Crassus!

These thoughts might not hold together as well as I'd hoped they would.  Waiting for the emergent catalysis of my research...