John Searle Has Died

Summary

John R. Searle, an uncompromising and wide-ranging philosopher who was best known for a thought experiment he formulated, decades before the rise of ChatGPT, to disprove that a computer program by itself could ever achieve consciousness, died on Sept. 16 in Safety Harbor, Fla., west of Tampa. He was 93.His son Tom confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that Professor Searle’s health had declined since a bout with coronavirus last year.Professor Searle, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for 60 years, was the rare philosopher who could proudly declare, “I’m not subtle.”He brought ironic humor and bluntness to subjects as diverse as the politics of higher education, the nature of consciousness and the merits of textual deconstruction as a philosophical style. In a 1999 profile, The Los Angeles Times called him “the Sugar Ray Robinson of philosophers,” after the boxer who fought in different weight classes.Professor Searle’s most prominent intellectual battleground was The New York Review of Books, to which he contributed from 1972 to 2014. It was where he labeled one book, by the esteemed philosopher David J. Chalmers, “a mass of confusions.” In a debate on another subject — the argument that computer programs function like minds — he described his aim as “the relentless exposure of its preposterousness.”His thinking about artificial intelligence became widely known thanks to an article he wrote in The Review: a takedown of a book of essays in which, remarkably, his own work appeared. Another piece of his inspired “The Hard Problem,” a 2015 play by Tom Stoppard, who thanked Professor Searle in a foreword to the script.At least 15 books by other authors have been devoted to Professor Searle’s work and its critics. Informed once that the listing of an introductory philosophy course featured pictures of René Descartes, David Hume and himself, Professor Searle replied, “Who are those other two guys?”Not everyone was charmed. Critics often complained...