The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just published David Cole’s update to the entry on The Chinese Room Argument.

The thought problem was posed by John Searle almost 30 years ago and has been a lightening rod for discussions about theories of consciousness and AI ever since.

For those unfamiliar with it, the argument is not against the notion that machines in general can think – Searle believes that minds are built on biological machines, after all – but rather against certain projects in AI that attempt to use computational theories to try to explain consciousness.  Searle’s argument is that computational models are a dead end and that thinking machines must be investigated in a different (apparently “biological”) way.

Of course, if biology can be reduced to the computational model (for instance) then Searle’s argument may be applicable to all machines and we will have to search for consciousness elsewhere.

Here’s the crux of the argument, from the SEP entry:

“The heart of the argument is an imagined human simulation of a computer, similar to Turing's Paper Machine. The human in the Chinese Room follows English instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols, where a computer “follows” a program written in a computing language. The human produces the appearance of understanding Chinese by following the symbol manipulating instructions, but does not thereby come to understand Chinese. Since a computer just does what the human does—manipulate symbols on the basis of their syntax alone—no computer, merely by following a program, comes to genuinely understand Chinese.”

If this sort of problem excites you, as it does me, then you may want to examine some of the articles about and around consciousness collected on David Chalmers’ website: http://consc.net/online .

The ComponentArt Summer Silverlight Coding competition is about to wrap up in a few hours.  It has managed to garner approximately 80 entries – all with publicly accessible Silverlight sites.

In the process of hosting this contest, Miljan Braticevic has achieved a wonderful thing – almost as a side-effect.  He has gathered a fantastic gallery of Silverlight applications which answer the often unvoiced question: What can one actually do with Silverlight?

If you are simply looking for ideas or, more to the point, trying to find a way to explain to your boss what Silverlight is, go here: http://www.componentart.com/community/competition2009/contestants.aspx .

The contest entries run the full gamut of mapping tools, social networking, dashboards, standard web site alternatives and games.

I do not envy the judges the task of bequeathing their golden apples.

With Silverlight 3, Silverlight seems to have reached a critical stage – that is, people are starting to criticize it.  This is a good thing since it means we can now talk about the reality of Silverlight rather than the promise of Silverlight as a technology.

Some recent comparisons have been made between Silverlight and Flash by Michael Lankton as well as Silverlight and HTML + JQuery by Dave Ward, a truly great developer.

One topic that hasn’t been broached, I believe, is the comparison of Silverlight and WPF.  For some die-hard WPF developers I know, Silverlight just seems like a crippled version of the technology they love.  This is somewhat unfair.  Silverlight has definite limitations when compared to WPF; it also, however, is able to reach a much broader audience because it is browser-based and platform neutral.  Until a mono version of WPF is implemented, Silverlight is going to be the main way for .NET developers to get their state-of-the-art applications onto their Mac using friends’ computers.

This reminds me of a comment I heard Derek Jacobi, the great Shakespearean actor, once make to the effect of:

“I do movies for the money.  I do television for the exposure.  But I do theater for love of the craft.”

As much as I have always enjoyed windows development and have cursed the many tricks and hacks one must know to do web development, web development was still always fun because people had a greater appreciation for what one did.  In part this is because web applications simply reach a wider audience.  It is also due, I think, to the fact that users are much more savvy about the web and the way they feel it should look than consumers of desktop applications.

And so those lessons might be applied to how we look at the relationship between Silverlight and WPF.  WPF allows one to practice one’s craft – which is an enjoyable but mostly solitary affair.  Silverlight, on the other hand, provides the developer with exposure for his work – and this is no bad thing. 

Scott Hanselman, perhaps the current reigning rock star in the Microsoft development world with an incredibly popular blog, Computer Zen, has approximately 17.5 thousand followers on Twitter.  William Shatner, a television actor currently up for an Emmy, has 114 thousand followers.  Colin Meloy, lead singer of a band I like, The Decemberists, has 910 thousand Twitter minions.

As involved as I tend to be in the life-world of software development – and despite its significance in the technological transformation of business and society --  I sometimes have to admit that it is a bit marginal.  Not only are my rock stars different from other people’s.  They are also less significant in the grand scheme of things.  By contrast, the biggest rock stars in society are, in fact, rock stars.

While it would be nice if we treated our teachers, our doctors, our nurses like rock stars, I am actually missing President Obama’s speech on healthcare tonight in order to play the just released Beatles Rock Band with my family.  According to this glowing review in The New York Times, it is not only the greatest thing since sliced bread – it is possibly better.  [Warning: the phrases cultural watershed and transformative entertainment experience appear in the linked article.]

The game is indeed fun and traces out The Beatles’ careers if one plays in story mode.  We had in fact gotten to 1965 before my 12 year old noticed the chronology and exclaimed, “Oh my Gawd.  They are so old.  I thought they were from the 80’s or something.”

This got me thinking incoherently about the fickle nature of fame which quickly segued into a daydream about sitting in the green room after a concert while my roadies picked out groupies at the door to come in and engage me in stimulating conversation.

Sometime in the 1990’s my philosophy department was trying to lure Hubert Dreyfus, then the leading interpreter of poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault in America, into our university.  Apparently everything was going swimmingly until the haggling started and we discovered that not only did he want the chairmanship of the department but he also wanted a 300K salary and merchandizing rights to any action figures based on his work.   300K is a lot of money in any profession, but it is an uber-rock star salary when you consider that most American academics supplement their meager incomes by selling real estate and Amway.  Negotiations quickly deteriorated after that.

I’m not saying, of course, that Hubert Dreyfus doesn’t deserve that kind of scratch.  He had his own groupies and everything.  The problem is simply that our society doesn’t value the kind of contributions to the common weal provided by Professor Dreyfus.

Perhaps a video game could change all that.  I could potentially see myself playing an XBOX game in which I kiss-butt as a graduate student (as I recall, I in fact did do that) in a foreign country, write a marginal dissertation, get a teaching position somewhere and then write a counter-intuitive thesis in a major philosophy journal (the kind with at least a thousand subscribers, maybe more) such as “Why Descartes was not a Cartesian”, “Why Spinoza was not a Spinozist”, “Why Plato was not a Platonist” (true, actually) or “Why Nietzsche was not a Nihilist” (at the beginner level).  With the success of that article, the player would then ditch his teaching position at a state college for a big-name university and gather graduate students around himself.  He would then promote his favorite graduate students to tenure track positions and they would in turn write glowing reviews of all the player’s books as well as teach them in all their classes.  It’s called giveback, and the game would be called Academic Rock Star.  I really could potentially see myself playing that game, possibly.

There are rock stars in every field, and one might offer suggestions for other titles such as Financial Rock Star, Accounting Rock Star, Presidential Candidate Rock Star,  Microsoft Excel Rock Star, Blogging Rock Star.

Perhaps the reason Microsoft has not picked up on any of these ideas is because – just as we all secretly believe that we will one day be rich – we all secretly believe that becoming a rock star in our own industry or sub-culture is attainable.

No one really believes, however, that he can ever become like The Beatles.  Consequently we settle for the next best thing: pretending to be The Beatles in a video game.