Bad philosopher, good friend

Last night I was at a departmental party to welcome the new students and our guest speaker/closet Discovery Institute apologist. As the night wore on, the party thinned out until it was just Matt Dunn, my advisor, and a post-doc from the Cognitive Science department (Karola). We got on the topic of whether psychological states can be ultimately reduced to neurons firing and such. We also were discussing whether computer programs *really* play chess or if they are simply manipulating symbols (the presupposition being that the former requires some "idea" of chess or understanding which is not present in the latter). Matt Dunn was pushing the line that Deep Blue does not play chess, and that there is something special about consciousness or being human. It was a light discussion and at 2 am after many beers, rigorous thought is supererogatory. Well, Karola begins to lay into Matt Dunn, calling him illogical and whatnot (imagine it in a German accent). Also, Matt Dunn made no pretension to being an expert on AI, philosophy of mind, or philosophy of psychology. I, ever the protective momma bear, jump in and say, reasonably I think, "Hold on, basically what Matt (Dunn) is suggesting is something along the lines of Searle's Chinese Room argument [a very famous argument in the philosophy of mind], and if he IS illogical (which he is not), he's in pretty good company being so." Well, Karola did not like this response to her polemical treatment of my friend's untutored position. Her reponse: "You are a bad philosopher. You think because Searle said it that it must be good. Searle has been refuted..." and it went on like that for a while. Of course I interjected that in fact I was not making some fallacious appeal to authority (Searle), but that I was sticking up for my friend and that I was merely pointing out that Matt Dunn's intuitions jibe with what some very smart people have said about the subject. Calling his intuitions "illogical" when he is not immersed in the literature (so he's unaware of the shortcomings of Searle's argument) is a bit unfair to him. Secondly, there's nothing wrong with having false intuitions. You have to start somewhere. I wish MY intuitions would stumble upon ingenious theses in the philosophy of mind ex nihilo.

So the lesson for this post:

Brian: good friend, bad philosopher
Justification: appeal to (self-appointed) authority, Karola