Computational ontology and deontology

Abstract

I’ll discuss an interesting argument from the recent book of John Searle Making the Social World (Oxford 2010) that tries to consider the construction of a society as an “engineering” problem and concludes that deontology works against the “computational” or “algorithmic” view of consciousness. I’ll introduce the notion of “consciousness” and the sense in which Searle uses the term (1); I’ll sketch Searle’s argument against the computational model (2) and I’ll criticize Searle’s reasons to warrant his criticism and I try to introduce a “compatibilist” view of human and artificial minds (3).