From: The Pantophobic (trivik@stwing.upenn.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 23:16:12 GMT
> Have you heard of Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment?
now i have
with ref to the link you sent : since moast of it is sust stuff thrown in
there - i'll paste his axiomatised argument, so it is clear:
Axioms:
(A1) Programs are formal (syntactic).
(A2) Minds have mental contents (semantics).
(A3) Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.
(A4) Brains cause minds.
Cinclusions:
(C1) Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
(C2) Any other system capable of causing minds would have to have causal
powers (at least) equivalent to those of brains.
(C3) Any artifact that produced mental phenomena, any artificial brain,
would have to be able to duplicate the specific causal powers of
brains, and it could not do that just by running a formal program.
(C4) The way that human brains actually produce mental phenomena cannot
be solely by virtue of running a computer program.
he sasys he gets the first conclusion useing only axioms 1,2 and 3.
fine i agree completely with this.
now he adds the 4th axiom that brains cause minds.
i.e. that the physical stuff that the brain is made up of, to use his
word "causes" our conciousness.
if he did not put this in and dissagreed with it then fine, else i do not know
what he is argueing about.
he gets conclusioin 3 out of nowhere
my understanding of formal program is something you can formulate. i.e. write
down a formula for it. constructing (note that word) a machine which mimics the
brain is a formulisation. and he accepts this to be posible, but conveineiantly
expludes it from being a formulisation.
what everyone else is scuttering around trying to find is a formulisation of
his 4th axiom, which may or may not exist, but he takes as an axiom to exist
(i.e. all of our brains)
> Jee...maybe I have an opinion that's in minority.
eer....no - the majority of the world beleives that formilised conciousness is
pegion poop just as you do. they wave their hands in the air and do not preduce
gold from lead (which is posiible) but minds from nothing.
> only people having their carreers in AI don't like to hear that
??..eer...ok
> how do you know that a person in your dream isn't self-aware?
good question
> when I deal with the alien long enough, I will intuit or feel eventually
> with a considerable certainty whether the alien is a robot or is a
> sentient being.
> Of course, this argument is by far not conclusive, I know.
eer...it is not even an argument
> Suggestions for further reading:
yup - let someone else do the argueing
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