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From: mirk@warwick.UUCP (Mike Taylor)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence (long)
Message-ID: <906@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jan 89 15:38:44 GMT
References: <564@soleil.UUCP> <1995@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Sender: news@warwick.UUCP
Reply-To: mirk@uk.ac.warwick.cs (Mike Taylor)
Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 32

In article <1995@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks) writes:
>If reductionism allows us to make progress in understanding all parts
>of the universe we have heretofore investigated, why should the same
>method not work in the case of the human mind?

Because the human mind is, by its very nature, something that can only
be observed in its entirety from within, and this viewpoint of conciousness
that we have is not succeptible to reductionist methods because we cannot
view the phenomenon objectively.  It is an intrinsically subjective thing.

Thomas Nagel's article "What is it like to be a bat?" (which can be
found in Hofstadter & Dennet's "The Mind's I") makes this point in
rather more detail, but in a very dull and dry way, IMHBDO.  His basic
point is that we cannot understand what it is like to be a bat because
it is a feeling subjective to the bat (if it is conscious at all).  We
can imagine what it would be like for ourselves to be a bat - but to
have a true picture of the phenomenon of bat-consciousness, we must
understand what it is like for the bat to be bat.  Clear?  No, I
didn't think so :-( :-)

I will try to restate the point in its bare form: to analyse something
by reductive techniques, we must be able to view it objectively.  But
to view consciousness objectively is to omit the most important aspect
of the phenomenon, namely the subjective experience of it, and thus
any reductionist anaysis made on this basis will be incomplete and/or
inaccurate.

There - that wasn't so bad, was it? :-)
______________________________________________________________________________
Mike Taylor - {Christ,M{athemat,us}ic}ian ...  Email to: mirk@uk.ac.warwick.cs
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