Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!oberon!sm.unisys.com!ism780c!ico!nbires!matt From: matt@nbires.nbi.com (Matthew Meighan) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: the brain doesn't create the mind, it's the other way around Message-ID: <232@nbires.nbi.com> Date: 2 Mar 89 16:55:36 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <17923@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Reply-To: matt@nbires.UUCP (Matthew Meighan) Organization: NBI Inc, Boulder CO Lines: 73 dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) of Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University writes: " It is a very mysterious question indeed how real understanding, " subjective experience and so on could ever emerge from a nice physical " system like the human brain... nevertheless we know that it does, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ " although we don't know how. Similarly, it is a mysterious question how " subjective experience could arise from a massively complex system of " paper and rules. But the point is, it is the SAME question, and when we " answer one we'll probably answer the other. This 'we know that it does' seems, to me, to be a remarkable assertion. I don't see how any such thing has been (or ever can be) shown, and would be interested to hear an objective proof of this. If you want to say "nevertheless I like to assume that it does", that's fine. My own view is that subjective experience does not arise from the brain at all, but vice versa -- that the brain, and the rest of the physical body, is evolved by consciousness to give itself a vehicle with which to interact with other consiousnesses. Understanding and subjective experience do not exist in the brain at all, but in the mind, of which the brain is just the most obvious and least-subtle part. This viewpoint is plainly not provable -- that is, I can't prove it to YOU from MY experience. For me, it is both 'subjectively' true because it is what I feel, and 'objectively' true because I have observed phenomena I can't explain any other way. Those phenomena are scientific evidence to me, because I know they took place, and I would have to ignore the data to conclude other than I have. But they would be mere heresay to you, hence no evidence at all. My real point, though, is that your view that consciousness "arises" from the physical brain is as purely subjective as mine that it is the other way around. It seems to me that this assertion is a leap of faith, resembling more a religious conviction than a scientific one. You might be right, though, that the two questions you pose are the same one, and that the answer to one answers the other. It is self-evident to me (though not necessarily, of course, to anyone else) that the answer to both questions is "It doesn't." Perhaps (in what I think is the reverse of the sense in which you said that if we answer one question we can answer the other) we should take the fact that understanding does NOT emerge in computer programs as evidence that it does NOT emerge in brains, either. One could agrue (and some have) that understanding MAY arise in some computer program someday, that the ones we have are just not complex enough. But then we are really drifting from the facts into pure speculation, aren't we? It can be said of anything that it may happen someday; the data we have at this point is that this has never happened. I see no reason to assume that a *quantative* 'increase in complexity' will automatically cause a qualitative change of the magnitude of "the emergence of consciousness"; until such a thing takes place there is no reason to suppose it will. The more likely outcome is that as we make programs more complex, we will have exactly the same qualitatively stupid things we have now -- just more complicated ones. The questions of what constitutes understanding, or intelligence, are intrinsically interesting and important ones. But I am not sure that they are very important to AI. All we have to do is create machines that APPEAR to be intelligent (challenge enough!). We seem to be debating the question "Can we make machines that actually understand, in the sense that we do?" As a human being, my answer tends to be "of course not!". But as a programmer, I would more likely respond "What difference does it make?" -- Matt Meighan matt@nbires.nbi.com (nbires\!matt)