Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!tank!shamash!nic.MR.NET!umn-d-ub!njahren From: njahren@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU (the hairy guy) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Where might CR understanding come from (if it exists) Message-ID: <880@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> Date: 1 Apr 89 02:23:40 GMT References: <2691@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <813@htsa.uucp> Reply-To: njahren@ub.d.umn.edu.UUCP (the hairy guy) Organization: The IOnstitute for Advanced Partying Lines: 93 In article <813@htsa.uucp> fransvo@htsa.uucp (Frans van Otten) writes: >This discussion has degraded into a fight between two groups with different >viewpoints: > > 1. Humans have some mysterious powers that are responsible for their > having a mind. Animals might also have these powers, maybe even > martians. This property might be inherent to the building material; > carbon-hydrogen has it, Si doesn't. > > 2. Understanding etc. are properties which arise from a certain way to > process information. The information theory is what matters, not > the way it is implemented. If we humans can do it using our hardware > (neurons etc), then computers are able to do this using theirs. > I think there is at least one alternative here. In the characterization of (2), I think there is a certain ambiguity in the use of the term "information." The stains on my coffee cup carrie the information that it contained coffee yesterday, but is this information _for_the_coffee_ _cup?_ Certainly not. My mind carries the informatyion that I drank coffee yesterday, and this _is_ information _for_ me. So there is a fundamental difference between two things that we would call information. Now we can ask the question, what is the minimum amount of information that an "information processing" sequence must contain in order to be an instance of mentality. Now one thing that seems reasonable is that the sequence must be able to carry the information that it is _about_ something (other than itself). For instance, if I am thinking about alligators, I must know that I am thinking about alligators, or else I wouldn't be thinking about alligators (this is not a big revelation to most people). Now I might be mistaken, like I might be thinking about an alligator but be attaching the name "crockadile" to it, or I might think that alligators are small furry things that rub up against you, while we can imagine a possible world where alligators are long green things that would just as soon chow on you as look at you. Also, I might not know very much about alligators. For instance, suppose I am a little kid and my mother says to me: "Go tell your father that the alligators are coming up from the swamps and we should leave some milk and cookies for them." Now all I would know about alligators is that they are something my folks are talking about. But in all these cases, I would submit that if I think about alligators, I know that my thoughts are directed towards alligators, it's just that the other mental images of alligators I could appeal to are either incorrect or very sketchy. Now, if we accept this as a pretty necessary feature of mentality, we can ask, in the abstract, whether syntactic digital computation is a sufficiently rich process to carry the information that it is _about_ something. If we find reason to believe thatr it is not, then we would also have reason to believe (1) human mentality is not syntactic digital computation, and (2) syntactic digital computation cannopt give rise to a system of information processing as rich as human mentality, no matter what medium it is implemented in. I see the Chinese Room argument as an argument that Syntactic Digital computation is in fact _not_ sufficiently rich to mee the standard for mentality I oulined above. I personally find it convincing, and would be willing to discuss either this interpretation of CR or the standards above, but I believe I have show that there is at least one reasonable alternative to the two positions Mr van Otten describes above. >order to survive. So the behaviourist approach is justified: "when the >system seems to act intelligently, it *is* intelligent". And all this time I thought there was something called "consciousness." Imagine! But seriously, isn't the question of consciousness and intensionality the question that makes philosophy of mind interesting in the first place. And isn't your behavioristic brushing of them aside tatamount to denying them as important aspects mentality? And if you do choose to deny this, don't you come up with the problem that we _are_ conscious and intensional, and that that's why we're doing all this in the first place? Neal. 530 N 24th Ave E "I cannot disclaim, for my opinions Duluth, MN 55812 *are* those of the Instutute for njahren@ub.d.umn.edu Advanced Partying" "Silence in El Salvador also. Just how old are "the bad old days"? Down goes Vice President Quayle on February 3 to urge good conduct on the Salvadorian Army. On the eve of Quayle's speech, says the human rights office of the Catholic Archdiocese, five uniformed troops broke into the homes of university students Mario Flores and Jose Gerardo Gomez and took them off. They are found the next day, just about the time Quayle and the U.S. press are rubbing noses at the embassy, dead in a ditch, both shot at close range. Gomez's fingernails have signs of "foreign objects" being driven under them. Flores's facial bones and long vertabrae are fractured, legs lacerated, penis and scrotum bruised "as a result of severe pressure or compression." No investigation follows." --Alexander Cockburn _The_Nation_, 3 April, 1989