Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!wuarchive!usc!apple!hercules!gilham From: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Recursive Searles, or what? Message-ID: Date: 6 Jan 90 18:36:15 GMT References: <12679@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <12702@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <1224@oravax.UUCP> Sender: usenet@csl.sri.com Organization: Computer Science Lab, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA. Lines: 47 In-reply-to: daryl@oravax.UUCP's message of 5 Jan 90 22:55:13 GMT daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes: ========== Roger Penrose is simply wrong to say that is equivalent to postulating "mind-stuff". The systems reply takes it that a mind is a *pattern* produced by physical entities, and is not the entities themselves. This is no more dualism than is believing that sound is a vibration in physical matter, but is not itself matter, or that heat is a property of substances but is not itself a substance. When you say something like "I understand English", what is the "I" that understands? You (and Searle) seem to think it is a physical entity, a particular human body. I don't think that is right, at all. After all, as the old chestnut goes, you replace all the atoms in your body every seven years or so. Any mind that can remember back to your childhood cannot be completely associated with any particular physical entity. ========== I reply: What is the difference between a ``pattern'' produced by physical entities that is not the entities themselves, and a non-physical mind-stuff? Certainly a pattern of organization does not produce new physical entities that did not previously exist, so the pattern must be non-physical. So ``pattern'' (in the sense you are using it) and ``mind-stuff'' in Penrose's sense seem to me to be two names for the same thing. Besides this, I am a little unclear about what a pattern is apart from the mind of the observer, and how one decides which patterns qualify as being intelligent. I remember seeing some joke about patterns -- what is the next number in the sequence 2 4 8 16 ... I think the answer was 31, because there is some quartic polynomial that generates it and polynomials are less complex than exponentials! The point is that patterns are things we project onto the world to make sense of it. I personally don't want to restrict the phenomenon of consciousness to a purely physical basis. However, the point is that many proponents of strong AI argue this way: "Can machines think? Sure, we are machines and we think!", meaning that we are the sum total of the physical processes going on inside of us. Searle's argument indicates that either the Turing test is not an adequate indicator of understanding (because there is no physical entity doing the understanding), or that there is some non-physical entity that is actually doing the understanding. -Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com