From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!mcnc!aurs01!throop Tue Jun 23 13:21:01 EDT 1992
Article 6293 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Transducers
Message-ID: <60839@aurs01.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jun 92 19:56:46 GMT
References: <1992Jun17.132117.9273@Princeton.EDU> <60837@aurs01.UUCP> <1992Jun17.182829.18441@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
> Once you have an analog signal, it is quite hard to apply a Searle -
> style argument and say that the signal is symbolic and/or syntactic.
> Harnad interprets this as implying that analog is essential.  I prefer
> to interpret it as persuasive evidence of the bogosity of Searle's
> argument.

Hmmmm.  Yes.  Well, here's a thought pump that attempts to show that it
*would* be possible to apply a Searle-style argument to analog,
"transducer-only" systems.

Let's take as an example a feedback mechanism to keep a turntable
rotating at constant speed.  Nothing symbolic, we're just dealing with
sensors and effectors and real-world interaction.

To our dismay, we find that the regulation of our turntable speed is
based on an accelerometer at the rim of the spinning plate, the reading
of which is digitized, then fed into a multiplier and a table lookup
to derive a new motor voltage.

Naturally, we scrap the symbol-ridden thing immediately, and have the
accelerometer drive a lever which rotates a cam which drives a lever
which drives a potentiometer which gets us a new motor voltage using
only honest transduction.

But still.  The analog regulator has no more "semantics",
"groundedness", "causal powers" or anything else than the digital one.
Just makeing the lever system more and more complicated and the sensors
and effectors more and more subtle and throwing in more kinds of
transduction in an attempt to pass the TTT won't do anything but give
more complicated behavior.  But Searle has already said that adding
mere complexity won't get us semantics/groundedness/whatever in the
digital, so-called "symbolic" case, and so I'm forced to conclude that
mere complication won't do the trick for "transduction" either.

No matter how hard I try to understand it, this attempt to distinguish
"nonsymbolic" processes as somehow distinct in and of themselves from
"symbolic" ones makes no sense to me.  Processes are processes.  The
symbolic or nonsymbolic distinction is purely in the eye of the
beholder.  The attempt to label computer processes as always symbolic
simply begs the question of whether computer processes can themselves
ever be legitimate beholders.

Wayne Throop       ...!mcnc!aurgate!throop


