From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!samsung!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl Thu Dec 26 23:57:07 EST 1991
Article 2272 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Message-ID: <1991Dec19.133719.22212@oracorp.com>
Date: 19 Dec 91 13:37:19 GMT
Organization: ORA Corporation
Lines: 84

DMC = Daryl McCullough
MZ = Mikhail Zeleny

DMC:
>>I don't understand what you are driving at here. Are you saying that a
>>program can't be correctly implemented without some conscious agent's
>>intervention? 

MZ:
>As I have argued all along, interpretation, like all semantic activity, is
>essentially creative.

And, all along, I have not understood your argument. It seems to me
that a computer is perfectly capable of compiling and running a
program, a syntactic object. That was Chalmer's point, that while a
program, as scratches on a piece of paper, has no causal properties, a
program when run by a computer *does*.

DMC:
>>Isn't that what a compiler is supposed to do?

MZ:
>The compiler is a program.  Who implements it?

Another compiler that has already been implemented. Sure, the first
compilers were implemented by humans, but since then most compilers
have been bootstrapped; one uses earlier versions of a compiler to
compile later versions of the very same compiler.

Certainly writing a compiler program is a creative act, as is the
writing of any program. However, interpreting programs (in the sense
of going from syntax to action, not in the sense of going from syntax
to meaning; I have been focusing on "causal powers") is pretty
uncreative, and pretty dull (which is why we get machines to do it).

DMC:
>>Anyway, a program is a mathematical description of a class of
>>machines. When someone says that the program has this or that
>>property, they are only talking about the correct implementations: to
>>say that I is an incorrect implementation of program P is to say that
>>I is *not* an implementation of P.

MZ:
> Call it what you will, but correctness of an interpretation is a
> non-recursive notion.

Why is that relevant? The claim we are discussing is whether every
correct implementation of a program will have certain causal powers,
not whether you or I or a computer can recognize all correct
implementations.

DMC:
>>You are drifting away from Chalmer's original point: the meaning of a
>>program is a machine with certain causal properties; properties of the
>>form "inputing a 5 will cause the output of 25", or whatever. An
>>implementation of this program will have this causal property by
>>virtue of what it *means* to be an implementation.

MZ:
>Quite so.  However note that, if your process of "inputing a 5 will cause
>the output of 25" is construed as a physical activity, then I have argued
>that the physical causal powers of a program's implementation are
>irreducibly intensional with respect to, and non-emergent from its logical
>structure, even when the latter is construed semantically, as interpreted
>by a conscious agent.

I don't know what that paragraph means. Let me just reiterate my
claim: the logical structure of a program causes certain behavior in a
physical computer running the program. The behavior produced is itself
causal; it can cause email messages to be sent, it can set off a burglar
alarm, it can multiply numbers together.

MZ:
>Which is to say that meaning is a burden that has to be borne by
>consciousness.

Sure. What this thread is ultimately about is whether a computer can
have consciousness. Searle said no, because it doesn't have the right
causal properties. Now, are you saying that it can't have the right
causal properties because it doesn't have consciousness?

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp. 
Ithaca, NY


