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Article 2000 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <1991Dec10.000938.5479@spss.com>
Date: 10 Dec 91 00:09:38 GMT
References: <wdEw6pa00iUzE2j7Qr@andrew.cmu.edu>
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In article <wdEw6pa00iUzE2j7Qr@andrew.cmu.edu> fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle) writes (quoting me):
>> The fact that the Room's ability to deal with the external world is 
>> ultimately a bunch of computer instructions is no more significant than
>> the fact that our ability to do the same thing is ultimately a bunch of
>> neurochemistry.
>
>I think you're comparing two different levels here.  Computer instructions
>are at the level of patterns or extended structures which are informational. 

Huh?  Do you think that applies to a shift-left instruction?  To a POP?
"Computer instructions" could refer to anything from machine code to
high-level function calls.  There is no level which can be _exclusively_
identified with "patterns" or "information."

>Neurochemistry is a little bit below this.  A more apt comparision would
>be with the retinotopically mapped response to the visual stimulus on the 
>visual cortex, for example.

We were considering the "robot reply" to Searle.  In the case of both the
human and the robot you can reduce their interaction with the outside world,
if you choose, to the same level as their internal computation.  If the
reduction of humans to neurochemistry preserves their status as referring
and manipulating agents, why is the same not true for the reduction of
robots to computer code and data?


