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Article 4912 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Message-ID: <1992Apr4.010455.14839@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Date: 4 Apr 92 01:04:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: organpip.1992Apr4.010455.14839
References: <1992Apr2.164457.24191@oracorp.com>
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Reply-To: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Organization: Center for Neural Systems, Memory, and Aging
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In article <1992Apr2.164457.24191@oracorp.com> 
daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>
>We haven't come to a consensus about what it means for two state
>machines to be equivalent, except that I have proposed that they are
>equivalent if there is a mapping between corresponding states that
>preserves the transition relation. The questions are: is such an equivalence
>sufficient to imply equivalence of mental properties, and is such an
>equivalence necessary to imply equivalence of mental properties.
>
  I think we have more or less a consensus that you're right
about what it means for two (finite) state machines to be
equivalent.  But the difficult question is what it means 
for a particular *physical object* (such as a computer,
or a human, or a rock) to implement a finite state automaton.
Is there a definition strong enough to make implementing a
particular FSA imply something about mental properties?

	-- Bill


