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Article 3472 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.192338.23882@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 92 19:23:38 GMT
References: <1992Jan31.193524.28969@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu>
Distribution: world,local
Organization: Indiana University
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In article <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes:

>  Consider an arbitrary rock, and an arbitrary finite state
>automaton.  There exists a mapping from vibrational states
>of the rock to states of the FSA which preserves the state
>transition function of the FSA.  (The mapping is probably
>time-dependent, but so what?)  Under this mapping, the rock
>is performing the same computation as the FSA.

I think one can fairly deny that an arbitrary object implements any
given FSA.  There's certainly a real sense in which a rock doesn't have
the causal complexity of the brain.  So presumably one has to put some
restrictions on what counts as a "state" or a "property" in the
definition of implementation.  States with time-varying definitions,
at least, will be ruled out.

Of course the precise specification of the class of "natural" states
and properties is an interesting and difficult task, not unrelated to
the problems raised by the famous "grue" problem.  e.g. it's not enough
to simply say that states can't be time-varying, as even "green" can be
characterized as "grue before t or bleen after t".  So we need a prior
notion of naturalness.  But it's not implausible that such a notion can
be spelt out so that brains will end up implementing FSAs that rocks do
not, and Putnam's problem will be avoided.  (Although I may think that
rocks have associated conscious states, I certainly don't think these
are remotely as rich as human consciousness.)

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


