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Article 3656 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
Summary: munch, munch
Message-ID: <1992Feb11.223848.7203@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 92 22:38:48 GMT
References: <1992Feb7.223611.5980@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Feb10.042237.4622@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb10.164653.15748@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 55

In article <1992Feb10.164653.15748@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

>I have to disagree here.Whenever I see someone say "It's just obvious that..."
>I worry about *them* being in the grip of an ideology.  What we are arguing
>about are intuitions.  My point is that someone who is less tutored that
>us might very well have different "intuitions", which makes "intuitions"
>obviously contingent upon what we already know. My question is simply why 
>we should we accept one *narrow* definition of states as the *right* one?
>It seems to me that the only answer offered so far is that "Well, it just
>feels right...".

I think you're losing track of the logic of the discussion.  Formal
definitions, such as that of an implementation of an FSA, are almost
always invented to formalize certain intuitive notions that we
want to capture, such as the intuitive distinction between the causal
organizations of brains and clocks (and if you can't see that there's
at least a very strong prima facie case that there's a distinction
there to be captured, then there's not much I can do for you).
If a given definition turns out not to capture that distinction, that
doesn't imply that there's no distinction to be made; it means that
the definition's no good.  Of course, it may turn out that *no*
definition can capture the distinction, in which case the distinction
may be illusory, but one can't draw that conclusion just because one
definition fails.  

(Incidentally, the more I think about Putnam's proof, the more I come
to the conclusion that this discussion is irrelevant, because it
seems to me that his "FSAs" don't have the required counterfactual
behaviour, especially in response to inputs and outputs.)

>My interest in this issue comes about precisely because I *don't* see
>any way in principle to separate "environment" from "entity" for
>functionalism, which seems to me to be a difficulty, as how does one pick out
>individual conscious entities if everything is just a mass of interacting
>functions?  I certainly *feel* that I am a separate entity from the rest
>of the world.  (I am speaking here only of the phenomenal experience, and
>not of some absolute physical separation.)  What I would like to find out is
>*how* one determines the limit of a conscious system from a purely
>functionalist perspective.  

Any given physical object participates in lots of systems (as is very
familiar from the cases of the Chinese room, Bolivian economy, etc etc).
For any given chunk of the environment, you can construct a system
that contains bits of your brain, bits of that chunk, etc.  It happens
that the system that is *you*, i.e. is responsible for giving rise to
your phenomenal experience, is a particular system that is almost
certainly contained wholly within your skull.  There are other systems
that contain bits of your skull and bits of the environment, and these
might give rise to other kinds of phenomenal experience.  There's no
canonical map from object to system.

-- 
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."


