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Article 3707 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: silber@orfeo.Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Silber)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Fables, Foibles, and Physics (was Re:Ref...(was re:Multi...Strong AI))
Keywords: consciousness,functionalism,meaning
Message-ID: <kplhqrINNreg@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 13 Feb 92 19:30:35 GMT
References: <1992Feb7.232150.8611@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Feb12.040025.14716@cs.yale.edu> <1992Feb12.063035.15857@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> <1992Feb13.045721.29805@cs.yale.edu>
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In article <1992Feb13.045721.29805@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:
   
	DM:
	...
   In a nutshell, the problem I see is how to spell out how meaning
   actually works, and not just under what circumstances we can
   usefully attribute meaning to a system.  I think if we are careful
   enough the problem can be minimized, but it always seems to lurk in
   the background.
   
   However: I don't this problem is specific to the issue of meaning or
   intentionality.  Let me illustrate with a fable.  Suppose God created
   the universe as a humongous wave function.  
	...
   [...the fable of the devil and the deep blue wave-particle duality...]
   ...
   Clearly, there has to be a sense in which atoms are real regardless of
   whether anyone is taking any stance toward them.  And information
   processing is just as real, in spite of the attempts by people like
   Searle (and Gemar, I think) to argue that whether a system is an
   information processor is purely up to human observers (who confer
   derived intentionality on it).

 Assert:
 From the cosmological viewpoint, projecting back to the first
 10^(-50) th of a second, before the 'stuff' had cooled enough to
 make the quarks that make the quatsch, neither atoms nor 'noumena'
 existed.  There was definitely a time in the history of THIS universe,
 when neither atoms nor Integers existed.


   


