From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael Mon Mar  9 18:33:20 EST 1992
Article 4087 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael
>From: michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb27.212337.22579@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Feb24.175920.16996@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Feb25.105322.24546@norton.com> <1992Feb25.202744.27815@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1992 21:23:37 GMT

In article <1992Feb25.202744.27815@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes:

>  This is a misunderstanding.  Nobody is claiming that rocks are
>intelligent.  The argument is that a certain definition of "intelligence"
>that seems reasonable is actually not reasonable because it implies
>that rocks (and everything else) are intelligent.
>
>  I will briefly repeat the argument.  
>
>  Proposed definition:  An object is "intelligent" if it implements
>some sufficiently sophisticated set of programs.
>
>  This raises at least two questions:  1) What is a program; 2) What
>does it mean to "implement"?
>
>  If you accept the (modified) Church-Turing thesis (which most people do),
>a program can be identified with a finite state automaton, so the first
>question is no problem.
>
>  The obvious-seeming answer to the second question is that an
>object implements a program (= FSA) if there is a mapping
>from states of the object to states of the FSA such that
>the state-transition rules of the Turing machine are respected by
>the mapping.
>
>  What is a "mapping"?  There is no ambiguity here:  "mapping" just
>means a function, in the mathematical sense.
>
>  Now Putnam's argument, which I will not repeat, is that this
>seemingly natural definition is bad, because with such a broad
>notion of implementation it can be shown that every physical object
>(such as a rock) implements every program, or at least an enormous
>set of programs.  The conclusion is that some more restrictive
>notion of implementation is needed.   

This is merely one conclusion.  Another possibility is that identifying
intelligence with carrying out an implemented program is wrong.

As I've noted before, it's not clear to me that any other definition of
implementation can be defended against the charge of being ad hoc.  
Those of us who want to be realists about mental entities worry about
merely defining the problems of functionalism away, without giving
good reasons *why* things are like this.

- michael
 



