From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Thu Jan  9 10:34:18 EST 1992
Article 2576 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Keywords: look up `nomological', `anomalous', and `type'
Message-ID: <5918@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Jan 92 22:38:06 GMT
References: <1991Dec23.210052.25960@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1991Dec23.185045.6898@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec24.020441.8340@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1991Dec24.014716.6901@husc3.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 50

In article <1991Dec24.014716.6901@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <1991Dec24.020441.8340@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
>chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>MZ:
>>>Once again, the rightness of your causal structure is determined by whoever
>>>determines the correctness of implementation.
>
>DC:
>>This is just irrelevant.  The origin of the implementation relation doesn't
>>matter.  All that matters is that *if* the system is an implementation, then
>>it has the right causal structure.

It may help me to understand this if you can tell me how many
different causal structures count as an implementation?  Well,
not just how many -- what is the range of possibility.  Are
all of the implementations the right structrue for thinking?

>No: if the system is a *correct* implementation, then it has the right
>causal structure.  Now define correctness in a non-question-begging way.

I'm not even sure that all correct implementations have the right
causal structure, since a given program can have a wide range of
implementations, with a wide range of causal structures.  (Some
might use ICs, other beads and string; there are different compilers
that produce different object code; etc.)

If all of these are the right causal structure for thinking, it
seems to me that they must be "right" at a fairly abstract level,
which again suggests functionalism.

Or, instead of considering "implementation", we might consider
a program a (functional) description of a causal structure.
But Searle would still be right if it matter in what kind of
physical system the causal structure was realized.

(Dave Chalmers, quoted by MZ:)

>>Systems with an appropriate causal structure think.
>>Programs are a way of formally specifying causal structures.
>>Physical systems which implement a given program *have* that 
>>causal structure, physically.

Ok, suppose they do.  They also have other properties.

>>Physical systems which implement the appropriate program think.

Do all of them, no matter what other physical properties are
involved?  Searle claims to have shown otherwise.

-- jd


