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Article 2617 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <1992Jan10.043433.15202@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 92 04:34:33 GMT
References: <5907@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan8.204759.9392@mp.cs.niu.edu> <5923@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 53

In article <5923@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <1992Jan8.204759.9392@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>>
>>  Why don't we do a few "back of the envelope" calculations.
>>
>>  The brain is thought to have a lot of computational power.  Let's assume
>>it is the equivalent of perhaps 1000 Cray supercomputers.
>>
>>  Now on doing the sort of 'syntactical table lookup' that computers do,
>>a human might take at least one second, and perhaps much much more, to do
>>what a Cray does in a nano-second.  So we are going to need about 10^12
>>people in that Chinese room.  I hope the air conditioning is pretty powerful!

>This point has been made many times, in this newsgroup and elsewhere.
>However, it isn't the robot reply, which is what I was discussing.

 Actually it is very much related to the robot reply.  If the robot has
huge numbers of sensors, and "grows up" in a chinese community learning
the way a human would, it will likely record huge volumes of information,
which will take that kind of computing power to access.

>I used the formulation "if Searle is right" in order to consider
>whether sensors would make any difference.  Whether he is right

 The sensors are probably essential.

>>  (1)	Computations in physics require real numbers.
>>
>>  (2)	Computers use only 0 and 1, which are integers.
>>
>>  (3)	You can't get real numbers out of integers.
>>
>>  (4)	Therefore you cannot do computations in physics using computers.
>>
>> Perhaps I should comment on (3).  It may seem to be a patently false
>>assumption.  But remember that the Greek geometers used geometry to deal
>>with real numbers because they had serious problems dealing with (3).
>
>Well, (1) is false, for one thing.  But if it were true, you

  (1) is false only because sufficiently accurate floating point approximations
will be adequate.  But sufficiently accurate floating point data, perhaps
terabytes of it, might indeed be able to represent semantics.  The "error"
in (1) is no more serious than the error in your comment in an earlier
posting when you suggested that data can be constants in the program, so is
syntax.  You can call it syntax if you like, but it could still represent
semantics with sufficient accuracy.

-- 
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


