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Article 2886 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <1992Jan18.231427.26990@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 92 23:14:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: bronze.1992Jan18.231427.26990
References: <1992Jan18.144220.11862@oracorp.com> <1992Jan18.195906.15800@news.media.mit.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 30

In article <1992Jan18.195906.15800@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>My point is that some skeptics could miss Darryl's point because of
>not realizing that an adequate such table-machine must indeed be so
>large that, as he says, the internal state-transition mechan ism must
>indeed be of the order of graph-complexity as the wiring of the brain!
>After all, the table itself has as many entries as the brain has
>states.

You seem to be thinking about a different kind of table -- one that has
a single state for each brain state, with appropriate connections between
these?  I'm certainly not arguing that this wouldn't be conscious.  The
one I'm talking about is the one whose internal structure consists
entirely of a huge tree, representing a space of conversations.  At
a given time, an input statement comes in, the system followse the
appropriate branch labelled with that statement (a branch exists for
every possible input), and finds at the new node a representation of the
appropriate response, which it utters.  So there's only one
state-transition between every input and output.  As for the size of
the table, assuming (conservatively) one million possible input
statements on each step, and the capacity to handle a "Turing test"
of a million steps (this has to last a lifetime, remember), it will
have 10^(6 million) entries.  But its causal structure will be extremely
simple, and it seems very implausible to me that this huge but trivial
mechanism could support consciousness.

-- 
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."


