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Article 3010 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: <1992Jan22.194020.18127@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 92 19:40:20 GMT
References: <1992Jan20.161508.11719@oracorp.com>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 40

In article <1992Jan20.161508.11719@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:

>This is what I mean by saying "true by definition".

OK, but I'd prefer "true by meaning", or even better "true by semantic
constraints", as most terms don't have explicit definitions.

>I would say that they are neither wrong, nor stupid, but that they are
>assuming a more precise meaning to "mentality" than we are able to
>agree on in this newsgroup.
>>
>That *can't* be the case for statements involving words without
>agreed-upon meanings.

Well, any conceptual analysis involves a certain degree of conceptual
refinement first, to clear up various confusions, inconsistencies in
various people's usage, and so on.  e.g. presumably some people think
that mentality means "has a disembodied soul", but that doesn't count
against the possibility of an analysis of mentality as a concept; we'll
just have to perform a certain amount of legislation against bad ideas.

>I think this is very strange. What makes a state trivial or not trivial?
>And what makes one "causation" uninteresting and another interesting? The
>goal of Turing's invention of "Turing machines" was to reduce the behavior
>of complex machines to a repeated sequence of entirely trivial operations:

>The transitions are utterly trivial, exactly comparable to the
>transitions of the lookup-table machine. All the complexity is in the
>table of state transitions, and in the initial tape. The table of transitions
>corresponds to the table in my thought-experiment, and the tape corresponds
>to the conversation.

Yes, but put together enough of those state-transitions and you get
highly organized, complex processing.  A single state-transition
is trivial.

-- 
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."


