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Article 3018 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.202459.23291@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <5994@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan18.220331.22607@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <6034@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 92 20:24:59 GMT
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In article <6034@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>All of your explanations are in terms very close to state transitions,
>and I think it's plausible only when you stick to that kind of
>direct description.  And if that's how it has to work, I'll be
>disappointed.  I thought what AI would give us was something more
>like this: we have Lisp program, and running it on any machine that
>can run it produces understanding, consciousness, etc.  And if we
>translate it into Prolog or ML or Basic, it still works.

I think that AI can probably give us this too, but it might
require more work (depending on just how the "translation" is
done).  One would have to spell out a notion of the required
causal structure for an "implementation" at a more abstract level.
For now, I've just been concerned with spelling out *a* fairly broad,
notion of implementation such that all implementations of a program
have the required properties in common.  This surely yields a strong
"strong AI", strong enough that e.g. Searle surely wouldn't accept it.

-- 
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."


