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Article 3028 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke)
Subject: Re: Is understanding algorithmic?
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.165800.20249@cs.ucf.edu>
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Organization: University of Central Florida
References: <DIRISH.92Jan18155827@jeeves.math.utah.edu>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1992 16:58:00 GMT

In article <DIRISH.92Jan18155827@jeeves.math.utah.edu> dirish@math.utah.edu  
(Dudley Irish) writes:
| We can picture the situation as follows.  We have a four assumptions:
| 
| 	0) Understanding is algorithmic
| 	1) Church-Turing thesis is true
| 	2) Reference is required for understanding
| 	3) A Turing machine cannot refer
| 
Bravo!
A very clear, succinct distillation of the issues.  
All the Searle/Penrose discussions can be put in this framework.
Clearly Searle does not believe in 3.
Clearly Penrose does not believe in 0.

Me?  I think I don't like 0.  I have something of a physics background
and quantum mechanics already provided examples of events which are difficult 
to explain on a turing mechanical basis.  E.G.  the time series of radiative
transitions of an atom is totally random according to quantum mechanics.  Any
algorithmically generated time series is necessarily less random. See Erber and  
Putterman, "Randomness in quantum mechanics:  nature's ultimate cryptogram",  
Nature, 318, p41-43.

It is a big step from quantum mechanics to intelligence/understanding, but 
to me the loophole is there.

Thomas Clarke, Institute for Simulation and Training,
University of Central Florida


