From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael Tue Jan 28 12:16:15 EST 1992
Article 3039 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael
>From: michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar)
Subject: Strong AI and panpsychism (was Re: Virtual Person?)
Message-ID: <1992Jan23.015152.510@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Jan19.211715.9777@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <6025@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan22.213820.20784@cs.yale.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1992 01:51:52 GMT

In article <1992Jan22.213820.20784@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:
>
> If Strong AI is right, then
>rooms, abacuses, computers, pencils pushed by clerks, and the economy
>of Bolivia are all capable of sustaining computational processes that
>constitute minds.  

[some irrelevant lines deleted]

>[The reference to the economy of Bolivia is a semihumorous allusion to
>Ned Block's paper on functionalism and qualia.  Please do not spend a
>lot of time attacking it.]

But Drew, certainly believing that the Bolivian economy *could* be a mind 
is one of the most extraordinary consequences of the Strong AI position.
Since it is only the *functional* role that the material constituents play
that matters in producing a mind, literally *any* collection of matter
can be a mind.  More to the point, with the enormous amount of matter in
the universe, and the practically infinite characteristics that we can
ascribe *formally*, there are minds *everywhere*.  Who knows, under some
description, if Strong AI is correct, the molecules of air in the room
I'm in might, at least for a moment, constitute a mind.  Perhaps if the
amount of cash in every cash register in the world were taken as activation
levels in a network, the world economy would have a mind.  Maybe, by converting
gravitational attraction into electrical current, we could see that all
the stars in the galaxy constitute a mind.  

It is this panpsychism which functionalism seems to imply which makes me
*very* nervous.  I will agree that the above is not a *logical* argument
against Strong AI, but it certainly should cause its advocates to pause and
consider to what, at root, their position commits them (the ethical problems
alone boggle the mind!).

- michael




