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Article 3198 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: lehman_ds@lrc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism (was Re: Virtual Person?)
Message-ID: <1992Jan23.145612.154@lrc.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 92 19:56:11 GMT
References: <1992Jan19.211715.9777@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <6025@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan22.213820.20784@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jan23.015152.510@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC
Lines: 41

In article <1992Jan23.015152.510@psych.toronto.edu>, michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
> 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
  Strong AI does NOT claim that just anything could be a mind as you seem to
imply it does.  AI is the processes of reasoning that formulates a rational
(or irrational depending upon your view of a given subject) response to
a given premise.
     Drew Lehman
     Lehman_ds@lrc.edu


