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Article 3274 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism (was Re: Virtual Person?)
Message-ID: <1992Jan29.193727.25699@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 29 Jan 92 19:37:27 GMT
References: <1992Jan23.214130.27931@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan26.174822.12526@psych.toronto.edu> <17193@castle.ed.ac.uk>
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In article <17193@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>
>The complete works of Shakespeare is a large book, which can be
>implemented in any technology, simply by virtue of an appropriate
>encoding, and need not have the functional/causal relationships
>necessary in implementing a device like a mind or a clock. It is also
>vastly simpler than a human mind. Therefore the chances of the
>complete works of Shakespeare being accidentally implemented by a
>suitable description of the change in the pockets of the inhabitants
>of China, the motes of soot floating over Iran, or whatever, is far
>far greater then the chances of a mind being implemented by this sort
>of accident.  In other words, if there a remote but significant
>likelihood of the kind of panpsychism abhorred by Michael Gemar, we
>should be able to find "accidental" copies of Shakespeare turning up
>all over the place.

Maybe they are all ofver the place, but you haven't found the
right interpretation yet.

I think it's interesting that "anything of sufficient complexity
can be interpreted as anything else of similar complexity" is
used by both the pro- and anti-AI sides.  For instance McCarthy
and O'Rourke have argued that Searle is wrong to say the i/o of
the Chinese Room could be interpreted as moves in a Chess game,
and Minsky has argued that the table lookup machine would have
enough complexity that

   However, a reasonable guess might be that the state-transition
   table for the internal location states must be -- what's the
   mathematical word for this -- a structure of which the simulated
   brain's transition semi-group is a homomorphism.

-- jd


