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Article 4616 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Systems Reply I
Message-ID: <1992Mar19.225312.4180@spss.com>
Date: 19 Mar 92 22:53:12 GMT
References: <1992Mar9.171606.6886@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar16.231755.32589@spss.com> <1992Mar19.202259.16791@psych.toronto.edu>
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In article <1992Mar19.202259.16791@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu 
(Michael Gemar) writes:
>Well, I'm *darned* impressed that you've hung onto old postings, although it
>it will certainly make me more cautious about what I say...

I don't mean to make you paranoid!  I was away for two weeks and came back
to find 321 articles in comp.ai.philo to wade through.  It makes patterns
more noticeable.

>I should point out that the position that I have been trying to explicate
>is the one that *Searle* puts forward.  I'm not so sure I buy his response
>to the Systems Reply now [....]

Great!  And they say nothing ever happens on comp.ai.philosophy.

>>All this said, I think the CR story helps point out a difference between
>>human and (traditional symbolic) computer operation.   Why does the 
>>man in the CR, or the CPU, not understand Chinese?  Surely part of the
>>answer is that they are such narrow informational channels.  [...]

>This point is not at all clear to me, since we assume that, in the CR, the
>operations which are producing the mind occur *serially*.  In general, 
>*any* parallel architecture can be converted to serial (almost *all*
>connectionist work is done on conventional, serial machines).

Parallel and serial machines are equivalent... in some things; computational
power, for instance.  In other things they're not: e.g. speed.

My question is, do mental phenomena such as consciousness, or qualia,
fall into the first category or the second?
Perhaps consciousness can only occur in a parallel architecture, 
and disappears when the same algorithm is simulated serially.

I have no proof for this; it's only an idea.  But it fits my intuition 
about the nature of the difference between a brain and a (serial) computer.


