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Article 7242 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Message-ID: <1992Oct12.220803.15594@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 92 22:08:03 GMT
References: <26609@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct12.170930.9523@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Oct12.185533.6092@spss.com>
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Cc: minsky

In article <1992Oct12.185533.6092@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1992Oct12.170930.9523@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu 
>(Marvin Minsky) writes:
>>In article <26609@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>>>Contrary to popular opinion, even Searle of Chinese Roon fame agrees with 
>>>that, as he made plain in the Jan 1990 edition of Scientific American>>
>>That a mere machine could think?  I don't remember any such statement
>>by Searle.
>
>How about this, from the first paragraph of said article (I keep a copy
>handy for use in comp.ai.philo polemics):
>
>  "Can a machine think?  Can a machine have conscious thoughts in exactly
>   the same sense that you and I have?  If by 'machine' one means a physical
>   system capable of performing certain functions (and what else can one
>   mean?), then humans are machines of a special biological kind, and humans
>   can think, and so of course machines can think.  And, for all we know, it
>   might be possible to produce a thinking machine out of different materials
>   altogether-- say, out of silicon chips or vacuum tubes.  Maybe it will
>   turn out to be impossible, but we certainly do not know that yet."

>In _Minds, Brains, and Science_ he adds green slime to the array of
> potentially mind-causing materials.

Well, I don't want to nit-pick, but this doesn't distinguish between
'machine' and anything else -- nor does it suggest what might be
special about 'biological' ones.  Generally, I think most people reserve
the term machine for a collection of objects assembled in an
especially "insulationist" manner -- that is, in such a way that those
'functions' are realized in a particularly reductionist way, in accord
with the how the functions of the parts interact in accord with how
they are assembled.  But what the heck, he had to leave room for the
green slime.


