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Article 7243 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: <1992Oct12.221609.15695@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 92 22:16:09 GMT
References: <26774@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct12.130804.18065@sophia.smith.edu> <1992Oct12.191445.18565@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
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Cc: minsky

In article <1992Oct12.191445.18565@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c60c-2gh@web-4f.berkeley.edu (Erik Strickland (Og)) writes:
>
>	Of all of the people attending this discussion, I am perhaps the most
>fortunate, inasmuch as I'm a student at UC Berkeley who has studied under 
>Searle for a year and a half. 

>	According to Searle, the mind is a secretion of the brain, which "just
>happens" as a result of electrochemical reactions in the brain. At no point is
>there any real "information processing" going on in the brain, as "information"
>is a meaningless concept without an observer, and (excepting a homunculus) there
>is no observer in the brain. The brain in this way is not a computer or
>information processing device, but is just a lump of conveniently arranged 
>molecules, much like a heart or liver. 
>	The original question was this: If I could in some way simulate all of the
>electrochemical processes/entities in the brain, such that for all time, the state
>of my model was in 1-1 correspondence with the modeled brain, would the simulated
>brain have a simulated mind? 
>	Searle's position is very much consistent with all of our brain-damaging
>experience, and is difficult to counter. It is the actual goo inside your brainpan
>that does the work, much as it is the acids/catalysts inside your stomach which
>actually digest your food. In both cases, simulation of the physical processes
>does nothing more than prove a clever exercise in computer science; in neither case do you get the 'secretion' of the simulated entity, the mind or the digestion.
>	Searle says that, should our dogma be incorrect and silicon be able to
>secrete mind-stuff in the way that brains do, then great, wow, neat. But you
>can't get there through information processing, you can't get there through 
>computer science; you can't make a mind out of an arbitrary substance.
>
>	I've found that, in general, people on this newsgroup are very vague
>and miss the point quite often. I hope I've done neither. 

Ha. Ha.  I guess I've missed the same point with respect to
transubstantiation in Catholic theology, and I guess Pasteur missed
the same point with respect to 'living things' and organic chemistry.
No, you're not being vague, merely insisting that certain substances
cause minds.  No more arbitrary than insisting that saying certain
prayers induce states of grace, etc.  In other words, does Searle
suggest any reason why the mind-stuff is secreted by the hydrocarbons
-- rather than the, I think, more plausible (and more widely believed)


