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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 00:03:59 GMT
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In article <39snr3$52b@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>gyro@netcom.com (Scott L. Burson) writes:
>
>> Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 08:57:33 GMT
>>......
>
>> It's an old argument, but for those who aren't familiar with it I'll give a
>> brief example.  I look at my screen right now, and there's a little yellow
>> rectangle that represents the cursor.  Now I know that yellow light has
>> certain physical properties, and that it stimulates the visual receptors in my
>> eyes in a certain way, and the receptors in turn send certain signals along
>> the optic nerve to the visual cortex, etc.; but nowhere in that purely
>> physical description of a sequence of events is there room for the
>> *experience* of yellowness.
>
>Are you sure there will never be robots saying exactly the same
>thing, 

Why would it matter if they did?

>Penrose believes it is all physical. He just thinks we have not yet
>got the right physics, and he thinks the kinds of physics used in
>(Turing machine equivalent) computers won't do.

Just so.  And hence I wonder why it's so controversial!

>I prefer to put the slogan in a slightly different way: There's no
>magic in the universe.
>
>Or, in other words: there's no ultimate mystery -- the workings of
>everything can, in principle, be understood.

But those are two rather different claims.  For instance, we might
understand magic and we might not be able to understand some non-magic.
(I don't know about you, but there's certainly some non-magical
stuff I don't understand.  Maybe everything will eventually be
figured out by someone, but we can hardly call it certain.)

> (But not necessarily by
>every particular person, and not necessarily all at once, and not
>necessarily in our lifetime.)

But necessarily by someone eventually?  Why?

>This sort of slogan can't be proved. I think one just does or does
>not make a commitment to it. This means attempting to unravel all
>apparent counterexamples, i.e. apparent mysteries (e.g. visual
>qualia as you've described them).

I make no commitment to it, but I'm still interested in unraveling
apparent counterexamples.

>For example it might turn out after further investigation that
>Penrose is correct in his conjecture that the functioning of the
>brain depends crucially on physical mechanisms that nobody yet
>understands, and the functioning cannot be replicated without those
>mechanisms. (After all, it is no more likely that physicists of 1994
>have found out all the important processes there are than that
>physicists of 1974 had).
>
>This is an empirical question. As yet, I don't think Penrose or
>anyone else has produced strong arguments for believing his
>conjecture. That doesn't mean it is wrong.

Just so.

-- jeff
