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Article 3485 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb5.020733.21580@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 92 02:07:33 GMT
References: <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> <1992Feb5.005813.6383@nuscc.nus.sg>
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Organization: Indiana University
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In article <1992Feb5.005813.6383@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

>Now consider some arbitrary entity which we are willing to agree is conscious.
>Let us call that entity John_Searle (just so we have symbols for everything).
>Then we may assume, for the sake of argument, that there is some set of finite
>state automata which model the behavior of John_Searle;  and we can call that
>set A(John_Searle).  The problem is that there is no reason to assume that the
>sets A(R) and A(John_Searle) have a non-empty intersection, which means that
>you cannot assume that anything about the behavior of ANY of the members of
>A(R) will have anything to do with consciousness.

This seems to miss the real problem, which is that if you allow states
with time-varying definitions, then it turns out that any object
implements any FSA whatsoever.  (The proof is in the appendix to
Putnam's _Representation and Reality_.  It may or may not have problems
with handling inputs/outputs and counterfactual transitions; I haven't
checked it closely enough to say.)  So both sets above will be
identical to the set of all FSAs.  To avoid this result, one presumably
has to place restrictions on the kinds of physical "states" that can
count as realizations of the states of the FSA.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


