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Article 3514 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@widder.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb5.173116.8522@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 92 22:31:14 GMT
References: <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> <1992Feb4.192338.23882@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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In article <1992Feb4.192338.23882@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>In article <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> 
>bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes:

BS:
>>  Consider an arbitrary rock, and an arbitrary finite state
>>automaton.  There exists a mapping from vibrational states
>>of the rock to states of the FSA which preserves the state
>>transition function of the FSA.  (The mapping is probably
>>time-dependent, but so what?)  Under this mapping, the rock
>>is performing the same computation as the FSA.

DC:
>I think one can fairly deny that an arbitrary object implements any
>given FSA.  There's certainly a real sense in which a rock doesn't have
>the causal complexity of the brain.  So presumably one has to put some
>restrictions on what counts as a "state" or a "property" in the
>definition of implementation.  States with time-varying definitions,
>at least, will be ruled out.

Note that your original concern is not with any specification of the rock
as an FSA, but with the thing itself.  Thus your thesis presupposes that
there is an essential description associated with enery naturally occurring
state, surely a prima facie absurdity.  I would be interested in finding
out how you propose to resolve this conundrum.

DC:
>Of course the precise specification of the class of "natural" states
>and properties is an interesting and difficult task, not unrelated to
>the problems raised by the famous "grue" problem.  e.g. it's not enough
>to simply say that states can't be time-varying, as even "green" can be
>characterized as "grue before t or bleen after t".  So we need a prior
>notion of naturalness.  But it's not implausible that such a notion can
>be spelt out so that brains will end up implementing FSAs that rocks do
>not, and Putnam's problem will be avoided.  (Although I may think that
>rocks have associated conscious states, I certainly don't think these
>are remotely as rich as human consciousness.)

Bravo! having declared yourself a dualist, you are now well on the way to
becoming perhaps the very first Platonist ever to grace the AI supporter
camp!  For how do you propose to "cut the nature at its joints" without
inferring the Third Realm of immutable Forms that determine the boundaries
thereof?

What is a natural state?

>-- 
>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."


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: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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