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Article 3546 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb6.113740.2533@arizona.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 92 18:37:39 GMT
References: <1992Jan31.193524.28969@psych.toronto.edu> 
 <1992Jan31.233453.7625@news.media.mit.edu> <1992Feb3.113723.2519@arizona.edu> <1992Feb4.151115.5600@news.media.mit.edu>
Reply-To: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
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minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>What's more, I don't even see why those formal systems even need to be
>run on real computers, if they are specified complete with their
>environments.  Those virtual beings, just as "conscious" as me and
>(presumably) you, can lead arbitrarily rich, imaginative lives, or
>whatever.

Bill Skaggs
>  Well, here's the problem, as I see it:  
>
>  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.
>
>  Therefore, if an FSA can be conscious, and consciousness is
>merely a matter of performing the right sort of computation,
>then a rock can be conscious.
>
>  What's wrong with this reasoning?

MM:
>Nothing.  So long as it performs the _right sort_ of computation.  But
>there's no reason to think that rocks can do this. Brains, in good
>health, can -- but this is a result of 3 billion years of evolution.
>Rocks don't evolve because of not having hereditary structural codes,
>etc.

I wasn't sufficiently clear.  What does it mean for a thing to perform a
computation?   If you accept the Church-Turing thesis, it means that
there exists a mapping from states of the thing to states of some
Turing machine, such that the evolution of states of the thing
corresponds to the state transition table of the Turing machine.
In other words, a thing is performing a computation if it is
"isomorphic" to a Turing machine.

But what sorts of mappings are allowed?  If any arbitrary, time-
dependent mapping is acceptable, then the dynamics of *any*
object can be mapped to *any* Turing machine -- so every
object is simultaneously performing every possible computation.

Therefore, if we want to avoid rabid panpsychism, we must restrict
the set of allowable mappings -- but I would claim that restricting
the set of mappings amounts to grounding the system.

	-- Bill

P.S. I understand that Putnam has made essentially the same
argument somewhere.


