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Article 3598 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: todd@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp (Todd Law)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle Agrees with Strong AI?
Message-ID: <TODD.92Feb7172519@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
Date: 7 Feb 92 08:25:25 GMT
References: <TODD.92Jan23224728@ai12.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
	<1992Jan27.023737.1343@nuscc.nus.sg>
	<TODD.92Jan29143005@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
	<1992Feb4.010409.9415@nuscc.nus.sg>
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Organization: Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya ,Japan.
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In-reply-to: smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg's message of 4 Feb 92 01:04:09 GMT


In article <1992Feb4.010409.9415@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

>>>>A living entity is a living part of an ecosystem!
>>
>>This opens a large can of worms which is perhaps unnecesary.  It is
>>more a description of how life happens to occur in our environment.
>
>I find it very difficult to believe that a description which pulls back to the
>abstractions of "the whole, its parts, and theway those parts interact" can be
>construed as biased towards our own environment.
[parts deleted]

More clearly, what I wanted to say was that defining life in terms of an
ecosystem would lead to an even more discriminatory definition since
we would probably (as in the case of intelligence) arrive at a definition
that says life must be as complicated (approximately) as our own ecosystem.
This is similar to what has happened to intelligence. As we have been
able to mimic many of the human brain's functions on machines, we
keep imposing tighter and tighter restrictions on what intelligence is.
The current definition would even appear to be:  Whatever machines CAN'T
do.  Similarily, we will probably eventually define life as whatever
man CAN'T mimic.  This is fine, since it pushes us to understand what
life and intelligence really are.

[parts deleted]
>>Maybe we should define life as something which discriminates.
>
>If that is the case, then you had better be prepared to take on the qualia
>crowd.  Would you say that a thermostat discriminates hot from cold?  If it
>does, would you then say it is alive;  or would you say that it does NOT
>discriminate because you KNOW it is not alive (just as Searle knows that
>he does not know Chinese)?  It sounds like all your doing as adding
>"discriminate" to the list of words that give us a hard time.

And this time you stack the dice against me.  Touche'.
(maybe I should have said "something which discriminates, in addition
to the other usual criteria")

Perhaps we discover that when we don't know _precisely_ what we are
talking about (specifically with regard to life and intelligence),
that it is possible to come up with all manner of circular arguements,
apparent contradictions, etc.  Hence, the pointlessness of much of
what goes on in comp.ai.philosophy.

Can you enlighten me about the "qualia crowd"?

Todd Law
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