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Article 3692 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Feb12.150503.23822@oracorp.com>
Date: 12 Feb 92 15:05:03 GMT
Organization: ORA Corporation
Lines: 48

David Chalmers writes:

>>Being "highly gerrymandered" seems to me to be a matter of the
>>difficulty of interpreting a rock as conscious, but it doesn't seem to
>>be relevant to the question of whether it can be so interpreted. Why
>>should a convoluted, complex definition of the mental states count any
>>less than a straight-forward one?

>You must have misunderstood something: it's Putnam's physical "states"
>that are gerrymandered.  The notion of gerrymandered mental states
>doesn't come into the picture.

What I thought you were saying was that in Putnam's argument that any
physical object implements any functional system, the correspondence
between physical states and mental states was very unnatural and ad
hoc. My question was why does it matter; if there exists *any* mapping
(however strange) between physical states and mental states, then why
can't the physical object be said to *possess* those mental states?

> I'm a realist about (phenomenal) mental states in any case, so
> definition and interpretation is irrelevant to their existence.

Definition and interpretation are relevant to what it *means* for a
mental state to exist. I thought that you were taking the
functionalist stance, that a physical object has certain mental states
if and only if it implements a certain state machine. It implements
such a state machine if and only if there is a mapping from physical
states to machine states that preserves transition relations. Putnam
claims that there *always* exists such a mapping, and you seem to be
saying that only certain mappings count. Are you in agreement with all
of this?

Formally, an interpretation *is* a mapping. So the existence of mental
states does depend on the existence of a certain interpretation.

> The notion of implementation via physical states and processes
> comes up as part of a *theory* about the physical bases of
> consciousness, rather than being any kind of definition or
> conceptual analysis of consciousness.

But if the functionalist theory is correct, then the property of being
conscious is coextensive with the property of implementing a certain
type of state machine. And Putnam seems to be saying that every object
implements every state machine.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY


