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Article 5584 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Comments on Searle - What could causal powers be?
Message-ID: <1992May12.151233.17242@guinness.idbsu.edu>
Date: 12 May 92 15:12:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: guinness.1992May12.151233.17242
References: <1992May10.001713.19164@psych.toronto.edu> <1992May11.202715.47273@spss.com> <1992May12.003415.7383@psych.toronto.edu>
Sender: M. Randall Holmes
Organization: Boise State University Math Dept.
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In article <1992May12.003415.7383@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>In article <1992May11.202715.47273@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>In article <1992May10.001713.19164@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu
>>(Michael Gemar) writes:
...
>>>entities" won't do it (I'm sure that the Bolivian economy would be very hurt
>>>to hear you say such things about it).  Why should "compactness", or        
...
>>OK, let's say that the Bolivian economy, looked at in a certain way, can be
>>seen to implement an algorithm that passes the Turing Test.  But surely
>>there's nothing that *makes* it do that. 
>
>Sure there is, namely, the principles of economics, along with the initial
>conditions and any "input" into the system.
>
>> All the actions and states which
>>go to make up the Bolivian economy have a different explanation. 
>
>So do the activities of our brains.  They are (making the safe assumption
>that you are a materialist) purely explicable on the physical, or
>biochemical, or neurological level.  No need for any of this spooky
>cognitive stuff at all...
>
>> And
>>because the economy is based on those actions, not on the need to implement
>>an intelligent algorithm, it may stop being an implementation of a mind
>>at any moment.  By contrast, something does make the brain generate a mind; 
>>its "program" has definite causes in genetics and neurochemistry.
>
>Your problem about ceasing to be an implementation only applies to the
>case in which the Bolivian economy *fortuitously* implements a 
>Turing-Test-passing program, and not to the case where it is
>arranged and manipulated *intentionally* (say by Donald Trump :-) to
>implement such a program.  Sure, it's unlikely that the Bolivian
>economy *currently* has mental states.  What I want to know is if
>it could *in principle*.  You seemed to suggest that the answer is
>"no", but it is unclear to me why.
>
>>I think there's kind of an anthropic principle at work here.  If the Bolivian
>>economy implements a mind, it does so only by chance and temporarily;
>>it's not a mind that you can do much with.  Any mind that exists long
>>enough to worry about the question can conclude that it is implemented
>>on something like a brain rather than something like the Bolivian economy.
>>
>>We're wandering away from how brains cause minds, here.  My original theory #4
>>("Because of identifiable characteristics of the brain") was intended to
>>provide a home for Searle.  If there is any content to his contentions,
>>it must be that mental phenomena are made possible by some physical process,
>>or by some detail of implementation in the structure of the brain.
>
>This is certainly how I read him.
>
>- michael
>

I'm certainly not proposing that this is true, but it seems to me
perfectly conceivable that an intelligent economy would have real
advantages _as an economy_, and so its intelligence would be a stable
phenomenon (and that it might behoove Bolivian politicians to
communicate with their economy (by carefully modulated fluctuations of
central bank interest rates?) if it turned out that it _was_
intelligent for intrinsic reasons -- perhaps very soothingly if it
turned out to have the intelligence and "emotional stability" of a
3-year-old, as seems quite probable, given the behaviour of economies
:-)) An intelligent economy sounds like a much more realistic variant
of the Chinese Room (the economy has independently intelligent beings
as neurons, but it does not "use" anything like all of their
intelligence; the intelligent Bolivian economy, on "introspection",
would know a great deal about sales of television sets, say, and very
little about the content of television programming (although it would
be aware of ads in its own peculiar way, perhaps).  It would be
unlikely to know anything at all about conversations on the
hypothetical Bolivian equivalent of comp.ai.philosophy.

-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu


