From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!wupost!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl Mon Mar  9 18:34:32 EST 1992
Article 4197 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism
Message-ID: <1992Mar2.174521.1214@oracorp.com>
Organization: ORA Corporation
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1992 17:45:21 GMT

dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>>>Well, there's a mapping from the 600 mental states I've had in the
>>>last 10 minutes to the 600 books in my bookshelf, so obviously a
>>>mapping alone isn't enough.

>>Obviously. I thought it was clear that I was talking about mappings
>>that preserve the transition relation between states.
> 
> Any transition relations between mental states are more or less
> irrelevant here.

Irrelevant? Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "mental
states", but I was assuming that you meant some more sophisticated
version of folk psychology, where you can talk about the states of
"being happy", "being angry", "thinking about dinner", etc. If that
indeed is what you mean, I don't see how you can really make sense of
mental states apart from their causal roles.

> The physical states will usually be much more fine-grained than the
> mental states; maybe there will be thousands of physical
> state-transition for a single mental state-transition (whatever a
> "mental state-transition" is).

This doesn't cause any problems; to say that physical states are more
"fine-grained" than mental states simply means that the function
mapping physical states to mental states is not one-to-one; several
physical states get mapped to the same mental state. If the thousands
of physical transitions do not change the corresponding mental state,
then the physical transitions are mapped to the null mental state
transition.

As to what a mental state transition is; what's wrong with saying
things like "If I am happy, and I find out that my dog died, then I
become sad." That seems like a transition between mental states to me.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY 


