From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!wupost!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Mon Mar  9 18:34:43 EST 1992
Article 4212 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!wupost!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reference (was re: Multiple Personality Disorder and Strong AI)
Message-ID: <466@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 3 Mar 92 00:04:19 GMT
References: <1992Feb25.182526.12698@oracorp.com> <18595@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 39

In article <18595@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
|
|On the other hand, I think it remains true that what a program does is
|to transform some input data into some output data, and that this
|transformation can only be purely syntactic. This seems to me to pull
|the rug out from under the "English reply". Anyone care to comment?

Yes.

I think it remains true that what a brain does is to transform some input
data into some output data (including muscle control signals), and that,
since it only has access to an encoded representation of the data, this
transformation can only be syntactic.


This statement is entirely consistant with what is curently known of
neurobiology.  It may not be the last word, but it is certainly not (yet)
disproven.  It is at least a reasonable point of view, given current
knowledge.

The only attempts I have seen to counter it are either inconclusive
appeals to intuition ("the brain has unexplained properties, so it must
have some mysterious mechanism to create them"), or appeals to the equally
mysterious, and inexplicable, philosophy of quantum mechanics (aka the
Copenhagen interpretation thereof).


While I do admit that the brain has unexplained capabilities, I am perfectly
content to wait until they are explained to make any conclusions about what
sort of mechanisms are involved.  And in the mean time, I see no reason
to buy in to any one concept of them to the extent of deciding what
computers can and cannot do.  [I may, and do, have hypotheses about what
sorts of mechanisms will be found, but I know full well they are neither
complete nor properly demonstrated as yet, so I do not *assume* their truth
when making logical argumentation].
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



