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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Causes and Goals (was re: The Systems Reply I)
Message-ID: <1992Mar15.170938.9882@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 92 22:09:37 GMT
References: <6374@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Mar11.201637.21875@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar14.010014.552@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1992Mar14.010014.552@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs) writes: 

>In article <6374@skye.ed.ac.uk> 
>jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

JD:
>>BTW, I still haven't seen a satisfactory answer to the point that
>>the Room manipulates meaningless symbols (ie, treats them syntactically)
>>without any way to attach meaning to them.  But maybe I've just
>>missed it in all the noise.

BS:
>  I will argue that the symbols the Room manipulates are not
>meaningless.  Here goes:
>
>  To say that a symbol has meaning is to say that it represents.
>How does a symbol come to represent?  The Functionalist answer,
>which I subscribe to, is that a symbol represents if it has
>the *function* of representing.
>
>  What, then, is a "function", and how does something come to
>have one?
>
>  Answer: "function" is a teleological notion.  The function of
>a component is the role it plays in achieving the *goal* of the
>system it is part of.

So far, so good.  Note, however, that you might have gotten to the same
point without assuming "Functionalism", whatever it might be, being that
the teleological nature of meaning can be deduced from more or less
universally acceptable semantic premisses.

BS:
>  What, then, is a "goal", and how does something come to have
>one?
>
>  Answer:  Any system (such as the human genome) that has evolved
>by natural selection can be assigned the primitive goal of 
>surviving.  Other goals and functions are inherited from this
>primitive goal.  Machines inherit goals from the fact that they
>are designed for specific purposes by beings that have evolved
>by natural selection, and the components of machines perform
>functions in helping them achieve their goals.  

Now you have a problem.  Setting aside the commonly acknowledged problems
inherent in the sort of vitalism you seem to be assuming (most evolutionary
biologists these days disclaim the theoretical indispensability of any
notion of final cause), what you have is yet another quasi-materialist
vulgarization of the Hegelian view of universal history, the main
difference being that the primitive goal you postulate is outward-, rather
than inward-directed.  Now, the goal-inheritance scheme you are advocating
must be either wholly transitive, i.e. reducing the teleology of every
natural system to the one primitive goal of survival, or compositional,
i.e. capable of combining this goal with other primitive (irreducible)
goals on any level of organizational structure; in other words, either all
of your goals are wholly reducible to the single primitive goal of survival
of the species, in which case you don't have any personal goals that would
enable *you* to mean *anything* by your own words, or you have some private
goals, in which case your evolutionary story is bereft of any explanatory
force in determining the private semantics of your utterances.  Either way,
you lose.

BS:
>  Now to answer the original question:  The Chinese Room is created
>by humans for the purpose of passing the Turing test, so its symbols 
>have the *function* of representing what they are designed to
>represent.  That is, they have meaning.
>
>  If something like the Chinese Room could arise by accident,
>then there would be a problem, but that is impossible.

Now, either "the purpose of passing the Turing test" is a genuinely
irreducible *telos* that would imbue each utterance of the Chinese Room
with genuine semantic value (but what could give rise to such a phenomenon
in a "billiard ball" world of efficient causes and effects?), or it is a
pseudo-purpose, wholly explainable in the terms of the vital force of the
witless genome (but how would it determine any semantic value?); either
way, you must choose between materialism and meaning.

>	-- Bill


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