From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael Tue Apr  7 23:22:31 EDT 1992
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>From: michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar)
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Mar24.025128.9379@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <92Mar25.053818est.14337@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1992Mar26.073417.14604@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-ID: <1992Mar26.204239.1806@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1992 20:42:39 GMT

In article <1992Mar26.073417.14604@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>I arise at something like this view through the following considerations:
>any object, e.g. a human body, implements a whole lot of FSAs.  How do
>we decide which FSA is the one in virtue of which the relevant cognitive
>properties hold?  Well, presumably it has to be an FSA that gets the
>behaviour right, given the inputs (given that we can independently
>decide what counts as behaviour -- "outputs" such as sweat or even
>arm-twitches will not, for instance -- and the relevant inputs).  There
>will still be a lot of FSAs that do this, at finer and finer levels
>of description.  The usual thing to do in cognitive science is to
>take the highest-level description that gets the behaviour right,
>and to dismiss the finer descriptions as implementational detail.
>
>Eventually I think we want to reject this view, but this is roughly
>the motivation.  Without this criterion, it's fairly difficult
>to see how we are going to pick out the relevant level of
>description of a being's functional organization.
>

I agree that the view you present above is problematic, and should be
rejected, but I have no inkling at what a functionalist does then, i.e.,
how one would pick out the relevant level of functional analysis.  This seems
to me to be a rather important problem - do you have any suggested methods
of attack?

- michael



