Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.alpha.net!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl.gov!ames!news.Hawaii.Edu!uhunix2!roitblat
From: roitblat@uhunix2.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Herbert Roitblat)
Subject: Re: Reductionist Materialism (was Re: I lie therefore I am?)
Message-ID: <CzHDJx.C8v@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Sender: news@news.Hawaii.Edu
Organization: University of Hawaii
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
References: <36e5oe$6nc@toves.cs.city.ac.uk> <783521040snz@develco.demon.co.uk> <390dt7$gf9@netaxs.com> <39p329$kno@crl2.crl.com> <1994Nov11.210534.24348@seas.smu.edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 20:43:08 GMT
Lines: 77

Kenneth J. Hendrickson (kjh@seas.smu.edu) wrote:
: In article <39p329$kno@crl2.crl.com>, Andrea Chen <dbennett@crl.com> wrote:
: >>It should be possible "in principle" to examine the structure of the 
: >>dean's brain and determine through the connections present what his 
: >>actual beleifs are but that may also involve understanding the 
: >>organization and schema of most of the whole brain. 

: Stuff and nonsense.  Non-sense.  Let's examine the hidden syllogism.

: Major premise:	Matter and energy is all that exists.  Everything that
: 		exists is either matter or energy itself, or a direct
: 		consequence of interaction between different bits of
: 		matter and energy.

: Minor premise:	If matter and energy were all that existed, it would be
: 		possible to understand and describe everything by
: 		studying the matter and energy out of which it was
: 		made.
   ...

: The minor premise is true.  Perhaps it is so obvious as to be
: self-evident.  However, I contest the major premise.  Ideas exist, and
: they are not material stuff, nor the result of interactions of material
: stuff.  The fundamental thing about ideas is that they have ABOUTness.
: Ideas are about things.  Ideas can be about other ideas.  Matter and
: energy cannot have ABOUTness; they just are.

Intentionality (aboutness) does not imply immateriality.  This message
is about the issue of fundamental reductionism.  It is nevertheless
instantiated in some physical medium.  At the moment I type it, it is
instantiated in an electronic medium as well as in the pattern of
light and dark on my computer screen.  The content of the message can
change forms and can change media several times in the course of its
transmission from me to you, the reader, but its content will remain
relatively invariant.  One might say that the intentionality of the
message transcends the medium in which it is represented, but one
cannot say that it is not physically instantiated at any particular
point in time.



: You (and almost everybody else in AI, NLP, MT, and machine learning) are
: making a fundamental category mistake.  You are confusing form and
: matter.  You are confusing syntax and semantics.  Actually, you are
: denying form, and claiming matter is all that exists---denying
: semantics, and claiming that syntax is all that exists.

I would not be so quick to accuse others of a category error.  The
problem with trying to go from patterns in the brain to patterns of
intentional thought is not that the latter are immaterial, it is that
the relationship between the two is incredibly complex.  Reductionism
may not be possible because of emergent properties of the organization
of action in the brain, rather than because the brain does not
instantiate the thought.  If one were to take all the characters in
this paragraph, for example, and arrange them in alphabetical order,
the intentional properties of the text would be lost.  Knowing
everything about the freuqencies of the letters would tell us nothing
about the message.  Similarly, knowing everything about the activation
of all the neurons in the brain may not tell you what the brain is
thinking about.

To give you some idea of the complexity, the brain has about 10^14
neurons, each with about 10^3 connections on average.  Let's say that
1/10 of them is involved in intentional thought.  That means that the
brain has about 10^16 different states it can be in at any one time.
Temporal variations are also important, so the number of states again
increases.  I think that this presents a formidable problem to anyone
who would want to capture an exhaustive description of even one brain
state at one point in time.

Hardcore materialism is not a mistake, even if reductionism is.  

--
Herbert Roitblat                    roitblat@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
Department of Psychology            roitblat@uhunix.bitnet
University of Hawaii                (808) 956-6727  (808) 956-4700 fax
2430 Campus Road,                   Honolulu, HI 96822 USA
