Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <Czu91D.rC@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <CzsJoI.EJs@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <3b0o42$i2g@news.u.washington.edu> <1994Nov24.123227.27677@oxvaxd> <499572533wnr@luptonpj.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 19:34:25 GMT
Lines: 52

In article <499572533wnr@luptonpj.demon.co.uk>,
Peter Lupton <Lupton@luptonpj.demon.co.uk> wrote:
.........
>I'm all ears. In order to explain how come the rock is running a 
>program, I need to know how it is to be programmed. Then the
>question of what program is being run falls out.
>
Stonemason's tools would come handy (chisel, hammer, etc).

>Programming is closely related to the theory of recursive
>functions and universality. The problem is this: given my
>desire to program the following recursive function, what
>finite collection of things do I need to know about this 
>rock in order to set about the task of programming it?
>
You expect too much of a rock and this is why you are disappointed. It has
very limited capabilities and it's program is basically hardwired (if I may
say so =:-)). You can modify its program chipping off a bit here and there,
but it may be hard to program it to recognize handwritten characters.
For instance if you made it round it would roll down  for any inclined surface. 
If you made it cubical, it would stay put for some input data (surface) and 
it would roll down for some other (sufficiently inclined surfaces) ones. As 
for any good program the output (movement of the rock) would depend on inupt 
(surface it is put on). 
However, take a calulator, say a very early one which could only perform four
arithmetic operations. Hopefully you agree that it was programed? Even
though it was difficult to change this program and it might have been 
impossible to program it to execute any recursive function of your choice
without a substantial change of the hardware.

>Now I don't know whether it makes sense to talk about programming
>a rock - I suspect it doesn't. But that question cannot be answered
>merely by mentioning the surface of the rock and the waving of
>hands.
>
Whether it makes sense or not (to talk about programming a rock) depends 
on what you want to achieve. My aim was to show that a claim of objectivity of 
a notion of "running a program" cannot be supported by the rock example. 
In fact, by arguing that you can view even a rock as executing
a program, I attempted to indicate that this notion is very subjective.
This does not however mean that I agree with an (Putnam's I believe) idea
that it makes sense to view a rock as executing _any_ program. 

>Cheers,
>Pete Lupton

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
