From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Thu Dec 26 23:57:02 EST 1991
Article 2265 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Causes and Reasons
Message-ID: <333@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 18 Dec 91 23:43:14 GMT
References: <1991Dec17.033356.22762@oracorp.com> <1991Dec17.154142.21021@psych.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 41

In article <1991Dec17.154142.21021@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
|> I'm inclined to just bite the bullet and
|>face up to the possibility (likelihood, in my opinion) that what a
|>*person* is thinking about is not uniquely determined.
|
|I honestly don't mean to be rude, but I take such statements to be evidence
|that the person making them is so committed to a theoretical position that
|they are willing to say things that are *clearly* wrong.
|
|*I* uniquely determine what *I* am thinking about.  I am the sole arbiter
|of the content of my conscious thoughts.  How could it possibly be otherwise?

But that's *circular*.  It gets us no forwarder.

In order to answer the question of whether an arbitrary entity possesses
semantics we *must* have an *operational*, *external* criterion for recognizing
meaning.

So, how can *I*, as 'not you' observationally determine that your mental
processes *uniquely* refer to some particular set of situations.

If the hypothesis that a Chinese dialog can be equally well interpreted as a
series of chess moves is true, then it seems unlikely that your mental states
have a uniquely identifiable set of referents from the outside.

Your own 'perceptions' of self count for little, since they are part of the
set of mental states whose referents we are trying to establish!


Actually, my own intuition here (just intuition) is that the interpretive
indeterminacy result does not apply to most normal discourse sequences,
and thus does not apply to your mind.  [Rather like the halting problem,
which is, in general, unsolvable, but most for most 'real' algorithms the
halting behavior *can* be determined - {while(1);}].

Still, demonstrating this is another problem, so the other possibility remains
open for now.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



