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Article 2290 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: silber@orfeo.Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Silber)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: "bereft of causal structure"
Message-ID: <1516@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 17 Dec 91 22:14:32 GMT
References: <1991Dec15.201231.19710@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1991Dec16.002259.6621@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec16.080242.27055@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1991Dec16.082402.6631@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1991Dec16.082402.6631@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
   MZ:
	(begin)
   ...
   When a
   cook follows a recipe, how do you determine his competence in so doing?
   Besides, you are missing the main point: a Turing machine is bereft of
   causal structure, possessing solely a logical one; and the causal structure
   of its physical embodiment is in no way supervenient on the latter.  This
   is a straightforward example of intensionality: physical necessity is more
   finely grained than the logical sort, and hence cannot be determined from
   the latter.  Thus physical structure is not supervenient on the logical
   structure, and a program specifying the latter will fail to specify the
   former. 
   ...
	(end)

 I see in this exposition, a link to MZ.'s earlier nore re: the
 philosophical assessment of the requisites of "personal identity".
 viz. issues of "continuity" and "volition".  In this regard one
 might again raise the issue of why a "Turing" machine is bereft of
 causal structure, but HAL is not.  Volition and Continuous Identity
 CAN be a priori- /base- /"instinctual-" components of a an abiotic-
 machine, which, when activated and allowed to run continuously ,
 functions according to a self-identifying, teleological pattern
 governed by those primal subsystems which condition the "logical"
 surface actions of the machine/creature.  The primal/motivational
 compuational subsystems are not specified by the surface-logical 
 system of the organism, yet they ARE specifiable in a logical way,
 by the logic of dna-mutations in the biotic case, or by the logic
 of the design of the motivational "platform" in the case of a HAL.


