From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Mon Dec 16 11:01:45 EST 1991
Article 2105 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo
>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: The Robot Reply (was Re: Searle, again)
Message-ID: <1991Dec13.182542.20268@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <YAMAUCHI.91Dec5235651@heron.cs.rochester.edu> <5825@skye.ed.ac.uk> <309@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1991 18:25:42 GMT

In article <309@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:


>
>Looking at it from the inside the input to the brain from sense organs
>is just more dits and dahs travelling along the axons.

To be precise, this is a common misconceptions. There are graded
potentials from the neurons in most sense-receptor systems.  The all
or none principle only applies strictly in the CNS. 

All you've done is denied the existence of a patent phenomenon on the basis of
current theory. That's scientifically backwards. If Your explanation of 'all
the nervous system does' fails to account for such a phenonmenon, then you
explanation must simply be wrong. That we can't yet figure out how one might
get semantics into the brain in no way jusitifies the repudiation of semantics.
What it justifies is repudiation of our current understanding of the
relationship between neurology and cognition.







>
>We *learn* the syntax associated with each input channel and then build
>higher levels of data structure on top of this to which we attach symbols,
>all by means of *learned* *associations*.  The actual internal operations
>of the brain are purely in terms of the neuronal signals and thier
>relationships, which seems to meet the definition of 'syntactic' presented
>here earlier.
>-- 
>---------------
>uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)
>


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
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