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Article 1401 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: peter@cs.vu.nl (Grunwald PD)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Daniel Dennett
Summary: Daniel Dennett the Charlatan?
Keywords: Godel, Turing, Dennett, Charlatan
Message-ID: <11785@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 19 Nov 91 15:38:43 GMT
References: <11779@star.cs.vu.nl>
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Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Lines: 191


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Please ignore my previous one-line posting! A terrible accident happened to my
stuffing mouse!
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In article <1991Nov18.145812.5577@husc3.harvard.edu>, zeleny@brauer.harvard.edu
(Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
> In article <11749@star.cs.vu.nl>
> peter@cs.vu.nl (Grunwald PD) writes:

[stuff deleted]

>
> GPD:
> >So Alan Turing in his 1950 paper 'Can Machines Think' was  charlatan or
> >ignoramus?
>
> Both.  An imitation, however good, is still an imitation.
>
> GPD:
> >Come on...
>
> Appeals to eminent authority fail to impress me. Defend the Turing Thesis.

Ok:

Why are you convinced that you are not the only conscious being in the world?

(I supposed you are convinced of this. If you are a solipsist then my argument
 fails, but then in fact one of the two of us does not exist and nothing is
 important anymore)

The only evidence you have is the one you get by observing other people: they
behave in a way that absolutely convinces you of them being conscious of them-
selves, being aware of the world.

So if someday a computer would be just as convincing: what makes you conclude
that it is an imitation? that it is not conscious?

Mind, I am not saying that a computer would ever be able to do this. I doubt
it very much... but if you ask me to defend the Turing thesis, I defend it
by asking you to answer the question four lines above. 'An imitation is still
an imitation' is not a convincing argument to me.

BTW, I don't mind if you call somebody an ignoramus. But calling someone
a 'charlatan' is - at least in Dutch, maybe it's different in English? - saying
that he deliberately and maliciously spreads around false statements of which
he himself knows that they are false and that he does this for his own profit.
That is a very serious accusation of which you can't blame Turing who was all
but famous during his life time.

>
> MZ:
> >> the earlier attempts to explain the functioning of human mind by reference
> >> to the capabilities of the dominant contemporary technology (e.g. clockwork
> >> mechanisms, chemistry, steam engines, etc.), or its behaviorally manifested
> >> properties -- by reference to observable physical properties of human
> >> organs (remember phrenology?).  If the brain can be seen as the seat of
> >> consciousness, why not the liver or the kidneys?  Moreover, there also
> >> exist sound theoretical reasons for rejecting any theory that purports to
> >> reduce human intelligence to the rank of properties of Turing machines.
> >> For those unconvinced by the arguments of Penrose, I have a challenge of my
> >> own making: develop an adequate semantical theory that would characterize
> >> the relevant relations of expressing and denoting, and could be implemented
> >> by a finite state automaton.  So far, John McCarthy has failed to come up
> >> with an answer; anyone who feels that he can do better, is hereby invited
> >> to try.
>
> GPD:
> >'dominant contemporary technology': your claim might hold for the world until
> >1936, when the Church-Turing thesis was developed. In their respective articl
es,
> >Church and mainly Turing give a framework for everything that can be computed
> >at all. As computers are (approximations to) Turing Machines and the machine
to
> >implement intelligence would be a computer, this is not just 'contemporary
> >technology' but the most general technology thinkable by us human beings.
>
> You are manifesting the limitations of your imagination.  A quick perusal
> of an elementary textbook (I recommend Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman) will
> quickly disabuse you of the notion that the Turing machine represents
> either "the most general technology thinkable by us human beings", or even
> the most powerful such technology.  More importantly, you are demonstrating
> the common millenial fallacy of taking the boundaries of present scientific
> inquiry for absolute limits of human accomplishment.

As I wrote a few articles ago, I have to correct myself. You are right:
'the most general technology' is not the computer. What I mean, however,
can be found in this same former article.
>
> GPD:
> >Whether you find Penrose's et al. arguments convincing or not (I do find
> >them a little convincing myself, I must say) you must not be blind to the fac
t
> >that the reductionist claim has at least the Turing machine behind itself and
> >that is definitely more than current technology and therefore certainly
> >not charlatanesque or ignoramusque.
>
> Please return to Church's thesis, and think about the difference between
> calculability and effective calculability; then reconsider the reductionist
> claims.

I will.

>
> GPD:
> >In effect (I don't know if they would agree on this, these are my own
> >conclusions)
> >Dennett says: 'What we call Consciousness is an automatic by-product of certa
in,
> >             very complicated, (Turing-) machines'
> >Searle says: 'Machines can never be conscious (or even intelligent (!?)) beca
use
> >             they inherently lack 'semantics', which is necessary for
> >             consciousness and inherently only available to human beings '
> >
> >I would not dare to say who is the charlatan...both, neither or one of them?
>
> Searle's argument seems a bit mystical to me in its last ("inherently")
> part, due, no doubt, to my lack of insight into the inherent nature of
> human beings; however its semantical part is perfectly good, and can be
> strenghthened as follows.  Consider a sentence S expressing a meaning M(S).
> Suppose that the semantical relation M is recursive, as would be required
> under Church's thesis for it to be effectively computable.  Then, using
> G\"odel's trick... (continuation and conclusion of this argument is left as
> an exercise for the reader)

You can use G\"odel's trick for a formal system that you have devised yourself.
But as a human being, you have in no way devised yourself and your supposedly
existing PSR (Personal Semantic Relation) M(S). So you cannot apply Godel's
trick to yourself. Maybe some god or whatever can, but if you could in
principle be defined as the implementation of a PSR, you could never find
your own Godel sentences - so maybe you're incomplete, but you'll never know
it!
I don't believe in such a PSR at all, but your argument is not convincing
enough to me. (I think it is in fact Lucas' argument, but correct me if I'm
wrong)

I think Godel himself said that intelligent machines were imagineable to him,
but either it would be a non-human-like intelligence, or the exact workings
of the machine (among which a PSR?) would not be known to humans - consider
a learning machine after having learned.

> >Ciao,
> >Peter
> regards,
> mz

Ciao again,
Peter

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