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Article 1669 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Personal Identity (was re: Searle)
Message-ID: <1991Nov27.092843.5953@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 91 14:28:42 GMT
References: <JMC.91Nov24195716@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <1991Nov25.075639.5861@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Nov26.210424.5913@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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Nntp-Posting-Host: zariski.harvard.edu

In article <1991Nov26.210424.5913@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> 
max@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com (Max Webb) writes:

>In article <1991Nov25.075639.5861@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

JMC:
>>>In Searle's hypothetical case, the man's ordinary personality is
>>>interpreting a description the hypothetical Chinese personality that
>>>has different knowledge from the man's ordinary personality.  There
>>>should be no difficulty in understanding this.

MZ:
>>How do you individuate a personality?

MW:
>Didn't you just read it? The 'interpreted' chinese personality
>has it's procedural and declarative parts encoded in a representation
>different from the encoding of the hosts original personality. Since
>the encoding is different, and no translation is supplied, the bodies
>of data/knowledge/whatever are kept distinct. THAT is why the original
>personality in the host doesn't end up with any kind of knowledge
>of chinese.

I didn't ask "How do you encode a personality?" simply because I consider
this question to be incoherent.  My question has to do with determining
personal identity, without which McCarty's argument falls flat on its
metaphorical face.

MW:
>If you supplied the man mappings to/from his original representation
>to the new one (chinese->english, and english->chinese dictionaries
>and grammar rewriting rules), the boundary would disappear, and knowledge
>encoded in the chinese construct (but that was unavailable to the host)
>would be available to the host, and the host would be able to apply
>its knowledge to tasks facing the chinese construct. In other words,
>some sort of 'rote' chinese competence would be attained by the host.

Before you can start talking about representations, you owe me a semantical
explanation thereof.  The question is painfully simple: how do you justify
your talk about "boundaries"?  I warn you though: do not attempt a facile
answer before you know what is going on; read some Locke or Reid on
personal identity, or at least peruse the relevant articles of Edwards'
Philosophical Encyclopedia.  My point is as follows: the best available
criteria of personal identity depend on the continuity of memory and/or the
continuity of conatus (striving), and, ipso facto, on the assumption of a
first-person perspective, which cannot be made in this discussion without
begging the question of machine consciousness.

MW:
>Your claim that the rule system is 'internal' to the person just because
>they have memorized it is wrong. It is not internalized in a natural
>language competence sense until you supply mappings to the rest of
>the mental domains an intelligence has, allowing it to be functionally
>integrated. When you take _that_ into account, Searles argument falls
>apart.

On this, I am inclined to agree: there is an obvious difference between
understanding a rule, and simply being able to follow it.  On the other
hand, the crux of the issue is exactly whether it's theoretically possible
for a computer to understand the rules expressed in its program, rather
than merely to follow them.

>	Max

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