From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!oz Tue Apr  7 23:23:39 EDT 1992
Article 4866 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
In-Reply-To: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu's message of 1 Apr 92 13: 19:54 GMT
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References: <OZ.92Mar29232211@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> <1992Mar30.084129.10452@husc3.harvard.edu>
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	<1992Apr1.081958.10553@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1992 05:01:24 GMT

Mikhail Zeleny writes [after the usual opening vituperations]:

   				...My point had to do with the
   desire to see some of the arguments that appear herein with some
   regularity, in their definitive form.  Note that that's exactly what I do
   with my own writings.

No. You have not published a scrap of your opus in any form that is
definitive and respectable, which is what you demand of others. You
have nothing but an unpublished, unfinished work that by definition
implies no commitment and responsibility whatever. That, and plenty
of vacuous internet blabber.

As Samuel Clemens once wrote, noise proves nothing. Often a hen who
has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid. What
you have laid we may never know, but perhaps the cackling will stop
someday.

[further zelenybabble elided]

   OY:
   >   >Are you willing to publish your vitriolic internet tirades on Dennett?
   >   >I doubt it.

   MZ:
   >   Their gist is all there, mostly in the footnotes.

   OY:
   >Translation: "I excluded all the attacks on Dennett's character
   >	      so that my work will not be the laughing stock of
   >	      every philosophy student in this continent"
   >
   >bosh.

   You are very good at speculating about the contents of the work you've
   never seen.

Really. Here is a sampling of crap you posted on Dennett. So show me
that these are a part of your "opus", consistent with your professed
commitment to your stated views. Then, publish it exactly as stated.
Either prove me wrong, or do close your loud mouth [or whatever] and
crawl back into your platonic cave of delusions...

oz

	----------------

	... may even come up with a brief review of his latest fantasy
	masterpiece, "Consciousness Explained", within two weeks, the
	period needed for procuring and perusing the drivelous piece of
	trash without enriching the old fraud.

	... for a prime example of intellectual dishonesty, see his
	petulant, disingenuous response to Colin McGinn's "The Problem of
	Consciousness", towards the end of the book, and then, by going
	back to McGinn's text, figure out the rather obvious reason why it
	is highly unlikely that Dennett read the book he's citing.

				...  Also spot his obligatory mention of
	Penrose, curiously combined with lack of substantive response to
	his devastating anti-AI arguments.  Charlatan or ignoramus? you be
	the judge.

	Not that I would deny myself the pleasure of refuting reductive
	materialism and functionalism (but note that the issue of the
	possibility of AI doesn't depend on these assumptions; only its
	likelihood does); you might look into the writings of
	D.M.Armstrong, a real philosopher to Dennett's ignoramus and/or
	charlatan, to see the dire inadequacy of the content-dependent
	picture of reflective consciousness, which he successfully
	explains in materialist terms.

						... on the other hand,
	purely syntactical considerations analogous to the above argument,
	can reduce to shreds Dennett's attempt to refute the Chinese Room
	argument by appealing to the hackneyed "Systems Reply" (pp.
	435--40 of his latest masterpiece, "Consciousness Explained").
	Quite aside from Dennett's ignorant and/or charlatanic claim that
	the AI software is in principle different from "some simple
	table-lookup architecture"  (of course, all Turing machine or FSA
	programs *are* instances of some simple table-lookup architecture ...
	
	...	My specific arguments against Dennett's ignorance and/or
	charlatanism are to be found in a preceding article; ...

	So, the intellectually dishonest Dennett and his ilk turns out not
	really to be well exemplified by Dennett so much as those in
	general collected in Boden's anthology, ...
	
		... Like Dennett, you are playing the drummer boy to an
	army of pseudo-scientific profiteers.
	
	Dennett will do just fine as a whipping boy; feel free to address
	my article expressly dedicated to his foibles, fallacies, and
	frauds. However, at this time, let's occupy ourselves with more
	capable targets.

	As in Dennett's case, I can't decide between ignorance and
	charlatanism.  Read on: "This is of interest as affordind a
	psychological justification of the Turing definition of
	computability and its equivalents, Church's $\lambda$-definability
	and Kleene's primitive recursiveness: if any number can be
	computed by an organism, it is computable by those definitions, and
	conversely."  Reflect on the difference between computability and
	effective computability, and judge for yourself.

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