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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <CzzrLH.93H@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <3b0176$hu8@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1994Nov24.121032.27675@oxvaxd> <CzsKqx.Gon@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <Czu6C4.30z@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 19:03:16 GMT
Lines: 101

In article <Czu6C4.30z@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>In article <CzsKqx.Gon@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>>In article <1994Nov24.121032.27675@oxvaxd>,  <econrpae@vax.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>Was the property of being made out of gold a subjective property
>>>until chemists formulated scientific tests of goldhood?
>>>
>>Yes. This is exactly the point. When chemists formulated scientific tests of
>>goldhood, they at the same time changed the content of the term. Before 
>>"gold" was something which had such and such properties and other substances,
>>as long as they showed these properties, were "gold" too. 
>
>That's one way of seeing it.  But why can't we also see it like this:
>
>(a) People thought the other substances were gold (or perhaps we cay
>    they called them "gold"), but those substances turned out not to
>    be gold after all.
>
This discussion raged in c.a.p. not so long ago. I am really puzzled how
you can hold such a view. When people had no way of distinguishing between
gold and fool's gold, what sense does it make to say that they only mistakenly
thought that fool's gold was gold?? They used the word 'gold' for a substance 
with given properties. How do you know that in fact they did not mean mica
(fool's gold) but due to a mistake the person who invented a method of
distinguishing between them used the word gold for this other substance?
Unless, in a pure Platonic fashion you assume that we are inborn with 
the notion of 'gold', a chemical element with properties which require 
sophisticated physical knowledge to understand and be able to establish?
Saying "those substances turned out not to be gold after all" you seem to
think so. Even in prehistoric times, people refering to something as "gold"
meant the substance with a specific atomic weight, is this so?
As you know, any element (gold including) have several varieties called
isotops. Are all gold isotops 'gold'? If not, which is "real gold"? If so,
why? They are not, from physical point of view, the same substance since they
differ slightly in their properties. 
Assume that some alien beings had a sense of taste which allowed them to 
distinguish different isotopes of gold and conseqently, they considered them
different substances. Which one would we translate as 'gold'? Would they be 
wrong considering them different, because 'gold' is (?) any isotope or their 
mixture?

>I'd find it odd if we *couldn't* legitimately say (a).  Suppose
>people counted "fool's gold" as gold in the past.  Surely it's
>possible to meaningfully say they were wrong.
>
No, it is not possible, as argued above. We cannot legitimately say (a).

>Now, you might question whether they were wrong by their own
>lights.  Perhaps they counted all this stuff as gold and had
>to chose, when certain tests came along, whether they should
>still count it all as gold.  Perhaps that's how they saw it.
>But they might well have thought themselves that they'd been
>mistaken.
>
>In any case, for a given version of "gold", why is it subjective
>whether something is gold in that sense?  Is a change in the
>meaning of "gold" the only possiblity?  Surely not.  Surely 
>someone could think something was gold and hence (because of
>their meaning of "gold") that it had certain properties
>and be wrong.
>
??? This is completly different if you think that something has specific
properties and you are wrong. What we were discussing is a situation when
something is identified by its properties and then, by introducing more 
properties, the class is divided into two or more classes. The name of the
original class is now used only to one subclass. Claiming that the previous
use of the class name was on occasion wrong (because applied to members of
a subclass, which is later given a different name) is (a Platonic) nonsense.

>>When chemical test were developed, which differentiated among various things
>>called "gold" until then, a decision had to be made to which of these to
>>apply the term. Wasn't this decision subjective?
>
>Why would that stop a given notion of gold from referring to
>objective properties?
>
What do you mean? Which objective properties? Those of what is now known as
'gold' or those of what is now known as "fool's gold"? The point is that there 
is no objective reason why the term referring to the original class (gold) 
should be applied to one subclass and not to the other. Can you give such 
a reason?

>> As you may know, there are
>>various types (isotopes) of gold. Which one is "real" gold?
>>Again, as in another post, the disagreement can be traced to a philosophical
>>stance. Are our clasiffications "objective" or "subjective"?
>>May I suggest Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"?  
>
>An interesting book.
>
It certainly is, but it seems that you have not taken to heart (or mind :-))
what it says.

>-- jeff

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
