excreationist

Well this is what Searle said in <a href="http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/psychology/cog/psy3241/searleconsc.htm#key%20questions" target="_blank">The Mystery of Consciousness</a>:
Anyway, I think the main thing the chinese room argument was against was people who thought a computer that had explicitly programmed rules in it would be conscious. The chinese room is like <a href="http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/alicechat.html" target="_blank">A.L.I.C.E.</a>... all of its intelligence is explicitly programmed in... it isn't self-learnt. So the program doesn't have any real understanding of what it is doing.

Synaesthesia

Sammi,
Hey Sammi. Searle himself claims to have shown that the brain's functionality could be emulated on a symbolic manipulator. He then simply makes a leap and assumes that symbol manipulation can never be conscious. On this point no argument ever actually put foreward, his most controversial conclusion is really only a premise.

I don't think we can detach feeling from thinking. Brain damage affecting emotional responses causes cognitive defects. We operate much differently when conscious than when unconscious is compelling indication that consciousness is functional.

tronvillain

snatchbalance:
I see that more as an indication of your lack of imagination rather than an special insight into physical necessity.

What are the human body and brain if not extremely complex machines? There is no apparent obstable to a sufficiently powerful computer performing any action of which a human brain is capable, so the machine (or rather then entity created by the machine) could have feelings.

At the moment we are not aware of any other perspective, but that does not mean one could not be created from "inorganic" materials.

tronvillain

Sammi:
For such a machine to only be a symbolic manipulator is unlikely in extreme, given the incomprehensible size of the program which would be required. It is far more likely that the program would take shortcuts, permitting it to do things like learn and think and generate responses rather than having them be preprogrammed.

As Dennett says:
The argument depends on the assumption that "Surely more of the same, not matter how much more, would never add up to genuine understanding." Of course, this is obviously not true when comparing organics humans and insects, so there is no reason to think it true when it comes to inorganics. If there was, one could simply point to a calculator and say "This calculator does not understand Chinese" and not have to resort to Searle's misdirection.

Synaesthesia

Snatch,
Surely you take the signes, the purely behavioral signs, that other participants on this BB are exibiting as evidence of their psycological similarity to you. There's more to behavior than pounding hearts and open sweat glands.

snatchbalance

tron,

Well, when you or anyone else builds a machine, I guess based on silicone and metals, that can assimlate protiens and produce various hormones with the proper stimulation, just let me know. Such a thing may be possible, in lala land, but not around here.

In other threads you argue against the possiblity of knowing how a bat could feel. Here, you argue that a machine could have feelins, supposedly comparable to our own. What a joke.

SB

snatchbalance

Snyeathasia,

No emotions are not the only sign of consciousnes, but they are, IMO, part and parcel of "complete" consciousness. The ability to seperate from your surroundings and perform computations may be a form of consciousness, but, again IMO, a lesser form.

SB

tronvillain

snatchbalance:
Electronic equivalents could be used for hormone, substituting electronic messengers for chemical ones. There is no apparent need to resort to utilizing actual biological components to produce emotion.

I didn't argue that it was impossible, I simply argued that it is entirely possible that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat - we may have absolutely nothing analagous to a bat's experience of sonar. This does not preclude knowing a lot about what it is like to be a bat. Here I argue that a machine could have feelings comparable to our own, because there is no apparent obstacle - a serial machine such as a computer can act as a parallel machine, and our brain is simply an extremely large and complex parallel machine. If you think assimilating

snatchbalance

Tron,


Except that the brain, and I guess you really mean the neocortex, does not function in isolation. Conscious computations are only a small part of the story. All of our drives(feelings) take place on the substrate of biology, this cannot be denied. To say that a computational made out silicon and such, will have comparable drives(feelings), is a very hard contention to support,IMO.

With this being said, I don't doubt that eventually a machine that is aware, in some sense, that it is a machine, can and will be created. But it will still be machine(not that I'm denying that we are BIOLOGICAL machines). Will it have an unconscious, that informs its conscious functions? Will it begin to metabolise its own parts if it gets "hungry" enough? No, whatever "drives" or "feelings" such a machine might have are truly beyond our imagimations. We will have nothing to relate them to; no common ground.

To me, they won't count as "feelings" at all.

SB

Mr. Sammi

All you dandy fellas and ladies drove right past my point. The point of "kernel information". I will only make one analogy, and the human one is, when the heart is failing, or another body part, the body knows and tells the brain. When the bus gets scratched in a machine, the whole machine goes down, it just crashes. The implication is a change in "physical construction" for machines to attain "the sense of itself".

The difference between symbolic operations in a machine AND symbolic operations in a human is a simple one. The human is NOT-BLIND to its symbolic operations WHEREAS a machine is blind to all its operations. I have the proof of Serle's leap-of-faith.

Sammi Na Boodie ()