[Wittrs] Re: Is Computation too Static to Sustain a Mind?
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:35:35 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
>
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> Stuart, I'm still not clear how the words "static" and "dynamic are
> being used. As you say, Charlie has to tell us.
>
I believe Charlie has, nearby, though I am holding off commenting in hopes
others will do so. I don't wan't to monopolize the discussion anymore than I
have sometimes inadvertently done.
> On the matter of the two meanings of intentionality, I'm also a bit
> perplexed, as you rightly see.
>
> > As noted before, the philosophical notion of "intentionality" is the
> notion of "aboutness" as in thinking about,
>
> Why do you call it a "philosophical notion", rather than just one usage?
Because the notion of "intentionality" in the tradition of philosophical
discourse is not the idea of having motives, objectives, etc., but of the fact
that to think is always to think about something. If one is aware, it must be
an awareness of something. If one understands, it must be an understanding of
something (an idea, a thought, a claim, a sentence, a word, etc.). If one
believes, it must be a belief that X, and so forth. The idea is that it is this
aspect of the features of our mind that we humans inevitably have and that a
computer, say, does not under any ordinary of what a computer is engaged in
doing. It may do a calculation and produce a quantitative product at the end
but it is not about anything and the machine is typically said to have no
awareness/understanding of what it has done or what it has produced.
> OK. Let me state it in my words. Here, on this List, you are only
> interested in "intention" when it refers to "thinking about" and not
> when the "thinking about" is about a motive or goal, or in a situation
> where a person is thinking nothing in particular but does have a goal.
>
Not exactly. Sometimes goals are part of the discussion, of course. But when
we're talking about what makes a mind, mind, and what differentiates it from
non-mind activities that may look superficially like mind type activities, the
issue is not whether it has motives but whether, when it does what it does, it
connects what it is doing to some referential ground beyond the representations
(symbols) it manipulates to complete those non-mind function.
> I'll try to respect this distinction. But the bottom line for me is
> this: Can the cause/effect concept found in the physical sciences be
> intelligibly applied to either? Yes, one can say "You caused me to think
> about"
Different sense of "cause" of course.
>or "You caused to redoubled my efforts." But this sort of
> causation requires the mediation of a person who understands what you
> saying to him. This sort of account violates the objectivity of physics.
>
It's a different language game, in Wittgensteinian terms.
> > The philosophical question...asks how our instances of knowledge can
> be about the things we know.
>
> That question must come from a discussion that passed me by. Quite a
> queer question. If our knowledge isn't about things we know, what in the
> world is it about.
>
> bruce
The issue is how is it that we know things while computers (like Searle's CR)
just contain lots of symbols that are knowable to us but not knowable to the
computers themselves? And then, of course, whether what we are doing when we
know things is, in fact, qualitatively different from what it is computers do
(as appears to be the case) or merely quantitatively different (which seems to
be counter-intuitive when we consider this introspectively).
SWM
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