Neither short nor sweet, J. I was referring to an explicit statement which Searle might have made as cited by Budd. I asked for the reference, not to challenge that he said it but because I was interested in reading it if he had and I did not recall it.

Your challenge to me, on the other hand, was to my understanding of Searle's position, NOT to whether I recollected some particular statement(s) he had made and you have yet to demonstrate where my understanding of Searle's position is faulty on your view. Noting that I didn't recall some of Searle's phraseology, which I said I didn't recall, is not to back up your claim which challenged my analysis of his argument(s) rather than my recollection of some of his precise verbiage.

When you are up to that and do that on this list, if I am still paying attention, I shall be glad to address that as I addressed Budd's numerous misconceptions. As noted, when you do, please place your claims with their supporting arguments and evidence on a separately identified, clearly labeled post so I won't miss it.

SWM

P.S. I will address some of Searle's remarks below, at least, for the record.

--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "J" <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> This will be short and sweet, satisfying your demands with minimal hassle for me.
>
> SWM wrote
> > I am unaware that Searle ever called "strong AI" dualism so if you can provide the citation, I'd be interested to read it in context.
>

> In the seminal essay, the very source of the subject you've been debating for close to 6 years now, an essay the understanding of which you proclaim in the face of various critics on various message boards, viz. "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Searle wrote:
>

> Third, this residual operationalism is joined to a residual form of dualism; indeed strong AI only makes sense given the dualistic assumption that, where the mind is concerned, the brain doesn't matter. In strong AI (and in functionalism, as well) what matters are programs, and programs are independent of their realization in machines; indeed, as far as AI is concerned, the same program could be realized by an electronic machine, a Cartesian mental substance, or a Hegelian world spirit. The single most surprising discovery that I have made in discussing these issues is that many AI workers are quite shocked by my idea that actual human mental phenomena might be dependent on actual physical-chemical properties of actual human brains. But if you think about it a minute you can see that I should not have been surprised; for unless you accept some form of dualism, > the strong AI project hasn't got a chance.

Searle offers here an intriguiging reinterpretation of what's meant by dualism on my view. Indeed, this strikes me as a clear revision of the term, a new use.

> The project is to reproduce and explain the mental by designing programs, but unless the mind is not only conceptually but empirically independent of the brain you couldn't carry out the project, for the program is completely independent of any realization. Unless you believe that the mind is separable from the brain both conceptually and empirically?dualism in a strong form?you cannot hope to reproduce the mental by writing and running programs since programs must be independent of brains or any other particular forms of instantiation. If mental operations consist in computational operations on formal symbols, then it follows that they have no
> interesting connection with the brain;

Of course that doesn't imply dualism unless one supposes that two different and fundamentally separate factors are at work which is how "dualism" is actually used in philosophical circles. And no one in the AI field I am aware of thinks that there are two distinct ontological basics to be identified in mental and physical phenomena.

>the only connection would be that the brain just happens to be one of the indefinitely many types of machines capable of instantiating the program. This form of dualism is not the traditional Cartesian
> variety that claims there are two sorts of substances,

Ah, and here even Searle appears to recognize that he has made an unothodox move!

> but it is Cartesian in the sense that it insists that what is specifically mental about the mind has no intrinsic connection with the actual properties of the brain. This underlying dualism is masked from us by the fact that AI literature contains frequent fulminations against "dualism"; what the authors seem to be unaware of is that
> their position presupposes a strong version of dualism.

If "dualism" means that two ontological basics (neither can reduce to the other) are at work in the world, a claim that minds are just the functioning of physical processes, whether they are brains or computers, is clearly not dualism except by Searlean fiat. Of course two different order phenomena are being referenced when we talk of minds and brains, but that doesn't mean it's dualism anymore than it would be to speak of matter and energy, Searle notwithstanding. Searle himself would admit that not all brains are conscious, i.e., have minds. Only some do, i.e., if they are of the right sort, in good working order and doing the right things.

The question then is WHAT is it to have a mind? Is it to have something that is irreducible to what is physical or is it to have something causally reducible to what is physical? If it is the latter then there is no dualism because it is just a particular _expression_ of the same thing everything else expresses which is to say our underlying physical reality. If the former, of course, then it is dualism but it is only Searle's argument that gets you there when you look at the conclusion he wants to draw from his Chinese Room scenario.

The point is that Searle asserts that only brains and what are like brains can produce minds but he note's that we don't know what that is and yet he denies that computational processes running on computers can do it. But if he doesn't know what it is brains do, then how does he know computers aren't doing, at some relevant level, what brains do? In the end, isn't that an empirical question, one that Searle cannot simply assume?

> "Could a machine think?" My own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own
> definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines.

Actually, it's about a very particular kind of machine (computational machines) which may, or may not, be like brains in the relevant way. At this stage we just don't know, as even Searle notes (except that we know that computers and brains are made of different materials and operate differently). But Searle's actual argument (the CRA) amounts to a logical claim that computers must be excluded from the class of mind causing machines based on their nature but it is a nature whose similarity or difference to brains is an empirical (not a logical) question. And yet Searle purports to give us a logical argument that addresses what is finally an empirical matter.

> Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific
> material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.

A spurious argument since milk and sugar are not processes in the way the mental is a process (or complex of processes). Until Searle can show that brains actually have some unique element in their operations that computers don't share and that only these unique operations can produce minds, all he has is a supposition, a claim which may or may not be true on an empirical basis. Logic (his CRA and his later argument) have nothing to say about this.

> In defense of this dualism the hope is often expressed that the brain is a digital computer (early computers, by the way, were often called "electronic brains"). But that is no help. Of course the brain is a digital computer. Since everything is a digital computer, brains > are too.

Everything is a digital computer in the same sense that everything is a process! But not all processes (including milk and sugar which are so many atoms doing so many things in such and such a way) are the same. They don't all do the same things or appear to us, on our level of operation/observation, in the same way. A wheel's turning and a bowl of sugar are both physical but that doesn't mean they are both physical objects.

> The point is that the brain's causal capacity to produce intentionality cannot consist in its instantiating a computer program, since for any program you like it is possible for something to instantiate that program and still not have any mental states. Whatever it is that the brain does to produce intentionality, it cannot consist in instantiating a program since no program, by itself, is sufficient for intentionality.3
>
> Bon voyage,
> JPDeMouy

As I said above, all you have shown is that Searle made the explicit claim I did not recall him making. But your allegation was that I have misunderstood Searle's claims and his argument, not that I didn't recollect something he said in the course of making his argument. If you really want to defend what you say, instead of hanging your hat on some phraseology I failed to recall, try to deal with his argument and my critique of it.

Note that, in the end, Searle rests his case on the impossibility that computational programs running on computers can be intentional. But he gives no account of what it takes to be intentional except to say that we know brains can be. Yet THAT is no argument that other physical platforms cannot be.

To get to that he offers a scenario of a computational system which he calls the Chinese Room in which he purports to show that intentionality is missing and concludes that, therefore, anything made up of what we find in the Chinese Room must also lack intentionality. But since brains manifestly don't lack intentionality, they must have something in them that the Chinese Room lacks.

That is a spurious argument since he doesn't know if there really is a missing underlying feature or if brains have such a feature over and above what computers have. All he knows is that his CR system lacks intentionality. But if it is underspecked as I've noted, that is not surprising. No one thinks a rote translator, however powerful, is all that consciousness is. Nor is it surprising if his account of what intentionality is rests on a dualist assumption that supposes it cannot be reduced to constituent non-intentional processes. So he is wrong on either count.

Anyway, I doubt you are really prepared to do more than carp here, J, on past evidence. But if you think you can do more than seek out some texts and copy and paste them here, if you think you can actually address the substance of the underlying arguments, I'll be glad to explore that with you, regardless of the level of your incivility.

As to your apology offered earlier, keep it. I don't want or need it nor do I care how incivil you continue to be (though I'll admit to finding it offensive). What you owe this list and me is the courtesy and honesty of supporting the allegations you made or a formal retraction acknowledging that you can't. Absent that, faux apologies from you are pointless blather.

SWM

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Kirby,

My apologies for the delay. I've gotten distracted by some much less worthwhile discussions as well as some worthwhile ones that simply required less of my time and energy than this. I hadn't forgotten you.

Of course, I think I still have a couple of other posts out there waiting for you, so perhaps apologies are unnecessary.

> There is a Nintendo character named Kirby, whom I reference
> in my
> slides at http://www.myspace.com/4dstudios

That's the one!

I'm happy to be associated with something
> other
> than a vacuum cleaner for a change

The Dysons are much better.

You ever heard of Jack Kirby? He co-created Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The X-Men, and many others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kirby

> "Triggering perceptual shifts that restore clarity" might
> be one way
> of characterizing it. That's part of the inherent
> difficulty too, as
> once in the realm of perceptual shifts, gestalts, how does
> one know
> if this "triggering" has occurred?

The discussions of "aspect blindness" in the later work (PI pt. II, RPP I and II, and LWPP I & II passim.)

Often, in cases like we're discussing, it is evidenced in a capacity to put a picture to a new use.

Be careful though. Sometimes we can confuse resistance to ideas with an inability to understand them. Recall the "you just don't get it" of identity politics.

You'll get these pedagogical concerns,
> that exposure to
> an unfamiliar model of area and volume, not based on right
> angles,
> will only interfere with student comprehension of
> traditional content.

That's an empirical question of course. I don't know whether exposure to variant schema would enrich comprehension or cause confusion. Likely, it depends a lot on age.

> Do we teach this in art schools? In some maybe.

I think it definitely has a place in design schools!

> You could see this as countering some unexpressed view that
> "math is
> fascist" in the sense of "my way or the highway".

Again, I wouldn't call this a philosophical issue, per se, but if people misuse the word "fascist" and if their notions of political liberty blind them to the role that authority, unquestioning agreement, and strict training by repetition play in the functioning of our understanding, our language, and our very form of life, then perhaps they need a wake up call and perhaps their notions of liberty are simply bosh.

Seeing freedom as well as constraint in all of this is certainly a good thing. You're right about that.

But people who make such judgments as "math is fascist" are in my experience among the worst dogmatists, obscurantists, and opponents of human freedom and dignity going. As well as being total asshats.

That's not diplomatic though. Obviously.

>
> From the point of view of struggling students, sometimes
> finding math
> oppressive, a little novelty might go a long way towards
> forestalling
> a disconnect.

hmmm. Perhaps.

I wonder though if students like that whose interest one might hope to pique with the new thing ("Ooooh! Shiny!") would have any follow through anyway. That would be nice and I do not rule it out.

> That's the thing though: mathematics as we teach it
> in schools is
> conservative, change-averse. We might think of it as
> the one
> discipline least likely to change. This has to do
> with math's
> reputation for dealing with eternal verities, with nothing
> new under
> the sun, at least where primitive geometry is concerned.

"Has to do with"? Is the conservatism of mathematics explained by such notions? Are such notions rooted in the conservatism? Or are such notions an _expression_ of the attitude with which we approach mathematics and of how we treat mathematics? And isn't how we treat mathematics an important part of the various roles it plays for us?

(Conservatism in mathematics and conservatism in the teaching of mathematics. Conservatism in the teaching of fundamental mathematical concepts and conservatism in the teaching of further extensions. Compare.)

That's
> why I say math teachers
> need help from philosophers, especially those in the
> Wittgenstein
> camp, given their pragmatic operationalism (meaning through
> use).

hmmm

Did you catch my remarks elsewhere regarding operationalism? (It was in a post to JRStern "re: QM without consciousness" or something like that.) I'm wondering if you mean "pragmatic" as a reference to Pragmatism or simply colloquially. And if you mean "operationalism" in a more or less doctrinaire sense?

I certainly would not be inclined to call myself a pragmatist or an operationalist.

> Going back to my volumes table, I'm suggesting what's novel
> is our
> ability to interject more whole number volumes and simple
> fractions
> than previously, even though we're introducing such
> non-rectilinear
> concepts as the rhombic dodecahedron, a space-filler.
> We assign it
> a volume of six, slice and dice it to come up with a
> corresponding
> cube, octahedron and tetrahedron of 1/2, 2/3 and 1/6 the
> volume
> respectively (i.e. 3, 4 and 1) -- the beginning of a
> language game,
> with more pieces to come later.

I find this aspect very interesting.

I've shared some of this with my father, an engineer who, when I was a child, made a hobby of welding models of Platonic solids and the like. He was interested as well.

>
> Having this more sophisticated visual vocabulary coupled
> with less
> intimidating, more memorable whole number relationships, is
> something
> new (since the 1960s). It's new because our Roman and
> Greek
> forebearers considered right angles "normal" even though
> squares
> have no inherent structural stability.

I wonder here about the "even though"...

When you do
> post and lintel
> architecture, rest cross-beams atop columns, you get used
> to thinking
> of structure as rectilinear.

Is this meant to be an explanation? What sort of evidence would support it or falsify it?

The tetrahedron (tetra
> for four),
> although the minimum wire-frame enclosure, more primal than
> the cube,

"More primal" in the sense of "minimal" or in some other sense?

> didn't get as much focus in the early days of western
> civ. Those
> mental habits are difficult to counter to this day.
> Yet what better
> example of challenging a dominant paradigm?

I mentioned in another post, I wonder about putting things in these terms.

Do you mean "paradigm" in anything like a Kuhnian sense? It doesn't seem to me that this approach is incommensurable without the prevalent one in anything but the familiar and epistemologically innocent mathematical sense.

Math
> teachers need help.
>
> However since the invention of microscopy, other more
> powerful
> instrumentation, it has become apparent that nature is
> more
> triangulated in her designs. Our more sophisticated
> visual vocabulary
> is going to help us down the road, as future biologists,
> chemists,
> engineers. The world of sphere packing, of lattices,
> will be more
> front and center, thanks to our more 60-degree based
> approach.
> Stabilize what we have, trail blaze new material.
> It's an exciting
> time to be a math teacher.
>
> That's the PR anyway.
>

Ah.

I've never trusted PR.

> In other words, we're hoping to excite teachers about
> these
> developments, not trigger a "let's not rock the boat"
> backlash right
> from the get go.

Okay, yes. Though I wonder if math teachers as a group are as persuaded by such forms of persuasion as some others might be or if their liable to think, "Sounds like snake oil. Too good to be true. Panacea. We've been burned before."

I don't know enough about the attitudes of math teachers in various parts of the country to do more than entertain possibilities that might warrant caution. Take what you will.

> Also, as soon as one touts something as "better" or "new
> and
> improved", there's some resulting anxiety about introducing
> the
> change, undermining the existing "music of authority" in
> some way.

I think experiences with New Math might offer legitimate reasons caution without needing to posit... um, I'm not quite sure what :music of authority" is meant to suggest.

> This may account for why this material is still unfamiliar
> and not
> widely discussed, even after a half century. There's
> an underlying
> defensiveness perhaps?

I'd be reluctant to speculate about motives here.

The remarks about various transformations, comparisons with tessalations, and so on, were quite interesting in their own right but seem to not connect with my point. (I still found the material quite fascinating though.) I think I made the point better in a subsequent post though, so I'll leave it.

> If the philosophers think what we're doing is OK, i.e.
> passes enough
> tests for being coherent, not breaking the rules, then math
> teachers
> might feel comfortable enough to develop a lot more
> bridging
> exercises.

Why in heaven's name would math teachers give a gods damn about what philosophers have to say and why would any philosopher presume to suppose she could approve or disapprove here? (I know the answer to the latter: some philosophers are a presumptuous lot. But I hope no Wittgensteinian would so presume.)

A philosopher (perhaps a better one than myself) can help in exploring how we relate these new concepts with the old, how we think about the transitions between the different cases.

Whether the new approach is legitimate is a mathematical question and not a philosophical one. It is a question of whether one can translate between the systems, whether conversions between them preserve consistency. From what I can tell, that's not a problem, but a mathematician is far more qualified to answer that.

If the answer to the mathematical question is affirmative, then it may be best not to emphasize talk of "paradigms" (unless the buzz word is just good for PR rather than being offered as a philosophical insight) and such because the real question is one of the allocation of educational resources (a procedural, political question, not a philosophical one - save perhaps to a Rortian).

On that question, I could only entertain possibilities with you. If thinking about mathematics philosophically gives me any particular insight into reservations people might have, that would be a side effect. It wouldn't make it a philosophical matter.

A philosopher might be able to assist in thinking and speaking more clearly about the relationships between the different approaches and in helping others to but - as the reference to PR may remind us - clarity may not be the winning strategy in political matters anyway.

JPDeMouy

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--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
>
> Bruce, if you want to continue this I suggest we take it off line.

Perhaps...but for the time being I plan to post my thoughts on these
matters and see who might be interested.

> I'm sure I shall never convince you and it's equally probable you
won't win me over to your viewpoint

As I see it, it isn't a matter of convincing but of clarifying. You have
been extraordinarily helpful in "holding my feet to the fire", forcing
me to articulate my position. I'm indebted to you for that.

bruce

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Consider...

If one starts with a notion of substance, an ontological distinct
something, then,
for parsimony sake, one would want to explain everything in terms of a
single
substance. The natural sciences could be conceived as studying one
substance, the
physical. Whether the various forms, particles, waves, forces, etc. are
all an
_expression_ of one substance, I don't believe is physics's concern, nor
do I see how it
has any impact on their study. The problem begins, not for them, but for
us, when we
look at psychology, more specifically, the relationship between brain, a
material
substance, and mind.

Psychologists, like physicists, usually don't worry about whether the
object of
their study, mind, is the same or a different substance then the object
of physical
study. But neurologists working on the brain/mind border have reason to
worry.
Just what is the relationship.

Now, if the researchers hold to a substance doctrine, they have to
decide whether
the mind is a different substance. If it is, then how can the two
substances
interact? If brain and mind are not, given the fact that there were
non-mental entities before
physical ones, matter must somehow generate mind. But there are problem.

The mental isn't tangible. Perhaps it's sub-atomic particles, a wave, a
ray,
something we can't sense. All of these possibilities are based on the
assumption that mental states are
some sort of thing that exists on some plane; and the material brain
produces these
things. Where? This proposal makes the person a container. Do mental
states exist
in the mind the way stars exist in space? Don't think so. Mental states
exist only in so far as
some one thinks them. Space doesn't think stars. There is something
terrible wrong about thinking of the
brain as producing mind, the way physical things produce other physical
things.

Still, no one can deny that the brain is the basis for mind. What
alternative way of
seeing this is possible?

For starters, we ought to abandon the concept of substance, the notion
of an
ontological simple. How about: There is nothing out there that is
basically of one kind or
another. We can conceive of the brain as physical thing operating
mechanically or as
a purposive being operating rationally. By the same token, we can
conceive of mind
along mechanical lines (Tourette's syndrome, dreaming, etc.) or
purposive ones.

The alternative, I'm proposing, is to view the relationship between
brain and mind
as a conceptual convenience that under certain circumstances can be
expressed "causally",
i.e., the alarm caused me to awake, and, at other times, deliberately,
"I've trained my brain not
to hear the alarm when I want to sleep in."

Wittgenstein puts it this way: (PI, page 180)

"It's like the relation: physical object -- sense impressions. Here we
have two different language games
and a complicated relationship between them. -- If you try to reduce
their relations to a simple formula
you go wrong."

That is to say, the material brain and our conscious life can't be
reduced to the simple formula, causality.

bruce