[Wittrs] Re: Further Thoughts on Dennett, Searle and the Conundrum of Dualism

  • From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:08:50 -0000

--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gabuddabout" <wittrsamr@...> wrote:

<snip>

SWM:
> > > Everything, Gordon, finally depends on breaking the presumptive intuition 
> > > that consciousness is an irreducible something in the universe and seeing 
> > > it as a system property instead.
> > >
> > > SWM
> >
> >
> > Not everything, by any stretch, Stuart.
> >
> > The distinction you are unwilling to make is between functional properties 
> > and first-order properties.
> >
> > Computation is a second-order property.
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Budd

Your distinction between first and second order ("functional") properties is 
both inadequately explicated and elaborated and amounts to little more than an 
assertion that there are such "second order properties" which are distinguished 
by their lack of causal power and that computation is entirely made up of this 
kind of property.

In fact you persist in missing the point that no one (not AI researchers, not 
Dennett and not me) is talking about computation in the abstract but, rather, 
about certain physical processes (occurring on a physical platform) performing 
certain information processing operations according to a prescribed set of 
steps (the programmed algorithms).

Merely insisting that computational processes running on computers are nothing 
more than the abstraction of something called a "program" is not only mistaken, 
it's to miss the whole point. As brains are physical and their operations 
(processes) are physical, so, too, are computers and their operations. If 
physical brains can "cause" consciousness then why not physical computers?

SWM

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