[Wittrs] Re: No Effing Way--Again
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:35:24 -0000
Budd, I'm going to reply as you habitually do:
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gabuddabout" <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> Stuart writes:
>
> "But Searle takes the third premise as grounds for a denial of causality, as
> in computers can't cause consciousness (as brains do), which means he uses
> the third premise in a way that the claim that it is conceptually true
> doesn't support because non-identity does not imply non-causality and the
> non-causality
> claim is not, itself, conceptually true UNLESS you take the claim of
> non-identity to be tantamount to a non-causality claim (i.e., think that to
> cause X something must already be X -- see below for more on this)."
>
> Your argument above needs us to be blind to the first premise. That is
> another place where the noncausality claim is implied. The third premise is
> really two, what with the conjunction of independent clauses. You're simply
> shown to be mistaken in thinking that Searle needs one of the independent
> clauses to be belched out of the other (i.e., the non-identity claim as
> grounds for the non-causality claim)
>
You're simply wrong, Budd. You just don't understand anything. My target
argument has trumped your target article not to mention your lame responses
nine ways to Sunday. Oh wait. It's not Sunday. Well, okay, make it Thursday
which is almost over by now so I guess we'll compromise on Friday . . . or
Saturday. Wanna play?
Boy, I can't believe how you keep lying about Searle, Stuart!
(Like it so far? Find it convincing?)
> What you're up against here is this: You are being shown to be oblivious to
> the first premise, along with the English language Witters asks us to get
> keen on, just a little bit. Ah, but maybe you were working a bit. "Bit" can
> be entertainingly considered a bit a bit....
>
You are being shown to be oblivious to what it means to be oblivious.
Bedump-bump!
> There are many convolutions to what you say. But if you can find an
> equivocation or a bit of fuzziness in the target article, that would be a
> feat I'd like to witness. Also, the very summary forms of the CRA are
> motivated by the searching thoughts of Searle found in the target article.
> The target article is google-ready, at least in a penultimate version said to
> contain mistakes but I didn't really see any mistakes that compromised
> content.
>
Searle is just so bad and knows so little that he must be lying about Dennett.
Unless you are, in which case you're lying about Dennett and Searle both but
Searle isn't going to take that lying down. Or rather I and my fellow
Dennettians (are there any besides me?) aren't. Oh wait, I'm channeling me
channeling you when I should be channeling you channeling me, right? Well it
all prolly just boils down to a failure to distinguish between strong and weak
AI which Searle is okay with, that is with weak AI, because strong AI just
can't fly. And Searle shows it. Yeah! Take that, Stuart!
Or maybe it's a problem because you just don't get the difference between S/H
and non-S/H. Well whatever (drum roll please . . .).
> Target article: "Minds, Brains, and Programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences
> 3 (3): 417-457.
>
> Searle suggests that his article "can be viewed as an attempt to explore the
> consequences of two propositions."
>
Yeah, THIS is the key. Why haven't you paid attention to his motivation? (Oh
right, that's what you should be saying to me, not what I would be saying to
you while channeling you -- but then the water flows through many channels and
the Wittrs riverbed flows with the river and . . . bedump-bump!)
> Anyone ready to note that the second proposition is the claim that
> "Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition
> of intentionality."
>
Yeah, see how he says that in this 1980 version of the argument he revised
twenty times since then? If you don't like his latest version, you gotta argue
with his earliest. No, wait, you gotta argue with every iteration but first you
gotta start with the old target article which Stuart refuses to read or
pretends to have read or pretends I never told him where to find it so he could
read it . . . oh wait, I am Stuart channeling Budd, right? So am I supposed to
be arguing against Budd here or is that against myself? In which case how can I
beat myself? I know, I can pretend to be Budd whose arguments are slam-bang and
no way (no effing way!) Stuart could show they aren't and if he did well, I
don't buy it anyway, and besides everyone here agrees with me and disagrees
with Stuart. Just ask Gordon and Joe and everyone else!
> Notice that in the past Stuart argues against the first premise by saying
> that Searle is arguing against a strawman. Stuart says that Searle's notion
> of programs being abstract simply leaves out the fact that they are (in
> capitals) Running. Note that Searle is, in fact, using the word
> "instantiating." I think that's an action verb on a parrr with "running."
>
Yep, Searle recognizes the computers are running but he ain't talking about
that but about those programs they're supposed to be running which ain't
natural kinds, pace Searle, even if Dennett, Stuart's favorite, doesn't know
what he's talking about pace Stuart, or is that pace me? -- but then neither
does Stuart -- and so programs can't cause anything and everyone knows brains
cause minds except maybe Bruce who doesn't know what cause means anyway, or Joe
who keeps confusing cause with other words but, hey, Joe is good with Searle so
I'm good with Joe -- that is Stuart when channeling Budd is good with Joe, when
he's only channeling Stuart -- can anyone channel themselves? -- he's bad with
Joe. But then Stuart is bad most of the time anyway. Hey, let's be friends, I
can dig being friends who are so bad in philosophy they channel Stuart -- or
are Stuart -- where was I again?
[Ah, from here on in, Budd, you do such a good job of channeling yourself I
guess I'll leave the rest to you. Happy reading fellow posters. -- SWM]
> My Tennis buddy beat me today 7-5 and 6-2 but offered a Sartre snack:
> Transverse intentionality such that there's the going from point A to B, then
> B to... such that consciousness is had as an illusion sort of after the fact,
> because of, well, transversion. I asked if this illusion must necessarily
> include memory content and it was conceded. Then I said something about how
> Sartre's position need not be spelled out eliminatively as a position denying
> what Sartre referred to as the "transcendental Ego." Memory demands some
> sort of (I don't want to say "entity" but am willing to say "brain," and why
> not?) structure that can sustain "it." Fodor is said by Dennett to practice
> safe science just because Fodor won't give up on mental content. But what
> good is a theory of mind if it eliminates the subject matter that it is
> supposed to explain?
>
> That is just too chic, too loose, too deconstructionist, in fact, too
> nihilistic for Fodor's confessed sensibilities.
>
> But I understand why some would argue that the science of mind is
> nihilistic--why truth? Why not untruth to better serve social needs? What
> if, as Nietsche avered, "Truth kills"? Pouring over possible philosophical
> arguments first thing in the morning are ya? Well, says Nietzsche, might as
> well be sinning against the Holy Ghost!
>
> Search me, as Fodor might say.
>
>
> Stuart continues:
>
> "Does Searle realize he has done this? Probably not as I don't think he would
> be deliberately misleading. Has he done this? I think the evidence is pretty
> obvious that he has."
>
> Well, maybe by your lights. It is just overwhelmingly obvious to me, on the
> other hand, that a noncausality claim as an independent clause of the third
> premise really makes for four premises--and the first premise implies a
> noncausality claim as well.
>
> Next step: Switch to a charge of circularity because the charge of
> equivocation was an egregious case of the
> "no-speaky-English-so-good-because-taught-by-Witters-to-keenly-observe-usage"
> syndrome which I just made up because I can. But how else do you expect me
> to keep my end of the bargain when I've been accused of being (of all people
> and heaven forfend!) all over the map? So what if Stuart's map is intended
> as the existential one where I'm all over it. How else does one follow? he
> he
>
> Functional properties are 2nd order ones even if they are Running (read
> "running" as "supervenient on 1st order physical properties.").
>
> Circularity is dismissed because of the way instantiated (i.e., running)
> programs work. There's the functional properties wedded to the first order
> properties.
>
> You then have an S/H system with software/hardware separability of a kind you
> don't find in brains since there are no logic gates in brains. We'll have to
> defer to Smolenski and Fodor's reply to him on connectionism years later if I
> have my way (of not reading too much!).
>
> But so far, Searle hasn't refuted, say, Dennett because, well, Dennett
> doesn't believe in mental contents.
>
> Dennett will argue against the second premise (that minds have semantics) by
> saying that science can't truck in intentionalistic idioms except insofar as
> they are used as a stance which has as goal the elimination (recursive
> decomposition) of any and all intentionalistic idioms (except maybe in the
> marketplace, which means not in the real world, especially for a certain kind
> of direct realist, how do I go on!).
>
> Someone more daring than myself might accuse Dennett of being pie-in-the-sky,
> as opposed to either Searle or Dennett being wed to Granny's "safe science."
>
> So I propose a pie throwing contest. It will be a fuzzy one where some pie
> is eaten and some pie is ticklish and right on the money.
>
> Hairly (I mean baldly, hey, and a bit ribaldly, but just a bit) yours,
> Budd
>
=========================================
Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/
Other related posts:
