[Wittrs] Re: What Is Ontological Dualism?
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:53:13 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Joseph Polanik <jPolanik@...> wrote:
>> The music and video still play, whether or not there is a human
>> around lending intentionality.
> would they be playing if there had never been any human
> intentionality to establish the programming conventions on which
> those devices operate?
That's a quite different issue. And, incidently, it is one of the
reasons that I am skeptical of computationalism.
> Searle's point is that neither the man in the CR nor the CR as a
> system acquires the subjective experience of understanding just by
> manipulating symbols according to rules.
Searle's argument establishes the first (though that was never a real
issue). It fails to establish the second.
> are you claiming that if we stop focusing on the CPU we'll see that
> the system as a whole has subjective experience?
No, I don't claim that. I claim only that if we stop focussing on the
CPU, we will see that nothing at all is proved about whether the system
as a whole has subjective experience.
> the so-called 'Systems Reply' does not even attempt a response to
> Searle's point: there is no subjective experience of understanding
> Chinese in the CR.
The Systems Reply is responding only to Searle's claim that he has
disproved that there could be intentionality. The AI folk do recognize
that a positive claim of achieving intentionality will require
experimental demonstration, and they acknowledge that they have not
achieved that.
Back to an earlier point:
> would they be playing if there had never been any human
> intentionality to establish the programming conventions on which
> those devices operate?
The AI people say very little about how one of their AI systems would
go about establishing conventions. For that matter, I see very little
mention of this in what I have read on scientific epistemology. Yet
establishing conventions is a fundamental part of scientific progress.
So, yes, I do see this as a problem both for AI and for epistemology.
Regards,
Neil
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