[Wittrs] Re: Who beat Kasparov?
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:48:40 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Gordon Swobe <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
> --- On Fri, 3/19/10, SWM <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> > Can you explain how to hold Dennett's position that consciousness
> > is just a function of certain processes performing certain tasks
> > implies anything dualistic?
>
> Dennett holds to a computationalist theory of mind, i.e., he believes strong
> AI = true.
>
> But strong AI = true iff dualism = true:
>
> "Historically, scientific developments in the West that have treated humans
> as just a part of the ordinary physical, biological order have often been
> opposed by various rearguard actions. Copernicus and Galileo were opposed
> because they denied that the earth was the center of the universe; Darwin was
> opposed because he claimed that humans had descended from the lower animals.
> It is best to see strong AI as one of the last gasps of this anti-scientific
> tradition, for it denies that there is anything essentially physical and
> biological about the human mind. The mind according to strong AI is
> independent of the brain. [Strong AI is thereby dualistic -gts]
>
> -Searle, "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?"
> -gts
>
Ah, Searle himself then! What a strange position though given that argument of
people like Dennett is that anything physical can make consciousness if it can
perform the right activities. On the other hand, it's Searle whose argument
depends on the notion that consciousness cannot be explained as being
constituted by things that aren't already of that type and it is precisely THAT
position that implies that there must be two fundamentally distinct basic types
of existence in the universe and that one isn't responsible for the other.
Maybe there's confusion here on what dualism is?
SWM
>
>
>
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