On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The only understanding of Chinese going on is by those Chinese speakers > outside the room who are carrying on a one-sided conversation with a rule > book. So you say, but Searle says his idiotic thought experiment has PROVEN it; and yet one key step in the "proof" is "if there is understanding it can only be in the little man but the little man does not understand so there is no understanding involved". But if you start the thought experiment as that as one of the axioms then what the hell is the point of the thought experiment in the first place, how can you claim to have proven what you just assumed? I stand by my remarks that Clark's Chinese Room, described previously, has just as much profundity (or lack thereof) as Searle's Chinese Room. > > > OK fine, the man does not understand Chinese, so what? How does that >> prove that understanding was not involved in the room/outside-people >> conversation? >> > > > Because there is nobody on the inside end of the conversation. > So what? The point of the thought experiment was to determine if understanding was involved at the room end, not how many people were inside the room, you can write and scream that there was no understanding from now to the end of time but you have not proven it, and neither has Searle. It's not uncommon for a mathematical "proof" to contain a hidden assumption of the very thing you're trying to prove, but usually this error is subtle and takes some close analysis and digging to find the mistake, but in the case of the Chinese Room the blunder is as obvious as a angry elephant in your living room and that is why I have no hesitation in saying that John Searle is a moron. > I suspect the use of the man in the room is a device to force people to > identify personally with (what would normally be) the computer. Yes that's exactly what he's doing, and that's what makes Searle a con artist, he's like a stage magician who waves his right hand around and makes you look at it so you don't notice what his left hand is doing, and the thing that makes him a idiot is that he believes his own bullshit. It's as if I forced you to identify with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and then asked you to derive grand conclusions from the fact that acetylcholine doesn't understand much. > yes I only have first hand knowledge of consciousness. Because the nature > of sense is to fill the > gaps, connect the dots, solve the puzzle, etc, we are able to generalize > figuratively. We are not limited to solipsism By "fill in the gaps" you mean we accept certain rules of thumb and axioms of existence to be true even though we can not prove them, like induction and that intelligent behavior implies consciousness. That is the only way to avoid solipsism. > >> Take a sleeping pill and your brain organization, its chemistry, >> changes and your consciousness goes away; take a pep pill and the >> organization reverses itself and your consciousness comes back. >> > > > The organization of the brain is still the same in either case. > Bullshit. > > the brain retains the capacity for consciousness the whole time. As long as the drug is in your brain consciousness is not possible, it is only when chemical processes break down the drug and the concentration of it is reduced (it wares off in other words) does consciousness return. > If the pill killed you, a pep pill would not bring you back. And if the pill did kill you that would certainly change brain organization. And by the way, why do you believe that dead people are not conscious? Because they no longer behave intelligently. > What we sense is not imposed from the outside, > Well it had better be! If the outside world could be anything we wanted it to be then our senses would be of no value and Evolution would never have had a reason to develop them. In reality if we project our wishes on how we interpret the information from our senses too much our life expectancy will be very short; I don't like that saber toothed tiger over there so I'll think of him as a cute little bunny rabbit. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
