On 28 Feb 2012, at 20:18, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Feb 28, 5:42 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
There is no such thing as evidence when it comes to qualitative
phenomenology. You don't need evidence to infer that a clock doesn't
know what time it is.
A clock has no self-referential ability.
How do you know?
By looking at the structure of the clock. It does not implement self-
reference. It is a finite automaton, much lower in complexity than a
universal machine.
By comp logic, the clock could just be part of a
universal timekeeping machine - just a baby of course, so we can't
expect it to show any signs of being a universal machine yet, but by
comp, we cannot assume that clocks can't know what time it is just
because these primitive clocks don't know how to tell us that they
know it yet.
Then the universal timekeeping would be conscious, not the baby clock.
Level confusion.
You reason like that: no animals can fly, because pigs cannot fly.
You mistake my common sense reductio for shortsighted prejudice. I
would say that your reasoning is that if we take a pig on a plane, we
can't rule out the possibility that it has become a bird.
No. You were saying that computer cannot think, because clock cannot
thing.
This is
another variation on the Chinese Room. The pig can walk around at
30,000 feet and we can ask it questions about the view from up there,
but the pig has not, in fact learned to fly or become a bird. Neither
has the plane, for that matter.
Your analogy is confusing. I would say that the pig in the plane does
fly, but this is out of the topic.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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