On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels 
>>>> constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do 
>>>> that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied 
>>>> by 
>>>> number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't 
>>>> be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single 
>>>> pixel.
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>
>> He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room.  He 
>> is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower 
>> in Chinese room) with what the program can know.  Consider the program of a 
>> neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU 
>> processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can 
>> see any arbitrary number of inputs at once.
>>
>> How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a 
>> single pixel at a time?
>>
>
> Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is 
> execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected 
> values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character 
> at at all, let alone any "seeing". A program could convert a Word document 
> into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical 
> activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. 
> Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into 
> the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics.
>
> Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out 
> that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is 
> accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. 
>
>
> Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid 
> by many.
>

I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have 
so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it "has 
been shown invalid". In whose opinion?

This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite 
thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes:

"There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create 
meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a 
priori by thought experiments."

The replies listed are not at all impressive to me, and are all really 
variations on the same sophistry. Obviously there is a difference between 
understanding a conversation and simply copying a conversation in another 
language. There is a difference between painting a masterpiece and doing a 
paint by numbers or spraypainting through a stencil. This is what computers 
and machines are for - to free us from having to work and think ourselves. 
If the machine had to think and feel that it was working like a person 
does, then it would want servants also. Machines don't want servants 
though, because they don't know that they are working, and they function 
without having to think or exert effort.

Craig


> Bruno
>
>
>
>
> Craig
>
>  
>
>> Jason
>>
>
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
> "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an 
> email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>.
> To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:>
> .
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>  
>  
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.


Reply via email to