On 12 Jan 2014, at 14:40, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Here then is simpler and more familiar example of how computation
can differ from natural understanding which is not susceptible to
any mereological Systems argument.
If any of you have use passwords which are based on a pattern of
keystrokes rather than the letters on the keys, you know that you
can enter your password every day without ever knowing what it is
you are typing (something with a #r5f^ in it…?).
I think this is a good analogy for machine intelligence. By storing
and copying procedures, a pseudo-semantic analysis can be performed,
but it is an instrumental logic that has no way to access the
letters of the ‘human keyboard’. The universal machine’s keyboard is
blank and consists only of theoretical x,y coordinates where keys
would be. No matter how good or sophisticated the machine is, it
will still have no way to understand what the particular keystrokes
"mean" to a person, only how they fit in with whatever set of fixed
possibilities has been defined.
You confuse level of description. What you say does not distinguish an
organic brain from a silicon one. The understanding is not done by the
computation in the brain, but by the person having some role in some
history, and only manifest itself through some computations (assuming
comp).
Taking the analogy further, the human keyboard only applies to
public communication. Privately, we have no keys to strike, and
entire paragraphs or books can be represented by a single thought.
Unlike computers, we do not have to build our ideas up from
syntactic digits.
It is the same for computers, once they have developed some relative
history. This is well modeled by the "& p" part of the definition of
knowing, and the math confirms this. Similarly, no code at all can
explain why you feel to be the one in W, instead of the one in M, in
the WM-duplication experience. Computers are not just confronted with
symbol, but also with truth.
Instead the public-facing computation follows from the experienced
sense of what is to be communicated in general, from the top down,
and the inside out.
OK. But that does not distinguish a carbon brain from a silicon machine.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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