Samantha: MT: You've been fooled by the puppet. It doesn't work without the
puppeteer. Samantha:What's that, elan vitale, a "soul", a
"consciousness" that is
independent of the puppet?
It's significant that you make quite the wrong assumption. You too are
fooled. The puppeteer is the human operator/programmer. V. simple and
obvious. Computers do not actually EXIST. All that exists here are lumps of
metal - until human beings come along - and give them life and meaning.
Without humans they lie there, dead.
All your thinking, I suggest, is predicated on an obvious falsehood - that
computers exist in their own right and are not just tools/extensions of
human beings. And it is still a very large set of unsolved problems as to
what will be required to make a robot or computer exist in its own right.
If you are serious either as scientist or technologist, you have to start
from the fact of those unsolved problems, and not just wishfully assume that
they have all been magically answered. You can be sure that the answers,
whatever they are, will transform your current thinking.
Re why only a moving body can think, it is still a large philosophical and
scientific problem, and I'm just in the middle of working it out ! (But I'm
increasingly confident it is soluble and soon). The basic biological
evidence for that assertion though is obvious - the only self-sufficient
"in-their-own-right" entities that can actually think are indeed moving
organisms/ animals. And the classic fact is that when a sea squirt stops
moving, it immediately devours its own brain.
The other basic fact here is again obvious if you look at the whole and not
just a part. Above it wasa case of don't just look at the computer look at
everything that happens with and around it, like the human operator. Here
it's a sub-case of that - don't just look at the thoughts/ideas - the print,
say on the screen, or the writing on the page - look at how they are
produced. And - hey - they don't happen without movement - someone
typing/writing them.
As Daniel Wolpert says:
"Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether
foraging for food or attracting a waiter's attention. Indeed, all
communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is
mediated via the motor system. Taking this viewpoint, the purpose of the
human brain is to use sensory signals to determine future actions. The goal
of our lab is to understand the computational principles underlying human
sensorimotor control"
http://learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/wolpert/
(But that still doesn't solve the problem I referred to which is to explain
why thinking generally is predicated in its very content on moving bodies -
and not just produced by moving bodies).
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