On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 12:28:04PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > >As I understand it, COMP refers to the conjunction of: > > > >1) Arithmetic realism > >2) Church-Turing thesis > >3) Survivability of consciousness under duplication > > > > ...and annihilation of the "original" (if not it could be trivial). I guess > that's what you intended to mean. > > > > >Computationalism (as I understand it) is the strong AI principle - > >that a program running on a Turing machine (or equivalent) is > >sufficient to generate consciousness. A stronger version might be that > >all conscious processes can be represented by a program. I can see how > >3) follows from this stronger version - but I don't see how > >computationalism follows from COMP. > > > > Well, that's really a question of vocabulary. I prefer to say Strong AI > for ... the strong AI thesis. I guess also you intended to say that COMP > does not follow from the Strong AI thesis, because the fact that machines > can think does not entail that we are machine (machine can think does not > entail that *only* machines can think). But COMP entails the strong AI > thesis, > because if I am a machine then machines can think. (accepting the > perhaps foolish idea that *I* can think :)
How does COMP entail that I am a machine? I don't follow that step at all. > Computationnalism is really the "modern" digital version of "Mechanism" > a philosophy guessed by early Hindouist, Plato, ... accepted for animals by > Descartes, for humans by La Mettrie, Hobbes, etc. With Church > thesis mechanism can leads to pretty mind/matter theories. > If one accepts mechanisms that go beyond the Turing machine, then computationalism is a stricter assumption than mere mechanism (which I basically interpret as "anti-vitalism"). I would counter that a Geiger counter hooked up to a radioactive source is a "mechanism", yet the output cannot be computed by a Turing machine. (Of course some people, such as Schmidhuber would disagree with that too, but that's another story). > Bruno > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 (") Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centre http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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