Kim, Bruno,
> Not at all. You have already done the first and last leap of faith of > the reasoning when accepting the digital brain at the first step. I am > aware that you are not aware of that, because in the reply you seem to > believe that the MEC hypothesis can be taken for granted. But it can't. I think you are talking of two different machine conceptions. I would like to quote Steve Harnad: Harnad, S. Can a machine be conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2003, 10, 67-75 BEGIN: ...if we do follow this much more sensible route to the definition of "machine," we will find that a machine turns out to be simply: any causal physical system, any "mechanism." And in that case, biological organisms are machines too, and the answer to our question "Can a machine be conscious" is a trivial "Yes, of course." We are conscious machines. Hence machines can obviously be conscious. The rest is just about what kinds of machines can and cannot be conscious, and how -- and that becomes a standard empirical research program in "cognitive science"... END QUOTE I think this is the machine concept Kim was using originally (and maybe still has in mind). This conception can, I think, be indeed taken for granted by every scientifically minded person. Bruno, on the other hand, is talking about the machine concept as it exists in logic: here machine/mechanism - and also the COMP(utationalism) of cognitive science - does not mean any physical causal system, but effective mechanisms - an informal notion formalised (according to Church-Turing Thesis) with UTM/Lambda/Rec. Functions. And COMP is the assumption that we are Turing-emulable (with an UTM for example), not the more trivial hypothesis that we are a physical causal system. And this (COMP), indeed, can't be taken for granted but must be assumed. Happy Holidays, Günther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
