On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9/23/2010 8:26 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> If you expose a deterministic system to a set of inputs that represent >> a particular environment, the system will react in the one and only >> way it can to that set of inputs. >> > > And if that reaction is to manipulate it's envrionment is a way advantageous > to it, it's intelligent.
A rock interacts with its environment. A human interacts with its environment. The term "manipulate" is misleading...in that it adds nothing over "interacts with" except the implication of intentionality. Which assumes that which must be proven...that there is something intrinsically different in the rock's interactions and the human's interactions. Basically I am arguing that intentionality is epiphenomenal in a rule-driven universe. It has no causal power, it doesn't add anything to the underlying rules, and it isn't part of the underlying rule set. Intentionality is just part of how things seem to us...an aspect of our conscious experience. It is a concept that we are conscious of, but which has no existence outside of conscious thought. Since intentionality is merely experiential, epiphenomenal, and non-causal - an abstract concept - then intelligence is as well. > Intelligence must always be relative to some > situation or environment. That's where Putnam and Moravec go wrong and > Merriam-Webster get it right. If you can find a Putnam-mapping that can extracts a representation of a conscious entity, you can also find a mapping that extracts a representation of an environment to go with it. The attribution of intelligence is just part of our experience. Which is just to say, "that person seems intelligent to me". But the rule-generated belief that the person is intelligent is all there is to his intelligence. Therefore: No one is intelligent, but many people are believed to be. >> Knowledge is just the internal state of the deterministic system. >> > > That's not a usable definition: internal=inaccessible. Knowledge must be > expressible. It must be information that makes a difference. Otherwise you > fall into the paradox of the rock that computes everything. A rock's internal state does make a difference in how it interacts with its environment. It's just that these differences are too subtle to be easily detected. The way the rock absorbs and emits heat and radiation, it’s response to vibrations, and even the precise way air molecules interact with it all reveal information about it’s internal state. To quote Jim Holt: "Take that rock over there. It doesn't seem to be doing much of anything, at least to our gross perception. But at the microlevel it consists of an unimaginable number of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that even our fastest supercomputer might envy. And they are not jiggling at random. The rock's innards 'see' the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers's slogan, 'Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.' But the rock doesn't exert itself as a result of all this 'thinking.' Why should it? Its existence, unlike ours, doesn't depend on the struggle to survive and self-replicate. It is indifferent to the prospect of being pulverized. If you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being. And you might draw the moral that the universe is, and always has been, saturated with mind, even though we snobbish Darwinian-replicating latecomers are too blinkered to notice." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
