On 3/7/2013 12:04 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
If you have ever worked with Terminal Servers, RDP, Citrix Metaframe,
or the like (and that's what I have been doing professionally every
day for the last 14 years), you will understand the idea of a Thin
Client architecture. Thin clients are as old as computing, and some of
you remember as I do, devices like acoustic couplers where you can
attach a telephone handset to a telephone cradle, so that the mouth
ends of the handset and the earpiece ends could squeal to each other.
In this way, you could, with nothing but a keyboard and a printer, use
your telephone to allow you access to a mainframe computer at some
university.
The relevance here is that the client end is thin computationally. It
passes nothing but keystrokes and printer instructions back and forth
as acoustic codes.
This is what an mp3 file does as well. It passes nothing but binary
instructions that can be used by an audio device to vibrate. Without a
person's ear there to be vibrated, this entire event is described by
linear processes where one physical record is converted into another
physical record. Nothing is encoded or decoded, experienced or
appreciated. There is no sound.
Think about those old plastic headphones in elementary school that
just had hollow plastic tubes as connectors - a system like that
generates sound from the start, and the headphones are simply funnels
for our ears. That's a different thing from an electronic device which
produces sound only in the earbuds.
All of these discussions about semiotics, free will, consciousness,
AI...all come down to understanding the Thin Client. The Thin Client
is Searle's Chinese Room in actual fact. You can log into a massive
server from some mobile device and use it like a glove, but that
doesn't mean that the glove is intelligent. We know that we can
transmit only mouseclicks and keystrokes across the pipe and that it
works without having to have some sophisticated computing environment
(i.e. qualia) get communicated. The Thin Client exposes Comp as
misguided because it shows that instructions can indeed exist as
purely instrumental forms and require none of the semantic experiences
which we enjoy. No matter how much you use the thin client, it never
needs to get any thicker. It's just a glove and a window.
--
Hi Craig,
Excellent post! You have nailed computational immaterialism where
it really hurts. Computations cannot see, per the Turing neo-Platonists,
any hardward at all. This is their view of computational universality.
But here in the thing, it is the reason why they have a 'body problem'.
For a Platonistic Machine, there is no hardware or physical world at
all. So, why do I have the persistent illusion that I am in a body and
interacting with another computation via its body?
The physical delusion is the thin client, to use your words and
discussion.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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