On Thursday, March 7, 2013 5:45:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > On 3/7/2013 2:21 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: > > 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. > > > I'm fairly sure Bruno will point out that a delusion is a thought and so > is immaterial. You have an immaterial experience fo being in a body. > > But the analogy of the thin client is thin indeed. In the example of the > Mars rover it corresponds to looking a computer bus and saying, "See there > are just bits being transmitted over this wire, therefore this Mars rover > can't have qualia." It's nothing-buttery spread thin. >
Why? What's your argument other than you don't like it? Of course the Mars rover has no qualia. The thin client metaphor is exactly why. All that are being transmitted are the sets of data that the software is trained to recognize. The rover could spit out a thin client mini-rover that is just a camera on wheels and the rover could steer it remotely. Would the mini-rover have qualia now too, as an eyeball on a wheel? > Meantime the Mars rover and Watson continue to exhibit intelligence of the > same kind you would associate with qualia if exhibted by a human being, or > even by a dog. > That shouldn't be surprising. Mannequins resemble human bodies standing still remarkably well. > You have no argument, just wetware racism. > I'm the one laying out a carefully reasoned example. You are the one responding with empty accusations. It doesn't seem like my position is the one closer to racism. Craig > > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
