On 3/7/2013 3:01 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
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.
That's your careful reasoning?
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?
No, it's the autonomous system rover+minirover that would have qualia.
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.
More reasoning?
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.
No you're the one with the double standard. If it acts intelligent and it's wetware, it
is intelligent. If it acts intelligent and its hardware it can't be intelligent. If you
have any other critereon, any conceivable empirical evidence, that would convince you that
an intelligent acting entity made of hardware in intelligent I'd like to hear it. It
there is none, then it's mere prejudice.
Brent
Craig
Brent
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