On 3/7/2013 4:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, March 7, 2013 7:33:46 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
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?
My reasoning is that in constructing thin client architectures we find that we save
processing overhead by treating the i/o as a simple bitstream applied to extend just the
keyboard, mouse, and video data. We understand that there is a great deal less
processing than if we actually tried to network a computer at the application level, or
use the resources of the server as a mapped remote drive. What accounts for this lower
overhead is that the simulation of a GUI is only a thin shadow of what is required to
actually share resources. If qualia were inherent, then the thin client would save us
nothing, since the keystrokes and screenshots would have to contain all of the same
processing 'qualia'.
I can't even make sense of that assertion. "If qualia were inherent" in what? If they
were inherent in the keystrokes and screenshots then they would take no more processing
than screenshots and keystrokes.
The view from the thin client, resembling the server OS that we expect, would be all the
evidence that you would need to announce that I can't prove that there is a thin client.
What does "the view from the thin client" mean?
What is your counter argument though? Why do you keep putting my view on the offensive
with no substantial criticism?
If qualia are generated by information processing then they exist where information is
processed. In your example, there is little processing by the keyboard and the monitor.
But in any case "qualia" are no more localized in hardware than is computation.
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.
Why does the system include just those and not the programming, programmers, and the
whole history of computing that has the qualia?
Because those are far away and long ago. Whatever effects they have are via the local
hardware - which is why we call a Mars rover autonomous.
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?
More unsupported criticism?
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.
So if a broken piece of tape that you put on a door tells you that there's been an
intruder, is it intelligent tape? Or an intelligent tear in the tape?
No, I use intelligent to mean capable of processing information and learning so as to act
toward goals. You could define it just as information processing, in which case the tape
processes one bit and halts. So equating the two is just a kind of word play of your part
to obfuscate the point.
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.
I have already addressed this. The empirical evidence is simple. Create an artificial
brain. Walk someone off of their natural brain onto the artificial brain one hemisphere
at a time. Let them live in the artificial brain for a few months, then walk them back
over. If they say that they were indeed awake and felt normally conscious while in the
digital brain, then I would take their word for it, for sure.
Why would that make any difference to you. Maybe they just had false memories
implanted.
What is your empirical evidence that will convince you that my view is right?
While watching brain with whatever instrumentation is necessary, observe a physical change
not consistent with known physics. And even more convincing if the change is repeatable
and correlates with a reported or acted choice.
Brent
Craig
Brent
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