On 07 Mar 2013, at 23:21, 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.
Computational universality is a standard notion. No need of Plato.
Only arithmetical realism, of the kind you need to pay taxes.
But here in the thing, it is the reason why they have a 'body
problem'.
Not really. But in fine, yes. That is the result of a proof. No need
to present this as obvious, as nothing is obvious in the mind-body
problem domain.
For a Platonistic Machine, there is no hardware or physical world at
all.
That is wrong. There is one. We can compare to the world we observe,
already. And test comp.
So, why do I have the persistent illusion that I am in a body and
interacting with another computation via its body?
See the papers and post. That's what I explain. To refute comp you
must derive a physical facts from comp refuted empirically.
Bruno
The physical delusion is the thin client, to use your words and
discussion.
--
Onward!
Stephen
--
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 [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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 [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
