On 07 Mar 2013, at 23:45, meekerdb 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. 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. You have no argument,
just wetware racism.
Well said.
Leibniz is famous for doing that with the brain. Look in there, and
you see only elementary mechanism and no qualia. But Leibniz did not
use that to refute mechanism.
Bruno
Brent
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