On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: > >> >> >> >> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> "If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels >>>> constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do >>>> that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by >>>> number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't >>>> be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single >>>> pixel. >>> >>> >>> >> >> He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He >> is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower >> in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a >> neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU >> processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can >> see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. >> >> How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a >> single pixel at a time? >> > > Who says OCR software can recognize letters? > The people who buy such software and don't return it. > All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly > against a table of expected values. > It's a little more sophisticated than that. There are CAPTCHA defeating OCR programs that recognize letters distorted in ways they have never previously seen before: http://www.slideshare.net/rachelshadoan/machine-learning-methods-for-captcha-recognition You need more than a simple look up table for that capability. > There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at > all, let alone any "seeing". A program could convert a Word document into > an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical > activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. > Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into > the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. > Sounds like what goes on when someone dreams in the dark. > > Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out > that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is > accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. > It doesn't point out anything, it is an intuition pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump ) that succeeds in swaying people to an apparently obvious conclusion (if they don't think too deeply about it). Jason -- 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.
