On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg 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
<[email protected]> 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? All that it needs to
do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a
table of expected values. 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.
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.
Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown
invalid by many.
I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno.
You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim
that it "has been shown invalid". In whose opinion?
It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient
enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter "Mind's I
" book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not
understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute
comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the
high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy
supervene. It is a simple confusion of level.
The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler
though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is
no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book,
nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese
at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead.
The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are
using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if
they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake
the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get
wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the
correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete
color blindness.
What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who
wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the
case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You
don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why
computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to
understanding on any others.
I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really
try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if
you knew that comp is false.
This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite
thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes:
"There continues to be significant disagreement about what
processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well
as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments."
Thought experience are like proofs in math. Some are valid, some are
not valid, some are fatally not valid, some can be corrected or made
more precise. The debate often focuse on the truth of comp and non-
comp, and that involves sometimes opinion. I don't really play that
game.
Game? All it's saying is that there is no consensus as you claim.
The fact that you claim a consensus to me smells like a major
insecurity. Very much a 'pay no attention to the man behind the
curtain' response.
Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor
beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of
communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-
religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or
false.
The replies listed are not at all impressive to me, and are all
really variations on the same sophistry. Obviously there is a
difference between understanding a conversation and simply copying
a conversation in another language. There is a difference between
painting a masterpiece and doing a paint by numbers or
spraypainting through a stencil. This is what computers and
machines are for - to free us from having to work and think
ourselves. If the machine had to think and feel that it was working
like a person does, then it would want servants also. Machines
don't want servants though, because they don't know that they are
working, and they function without having to think or exert effort.
And this is begging the question.
Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.
Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.
Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from
there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not
looking at a theory. I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
Craig
Jason
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