On 27 Jan 2014, at 22:22, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, January 27, 2014 5:57:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 27 Jan 2014, at 06:07, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, January 25, 2014 11:36:11 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On 26 January 2014 01:35, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]>
wrote:
>> But that doesn't answer the question: do you think (or
understand, or
>> whatever you think the appropriate term is) that the Chinese Room
>> COULD POSSIBLY be conscious or do you think that it COULD NOT
POSSIBLY
>> be conscious?
>
>
> NO ROOM CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO BODY CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO FORM CAN BE
> CONSCIOUS.*
>
> *Except within the fictional narrative of a conscious experience.
Puppets
> can seem conscious. Doors, door-knobs, and Chinese rooms can SEEM
to be
> conscious.
Do you think Barack Obama is conscious? If you do, then in whatever
sense you understand that, can the Chinese Room also be conscious?
Or do you think that is impossible?
Yes, I think that Barack Obama is conscious, because he is
different from a building or machine. Buildings and machines cannot
be conscious, just as pictures of people drinking pictures of water
do no experience relief from thirst.
To compare a brain with a machine can make sense.
To compare a brain with a picture cannot.
It depends what the picture is doing. If you have a collection of
detailed pictures of brains, and you organize them so that they are
shown in different sequences according to some computation, isn't
that a simulation of a brain?
It is not. It is a description of a computation, not a computation.
The computation is in the logical relation, which includes the
counterfactuals.
Now, we do describe computation by some description, and so this
confusion is frequent. But it is the same type of confusion between
ciphers and numbers. Ciphers and sequence of ciphers are not numbers.
It is the cionfusion between "345" and 345.
In either case, consciousness makes no more sense as part of a brain
or a machine than a picture.
Right. We agree on that. But a brain can locally manifest a person. A
picture cannot. You can't implement it in a computer, in the sense of
implementing a program, which then can manifest a person.
Machines are like 4D pictures. One picture or form leads to another
and another, and if there were some interpreter they could infer a
logic to those transitions, but there is nothing in the machine
which would itself lead from unconsciousness to awareness.
No, but the machine can still enact it.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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