On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:26:38PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > > But I'm interested in Russell's argument that the Chinese Room would > have to be so big as to be absurd. ISTM it's not nearly as big as > the UD. Is there some principle that rules out things that are to > big or to improbable? >
I always assumed that the CR absurdity worked because the "little man" inside the room just looked responses up in a book. Clearly, if its a lookup table like this, then the book would be absurdly ginormous. But if the book contained, say a printout of an AI program in C, then indeed it wouldn't be so large. But then the book has rather complex contents, it is not so absurd to think that following its instructions could not instantiate a consciousness, which I think Searle was trying to get us to admit. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
