On Jan 27, 2008 9:18 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Samantha: MT: You've been fooled by the puppet. It doesn't work without the > > puppeteer. Samantha:What's that, elan vitale, a "soul", a > > "consciousness" that is > independent of the puppet? > > It's significant that you make quite the wrong assumption. You too are > fooled. The puppeteer is the human operator/programmer.
You could just as easily say that we are puppets of the machines. We can't exist nowadays without computers. If, tomorrow, all the computers in the world stopped working, the global economy would utterly collapse. > V. simple and > obvious. Computers do not actually EXIST. Then what, exactly, are you using to communicate with us? > All that exists here are lumps of > metal - until human beings come along - and give them life and meaning. > Without humans they lie there, dead. Without food, humans lie there, dead. Clearly, cows and corn are the true masters of this planet. We must be just their puppets- after all, do not we depend on a constant supply of food to exist? Without them, we are nothing. > All your thinking, I suggest, is predicated on an obvious falsehood - that > computers exist in their own right and are not just tools/extensions of > human beings. Most current computers are tools. This does not automatically mean that all computers everywhere, indefinitely far into the future, must always be tools. > And it is still a very large set of unsolved problems as to > what will be required to make a robot or computer exist in its own right. I don't see how the statement "the computer I'm using to write this email doesn't exist" is any less absurd than the statement "2 + 2 = 5". > If you are serious either as scientist or technologist, you have to start > from the fact of those unsolved problems, and not just wishfully assume that > they have all been magically answered. You can be sure that the answers, > whatever they are, will transform your current thinking. We all know it is a hard problem. We, the human species, have solved hard problems countless times before, and there's no reason to think we'll be magically stopped by this one. > Re why only a moving body can think, it is still a large philosophical and > scientific problem, and I'm just in the middle of working it out ! (But I'm > increasingly confident it is soluble and soon). Cart before the horse. Arguing a position and then coming up with an explanation for it is not reason, it is rationalization. See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/the-bottom-line.html, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/rationalization.html. > The basic biological > evidence for that assertion though is obvious - the only self-sufficient > "in-their-own-right" entities that can actually think are indeed moving > organisms/ animals. Specifically, bacteria. No higher organisms, including us, could exist without the mitochondria and other symbiotic prokaryotes in our cells. Please read http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html to hear what your argument sounds like from the other side. > And the classic fact is that when a sea squirt stops > moving, it immediately devours its own brain. > > The other basic fact here is again obvious if you look at the whole and not > just a part. Above it was case of don't just look at the computer look at > everything that happens with and around it, like the human operator. Here > it's a sub-case of that - don't just look at the thoughts/ideas - the print, > say on the screen, or the writing on the page - look at how they are > produced. And - hey - they don't happen without movement - someone > typing/writing them. My computer can happily print out ten gigabytes worth of messages without any movement at all. > As Daniel Wolpert says: > > "Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether > foraging for food or attracting a waiter's attention. Indeed, all > communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is > mediated via the motor system. This is specific to *humans* (and animals more generally). Computers and animals are very, very different. A computer can communicate with the world by sending pulses of high and low voltage along a wire. A human cannot. > Taking this viewpoint, the purpose of the > human brain is to use sensory signals to determine future actions. The goal > of our lab is to understand the computational principles underlying human > sensorimotor control" > > http://learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/wolpert/ > > (But that still doesn't solve the problem I referred to which is to explain > why thinking generally is predicated in its very content on moving bodies - > and not just produced by moving bodies). Please, for Eru's sake, read up on rationality and logic. If you start off by assuming a wrong statement, and then try to solve the "problem" of giving evidence for it, you're never going to get anywhere. > > ----- > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > - Tom ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=90338188-04a08e
