Re: natural versus artificial evolution
- From: Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 18:50:09 -0700
N wrote:
does panpsychism include artificial and manmade products from second
rate
minds and bits of reinforced metal?
You might want to read about Searle and his Chinese Room Argument
because it often discussed and a basic part of philosophical AI.
http://consc.net/papers/rock.html
"The theory of computation is often thought to underwrite the theory
of mind. In cognitive science, it is widely believed that intelligent behavior is enabled by the fact that the mind or the brain implements some abstract automaton: perhaps a Turing machine, a program, an abstract neural network, or a finite-state automaton. The ambitions
of artificial intelligence rest on a related claim of computational sufficiency, holding that there is a class of automata such that any implementation of an automaton in that class will possess a mind. A similar claim is often made about many specific mental properties, including properties characteristic of human mentality: that is, it
is claimed that there exists a class of automata such that any implementation of an automaton in that class will have the mental property in question. In this way, it is hoped that computation will provide a powerful formalism for the replication and explanation of mentality.
In an appendix to his book Representation and Reality (Putnam 1988, pp. 120-125), Hilary Putnam argues for a conclusion that would destroy these ambitions. Specifically, he claims that every ordinary open system realizes every abstract finite automaton. He puts this forward as a theorem, and offers a detailed proof. If this is right, a simple system such as a rock implements any automaton one might imagine. Together with the thesis of computational sufficiency, this would imply that a rock has a mind, and possesses many properties characteristic of human mentality. If Putnam's result is correct, then, we must either embrace an extreme form of panpsychism or reject the principle on which the hopes of artificial intelligence rest. Putnam himself takes the result to show that computational functionalism cannot provide a foundation
for a theory of mind. [[Searle (1990) argues for a similar conclusion, although his argument is much less detailed than Putnam's. I comment
on it briefly toward the end of the paper.]]"
--------------------------------
www.sse.reading.ac.uk/common/publications/01182.pdf
"The main argument presented here is not significantly original –
it is a simple reflection upon that originally given by Hilary
Putnam (Putnam 1988) and criticised by David Chalmers and others.
In what follows, instead of seeking to justify Putnam’s claim
that, “every open system implements every Finite State Automaton
(FSA)”, and hence that psychological states of the brain cannot
be functional states of a computer, I will seek to establish the
weaker result that, over a finite time window every open system
implements the trace of a particular FSA Q, as it executes program
(p) on input (x). That this result leads to panpsychism is clear
as, equating Q (p, x) to a specific Strong AI program that is
claimed to instantiate phenomenal states as it executes, and
following Putnam’s procedure, identical computational (and ex
hypothesi phenomenal) states (ubiquitous little ‘pixies’) can be
found in every open physical system."
------------------------------------------
> CHALMERS:
> A bridge between these> systems and the abstract theory of
> computation is required. Specifically, we need a theory of
> implementation: the relation that holds between an abstract
> computational object (a> "computation" for short) and a physical
> system, such that we can say that in some sense the> system
> "realizes" the computation, and that the computation "describes"
> the system. We cannot> justify the foundational role of
> computation without first answering the question: What are the
> conditions under which a physical system implements a given
> computation? ...
> CHALMERS:
> If even digestion is a computation, isn't this vacuous? This
> objection expresses the feeling that if every process, including
> such things as digestion and oxidation, implements some
> computation, then there seems to be nothing special about
> cognition any more, as computation is so pervasive. This objection
> rests on a misunderstanding. It is true that any given instance of
> digestion will implement some computation, as any physical system
> does, but the system's implementing this computation is in general
> irrelevant to its being an instance of digestion. To see this, we
> can note that the same computation could have been implemented by
> various other physical systems (such as my SPARC) without it's
> being an instance of digestion. Therefore the fact that the
> system implements the computation is not responsible for the
> existence of digestion in the system. ...
> CHALMERS:
> Justification of the thesis of computational sufficiency has
> usually been tenuous. Perhaps the most common move has been an
> appeal to the Turing test, noting that every implementation of a
> given computation will have a certain kind of behavior, and
> claiming that the right kind of behavior is sufficient for
> mentality. The Turing test is a weak foundation, however, and one
> to which AI need not appeal. It may be that any behavioral
> description can be implemented by systems lacking mentality
> altogether (such as the giant lookup tables of Block 1981). Even if
> behaviour suffices for mind, the demise of logical behaviorism has
> made it very implausible that it suffices for specific mental
> properties: two mentally distinct systems can have the same
> behavioural dispositions. A computational basis for cognition will
> require a tighter link than this, then. ...
Does your pet rock have a mind? What then of "a rag, a bone,
a hank of hair, my lady fair"?
.
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