🚀 go-pugleaf

daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
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Roger Penrose is simply wrong to say that is equivalent to postulating
"mind-stuff". The systems reply takes it that a mind is a *pattern*
produced by physical entities, and is not the entities themselves.
This is no more dualism than is believing that sound is a vibration in
physical matter, but is not itself matter, or that heat is a property
of substances but is not itself a substance.

When you say something like "I understand English", what is the "I"
that understands? You (and Searle) seem to think it is a physical
entity, a particular human body. I don't think that is right, at all.
After all, as the old chestnut goes, you replace all the atoms in your
body every seven years or so. Any mind that can remember back to your
childhood cannot be completely associated with any particular physical
entity.
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I reply:

What is the difference between a ``pattern'' produced by physical
entities that is not the entities themselves, and a non-physical
mind-stuff?  Certainly a pattern of organization does not produce new
physical entities that did not previously exist, so the pattern must
be non-physical.  So ``pattern'' (in the sense you are using it) and
``mind-stuff'' in Penrose's sense seem to me to be two names for the
same thing.

Besides this, I am a little unclear about what a pattern is apart from
the mind of the observer, and how one decides which patterns qualify
as being intelligent.  I remember seeing some joke about patterns --
what is the next number in the sequence 2 4 8 16 ...  I think the
answer was 31, because there is some quartic polynomial that generates
it and polynomials are less complex than exponentials!  The point is
that patterns are things we project onto the world to make sense of
it.

I personally don't want to restrict the phenomenon of consciousness to
a purely physical basis.  However, the point is that many proponents
of strong AI argue this way: "Can machines think?  Sure, we are
machines and we think!", meaning that we are the sum total of the
physical processes going on inside of us.  Searle's argument indicates
that either the Turing test is not an adequate indicator of
understanding (because there is no physical entity doing the
understanding), or that there is some non-physical entity that is
actually doing the understanding.

-Fred Gilham    gilham@csl.sri.com