🚀 go-pugleaf

msellers@mentor.com (Mike Sellers) writes:
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  This whole improbable set up may seem to be begging the question of the 
original Chinese Room symbol manipulation scenario (though set up in the 
large), but it contains an important difference:  Each Booth is blind to 
the functioning of the others, and knows only about its own activity.  
Individually they are rather primitive, if flexible, cuneiform processors,
and possess none of the attributes we are interested in.  However, taken 
together, we must conclude that (through some process we do not as yet 
understand (!)) the whole mass of them together will eventually --given 
the necessary and sufficient environmental input-- take on awareness, 
understanding, and cognizance.  This must be the case, since the only 
existing example of a thing possessing these qualities aquires and 
maintains them by just such a system.  
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This is true ONLY if you assume that the only processes going on in
the human mind are algorithmic.  This seems to be the exact question
we are trying to resolve.

-Fred Gilham   gilham@csl.sri.com