🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep11.231731.7954@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu  
(Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
> Consider a computer program, written in C.  What kind of entity is it?  Is
> it an electronic entity?  Well, perhaps---but what about printouts of the
> computer program?  We tend to say that those are also computer programs.  So
> maybe a computer program is a sequence of ASCII characters.  Well, what
> about a French version of the same program? 
> 
> The analogy with "mind" should be clear.  Even if all minds that we know of
> occur in human beings, this doesn't automatically guarantee that "mind" is a
> biological entity 
> 
> All this suggests that "mind" is one of those ill-defined philosophical
> concepts that Barry Merriman so despises, and not a biological concept.


Yes, that is true. Then my reaction is: maybe it doesn't matter if
we define precisely what 'mind' is. 'mind' is a term humans made up 
to label a human property, and attempts to generalize, abstract
or make it more precise may simply not be important. 

(Such things
are possible, but may have no significance, as they are just arbitrary
modifications of the meaning, and don't really hold any new insight.)


Similarly, 'computer
program' labels a broad class, and it may simply not be important
to have a precise critieria as you ask for above. One can always 
make an exacting specification, but it may just be arbitrary.

This sort of issue used to plague AI and more recently AL (Artificial
Life)---i.e. formulate a definition of the thing in question.  I think
now folks realize a definition is not so important, because no 
great definition pops out as us above all others---suggesting there
is really no precise phenomena to be defined. Its one of those:
we'll know it when we see it things. And one just has to accept such things.

As for minds, when we develop think machines, I imagine we'll just 
call them electronic minds, call ours biological minds, and 
not worry about the precise relation between them.

--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet; NeXTMail is welcome)