🚀 go-pugleaf

jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>>There is evidence at compile-time of
>>thinking behavior. If you look at the code, you can see what the
>>responses to all possible inputs will be.
>
>That's not behavioral evidence (ie, not some behavior that's
>evidence), it's looking at the source code.  And, of course, one
>of my repeated points is that you can tell something by looking at
>the source code, which shows we're not confined to behavior.

As I said before, for me "behavior" is not a sequence of actions, it
is a causal relationship between inputs and outputs. The code is the
specification of this causal relationship.

>>What I was trying to suggest is that the notion of "having a thought
>>at a particular time" is not very meaningful. It is meaningful to talk
>>about the time that a physical event occurs, and it is meaningful to
>>talk about the subjective ordering of mental events, but it is not
>>especially meaningful to talk about the objective time at which a
>>mental event occurs.
>
>Why not?  Of course, an event may have some duration, and so it may
>not be right to assign it a single point in time.  On the other hand,
>it is entirely meaningful, and even true, to say that between typing
>this star -- * -- and this one -- * -- I was thinking about how bad the
>weather is in Edinburgh tonight.

There is certainly a relationship between the subjective ordering of
mental events and the objective time of physical events. However, I
don't think that the question "At what objective time did thought T
occur" necessarily has an answer.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY