🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct02.202707.126376@Cookie.secapl.com>,
frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

>>I also don't believe that mental states are determined by physical
>>states. I believe that the relationship between a mental state and the
>>corresponding physical state to be something like the relationship
>>between an algorithm and a corresponding implementation, or the
>>relationship between a theory and its models.
>
>Two very different analogies.  I *can* in principle determine the algorithm
>from the implementation (although there may be cases where I am not smart
>enough to do so).

I disagree. In implementing an algorithm as a physical system, there
will be some state variables that will be used as inputs, some that
will be used as outputs, some that will be used as "scratch paper",
some that will be used as memory. Still other state variables will be
completely irrelevant to the algorithm (for example, in most computers
such things as the temperature of the CPU, which is certainly a state
variable of the computer as a physical system, is completely
irrelevant). It is not possible (even in principle) to uniquely
interpret a physical system as an implementation of an algorithm
without knowing more about implementation conventions.

>But it is not in general possible to determine the theory
>from the model.[1]
>
>I think the first is the better analogy, and that mental states can be
>determined from the physical states.

I don't think so.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY