[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Tue, 12/8/09, John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> But for some reason this mysterious phase change only
> happens to 3 pounds of grey goo in our head and never
> happens in his Chinese Room. He never explains why.

He explains exactly why in his formal argument: 

Premise A1: Programs are formal (syntactic).
Premise A2: Minds have mental contents (semantics). 
Premise A3: Syntax is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics. 

Ergo, 

Conclusion C1: Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.

So then Searle gives us at least four targets at which to aim (three premises and the opportunity to deny that his conclusion follows).

He continues with more formal arguments to defend his philosophy of mind, what he calls biological naturalism, but if C1 doesn't hold then we needn't consider them. 

I came back to ExI after a long hiatus (I have 6000+ unread messages in my ExI mail folder) because I was struck by the fact that Wernicke's aphasia lends support to A3, normally considered the only controversial premise in his argument.

-gts









 
> Like most of us here, he subscribes to and
> promotes a species of naturalism. He [Searle] adamantly
> rejects both property and substance dualism. You won't
> find any mystical hocus-pocus in his philosophy.
> 
> Bullshit. He thinks intelligent behavior is possible
> without consciousness so evolution could not have produced
> consciousness, no way no how. He has no other explanation
> how it came to be so to explain its existence he has no
> choice but to resort to mystical
> hocus-pocus.
> he allows for the possibility
> of Strong Artificial Intelligence. He just doesn't think
> it possible with formal programs running on hardware. Not
> hardware enough!
> 
> So if atoms are arranged in a way that produces a
> human brain those atoms can produce consciousness and if
> arranged as a computer they can too, provided the computer
> doesn't use hardware or software. Don't you find
> that idea just a little bit stupid?
>  John K Clark 
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