[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

[Stefano Vaj]

2009/12/12 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>

> On Dec 12, 2009, Gordon Swobe wrote:
>
> or 2) consign myself to a dead end solipsistic philosophy in which you and
> everyone I know have the mental life of vegetables. I choose 1) by reductio
> ad absurdum.
>
>
> Then why isn't it also absurd to think that an intelligent computer has the
> mental life of a vegetable?
>
> This subject has been beaten to death innumerable times, but do we really
need to make (and is it possible to decide the truth of) assumptions
concerning the "true" mental state of others as if it were a thing distinct
from its expression and underlying mechanics?

That an intelligent computer has the mental life of a vegetable sounds like
an oxymoron to me... Its "intelligence", or mine for that matter, is defined
by the responses we can offer to the various input we are faced with.

And, by the way, we do not really know anything about the "real" mental life
of vegetables either. We can study and describe how they work and behave at
increasing level of details, and that is all there is to know about them.

All that stuff simply brings us back to the "homuncoli" hypotheses, or to
ko'an questions such as "what it would feel like to be somebody else" that
are only good for short circuit our brain processes when engaged in Zen
meditation...

--
Stefano Vaj
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