[ExI] The symbol grounding problem in strong AI

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 27 17:00:50 UTC 2009


--- On Sat, 12/26/09, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>> I will in the next day or so if time allows write a
>> separate post for the sole purpose of explaining what I see
>> as the logical fallacy in your behaviorist/functionalist
>> arguments. I wrote one already (the post with "0-0-0-0"
>> diagram) but I see it didn't leave any lasting impression on
>> you even if you never offered any counter-arguments. So I'll
>> try putting another one together.
> 
> Perhaps you missed this post:

I didn't miss it. You did not actually address my argument that another person who starts from the same sorts of premises as you can create a competing argument that negates yours. It seems that you take it on faith that science will one day find the neurological correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the biological activities taking place between neurons and not in the activities taking place inside them. Your competing functionalist claims the opposite as you: he says that what happens inside the neurons matters to consciousness - that we will find the NCC there - and that what happens outside neurons only serves to drive the internal behaviors of natural neurons. His argument seems to me just as reasonable as yours, but it negates yours.

> It is not my theory, it is standard functionalism. The
> thought experiment shows that if you replicate the function of the
> brain, you must also replicate the consciousness.

Even if I believed that replicating the function of the brain would replicate consciousness in the way you hope, you did not actually replicate the function of the brain. You merely replicated the externally observable inputs and outputs of neurons, on the unspoken and as far as I can tell unjustified assumption that the internal functions of neurons do not and cannot matter. It looks to me like you just drew an arbitrary wall at the cellular membrane.

Nobody has yet elucidated a coherent theory of consciousness. Nobody knows what happened in George Foreman's brain to cause him lose consciousness when Muhammad Ali punched him, or what happened in his brain a few moments later to cause him to regain it. Because any theory then seems about as good as any another, I offer one that I made up two minutes ago that illustrates the problem that I see with your neuron replacement arguments:

I call it the mitochondrial theory of consciousness. On this theory, which I just made up, consciousness appears as an effect of chemical reactions taking place inside the mitochondria located inside neurons. When those reactions get disturbed the subject loses consciousness. When the reactions begin again normally, the subject regains consciousness.

Your challenge is to show that replacing natural neurons with your mitochondria-less nano-neurons that only behave externally like real neurons will still result in consciousness, given that science has now (hypothetically) discovered that chemical reactions in mitochondria act as the NCC.

I think you will agree that you cannot show it, and I note that my mitochondrial theory of consciousness represents just one of a very large and possibly infinite number of possible theories of consciousness that relate to the interiors of natural neurons, any one of which may represent the truth and all of which would render your nano-neurons ineffective. 

-gts





      



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