[ExI] The symbol grounding problem in strong AI

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 4 14:01:39 UTC 2010


--- On Mon, 1/4/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems to me you must accept some type of epiphenomenalism if you say 
> that Cram can pass the TT while having different experiences to
> Sam. 

I don't see how that follows, nor do I posit any guess as to their actual experiences (especially for Cram, who may have none by the time the doctors finish with him). 

I see this experiment in the medical context that you framed. As would happen in a real world hospital setting, the neurosurgeons work on these poor fellows with the alphabet soup neurons until they pass the TT and report normal subjective experiences. 

Cram's doctors have an extra luxury in that they can program the p-neurons to correct any lingering symptoms. If Sam's m-neurons fail, too bad for Sam. 

At no time can we really know what goes on in the patients' experiences, except that they report it to their doctors.

> This also makes it impossible to ever study the NCC scientifically. 
> This experiment would be the ideal test for it: the p-neurons function 
> like c-neurons but without the NCC, yet Cram behaves the same as Sam. 

We needn't create artificial neurons to study the NCC. We need to identify possible target areas and then to test our theories with technology that switches it off and on in a live patient. Most likely it involves a large swath of neurons that need simultaneously to have the correct synaptic activity and (I would guess) electrical coherence or patterns of some kind. (My guess about the electrical activity helps explain why I reject your beer-cans-and-toilet-paper model of the brain.) 

>> If Sam passes the TT and reports normal subjective
> experiences from m-neurons then I will consider him cured. I
> have no concerns about "type" of consciousness.
> 
> As you agreed in a later post, only some m-neurons are
> c-neurons. It could be that an internal change in a m-neuron could 
> turn it from a c-neuron to a ~c-neuron. But it seems you are saying there
> is no in between state: it is either a c-neuron or a ~c-neuron.

I consider them not much different from b-neurons, and just as in b-neurons I would not rule out the possibility of dysfunctional but still operational ones.

gotta run, more later... feel free to respond...

-gts



      



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