[ExI] The digital nature of brains (was: digital simulations)

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sat Jan 30 16:05:13 UTC 2010


2010/1/31 Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>:
> --- On Sat, 1/30/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It still doesn't count as meaningful use of words, it's
>> just a dictionary. Meaningful use of words would involve DWAP
>> participating in a discussion as we are now having.
>
> Okay, so I add more subroutines that allow DWAP to not only give you meaningful complete answers to your complete questions about the meanings of words, but also to respond to other complete sentences in other meaningful ways. I then use DWAP to respond to your posts here on ExI.
>
> I take it you think DWAP now has conscious understanding of words. If so then what amazing thing did I, a lowly programmer of syntax, do to give a real mental life to DWAP? How did that miracle happen?
>
> Looks to me like I merely deceived you with some fancy programming tricks.

Go ahead and write this clever program, you'll be a lot more famous than Searle!

Your argument is of the form, Here we have a couple of dozen different
elements, and obviously they're pretty stupid. No understanding in
them whatsoever! So how is it possible to get from a completely stupid
thing to something as clever as a human? Obviously, it's impossible.
Therefore humans must get their cleverness from some supernatural
source.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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