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

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 31 17:42:38 UTC 2010


--- On Sat, 1/30/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>> He no longer exists as part of a larger system that
>> might understand the symbols, unless you want to step foot
>> into the domain of religion and claim that some god
>> understands the symbols that he cannot understand. Is that
>> your claim?
 
> He is the whole system, but his intelligence is only a
> small and inessential part of the system, as it could easily 
> be replaced by dumber components. 

Show me who or what has conscious understanding of the symbols. 

> It's irrelevant that the man doesn't really
> understand what he is doing. The ensemble of neurons doesn't
> understand what it's doing either, and they are the whole system too.

I have no objection to your saying that neither the system nor anything contained in it has conscious understanding, but in that case you need to understand that you don't disagree with me; you don't believe in strong AI any more than I do.

-gts






      



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