[ExI] Philosophy and philosophers

[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Dan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> he's [Searle] is not a dualist

However I am a duelist, I think that a noun (like the brain) is not the
same as the way a noun behaves (like the mind).

 > the Chinese Room, regardless of your view of it, don't you agree that
> it's been influential in the AI field
>

I agree that the Chinese Room has been influential, but not in a good way.
The Chinese Room thought experiment is not just wrong it is STUPID. I say
this because it has 3 colossal flaws, just one would render it stupid and 3
render it stupidity cubed:

1) It assumes that a small part of a system has all the properties of the
entire system.

2) It assumes that slowing down consciousness would not make things strange
and that strange things can not exist. Yes it's strange that a room can be
conscious but it would also be strange if the grey goo inside your head was
slowed down by a factor of a hundred thousand million billion trillion.

3) This is the stupidest reason of the lot. Searle wants to prove that
mechanical things may behave intelligently but only humans can be
conscious. Searle starts by showing successfully that the Chinese Room does
indeed behave intelligently, but then he concludes that no consciousness
was involved in the operation of that intelligent room. How does he reach
that conclusion? I will tell you. Searle assumes that mechanical things may
behave intelligently but only humans can be conscious and it is perfectly
true that the little man is not aware of whats going on therefore Searle
concludes that consciousness was not involved in that intelligence,
therefore mechanical things may behave intelligently but only humans can be
conscious. By assuming what he wants to prove all Searle has proven is that
he's a idiot.

And now let me tell you about Clark's Chinese Room: You are a professor of
Chinese Literature and are in a room with me and the great Chinese
Philosopher and Poet Laozi. Laozi writes something in his native language
on a paper and hands it to me. I walk 10 feet and give it to you. You read
the paper and are impressed with the wisdom of the message and the beauty
of its language. Now I tell you that I don't know a word of Chinese; can
you find any deep philosophical  implications from that fact? I believe
Clark's Chinese Room is every bit as profound as Searle's Chinese Room. Not
very.

All Searle did was come up with a wildly impractical model (the Chinese
Room) of a very very VERY slow intelligence in which a human being happens
to play a trivial part.

 > Quine, Russell, and Frege all studied philosophy, and their major work
> was as philosophers.
>

Quine was very witty writer and  logician and I'm a fan of logic,  but I
always associate him with Douglas Hofstadter and his book "Gödel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", the most brilliant book I ever read. In
that book Hofstadter coins a new verb "to quine" which involves the use
/mention distinction.

Bertrand Russell's major work was the mathematical book Principia
Mathematica; he said that besides himself and his coauthor Alfred North
Whitehead only one other person read all 3 of the enormous volumes cover to
cover, and that person was Kurt Godel; but that one reader was enough to
change everything. This isn't a exact quote but he said that as he got
older he got too stupid for mathematics so he switched to philosophy, and
when he got even older and was too stupid for philosophy he switched to
politics.

And as for Ferge...

 > Frege pretty much single-handedly developing modern symbolic logic,
>

I couldn't have said it better myself.

> I'm not disagreeing with the value of Darwin's contributions, though it's
> likely he did have a philosophy course in divinity school.
>

If it was in divinity school it was a anti philosophy course.


> > Also, he wasn't really a professional scientist -- not that there were
> many at that time.
>

The word "scientist" hadn't even been invented, people like Darwin and
Newton were called "Natural Philosophers", a charming term that I wish we
still used. But it's true that Darwin was not a professional in the sense
that he was never payed for his scientific work but he didn't need to be,
Darwin was rich.


>> And what important new ideas did they come up with that Einstein, Dirac
> or Feynman hadn't discovered a half century  before?
>


> > The scientists you mention were steeped in philosophy,
>

As I said I love philosophy, it's philosophers I have a problem with.


> > Einstein especially in the ideas of Ernst Mach.
>

Einstein was a fan of some of Mach's ideas but Mach was not a fan of
Einstein, to the day he died he never accepted relativity, Special or
General, nor even the atomic theory of matter.


> > scientists don't tend to come up with great new philosophic ideas.
>

Scientists (and mathematicians) are the only ones who do come up with great
new philosophic ideas, after they do it takes card carrying philosophers a
century or two to incorporate the discovery into their own work, but by
then of course scientists have moved on. So philosophers fight the last war
and are always 2 or 3 revolutions in thought behind.


> > But if you want to look at a philosophy who seems to have some direct
> impact on science, think Popper.
>

Science impacted Popper but Popper didn't impact science, no scientist
would read Popper and become a better scientist because of it. Popper and
all philosophers of science reminds me of movie critics, they keep telling
movie makers how they're doing it all wrong but couldn't make a movie
themselves if their life depended on it.


> >  My hobby horse is against those making uninformed attacks on Aristotle.
> I see that all too often coming from people who haven't actually studied
> Aristotle,
>

I have't read much Aristotle, few have, unlike Plato he was not a good
writer; as for his ideas, about 5 minutes of study (he doesn't deserve
more) is enough to convince me that Aristotle was the worst physicist who
ever lived.

 John K Clark
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