[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Mike Dougherty]

So what part of "this" do you think should come around once per decade?

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 11:46 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I think it's time for this again
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 1:49 PM Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Sense data seems like the obvious place to look for that help: the man
>> in the room has no access to sense data from the outside world, so perhaps
>> that explains why he cannot attach meanings to the symbols he manipulates.
>> But when we look at how computers get sense data, we see that sense data
>> also amounts to nothing more than meaningless patterns of 1's and 0's.
>> >
>> > At this point Stathis throws up his hands and proclaims that Searle
>> preaches that human brains do something "magical". But that's not it at
>> all. The CRA merely illustrates an ordinary mundane fact: that the human
>> brain has no special place in the nature as a supposed "digital computer".
>> The brain has the same ordinary non-digital status as other products of
>> biological evolution, objects like livers and hearts and spleens and nuts
>> and watermelons. It just happens to be one very smart melon.
>>
>> So your gripe is with the digital part of computers?  Suppose analog
>> computers had become the dominant technology, would you still be
>> complaining that they can't be meaningfully intelligent because
>> they're merely machines lacking the quintessence that makes human
>> consciousness?  (opening yourself to potshots about the requirement of
>> a soul)
>>
>> Suppose I replicate the IO transformation of CR using a complex series
>> of tubes and buckets filled by an eternally replenished aquifer?
>> There's no digital zombie-ism to preclude intelligence, can can my
>> Rube Goldberg water wheel be intelligent?  Is it conscious?
>>
>> Have you ever seen the implementation of an adding machine using
>> cellular automata? (Game of Life, etc.)   It's an interesting setup
>> because the CA rules have nothing at all to do with counting or the
>> operation of addition - however the CA rules can still be exploited to
>> do interesting and useful computation.  Neurons may be bound by
>> analogous rules as the CA cells, but we still somehow exploit the
>> function of groups of neurons to convince ourselves that we're
>> intelligent and conscious of that belief.
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