[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Will Steinberg]

Well we've been talking about consciousness!  Just getting cerebral again
in general.  This whole Searle clusterfuck was probably the most fun I ever
had on the list and was a long period of great discussions.  And I'm
interested to see what people might have to add after a ten year break from
the topic :3

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 12:15 AM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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