[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Mike Dougherty]

I am disappointed to note that while rereading my own post that you replied
to i was struck by how much better was the writing then.   I know many
people lament the descent of the list from its heyday... but i wonder how
much personal responsibility any of us take for letting attention and
commitment to quality suffer.

Other than that, i still like the idea of an analog computer powered by an
endlessly refilling fountain.

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 11:28 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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