<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span>Another problem with the computational model of mind, which I will add on top of my own post here, is that it seems to lead to the homunculus fallacy. Simply stated: if the brain is like a computer then who/where/what is the computer operator? Is that homunculus also a computer?</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><span><br></span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><span>-Gordon</span></div> <div style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;
font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <hr size="1"> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">From:</span></b> Gordon <gts_2000@yahoo.com><br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> <br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Thursday, April 25, 2013 8:35 PM<br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [ExI] Digital Consciousness .<br> </font> </div> <div class="y_msg_container"><br><div id="yiv6649837118"><div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div><div style="font-size:12pt;">Most of us here have probably heard of John Searle's famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Chinese Room Argument (CRA) which attempts to show that computers can never know the meanings of the symbols they manipulate, i.e., that
semantics cannot come from manipulation of symbols according to the rules of syntax in a computer program. </div><div style="font-size:12pt;"><br></div><div style="background-color:transparent;">Many of us may not however know that Searle's more interesting work on the subject occurred later in his life. He realized that his CRA had missed an important point: that there is no syntax in the brain in the first place - that syntax is not intrinsic to physics. Syntax is, rather, assigned by the observer. </div><div style="
background-color:transparent;"><span style="background-color:transparent;"><br></span></div><div style="background-color:transparent;"><span style="background-color:transparent;">As Searle put it in a speech to the American Philosophical Association, "</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;">Computational states are not </span><i>discovered within</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"> the physics [of the brain], they are </span><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;">assigned</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-style:italic;">to</span> the
physics... </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This is a different argument from the Chinese Room Argument and I should have seen it ten years ago but I did not. The Chinese Room Argument showed that semantics is not intrinsic to syntax. I am now making the separate and different point that syntax is not intrinsic to physics.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;">" </span></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color:transparent;font-size:12pt;"><br></span></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><span style="background-color:transparent;font-size:12pt;">This idea is disastrous to the theory that the brain is like a digital computer.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;font-size:12pt;"> Even if we could find a way to get semantics from syntax, syntax
is not intrinsic to the brain.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><br></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><span>If the brain is not <span style="font-style:italic;">intrinsically </span>like a digital computer operating according to syntactical rules of a program then for what reason to do we think we can make a conscious brain on a digital computer? It seems to me that to make a conscious brain, we must do something much closer to what nature has done.</span></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;"><br></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: transparent;">-Gordon</div></div><div style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div
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