[ExI] Wernicke's aphasia and the CRA.

Alfio Puglisi alfio.puglisi at gmail.com
Sat Dec 12 17:52:11 UTC 2009


On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- On Sat, 12/12/09, John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> > Then why isn't it also absurd to think that an intelligent computer
> > has the mental life of a vegetable?
>
> Because 1) programs are formal (syntactic), and 2) minds have mental
> contents (semantics), and 3) syntax is neither constitutive of nor
> sufficient for semantics, programs are neither constitutive of nor
> sufficient for minds.
>
> It follows also that because biological brains have minds, they must do
> something besides run formal programs.
>

Do you also expand this statement to "something besides moving molecules
around and shuffling electrical charges?" Because that's what a biological
brain does. If this description is too low-level to encode semantics, then
you have just defined a computational substrate for the (formal or
non-formal) brain program that encodes the semantics and, voila',  the
simulation is ready :-)   Unless minds are not physics-based, there's no way
to escape the conclusion that semantics, or whatever makes up mental states,
is some function of brain's matter and electrical charges arrangement and
movement.

Alfio
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20091212/67a0018f/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list