[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Fri Apr 26 04:07:25 UTC 2013


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 10:35 PM, Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Most of us here have probably heard of John Searle's famous (or infamous,
> depending on your point of view) Chinese Room Argument
>

Yes I've heard of it, the most idiotic thought experiment in history.

> He realized that his CRA had missed an important point
>

No shit Sherlock.

>that there is no syntax in the brain in the first place
>

I'm not sure what you mean by "in the first place". Chomsky thinks that we
inherit certain rules of grammar but it's not really important if he's
right or not, regardless of whether it comes from genes or from the
environment everybody in every culture, regardless of what language they
speak, has pretty extensive syntactic rules in their brain by the time they
are 6 or 7. And nowadays even cell phones have pretty extensive syntactic
rules in their memory banks.

> that syntax is not intrinsic to physics. Syntax is, rather, assigned by
> the observer.
>

Yes, there is not just one correct syntax and no human language is perfect,
they all have needless wheels within wheels. I still don't see what your
point is.

> As Searle put it in a speech to the American Philosophical Association,
> "Computational states are not discovered within the physics [of the brain],
> they are assigned to the physics
>

Computational states are no different from anything else, they happened for
a reason or they do not. If they happened for a reason then they are
deterministic and if they do not then they were random.

> The Chinese Room Argument showed that semantics is not intrinsic to
> syntax.
>

The Chinese Room Argument showed that John Searle is not a very bright man.

> I am now making the separate and different point that syntax is not
> intrinsic to physics."
>

Chocolate cake is not intrinsic to physics either, lots of different cake
recipes are compatible with the laws of physics. If you have a point I'll
be damned if I see it.

> It seems to me that to make a conscious brain
>

To hell with consciousness! People on the internet love to talk about
consciousness because it's so damn easy but they hate to talk about
intelligence because it's so damn hard.

> we must do something much closer to what nature has done.
>

Without question random mutation and natural selection is the stupidest way
there is to make complex objects, but until the invention of brains it was
the only way to do it. What a moron has accomplished a intelligent designer
(and I'm not talking about God) can do too and it won't take 3.5 billion
years either.

  John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130426/149f2498/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list