Subject: matting scrutiny

From: "indifferently" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 17:03:28 +0300

things in the world exist irrespective of whether we know  them or not. I would say a lot of trouble is hidden in the words "given instructions on how to convert one set of Chinese symbols to another".
Don't be mislead by the fact that its 'life' would run very slowly; it won't notice.
It's like Maxwell's Demon: "assume we could distinguish between hot and cold (high and low energy) particles, then .
First, he has done important work in a wide variety of fields.
(Go Tenderloin or Hunters point or Richmond in east bay or East Oakland, say. Beyond that, who can say whether an ant is concious whereas a hypothetical computer program that passes the Turing test is not?
You just made a load of unsubstantiated statements of faith.
But maybe kids in the bedroom given teddy bears to play with (19th century?
I'll bet they even naturally select code patterns that the original designer never predicted, more closely aligned to survival in their environment.
) Having a conversation with Blockhead would be just like having a conversation with a real person.
Have you considered that it just is?
What if Blockhead had no record of conversations, only a set of rules hardwired in, and a large but lossy memory, and a clock that wasn't quite perfect.
There's something about computer programming that gets you thinking that the brain is nothing more than a special kind of program.
Because one property of computer programs is that they can run on any sort of hardware. After all, talking to a properly-enabled cell phone works just like talking to a properly-enabled person!
To me, the human skull-box and the Chinese Room are perfectly analogous. Make Blockhead reproducible, with a lossy pattern of the program.
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It's hardly the knock-down argument I was waiting for.