jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

In article <1116858144.075415.255720@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

In article <1116811750.087698.54780@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote:

Everything that consciousness was, the argument went, was surely unique
to and could be traced to a particular center of the biological human
brain. However, it has been shown that that the human brain has
"functional plasticity" such that people with as much as half of their
brains removed during early infancy apparently can develop into adults
whose behavior cannot be distinguished from other adults with all of
their original brain intact.

Sheesh! These people need to get out and work on farm for ten
years.

They'd see that some psychological (and neurological) theories
are udderly ridiculous in context of AI, a result of moodled
thinking.

Nope. There is no evidence that this description is about a duck.
My response indicated that such a marketing ploy is not effective.
Yet you still keep trying by....

Functionalism

....introducing a red herring that stinks; you deliberately
misinterpreted a word I used.

If a Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented
in order to divert attention from the original issue, the basic idea
being to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument
and to another topic, having the following form: Topic A is under
discussion; Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to
topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A); Topic A is
abandoned, changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an
argument against a claim, and you mention "function" in a way that
appears to a be a "distinction without a difference," then how have you
determined that it was my (will) to do such a thing.

It seems that the entire argument does in fact show paralells to the
duck argument and also the "Chinese Room" argument as well; as long as
the function meets the criteria processes.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html#index

Chinese room

From Wikipedia,

the free encyclopedia.

The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment

..designed by John
Searle (1980) to debunk the stronger claims made by strong AI (also
functionalism).

A belief of strong AI is that if a machine were to pass a Turing test,
then it can be regarded as "thinking" in the same sense as human
thought.

.. Or put another way, proponents of strong AI hold that the
human brain is a computer (of a sort) and the mind nothing more than a
program.

.. Adherents to this idea believe furthermore that systems
demonstrating these abilities help us to explain human thought. A third
belief, necessary to the first two, is that the biological material
present in the brain is not necessary for thought.

..Searle summarizes
this viewpoint, which he opposes, in this manner:

The computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the
appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in a sense that
computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand
and have other cognitive states. (Hofstadter and Dennett, 353)

Contents
1 Thought experiment
2 Formal argument
3 Criticism
3.1 The systems reply
3.2 The robot reply
4 Related works

Thought experiment

In the Chinese room thought experiment, a person who understands no
Chinese sits in a room into which written Chinese characters are
passed. In the room there is also a book containing a complex set of
rules (established ahead of time) to manipulate these characters, and
pass other characters out of the room. This would be done on a rote
basis, eg. "When you see character X, write character Y". The idea is
that a Chinese-speaking interviewer would pass questions written in
Chinese into the room, and the corresponding answers would come out of
the room appearing from the outside as if there were a native Chinese
speaker in the room.

It is Searle's belief that such a system could indeed pass a Turing
Test, yet the person who manipulated the symbols would obviously not
understand Chinese any better than he did before entering the room.
Searle tries to refute the claims of strong AI one at a time, by
positioning himself as the one who manipulates the Chinese symbols. The
Chinese room assails two claims of Strong AI. The first claim is that a
system which can pass the Turing test understands the input and output.
Searle replies that as the "computer" in the Chinese room, he gains no
understanding of Chinese by simply manipulating the symbols according
to the formal program, in this case being the complex rules.

.. The
operator of the room need not have any understanding of what the
interviewer is asking, or the replies that he is producing. He may not
even know that there is a question and answer session going on outside
the room.

The second claim of strong AI which Searle objects to is the claim that
the system explains human understanding. Searle asserts that since the
system is functioning, in this case passing the Turing Test, and yet
there is no understanding on the part of the operator, then the system
does not understand and therefore could not explain human
understanding.

The core of Searle's argument is the distinction between syntax and
semantics. The room is able to shuffle characters according to the rule
book. That is, the room's behaviour can be described as following
syntactical rules. But in Searle's account it does not know the meaning
of what it has done; that is, it has no semantic content. The
characters do not even count as symbols because they are not
interpreted at any stage of the process.

The fact that syntax is insufficient to account for semantics is
perhaps not as controversial as understanding what needs to be added to
syntax in order to account for semantics. Searle lists consciousness,
intentionality, subjectivity and mental causation as candidates. Any
adequate theory of the mind must be able to explain intentional states.
Searle is at pains to point out that the mind is a result of brain
function.

.. He rejects dualism, insisting that mental states are
biological phenomena.

Formal argument

In 1984 Searle produced a more formal version of the argument of which
the Chinese Room forms a part. He listed four premises:

Premise 1: Brains cause minds

Premise 2: Syntax is not sufficient for semantics

Premise 3: Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal,
syntactic structure

Premise 4: Minds have semantic content
The second premise is supposedly supported by the Chinese Room
argument, since Searle holds that the room follows only formal
syntactical rules, and does not "understand" Chinese.

Searle posits that these lead directly to three conclusions:

Conclusion 1: No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a
system a mind. Programs are not minds.

Conclusion 2: The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely
in virtue of running a computer program

Conclusion 3: Anything else that causes minds would have to have causal
powers at least equivalent to those of the brain
Searle describes this version as "excessively crude".

There has been considerable debate about whether this argument is
indeed valid. These discussions centre on the various ways in which the
premises can be parsed. One can read premise 3 as saying that computer
programs have syntactic but not semantic content, and so Premises 2, 3
and 4 validly lead to conclusion 1. This leads to debate as to the
origin of the semantic content of a computer program.

Criticism

There are many criticisms of Searle's argument. Most can be
categorized as either systems replies or robot replies.

The systems reply

Although the individual in the Chinese room does not understand
Chinese, perhaps the person and the room considered together as a
system, do. Searle's reply to this is that someone might in principle
memorise the rule book; they would then be able to interact as if they
understood Chinese, but would still just be following a set of rules,
with no understanding of the significance of the symbols they are
manipulating.

The robot reply

Suppose that instead of a room, the program was placed into a robot
that could wander around and interact with its environment. Surely then
it would be said to understand what it is doing? Searle's reply is to
suppose that, unbeknownst to the individual in the Chinese room, some
of the inputs he was receiving came directly from a camera mounted on a
robot, and some of the outputs were used to manipulate the arms and
legs of the robot. Nevertheless, the person in the room is still just
following the rules, and does not know what the symbols mean.

Suppose that the program instantiated in the rule book simulated in
fine detail the interaction of the neurons in the brain of a Chinese
speaker. Then surely the program must be said to understand Chinese?
Searle replies that such a simulation will not have reproduced the
important features of the brain-its causal and intentional states.

But what if a brain simulation were connected to the world in such a
way that it possessed the causal power of a real brain-perhaps linked
to a robot of the type described above? Then surely it would be able to
think. Searle agrees that it is in principle possible to create an
artificial intelligence, but points out that such a machine would have
to have the same causal powers as a brain. It would be more than just a
computer program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

But the processes are limited to the physical.

What would the necessary conditions be for a process not being
physical, if you claim to concieve of such prcesses?

let the phone kill and eat your worthless computer locs;

http://images.google.com/images?q=pocket+pc+phone