Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Tom Caylor writes:
>
> > > I agree (with the proviso that I suppose that by "machine" you talk
> > > about the old pregodelian conception of (non universal) machine.
> > > We don't know what universal machine are capable of, and I don't see
> > > why a present "God" would abandon them. I hope you can harbor some
> > > doubt about the proposition that machine are stupid, lack subjective
> > > phenomenality, etc.
> > >
> > > Bruno
> > >
> > >
> > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
> >
> > I don't want to commit my future to a machine.
> >
> > Tom
>
> It's an interesting turn of phrase in the current discussion: did you really mean
> to say "I don't want to" or "I don't think it is the case, independently of what I
> want"?
>
I said "I don't want to..." to bring it back to the point that meaning
is ultimately personal. The modern philosophers redefined "personal"
as meaning "meaningless" and this is the suppositional sea of 0's and
1's that we are all swimming in, actually sinking in if we are a
machine.
> Anyway, I don't see how you could deny you are a machine any more than you
> could deny a car is a machine. You are made up of tiny little components all working
> together smoothly, and if something breaks, you break. God could have made us solid
> like a potato animated by an immaterial soul, or left out the solid part altogether, but
> instead he made every part function in accordance with the basically very well understood
> chemistry of a handful of elements. It's amazing that these chemical reactions give rise to
> walking, talking humans, but then I'm still pretty impressed that my car can take me to places
> in quiet comfort while thousands of explosions are occurring in the engine.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
> _________________________________________________________________
This is going to be fun exercise. "I am not a machine." There, I just
denied it, even though you don't see how. But you now have some
empirical evidence. Unless you don't consider me as a valid part of
the population. Just kidding, my point is that we can't use science to
answer these questions. You and Bruno already are hypothesizing that
we are machines. It's fun to see where it leads, but after a finite
number of steps I want to stop (not "it is the case that I will stop
independently of what I want", whether or not that is true) because I
*believe* I am not a machine. By the way, a car cannot do what I just
did (in a finite number of steps), unless it is preprogrammed to do it,
but then that isn't the real thing.
Tom
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Received on Mon Dec 04 2006 - 14:20:00 PST