Kim, Bruno,
> Not at all. You have already done the first and last leap of faith of
> the reasoning when accepting the digital brain at the first step. I am
> aware that you are not aware of that, because in the reply you seem to
> believe that the MEC hypothesis can be taken for granted. But it can't.
I think you are talking of two different machine conceptions.
I would like to quote Steve Harnad:
Harnad, S. Can a machine be conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 2003, 10, 67-75
BEGIN:
...if we do follow this much more sensible route to the definition of
"machine," we will find that a machine turns out to be simply: any
causal physical system, any "mechanism." And in that case, biological
organisms are machines too, and the answer to our question "Can a
machine be conscious" is a trivial "Yes, of course." We are conscious
machines.
Hence machines can obviously be conscious. The rest is just about what
kinds of machines can and cannot be conscious, and how -- and that
becomes a standard empirical research program in "cognitive science"...
END QUOTE
I think this is the machine concept Kim was using originally (and maybe
still has in mind).
This conception can, I think, be indeed taken for granted by every
scientifically minded person.
Bruno, on the other hand, is talking about the machine concept as it
exists in logic: here machine/mechanism - and also the
COMP(utationalism) of cognitive science - does not mean any physical
causal system, but effective mechanisms - an informal notion formalised
(according to Church-Turing Thesis) with UTM/Lambda/Rec. Functions.
And COMP is the assumption that we are Turing-emulable (with an UTM for
example), not the more trivial hypothesis that we are a physical causal
system.
And this (COMP), indeed, can't be taken for granted but must be assumed.
Happy Holidays,
Günther
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Received on Wed Dec 24 2008 - 10:44:01 PST