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| Authored by: PolR on Thursday, July 19 2012 @ 06:40 PM EDT |
Think of a printing press. Is telling the story in the novel a function of the
printing press? Of course not. It only prints marks of ink on paper. But there
is no dispute that the book conveys a semantics. This is the kind of distinction
I make. Computer are like printing presses. They are not functionally related to
the semantics if we define "functionally related" as resulting from
the operation of the machine. But the semantical relationship is still present.
If you want to compare with the chemistry of the brain I am not sure physicians
completely understand what happens in there. Some philosophers compare the brain
to Turing machines but there is no universal agreement. I don't think we have
the data to make a fact-based determination. Do we have scientific proof that
the brain computes algorithms in the mathematical sense? Without such a proof
your argument is speculation.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 20 2012 @ 08:52 PM EDT |
Regarding semantics, check out the Chinese Room Argument, and its critics. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
or http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
It seems to me that PoIR takes a point of view similar to that of John Searle,
who devised the Chinese Room argument. I am sympathetic to his point of view,
particularly at the instruction cycle level, but I think we should be aware of
other ways of looking at things.
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