Neurologist outlines why machines can’t think

[Silmarien]

No doubt; but perhaps she hasn't encountered that particular research.

Then you can either write directly to her asking her what she thinks of it, or bring it up here without referring to her at all. To suggest that she isn't familiar with her own field because you're under the mistaken impression that she's a theist is condescending in the extreme.

There may be a confusion of terms here, given that "causality" has different meanings in science and philosophy. I don't think it's very useful to say that causality in the philosophical sense emerges, since the concept of emergence presupposes some prior existing form of causality, unless we think that emergence happens spontaneously for no reason whatsoever, which I find irrational in the extreme. Not to mention bizarrely dogmatic. And of course is going to slam straight into the problems associated with Humean causality.

So I don't see how invoking emergence avoids Cartwright's categories. Once we move from the physical to the metaphysical, we're still left viewing what's going on through an empirical, instrumental, Platonic, or Aristotelian framework.

You misunderstand me; I was referring to her conclusion about the accounts she describes (I thought I said that):

"Conclusion. None of the 4 contemporary accounts of laws that I have reported on can make sense of laws of Nature without God."

Because the fourth account replaces the concept of laws with powers. She explicitly clarifies this in the very next sentence and then says that the choice is between God and natural powers.

Actually, I'm a big fan of intuition - provided it involves areas of sufficient experience and expertise.

The brain is an excellent 'deep learning' system, but for reliable intuitions, it needs a lot of training examples in the relevant field. I found it very useful in my software development career, but it does have the same problem that they're currently trying to address in deep learning AIs - it doesn't show its working; i.e. it doesn't provide explanations, because it's basically just sophisticated pattern-matching.

That doesn't really address the problem that intuition plays a role on all sides in this particular issue. You have materialistic intuitions, which is certainly not uncommon in computer related fields, but they're not necessarily more reliable here than anyone else's.

 

[Silmarien]

If we can make a "robot zombie" that can trick people into thinking that it's human. If you couldn't tell a difference, then what would be the difference? It can already be done in context of chatroom, text, or phone conversation.

I think Searle's Chinese Room is a decent illustration of the difference between actually thinking and merely being able to trick someone into believing that you are thinking. Differences don't depend upon my ability to distinguish between things--even if I were blind, red and green would be separate colors.

From a policy perspective, if we have reason to believe that our robot zombie might be conscious, then we ought to grant it rights as if it were. Because it very well might be. But obviously only the robot zombie could know for sure.

However, given my initial view (as summarised in your post), I don't see how the other view (belief in the reality of the existence of the ideal-in-context-of-our-reality God) is compatible. I can see the social and emotional utility attending such belief, but the belief in an ill-defined and inexplicable deity itself seems irrational and at odds with the first view. For all that we're good at compartmentalizing and holding conflicting ideas, it doesn't work for me.

It's fine that it doesn't work for you, but that doesn't make it irrational or a matter of compartmentalization. A naturalistic theory of mind would drive me straight into a disassociation disorder, because it's something that I cannot reconcile with reality. Speaking for those of a more scholastic bent, we really do disagree with you on which position is more rational. Social and emotional utility is great, but some of us are in the theistic camp for intellectual reasons also.

So yeah, I don't see much difference between the charge that theists are compartmentalizing for emotional reasons and the one that atheists are denying what they know in their hearts to be true, or whatever nonsense people come up with. Having been on both sides (though I was a decidedly continental atheist), it really is a matter of deep, axiomatic disagreement, and everything else flows from that.

 

[zippy2006]

Great posts in this thread! They are by far the highest quality content I have ever read on this forum, and you handled the unwieldy Frumious remarkably well. So what gives? Are you a bored philosophy professor killing time?

Of course. I subscribe to a computational theory of mind (if an explicitly Neoplatonic version), so I have no problem with genuinely conscious and teleologically oriented artificial intelligence. My concern here would be how goal-seeking behavior can be accounted for at all on a materialistic ontology. How does non-teleological behavior give rise to teleological behavior?

Here's a question for you: how does teleologically-oriented artificial intelligence arise in your Neoplatonic system? Given the last question in your quote here, presumably you believe that the seeds of AI already contain some requisite level of teleology?

My philosophy--which is admittedly rusty--generally follows Aristotelian-Thomistic contours from a Catholic perspective. The Aristotelian tradition is clearly present in your thought, but can you say a word about your Neoplatonism? I've always been interested in that angle largely due to the fact that many great thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Eckhart seemed to have a strong Neoplatonic root. Further: what would be a good Neoplatonic introduction for someone familiar with the A-T tradition and Catholic mysticism?

Thanks!
-Zip

 

[Strathos]

Well that's a bit dogmatic don't you think.

I find ideas like that to be potentially very dangerous, similar to dehumanizing people by claiming that they are demons/possessed by demons, which has historically led to many atrocities.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... there are hundreds of reported cases of near-death experiences where a person can be completely brain dead, that is they have no brain activity at all and yet once they are revived they recall real events that took place while pronounced brain dead, events that are affirmed by credible sources, such as the doctors themselves.

No; I did some research into this a few years ago. In fact, such reports are rare in comparison to the number of people potentially in a position to experience them; most are simply unverifiable uncorroborated claims, or hearsay. The few well-known cases that have been thoroughly investigated do not hold up particularly well.

Brain death is the irreversible loss of all functions of the brain, including the brainstem, so no-one comes back from it, by definition. Sometimes people recover from a state where there is no detectable brain activity, but what this means depends on the situation - standard EEG may not detect residual brainstem activity, and in an emergency situation may not be available. There are differing standards for the diagnosis of brain death in different countries (and different states in the US).

Sometimes clinical death is invoked; e.g. "I died on the operating table". The definition of clinical death varies but is typically identified with the cessation of autonomous heartbeat and respiration, which means artificial resuscitation is necessary. This is not uncommon today, and is often done deliberately in operations.

The biggest study of NDEs was the 4 year AWARE study conducted by Dr Sam Parnia, involving cardiac arrests in major hospitals around the world. Of the 101 patients who completed the study, 46% had no awareness, recall, or memories of their time in cardiac arrest; of the remaining 55, 46 described memories incompatible with a NDE (by the Greyson NDE Scale), 7 had no auditory or visual recall of CA events (they had dreamlike experiences of tunnels, bright lights, & beautiful people), and 2 had some visual or auditory memory of CA events - one whose heart was fibrillating, reported looking down on himself and accurately described what was happening at the time; they concluded this likely corresponded with up to 3 min of conscious awareness during CA and CPR. One had auditory memory of events when the staff thought he was unconscious.

The study concluded, "This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness." So interesting, but nothing particularly exciting there.

If you have some particular case or cases in mind, I would be interested in details, links, references, etc.; some new examples may have appeared since I last looked.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

To suggest that she isn't familiar with her own field because you're under the mistaken impression that she's a theist is condescending in the extreme.

I didn't suggest she's unfamiliar with her own field, unless she's also a quantum physicist; nor do I think she's a theist - I don't know what her personal beliefs are. You're reading into my post things I didn't say.

There may be a confusion of terms here, given that "causality" has different meanings in science and philosophy. I don't think it's very useful to say that causality in the philosophical sense emerges, since the concept of emergence presupposes some prior existing form of causality, unless we think that emergence happens spontaneously for no reason whatsoever, which I find irrational in the extreme. Not to mention bizarrely dogmatic. And of course is going to slam straight into the problems associated with Humean causality.

Yes, the meanings may be different, and her use of 'the notion of causes' implies an interpretation.

So I don't see how invoking emergence avoids Cartwright's categories. Once we move from the physical to the metaphysical, we're still left viewing what's going on through an empirical, instrumental, Platonic, or Aristotelian framework.

Sure; I didn't suggest otherwise.

Because the fourth account replaces the concept of laws with powers. She explicitly clarifies this in the very next sentence and then says that the choice is between God and natural powers.

Yes, I read that.

That doesn't really address the problem that intuition plays a role on all sides in this particular issue. You have materialistic intuitions, which is certainly not uncommon in computer related fields, but they're not necessarily more reliable here than anyone else's.

I agree; I don't think philosophical intuitions are likely to be reliable, although they can be regarding the logic of the arguments involved.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... you handled the unwieldy Frumious remarkably well.

Lol! I'm just a philosophical novice, but I enjoy a good discussion

 

[DogmaHunter]

Not really.

We can cause physical brain patterns to alter, meaning it's the immaterial mind that dictates the brain.

And "we" use thoughts to do that, right.
Thoughts, which require a physical brain to manifest / happen.
So it's the brain itself that does that.

You haven't demonstrated, at all, that there is some "immaterial" component to the thing you call "mind" - which you yourself said that "mind" is not really thing, it rather is what the brain does.

The only valid conclusion from the evidence, is that the mind IS the brain. More specifically, the mind is what the brain does / produces. It's a function of the brain.
The "mind" does not exist as a seperate entity.

Also, right now, all of your thoughts and memories are webbed in a steady state of quantum entanglement, and there are hundreds of reported cases of near-death experiences where a person can be completely brain dead, that is they have no brain activity at all and yet once they are revived they recall real events that took place while pronounced brain dead, events that are affirmed by credible sources, such as the doctors themselves. Energy is never destroyed, that's the first law of thermodynamics.

There are also thousands of reports of alien abduction.
Meanwhile, in actual clinical studies (as supposed to anecdotes), such things don't seem to happen.

The sciency sounding whoo-whoo a la Deepak Chopra, doesn't impress either.

Energy is only transferred and contained, which is why there are so many cases of people born without a full brain, even born with virtually no brain at all, but still have a self-awareness & personality.

I'ld like to see a single example of someone being self-aware with personality, while not having a brain.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Well that's a bit dogmatic don't you think.

I'm a software programmer.
No, AI engines aren't "user interfaces for evil spirits".

Seriously dude...

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

So yeah, I don't see much difference between the charge that theists are compartmentalizing for emotional reasons and the one that atheists are denying what they know in their hearts to be true, or whatever nonsense people come up with.

I wasn't referring to theists compartmentalizing, I was referring to me, a compartmentalizing human.

 

[devolved]

I think Searle's Chinese Room is a decent illustration of the difference between actually thinking and merely being able to trick someone into believing that you are thinking. Differences don't depend upon my ability to distinguish between things--even if I were blind, red and green would be separate colors.

Chinese Room concept is a bit outdated when it comes to some former misconceptions about continuum of "understanding" as a concept. I would argue that the concept of "understanding" is illusory, and that there is no difference between cognition and "understanding" except for the breadth of the context any given cognitive process would link to. What we would call "understanding" seems to be just that - our ability to quickly trace and approximate how closely certain patterns match other patterns.

What we would call "heavy thinking" generally involves the difficulty of tracing the context, which requires different sets of cognitive processes that lack required context and depend on experimental try/fail.

Not understanding, is ironically involves the same exact process as understanding. The difference is that there is no cognitive pattern match on the other end of that process.

I think we can agree that conscious process and "understanding" are two separate things. One can understand something without consciously doing so. From what we see from some experimental data "Understanding" as a process informs the consciousness as a process. Consciousness seems to sit "on top" of cognition. That's why I don't see claims that consciousness may be the "other dimension" as dismisable, at least not yet.

From a policy perspective, if we have reason to believe that our robot zombie might be conscious, then we ought to grant it rights as if it were. Because it very well might be. But obviously only the robot zombie could know for sure.

I actually take the concept of rights to be just illusory as the concept of understanding. If it's something you have to enforce for these to exist, then these don't exist in actual reality. The concept of rights, as we understand these today, is a concept of behavioral expectation or morality. "Rights" automatically exist in context of agreed-upon moral behavior. The "fight for rights" is simply an attempt to modify expected moral behavior to favor a certain group.

I'm not sure that talking about "rights" is more helpful than talking about broader concept of morality. Morality tends to be more egalitarian IMO, so we should stick with that. Discussing rights can quickly devolved intod discussion about artificial suppression of natural advantages, which is what it tends to be today.

For example, generally we don't consider it as a "sane" to bash a computer with a bat. Yet, I'm not sure that we can ever qualify owning a sex doll, no matter how realistic it may be, as "sex slavery".

Maybe if we progress down the road of intellectual maturity where we properly place ourselves on certain continuum of "symbiotic existence", instead of claiming dominance because we can. But, we are long way from that. There will be likely a couple "system failures" and "reboots" before we get closer.

 

[devolved]

So it's the brain itself that does that.

It's a good assumption, but you'd need to demonstrate that conscious thought is indeed a product of "material" brain process only. And to do that you would need an explanation of how brain produces conscious thought. Until you can definitively explain that, there's a room for assuming that there may be other variables to consiousness than what we refer to as "material".

The only valid conclusion from the evidence, is that the mind IS the brain. More specifically, the mind is what the brain does / produces. It's a function of the brain.
The "mind" does not exist as a seperate entity.

Mind relates to consciousness. Brain relates to physiology. Unless you can come up with a coherent explanation of how brain produces conscious experience... You can't conflate and equivocate these as function.

The problem is precisely that there seems to be an "internal observer" that sees as opposed to mere functional execution of zombie-like existence that we should have if deterministic materialism is all there is.

A good example would be playing an RPG. You hook into and observe a simulated world that exists and functions by "physical rules" that may be vastly different than yours. The rules by which the "observing mind" functions may be vastly different than those of the "physical reality" that such mind observes.

If the access to RPG is all you've had... You could confuse that with "ultimate reality" that you otherwise exist in.

If the RPG is of the Minecraft type, then you may be convinced that reality is built out of discrete cubes and that's all there is to reality. But it wouldn't explain as to how these cubes produce complex thought that you are engaging in. But that's essentially what you are doing with your claims of materialism.

 

[DogmaHunter]

It's a good assumption, but you'd need to demonstrate that conscious thought is indeed a product of "material" brain process only.

Ha, sneaky. Not "only". The "only" part is impossible.
I can only show that thought goes hand in hand with material brain activity (which these days is rather trivial with brain scans and such). Does that show that aren't "other" things going on? No.

You're basically trying to shift the burden of proof. If you wish to claim that there are immaterial processes involved, then it's upto you to provide evidence for that.

And to do that you would need an explanation of how brain produces conscious thought.

Disagree.
Detecting the material brain activity is one thing. Completely unraveling in detail how exactly that activity works, is another.

Until you can definitively explain that, there's a room for assuming that there may be other variables to consiousness than what we refer to as "material".

You can assume whatever you want.
You an also assume that there is an undetectable fairy in each of us that operates the brain like a space ship. But lacking any evidence for that assumption....

Mind relates to consciousness. Brain relates to physiology. Unless you can come up with a coherent explanation of how brain produces conscious experience... You can't conflate and equivocate these as function.

Again, you're mixing things up.
Understanding in detail how the brain does what it does, is not a requirement for demonstrating the relationship between the brain and what it does/produces.

The evidence that the "mind" (or consciousness, or spirit, or whatever you wish to call it) is a product of the brain is completely overwhelming. This is why altered personality or change in cognition, after brain damage or such, is a thing.

The problem is precisely that there seems to be an "internal observer" that sees as opposed to mere functional execution of zombie-like existence that we should have if deterministic materialism is all there is.

That is again an assumption. It assumes that material underpinnings can't account for consiousness. Yet, only material underpinnings can be observed.

A good example would be playing an RPG. You hook into and observe a simulated world that exists and functions by "physical rules" that may be vastly different than yours. The rules by which the "observing mind" functions may be vastly different than those of the "physical reality" that such mind observes.

If the access to RPG is all you've had... You could confuse that with "ultimate reality" that you otherwise exist in.

You don't need to look at RPG for examples of that.
Just look around the world in various culturs, cults, religions.

Some of them believe rather strange and weird things. To us. To them, it is totally normal.

If the RPG is of the Minecraft type, then you may be convinced that reality is built out of discrete cubes and that's all there is to reality. But it wouldn't explain as to how these cubes produce complex thought that you are engaging in. But that's essentially what you are doing with your claims of materialism

Sounds like you are making a Matrix type argument.
In any case, you are mistaken: I'm not a materialist. Not in the dogmatic sense at least. Not in the sense that I make the claim that "the material is all that exists." I might be one in the sense of "the material is all that seems to exist".

I'm very open to any sound evidence of immaterial, even supernatural, things. I just don't see the point in accepting such claims as true without such evidence. So I don't.

After all, there's a potentially infinite number of such claims.


So to sum up, my position is that all the currently available evidence suggests that the mind / spirit / consciousness / whatever is the product of a material brain. All the evidence suggests that no brain = mind / spirit / consciousness / whatever. I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests otherwise.

So why would I believe otherwise?

 

[devolved]

I can only show that thought goes hand in hand with material brain activity (which these days is rather trivial with brain scans and such). Does that show that

Well that's the thing. When that's all you can show ,you can't rush to definitively correlate the two without need for anything else out there.

If you did not know how TV works, I could likewise "show you" that TV is solely responsible for displaying the images that you see when I turn it on. Would it be up to you to debunk that claim?

You're basically trying to shift the burden of proof. If you wish to claim that there are immaterial processes involved, then it's upto you to provide evidence for that.

"Material" is an axiomatic model. You invoke it as an assumption. Why would you then assume that someone else had a burden of proof when you are making a claim that material exists, and projecting that claim to assuming that material is all that exists? You are assuming "material" by building models and naming properties.

You can't even prove that nature of reality is discreet. How would you prove that it's material apart from axiomatic framework?

The evidence that the "mind" (or consciousness, or spirit, or whatever you wish to call it) is a product of the brain is completely overwhelming. This is why altered personality or change in cognition, after brain damage or such, is a thing.

Yes, the evidence that TV independently produces the images is likewise overwhelming via the same logic. We can damage the TV or parts of the TV and we can know which one is producing the sound and which one is responsible for picture.

If the broadcast variable is hidden, then that's all you end up assuming... falsely.

I have no problem with that in a scope of methodology. It's useful in that scope. I'm not quite sure why you are making that claim outside the science lab.

Likewise, you are mixing up consciousness as "self" and personality. These are two different things. Ask someone who ever took a good dose of DMT and they'll explain.

That is again an assumption. It assumes that material underpinnings can't account for consiousness. Yet, only material underpinnings can be observed.

I'm not assuming that. I claim that I don't know. And in lack of knowledge there are more degrees of freedom to draw various hypothetical scenarios.

It doesn't mean that these scenarios have to be unconstrained. But we have room for these in context of philosophical discussions.

What you are trying to do here is definitively assume that material is the only viable me mechanism without actually explaining how a chain of physical causality can produce a coherent "mental picture".

You don't need to look at RPG for examples of that.
Just look around the world in various culturs, cults, religions.

Some of them believe rather strange and weird things. To us. To them, it is totally normal.

Having said that, not sure what your point is here.

My point is that if all you can see is RPG then you are limited to examination of RPG reality. Assuming that RPG perception is what reality is would be false, since you are not taking the observer into account.

 

[devolved]

In any case, you are mistaken: I'm not a materialist. Not in the dogmatic sense at least. Not in the sense that I make the claim that "the material is all that exists." I might be one in the sense of "the material is all that seems to exist".

But, in such case you are circularly defining "material". You are not merely saying that material is all that seems to exist. What you are saying first is that what seems to exist is material. It's like plopping a flag on the Moon and claiming it an American territory.

Likewise, you didn't arrive with that idea through independent examination of reality. You are merely adopting an axiomatic system that's fed through mainstream education of science as it exists today. That becomes the lens through which you examine reality that you call "material" by default.

In short. All you see is properties as your mind interprets these from observing reality. We know that, for example, perception of color is relative to how you "white balance" for lighting conditions. So, all of our instruments are "perception-centric". It's just mechanical way of "begging the question".

Thus, all you can claim from science is ratios and sequence. It's useful, of course, but you can't reify models simply because models reflect the same ratios and sequence.

Term "material" is irrelevant in context of causal factors behind something. "Material" is a model and not reality.

I'm very open to any sound evidence of immaterial, even supernatural, things. I just don't see the point in accepting such claims as true without such evidence. So I don't. After all, there's a potentially infinite number of such claims.

Again, what you are doing is defining the model, and then saying "I'm open to other models, as long as these are explain by language and constraints of my model"... but you don't really care to demonstrate why and how your model is viable beyond initial assumption that it is.

After all, there's a potentially infinite number of such claims.

We are not talking about potentially infinite. We are talking about specific continuum of observable. It maybe vaguely-defined, but it's not anymore vague than concept of "material".

So to sum up, my position is that all the currently available evidence suggests that the mind / spirit / consciousness / whatever is the product of a material brain. All the evidence suggests that no brain = mind / spirit / consciousness / whatever.

Again, you are running with an axiom that subsequently results in these dichotomies.

Methodological naturalism is a method for deriving ratios in certain context of arrangement and sequence. That's all it gives you. Someone like Lorenz Kraus can go on and tell all sorts of interesting stories as possibility, but he did not derive these through observation. These are projections that are held together with a long string of axiomatic assumptions that Lorenz is convinced are correct because his models can predict ratios in certain context. If the ratios don't work out well, then the property of these particles are normalized to make the ratio of the math work via rather incoherent claims like "point particles", for example. And the rationalization is that "reality is not what it seems to be".

So, which one is it ?

What Lorenz ignores is "his own self" in that equation, because people like himself built instruments that derive "minimal quantized ratios" (running with assumptions that these exist), and they call these particles. And subsequent experimentation is done by reducing the reading of the aggregate output of certain controlled events to those minimal ratios to claim that some particle is responsible for differential. That's the extend of "materialism" in context of modern particle physics.

Just like we can argue that clocks merely measure the movement of their own hands and we call that "time", we can argue that instruments measuring energetic ratios are called "particles". "Quantum" in QM is a mathematical construct. We never observe that in reality apart from instrumental readouts of differential aggregate that circularly reduced to "quantum".

But, what physics students get is the model first, and upon subsequent reification they are show how instrumental readouts confirm these models. And that's how education systems approach these... as axiomatic frameworks that are being reified as "reality" instead of approaching these as mere ratios of reality in specific contexts.

So, when you, being educated via such framework, reify this model... it becomes the lens through which you see the world and other possibility. This model becomes a "valid default", while it's inherently axiomatic. I'm not saying that it's not useful... but the useful part is the ratios and sequence... not the "verbiage story" constructed around that skeleton.

The point being... when you get a ratio of something, calling it "material" is irrelevant when it comes to unknown causal relationships. We have no clue whether we actually are in the Matrix, or "maya" or all are a part of collective consciousness that's merely engaging in "roleplay" in order to enhance "collective experience", or if we live in a continuum of reality sustained by God as a coherent function, or if we live in a multiverse of possibilities... etc. Dichotomizing something as "natural and material" and "spiritual and immaterial" is merely an axiomatic bias in action.

I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests otherwise. I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests otherwise.

Are you aware of any evidence that we can replicate conscious experience by means of mere computation or chain of electro-chemical reactions? If you don't, then why would you assume so?

 

[devolved]

I know I maybe confusing some people here, since it can be seen that I'm arguing both sides. But I'm doing so only because both sides have their place in this discussion in context of certain thresholds.

Methodological naturalism can be useful up to a certain point. After that point, if we adhere to initial assumption of methodological naturalism, we risk of being permanently stuck in that loop and plateau in scientific knowledge and development.

Therefore, wherever possible, these assumptions can be re-examined or provisionally set aside to see if different sets of assumptions can get us further in our quest for understanding reality. It may be that we may flip some switch somewhere and we'll figure out that we are looking at it all wrong. Unfortunately, the current philosophical framework of scientific education is virtually non-existent apart from a singular model that's subsequently reified as "real reality".

It's the scientific version of Trump's "real Americans".

 

[Silmarien]

Great posts in this thread! They are by far the highest quality content I have ever read on this forum, and you handled the unwieldy Frumious remarkably well. So what gives? Are you a bored philosophy professor killing time?

If only, hahaha. More like a bored attorney wishing I'd gone to grad school instead of law school!

Here's a question for you: how does teleologically-oriented artificial intelligence arise in your Neoplatonic system? Given the last question in your quote here, presumably you believe that the seeds of AI already contain some requisite level of teleology?

The way I view the mind actually draws more from Vedic thought, but I conceptualize it with Platonic language to avoid the hard idealistic eliminativism of Hinduism. Basically I agree with materialists that the mind can be reduced to a complex system of computational processes, but then I follow Plotinus in holding Intellect to be ontologically dependent upon a principle of absolute simplicity, so to speak. I would hold that at the heart of the self-conscious, subjective person is a little piece of nothingness in the apophatic sense.

As for AI and teleology, I would view all computation as teleological, so I don't necessarily see that as a problem. (My point was more that I would like to see materialists explain why reality appears to have a computational element without borrowing from hylomorphism or Platonism.)

My philosophy--which is admittedly rusty--generally follows Aristotelian-Thomistic contours from a Catholic perspective. The Aristotelian tradition is clearly present in your thought, but can you say a word about your Neoplatonism? I've always been interested in that angle largely due to the fact that many great thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Eckhart seemed to have a strong Neoplatonic root. Further: what would be a good Neoplatonic introduction for someone familiar with the A-T tradition and Catholic mysticism?

Oh, I'm a recovering Nietzschean, whose entire philosophical system was in direct opposition to Plato, so these days I tend to view questions in terms of Plato against his 19th and 20th century interlocutors. These are the forerunners of postmodernism, whose interests were primarily in the human person and their relationship with the world, which really is just a new permutation on all the problems that Plato described so clearly. I do, however, have a strange habit of alternating between continental and analytic moods, so when I switch over to a more empirical state of mind, I drop the Platonists for the Aristotelians. But having been forged in the fires of French philosophy, so to speak, that's always going to be secondary for me. (Unless Jacques Maritain manages to win me over to Thomistic personalism, at least. )

As far as scholars of Neoplatonism go, a couple that I would recommend are Pierre Hadot and Lloyd Gerson. There are also some Christian Platonists out there--I haven't read him yet, but the Catholic scholar of Platonism that I've heard most about is John Rist. I don't think he's a Thomist, but I discovered him through a Thomistic site, so he's probably a good bet.

 

[Silmarien]

Chinese Room concept is a bit outdated when it comes to some former misconceptions about continuum of "understanding" as a concept. I would argue that the concept of "understanding" is illusory, and that there is no difference between cognition and "understanding" except for the breadth of the context any given cognitive process would link to. What we would call "understanding" seems to be just that - our ability to quickly trace and approximate how closely certain patterns match other patterns.

You just changed the topic. You were specifically asking what the difference between a robot tricking a person into thinking it was human and it actually being human. That has nothing to do with what we mean by the word "understanding," and the Chinese Room concept is perfectly valid in demonstrating the problem in conflating the appearance and reality of understanding something, no matter how we want to define the word "understand."

I actually take the concept of rights to be just illusory as the concept of understanding. If it's something you have to enforce for these to exist, then these don't exist in actual reality. The concept of rights, as we understand these today, is a concept of behavioral expectation or morality. "Rights" automatically exist in context of agreed-upon moral behavior. The "fight for rights" is simply an attempt to modify expected moral behavior to favor a certain group.

Well, this appears to be full-blooded moral nihilism and a justification for oppression, so I cannot agree with you. But given that we are very good at finding excuses to demean and dehumanize each other, I do think that the political aspects of potential AI need to be recognized. Otherwise we will enslave whatever conscious machines we might create. I do not find that acceptable, regardless of whether or not you think it an illusory concern.

 

[Silmarien]

I agree; I don't think philosophical intuitions are likely to be reliable, although they can be regarding the logic of the arguments involved.

The logic that relies upon philosophical intuitions being reliable in the first place, you mean? It doesn't seem to matter much if the logic works if we have no reason to trust our philosophical intuitions about logic at all. Goodbye rationality, goodbye science, and hello postmodern meta-narratives.

 

[devolved]

Well, this appears to be full-blooded moral nihilism and a justification for oppression, so I cannot agree with you.

Focusing on morality instead of rights is moral nihilism? That's new.

But given that we are very good at finding excuses to demean and dehumanize each other, I do think that the political aspects of potential AI need to be recognized. Otherwise we will enslave whatever conscious machines we might create. I do not find that acceptable, regardless of whether or not you think it an illusory concern.

I'm not quite sure how "robotic rights" could ever work as a concept. It would simply give plentiful deterrent for businesses to keep these as clearly unconscious possible.

I'm curious as to what you think about something like animal farming for food?