
Antoine Taveneau CC– BY-SA 3 0
And Alan Turing tried to live with it:
Maybe that’s not the story you heard, but …
It is indeed a strange quirk in intellectual history that Turing seems to have flip-flopped on this issue, almost politician-like, yet no one seems to have noticed. Gödel, for his part, remained cagey about the strong version of his result, noting only that a disjunction must therefore be true: we are either inconsistent machines or minds. Gödel must surely have jested here because inconsistency in the mathematical sense means that anything can be proven, making human thinking worthless—moons might be made of cheese then. Gödel seems to have stopped short of believing in his own Platonism, or at least proving that it must be true. But the evidence suggests strongly that viewing the mind as a big computer is probably wrong.
Science, at any rate, is something we do, looking in from the outside as it were. Whether we are ultimately caught up inside the very systems we devise to describe and explain is a philosophical question. It seems to me anyway, and indeed to the Turing of the 1930s, and most assuredly to Kurt Gödel the Platonist, that we sit outside the systems we make, the webs we weave so to speak, always on the precipice of the discovery of new truths. That’s a belief that makes sense of evidence, to be sure. It has the additional salutary consequence of making sense of our own possibilities and future.
Analysis, “The mind can’t be just a computer” at Mind Matters News
See also: Human intelligence as a halting oracle (Eric Holloway)
and
Things exist that are unknowable (Robert J. Marks)
News,
UD is really in new territory these days, computationality vs minds.
I followed the link, liked this:
In answer to attempted refutations, I point to Reppert’s different but telling approach:
Computational substrates aren’t even actually reasoning.
KF
Great point KF. Computational “reasoning” is just pushing around symbols. The only reason computation can give us true conclusions is because we’ve supplied the program with valid logic and sound premises. Computation cannot give us either of those things.
It is obvious that the mind is not just a computer as we know them today. But that doesn’t mean that computer science won’t advance to the point that computers act in a way that is indistinguishable from a mind. And if we ever get to that point, our egocentrism will simply find other reasons to maintain our perceived exceptionalism.
Brother Brian:
First someone has to figure out what that means. Then someone needs the ability to design the hardware and software. There needs to be funding.
As in we designed and built that alleged AI?
BB,
The essential point is in Leibnitz, Monadology 17:
ANYTHING that is a dynamic-stochastic entity working on mechanical and/or stochastic interactions of component parts, is not reasoning in any relevant sense. The why of that was put by Reppert, long since:
Intellectual IOU’s unbacked by substantial empirical demonstration that hope for some future undefined computational substrate is not going to escape the implications of dynamic-stochastic systems. Insight, understanding, reasoning simply do not work in that way. That’s part of why for 2400 years, we have understood that causal factors work by necessity, stochastic/chance process or intelligence.
There is a qualitative difference here.
KF
KF
KF
This certainly does not have to be confessed. It may turn out to be true but this statement, at this time, is nothing more than opinion.
Your argument also assumes that computer science will be limited in the future to the limitations it has now. If anything, computer science has shown us that limits can be broken.
As far as I know, there are no hard and fast roadblocks that would prevent us, some time in the future, from developing a computer that functions mechanically, electrically and chemically as the human brain does. If and when we do this, and if we can’t distinguish its reasoning and thinking capabilities from that of a human, would we not have to conclude that it was conscious? That it had a mind?