Skip to main content

Not so fast, says Daniel Dennett

One response to Daniel Dennett's confident statements about the mind being instantiatable by computers is to propose that a Rube Goldberg device could produce the same sort of results as a computer, given enough time and a little luck (i.e., no breakdowns in the components).  Actually, I think something of this sort has been proposed already, and DD himself replied that these devices operate too slowly.  Unfortunately, I didn't read DD himself saying this but heard someone else referring to him.  In any case, DD's reply would be apt, at least initially, for such a device would be so sluggish that it would fail to convince a human observer that it was driven by thought: a slow motion computer will fail the Turing Test.

Suppose, however, that we give free reign to thought experiments: the following scenario might problematize DD's reply.  Suppose, that is, that a device with the same structure as the Rube Goldberg device were somehow miniaturized so that it worked as quickly as a computer and was just as capable (or incapable) of passing the Turing Test as a computer made of normal components: if (per impossibile) the latter sort of computer could pass the Turing Test and in so doing show that it is capable of thought, then the former could as well.  In such a case, would we really have a good reason to object to the attribution of consciousness to the a Rube Goldberg computer that has the same structre but which works at a normal speed?

It doesn't seem so; hence DD's reply about such devices being too slow doesn't seem plausible.

Another insight or intuition, however, might lie behind the response that the device is too slow.  That intuition would be that cognition consists of a series of judgments, and that each of these judgments involves component acts through which an aspect or part of the whole thing to be judged is apprehended.  Judgment can only be about what one already apprehends.  The two must be simultaneous.  And simultaneity cannot occur in a Rube Goldberg device or in galaxy-wide contraptions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more