Comment by mjburgess
5 hours ago
> this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building
> with no clear reason whatsoever as to why
It's not clear to me how you can understand that fire has particular causal powers (to burn, and so on) that are not instantiated in a simulation of fire; and yet not understand the same for biological processes.
The world is a particular set of causal relationships. "Computational" descriptions do not have a causal semantics, so aren't about properties had in the world. The program itself has no causal semantics, it's about numbers.
A program which computes the fibonacci sequence describes equally-well the growth of a sunflower's seeds and the agglomeration of galactic matter in certain galaxies.
A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described. A simulation of fire is, by definition, not on fire -- that is fire.
A simulation is a game to help us think about the world: the ability to derive some descriptive statements about a system without instantiating the properties of that system is a trivial thing, and it is always disappointing at how easily it fools our species. You can move beads of wood around and compute the temperature of the sun -- this means nothing.
There we go again. You claim that thinking is a biological process by definition, and use your definition to "prove" that software cannot be thinking. What if instead of software simulation of thinking we would have an actual software thinking? Your point would be to disregard it, not based on behaviour, but based on whatever your idea of "propper hardware for thinking" is. Pure troll and sophist, that Searle
Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
> Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things.
What we mean by a simulation is, by definition, a certain kind of "inference game" we play (eg., with beads and chalk) that help us think about the world. By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation.
If the claim is that an electrical device can implement the actual properties of biological intelligence, then the claim is not about a simulation. It's that by manufacturing some electrical system, plugging various devices into it, and so on -- that this physical object has non-simulated properties.
Searle, and most other scientific naturalists who appreciate the world is real -- are not ruling out that it could be possible to manufacture a device with the real properties of intelligence.
It's just that merely by, eg., implementing the fibonacci sequence, you havent done anything. A computation description doesnt imply any implementation properties.
Further, when one looks at the properties of these electronic systems and the kinds of causal realtions they have with their environments via their devices, one finds very many reasons to suppose that they do not implement the relevant properties.
Just as much as when one looks at a film strip under a microscope, one discovers that the picture on the screen was an illusion. Animals are very easily fooled, apes most of all -- living as we do in our own imaginations half the time.
Science begins when you suspend this fantasy way of relating to the world, look it its actual properties.
If your world view requires equivocating between fantasy and reality, then sure, anything goes. This is a high price to pay to cling on to the idea that the film is real, and there's a train racing towards you in your cinema seat.
There is a massive difference between chemical processes, like fire, and computational processes, which thinking likely is. A computer can absolutely be made to interact with the world in a way that assigns real physical meaning to the symbols it manipulates, a meaning entirely independent of any conscious being. For example, the computer that powers an automatic door has a clear meaning for its symbols intrinsic in its construction.
Saying that the symbols in the computer don't mean anything, that it is only we who give them meaning, presupposes a notion of meaning as something that only human beings and some things similar to us possess. It is an entirely circular argument, similarly to the notion of p-zombies or the experience of seizing red thought experiment.
If indeed the brain is a biological computer, and if our mind, our thinking, is a computation carried out by this computer, with self-modeling abilities we call "qualia" and "consciousness", then none of these arguments hold. I fully admit that this is not at all an established fact, and we may still find out that our thinking is actually non-computational - though it is hard to imagine how that could be.
There are no such things as "computational processes". Any computational description of reality describes vastly different sets of casual relata, nothing which exists in the real world is essentially a computational process -- everything is essential causal, with a circumstantially useful computational description.
On the contrary, computation is a very clear physical phenomenon, well understood and studied, so well understood that we can build machines to do it. And, again, those machines don't need any interpretation - they do measurable things in the real world, such as opening doors and cutting parts.
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The only thing that can accurately simulate a process or system is the real process or system. Any simulation that perfectly simulates something becomes that something. Everything else contains simplifications and approximations and is an imperfect simulation.
Fire is the result of the intrinsic reactivity of some chemicals like fuels and oxidizers that allows them to react and generate heat. A simulation of fire that doesn't generate heat is missing a big part of the real thing, it's very simplified. Compared to real fire, a simulation is closer to a fire emoji, both just depictions of a fire. A fire isn't the process of calculating inside a computer what happens, it's molecules reacting a certain way, in a well understood and predictable process. But if your simulation is accurate and does generate heat then it can burn down a building by extending the simulation into the real world with a non-simulated fire.
Consciousness is an emergent property from putting together a lot of neurons, synapses, chemical and physical processes. So you can't analyze the parts to simulate the end result. You cannot look at the electronic neuron and conclude a brain accurately made of them won't generate consciousness. It might generate something even bigger, or nothing.
And in a very interesting twist of the mind, if an accurate simulation of a fire can extend in the real world as a real fire, then why wouldn't an accurate simulation of a consciousness extent in the real world as a real consciousness?
>A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described.
This notion of causality is interesting. When a human claims that he is conscious, there a causal chain from the fact that they are conscious to their claiming so. When a neuron-level simulation of a human claims it is conscious, there must be a similar causal chain, with a similar fact at its origin.