Marchesk

You mean like how Northern Europeans look different than Southern Europeans? What about red head, freckled Irish people with their light skin? Are the...

Yes, but why lump them into one category called "white", "black" or "red"? The reason this happend is because of racism during the colonial era to jus...

Which I never said. I stated that being white or black (or Asian, etc) is a social construction.

Europeans are made up of many ethnic groups, just as Africans are. The idea of a single white race to which various ethnic groups may or may not be in...

But the idea of being white was invented to justify colonialism and slavery. Before that, people were French, German, English, Polish, etc.

Some argue that the notion of whiteness is itself racist and privileged, and that the solution to racism (at least in the West), is to abolish "whiten...

Sounds like bullshit, with all due respect to Epicurus. But, some people are more disciplined in what they can endure. I'm skeptical that any kind of ...

Sociopaths certainly exist. I wasn't aware that psychology denied this. But it is on a continuum, as has been pointed out. Most sociopaths aren't seri...

LOL. What makes a Clinton that much different than Obama? Please. And Or maybe some people just don't like here as a presidential candidate. There's n...

Interesting. Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book called Philosophy in the Flesh in which they see the bewitchment of language for philosophers as one of t...

But horses had properties A, B, and C before we called them horses. And that's why we know them as horses and not rabbits or any other animal.

Just to be clear, what you're arguing is that meaning has nothing whatsoever to do with things themselves. Before there was any words for horses, ther...

If they don't, then why are talking about horses being equine animals, regardless of whether we decide to use the word "horse" differently at some fut...

And the thing being referred to is non-linguistic. Tying this back to the Chinese Room argument, Searle's contention was that correctly outputting the...

No, you're mixing up the meaning with the word being used.

So when I output "horse" instead of "rabbit" at T2, not knowing a word of English, what do I mean? Do I somehow manage to mean rabbit? How?

So you agree that if I am Chinese speaker trained to output "horse" when I see "rabbit" in the appropriate situation (T2), that neither I nor the syst...

So you agree that horses is what gives meaning to how we use the word "horses".

But we use the word "horse" to refer to animals with certain properties, and that's where the meaning comes from. The meaning of "horses" is horses. A...

Right, but what exactly are you trying to claim? That the meaning of rabbits or horses is contained in the word we use, such that if we use another wo...

So you agree that "rabbit" means those furry creatures with big ears, and not equines, even if we decide to use the word "horse" instead.

We can change the word "horse" such that it's a synonym for "rabbit", which means those furry creatures with big ears, regardless of what we want to c...

We didn't change the meaning of gay, we changed the way we used the word, "gay", such that it means homosexual now. The meaning is not the in the word...

The word used changes, but a horse is a horse, of course. The meaning of horse remains the same. We don't mean that rabbits are now horses. We mean th...

Gay already means something, so I picked a meaningless word to transition to. Then you can see that meaning doesn't change when the word changes.

I was aiming for humor there, because the conversation was starting to make me to laugh.

So let's invent a new word called horsexual, and let's say that gay now means "horsexual". Now what?

And if we say that rabbits were gay, we mean that horses are homosexual, right?

You don't still mean happy, you mean homosexual now. So you don't still mean "gay".

You haven't changed the meaning of "horse". You've exchanged the word for another. Now you call a "horse" a "rabbit", but you still mean horse. A hors...

Whoa, I went and read some of that. Pretty extreme stuff. Would make for an interesting conversation.

The best and the worst.

He also wrote a story of purgatory or temporary hell where everyone was completely self-absorbed or caught up in whatever issue. They still had a chan...

Because sometimes it feels like we're already there? And heavenly bliss is a more fleeting state.

Google had their DeepMind machine learning software learn various Atari 2600 games. For some of them, it excelled. But it struggled with others. It sc...

Fair enough. I think I've made the mistake of accepting Searle's setup. If I don't buy into the computational theory of mind, why would I expect the C...

Before language, there were animals who experienced and felt. That's what's fundamental. Language is late in the game. Symbols are parasitic. You ask ...

Yes, since they don't always produce the same output. Animals, and particularly humans, display a great deal of flexibility and variability There is a...

The reason is because symbol manipulation alone undermines itself. In order for there to be symbols to compute, the symbols have to be defined. Chines...

Actually, my contention was that symbol manipulation alone doesn't result in understanding. If a computer can be arranged to do more than symbol manip...

First off, you agree that there is something more to feeling than producing a symbolic representation of feeling in the proper context, correct?

You can't be serious.

Are they, though? Have computers formed a linguistic community? Have they told us what the symbols of that community mean (or how they are used to use...

I don't know. I guess hurricanes might be aroused when they hit shore of a major city. It probably has to do with animals being sexual, and needing to...

And computers form a linguistic community? Something about machines not being animals, probably.

I don't know. How do you know a rock can't be sexually stimulated?

This is like asking how do I know computers/robots can't be sexually stimulated just because it can be faked.

Two questions here: 1. Who or what determines what the proper output is? 2. Do computers have physiological arousal?

No, it's not. A person can fake emotions, afterall. I might be convinced that you're sorry (or the robot), but maybe it's just mimicry. Maybe you don'...

Interesting that you mentioned that movie, since the machine in the movie manipulated the feelings of the protagonist in order to accomplish some othe...