Marchesk

Grief isn't a symbol, it's an experience. It can be communicated with symbols, but the symbols aren't grieving. As such, outputting grieving symbols i...

We use symbols to communicate meaning. Searle's argument, as I understand it, is that computers (or any system) are unable to do this if all they're d...

Humans provide meanings to the symbols in the first place, which is what you're ignoring.

But here's the thing. The computer is taking in symbols, manipulating those symbols, and outputting symbols, correct? So what's the difference between...

Computers are instantiations of Turing machines (limited by physics), correct? You agreed that an abstract Turing machine can't compute grief. What ma...

And what makes that meaningful? Humans give meaning to symbols, not the other way around. What a computer computes is only meaningful to the degree it...

What does it mean for matter to be using symbols? What is it about a computer which results in use of symbols such that there is meaning?

And an abstract Turing Machine can't be said to be using symbols, even if we wrote out the entire computation for being in grief, but a computer can, ...

So it is matter that gives meaning to symbols?

Right, and I'll accept that this is one notion of understanding, being that words can have multiple meanings. Siri knows how to tell me what the tempe...

Right, so what makes a computer different than an abstraction, like a Turing Machine (of which a computer is a finite realization)? Is it that the com...

I already told you that 1 means any individual thing in context of counting or sets. I'm sure someone else can provide a better mathematical definitio...

How so? You just asked why a bunch of symbols can't have emotions if humans have emotions. I just told you that symbols are stand ins for something el...

Because symbols are abstractions from experience. They stand in for something else. An emoticon isn't happy or sad or mad. It just means that to us, b...

Again, that's not what "1" or "+" or "2" means, at all.

Okay, let's set aside empirical matters and just accept that humans do experience emotion. What about Turing machines? Can a Turing machine, in just i...

The mathematical symbol "1" means any item or unit ever, in the context of counting or sets. You can use it to denote any one thing. If I made up some...

Humans form emotional bonds and machines don't. Do you need some scientific literature to back this up? Humans also grieve when those bonds are broken...

That's not what reference means at all.

No, not dogma. It's really absurd to maintain otherwise, unless you're invoking some altered version of the other minds problem in which I'm the only ...

We understand that people are doing something more than manipulating symbols. When I say that I understand your loss, you take it to mean I can relate...

How would you not? Are you supposing that I have some condition where I can't experience pain or fatigue (I'm not aware that there are any humans immu...

Right, because he was attacking symbol manipulation as a form of understanding. Okay, so there's consciousness-based understanding where the words, "I...

Perhaps I have yet to lose someone close and therefore am just being polite. So let's say you stub your toe. I say that looks painful. Are you going t...

The computer understands it in a propositional sense. Let's make this more complex. Let's say the computer has been programmed to read faces and emoti...

We can agree on that. Searle's contention is stronger. He was arguing against the notion that a computer could understand Chinese like a human being d...

Which is the same as saying that Martha doesn't understand Chinese, right? The point being that languages are used in context of a world, not a lookup...

Let's say we give a test subject a rulebook and then feed them sets of symbols. For example, whenever they see: å ß ? Then they write down: ç Now do t...

Since math is being brought up, let's take the symbols 1 and +. We can of course tell a computer to compute 1 + 1. It will give us back a new symbol, ...

Let's put it a different way. Symbols stand in for whatever it is that we understand. They're an abstraction. The claim Searle is making is that no am...

Humans understand the symbols the system is outputting. But does the system? Searle was objecting to a strong notion of AI in which computers could ac...

But by this, did Wittgenstein mean knowing how to transform one sentence into another, or did he mean knowing how to use it in the world? It's the dif...

No, understanding math is like understanding programming. You can use both in situations you haven't encountered before. And what does that get you? H...

So succinct. Should be a meme.

Maybe so, but a lot of criticisms I come across are system replies, so I thought maybe if it was stated differently, it would be clearer that the "sys...

If we do get to the place where machines can perform all human labor, will we also automate decision making? CEOs, Judges and Politicians are only fal...

If we're talking about being angry at a storm or cancer, then you might have a point. But we're talking about murder, as in one human taking another h...

The problem here Michael is that we prosecute crimes as if there is an explanation, and something did happen beyond "we experience X". Take for exampl...

You could probably replace capitalism with civilization. Specialization comes with the rise of civilization. It's not new.

People start out with different premises and start arguing form there. If your metaphysics is fundamentally different than mine, then of course we're ...

Predictions are about validation. Usefulness is a matter of technological application. And not all scientific theories are useful in the everyday sens...

The problems suggests that QM has foundational issues. When you can't make heads or tails over something behaving like a wave in one experiment, but b...

Edit: I see your reply was to Moliere. Jumped the gun a bit. And naturally you missed the point of the article, which as that changing from viewing th...

And the author of that SA article did mention instrumentalism, but thought that most scientists believed that science was about reality, otherwise why...

I just read a philosophical article on QM in the magazine Scientific American. It was interesting because it discussed universals, materialism, and tr...

I only have interest in philosophy to the extent that it asks interesting questions. If it exists to undermine itself, then I'd rather waste time thin...

Maybe. It is curious though how well something like e=mc2 works. As if there is something more than just the observables.

Right, but it employs math and theoretical entities, as John mentioned. In the context of scientific laws and theories, it's more a matter of rational...

E=MC2 is not an empirical statement. It belongs to the the theoretical side of science. Nobody observes an equation, or law of physics. Rather, theory...

I very much doubt that. It's more like the genius has the ambition to pursue whatever is surprising about them, and is able to succeed at that, such t...