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> 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 wh

> 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.

mattclarkdotnet 1y ago
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
- mjburgess 1y ago
  > 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.
  - mlsu 1y ago
    > By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?
    - mjburgess 1y ago
      Define any property of interest. Eg., O = "reacting with oxygen" S is a simulation of O iff there is an inferential process, P, by which properties of O can be estimated from P(S) st. S does not implement O Eg., "A video game is a simulation of a fire burning if, by playing that game, I can determine how long the fire will burn w/o there being any fire involved" S is an emulation model of O iff ...as-above.. S implements O (eg., "burning down a dollhouse to model burning down a real house").
      - euphorium 1y ago
        [dead]
      - mlsu 1y ago
        If P successfully produces the relevant behaviors of O (burning, light, etc), then P is an implementation of O. There's no separate "real O" floating out there that P fails to capture. In other words, when you are playing the game, there _is_ fire involved. You define a 'real' implementation to exclude computational substrate, then use the very same definition to prove that computational substrate cannot implement 'real' implementations. It's circular!
- Zarathruster 1y ago
  > 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 Searle described himself as a "naive realist" although, as was typical for him, this came with a ton of caveats and linguistic escape hatches. This was certainly my biggest objection and I passed many an afternoon in office hours trying to pin him down to a better position.
tsimionescu 1y ago
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.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  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.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    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.
    - mjburgess 1y ago
      I have never encountered this physical process. Here I am typing on a keyboard which is powered through an electrical field that is guided by a peice of wire under each key -- whose operation, when mechanically activated, is to induce some electrical state in some switches it is connected to, and so on. I associate the key with "K", and my screen displays a "K" shape when it is pressed -- but there is no "K", this is all in my head. Just as much as when I go to the cinema and see people on the screen: there are no people. By ascribing a computational description to a series of electrical devices (whose operation distributes power, etc.) I can use this system to augment by own thinking. Absent the devices, the power distribution, their particular casual relationships to each other, there is no computer. The computational description is an observer-relative attribution to a system; there are no "physical" properties which are computational. All physical properties concern spatio-temporal bodies and their motion. The real dualism is to suppose there are such non-spatio-temporal "process". The whole system called a "computer" is an engineered electrical device whose construction has been designed to achive this illusion. Likewise I can describe the solar system as a computational process, just discretize orbits and give their transition in a while(true) loop. That very same algorithm describes almost everything. Physical processes are never "essentially" computational; this is just a way of specifying some highly superficial feature which allows us to ignore their causal properties. Its mostly a useful description when building systems, ie., an engineering fiction.
bondarchuk 1y ago
>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.
112233 1y ago
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

mattclarkdotnet 1y ago

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

mjburgess 1y ago
> 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.
- mlsu 1y ago
  > By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation. This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    Define any property of interest. Eg., O = "reacting with oxygen" S is a simulation of O iff there is an inferential process, P, by which properties of O can be estimated from P(S) st. S does not implement O Eg., "A video game is a simulation of a fire burning if, by playing that game, I can determine how long the fire will burn w/o there being any fire involved" S is an emulation model of O iff ...as-above.. S implements O (eg., "burning down a dollhouse to model burning down a real house").
    - euphorium 1y ago
      [dead]
    - mlsu 1y ago
      If P successfully produces the relevant behaviors of O (burning, light, etc), then P is an implementation of O. There's no separate "real O" floating out there that P fails to capture. In other words, when you are playing the game, there _is_ fire involved. You define a 'real' implementation to exclude computational substrate, then use the very same definition to prove that computational substrate cannot implement 'real' implementations. It's circular!
Zarathruster 1y ago
> 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 Searle described himself as a "naive realist" although, as was typical for him, this came with a ton of caveats and linguistic escape hatches. This was certainly my biggest objection and I passed many an afternoon in office hours trying to pin him down to a better position.

tsimionescu 1y ago

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.

mjburgess 1y ago
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.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  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.
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    I have never encountered this physical process. Here I am typing on a keyboard which is powered through an electrical field that is guided by a peice of wire under each key -- whose operation, when mechanically activated, is to induce some electrical state in some switches it is connected to, and so on. I associate the key with "K", and my screen displays a "K" shape when it is pressed -- but there is no "K", this is all in my head. Just as much as when I go to the cinema and see people on the screen: there are no people. By ascribing a computational description to a series of electrical devices (whose operation distributes power, etc.) I can use this system to augment by own thinking. Absent the devices, the power distribution, their particular casual relationships to each other, there is no computer. The computational description is an observer-relative attribution to a system; there are no "physical" properties which are computational. All physical properties concern spatio-temporal bodies and their motion. The real dualism is to suppose there are such non-spatio-temporal "process". The whole system called a "computer" is an engineered electrical device whose construction has been designed to achive this illusion. Likewise I can describe the solar system as a computational process, just discretize orbits and give their transition in a while(true) loop. That very same algorithm describes almost everything. Physical processes are never "essentially" computational; this is just a way of specifying some highly superficial feature which allows us to ignore their causal properties. Its mostly a useful description when building systems, ie., an engineering fiction.

bondarchuk 1y ago

>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.

112233 1y ago

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