DSherron comments on Could Robots Take All Our Jobs?: A Philosophical Perspective - Less Wrong
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Comments (14)
Do those same people still oppose the on-principle feasibility of the Chinese Room? I can understand why such people might have problems with the idea of a conscious AI, but I was not aware of a faction which thought that machines could never replicate a mind physically other than substance dualists. I'm not well-read in the field, so I could certainly be wrong about the existence of such people, but that seems like a super basic logic fail. Either a) minds are Turing complete, meaning we can replicate them, b) minds are hyper computers in a way which follows some normal physical law, meaning we can replicate them, or c) minds are hyper computers in a way which cannot be replicated (substance dualism). I don't see how there is a possible fourth view where minds are hyper computers that cannot in principle be replicated, but they follow only normal physical laws. Maybe some sort of material anti-reductionist who holds that there is a particular law which governs things that are exactly minds but nothing else? They would need to deny the in-principle feasibility of humans ever building a meat brain from scratch, which is hard to do (and of course it immediately loses to Occam's Raxor, but then this is philosophy, eh?). If you're neither an anti-reductionist nor a dualist then there's no way to make the claim, and there are better arguments against the people who are. I don't really see much point in trying to convince anti-reductionists or dualisms of anything, since their beliefs are un-correlated to reality anyway.
Note: there are still interesting feasibility-in-real-life questions to be explored, but those are technical questions. In any case your paper would be well improved by adding a clear thesis near the start of what you're proposing, in detail.
Oh, and before I forget, the question of whether machines we can currently build can implement a mind is purely a question of whether a mind is a hyper computer or not. We don't know how to build those yet, but if it somehow was then we'd presumably figure out how that part worked.