Stupid Questions September 2017

Erfeyah

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

What about it seems worth refuting?

The Zombie sequence) may be related. (We'll see if I can actually link it here.) As far as the Chinese Room goes:

I think a necessary condition for consciousness is approximating a Bayesian update. So in the (ridiculous) version where the rules for speaking Chinese have no ability to learn, they also can't be conscious.
Searle talks about "understanding" Chinese. Now, the way I would interpret this word depends on context - that's how language works - but normally I'd incline towards a Bayesian interpretation of "understanding" as well. So this again might depend on something Searle left out of his scenario, though the question might not have a fixed meaning.
Some versions of the "Chinese Gym" have many people working together to implement the algorithm. Now, your neurons are all technically alive in one sense. I genuinely feel unsure how much consciousness a single neuron can have. If I decide to claim it's comparable to a man blindly following rules in a room, I don't think Searle could refute this. (I also don't think it makes sense to say one neuron alone can understand Chinese; neurologists, feel free to correct me.) So what is his argument supposed to be?

Thanks for the pointer to the zombie sequence. I 've read part of it in the past and did not think it addressed the issue but I will revisit.

What about it seems worth refuting?

Well, the way it shows that you can not get consciousness from syntactic symbol manipulation. And Bayesian update is also a type of syntactic symbol manipulation so I am not clear why you are treating it differently. Are you sure you are not making the assumption that consciousness arises algorithmically to justify your conclusion and thus introduce circularity in your logic?

I do... (read more)