You really need to link the previous post—and important subthreads, 1, 2, 3 -- when you make a post like this. Other people need to be able to easily access the discussions you refer to. (Yes, that compilation may be biased toward what I was involved in.)
There were several notable replies that you also should have accounted for here, including:
1) How “where is color?” question is turned around to “where is the chess in Deep Blue?”
2) The Gary Drescher approach of equating qualia with generated symbols.
I thought of linking, but I wanted a fresh start, something self-contained. It’s a debatable choice. What I really wish is that when I posted this two days ago, I’d thought of creating in advance a thread for each major question. It will be difficult to migrate the discussion there now, but I would like to try.
Responding briefly:
1) I think “where is color?” and “where is chess?” are just different sorts of questions. The latter is an instance of “where is meaning?” or “where is computation?”. Because meaning and computation can be imputed to symbols and artefacts by convention, the where-is-chess discussion needs to keep the human original in view as well. A systematic answer should first say where is chess when humans play each other. Then we can talk about chess computers playing each other, and whether that situation contains chess only by convention, or intrinsically, or whether machine chess is a mixture of intrinsic and attributed meaning and computation.
2) If you wish to speak of there being symbols in the brain, again, you have to take a position on computation and meaning. Then, if you’ve managed to identify an actual physical thing or property which you think can be called a symbol, then you need to explain how to get color out of that particular physical thing.
You really need to link the previous post—and important subthreads, 1, 2, 3 -- when you make a post like this. Other people need to be able to easily access the discussions you refer to. (Yes, that compilation may be biased toward what I was involved in.)
There were several notable replies that you also should have accounted for here, including:
1) How “where is color?” question is turned around to “where is the chess in Deep Blue?”
2) The Gary Drescher approach of equating qualia with generated symbols.
I thought of linking, but I wanted a fresh start, something self-contained. It’s a debatable choice. What I really wish is that when I posted this two days ago, I’d thought of creating in advance a thread for each major question. It will be difficult to migrate the discussion there now, but I would like to try.
Responding briefly:
1) I think “where is color?” and “where is chess?” are just different sorts of questions. The latter is an instance of “where is meaning?” or “where is computation?”. Because meaning and computation can be imputed to symbols and artefacts by convention, the where-is-chess discussion needs to keep the human original in view as well. A systematic answer should first say where is chess when humans play each other. Then we can talk about chess computers playing each other, and whether that situation contains chess only by convention, or intrinsically, or whether machine chess is a mixture of intrinsic and attributed meaning and computation.
2) If you wish to speak of there being symbols in the brain, again, you have to take a position on computation and meaning. Then, if you’ve managed to identify an actual physical thing or property which you think can be called a symbol, then you need to explain how to get color out of that particular physical thing.