As far as I can tell, Scott’s argument does not argue against the possibility that a waterfall could execute a single forward pass of a chess playing algorithm, if you defined a gerrymandered enough map between the waterfall and logical states.
When he defines the waterfall as a potential oracle, implicit in that is that the oracle will respond correctly to different inputs—counterfactuals.
Viewing the waterfall’s potential oracleness as an intrinsic property of that system is to view counterfactual waterfalls as also intrinsic.
as Aaronson makes clear in the paragraph before the one you quote, where he cites the Chalmers argument!
Different arguments aren’t always orthogonal. They are often partial refraimings of the same generators. Maybe I was too clumsy when I said his boils down to the chalmers response, what I really meant to say was his argument is vulnerable to the same issues as the chalmers response (counterfactuals are not intrinsic to the waterfall), which is why I don’t think it solves the problem.
if we’re talking about playing a single game, the entire argument is ridiculous; I can write the entire “algorithm” a kilobyte of specific instructions.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
PS. Apologies that the original response comes off as combative
As far as I can tell, Scott’s argument does not argue against the possibility that a waterfall could execute a single forward pass of a chess playing algorithm, if you defined a gerrymandered enough map between the waterfall and logical states.
When he defines the waterfall as a potential oracle, implicit in that is that the oracle will respond correctly to different inputs—counterfactuals.
Viewing the waterfall’s potential oracleness as an intrinsic property of that system is to view counterfactual waterfalls as also intrinsic.
Different arguments aren’t always orthogonal. They are often partial refraimings of the same generators. Maybe I was too clumsy when I said his boils down to the chalmers response, what I really meant to say was his argument is vulnerable to the same issues as the chalmers response (counterfactuals are not intrinsic to the waterfall), which is why I don’t think it solves the problem.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
Thanks, I appreciate this :)
I’ve written my point more clearly here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zxLbepy29tPg8qMnw/refuting-searle-s-wall-putnam-s-rock-and-johnson-s-popcorn