Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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This essay is filled with so many falsehoods, assumptions, and lack of knowledge that I don't know where to begin. It's also written with a snarky, arrogant attitude which is not helpful. To list a few:

- "there is every reason to believe that a human brain is a machine"

Given what evidence?

- Platonism died for mathematicians some centuries ago, and simply looks silly.

And yet Frege and Gödel, two of the most accomplished mathematicians of the past century, could be described as Platonists. Clearly this isn't a closed question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Plat...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

Regarding digestion: if the Turing Test is determining whether a computer is thinking like a human being, then focusing only on input and output, and not the 'being', sort of misses the entire point. Remember that Searle's Chinese Room is primarily a criticism of the Turing Test.

As always, the truth is: it's more complicated than it seems.

I certainly agree that Adler's provocative tone is not helpful and his strokes are sometimes too broad to be fully correct as you have rightfully pointed out, but the general point stands.

To me the Turing test gives a falsifiable experiment that defines what "thinking like a human being" means.

It does so by focusing only on the input output. To do that, it puts the system under test out of view of the experimenter and mediates the experiment with written text.

So yes, the input output is the important part, the Turing test, albeit flawed, is interesting, and any claim that machines can't think based on a definition of "think" that does not lend itself to a falsifiable experiment, such as Searle's, is uninteresting.

I will leave it at that and make a quick exit, as Adler suggests.

> Given what evidence?

Well, one could just as well pose the same question to any dualist.

The evidence for minds being physical phenomena comes, at least in part, from the observation that minds appear to be the result of physical brains, which have evolved through a physical process from much simpler precursors, doing physical things. This is far from proof, and is only a hint of an explanation of how it all actually works, but it is as least as good evidence as anything offered by dualists, who do not seem to have anything to offer in the way of a constructive explanation of minds -- they seem to spend all their time arguing against materialism, rather than for a particular idea of how minds work.

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