RE: Is There a Point To Living a Moral Life?
October 22, 2013 at 9:47 pm
(This post was last modified: October 22, 2013 at 10:02 pm by FallentoReason.)
genkaus Wrote:What you call "interpreting the significance of those symbols" is simply another form of manipulation and data-processing and there is no reason why a machine would not be capable of this.
I'd hardly say a machine e.g. a computer that processes data, interprets the meaning of said data. A machine is simply a contraption that causally goes from A to B e.g. a civil engineer inputting loads on a model of a structure, then the computer via electricity and causal relations of electrons processing the input to arrive at the output i.e. how the building performs under those loads. But the conputer suffers from the same problems as I highlighted in my previous post: how can electrons and stored data in the hard drive be *about* something? The output data, which is causally being shown as pixels on a screen, are meaningless, until a conscious entity assigns anything meaningful to it. In this case, it's the civil engineer who assigns meaning to the pixels which represent the resulting axial forces, shear stresses and moments on the members. The computer isn't capable of such an interpretation. And this is rather obvious - it's not a conscious entity like the engineer.
@MFM
Naturalists don't believe anything: how do brain states represent the proposition "naturalism is true"? You would be assuming that said brain states are *about* the proposition "naturalism is true", but that would be assigning meaning to something physical. Thus, a naturalist having *any* belief begs the question.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle