Re: Money and Mind

[Ian Wright <iwright@xxxxxxxxx>]

Andy,

This is a quick reply -- not sure how relevant this is to the list.

Mind does not only consist of activities of the body. Mind is
implemented in the body, but many mental processes require no bodily
activity in the usual sense of the term, e.g. dreaming.

Some readers thought Ryle was a behaviourist because he did seem to
claim that, for example, "happiness" was not a state of mind, but
simply a term that refers to a large set of counterfactual statements
about observable activities, the kinds of activities that happy people
normally perform. But although this may be a good theory of everyday
language use it is an incomplete theory of happiness - for it is the
case that types of happiness are types of mental state that we
experience, and much of that experience is private and not observable
in "outer bodily activity".

I read the Copeland article some time ago and thought he was
stretching things to claim that Turing did not believe that human
intelligence is replicable by computing machines, particularly as
Turing was one of the founders of AI and orginator of the famous
Turing Test. Turing did claim that human mentality was a natural
phenomenon that in principle we could replicate. Copeland's other
statements regarding the hypothetical nature of the Church-Turing
thesis are fine -- it is a thesis, not a theorem, it may be wrong, and
we might need other kinds of mechanisms to replicate intelligence. I
don't see any challenge to AI in the article, even one particular view
of it.

-Ian.