menotyou

Sorry to miss your birthday ... I haven't even logged onto SG for about a week cos my (ex) lady was over and I was busy showing her around the bay area .... i got round to posting some pics finally .... no dread yet though hopefully within the next week that will be changed and the girly hair will die forever

oh i looked up the emperor norton thing ... absolutely amazing and quite amusing ... my favorite is when they let him put 'emperor' as his occupation on the census

"appy Birthday.

Happy Birthday!! Better late than never, right? Sounds like you had a great time. Jager has a way of doing something crazy things to a person.

Hope you have a wonderful birthday!!

That was a big boom.

I didn't know that.

Great. *looks in the sky for planes*

Do you understand what it's like?

There is one way to settle the argumentt ... I need to find out first whether sloths are a protected species? mmm sloth burger mmm

I stand corrected. Thats what I get for not fact-checking things my hairdresser tells me before spouting them off to others. Gleefully going back to children's songs being children's songs.

Hey there,

I was glancing through the old philosophy group threads and came across your thing about God being a programmer and was really suprised that no one mentioned that there is a big history idea that the human mind is essentially a computer program and that it is only a matter of time before we create computers with minds.

It was quite a fashionable view for a while and it seems strange that no-one on the thread said anything about the Chinese room argument by John Searle. In brief this was the argument that we will never be able to make programs that think (in the sense we think) because this doesn't make sense as a concept. The Chinese Room argument tries to show that human minds have semantics or meanings while even the best programs have no semantics only syntax that is they only shuffle around symbols in a way we told them to when we designed them.

Obviously there are people that disagree with Searle on this though. I haven't looked closely at a lot of the really good objections but the one that sticks in my mind is the objection that Searle begs the question in assuming that human minds have semantics ... although now I think about it that doesnt sound so hot.

Anyway there's a lot of stuff on the Chinese Room and Strong A.I (which is what Searle calls it) on the net although if your really interested you should see the relevant chapter 'can computers think' in Minds, Brain and Science by Searle. I think there's something in his Rediscovery of the Mind too.

I'm sorry if this has been annoying ... I'm not trying to be bitchy or clever I just thought you would like to know about this argument of Searle's if you want to develop your idea.

RE: Your Website.

People aren't stupid, it's just that the waves don't look all that menacing. The ocean produces large waves all the time, and most of the time they don't make it up onto the shore and into the hotel swimming pools. I can't be sure I would run either.