Duncecap Posted:

Okay, take that piece of paper declaring “Here is a thought”, and cast it into space. Imagine that long after humanity dies out, (bumume we do), an alien race finds it, and decodes the message.

Now imagine that there are infinite possible meanings, including nonsensical ones.

The message is something external to them. If you want to state it that way, yes, it causes thought in someone else, a thought that would not have occurred if they had not read the message, and it is the same thought as you were thinking when you wrote the sentence.

It causes a thought in someone else, but you cannot be sure it is the same thought you were thinking when you wrote the sentence. How can you possibly defend the claim that there is a one-t

o-one mapping between a sentence and a particular meaning?

Even better, take a really large, really complex computer, and get it to simulate a human brain. Can it think? We do indeed have this technology, and we we can, in fact, with a large enough cluster, do exactly this right now. If any of you have heard about “Blue brain”, a couple of research teams are competing against each other with a simulated cat brain to discover more about neuronal interaction.

Artificial neural networks are still not as good as neurons. I say this not out of the bumumption that hardware is incapable of imitating wetware, but as a statement of fact—we cannot build brains, at least not yet.

But I digress, the point is, would such a machine be able to think?

Now, can a slightly stupider machine think?

If no, then would you say that a very special human is incapable of thought?

And certainly we can think of stupider humans than some animals.

And certainly we can think of stupider animals.

At what point are they incapable of thought?

I ask the same question of a simpler and simpler computer.

At what point is a computer not able to think?

The old “Is a haystack with one strand of hay removed still a haystack?” problem isn’t the core of the issue. Still, in order to begin answering the questions you pose, we would need a definition of thought. In Funes el memorioso, Borges’ narrator describes thought as the collapsing of distinctions. I would add the ability to make distinctions to that. This would be a bare-bones definition, in a sense something a single neuron is capable of. However, human thought (what we mean when we normally say thought) is more complicated. How? We don’t need an interpreter for our thoughts—we can interpret them ourselves.

Now, here’s where I blow your mind:

Don’t count on it.

A computer does not need to be made of silicon or use electricity. A grid of stones in a field could be a computer, and technically speaking, with enough time, space and stones. run exactly the same software as your computer on your desk.

Uh, yeah, it’s called a Turing machine.

So even once a computer becomes too simple to be held in electronics, we can simplify it further into rocks. Or trees. Or the movement patterns of unladen swallows.

True. Yet, it still requires an interpreter.

So the root question is: What is a thought? Having defined that, when is a “mind”, (seeing that ANYTHING can hold, represent, contain, change and create a thought), incapable of having a thought?

That is the root question, but the claim in parentheses is not quite right.

Further if we define something as having a mind if it thinks, than would we have to extend the set of things that have minds to include the universe?

You could say that the universe thinks in a sense, but that sense would be unintelligible—the universe would be thinking mostly nonsense.

So yes, for some interpretation of the period at the end of your sentence, it does indeed contain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Now, try to pick an interpretation that makes sense.

The key word in my question was intrinsic. Are the meanings of the period at the end of that sentence inherently part of its makeup, or are they arbitrary possible interpretations?