The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (Penguin Press Science)
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 014006253X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
Science Dictionary for Kids: The Essential Guide to Science Terms, Concepts, and Strategies
symptoms as the earlier cases. The epidemiology team, and many others, now proposed that the cause of illness in the four cases might not be a physical agent such as a virus or toxin, but rather an abstract piece of information-which could be stored on tape, transmitted over a telephone line, displayed on a screen, and so forth. This supposed information now became known as "the Riddle," and the illness as "the Riddle coma." All evidence was consistent with the once-bizarre hypothesis that any
really "mean the same thing" to different people. Do two people ever speak the same language? What we mean by "speak the same language" is a prickly issue. We accept and take for granted that the hidden subterranean flavors are not shared. We know what comes with and what is left out of linguistic transactions, more or less. Language is a public medium for the exchange of the most private experiences. Each word is surrounded, in each mind, by a rich and inimitable cluster of concepts, and we know
the taste is the same, so it must be my problem alone. I guess I'm no longer cut out for this work." Chase and Sanborn are alike in one way. Both used to like Maxwell House coffee; now neither one likes it. But they claim to be different in An Epistemological Nightmare 428 another way: Maxwell House tastes to Chase the way it always d but not so for Sanborn. The difference seems familiar and striking, y when they confront each other, they may begin to wonder if the' cases are really all that
honestly say that you feel it is calculating something when its gears turn on each other? And a computer is just a fancy cash register, as I understand it. SANDY: If you mean that a cash register doesn’t feel like a schoolkid doing arithmetic problems, I’ll agree. But is that what “calculation” means? Is that an integral part of it? If so, the contrary to what everybody has thought till now, we’ll have to write a very complicated program to perform genuine calculations. Of course, this program
Computers certainly can make mistakes – and I don’t mean on the hardware level. Think of any present-day computer predicting the weather. It can make wrong predictions, even though its program runs flawlessly. PAT: But that’s only because you’ve fed it the wrong data. SANDY: Not so. It’s because weather-prediction is too complex. Any such program has to make do with a limited amount of data – entirely correct data – and extrapolate from there. Sometime it will make wrong predictions. It’s
