Ed Nixon, referring to a blog posting of mine about a fallacy in Ray Kurzweil’s thinking about selves, points to John Searle’s reply to Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines. Ed comments further here. Searle, of the famous Chinese Room thought experiment (Kurzweil’s response is here), hammers away (successfully, from my point of view) on the fact that computer programs are symbolic; the ones and zeros that are Deep Blue calculating a chess move are only about chess because we have so invested them with meaning. This is the real difference between atoms and bits.

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