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Letters
Letters
Mistakes and Table Legs • Beware of the Triads! • Burning the Library • The Misuse of Language • Species and Families • Some Learned Disputations Upon St Thomas Aquinas • Dworkin’s Death is Philosophy’s Loss • So What Is ‘Natural’?
Mistakes and Table Legs
DEAR EDITOR: At the risk of further trying Mike Alder’s patience, I would like to address the point raised by his response to my criticism of his article ‘Newton’s Flaming Sword’.
I would like to make clear that I am not claiming, as did the philosopher in his essay, that there is a “fundamental difference” between minds and computers that can never be gotten around. The mind is a machine; I have no reason to think otherwise. The question is whether it is a machine similar enough to the neural nets that Dr Alder is working with, so that the study of the latter will shed light on the former. A table leg and a human leg are both legs, but medical students do not dissect table legs in order to prepare for operations on human legs.
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