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Empiricism doesn't mean that you refuse to accept the existence of something until you witness it. It means that beliefs have at their root direct observations, which in conjunction with a logical argument support that belief.

According your definition of empiricism, you wouldn't accept that next years processors will any more powerful than this years until they've been built and you've run a benchmark, which would be a little dumb.

Instead, I'm assuming you combine your knowledge of scaling laws, the basic physics of computation, and your direct observation of the power of modern processors, and infer correctly that next years yet-to-exist machines will be more powerful than those available today.

Re the China brain: its a thought experiment designed to illustrate substrate independence, it is indeed unfortunate that we can't run the experiment. You could absolutely get a small group of individuals together and teach them to reproduce the behaviour of an individual neuron. That would then be enough to demonstrate that a whole brain is possible.

Re the hoverboard: anyone with a basic knowledge of physics knows that this is not possible. Since you have the capacity to reason and access to evidence, you don't have to wait, you can say confidently that it cannot happen unless our physical theories are profoundly wrong.

by gizajob1 hours ago|

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Well I said I’m “enough of” an empiricist, not that I was denying what you lay out. But in the case of such thought experiments that can be begun with a small empirical circumstance such as a small group of individuals and then logically extended, a lot of the time I’d still want to say “I don’t believe that the logic is a simple as you suggest to extrapolate”. While I’m not in favour of radical skepticism, I find a healthy skepticism in the face experiments which could theoretically be run to test their validity - in this case the skepticism shows that “no, you can’t actually organise a China brain, ever, because we can’t corral 1.4 billion people or even get them on board with such an idea” so I’d find the logic faulty that says there’s a proof for functionalism regardless within the thought experiment.

A basic knowledge of today’s physics would say the hoverboard is not possible. An advanced knowledge of physics five-hundred years hence might show a way of doing it. It “wasn’t possible” to build a thinking, talking machine five hundred years ago and look at us now.