From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jan 09 1997 - 19:38:18 MST
> I strongly disagree! If the brain is not a Turing Machine with a finite tape
> then it's magic and it's time for us to just give up and go to church.
Would you stop that? Nobody is attacking the Church-Turing Thesis, and
if we were it wouldn't necessarily have any religious implications.
We are arguing over whether neurons can be mapped to the individual
causal-transition tokens of a Turing machine, i.e. neurons would be the
bottom level of the brain. It is possible that:
1) Neural assemblies are the "bits" of the brain.
2) Neurons require complex systems to simulate.
3) Single synapses are the basic causal tokens of the brain.
4) [1..3]s are the causal tokens of the brain, but don't map easily to
Turing bits. RAM doesn't map well to Turing tape.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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