From: Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Date: Fri Nov 20 1998 - 07:14:26 MST
---Hal Finney <hal@rain.org> wrote:
> The source of the program is irrelevant for
answering this question. If any program has the
property that running it on a Turing machine produces
consciousness, then Turing functionalism is true. If
it turns out that the only way to make such a program
is by running an interaction with the environment,
fine; likewise for any other way of creating the
program. The source doesn't matter. All that matters,
for this question, is whether running a program can
produce consciousness.
But if running an interaction with the environment is
the source of the program, then it does matter.
Peter Wegner's 9705 _Communications of the ACM_
article, "Why Interaction is More Powerful Than
Algorithms" (see http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/pw)
provided an overview of the interactionist view:
"An object's operations are not algorithms, because
their response to messages depends on a shared state
accessed through nonlocal variables of operations...
controlled by unpredictable external actions... Input
streams of interactive machines are not expressible
by finite tapes [as in Turing machines], since any
finite representations can be dynamically extended by
*uncontrollable adversaries*... nonterminating
reactive processes, like operating systems, cannot be
modeled by algorithms... Interactive histories of
distributed systems ... consist of nonsequential
events that may have duration and may interfere with
each other...
"Raw interactive power is captured by interactive
identity machines (IIMs) that output their input
immediately without transforming it...
Interactiveness (openess) is nonmonotonic in that
decomposition of systems may create interactive
unpredictable subsystems, or equivalently,
composition of interactive systems may produce
non-interactive algorithms... Giving up the goal of
complete behavior specification ... makes respectable
software-engineering methods of incomplete partial
system specification by interfaces".
Wegner's and similar approaches were discussed at a
9711 Interactive Foundations of Computing Conference
at Washington University in St. Louis. Here's some
more heresy against the Turing Church from Ronald
Loui's lecture there (available at
http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/jp4.html):
"Alan Turing and Alonzo Church are canonically held
to be at the foundation. Computing is about
algorithms. Algorithms are essentially Turing
machines, infinite storage and finite control,
sequential, state-transition specifications... The
celebrated idea of Edsger Dijkstra is that a program
just is a function transforming inputs to outputs.
Programs are just cleverly compressed tables of
logarithms, no matter how fancy they pretend to be...
"Then Peter Wegner, before his naked emperor, had the
temerity to announce that algorithms are not what
most of computing is about. Instead, the management
of interaction better describes in abstract the
day-to-day computing practice. It is as scandalous
as the observation that scientists do not follow
scientific method, or that economic behaviors are
neither Bayesian nor utilitarian, or that logic is
about notation, not reasoning."
- Mark Crosby
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