From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 13:01:50 MST
On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 "Luke" <wlgriffiths@gmail.com> said:
> if we want to talk about a "ghost in the machine", we could posit
> that higher-dimensional signals which are too small to be measured except by a
> chaotic process could be significant determinants of the outputs of human
> brain processes.
New Physics should only be conjured up as a absolute last resort as when
there is just no alternative, such as when it became obvious that it was
impossible to reconcile Maxwell's equations with observed Black Body
Radiation; the only way out was the quantum. There is no need to invent
new physics (at least not yet) to explain intelligence, we've made
excellent progress duplicating it artificially over the last 50 years
without doing so. And your idea explains nothing it just kicks the
problem upstairs; the key to everything is mysterious signals from
another dimension without even an attempt made to explain how those
signals originated in that other dimension. There is another word for
all that, the soul. I don't believe in the soul.
> If you take Jim's brain out of his body and hook it into
> a robot body, that robot is NOT going to act like Jim unless you get the
> robot body to feed it the same patterns of hormones.
Obviously.
> How would you do that
Hormones are just signals that have a very small informational content
and travel extraordinarily slowly, if electronics can send information
in gargantuan quantities at the speed of light down a fiber optic cable
I fail to understand why hormone smoke signals would stump it.
> If humans are machines, then isn't the existence of humans a trivial
> proof that human intelligence can be recreated in a machine?
Yes but most people, even most people on transhuman lists believe in the
soul and do not think humans are machines, they even think that to be
called a reductionist is an insult. I don't.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service
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