Re: UPLOAD: advocatus diaboli

Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Thu, 09 Jan 1997 20:38:18 -0600


> 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.