From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Wed Mar 24 1999 - 12:25:40 MST
>> Basically, I used to be a Strong AIer, until I tried to define
>> computation in observer-independent terms - whether process A
>> instantiates process B - and wound up with a lot of basic elements
>> of cognition (many of which made it into _Coding_) but no objective
>> definition. I concluded that the Turing formalism formalized human
>> reasoning rather than physical law. Fini.
Even if you are correct, though, this has little bearing on the
possibility if articial conciousness. Turning computability only
limits a small subclass of machines, and says nothing about what
machines in general can be made to do. It may very well not be
possible to upload human consciousness into a deterministic
algorithm, but it should still be possible to upload it--or at
least reproduce it--in some other specialized chunk of silicon
or other hardware. Probably a collection of task-specialized
interacting hardware modules, including some number of computation
modules, would do the trick nicely. After all, even if we can't
agree on how to define consciousness, we cannot ignore that it
exists in us, and there's no hardware in us that physical law
prevents us from functionally simulating.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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