on 9/12/00 12:12 am, Ronn Blankenship at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> At 11:08 PM -0400 07/12/2000, William T Goodall wrote:
>>> Emulating consciousness would be redundant. Or maybe a category mistake.
>>> Simpler to just do it directly. Like what would 'emulating arithmetic' mean?
>
> Does a computer or calculator "do arithmetic" or does it "emulate
> arithmetic"? I suppose it depends on what one chooses to mean by "doing
> arithmetic." Most people would probably agree that a computer is not doing
> the same thing when it calculates that a human does when he/she/it <g>
> calculates.
Well it isn't doing it the same *way*. But people don't either - a lightning
mental calculator uses all sorts of tricks to calculate faster whereas other
people might have to scratch it out with pencil and paper the way (and there
are different ways) they learned in school. And presumably aliens would do
it differently again.
> On the other hand, one could define "arithmetic" as any black
> box that given certain input returns the same output as one would get by
> formally applying Peano's axioms, in which case a computer and a human are
> both "doing arithmetic."
>
> Just some random musings, I suppose.
--
William T Goodall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
