Hi Bruno Marchal You have a much more rational view of the mind/brain than I do. You seem to believe that reason must always be involved, but IMHO it need not and in faxct rarely is involved. I can walk up stairs without looking at my feet or thinking "right" or "left" foot".
And when I see a red apple, I see its "redness" without invoking the word "red". Or say I hold up shirts of different colors against me to see how well they look with my complexion or mood. I may not even technically know the difference between off-white and a sort of beige-ish white, Or white-ish beige. There is a name for it, but it escapes my mind right now. Maybe it's a light tan ? Roger , [email protected] 8/16/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-15, 03:30:22 Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model On 14 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Roger wrote: Hi John Clark 1) I can experiencre redness (a qualitative property) while computers cannot, all they can know are 0s and 1s. That is not valid. You could say that abrain can know only potential differences and spiking neuron. Of course you confuse level of description. In both case, brain an computer, it is a higher level entity which do the thinking. 2) One can use methods such as statistics to infer something in a practical or logical sense, eg if a bottle of wine has a french label one can infer that it might well be an excellent wine. A computer could do that. But one cannot tell other than by tasting it if a wine is truly a good vintage or not. A computer can't do that. Actually this is already refuted. I read that some program already taste wine better than french experts. And any creative act comes out of the blue if it is truly creative (new). "new" is relative. Improved jazs would be a good example of that. I believe that John Coltrane's solos came out of the Platonic world. Google on MUSINUM to see, and perhaps download, a very impressive software composing music (melody and rhythm) from the numbers. Numbers love music, I would say. Natural numbers can be said to have been discovered in waves and music, in great part. You must not compare humans and present machines, as the first originate from a long (deep) computational history, and the second are very recent. Better to reason from the (mathematical, abstract) definition of (digital) machine. Bruno Roger , [email protected] 8/14/2012 ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-12, 13:24:42 Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Roger <[email protected]> wrote: > Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or feelings Do you have any way of proving that isn't also true of your fellow human beings? I don't. > intution is non-computable Not true. Statistical laws and rules of thumb can be and are incorporated into software, and so can induction which is easier to do that deduction, even invertebrates can do induction but Euclid would stump them. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
