Hi Stephen P. King I think of the brain as a running sensor of the static platonic world. Sort of like looking out of the car window as you speed along.
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/7/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-06, 20:25:27 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On 9/6/2012 7:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 7:37:38 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/5/2012 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:38:07 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Hi Roger, ??? Please leave magic out of this, as "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ??? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I think you are both right. Computers qua computers don't feel anything because they aren't anything. The physical material that you are using to execute computations on does however have experiences - just not experiences that we associated with our own. There is a concrete experience associated with the production of these pixels on your screen - many experiences on many levels, of molecules that make up the wires etc., but those experiences don't seem to lead to anything we would consider significant. It's pretty straightforward to me. A stuffed animal that looks like a bear is not a bear. A picture of a person is not a person, even if it is a fancy interactive picture. Craig -- Hi Craig, I think that the difference that makes a difference here is the identity that emerges between matching of the experience *of* object and experience *by* object. Ranulph Glanville has, with others in the Cybernetics community, written masterfully on this in his "Same is Different" paper. Hi Stephen, How does the of/by distinction compare with map-territory and use-mention distinctions? Craig Hi Craig, Consider the difference/similarity of "self-observation" and "other-observation". I will try to post more on this soon. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.