On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:39:44PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> Hi Roger, >> >> On 18 Mar 2013, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: >> >> > >> >Since mind is an MQS or Multiple Quantum Superposition, it can >> >process information at the rate of a quantum computer. >> >> >> Since you seem to talk philosophy, let me translate what you say >> for our friends the scientists. >> >> If we assume that mind is a Multiple Quantum Superposition, and if >> we assume that mind can exploit those quantum superpositions to >> process information, then the mind can process information at the >> rate of a quantum computer. >> >> That implication seems to me quite reasonable. >> >> Test of the theory according to which a human mind is a Multiple >> Quantum Superposition: >> >> >> 1) show me a human as good as a quantum computer for finding a >> needle in a haystack. >> >> 2) Factorize 11111311111911111111511111111111121212111111111 >> >> > > Demonstrating these sorts of exponential speedups only falsifies the > proposition that a human mind is an ordinary classical computer (but > not COMP). It does not confirm in any way that a human mind operates > as a quantum computer, since random oracles are another way of > bridging computational complexity classes. > > We only need one idiot-savant to demonstrate this. > > By contrast, being unable to demonstrate this scaling means - well nothing > at all, actually.
I agree with Russell here. More generally, I always disliked these evaluations of the computational power of the human brain by the speed at which it can do arithmetics. It's quite possible that the brain is a computational beast, but the "software" it runs is specialised in other things: image pattern recognition, parsing semantic trees and so on. Arithmetics is a recent and unnatural activity for the brain, so it might very well have to be performed on top of inadequate and expensive pre-existing machinery. > -- > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
