On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]>wrote:
> **** > > All measurable processes – including information processing -- happen > over and require for their operations some physical substrate. My point, > which I believe either you may have missed or you are dodging is that > therefore a universal computer is impossible, because there would always > need to be some underlying and external container for the process that > could not therefore itself be completely contained within the process. > I'm not at all clear what you're talking about and have little desire for clarification because enough is clear to know that even if you are describing some sort of limitation to computers humans have the exact same limitation. > > I am not interested in nor do I much care whether humans are superior or > inferior to computers > That I quite simply do not believe because I do not think anybody would advance or be convinced by such incredibly weak arguments unless they had already decided what they would prefer to be true and only then started to look around for something, anything, to support that view. > >>We are either cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels, take your pick. >> > > Not sure whether you are attempting to be funny or are pouring the irony > on a little thick. An average human brain has somewhere around 86 billion > neurons > And today just one INTEL Xeon chip that you could put on your fingernail contains over 5 billion transistors each of which can change it's state several million times faster than any neuron can. > > Characterizing this fantastically dense crackling network as a cuckoo > clock or a roulette wheel is rather facile. > There is one thing that brains and cuckoo clocks and roulette wheels and the Tianhe-2 Supercomputer all have in common, things inside them happen for a reason or things inside them do not happen for a reason. > > If we are machines then we are surely fantastically complex and highly > dynamic ones. > Yes, and so are computers. > >> I can say with no fear of contradiction that things in the brain happen >> for a reason or they do not happen for a reason. >> > > You have said absolutely nothing that means anything more than >> reiterating your belief in reductionism. >> > No, what I said was that things happen for a reason or they do not happen for a reason. Are you telling me with a straight face that you disagree with that?! > > Something either happens or does not happen for a reason… sure.. and so > what? What insight have you uncovered by stating the obvious. The insight that we are either cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels, take your pick. > I can say that things happen, for a reason or they do not happen for a > reason, for any phenomena whatsoever, in the universe, but I have not > therefore, by stating the obvious, uncovered any deeper truths or given any > insight into any process or underlying physical laws. It is meaningless and > it leads nowhere in terms of providing any actual valuable insight or > explanation. It speaks but without saying anything. What is your point? > The point that free will is a idea so bad it's not even wrong. > > much of the fine grained details of brain functioning are still not > understood and that therefore it is impossible for us to model > That doesn't follow. We still don't understand how high temperature superconductors work but that doesn't prevent us from using them in machines. In the same way we wouldn't need to understand why the logic diagram of a brain is the way it is to reverse engineer it and duplicate the same thing in silicon; assuming of course that you wanted to make an AI the same way that Evolution did, but there are almost certainly better ways to do that with astronomically less spaghetti code. John K Clark -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
