On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 6:25:09 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, May 14, 2014, LizR <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote:
>
> Comp isn't really a theory, so testing it is a bit problematic. It's
>> "just" a logical argument which purports to show the consequences of taking
>> seriously the idea that brains are Turing emulable.
>>
>
> Why do you think it can't be shown that brains are Turing emulable? So
> far, there has been no natural phenomenon discovered that isn't Turing
> emulable,
>
I don't think that is true or meaningful. Something like 'making money' is
not necessarily Turing emulable (see my post on Moneybot Singularity). We
can't just build a program that makes money automatically because making
money involves other conscious agents permitting you to take money from
their accounts. Nobody can guarantee payouts indefinitely.
There is also the example of the violin and the piano song that I have
given, in which the song has onomotopoeic lyrics ('plink plink') that have
a different meaning when played by an authentic piano than it has when
played by the violin. There is no way for the violin to simulate a song
which directly references the aesthetic of another instrument's intrinsic
expression, so the Turing mechanism can only emulate the logic of the
song's execution, not the aesthetic of the instrument itself.
Setting those kinds of examples aside (and I would imagine that there are
many more), what does it mean to say that something is a 'natural'
phenomenon, when clearly our native, natural subjective experience can
exist entirely without reference to computation. If natural phenomena must
be emulated computationally, then that implies that there are other
phenomena in which we are emulating away from. If we consider phenomena
'natural' to be only those which exist outside of our bodies in public
space, then it is disastrously presumptuous to hold consciousness to that
standard, since nobody experiences their own consciousness as existing in
public space to begin with.
Craig
Stathis Papaioannou
>
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