On Thursday, May 15, 2014, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 6:25:09 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: >> >> >> >> On Wednesday, May 14, 2014, LizR <[email protected]> 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. > I have partly agreed with you in this thread that consciousness is not Turing emulable. Worse than that in fact, the question of consciousness being Turing emulable is meaningless, since it refers to an algorithm describing behaviour, and consciousness is not behaviour. However, consciousness is associated with the behaviour of certain atoms, and *that* is probably Turing emulable. It is then a further question, and not trivially obvious, whether emulating this behaviour on a computer will reproduce the consciousness. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/d/optout.
