On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 6:15 AM Lawrence Crowell < [email protected]> wrote:
*> I would say in general with a machine you can see the seems, bolts and > rivets while a biological system you don't.* A trivial difference, one has cartilage the other has bolts and rivets. > * > You can turn off a machine, but a biological system does not turn back > on.* So an artificial machine can do something that a natural biological machine can not, and that will be far from the only advantage they have. > *> Biological systems are spontaneous and will act accordingly.* I don't know what you mean by that. All machines, both natural and artificial, either do things for a reason and thus are deterministic or they do things for no reason and thus are random. Natural or artificial it makes no difference, they're either cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels. > > *A computer with no input just sits there.* A computer with no inputs can still calculate the digits of PI, and so can a human who can't see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. Although the human would perform the calculation much much slower and be more error-prone. > *> While there are clearly Turning machine or Church-Turing aspects of how > brains or neural systems work, there are also huge departures.* Huge departures? I can't even think of any tiny departures and neither can anybody else, nobody has ever found a problem that a human can solve that a Turing Machine couldn't. 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv21CcBMMrn5X0_8JvYYprXO1p13VsK7LPqYdFU7KpDZJw%40mail.gmail.com.
