On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 09:10:19AM +0200, Vincent Archer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:41:26PM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Given Moore's Law and the other rules of thumb regarding the progress of > > computer hardware it will be another 25 to 30 years before we match > > human capacity. > > > > Anyone who says they can achieve such in significantly less time is > > seeking funding. :-) > > Or is using the relatively simple reasoning that brains are full of > cruft, overcapacity, and other elements that are not specifically > required for sentience, but devoted to the management of a primate's > body, and we can do a better job.
The trouble with simple reasoning, especially in the area of biology, is that it is often wrong. Evolution is a miser. Still the crux of the point above turns on what is considered a threshold for sentience. My handy Webster's defines it as: Sentient Sen"ti*ent, a. L. sentiens, -entis, p. pr. of sentire to discern or perceive by the senses. See Sense. Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception. Specif. (Physiol.), especially sensitive; as, the sentient extremities of nerves, which terminate in the various organs or tissues. "and preception" is the stumbling block here. Without it we have a device with a sensor that does or does not do something based on readings from said sensor. Big deal, there was such a device controlling the furnace of the house I was born in over four decades ago. With it... ah, now that is a different kettle of fish. > Emulating a human is very very different from making a sentience. That's > the main flaw of the Turing's test: it attempts to prove the existence > of human-type sentience, not sentience in general. I think there is a conflation here of sentient entity and intelligent entity. The Turing test is looking for intelligence. During his day the only known model for intelligence was the self-image of human intelligence (which was (and still is) very poorly understood). -- Chief Gadgeteer Elegant Innovations _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
