X-Message-Number: 11538
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: one more reply to Mike Perry
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 23:06:20 +1000 (EST)

Hi everyone!

A reply to Mike: your story is fine, and I don't deny that you found the
pebble you say you found.

But did your father consider the pebble to be a sculpture?

As I said in my previous posting, there are 2 issues. If a piece of math
produced by a computer looks to us like an important and perceptive piece
of math, we'll certainly pay attention to it. But that does not imply that
the computer which made it had either mathematical perception or
abilities; if anyone had mathematical perception and abilities, it would
be the programmer(s) who originally wrote the emulation program, not
the program itself.

And to repeat, you are free to consider anything you wish as if it were
a poem or a piece of mathematics. Just be consistent. However if you find
such things in nature, your decision to consider a computer-written piece
of "poetry" to be poetry has no implications at all about the awareness
of the computer which produced it --- any more than the piece of rock 
you found implies that the forces which made it had any awareness,
consciousness, or independent abilities.

You can go forward here but not backwards.

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas

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