X-Message-Number: 14911
From: "Pat Clancy" <>
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 12:29:11 -0800
Subject: Re: Simulating People and Animals

> Do you believe that it will never be possible for sets of computers
> of the above description to take on the size and shape of a human body
> and to successfully imitate a person?  That is, even if humanity's
> total resources for the next billion years were dedicated to the project,
> it simply will never be possible---no matter how small and fast
> computers get and no matter how far materials technology proceeds---
> for computers to successfully imitate animals and humans, to all
> outward appearances and effects?

Excuse my butting in...

The AI proponents have been claiming for decades that they'll soon achieve a 
breakthrough, and it never happens. IMHO it never will happen, the Turing 

machine is simply not the right sort of thing for the job - it doesn't matter 
how 
many billions of parallel processors you hook together or how sophisticated 
your neural net program is. We will never have HAL running on a computer, 
not even by 20,001 (boy was "2001" way off!). A good critique of AI is a book 
called "What Computers Can't Do", by Dreyfus (sp?), who was at Stanford I 

believe - I think it was written at least 20 years ago but is still correct 
today.

I hope that some other form of substrate can be developed that can support 
an artificial mind. But this will depend on our achieving some degree of 
understanding of how the mind works. Currently we have _no idea_ how the 
mind works. Yes I know there are those, especially researchers in 
neuroscience and similar fields, who would say we have made breakthroughs 
in our understanding of brain function, we're close to understanding how 
memory and thought processes arise, yada yada yada... In my opinion the 
knowledge we've gained about the brain isn't even _close_ to giving us the 
_beginning_ of an understanding of the conscious mind. To go back to 
computers, but only as an analogy: it's as if you were given a computer, and 
you could observe it and run programs, but you had no idea whatsoever what 
made it work, no idea that there were such things as programming 
languages and bytes and etc. - all you knew how to do was take the cover off 
and measure the voltage at any point and try to correlate that with what was 
happening while you ran Excel. You could certainly come up with some 
observations, such as "this group of connections shows increased electrical 
activity when I click the OK button" - but you would still have no 
understanding of what was going on, as you would not know about the many 
layers of virtual machines (machine language, operating system, user 
program) that were running their programs to carry out any function, and you 
certainly couldn't infer anything about even the lowest level virtual machine 
with your voltmeter. IMHO understanding the mind is a similar problem, 
except orders of magnitude harder.

Pat Clancy

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