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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14911