X-Message-Number: 8520
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: To both Clark and Pietrzak
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 14:36:24 -0700 (PDT)

Hi again!


In my answer to John Pietrzak I alluded to how a human could do the 
calculationswe now do on a computer. Mr. Clark claims they cannot, because they 
would
need some form of external storage. Well, OK, we'll give our human a bunch of
pencils and lots of paper. And a VERY long lifespan, too (one thing we all
want!).

After all, the monkey can't understand Shakespeare, but it was a human being
who wrote the program, or wrote the program which got the computer to write
a program, or ... a sequence which must end somewhere, and which a human could
theoretically follow.


No, our minds are not tools. WE are the ones who will things, and choose things.
We design our tools to do for us what we want.

Finally, some comments are appropos here about speed. Unfortunately, we don't
yet have computers which operate at the speed of light. Yes, they do operate
faster than us, in most cases (what about our visual pigments?). But to simply
bring up speed begs the question entirely. We evolved our speed of neural 

conduction to be an OPTIMUM in the environments we had to deal with. We 
designedcomputers to do things for which speed was important. A computer devised
to
live in OUR environment (a lot here might depend on just what was a computer!)
would find all that speed quite useless. Given that something is paid for
that speed (special materials which don't arise in nature, lots of energy
put into their production, etc etc) that speed may even turn out to be 
SUBoptimal. And so the speedy computer is outcompeted by the slow dog (not
human, but dog). Or insects, or whatever.

Of course our future environment will differ from our present one. If we ever
need that speed, we will either devise tools (which may contain computers) or
find ways to modify ourselves so that we, too, are just as fast. But that's
really a side issue.

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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