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From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.math
Subject: Re: Sc--nce Attack (really on minds and computers)
Message-ID: <201@l5.uucp>
Date: Sun, 20-Oct-85 13:25:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.201
Posted: Sun Oct 20 13:25:53 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Oct-85 05:21:23 EDT
References: <299@umich.UUCP> <10699@ucbvax.ARPA> <10700@ucbvax.ARPA> <10702@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Organization: Nebula Consultants, San Francisco
Lines: 23
Keywords: Turing machines vs. the mind
Xref: watmath net.philosophy:2900 net.math:2404

In article <10702@ucbvax.ARPA> tedrick@ucbernie.UUCP (Tom Tedrick) writes:
>*IS THERE ANYONE THAT AGREES WITH ME THAT THE HUMAN MIND IS PROVABLY
> NOT EQUIVALENT TO A TURING MACHINE?*

Me.  But not for the reasons that you give.  Aristotle propsoed the definiton
``man is a rational animal''.  In recent years we have worked very hard on
the ``rational'' part but not very hard on the ``animal'' part.  I think that
the concept of ``living'' is very important to the concept of ``mind''.

This does not meant htat it is impossible to construct a living turing machine,
but this is not where the efforts in AI have been spent so far.  I fear that
intelligence may be the easy part, and that it is AL (artificial life) which
is the tough one.

Laura Creighton
l5!laura

what's life to an immortal?

-- 
Laura Creighton		
sun!l5!laura		(that is ell-five, not fifteen)
l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa