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From: spe@SPICE.CS.CMU.EDU (Sean Engelson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: The Success of AI
Message-ID: <193@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: Sat, 17-Oct-87 21:39:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: PT.193
Posted: Sat Oct 17 21:39:46 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 13:09:05 EDT
Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU
Reply-To: spe@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Sean Engelson)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 22

Keywords:



Given a sufficiently powerful computer, I could, in theory, simulate
the human body and brain to any desired degree of accuracy.  This
gedanken-experiment is the one which put the lie to the biological
anti-functionalists, as, if I can simulate the body in a computer, the
computer is a sufficiently powerful model of computation to model the
mind.  I know, for example, that serial computers are inherently as
powerful computationally as parallel computers, though not as
efficient, as I can simulate parallel processing on essentially serial
machines.  So we see, that if the assumption that the mind is an
inherent property of the body is accepted, we must also accept that a
computer can have a mind, if only by the inefficient expedient of
simulating a body containing a mind.

	-Sean-
--
Sean Philip Engelson			I have no opinions.  
Carnegie-Mellon University		Therefore my employer is mine.
Computer Science Department	
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