Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!isishq!doug From: doug@isishq.UUCP (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: *IF*? Message-ID: <58.22CCF148@isishq.UUCP> Date: 1 Jul 88 16:43:43 GMT Organization: FidoNet node 221/162 - ISIS International, Waterloo ON Lines: 97 J> From: jimmyz%oak.dnet@VLSI2.EE.UFL.EDU (Anubis The Psychic Chaos J> What leads you to believe the human mind is not a complex computer? J> Computers of are current time have a level of complexity no human J> device has J> EVER achieved before, and they are just a granule of what the J> human mind is. J> Or rather, the brain. THe brain is undoubetedly a complex computer, J> but the J> mind is a non-tangible thing. Just as this VAX 8600 I am using J> now is a complex J> (supercomputers and the like aside) computer, but the programs J> I am using to J> send this message have absolutely no physical substance. J> I'd say there is a heck of a lot of similarity. J> Agreed, there is similarity. In the same way there is similarity between the sun and a lightbulb. We have been making bigger and better lighbulbs for quite a while now. Can we make one just like the sun? Well, in this case we happen to *know* there are differences as well as similarities. We can't assemble enough matter, at least on earth, to build something just like the sun. Our lighbulbs, though similar, do not use the same sort of natural processes as the sun. It is not a logically sound argument to say that because our technology is advancing it will ever reach any given goal. The evidence of advancing technology does not *prove* anything at all. It is my hypothesis that there are fundamental differences between the way organic thought operates in a human creature - that is to say, human intelligence, and the totally logical, mathematical, effective procedures which by definition are machine intelligence. To build a good human intelligence out of silicon we would have to minimally understand human thought and intelligence quite well. This is really one of the more itneresting parts of AI research today, because the understanding of human intelligence is not really a "mechanical" problem. Heck, I don't even understand *myself*! A good example is provided by chess programs. The intelligence required to play chess is among the most mechanical and methodical. Machines can play very good games of chess too. But they don't do it the same way people do. They do it by making millions of calculations, and we *know* that is not how people do it. People use something like intuition and pattern recognition which we know to be quite intependent of any numerical analysis or number crunching. Computers play chess by doing an immense amount of arithmetic. As a calculator, the human brain is really quite slow. Something else is going on. Thus a quantum leap in technology is needed, a different kind of computer, to even begin to process data of any sort (even mathematical data) the way the human mind processes data. We know that any AI problem is highly dependent on input. Now the input into the "computer in my skull" comes through my eyes and my ears and my fingers and toes, my nose and my mouth. To call an intelligence human, it would need the same input spectrum. Of course people are working on computer smell and tactile sensors, and you might one day mimic the whole human sensorium, and create a mechanical copy of a human's entire experience. You might get a computer to react just like a man to a beautiful sunset, a starving child, or a girl in a bikini. You might get a computer pondering ethical problems and answering questions about the relative merits of marxism vs capitalism as a social order. You really might one day be able to do that (though I seriously doubt it), but God forbid that anyone would *want* to! I've confused the issue between the can do and the should do. But the should do speaks to the can do. What is a man? What is a machine? Do you really honestly think that the indisputable similarities add up to a potential identity? It strikes me as preposterous, and I am searching for a language to articulate why that is. The very fact that making mechanical men is something we should not be doing from a moral and ethical perspective suggests to me that we probably can't. Why is that? It's hard to be precise, but think of the sort of human intelligence manifested as a mother holds her newborn to her breast to suckle. Think about all the complex web of social, emotional, political, relational and economic input into the behaviour involved, (and there are two human intelligences to take into account in this behaviour which is highly relational in nature) and then try to think of a way to program a computer of any hypothetical power to mimic it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Fido 1:221/162 -- 1:221/0 280 Phillip St., UUCP: !watmath!isishq!doug Unit B-3-11 Waterloo, Ontario Bitnet: fido@water Canada N2L 3X1 Internet: doug@isishq.math.waterloo.edu (519) 746-5022 ------------------------------------------------------------------