Re: [asa] Sense and nonsense

On 6/21/07, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu> wrote:
>
> Perhaps I am naïve but it seems to me than any living entity, say, a human
> being, cannot create anything superior to itself.

In what sense do you mean "superior"?

A fork lift truck is vastly superior in lifting ability than humans. The
computer I'm typing the post on is far superior to me when it comes to doing
arithmetic. Think how many arithmetic operations go into the placement of
every pixel. Chess computers nowadays are superior players to all but the
top players in the world, and even they have a tough time with them
(Kasparov lost a match to "Deep Blue" several years ago).

You'll have to define what you mean by "superior" in order to make such an
assertion. This is a different order to "conscious" which was the point
discussed. Within a few years, we'll have chips with vastly superior
information storage capacity than the human brain. Who knows if the "strong
AI" postulate is true and that such a large memory, configured as a neural
network, will not become conscious? I wouldn't like to guess what the
answer is.

In "Star Trek", Data was never considered as a replacement for his crew. He
was vastly superior in knowledge, and physical strength, and in the ability
to absorb information quickly. But (in the program) he lacked the ability
to experience emotion - to understand the nature of humour, and so forth. [
Though late on they experimented with giving him an "emotion chip"].

But the whole point of my post is that some scientists believe (e.g. Roger
Penrose) that an algorithm can never be conscious, because consciousness
involves more fundamental physics.

Iain

The most intelligence, consciousness or rationality that humans can create
> is to give birth in the old-fashioned way.
>
>
>
> Therefore, a super computer like "Data," BTW I have never watched Star
> Trek, will never equal or replace its creator, man. Let us not forget that
> sentient, conscious beings or entities presuppose life and how to explain
> life from the nonliving is no mean feat. Therefore, it is doubtful that the
> physical plus mere physical interactions can create life.
>
>
>
> As Christine may have suggested, Christians have an answer in John 1:3,
> "All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came
> into being that has come into being," which is not easily amenable to
> scientific proof or scrutiny. Herein is where ID serves as metaphysics of
> science.
>
>
> Moorad
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of Iain Strachan
> Sent: Thu 6/21/2007 1:26 PM
> To: Christine Smith
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] Sense and nonsense
>
>
>
>
> On 6/21/07, Christine Smith <christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> To this I will repost an earlier question of mine
> which no one ventured an answer--it is evident, as Pim
> pointed out, that brain and thought, emotions, etc.
> are *correlated*, but *correlation does not prove
> causation*--can someone please point me towards
> specific research studies that *mechanistically* show
> how non-sentient electrical impulses and atoms can
> give rise to sentience? Do you propose that this is
> another fundamental property of substances, as I
> believe it was Don(?) argued earlier? Or do you
> propose another *mechanism* which directly causes
> these properties to emerge?
>
>
> This is probably the 64 billion dollar question, and is a topic of much
> controversy among AI researchers.
>
> The "strong AI" adherents would argue that consciousness is an "emergent
> property" of a sufficiently large and sufficiently interconnected
> neurons. The human brain has 10^10 neurons, with 10^14 interconnections
> (synapses). If you are of the strong AI persuasion, then you will believe
> that when we can build a computer with sufficient memory to simulate such a
> large neural network (and that time can only be a couple of decades away at
> most), then you will have a sentient, conscious machine like Data in Star
> Trek. In other words you would have a conscious algorithm. A futurologist
> from British Telecom gave a talk which I attended when he suggested that a
> "Data" would be a possibility by 2015 - a timeline much shorter than that
> envisaged by Gene Roddenberry!
>
> Such theories reach their ultimate philosophical embodiment in so-called
> "Alorithmic Theories of Everything", which suggest that the universe is just
> a simulation on a gigantic computer. See
> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html for an introduction to
> this idea. It also led to a kind of religious idea, dubbed "The Great
> Programmer Religion" - the Great Programmer running all possible universes
> up to a similar complexity as ours, in parallel on a gigantic computer.
>
> However, not everyone believes this will happen. Notably Roger Penrose, a
> maths professor at Oxford Univerity, and long-time associate of Stephen
> Hawking, does NOT accept that a mere algorithm will be able to be
> conscious. Penrose holds that some bit of physics is yet to be done to
> understand consciousness - he holds that it is in Quantum mechanics, and in
> particularly Quantum Gravity, that the answer to the riddle will be
> found (this would be the other mechanism you referred to that directly
> causes these phenomena). These ideas are explained in Penrose's popular
> science book "The Emperor's New Mind".
>
> There are also quasi-religious ideas embodied in here. It has been
> suggested that at the scale of the Planck length and Planck time, that the
> interconnectivity of the universe itself mimics that of a brain, and that
> possibly consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, rather
> than an emergent one and that the properties of matter etc "emerge" from the
> fundamental underlying consciousness. I think a Google on "Quantum
> Consciousness" should dredge up some interesting info on all this. I think
> this latter seems to lie closer to eastern mysticism than to Christianity,
> however.
>
> I don't know which side I'd take in the debate - I think we simply don't
> know enough to be able to say.
>
> Iain
>
>
>
>
>
>

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