On 8/26/2011 1:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
That's the problem. You're interested in the wrong thing. Cells and
organsims are not billiard balls. If you treat them as predictable
mechanisms, you lose the very dimension that you are trying to
emulate.
It's not a question of "treating" them as predictable; so far as anyone
has been able to tell they *are* predictable. No one has found any
evidence that they do not behave according to the known laws of physics
and chemistry - which means they are predictable. What evidence do you
have to the contrary?
The unpredictable behavior of a cell doesn't arise out of
complexity, it arises out of a higher order of simplicity that organic
molecules facilitate.
"Higher order simplicity"?? More magic or more poetry? You seem to be
agreeing that complexity is not sufficient to make cells unpredictable.
So in principle the complex behavior of the cell could be predicted even
at the molecular level. You are claiming this prediction would fail
because of ...what?
> Similarly with an artificial neuron, for the purposes of this
> discussion we are interested only in whether it stimulates the other
> neurons with the same timing and in response to the same inputs as a
> biological neuron would.
Even if you could create an artificial neuron which could impersonate
the responsiveness of an natural one, it wouldn't matter because it
still doesn't feel anything.
How do you know it doesn't feel anything? How do you know it doesn't
feel exactly the same as the neuron it replaced? How do you know the
feeling of either the neuron or the artificial neuron has an effect on
what you would feel? We know from operations on the brain that
electrostimulation may evoke memories, the sound of a melody, and other
qualia. The subject never says, "That felt like electrostimulation." or
"That didn't produce any feelings."
Brent
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