On Feb 12, 7:14 am, 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote: > And not of you don't.. We have made a little progress here. You think > computers are dumb because you think in terms of the hardware, > and not in terms of the software, despite the fact that the latter can > be of any degree of complexity.
Complexity isn't intelligence, and conflating the two obscures the more relevant issue of understanding. A DVD player exports a pattern of bits as pixels on a video screen. That is software interfacing between two hardware platforms. Neither the screen, the TV, the pixels, the microprocessors, the room, the couch, or the neighborhood is watching the movie. Only the human audience is watching the movie. The software is not watching anything, because it is not a thing anywhere except in our understanding. We are the ones who are writing it to satisfy our own human motives and we are the only ones in the universe who enjoy the results. On every other level, the software has no signal, no semantic content. It is purely a syntactic mechanism that runs on the basic detection-response level of sense. This view of intelligence recognizes subtle differences between actions and experience that scale up to be crucially important issues when considering AI. I'm not sure what alternative you are offering to this view, but it appears to be blind to these distinctions by presuming the neuron doctrine in the first place.If you start out thinking that consciousness can only be the software of the brain then you wind up having to conjure awareness for every program or mathematical function we can imagine. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
