On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 7:40 PM <cloudver...@gmail.com> wrote: *> The Church-Turing thesis is one of the most useless ideas ever invented.* >
Well... Bill Gates assumed its true and that gave him confidence to drop out if Harvard and to put the small amount of money he had into starting his own small company, and 15 years later that company was a colossus and Gates was the richest man in the world. I would call that a useful assumption. Carol E. Cleland wrote: *> there's a more correct way to view consciousness.* Speaking of usefulness, unlike intelligence theories there is no way to tell a good consciousness theory from a bad one. *> you haven't been clear about what that is, vacillating between "only > certain kinds of matter can be conscious" and "all matter is conscious".* I don't know about consciousness but if the logical operation of a collection of matter particles can't be reduced to that of a Turing Machine then it won't behave intelligently. As for consciousness all I'll say is that any argument advanced that a Turing machines can't be conscious can also be used with little or no modifications to advance the argument that none of your fellow human beings are conscious. > * I argue that mundane procedures can be said to be effective in the same > sense in which Turing machine procedures can be said to be effective. I > also argue that mundane procedures differ from Turing machine procedures in > a fundamental way, viz., the former, but not the latter, generate causal > processes.* I have no idea what that's supposed to mean John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
