As we know, a digital computer can use other elements electronic (vacuum-tube, semiconductor) gates. You can make one from steel rods and the like. Here is one that uses air pressure to open and close its valves:
9/3/09 [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17730-new-microprocessor-runs-on-thin-air.html] The interesting thing is that you can do everything with this gadget that you can do with any other digital computer, including pass the Turing Test. A lot of people think that computers, made sufficiently powerful and complex, will be able to "think". Certainly they can fool someone interacting with them at a Terminal, but what we mean by "think" and "conscious" is, for us Dualists, far more than that! Would these AI enthusiasts claim that a computer made with these air-pressure gadgets can be Conscious? They seem to believe that SPEED is not an essential part of Consciousness, so their logic ought to lead them to the conclusion that, if an electronic digital computer can ever be Conscious, then an air-pressure digital computer can as well, the only difference being that the latter would be SLOWER. These guys actually claim that, because a Chinese Room arrangement with English-speaking people carrying out set processing instructions can translate Chinese into English, that arrangement UNDERSTANDS CHINESE, even though none of the Elements of the computing arrangement (humans) understand Chinese. After all, they HAVE to claim that, since transistors don't understand Chinese and yet they claim that a complex-enough computer composed of Transistor elements can be Conscious and can understand Chinese. I once wrote an outline for a science-fiction story that included as a subplot a WOODEN COMPUTER that one of the characters claimed had Consciousness. In fact, this computer was emulating an entire Universe, which happened to be our own, so ALL of our Consciousnesses were part of this, uh, wooden device. (Don't laugh, there are a lot of "Hard-Matrix" people who believe that if you Emulate some Consciousness or Universe it is not different from a real Consciousness or Universe.
