--- "Eric B. Ramsay" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I came across an old Discover magazine this morning with yet another article > by Lanier on his rainstorm thought experiment. After reading the article it > occurred to me that what he is saying may be equivalent to: > > Imagine a sufficiently large computer that works according to the > architecture of our ordinary PC's. In the space of Operating Systems (code > interpreters), we can find an operating system such that it will run the > input from the rainstorm such that it appears identical to a computer > running a brain.
That's easy to prove. Write a program that simulates a brain and have it ignore the rainstorm input. > If this is true, then functionalism is not affected since we must not forget > to combine program + OS. Thus the rainstorm by itself has no emergent > properties. Choosing a universal Turing machine can't be avoided. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=96140713-a54b2b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
