John Searle
Dec. 11th, 2002 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciphergothThe question I asked was
"The Church-Turing thesis states that any machine we can really imagine building, certainly any machine that can be built using the physical law that we know, can be simulated on a computer. That includes the human brain, which we agree is a machine. So do you agree with Penrose that there's physical law we don't know that will extend the powers of the brain beyond those of a Turing machine?"
The question I should have asked was
"When you represent what you call Strong AI as being based on the belief that the brain is like a digital computer, that's a deliberate misrepresentation designed to make it seem less plausible. Strong AI is, as you know perfectly well, based on the belief (which you share) that the brain is some sort of machine, and as such is amenable to simulation on a computer. You fuck."
As for the way he misrepresents Dennett... well, anyway, I'm kicking myself because I'll never get the chance again...
Dreamt about a Goth weekend being run by this year's BiCon committee, in a town a bit like Whitby but different; people were bemoaning the absence of the Elsinore. Instead of sleeping in beds, we slept in mattress-shaped tanks of water; they were quite comfy once the heat of your body warmed the water. I went to what I thought was a plenary, but it turned out to be a crisis meeting of the commitee;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adjectivemarcus said I should stay because of being involved in last year. They were trying to call emergency services because of some sort of drug-related medical emergency, but their mobiles weren't getting reception and the landline was tied up because (babysimon explained to me) some interfering busybody had insisted that the best way to get them would be to dial out and raise them online...
"The Church-Turing thesis states that any machine we can really imagine building, certainly any machine that can be built using the physical law that we know, can be simulated on a computer. That includes the human brain, which we agree is a machine. So do you agree with Penrose that there's physical law we don't know that will extend the powers of the brain beyond those of a Turing machine?"
The question I should have asked was
"When you represent what you call Strong AI as being based on the belief that the brain is like a digital computer, that's a deliberate misrepresentation designed to make it seem less plausible. Strong AI is, as you know perfectly well, based on the belief (which you share) that the brain is some sort of machine, and as such is amenable to simulation on a computer. You fuck."
As for the way he misrepresents Dennett... well, anyway, I'm kicking myself because I'll never get the chance again...
Dreamt about a Goth weekend being run by this year's BiCon committee, in a town a bit like Whitby but different; people were bemoaning the absence of the Elsinore. Instead of sleeping in beds, we slept in mattress-shaped tanks of water; they were quite comfy once the heat of your body warmed the water. I went to what I thought was a plenary, but it turned out to be a crisis meeting of the commitee;
adjectivemarcus said I should stay because of being involved in last year. They were trying to call emergency services because of some sort of drug-related medical emergency, but their mobiles weren't getting reception and the landline was tied up because (babysimon explained to me) some interfering busybody had insisted that the best way to get them would be to dial out and raise them online...
no subject
Date: 2002-12-13 08:17 am (UTC)True dice are random. How do computers produce random (as opposed to psuedo-random) numbers? They can't - humans have to go off and make some physical hardware (like Walker's radioactive decay box or ERNIE's electronics) that does it for them.
It is true that it's possible to simulate a roulette wheel in real time with sufficient accuracy to make money (I'm more amazed that the people wot did it managed it with a 6502 programmed in hex...) albeit at some risk. But what that tells us is that roulette wheels aren't random!
And "any machine" is still way over what Turing in particular actually claimed.
'Thesis M' is such an extension: Whatever can be calculated by a machine (working on finite data in accordance with a finite program of instructions) is Turing-machine-computable.
And that's unproven, even if constrained to machines that could actually exist in the real world.
What I sense you'd like to have proven is Thesis M with the bit in parenthesis taken out... and I don't think that is ever going to happen.