X-Message-Number: 11530
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 01:36:19 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Emulated Person, Real Output

The discussion with Thomas Donaldson has gotten off the main point I was
trying to make. I don't doubt that today we don't have anything approaching
an emulation of a person in a computer, and in particular, someone with
literary gifts, at a fully human level, despite some interesting results.
Some of these will be found in Kurzweil's *The Age of Spiritual Machines*.
But I was saying that if we *did* have a human-level emulation, which we
might in some device of the future, the intellectual property produced by
that emulation (poetry, mathematics, whatever) would be *real* intellectual
property. It would be real in a way that, for example, an emulated stomach
would not be doing real digestion, which would counter a criticism of Searle
in his recent review of the Kurzweil book.

Mike Perry

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