X-Message-Number: 14921
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 18:53:34 -0800
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Simulating People and Animals

Pat Clancy in Message #14911 wrote

>Excuse my butting in...

Please don't worry about it.  We all should endorse the principle
that everyone's opinion is welcome.

>The AI proponents have been claiming for decades that they'll
>soon achieve a breakthrough, and it never happens.
>IMHO it never will happen, the Turing machine is simply not
>the right sort of thing for the job - it doesn't matter how 
>many billions of parallel processors you hook together or
>how sophisticated your neural net program is.

You raise two questions here; I meant only to ask about the
harder Turing machine case, not about other implementations,
such as neural nets.  Now, you and some others apparently believe
that the actions of one kind of physical object, namely a human
body, are in principle not duplicatable by at least one other
kind of body, namely a body driven by or composed of computers.
I hope that I am not misstating your opinion.

This leads to a host of very interesting questions, if you would be
so kind as to entertain them.  I will assume that, speaking again of
a human body as a mechanism, we all disbelieve in the presence of
a non-physical host, or soul, that affects the actions taken by
a body; this is a fairly safe assumption on this list, because
neither Alcor nor CI is making any preparations whatsoever to
suspend souls.  Okay, then

>I hope that some other form of substrate can be developed that can
>support an artificial mind. But this will depend on our achieving
>some degree of understanding of how the mind works. Currently we
>have _no idea_ how the mind works.

Well, evidently you know enough to pronounce it completely impossible
for computers to support artificial minds!  Can you describe how you
know this, or at least why you feel it with such certainty, if you
admit that you have _no idea_ how the mind works?

You recall that I have opened up the time domain in this discussion
to include billions of years, if necessary.  So I guess that you 
would not find it impossible for vast arrays of tiny computers to
successfully imitate, say, a cockroach.  Is there any other point
short of humans in a sequence of animals leading up to man---say
ant, cockroach, snake, shark, mouse, cat, dog, chimpanzee, human---
where you would be equally certain that simulation (as judged by
people) will never be possible?

What is it exactly that forbids the actions of humans or mammals
to forever resist simulation?  I know that this is a very difficult
question, and will understand if you don't have any thoughts on it.
For example, will it be possible (presumably after many millions of
years) for computers to successfully imitate people who are asleep?

On this score, I really am curious to know:  do you think that it
will be possible to simulate people who are walking from one place
to another?  How about people who are singing, or reciting poetry
with great affect?  Ping-pong players?  Politicians evading questions?

I suppose that you will grant that at some point we will have some
sort of clunking robot that will take out the trash, beat any of us
at chess, convincingly talk like a psychiatrist (for a short while),
and probably do many other kinds of things, including running away
and shouting for help if anyone tries to turn it off.  But what would
you guess is the key behavior that it will never be able to imitate?

Thanks, (and please forgive my levity at a couple of places)
Lee

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