X-Message-Number: 15243 Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 07:37:23 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: reply to Mike Perry For Mike Perry, again: In your latest reply you continue to propose the merits of revival as a creature living so slowly that it could not live in the current world. Given the billions of years until we slow down that much, the proposal that we simply wait looks kind of weak. Second, although you do mention some of the ways in which a Turing computer (or at least one which matches the original Turing computer) you completely fail to mention the differences between brains and neural nets. In my message I gave several, with none of them mentioned: production and erasure of neurons, and change in connectivity. But most of all, it fails completely to deal with one of the most obvious differences: as a parallel machine, brains work far faster than any single computer in the real world. (And remember too that the really fast computers, guess what, are PARALLEL!). BY ITS DEFINITION A TURING MACHINE CANNOT DEAL WITH THE ISSUE OF TIME. Yet the issue of time remains the most striking and simple difference between our more powerful computers and the classical Turing machines. It remains irrelevant to any real issue that perhaps, depending on our cosmology, the universe may someday slow down enough that a single computer could imitate us. We do not want to wait that long. Just why is it bad that not every machine, or even every machine which shows signs of intelligence, cannot be imitated by a Turing machine? If we find such machines, or find that we ourselves are such machines, we have gained rather than lost, even in our understanding of computers. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15243