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

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