X-Message-Number: 32509
From: 
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:12:59 EDT
Subject: Freeposiy & McCarthy & emergence

When I said a map of a city is  not the city, 
Freeposity replied that it would be if it were
detailed enough. Wrong, completely missing
the point. The point is that the map, however
detailed, and whether static or dynamic, is only
a collection of code. Likewise a simulation of a
person would be just a batch of code, with no 
life or consciousness or sentience. 
 
 
It may help some people to see a reductio
ad absurdum in the statement, attributed to
John McCarthy, that even a thermostat thinks
and feels. What does it feel? It's too cool in
here, or it's too warm in here, or it's just right
in here. What does it think? I'll turn up the
heat, or I'll turn down the heat, or nothing.
 
 
McCarthy was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence,
and may have coined the term. The attribution
above is over-simplified, but look at some of
his work on the Web and you will find there
is some truth in the claim of his anthropomorphism.
 
 
There is more truth in the attribution to McCarthy
and many others of the fallacy of "emergence"--the
notion that a computer (or animal) will become 
conscious without any special design, merely by
becoming complicated enough, something like
Skynet in the Terminator movies. It will  just wake
up one day, full of piss and vinegar.
 
 
Well, I can't prove that a computer will never
"wake up" just by accretion, but I can prove
that it could achieve any explicit computational
goal without waking up. See Youniverse.
 
 
Robert Ettinger


 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32509