X-Message-Number: 8677
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: spiritualism
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 21:54:35 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Mike!

As you can guess, just from my attention to brains and how they work, I would
hardly accept a spiritualistic approach. 

As for Turing's thesis as distinct from Turing machines, exactly what was his
thesis? It seems to me, given that computing has already seen lots of 
developments which make Turing machines at best only abstract models, that
if we want to refute or argue against any spiritualistic approach to explaining
how we work, then tying our argument to Turing machines is unwise. Lots of
things don't qualify as Turing machines because no one would claim they are
computers. To make your argument depend on a link runs a risk that someday
the notion of Turing machines may be seen as either:

A. An outmoded idea true only for certain special computers which happened
   to be the only ones available in the century Turing wrote.

B. A forgotten idea because the abstract machine they presented was eventually
   found to be irrelevant to the issues in computing thought to be most 
   important

I'll also say, for myself, that it would help understanding both on cryonet
and in general if somebody came up with a definition of just what was a 
computer. (Other than the job description of the 19th Century, a lab assistant
hired to do computations!). If we defined computers as Turing machines, or
even machines whose activity can be somehow mapped to Turing machines (for a 
definition we'd better be damned sure to specify how that mapping is done!)
then simply saying that something is a computer and therefore must be a 
Turing machine is a tautology and tells us nothing. If computation is the
only thing a computer is supposed to do, then that's fine, but it raises
serious questions about whether anything but a highly expensive parallel
machine would qualify. (Our PCs -- in the general sense, not just IBM
machines -- do lots of things other than compute). 

I've said before that I do not object to the notion that a DEVICE might be
constructed able to think and act like a human being. Whether that device
must necessarily be a computer seems to me to be an open question. What's
the difference? One major thing we do which computers do not (though now
they're getting add-ons that give them a little of this ability) is to 
interact with the world. We still interact with the world a lot more
efficiently than any computer. To verge a bit on the outrageous, I'd say
that a computer that was able to coach a football team to victory would
be much more of an achievement than one which could beat any human being
in chess. Why? Because coaches of football teams must deal with all the
confusion and behavior close to but not actually breaking the rules of
football. A chess game is far more structured, a mathematical system off
in its own highly structured world, totally invented by human beings.
A football game is not. (No guys, I don't like football, but that doesn't
affect the point I'm making).

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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