Re: virus: kurzweil cuts the mustard
Robin Faichney (robin@faichney.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 30 Dec 1998 19:25:02 +0000
In message <3.0.3.32.19981229135145.00a40180@mailhost.ais.net>, Bob
Hartwig <hartwig@ais.net> writes
>At 09:00 PM 12/28/98 +0000, you wrote:
>>
>>Umm, I'd think you should be more sceptical of a machine's
>>claim than that of a person, simply because you know that
>>*you* are conscious, and other people are built the same,
>>but that doesn't apply to machines.
>>
>
>Why doesn't it apply to machines? If I have two equally powerful computers
>that are built with parallel processing neural network architectures, both
>initialized with the same weights and trained equally, what difference does
>it make if one is implemented in meat and the other in silicon? Or even in
>a simulation on a super fast scalar processor?
The point is that we don't understand consciousness in people,
so we can't build it into machines. If you believe that any
sufficiently powerful computer would be conscious, then that's
just blind faith.
--
Robin