From: Ian Wright (ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Mon Jan 19 2004 - 18:42:51 EST
Hello Jerry, It is possible that human minds run on causal principles more general than our current understanding of universal computation. It is of course an open question, and I quite understand any scepticism. But a great merit of the Church-Turing thesis and associated ideas is that it entails a practical research program of building machines with mental capabilities, which can yield insight into naturally occuring mental capabilities. I also understand that many people are upset with what they see as a reduction of humans to machines, and interpret that as anti-human. A similar thing happened with Darwin and his apes. But that is the wrong way of looking at it. What has happened is that our concept of machine has been upgraded, rather than the concept of what is human downgraded. We can build artificial machines of much greater causal powers due to the discovery of universal computation and its embodiment in various computing machines. That means, we as humans, have progressed. I see no obvious reason why this cannot continue, and therefore why it will not be possible to entirely replicate our own capabilities in machines and thereby gain a very deep understanding of ourselves. I'm not saying that will be easy, or without its surprises along the way. Clearly I reject the notion that minds possess any non-material or special properties that could not be understood and replicated by human labour. Von Neumann, one of the pioneers of computation and computational devices, wrote a book about self-reproducing automata. He was interested in the question whether it was possible that a machine could build and construct other machines of the same or greater computational power. Unfortunately, I haven't read this book, but it is a good question. I do not reject psychology, or neuro-psychology, or more contemplative, philosophical approaches to mind. I think all these approaches can contribute. However, I do think that they are all ultimately limited because they are, at root, non-constructive. For example, the human mind, in terms of density of information processing, is the most complex thing in the known universe. I think a purely experimental approach of measuring stimulus-response patterns and deducing underlying mechanisms isn't going to cut it. Speculative theorising about the mind won't do either. The great advance of AI has been to take a constructive approach, that is try to build a material artifact that replicates mental properties. I don't agree that computational theories of mind cannot explain complex and contradictory mental processes, such as emotional phenomena. Usually such theories are causally much richer and more complex than those expressed in natural language. Another point is that most modern psychology takes the information processing viewpoint as given, even if not all psychologists build detailed working computational models, or embodied robots. Finally, the computational approach is not opposed to the important observation that the contents of the human mind are constituted by the social environment. Honestly, there is nothing to fear from this. -Ian. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
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