In <6hodma$o2j at ux.cs.niu.edu>, rickert at cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>[ so I disagree with Bill ]
No you don't.
>modlin at concentric.net writes:
>>Hardware design is important in a lot of practical ways. A design must
>>provide devices and channels for information to come into the system and
>>out of it... sensors and effectors, in biological or robotic terms.
>>Hardware design also determines how fast computations can proceed, and
>>how much information can be stored and manipulated... all very important
>>to the practicality of solving any particular computational problem.
>>>But hardware design has absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of
>>things that can be computed,
>>To the extent that that is true, computation is irrelevant to
>cognition. You could do all of the same computation on a Turing
>machine with no devices and channels at all. And since there are no
>channels, the Turing machine would have no world to cognize.
You aren't disagreeing with me here, that is a totally separate point.
This whole business is hard enough to talk about sensibly without people
inventing extra problems that don't exist.
The person to whom I was responding seemed to think that different
architectures would allow different types of computation. That isn't
true. All computing architectures can compute the same things, which
you know perfectly well.
That has NOTHING to do with the need for an interface to the world, or
whether computation can generate cognition. All I'm saying, which I
know you agree with, is that IF you want to do a computation, any
computing architecture can in principle do it. That let's us factor out
worries about whether we are using digital or analog or dedicated neural
net chips, and concentrate on questions that matter.
The original statement was that our modern computers could not be
conscious because they are just big number-crunchers, followed by
suggestions that a different (non-number crunching) computer
architecture might still be able to be conscious. That's false. If any
computer archictecture can do the job, all of them can, in principle.
And if a number-crunching computer can't do the job, then NO computer,
regardless of architecture can do the job. Period. We don't have to
worry about the architecture to talk about this question.
Bill