IUBio

Toward a Science of Consciousness 1998

Wim Van Dijck wim.vandijck at rug.ac.be
Fri Apr 24 17:07:43 EST 1998


On 23 Apr 1998 17:00:42 -0500, rickert at cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
wrote:

>modlin at concentric.net writes:
>>In <353EFFF7.857AE508 at linkserve.com.ng>, Lyle Bateman <lbateman at linkserve.com.ng> writes:
>
>>>Its a matter of a lot more than just programming, I'd have to say.  Hardware
>>>design is critical here.  With the type of architecture currently popular in
>>>the computer industry, conciousness will never happen.
>
>I have to agree with Lyle here.
Me too

>>In the sense that you seem to mean it, your statement that hardware 
>>design is critical is wrong.
>
>And thus I disagree with Bill.
Indeed

>>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. 

I once heard a quite strond argument during some introductory AI
classes: computer hardware (neural nets not included) work in
algoritms. Conscious minds, such as ours, use procedures (or whatever
you want to call it) that are not algoritm based. Computers CAN only
use algoritms (at least nowadays) so based on this principle, a
computer will never gain consciousness, no matter how big or fast it
is.

Greetings.
Wim.

In this  world, all you need is honesty and sincerity.
If you can fake those two, you're set for life.
                    ---- Groucho Marx



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