On 23 Apr 1998 modlin at concentric.net wrote:
> In <353EFFF7.857AE508 at linkserve.com.ng>, Lyle Bateman <lbateman at linkserve.com.ng> writes:
>> >
> >The human brain (my assumption here is that the brain is the root of human
> >conciousness, but that is by no means certain) is constructed in a vastly
> >different way than most current computers.
BJ: And may devolve upon a more *complete* physics.
Neural nets provide something of
> >an analogy between computer architecture and brain design, however the
> >complexity level differs by many orders of magnitude.
BJ: Mere complexity is not the critical issue.
> 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.
BJ: Right.
> But hardware design has absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of
> things that can be computed,
Architecture affects practical issues of
> performance, but makes absolutely no difference to what is possible if
> we provide enough capacity and don't care how long it takes.
BJ: No, this is only a silly dogma spawned by AI types.
> The difference between any computing machine and any other computing
> machine is only a matter of programming.
BJ: More of same. The architecture has crucially to do with what kinds of
sensory input can be operated upon.
