IUBio

Toward a Science of Consciousness 1998

OSAMA osamab at emirates.net.ae
Sat Apr 25 10:36:29 EST 1998


modlin at concentric.net wrote:
> 
> In <6hqde2$pki at ux.cs.niu.edu>, rickert at cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
> >modlin at concentric.net writes:
> >
> >>But if you really mean to say that the architecture used for the
> >>computing itself makes a difference to what can be computed, given the
> >>necessary input and ignoring performance...  then I respectfully suggest
> >>that's incorrect.
> >
> >The important points that you are missing are:
> >
> >       We are not given the necessary output.  We have to fetch our
> >       own input, and make our own decisions as to what input to
> >       use.
> >
> >       We have to make do with whatever performance we have.  It it
> >       took a year to make the decision whether to eat that morsel
> >       of food, we should soon starve to death.
> 
> I'm not missing those points.  I'm explicitly talking about computation,
> to which they are irrelevant.  They may have a lot to do with whether a
> computation is useful or effective, and we need to consider them in
> talking about what is needed for consciousness and intelligence...  but
> they have NOTHING at all to do with whether different architectures can
> compute different functions.
> 
> Computation is transforming data according to some functional
> relationship.  What we call a computing architecture is a set of
> primitive functions plus some means of combining them to make up other
> functions not defined as primitives in the architecture.  It turns out
> that any of many very simple sets of primitives is enough to allow
> combinations implementing any other computable function.  We call an
> architecture capable of at least such a set of primitives "Turing
> complete", and any such machine can compute any function any other such
> machine can compute,  given enough resources.   This is analogous to the
> notion of a "Boolean complete" set of primitive boolean operators such
> as (AND OR NOT) or (NAND).  Given a boolean-complete set of boolean
> operators you can generate all possible boolean functions, and given a
> Turing-complete set of computing primitives, you can compute all
> possible computable functions.
> 
> I'm finding it frustrating that you keep posting that you disagree, when
> I know that you understand this point because you've made it clearly
> yourself, several times.  Why disagree when I say the same thing?
> 
> Bill Modlin
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