IUBio

Toward a Science of Consciousness 1998

Oliver Sparrow ohgs at chatham.demon.co.uk
Tue Apr 28 02:38:54 EST 1998


 Stephen Harris <mulcyber at pacbell.net> wrote:

"" A program which can answer "hello Hal" with "hello Oliver"
"" does not evidence that this program has created the requirements
"" for a magnetic mind to come into existence. 

That is rather the point of much of the discussion on this usegroup.
1: Do you need awareness to get useful spontaneous information management?
2: If you do, then can you expect to generate awareness on current
     engineering platforms?
3: If not, why not? How could we re-approach said platforms to overcome
    this putative blocks?
4: If so, then what is it that you need to do. Specifically, how does one
    set about generating the concommitants of awareness when you do not
    know what these are?
5: Might there be an indirect route, which is to permit awareness to arise
    spontaeously from a sufficiently complex and predisposed architecture,
    as it appears to do in biological systems?
6: Back to (1). If you do not need awareness, but only the seeming of it,
    then what are the specific characteristics of awareness that you would
    like to access? (This is not much - never - discussed in this group but 
    lies at the heart of most practical applications.)

"" And we have no
"" knowledge about how to create life say for the interior of a sun,

Even Longley is unlikely to disagree with this observation.
______________________________________

Oliver Sparrow



More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net