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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (142840)	8/8/2004 8:59:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

C2, when we hunt down determinism, smoking it out of Tora Bora, chasing it around the world through myriad alleys and into attics and basements, we end up with the observing mind trying to pin down the quantum world, which both seem real, but leave us as empty-handed as the hunt for Osama. They both disappear, poof, into the aether. <Penrose claims that there is an intimate, perhaps unknowable relation between quantum effects and our thinking, and ultimately derives his anti-AI stance from his proposition that some, if not all, of our thinking is non-algorithmic.> One, the observer, creates the other, the observed, like a fun-house mirror. But to conclude from that difficulty that AI is in trouble is silly. Our minds are products of boring old bucket chemistry and I can't see why they can't be superseded. If anything, I suspect that the fact of their presence means they already have been. If I see a reason such as a brick wall in the way of development, then maybe I'd wonder if the jig was up. So far, the way cyberspace is proceeding, not to mention the industrial revolution in general, looks remarkably like a large scale entity in the process of formation. I feel akin to a mitochondria in the overall scheme of things. Sure, we human mitochondria might provide the energy for the Beast, but the Beast is indifferent to my little cell, out there in a piece of skin flaking off an elbow or dripping out onto the ground from a grazed knee during a bit of fun on a footy field. It's the height of absurd hubris to think that humans are at any kind of apex of biological existence, let alone mindful existence, even if the thinker is one of the anointed [usually self-anointed]. Look how we think, struggling around with words [and maths for the smart fellas] to interpret a pathetically limited range of perceptions and memories. It's embarrassing! You only need to read this FADG stream of consciousness from the beginning to see how clueless we are. And this is one of the good places. You think a bit of AI can't beat this? You are either with us or against us. Here we come! The USA is just another of those quaint 19th century anthropoid territorial tribal dominance hierarchies run by the haves and the have-mores. It has as much chance against us as Tyrannosaurus Rex did against the little warm-blooded mammals. It's big and mean, but really stupid, just like other collectivist central-planning monsters. The USSR has gone. Mao's mantras are obsolete. The British Empire is long gone. Mqurice

To: carranza2 who wrote (142840)	8/11/2004 11:14:31 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I've only read excerpts of the book. Our brains are massively parallel machines. Parallel processing has a cost associated with it which is typically 10%-20% of the resources. This is to say that a 2xCPU machine may be deliver say 180% performance and a 4xCPU machine may deliver only 300% performance. Long before you reach anything approaching human brain capacity, the system will thrash (spend more time on managing parallelism than processing). From what I know, Penrose shows that to design a processing unit fast enough to prevent thrashing, you have to resort to quantum computing and at levels that violate QED laws.