dfz (02/11/83)
There appeared recently an article by an individual named Prem, which contained as its basic premise the following paragraph: "The crux of the arguement is that conciousness is a non-linguistic, non mathematical, non dualistic experience. Such being the case, it is not possible to describe it any way, and hence it is impossible to build a machine that has conciousness." This smacks of the same "logic" used by a certain mathematician several hundred years ago (the name escapes me but I'll get the reference if anyone insists) in his attempt to "prove" that no space could possibly exist except Euclidean space. His "reasoning" was that no one to date had imagined any non-Euclidean spaces, therefore they did not exist. It seems to me that the mediocre mind of man has been proven wrong so often in its tendency to limit the realm of existence to that which it can imagine, that we should long since have abandoned this sort of argument. By the way, I heard that the director of the U.S. patent office attempted to have it closed in 1899 because, in his opinion, everything inventable had already been invented. -Dave Ziffer