simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke) (06/09/88)
Following the recent debate in this newsgroup about the value of AI, a thought struck me. It's a bit tenuous.... As I understand it, Turing's work shows that the behaviour of any computing device can be reproduced by any other. Modern cosmology holds that: 1] there is a material world. 2] if there is a spiritual world, it's irrelevent, as the spiritual cannot affect the material. 3] the brain is a material object, and is the organ which largely determines the behaviour of human beings. If all this is so, then it is possible to exactly reproduce the workings of a human brain in a machine (I think Turing actually claimed this, but I can't remember where). So AI could be seen as an experiment to determine whether a material world actually exists. While the generation of a completely successful computational model of a human brain would not prove the existence of th material, the continued failure to do so over a long period would surely prove its non-existence... wouldn't it? ** Simon Brooke ********************************************************* * e-mail : simon@uk.ac.lancs.comp * * surface: Dept of Computing, University of Lancaster, LA 1 4 YW, UK. * * * * Neural Nets: "It doesn't matter if you don't know how your program * *************** works, so long as it's parallel" - R. O'Keefe **********
weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) (06/12/88)
In article <517@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>, simon@comp (Simon Brooke) writes: >[...] >If all this is so, then it is possible to exactly reproduce the workings >of a human brain in a [Turing machine]. Your argument was pretty slipshod. I for one do not believe the above is even possible in principle. ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720