On Aug 4, 2013 8:08 AM, "Dan Asimov" <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
Adam, what is the connection between emulating human behavior (or the
vaguely defined Turing test) on the one hand, and Turing completeness on the other? And why should have we care about the Turing test? Humans are notorious for anthropomorphizing everything; it's as though we're programmed to be deluded about that.
--Dan
On 2013-08-04, at 6:11 AM, Adam P. Goucher wrote:
It is unlike anything whatsoever that is covered by physics. As far
as physics is concerned (and I am not blaming physics for this), the world could just be a totally insensate machine that follows physical laws but feels nothing.
Could it? Is philosopher's zombie possible? It seems to me unlikely that one could construct, grow, or otherwise have something that looks and acts and is physically like a human being but has no subjective experience.
Making something look like a human is not difficult. Nor is making something `physically like' a human being. The only one of those things that is actually hard to replicate is human behaviour.
We can simulate neural networks on computers, and they're becoming gradually more intelligent as time progresses. For instance, I think they've been able to design electronic circuits and produce art, amongst other things. Together with natural language processing and database accessing (such as Wolfram Alpha), and knowledge acquisition (such as IBM Watson), it wouldn't surprise me if a machine passes the Turing test within the next decade or so.
Also, computers are provably not conscious, since they can be emulated by Turing machines, which are obviously not conscious*.
* If they were conscious, then _everything_ of sufficient complexity would have the capability of consciousness. And as Geoff Xia showed us, the n-body problem enables particles to be projected to infinity in finite time, one corollary of which is Turing-completeness, so `sufficient complexity' means `a few elementary particles'.
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