From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Dec 23 2005 - 14:14:05 MST
You are confusing life (an arbitrary definition) with sentience (the only 100% certain definition of anything in existence we have). Life is some sort of metabolic pattern transfer. Consciousness is the (encoded within the physics of REAL chemistry) 1st hand perception and/or "awareness" of pain and pleasure. Your crappy simulations might be alive, but they would not feel. Yes, rods and balls neural networks or whatever, have no value. Evolution fluked out and captured the physics of something really special in our earth-history. Computation was probably maximized shortly after the big-bang (just a guess). Don't go looking there for signatures from aliens though.
David Picon Alvarez <eleuteri@myrealbox.com> wrote: From: "Phillip Huggan"
> I agree, mind is machine. But this machine utilizes electricity. So
quantum effects appear at some level. Its not like anyone actually has a
freakin clue what (physical) effect(s) really gives rise to sentience. I'm
guessing the chemistry of our brains interacts in a way to produce
I think that's the problem of your hypothesis, it assumes something else
than informatics is going on, and necessary, to sentience. If you built a
replicating organism that would grow and reproduce, and exchange genetic
information with others of its kind, but it were not based on DNA and carbon
chemistry, say it were based on much bigger mechanical components, would you
say it is not alive? What is the distinguishing aliveness stuff? If you
built a computer with lego bricks and it gave you a square root of a number,
is that any different than when it is done by an electronic computer, and is
this any different than when it is done by a human brain? If a simmulation
of the neural processes, including potential feedback loops with the
emerging EM field, of a human brain within an environment were computed on
millions of abacus by the adherents to some odd cult trying to keep alive
and consciouss their creation, would you say that the sum total of this
process is non-sentient, because the informatics is happening on rods with
balls, and off-loaded onto other people's brains, instead of happening all
put together in the same place, although the information processing is
absolutely indistinguishable by any objective means possible?
--David.
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