From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jan 15 2006 - 16:17:27 MST
Argh!! The term *randomness* has been misused one too many times. Yes silicon is versatile. Not as much as carbon, but probably #2 if you are building stuff. I'll leave the googling to you if you feel like tracing the specific engineering roots of why we don't yet use carbon-based semiconductors.
Fudley, you've defined in the past that anything either is random or is not. But there is no way for you to determine any method of classifying something in your scheme, nothing. As far as I can tell, everything reduces to randomness, which really seems to mean to you "I don't know". Quantum phenomena are not random. They follow a different class of rules than do classical systems. People are using these rules to construct a class of computers called Quantum Computers that aren't the least bit random. True Randomness is unpredictability, unintelligibility. Here we can use Anthropic reasoning to conclude the entire universe is not truly random.
Yes neurotransmitter molecules exhibit properties of a molecular computer. I'm sure if you string 'em up along a carbon nanotube or something you can find a way to turn them into switches. This does not mean if you take certain arrangements of your neurotransmitter-CNT shish-ka-bobs; if you connect them or wave them around the right way you will not get emotions. In our neurons there is a specific system orientation that has to be maintained for emotions to emerge.
You can't have computation without a physical computer substrate. But your computer software only affects physical changes within your computer. If you add robotics or nanotech or any sort of engineering to your computer, now you are affecting physical fields and particles and other mind-building tools. If you ask this type of computer to figure out a blueprint and then build it... viola, the computer can then kill us off or whatever. IMO, semiconductor substrate is too primitive to give birth to minds.
fudley <fuddley@fastmail.fm> wrote:
<SNIP>
> We know it is a chemical hormonal process.
> Physical not computational.
Can you name computational process that is not physical? I can’t. I can
only name one physical process that is not computational, quantum
randomness.
> Everbody knows carbon is a more versatile element
> for chemical processes than is silicon.
And silicon’s ability to form complex compounds has nothing to do with
the silicon in computer chips.
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