From: Luke (wlgriffiths@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 13:49:40 MST
>Hormones are just signals that have a very small informational content
>and travel extraordinarily slowly, if electronics can send information
>in gargantuan quantities at the speed of light down a fiber optic cable
>I fail to understand why hormone smoke signals would stump it.
If hormones have a "very small informational content" then so do motor
neuron impulses coming from the brain. And therefore simulating a human
must be easy.
Smoke signals are only as easy to predict as the Injun that's making them.
You conflate interface simplicity with behavioral simplicity. i.e. low
bandwidth with predictability.
The system that "decides" those hormone levels is very complex, and consists
of more cells than the brain, interacting in ways that are at least as if
not more complex than synaptic interactions.
What's your opinion on "gut feelings"?
- Luke
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 3:01 PM, John K Clark <johnkclark@fastmail.fm>wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 "Luke" <wlgriffiths@gmail.com> said:
>
> > if we want to talk about a "ghost in the machine", we could posit
> > that higher-dimensional signals which are too small to be measured except
> by a
> > chaotic process could be significant determinants of the outputs of human
> > brain processes.
>
> New Physics should only be conjured up as a absolute last resort as when
> there is just no alternative, such as when it became obvious that it was
> impossible to reconcile Maxwell's equations with observed Black Body
> Radiation; the only way out was the quantum. There is no need to invent
> new physics (at least not yet) to explain intelligence, we've made
> excellent progress duplicating it artificially over the last 50 years
> without doing so. And your idea explains nothing it just kicks the
> problem upstairs; the key to everything is mysterious signals from
> another dimension without even an attempt made to explain how those
> signals originated in that other dimension. There is another word for
> all that, the soul. I don't believe in the soul.
>
> > If you take Jim's brain out of his body and hook it into
> > a robot body, that robot is NOT going to act like Jim unless you get the
> > robot body to feed it the same patterns of hormones.
>
> Obviously.
>
> > How would you do that
>
> Hormones are just signals that have a very small informational content
> and travel extraordinarily slowly, if electronics can send information
> in gargantuan quantities at the speed of light down a fiber optic cable
> I fail to understand why hormone smoke signals would stump it.
>
> > If humans are machines, then isn't the existence of humans a trivial
> > proof that human intelligence can be recreated in a machine?
>
> Yes but most people, even most people on transhuman lists believe in the
> soul and do not think humans are machines, they even think that to be
> called a reductionist is an insult. I don't.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
> --
> John K Clark
> johnkclark@fastmail.fm
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service
>
>
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