[extropy-chat] A quick AGI question

[ben]

OK, i think i see what you mean, and i doubt if my previous reply was 
very useful.

Simply put, i think that you do have it backwards when you say it seems 
that software specifies the state of the hardware, which is what 
produces mind.

I'd put it thusly:
Hardware implements the software which constitutes mind.

A striking image that i remember from Steve Grand's book "Life and how 
to create it" (i think that's the title, anyway), is that of an eddy in 
a stream. It doesn't matter that it's a stream, or that it's made of 
water. What matters is the eddy itself. The dynamic pattern which 
wouldn't be there without the stream, but could equally have been in 
liquid nitrogen or hot plasma or numbers in a computer or a cloud of 
butterflies or a dust storm on Mars, solitons on a sheet of platinum, 
etc., etc...

A mind is a very complex eddy.

ben zaiboc


A B <austriaaugust at yahoo.com> reshuffled and dealt again:

 > ... I'll try to rearrange the question the best I can, with the 
limited understanding that I have.

 >  It seems to me that the human brain as a physical object, can and 
does produce intelligence and consciousness without what is commonly 
understood to be software. "Software" is just an invented human noun, 
typically used to describe computer code that may be recorded in any 
number of ways (eg. on a hard drive, within a program, or scribbled with 
crayon on a piece of paper). IOW, the algorithms that produce human 
intelligence seem to be supplied solely by the physical arrangement of 
the hardware of the brain. So my question is: Is the premise behind AGI 
(or really any software program, I suppose) that the active (running) 
software *pre-specifies* the physical arrangement of the hardware (eg. 
by specifying which transistors are active at what time) - and that this 
newly pre-specified hardware arrangement is what then "produces" the 
mind, moment by moment? IOW, isn't it ultimately the *hardware* that 
produces the mind, even though it is the software which is dictating the
  physical arrangement of the hardware, moment by moment?

 >  Sorry if this question is still clear as mud, I'm having a hard time 
of it.