[ExI] Is the brain a digital computer?

[Dave Sill]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It seems to me totally absurd to assign consciousness to a pile of beer cans and toilet paper, or to a billion men pulling levers, or to a nation of Chinese people talking to one another on the telephone (Block, 1978) or to an arrangement of cats chasing mice, or to pigeons trained to peck as Turing machines (Pylyshn, 1985) or to any number of other such theoretically possible "Turing equivalent" implementations.

OK, great, so it seems absurd. Does that mean it's impossible? Of
course not. It may be impossible for other reasons, but "apparent
absurdity" isn't one of them.

Does it not seem absurd to assign consciousness to a glob of
gelatinous gray goo?

-Dave