[ExI] The digital nature of brains (was: digital simulations)

Spencer Campbell lacertilian at gmail.com
Sun Jan 31 21:53:31 UTC 2010


Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>:
> Whether people here in extropyland realize it or not, digital models of human brains will have the real properties of natural brains if and only if natural brains already exist as digital objects, i.e, only if the human brain already exists in reality as a digital computer running software.

Yeah, walked right into that one. A few questions to see if I
understand where you're coming from.

How would one determine, in practice, whether or not any given
information processor is a digital computer?

Is it accurate to say that two digital computers, networked together,
may themselves constitute a larger digital computer?

Is the Internet a digital computer? Or, equivalently, depending on
your definition of the Internet:

Is the Internet a piece of software running on a digital computer?

Finally, would you say that an artificial neural network is a digital computer?

Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>:
> Why doesn't he also have access to its supposed intentional states so that he can understand the symbols? If he cannot access that understanding in his own head then it seems to me that we've just imagined something in a futile attempt to escape the conclusion that the man just plain cannot understand the symbols.

We haven't escaped any such conclusion: the man still has no
understanding of the symbols. He doesn't have access to the virtual
Chinese room's intentional states for the same reason that an instance
of Minesweeper doesn't have access to a simultaneous instance of
Solitaire. It's not that it's physically impossible, it's just that
the two entities aren't built to interact in that way. In fact, in the
man's case he was specifically engineered to lack that access.

I could also say that the Earth doesn't have access to my intentional
states, but it's a much more metaphorical analogy because the Earth is
not instantiating me as software; we're on the same level of
abstraction. Ontologically independent. If I exist then I exist
irrespective of the Earth's existence, though I might not last that
long if you take it out from under me.



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