[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 07:35:44PM -0700, Gordon wrote:

> If the brain is not intrinsically like a digital computer operating
> according to syntactical rules of a program then for what reason to do we
> think we can make a conscious brain on a digital computer? It seems to me
> that to make a conscious brain, we must do something much closer to what
> nature has done.

You're correct, but probably not for the reasons you think.

Computing as it is practiced today emerged ad hoc (Jacquard
loom) and is basically frozen chance. You might have noticed
that clock rates stopped doubling somewhen a decade ago, this
was the first crisis of sequential thinking. 

Due to physical limitations computing will have to change
within the next 20-30 years, and it will actually begin to
look more like biology than what you're currently thinking
when you mean 'computer'.

It's important to realize that difference between digital
and analog disappears at nanoscale and/or very fast switching
times, so what you think as a major division between 
operational domains has no real basis in reality.