RE: Implementation

From: Higgo James <james.higgo.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 14:14:36 +0100

The point I made earlier, 'I am a HLUT' - and it may have seemed facetious -
is that we are, in fact, HLUTs. You draw your 'inside' and 'outsied'
boundary as you wish (it's all arbitrary), then look something up by
stimulating the inside (brain,HLUT, whatever) with a request. You get an
answer, returned by the HLUT. The fact that it is a mass of competing
neurones, with molecular-level interactions, not a nice silicone-based
database, is irrelevant. The fact that part of the 'stimulus' is given by
'internal' factors such as levels of dopamine, is irrelevant.

You can view the neurones as a compressed version of the HLUT database. If
you gave me a HLUT to compress and sufficient resources, I might end up
giving you a wet brain.

Any system will return certain responses to certain stimulii. You are
arguing that the form somehow determines the function of the system.

Your denial of Hans's points necessitates that there are certain internal
functions of the conscious entity which CANNOT be viewed as outputs, such as
dreams. So the onus is on you to prove that dreams cannot be viewed as
outputs.

I won't bother refuting Gilles's final point, that the HLUT is 'too big'
to be conscious. Anyway, why should the HLUT be bigger than a brain? There
is a helluvalot of information stored in the configuration of a human brain
- quark by quark. A brain may be the most efficient rendering of a HLUT.

I wish I had more time to refute these daft anthromorphocentric reactions to
the HLUT's valid claim to consciousness. But I don't.

James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gilles HENRI [SMTP:Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Monday, August 02, 1999 1:42 PM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: Implementation
>
> A 21:12 -0400 1/08/99, Hans Moravec a écrit:
> >> HLUT would have to implement all this information (which could be
> >> done of course only for one singular human being), which is however
> >> constantly changing with time, and thus should constantly evolve
> >> following the same laws as a human being...that is being conscious!!
> >>
> >> Gilles
> >
> >An HLUT is an direct encoding the responses for of every possible
> >life of a single, particular person.
> >It is a tree where each node represents an instant and
> >which branches into different subtrees covering every possible
> >input the person could receive at that instant.
> >The tree is deep enough to encode all possible lifespans
> >of that person.
> >
> >As you say, the HLUT is as conscious the human being it encodes.
>
> If you refer to my previous mail, you will agree that HLUT is another
> system whose information is enormously larger than that actually stored in
> a human brain ( I suspect in fact that it is physically impossible to
> store
> as much information in our Universe). That's a reason to think that HLUT
> is
> NOT conscious (at least that's what I propose !)
>
> Gilles
>
Received on Mon Aug 02 1999 - 06:30:41 PDT