Dear Stathis,
Two points: I am pointing out that the "non-interactional" idea of
computation and any form of monism will fail to account for the "necessity"
of 1st person viewpoints. I am advocating a form of dualism, a "process"
dualism based on the work of Vaughan Pratt.
http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf
What in interesting about this form of dualism is that the dual aspects
become identical to each other (automorphic?) in the limit of infinite Minds
and Bodies. I don't have time to explain the details of this right now but
your fears can be assuaged: there is no coherent notion of an "immaterial
soul" nor a "mindless body". An example of the former is a complete atomic
Boolean algebra that can not be instantiated physically by any means and an
example the latter is found in considering a physical object that has no
possible representation.
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
To: <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 8:32 AM
Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind
>I appreciate that there are genuine problems in the theory of computation
>as applied to intelligent and/or conscious minds. However, we know that
>intelligent and conscious minds do in fact exist, running on biological
>hardware. The situation is a bit like seeing an aeroplane in the sky then
>trying to figure out the physics of heavier than air flight; if you prove
>that it's impossible, then there has to be something wrong with your proof.
>
> If it does turn out that the brain is not Turing emulable, what are the
> implications of this? Could we still build a conscious machine with
> appropriate soldering and coding, or would we have to surrender to
> dualism/ an immaterial soul/ Roger Penrose or what?
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
Received on Sun May 15 2005 - 09:47:59 PDT