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Article 6181 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: poremba@ucbeh.san.uc.edu (Michael Poremba)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Transducers
Message-ID: <1992Jun9.164225.1412@ucbeh.san.uc.edu>
Date: 9 Jun 92 16:42:25 EST
References: <BILL.92Jun8150837@cortex.nsma.arizona.edu> <1992Jun8.221324.535@mp.cs.niu.edu> <BILL.92Jun8213911@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> <1992Jun9.153213.2220@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati
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Neil Rickert writes:
>Bill Skaggs writes:
>>Neil Rickert writes:
>>                          But note that the disembodied version, when
>>participating in a Turing Test, would suffer all the difficulties of a
>>disembodied human.
> 
>   Agreed.  Whether this would be useful would depend on the intended
> purpose of the system.  If the system were intended mostly for abstract
> thought about mathematics (or about angels dancing on the head of a pin
> for that matter), being disembodied might not be a serious handicap.  But
> for other issues, it might be a serious deficiency.

I think an important question is whether consciouness can be *maintained*
disembodied. Are we sure what a disembodied human would be like? Similarly,
would the duplicate system be able to retain consciousness and awareness?
This depends on the architecture of the embodied functioning system, which
hasn't been determined.

--
Mike Poremba
poremba@uc.edu


