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Article 7340 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Message-ID: <1992Oct20.201325.6364@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 20 Oct 92 20:13:25 GMT
References: <1264@tdat.teradata.COM> <1992Oct17.185235.14938@klaava.Helsinki.FI> <1279@tdat.teradata.COM>
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 50

In article <1279@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com 
(Stanley Friesen) writes:

>[...] you seem to reject all categories of evidence for mind.
>[...] you have ruled out all types of evidence that are really available
>as irrelevent.  (Unless I am confusing you with someone else).

An evil twin posting malicious lies about me?  Kafkaesque...

>What kinds of evidence *would* you consider relevent?  If not behavior,
>what else is there?

Well, behaviour, certainly, and maybe some kind of direct examination of
the brain.  I understand that there has been some work on actually
detecting the formation of links between neurons on a time scale of weeks.

>|>I do not claim that an artificial mind is *certainly* possible, only that
>|>the past history of science makes it *likely* that it is possible.
>|
>|An artificial mind may certainly be possible; what is at issue is how
>|closely its capacities would match, fall short of, or even exceed those
>|of a human mind.  Where in the history of science do you see signs that
>|an artificial brain capable of true cognition is possible?  I see only
>|the history of digital computers, and recent efforts at neural network
>|simulation that so far have produced some impressive feats of pattern
>|recognition, but nothing even approaching the power of a human mind.
>
>You are looking at only this one *new* field.  I am looking at all fields of
>science, and see comparable levels of achievement on time scales of 30 to 100
>years.  What I see is that science *eventually* solves almost any problem
>it is applied to.  I see no reason why this one should be any different.[...]

Nor do I.  There is no fundamental difference between the brain sciences and
physical sciences, in my opinion.  It's a difference in the level of
complexity.  But frankly, I think you underestimate the difficulty of
the problems.  One researcher I spoke to expressed bafflement at the
virtually identical structure of chimp brains and human brains.  And
yet look at the difference in behaviour!  (Speaking only for myself,
of course...)  The reasons why the human brain is so powerful cannot
simply be read off the brain structure.  It is quite a mystery how the 
neurons are actually organized to produce the ability to `model the
world' in our heads, and carry out complex cognitive tasks like language.
I think that we'll have to wait at least a couple of centuries for a
full understanding of brain-function.  Sorry, no androids dreaming of
electric sheep in 2020.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy


