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Article 1391 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Daniel Dennett (was Re: Commenting on the posting
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Date: 18 Nov 91 21:22:35 GMT
References: <1991Nov14.223348.4076@milton.u.washington.edu> <1991Nov15.160741.5495@husc3.harvard.edu> <11749@star.cs.vu.nl>
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In article <11749@star.cs.vu.nl> peter@cs.vu.nl (Grunwald PD) writes:
>1936, when the Church-Turing thesis was developed. In their respective articles,
>Church and mainly Turing give a framework for everything that can be computed
>at all. As computers are (approximations to) Turing Machines and the machine to
>implement intelligence would be a computer, this is not just 'contemporary
>technology' but the most general technology thinkable by us human beings.

1. What evidence is there  to support your claim that
computers are "the most general technologies thinkable by us human beings"?
They seem pretty limited to me. Balky, picky, badly behaved, expensive,
tedious to use, error prone, and probably unhealthy.

2. Computers are pretty weak, even as approximations to Turing machines.
Try asking one for the fastest prime factorization algorithm that can
be executed on a Cray. Trivial for a turing machine, hopeless for 
a computer.

3. If claim 1 were true, how would it aid your argument? Perhaps we will
never produce any machine as profoundly ridiculous as a human being. Maybe
there is some physical analog of Godel's theorem that says if our brains
were simple enough for us to copy, we would be too stupid to copy them.
I don't say that there is such a law, but I just want to know why you
believe that there is not such a law.

4. What makes you identify "effective computation" with the limits of
thought? There are good reasons for believing that "effective computation"
includes things that are not actually computable (try stepping through
an algorithm of 60! steps) and there, conversely, things that we know which
do not seem deduceable by any machine at all --- e.g. come up with 
the calculus from some codification of what Leibniz knew.
 


Finally, anyone who claims that Aretha Franklin or Charlie Parker can be
reduced to some "byproduct" of the operation of a Turing machine, is to be
pitied rather than despised. Dan Quayle, on the other hand, I might be
convinced that he could be equaled by a rather modest computer.


