Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!vlsi_lib
From: vlsi_lib@netcom.com (Gerard Malecki)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
Message-ID: <vlsi_libCzLE6A.H02@netcom.com>
Organization: VLSI Libraries Incorporated
References: <3aj4a9$9ct@mp.cs.niu.edu> <vlsi_libCzHpFF.Cz9@netcom.com> <3ak08o$mvv@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 00:46:56 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <3ak08o$mvv@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In <vlsi_libCzHpFF.Cz9@netcom.com> vlsi_lib@netcom.com (Gerard Malecki) writes:

>>Which only reinforces my viewpoint. From the above, I assume that 
>>either you conclude that strong AI cannot produce consciousness or
>>you make a distinction between program execution and program trace.
>
>I most certainly make a distinction between program execution and
>program trace.
>
>>But what *is* program execution? It is program trace imported into
>>physical realism.
>
>A program trace is static.  Program execution is dynamic.
>

Sorry, but you are letting reality color your views. Concepts like 
"static" and "dynamic" have nothing to do with strong AI, where the states
are differentiated by some ordinal numbering. It does not matter if you
map these numbers to correspond to real time or real space or sectors on
a hard drive. Time is no more or no less special than any other physical
or abstract entity from the position of strong AI. 

As a result, you need not even "play" back a program trace recorded on
a hard disk. If replaying regenerates consciousness, then that consciousness
already exists in a spatial form in the hard disk. Strong AI does not 
make a difference between the two cases (although I do agree that a
conscious stream flowing in space would be incomprehensible to most of us).

If you had done a basic course in Digital Signal Processing, you would
agree with me more easily. There you would come across concepts like
"causality", "bandwidth", etc. But these terms also apply to 
signals that are spatially, rather than temporally, distributed, as in 
the case of image processing. The meanings of these terms should be
defined with the appropriate context in mind.
 
Shankar Ramakrishnan
shankar@vlibs.com

