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Article 5109 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: pollack@dendrite.cis.ohio-state.edu (Jordan B Pollack)
Subject: Re: Robert Rosen & Physical form of Church's Thesis
In-Reply-To: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com's message of 14 Apr 92 12: 37:53 GMT
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Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 15:41:52 GMT
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>argue that Churches thesis is false for simulations of chaotic processes...
the implication is that the brain is not equivalent to a Turing Machine...

Of course they are not equivalent, brain is a physical device, while a
Turing machine is an ideal!  While there are very neat and beautiful
lessons to be learned from research in chaos and fractals, it is
simply NOT the lesson that there is some mysterious "super-turing
power" of analog computation implemented by the chemistry and
circuitry of the brain. Certainly natural computation is organized
differently, and we don't understand it fully. Some lessons are
important to AI, however, having to do with the emergence of stable
complex physical states and of unbounded dependencies in dynamical
systems which do not require the interpretation (or even the
existence) of rules.

-- 
Jordan Pollack                            Assistant Professor
CIS Dept/OSU                              Laboratory for AI Research
2036 Neil Ave                             Email: pollack@cis.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210                        Phone: (614)292-4890 (then * to fax)


