Re: OT: Why we are here. (wasRe: OT: Tinkering versus creativity)

--- Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

> On 7/3/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> > The ultimate goal from my persepctive is to teach
> a
> > machine to use language. I can't really claim to
> > understand language until I can do that.
>
> The problem with this, as the cognitivists will tell
> you in as much
> detail as you can stand, is that you have as a
> subset of it the
> necessity to
> a) understand and codify human thinking and emotions
I think it is adequate to catalog the behavioral
implications of human emotions. To "understand" the
sentence "John is angry" the machine does not have to
understand what it feels like to be angry, it only
needs to have a list of the likely behavioral
consequences of the fact that John's current emotional
state is "anger".

> b) allow the machine to have direct experience in
> the world and
I believe it would suffice to have the machine
"experience" a simulated model of the world, where
"experience" measn that it can fetch the state
variables of objects and examine those state variables
AFTER some action is simulated. After all, as humans
all we really know is our sensory data. The machine
could aquire its sensory data from a world simulation.

> c) the machine might not be capable of some of the
> stuff that results
> in that language, i.e. it may not be implementable
> on architecture
> distinctly different from the brain.
That's a pretty radical claim. I think the only human
process that a machine is not capable of is
consciousness. (Which is not to be confused with
awareness of one's environment, which is merely the
ability to react to environmental inputs, which can be
done by a non-conscious machine.)

I believe that consciousness is elemental. The brain
thinks and the consciousness observes that process.
Without the brain the soul has no thought to observe,
and without the soul the brain has nothing to observe
its thinking. At incarnation the soul _inhabits_ the
brain, and given a sophisticated enough machine a soul
might choose to inhabit such a machine in its next
incarnation.

>
>  - Sai
>