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Originally Posted by J pold
I think it's bedtime for jammies.
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That was actually good advice!
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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
Personally, I think the whole notion of 'mind' and 'consciousness' are a little silly.
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How so? I can see how consciousness might be an illusion (there is considerable evidence that our consciousness is nothing more than a post-facto observer of workings of the real and hidden "mind"), but how is mind a silly notion?
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Originally Posted by octothorp
They aren't truly thinking, they're just running through formulas at an incredibly fast speed.
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Yet it's not clear that our minds do anything different; unlike digital computers, which are general-purpose machines theoretically capable of adapting and running any algorithm, our minds have many special-purpose modules that are tuned to interpret specific classes of algorithms, but so far no one has found any evidence to prove there is a difference in kind between brains and computers, as well as in what specializations are available. To make an analogy, most personal computers use a specialized module - the video card - to process graphics for on-screen display because such a module is far better at its specialized task than the computer's main CPU, but that doesn't mean the CPU couldn't do the same job through emulation, it just can't do it nearly as fast. So IF the mind is merely a conglomeration of specialized meat machines, then you can either try to mimic it with a sufficiently powerful digital computer that can model all the functions of these specialized machines internally, or build specialized computers that mimic each function of the brain and then network them in the same way the brain is networked.
For the mind to be impossible to model digitally, it seems there must be one of two things true about it: it processes on the quantum level, or there is a non-material component to it. I think it's Roger Penrose that argues the former, but from what I remember of his book about it, he was singularly unconvincing (although that doesn't mean he's wrong, he just might have the details wrong while the central idea is correct). The latter is of course the province of the religious, and might be summed up as "machines cannot have a soul."