Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Found out something about myself

I read this and discovered that my understanding of the universe has vastly outstripped my linguistic expertise.

For instance, I have no idea what Functionalism is, though I would recognize it if you described it to me.

On the other hand, the alternative, illuminated by the article, seems to be not understanding the universe as well as I do, which seems like a poor trade-off.

1 comment:

Alrenous said...

"We then transferred our brains into software. Each neuron was now replaced by a software expression and they all connected together functionally in the same way as they did when they were mushy.

The zombies still felt at one with this proposed zombie-on-a-disk."


I'm disappointed.
Someone (else) should have thought of the possible objection, that it's impossible for some reason to make software functionally the same as neurons.
Modern academics are remarkably useless.

The reason, it turns out, is brains are fundamentally indeterminate and software is fundamentally deterministic. To get indeterminate, thus functionally identical, outcomes, you need to add special hardware to the software. Ergo, the intuition that software ems are not brains is correct.