I believe your first question was answered as "judgement".
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I believe your first question was answered as "judgement".
What is the difference between a hu man and a human ?
One has empty space between the ears.
Quote:
Originally Posted by learning c
No, A human does have a clue. We have evolved into a system that has an interface capable of interacting with the universe. Otherwise known at the 5 senses. And have a pretty defined set of satisfactory results like if you don't eat you die. So how long would it take you to write a program that teaches a computer how to mine coal, build a power plant, generate electricity from coal, design and build a power grid to get electricity from said power plant to itself and plug itself in?
It's not a matter of teaching the computer, it's a matter of writing the program such that it doesn't need to be taught. Ingenuity. It's what drives advancement. You can't teach a computer to just come up with a good idea and work at it. The ultimate learning computer would have no code at all and have to write it itself... and as we all know, a computer must have a program to do anything. Except crash.
At least you got my point. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
All I could figure out from your posts was that the universe is like an abstract class and our senses are like an interface. :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by MasterBlaster
Sort of, if you want to put it in oop terms! The problem is when developing software you have a compiler that tells you if your class is implementing the correct interface. That does not exist in the case the original poster presented. That means that one application will have to randomly generate interfaces and the other would have to randomly spit out ojects until by chance it makes one that conforms to an interface. This would have to happen X ? ammount of times before your app could even begin to attempt to be self aware. That would take.... well You'd have a better chance of winning the mega millions lottery every week for the next few billion years. IMHO
ok we covered emotions, learning, evolution and intelligent design and I don't want to go around in triangles about it. so what about the concept of a soul, can a computer have a soul?
that really depends on how you define the word "soul"
before we could worry the possibility of a computer having a soul, you would have to first determine if humans infact have a soul.
The soul is often related to religion and the thing that is inside us that can not die and is seperate from our physical bodies.
Many people that believe in the existance of a soul, also think that humans are the only living creatues to have one, which of course opens up a whole other avenue for debate.
Most people that do believe in the soul, do agree that it does require life (aka carbon based life, the only life we actually know of at this point)
Quote:
Originally Posted by learning c
Yes that's easy. I play James Brown mp3s on mine all the time.
Yeah sure why not. just make a backup of everything stored on it. That pretty much covers the bases of the religous definitions of "Soul"
ok kleinma, good information :thumb:
so a soul has:
1. is not bound to the body
2. has religious connotations
3. is not possessed by animals
1. well many people have argued that a mind is not part of the body, and therefore could be the soul.
a computer therefore could have a soul
2. the religious connotation is being owned by another party usually called the devil, bezzlebub, lucifer, but by extension anyone who wants to posses the soul of another. so logically anyone who is owned by another does not have a soul.
at the moment computers have not been written to allow for independence and are therefore at the moment all owned and therefore do not have a soul. however, as previously explained they could be changed to have a soul from a conceptual perspective.
3. wild animals are arguably not owned by anyone and therefore do have a soul.
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Originally Posted by litlewiki
The difference is,
a "hu man" is someone a ferengi has decided to talk to,
while a human is someone wondering why he's standing around listening to a ferengi calling him a "hu man".
:wave:
what's a feren gi?
Ok, you can end the Trek jokes now...
Seriously, though, I can't believe I missed that one...
does the owner of a soul own their own soul?
Of all the Chit Chat threads I've ever seen this has to be one of the most inane.
can an owner of a soul talk to another owner of a soul?
can someone who owns their own soul talk to another person who also owns their own soul?
Are you talking to us?
Here are some things to ponder.
Why is red?
Who is moon?
Where is is?
What is the purpose of this thread?
Calm down, Marty. Since when has the CC section needed police for a serious discussion? Did ya wake up on the wrong side of the desk or something?
A huge factor in the difference between us and computers is our ability to think about something without desiring an answer. It's called contemplating. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is? Questions like that have no definite answer, and a program with no conclusion is more commonly known as frozen. With humans, it's just another thought. I know I've been contemplating the meaning of existence for years now, and I'm not planning on finding an answer. that's not the reason I think about it.
Perhaps I'm being a curmudgeon but there are certain topics that get my goat and intelligent design is one of them, my God ;) the phrase is almost an oxymoron!Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
I would think contemplating about anything is desiring an answer...Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
You might not find it, but you wouldn't even think about something if you were not looking for an answer to something.
The meaning of life and why we are here certainly have answers, but the answers tend to be different based on the person who is asking them. The question of "what is?" is a little bit to vague for me to try to map to something.
However contemplating things over long periods of time as you mention draw similarities to computer programs as far as I am concerned. You say you don't plan on finding an answer, and that is not the reason you think about it. So what is the reason? Is it to expand your thinking capabilities? Is it because you just enjoy to think about those types of things? Whatever it may be, its more about the journey of comptemplation (aka the things you gain from your thinking about such things over that period of time, either until you stop thinking about it forever, or you die).
So apply that to a computer program. maybe this program is a mail server. It just sits there all day waiting for email to come in so it can have something to do and send emails in and out. Always listening, waiting to work. Where is the answer there? Does this program ever get to a point where it has sent enough emails that it is satisfied and can stop? (aka does it ever have an answer?) Or is it just going to contemplate if there is data coming into the port its monitoring until it stops thinking about it (computer is turned off), or it dies (hardware failure ;))
I have to agree with Martin on this....COMPLETELY!! I can't decide whether this is all pseudo-serious babbling, or if people really mean anything they are saying....or even if they understand any of what they are saying.
However, I will add this one point: A computer program that has a few simple conditionals, like people have discussed, has no real relationship to a mind. The two aren't even vaguely analogous concepts. The kind of program you would need to have to be able to make an analogy to the human brain, would be one that is highly complex, but not beyond our current capability. If...Then statements are not analogous to thought, they are analogous to individual neurons. To expect a few neurons to manifest all the features of a complete and functioning, human brain, is utter silliness. It's only when you get programs with multiple, interacting, feedback loops that you can approach the workings of a brain. At that level, you won't have the precision that people talk about. You will have mistakes, errors in judgement, etc.
If all you know are simple linear programs, don't go comparing that to a brain, that's nonsensical.
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Originally Posted by learning c
No, there weren't.
I'll slightly agree, and slightly disagree.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
Comparing linear programs with the brain, of course that's silly. Then again, "learning c" might be someone who's only recently started programming and believes it to be a creation of divine inspiration. :afrog:
I was going to disagree about emulating human brain function with "with multiple, interacting, feedback loops" but then I realized that that was what I was going to say, so shuttup. :)
emulating the brain should be possible with a few lifetimes of hardcoding :D
no, but seriously,
the brain should (somehow) be logically explicable
shouldn't it?
That's a huge topic. Artificial intelligence has been our way of attempting to emulate a framework that is used by our brains. I think you should read up on it a little, you will like it.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheBigB
There are also certain quantum factors involved in the cognitive process which is another topic in itself.
A crude analogy would be, if we can create a computer that emulated all the conditions of the universe at a given point in time, can we calculate the conditions of the universe at a future point? It gets difficult there, because the computer built to emulate this would need to take itself into account, which internally will have to take itself into account and would therefore be the size of the universe itself.
Yes, crude analogy, sue me, but my point is, it's not that simple.
well you skipped a few steps mendhak :), now you are really getting to the most crucial issues :thumb:Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
There's are crucial issues in this thread?Quote:
Originally Posted by learning c
i would be interested in reading any good sources if you know of any mendhak?
Just out of curiosity, how long have you been programming for?
one week with c++, less actually :) I have been redefining medicine the rest of the time.
Then you haven't been doing it long enough to know the basic limitations of a computer.
The vast majority of programs are linear in nature. It may not seem like it, but the fact is there's only one tast running at a time. Given the speed of a computer, that task may take on the order of nanoseconds to complete, but it's only one task. When it's done, the program moves on to the next task.
The only real break from this is the idea of multi-threading. Complex programming, and only truly effective with a computer capable of hyperthreading. I believe multi-core processors can do it, but they have to be programmed to do it.
How many times a day do you do something that requires no conscious thought at all? We walk all over the place with no problems, usually not even thinking about it. It is purely instinct. Yet it takes complex calculations to make a robot move. It is constantly monitoring the position of everything to keep itself balanced. That is one task that a computer will ALWAYS process, simply because it lacks the ability for something to become instinctive. If you program a robot to learn, and check the processes it's running in twenty years, it'll still be computing the location of everything, and that in itself severely limits its ability to do anything else. The only way a robot will even approach instinct is with multiple processors, one dedicated to a particular task. That's probably the closest analogy i can come up with right now. The point remains, the subconscious is a powerful tool that a computer just doesn't have.
so are you saying that a computer can't multithread more efficiently than a hu man?
A computer in this day can barely multi-thread period. Humans do it without thinking about it.
i can do hundreds of simultaneous conscious tasks with a pc and there are many low level "subconscious" tasks occuring all the time, or have i missed something?
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Originally Posted by learning c
Attachment 55848
If you have one single-core CPU than your computer can only perform one single task at a time, be it addition or subtraction or memory management or some other mundane housekeeping duty.Quote:
Originally Posted by learning c