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It was a joke Carrol. You're supposed to laugh at me for thinking the computer was stupid.
In any event, I have thrown computers across the room, destroyed keyboards, tossed printers off the second floor back porch, and cut up floppies in a rage. I get a kind of hostile satisfaction out of rescuing them from dumpsters, vacant lots, or dusty closets. I routinely bang the box to get the removable cartridge drive to stop its boot up seek routine when it gets stuck. I used to do the same thing with typewriters and tv's.In some deep hormone saturated recess of my animal brain, I don't care WHY it doesn't work, I just what to kill it. Monsters from the Id. Sort of the same attitude I have toward capitalism, business leaders, republicans, and other lower forms of life.
For Gordon, Dace and Jim Baird(?) on this thread: `So I take it from this that you are in the anti-strong AI camp. Do you really think that there is some component of biological minds irreproducible by computers? And if so, what is it?' (Jim Baird)
The short answer is yes. But I think the problem of modeling the mind is that we don't know what it is or even if it is a localized phenomenon, or even if it is a phenomenon at all. Pick something like language or say the layout of city. I mean we discover/learn the structures of the world and then assume they are part of our mind, but in what sense is that true? Don't we depend on a seamless reciprocity between our minds and the structure of the world, almost to the point of being unable to distinguish one from the other?
See, it's not that there is some mystical biological component that I am thinking about, so much as the interpenetrating spheres between perception and conception. My problem with various models of mind is these don't allow for the richness and breath of perception. I think of this as a kind of world imprinting system, where almost all the order is in the world, so the mind doesn't have to impose order, say as spatial contiguity or temporal sequence, since these are already properties of the world (laws of physics?). All that's required is that these are registered in some form and responded too, or manipulated as givens. But I am not thinking too clearly tonight. It seems to me we've been over this territory just a few months ago. Maybe a better approach is to have someone post an article or web site with info, and then attack or support it or enhance it, so there is at least some central focus to the discussion.
Chuck Grimes
ps. This is an experiment to see if the Win95 box is connecting through the unix box correctly and will get the mail out to the isp server. I am typing this in eudora on a criminal copy of evil bills slug ware.