3.3 The problem is of course that a mathematical model is only as good as its assumptions, and those depend upon the quality of the evidence. The whole Turing Machine debate and its putative implications for consciousness is in my opinion a great distraction from the sober scientific job of gathering evidence and developing theory about the psychobiology of consciousness (e.g., Baars, 1988; 1994). The notion that the Turing argument actually tells us something scientifically useful is amazingly vulnerable. After all, the theory assumes an abstract automaton blessed with infinite time, infinite memory, and an environment that imposes no resource constraints. The brain is a massively parallel organ with 100 billion simultaneously active neurons, but the Turing Machine is at the extreme end of serial machines. This appears to be the reason why discussion of the Turing topic appears nowhere in the psychobiological literature. It seems primarily limited to philosophy and the general intellectual media.
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Ah, just right the right dose of medicine. Thank you for finding and posting this.
Mr. Baars clears the fog quite nicely .
This is exactly the point I was driving at (groping for) when I wrote that AI boosters' hopes depend entirely upon endless hardware improvement, chimerical innovations in software methodology and, not least of all, a deep comprehension of human cognition which appears to be beyond any forseeable improvement in our capacities.
His identification of the unspoken dependence upon *infinite time* is truly elegant.
This marries the philosophical concerns with a consideration of the architecture of actual machines very neatly.
DRM
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