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simplicio comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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What a strange debate that was! I was very surprised to find Pigliucci arguing, inter alia, that intelligence/consciousness might have to be implemented on carbon atoms in order to work.
And then he came out with the trope whereby the spirit of the AI machine looks, from outside itself, at its goals and spontaneously decides to change them.
He is a very interesting thinker usually, but he seemed very naive in this particular area.
The case for carbon atoms is pretty weak.
However, we can imagine some types of organic molecule have a mini giga-computer on board - their design encoded in the constants of nature, and that their dynamics can be tapped by trapping the vibrating molecule in an organic matrix.
Then carbon-based computers would have access to the giga-computer - while silicon-based ones would not - and would therefore work enormously more slowly.
This is a feeble case - but not a totally ridiculous one. Enthusiasts for non-computable physical processes play up this kind of possibility even further.
Okay, I think I get you. Maybe there could be some substrates that allow much faster processing than others (orders of magnitude); this would make the substrate an important engineering issue. Is that what you're saying?
But we are in the lofty realm of "in principle" here. If I can just imagine a computer - as big as the universe if you like - that simulates Massimo Pigliucci plus inputs and outputs on silicon or germanium or whatever you want, then intelligence/consciousness is not substrate dependent (again in principle). I think this is the case, the alternative being that there is something especially consciousnessy about carbon chemistry, which seems awfully dubious.
Yes, kinda. There are also the possibilities of novel types of computation being involved. We know about quantum computers. They can't do things classical computers can't do - but they can do them faster - in some cases MUCH faster. Maybe there are other types of computation - besides classical computation and quantum computation that we have yet to discover. Quantum computation was only discovered relatively recently - so maybe the future holds other possibilities. Gateways to oracles, etc.
It doesn't look as though the brain is anything other than a classical neural network - which could fairly-obviously be ported onto silicon - if we had fast enough silicon. However, there is at least some room for doubt on this point.