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Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky — LessWrong

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Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky

7th Aug 2010

1 min read

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Sweet, there's another Bloggingheads episode with Eliezer.

Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky: Science Saturday: Purposes and Futures

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Re: defining "mind" - not a big deal. I just mean a nervous system - so a dedicated signal processing system with I/O, memory and processsing capabilities.

Any nervous system? That seems like a bad idea. Is a standard neural net trained to recognize human faces a mind? Is a hand-calculator a mind? Also, how does one define having a memory and processing capabilities. For example, does an abacus have a mind? What about a slide rule? What about a Pascaline or an Arithmometer?

I just meant "brain". So: caclulator - yes, computer - yes.

Those other systems are rather trivial. Most conceptions of what constitutes a nervous system is run into the "how many hairs make a beard" issue at the lower end - it isn't a big deal for most purposes.