JoshuaZ comments on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Liron 07 August 2010 06:09AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 August 2010 03:38:15AM 1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: timtyler 09 August 2010 06:46:57AM 0 points [-]

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.