Gray comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: benelliott 04 April 2011 09:55AM

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Comment author: Gray 06 April 2011 04:09:12PM 2 points [-]

That's quite easy: I can lift a rock, a Turing machine can't. A Turing machine can only manipulate symbols on a strip of tape, it can't do anything else that's physical.

I think you're trivializing the issue. A Turing machine is an abstraction, it isn't a real thing. The claim that a human being is a Turing machine means that, in the abstract, a certain aspect of human beings can be modeled as a Turing machine. Conceptually, it might be the case, for instance, that the universe itself can be modeled as a Turing machine, in which case it is true that a Turing machine can lift a rock.