Annoyance comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong

140 Post author: Yvain 09 April 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: Annoyance 11 April 2009 02:17:21PM 0 points [-]

Any computational process can be emulated by a sufficiently complicated lookup table. We could, if we wished, consider the "conscious mind" to be such a table.

Dismissing the unconscious because it's supposedly a lookup table is thus wrong in two ways: firstly, it's not implemented as such a table, and secondly, even if it were, that puts no limitations, restrictions, or reductions on what it's capable of doing.

The original statement in question is not just factually incorrect, but conceptually misguided, and the likely harm to the resulting model's usefulness incalculable.