Re: The Emerging Mind : Concluding remarks

Is free will about freedom, or is it about the low cost of available
will?

How free is our farmer, who must ring that bell in any weather, so
that he can spend 12 hours as a farmer, working milking cows in any
weather, every day of his life, or else they will die, and he will
die?
(Him with his bad foot and all.)

But then, he could move to the city, get an office job, live in a
condo, watch TV, eat sleep and then retire at 65. But wouldn't he
probably say, that he feels more free out in the fresh air, on the
farm?
Even when the air smells like cow dung and he is not free really, but
at least he feels like he is the master of his own destiny.

But then he could still choose, to move to the city, because he has
free will. If he wanted to.
He would be maybe like a fish out of water though, and not fit in, so
really there are many constraints on his freedom that are not obvious.
His lack of training, his misconceptions regarding city life, and all
the rest, trapping him, on the farm, to a life of hard labor, yet he
wouldn't trade it for the world.

So if ever you think that life is not complex, think again. It is
beyond complex.

And do you not get the impression examining his life from this lofty
perspective, that there is something more to this whole picture? Do
you not feel like without you telling him, how to feel, what to think,
what to say, he really would not be able to do anything at all.
And even with you doing that, it still becomes difficult, when you try
to imitate real processes, such as give him the freedom to act on his
own accord, and moreso, to come up with something, you have not given
him.
For him to actually create something meaningful outside of his rule
set.

At what point, would we be able to say, he is alive?

If he passed the Turing test? He could fool you long before he
actually was conscious.
At what point could we say, look, our little animated guy, is now a
real person, he is looking at us, look he is waving at us, and wants
to say something.

So you see the mystery of life, is the conscious computers which do
all that for us. It is not surprising for us, all these
individualistic free thinking attributes and creative processes and
awarenesses, and realizations, because we have these conscious
computers providing some impetus. Running the software for us, making
sure that we get our sense of ownership of our bodies, our sense of
being the driver in the driver seat, our sense of free will in real
time, regardless of the mechanics involved.

With a thought we feel our status report, from a myriad of complex
systems.

When we see a dog run by twice, its natural for us to think that is
somehow more meaningful than it only running by once.
Imagine how many times, while driving down the road, you are checking
your memory banks for relative meaningful connections?
A sign that triggers a memory, well you have to know what the signs
mean every moment you are driving, so you have your ready access
memory and your long term memory, and you have to decide what should
go into long term memory and how everything should be cataloged, for
fast easy retrieval, and you do that naturally, without ever learning
how to do that.
That is just part of your programming.
You have a machine, a biological robot, one of the most complex things
in the universe, and you don't even have to learn how to use it, that
just comes naturally.
It runs by itself basically, on instinct and automated controls, it is
actually telling you, what it needs when it needs it.
You are hungry, so its time to eat. You are sleepy, so you should lay
down and all the rest.

And on top of all that, at times, if you are not paying attention, no
problem, it will just drive the car by itself.

Captain Kirk, never had to drive in downtown traffic, never had to use
a turn signal, he just said "Mr. Sulu! Warp factor one"
You on the other hand have to work your hands your feet, look in the
rear view mirror, the side mirrors, watch the traffic, steer the car,
obey the rules of the road, watch for bad drivers and all this while
talking on the cell phone to whoever.
I submit it is more difficult to drive a car than it is to drive the
Star Ship Enterprise, or any space ship.
And you can do this at about age 16 in most countries.

You _are, a conscious computer. Look at the computations you perform
every second while driving a car.

But I suppose the most startling thing in all this for the good
doctor, and for others in his field, is the realization, that the
average pc, is approaching the processing power of the brain, and we
do not have to rewrite the laws of physics nor do we expect new laws
to emerge from such processing power on our desktops.
Neither do we expect consciousness to arise from this vast processing
power, or for anything of importance of that sort to occur at all. It
is still garbage in and garbage out.

It sounds impressive to say there are 100 billion neurons in the
brain.

Well thats 100 gigabytes.

Chomsky said that the mechanism for language is so complex, that it
could not have been created by evolution. He said it must be a
miracle, or perhaps when you have a hundred billion neurons working as
a computer, different laws of physics will emerge.

Well we know what our pc's are capable of, and they have a long way to
go, before they could drive a car by themselves in heavy traffic,
while having a meaningful heated discussion on the phone.

Is it our programming is better than the pc's programming?

If we had a pc with 100 gigabytes of ram, thats the equivalent of 100
billion neurons.

But each have 7,000 connections. Well we have the Internet, does that
make it better smarter faster more intelligent more aware more
anything?
over 300 million connections, but not to each bit of ram memory, but
is that it then?
if we had 7,000 Internets that would make it smarter?

A cascading neural network of information leading to realization and
imagine the organization and filing system needed that we have built
in, that we can't even create for ourselves or the Internet.

Well the conscious computers manage far more than people realize and
without them, we would not be self aware, not conscious, and not truly
alive. We would be only robots.



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