[Full-Disclosure] Re: Re: Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.

gadgeteer_at_elegantinnovations.org
Date: 09/10/04

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Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:28:05 -0600

    On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 09:10:19AM +0200, Vincent Archer (varcher@denyall.com) wrote:
    > On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:41:26PM -0600, gadgeteer@elegantinnovations.org wrote:
    > > Given Moore's Law and the other rules of thumb regarding the progress of
    > > computer hardware it will be another 25 to 30 years before we match
    > > human capacity.
    > >
    > > Anyone who says they can achieve such in significantly less time is
    > > seeking funding. :-)
    >
    > Or is using the relatively simple reasoning that brains are full of
    > cruft, overcapacity, and other elements that are not specifically
    > required for sentience, but devoted to the management of a primate's
    > body, and we can do a better job.

    The trouble with simple reasoning, especially in the area of biology, is
    that it is often wrong. Evolution is a miser. Still the crux of the
    point above turns on what is considered a threshold for sentience. My
    handy Webster's defines it as:

     Sentient Sen"ti*ent, a. L. sentiens, -entis, p. pr. of
       sentire to discern or perceive by the senses. See Sense.
       Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception.
       Specif. (Physiol.), especially sensitive; as, the sentient
       extremities of nerves, which terminate in the various organs
       or tissues.

    "and preception" is the stumbling block here. Without it we have a
    device with a sensor that does or does not do something based on
    readings from said sensor. Big deal, there was such a device
    controlling the furnace of the house I was born in over four decades
    ago. With it... ah, now that is a different kettle of fish.

    > Emulating a human is very very different from making a sentience. That's
    > the main flaw of the Turing's test: it attempts to prove the existence
    > of human-type sentience, not sentience in general.

    I think there is a conflation here of sentient entity and intelligent
    entity. The Turing test is looking for intelligence. During his day
    the only known model for intelligence was the self-image of human
    intelligence (which was (and still is) very poorly understood). 

    -- 
Chief Gadgeteer
Elegant Innovations
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