I have been making this connection for years. It is only human arrogance that allows this small distinction. Stryderunknown must be ignorant in the ways of computers. How many out there will say that machines lack faults? Think of how much repair computers require. Machines are, however, superior in that they have no limits beyond that of their programmer. Even that is in question. The only thing they lack is the ability to adapt. That can be modified. All that would be necessary are autonomous repair and restructure units and a wide variance in design.
Teg, My ignorance as you put it, is what has kept this post going, otherwise you wouldn't have anything to post to. Machines are Stupid, programmers can be stupid, but if they are told to walk off a cliff, they wouldn't do it... but the machine would (because it hasn't been programmed with the foresight of knowing what would happen) Machines do have irrepairable problems like when an electrical serge causes electromagnetic fluctuations that cause the magnetic harddrives to malfunction, and become impossible to retrieve data. The entire debating of this topic has only been so because I have taken the Anti:Man=machine angle, otherwise this wouldn't have been a very useful philosophical discussion in my view. that could be seen as something else a machine faults upon, take for instance this debate didn't take place then all our arguements wouldn't have fully played out, this would mean that the first posts and there information would have been the whole arguement and we would have missed many points. That is something that us humans can see an do (argue until we get all the perspectives to draw a full dimensional interpretation) in comparison to a machine that just takes what data is inputed and follows a bunch of set calculative rules (which means they could make mistakes far beyond ourselves.) This is most noticable when you look at the work of Lorenz inputting his weather system at first will the full decimal placed number and allowing the simulation to run, and then later by accident placing in less decimal places which made a round off that caused chaos to the pattern he was use to. (the full story can be found in the book "Chaos by James Gleick") Of course I can see this arguement continuing and I hope it does... more angles are needed Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I thing I've mensioned this before. Let's just say a new born but magically knows how to walk. I'm pretty sure he/she will walk off a cliff because he/she don't know what's gonna happen. I know experiment have done to test this, and they found kid's just learnt to walk can manage to distinguish between a slope which will be safe for them depending on the angle it marks with the ground. I think it's like the programming language used in machine. If the machine has that kinda program built in, they will be able to do so, too. May be I should try some other arguments. Just say our universe was built by some great beings, then anything inside will satify machine. Our universe is complex but yet simple. Almost everything could be explained using maths. The way everything fits and awesome and could result from an intelligence much greater than ours.
Hevene ... Our universe is complex but yet simple. ??????????????????????????????? You've GOT to be kidding! Almost everything could be explained using maths. ??????????????????????????????? And if is isn't, create a new math! The way everything fits ... The only things that seem to fit are designed by humans. Everything else appears to be an unrelated hodgepodge that constantly surpises us.
....... I think you misunderstood my point. What I'm tring to say is that even though there are many thing we don't yet have an knowledge, but from the thing we do know, one concept works for all things in the universe (universal), eg. gravity, orbiting of planet etc. Maths are the tools for physicists to describe physics. We invented calculus to solve phyics problems and we could do that again. We have being tring to understand the universe for a long time, trying to find the center of universe, but then there's no way we could do so. Some of the theories we are developing today are more complex than the ones we got before, and therefore takes a long time to overcome. But one day, we will as our knowledge about the universe increases. The surprises is just an indication of the lack of knowledge.
Reverse I believe we could reverse the question. Is machines human? We are the creators of the machines and we use what we know when creating them. We study ourselves and other forms of life and we mimic the functions we can when making the machines. It is not the humans that seem to remind us of the machines, it is the machines that remind us of ourselves. We take natural ideas like a knee or the lungs and we apply that technic on the machines we create. By this reasoning there is nothing weird in machines mimicking humans. There could be differences though, like the wheel for instance, I have yet to se a human with biological wheels instead of legs.
Here's something from Physical review letters that you may find relevant. WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? This may seem to be more of a question for psychologists than physicists. But two researchers (Joseph Wakeling, jwakeling@webdrake.net, now at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Per Bak, Imperial College, 011-44-20- 7594-8528, p.bak@ic.ac.uk) argue that intelligence is not an abstract concept, but must be considered as a physical phenomenon. Any definition of intelligence, they say, cannot ignore a living being's environment, including its very own body. In their view, an organism is only intelligent relative to how well it solves the problems that its surroundings throw at it. This runs counter to many historical ideas, including the concept that the mind is separate from the body, or that it is possible to build a desktop computer that thinks like a human without having the same physical environment or body. To explore the idea of intelligence, the researchers ran computer simulations of artificial neural networks called "minibrains." In the simulations, 251 minibrains each attempted to pick the less popular of two choices, 0 and 1, analogous to 251 motorists all trying to pick the less congested road. This "Minority Game" would be repeated over many successive rounds. Each minibrain consisted of three layers of "neurons": "input neurons," which dictated how many past rounds it could remember, leading to an intermediary layer, which then led into an "output" layer that determined what choice was made. If the minibrain ending up making an incorrect choice, it would reduce the strength of the connections between neurons supplying the "wrong answer." The researchers were in for a surprise when they endowed all of the minibrains with equal abilities, which would be analogous to a bunch of motorists with the same amount of decision-making skill. In this situation, no minibrains correctly guessed the minority choice with even a 50 percent success rate, which is what you'd get by making the choice with a random flip of a coin. Even an E. coli bacterium, which searches for glucose by moving in random directions in its environment, is seemingly more intelligent than this. Only when the researchers introduced a "rogue" minibrain with more intermediate neurons to analyze the past rounds did it attain more than a 50 percent success rate. Their simulations suggest that intelligence often hinges on how much one can make use of the data in its physical environment. (Wakeling and Bak, Physical Review E, November 2001)
Cosider the simple machines: wedge, inclined plane, screw and the lever and wheel. Consider the complex machines are built from various combinations of simple machines. In the human skeleton, for example, bones joined at joints are levers, teeth are wedges. Elbow and knee joint bone surfaces are wheels. Foot arch bones are wedges. Certainly in the classical sense, the human body is a machine, before even needing to consider the biologic components of the human form. It is those biologic components that make the skeleton a self-actuating, complex machine.
I agree with Mr. G. Not only the bones, our cells are also like mini machines, which builds up tissues, organs, systems like I've discussed before. So in the other words, we are like Mr. G said, a complex machine.
