Daemon

Luckily though, there is still work for translators who do understand what they are talking about.

It was more of an answer than a question. Yes, human translators sometimes don’t understand what they are translating. Everyone has been baffled by po...

fMRI measures blood flow in the brain which is related to neural activity. It doesn't provide anything like the fine grain of data that would allow co...

In fMRI, brain activity is graphically represented by colour coding the strength of activation. What is in the data set that you imagine is transferre...

The phrase "algorithm adjacent" caught my eye. It looks like it might have a technical meaning, so I Googled it, but I don't find any examples of the ...

Because, as I said, computers don't actually do the stuff we say they do. Happily for my argument, this applies to quantum computers just as much as i...

Very disappointing. You just want to spout shite and won't engage. This forum used to be quite good, seems like it's fucked now. On you go then, on to...

I take it you can't then.

AI (and neural nets) is just a showy way of talking about laptops and PCs. Can you point to an "AI" that isn't just a digital computer?

This is a somewhat disappointing response, you don't seem to have thought about what I said at all. If what I said is correct, and of course I think i...

When we do stuff, like thinking, or feeling, or calculating or attempting to exercise a free will which we may or may not have, we are actually doing ...

Researchers had humans search like dogs, on hands and knees, and their performance finding stuff by smell was not greatly inferior to a dog’s!

I accidentally hit myself with a pickaxe, it knocked me out. Have you got anything useful to say?

Speaking from personal experience, when I have a general anaesthetic or hit myself on the forehead with a pick axe, I lose consciousness. Before and a...

Do you think that makes a difference to what I said? How?

People say somebody is a vegetable, or in a vegetative state, when they have no conscious awareness, generally because of injury or disease. If you ar...

I am totally convinced by the power of your rationale Oh Thunderballs!

To answer your question about "too (neither?)": it would be grammatical to say "She can't read a clock either", however I don't think that's what you ...

Speak for yourself!

Dogs aren't humans tho.

But it's precisely because we are freed (by language and language-based thought) that we are in a completely different world to the other animals.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you DanLager but you said their is little difference between us and other animals and I am saying there is a big differenc...

And we aren't culturally fixed, and we are free in limitless other ways, and so the difference between us is vast.

I think you're overlooking the vast difference between human and animal language and thought. We can say something new any time we want. No other anim...

You were talking initially about animal intelligence, in a Philosophy of Mind forum. Whether our intelligence or our minds are different to those of o...

Well, no. Human level language equips us to transcend instinct, for example it enables us to consider "what if" questions, it allows us to consider al...

I was in an aircraft flying at 30,000 feet yesterday. You think we make aircraft using our instinct?

We would be a whole lot more interesting than ants to an objective observer. However complex and fascinating their behaviour might be, they are unable...

That's not an interesting comment.

We have a full understanding of the biochemical "machinery" that allows the bacteria to behave in this way, as set out in the article I quoted from. I...

You ok mate?

Look, you've just told us that computation is 0's and 1's, the program pulls through the 0's and 1's, whatever that means. Then I've pointed out to yo...

There are no 1s and 0s in a PC. There are voltages, or "pits and lands" on an optical disc, and we interpret these as representing 1s and 0s.

Does a digital computer actually compute? Try reading the brief argument I've posted twice now. It answers your original question.

"An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuously variable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, m...

There isn't any doubt about the existence of analogue computers, just try to read and understand what people are saying to you.

Could you stop wasting everybody's time please?

"An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuously variable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, m...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/mar/09/false-memories-implanted-into-the-brains-of-sleeping-mice Neuroscientists in France ha...

1. You probably are more intelligent than average, judging solely from this post. 2. But what does it mean to be "very existential"? 3. There are endl...

The brain doesn't do information processing any more than digestion does. The brain does things like ion exchanges at synapses. We can describe this a...

From Scholarpedia via Wayback Machine, (thanks @magritte!): but also: A photodiode has experience, but a PC doesn't, unless it is "neuromorphic", what...

Wow, I only just discovered Scholarpedia thanks to you Frank. Has it gone for good??

The word "simulated" needs to be used with care. Simulating consciousness and giving rise to consciousness are two very different things. You can simu...

Nope. Tononi and Koch think computers and thermostats and photodiodes are conscious. Anaesthetists know better.

I'm not sure how you could know that. But in any case you are starting from a position where I previously had working sense organs. But suppose I had ...

An electronic device is only an "entity" insofar as it is defined as such by ourselves. We also define which elements of the device are to count as th...

How do you think Tononi et al would respond to the evidence presented by Mark Solms' about his patients with no cortex? https://youtu.be/CmuYrnOVmfk

I've read somewhere that they accept that a thermostat is conscious. A thermostat but not the whole brain? And the whole body is involved in conscious...

That doesn't follow, you've set off on a fantasy.