[aiethics] What are humans made of?

[Ing. Pedro E. Colla]

Alicebot AI Ethics Committee - http://www.alicebot.org


> B) There's something else to a human that we can't ever explain
> or measure

It's the most closest, actually I think the categories of the poll are 
highly biased (which poll isn't?), feel that some valid grays are
left out.

I believe we're a bunch of chemicals worth about US$ 34 in the 
open commodity market (acording with the late Carl Sagan)
organized in such a way that make us after some few billions
of evolution.

I think we've some sort of computing device in our brains and
therefore it MUST be a Turing machine of some sort (even 
if there are strong arguments against that such as Roger
Penrose et. al.).

It's likely that some of our brain process fells into the the 
domain of quantum mechanics and if so we could be ruled
by the Heinsenberg's principle limits to directly observe
what is going on.

It's highly suspicious we (humans) resort to things like religion
on circular arguments that doesn't seem computable; perhaps
a fancy and convoluted way to say "could not compute that"
that keep our self-esteem at adequate levels and avoid us to
be on a perennial neurotic state; or to consume all our 
computational resources feeding the loop.

However, nothing guarantees that the understanding of our
particular Turing Machine could be done by us; Godel's 
theorem suggest that we could not conclusively say yes or
not at this point.

Still, nothing should prevent us to be like the classical rabbit
example used to teach calculus, this that travels at each
time interval half the distance than in the previous time
interval. Mathmaticians would say that it will never reach the carrot,
and Engineers would say that it will become close enough
for all practical purposes. So perhaps it's irrelevant whether
we could or not fully understand ourselves, perhaps close
enough is enough.

Ing. Pedro E. Colla
Adrogue-BA
Argentina