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the whole brain (maybe eighty thousand in total), which is an in-
credibly small number. Babies don’t have any, most animals don’t
have any, and they likely only evolved over the last million years
or so. Some of the high-level emotions that are deeply human
come from these.
“Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence
on written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based
on language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much
more so than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers
doing a good job of performing in fields like math, medical diag-
nosis, and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than
demonstrating even a child’s mastery of language. Language is
the true embodiment of human intelligence.”
If we’re not so complex, then it’s only a matter of time until
computers are more complex than us. When that comes, our
brains will be model-able in a computer and that’s when the fun
begins. That’s the thesis of
Spiritual Machines,
which even includes
a (Heinlein-style) timeline leading up to this day.
Now, it may be that a human brain contains
n
logic-gates and
runs at
x
cycles per second and stores
z
petabytes, and that
n
and
x
and
z
are all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain
apart and record the position and relationships of all the neurons
and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a brain.
But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling
a brain in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent)
fraction of that space will yield a conscious copy of the original
meat-brain. Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step:
in Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” the gimmick is
that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough
“random numbers,” it just wakes up.
Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Comput-
ers have never been known for their skill at programming them-
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