Meme Sheepage

[newnumber6]

Okay, ask me three questions in a comment, yadda yadda yadda, I'll answer as truthfully as I can if I choose to answer at all (no, I'm not giving out my address or phone number. ;))
No holds barred! Except that I can choose not to answer something. ;)

Comments

Mind over Matter, Matter over Mind. Never mind, it's no matter.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

1) What's your favorite literary work written prior to the 20th century?
Hrm. I have to admit I'm not terribly into pre-20th century works. Most of the stuff I've read there are of course in the SF category. Some of the works of HG Wells, probably, or Frankenstein. They're probably up there for sheer entertainment.
However, I think I'll give the nod to Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott, which really opened my eyes to thinking of higher dimensional space. A lot of times I find myself considering things from the perspective of someone in a world with more or less than 3 spatial dimensions. Wow, that sounds intellectually pretentious. But, ah well. ;)
2) If you could travel anywhere in the world, but with the provision that you had to stay there for at least a year, and there was no guarantee that your needs would be met while there (so you would be left to your own devices as far as making money, feeding yourself, securing housing, etc.), where would it be?
Well, I'd probably cheat and say 'Toronto'. Since then there wouldn't be much worries, and I'm not particularly anxious to go anywhere.
If forced to choose someplace that's else, I'd probably choose Vancouver. I could possibly make a go of it, and if I couldn't, at least the weather's fairly nice.
3) Will computers ever achieve true sentience, or are they just limited to realistic simulations of intelligence?
Well, it's a many-parted question, depending on how you view it. To answer what I believe the thrust of it, I certainly believe 'true AI sentience' is possible. I don't believe there's anything particularly special about the brain that can't be replicated, eventually. This _may_ not be possible through just standard extrapolation and boosting of current computer systems; it might require an entirely new paradigm, a new system starting from the ground up, but I think it can be done (without the somewhat 'cheap' way of making it out of strictly biological components).
The more philosophical aspect of it is whether a sufficiently advanced simulation of intelligence counts as true sentience. That is, if a computer is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from a human intelligence, but when you break it down, all it's doing is say, following a hugely complicated state diagram (if XYZABG hold, respond in this way:), is that the same as a human sentience in which we feel we have a higher 'level' of thought, where the thoughts exist, as is... I don't know, but I think it is the same.
A sufficiently advanced simulation of true sentience _is_ true sentience, IMHO. The state-diagram representation of how the computer makes its decisions is not the mind, any more than the neurons firing in response to input in our brains is itself a mind. The mind is an abstract entity, bound to but divorced from the physicality. If that makes any sense.
Now, whether we'll actually develop truly sentient computers before we destroy ourselves, I'm not sure (of course there could be other alien races who have already developed them, or could develop them even if we don't, so I think the chances are high it will happen at some point if it hasn't already).