Artificial Intelligence

Last night, as I was attempting to fall asleep, I began thinking about computers and artificial intelligence. I believe that it will someday be possible to create a computer as smart or smarter than a human being, and perhaps even be conscious; but then I had a revelation: it doesn't have to be a computer. Indeed, if you have the patience, and enough beads, you could simulate a computer by meticulously adding and removing beads to simulate the ones and zeroes of the binary counting system. One doesn't even need beads; if you had enough paper and enough ink, you could write the ones and zeroes (or dots and dashes, pips and blanks, or whatever you want) out on pieces of paper, discarding the previous pieces of paper for each tick of the clock. Would it be possible for a system like this to one day become conscious? If you allow for conscious computers, then you have to allow for this as well.

But then, I had a startling thought: the patterns you would find on paper or with beads already exist as particles in this universe. Sure, if you dump a bag of beads out on the ground they probably won't form any type of recognizable pattern, but if you mentally reject some beads and include others, you realize that any pattern you can think of is already there... Now do this with all the particles in the Universe; there is potential for an infinite amount of consciousness in this Universe, as well as stars, planets, moons, asteroids and anything else you can think of, represented as pure information.

Indeed, there doesn't even need to be particles to make up the patterns, just the potential for information to exist. In this way, every possible configuration of matter and energy exists. It's easy to extrapolate from this the idea that there is no such thing as matter and energy... You, me, the 8 A.M. train to Boston, or anything else doesn't really exist; we're just one particular pattern of information, and there are an infinite number of them... An infinite number of universes, if you will, made of nothing but potential information.

I saw this documentray years ago that I think you might appreciate

video.google.com...

Computers are a collection of hardware components , they are not smart.
They can only do one thing at a time, allbeit, they do it very fast. Hardware will never become smart.
The software might someday.........but thats a long way distant.
Microsoft can't even write software that doesn't fail ever few days , never mind write code that could become self aware. i doubt half the dev's at Microsoft are selfaware, never the mind the crap they loosley call code.

If windows became self aware then it would spend most of its time in the hospital getting patched up after a nasty encounter with the viral hordes.

Originally posted by Power2theSheeple
I saw this documentray years ago that I think you might appreciate

video.google.com...

thanks, I'll check it out.

When some machine becomes self aware... I do hope their first model is a woman.

No to T-800... yes to T-X Stupid skynet.

Originally posted by rigel4
Computers are a colection of hardware components , they are not smart.
They can only do one thing at a time, allbeit, they do it very fast. Hardware will never become smart.
The software might someday.........but thats a long way distant.
Microsoft can't even write software that doesn't fail ever few days , never ming write code that could become self ware. i doubt half the dev's at Microsoft are selfware, never the mind the crap they loosley call code.

If windows became self aware then it would spend most of its time in the hospital getting patched up after a nast y skirmish with the viral hordes.

Software is information; the hardware is what stores the information and manipulates it. But I think you're missing the point. Whether or not we will create thinking computers, the potential for conscious matter already exists... We know this, because we're made up of matter, and we think.

Originally posted by LiquidLight

Originally posted by rigel4
Computers are a colection of hardware components , they are not smart.
They can only do one thing at a time, allbeit, they do it very fast. Hardware will never become smart.
The software might someday.........but thats a long way distant.
Microsoft can't even write software that doesn't fail ever few days , never ming write code that could become self ware. i doubt half the dev's at Microsoft are selfware, never the mind the crap they loosley call code.

If windows became self aware then it would spend most of its time in the hospital getting patched up after a nast y skirmish with the viral hordes.

Software is information; the hardware is what stores the information and manipulates it. But I think you're missing the point. Whether or not we will create thinking computers, the potential for conscious matter already exists... We know this, because we're made up of matter, and we think.

Not sure how you are defining matter, because all things are made of matter, and most things that exist are not
concious or alive using our definition of alive. I take your point though about humans being bio logical computers.
I wonder what rights would granted to a selfaware computer.
I f it can think then it must have a soul.