assuming thats true a soul is not part of the physical universe
kinda like the matrix, the physcal universe is in illusion implanted into your souls conscieness, and you dont know anything else besides it
The basic unit of a modern computer is a bit. It can be either 0 or 1. The next step up is a byte, it's made of eight bits and is 256 times as powerful as a bit.
The basic unit of a quantum computer is a q-bit. It can be 0, 1 or 2. The next step up is a q-byte, it's made of eight q-bits and is 6561 times as powerful as a q-bit.
Basically you get dramatically more computer power.
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Re: Re: is it possible for a computer to gain self awareness
yes
even if that is true, every aspect of what is called "self-awareness" has some correlate to neurological activity. If there is a soul, it has little to do with awareness, and would not prevent computers from being self aware
this isn't true (except for us not having the know how to make an aware robot now) for potentially 2 reasons
the first is that there are no quantum interactions at the neurological level that have a serious impact on awareness. Penrose's ideas are pretty much mythology in both the physics and neuroscience community, and while some quantum effects might mediate ion channels in the neurons themselves, there is absolutly no reason that a quantum computer would be necessary, because there are no quantum phenomena that need to be accounted for
the second is that understanding awareness is not simply a problem of not having enough power. Human consciousness is based upon the interconnected nature of our neurology, and its constantly changing interconnectivity. At this point, it might be more accurate to describe the problem as being one of cracking the neuro-code, or how patterns of activation represent coherent states of awareness, rather than just needing something with 10000x the power.
We would need a significantly more powerful computer if we ever wanted to simulate human awareness through an artifical brain (with billions of artificial neurons), and that specifically might be made easier with a quantum computer, but with the ever constant advances in micro-processing, a super-computer of some kind may also prove just as useful. Even then, we need more understanding of the higher areas (Frontal and pre-frontal regions, parietal lobe, some of the temporal-cortical pathways) before simulating them is going to provide much more data than fMRI anyways.
This also assumes that we are building awareness in robots in the very same way it occurs in humans. Awareness, as humans describe it, is most likely an epiphenomenon of our linguistic ability and intense social interaction. For this reason, it is possible to say that our brain is not built specifically for "awareness", but is aware because of some of the things it was built for. Because of this, there are some weird experiments (optical illusions being the simplest example) where our awareness is terribly ineffecient. It might even be the case that, when building aware robots, we need to avoid the human model, insofar as that is possible, to the end that our robots have an elevated sense of awareness than we do.
However, since our concept of awareness is inherently anthrocentric, it is debateable as to whether that would qualify as awareness, or just something new entirely
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May 20th, 2010 03:49 PM
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