full-disclosure - Re: Re: Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.

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Message-ID: <20040910182805.GD12419@hyper>
From: gadgeteer at elegantinnovations.org (gadgeteer@...gantinnovations.org)
Subject: Re: Re: Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 09:10:19AM +0200, Vincent Archer (varcher@...yall.com) wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:41:26PM -0600, gadgeteer@...gantinnovations.org wrote:
> > Given Moore's Law and the other rules of thumb regarding the progress of
> > computer hardware it will be another 25 to 30 years before we match
> > human capacity.
> > 
> > Anyone who says they can achieve such in significantly less time is
> > seeking funding. :-)
> 
> Or is using the relatively simple reasoning that brains are full of
> cruft, overcapacity, and other elements that are not specifically
> required for sentience, but devoted to the management of a primate's
> body, and we can do a better job.

The trouble with simple reasoning, especially in the area of biology, is
that it is often wrong.  Evolution is a miser.  Still the crux of the
point above turns on what is considered a threshold for sentience.  My
handy Webster's defines it as:

 Sentient Sen"ti*ent, a. L. sentiens, -entis, p. pr. of
   sentire to discern or perceive by the senses. See Sense.
   Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and perception.
   Specif. (Physiol.), especially sensitive; as, the sentient
   extremities of nerves, which terminate in the various organs
   or tissues.

"and preception" is the stumbling block here.  Without it we have a
device with a sensor that does or does not do something based on
readings from said sensor.  Big deal, there was such a device
controlling the furnace of the house I was born in over four decades
ago.  With it... ah, now that is a different kettle of fish.

> Emulating a human is very very different from making a sentience. That's
> the main flaw of the Turing's test: it attempts to prove the existence
> of human-type sentience, not sentience in general.

I think there is a conflation here of sentient entity and intelligent
entity.  The Turing test is looking for intelligence.  During his day
the only known model for intelligence was the self-image of human
intelligence (which was (and still is) very poorly understood).
-- 
Chief Gadgeteer
Elegant Innovations