"someone2" btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:fa988324-c645-45e3-bbae-ecdd2d105190@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
Daniel Dennet in 'What RobotMary Knows' made the claim that:

No it shouldn't be possible at all to build a human brain from non living
machines. Nature creates by allowing the final product to emerge
as it will from a highly cyclic and random process. The minute
you decide in advance what you want the final product to be
you've destroyed any chance of reaching life-like behavior.

It's like the difference between a man-made commercial forest
and the Congo. It may seem at first blush the two are very close.
But the predefined system cannot behave the same way
as the naturally evolved ecosystem.

And it's not just a matter of 'someday' our computers will become
good enough.

There's a Catch-22 with building life-like robots.

To become as complex as life and intelligence, one must
give up the idea of having any control over the
final product.

"His mind, of man a secret makes,
I meet him with a start,
He carries a circumference
In which I have no part,
Or even if I deem I do-
He otherwise may know.
Impregnable to inquest,
However neighborly."

Who would want a robot like that? It defeats the original purpose
of essentially having control over another human being
without the moral problems.

Even if we could, it's only moral for humans to build 'toys', not
things rivaling the complexity of life and intelligence.

Jonathan

"The Brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound."

Poems by Emily Dickinson

s