Creating a Mind

Recently, I read a review by Colin McGinn of Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. According to McGinn, the book reveals, at last, the secret of human thought which is pattern recognition! Kurzweil argues that one needs to build a machine that recognizes patterns in order to create a mind. Personally, I find this idea extremely naive because pattern recognition is just one of mind's many functions. On the other side, McGinn says that "the brain is causally connected to the mind and the mind contains and processes information", which seems bizarre. I always thought that the brain induces the mind but this statement implies that the brain and the mind are two separate entities. What is even more bizarre are reviews of the book like this:

Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain and artificial intelligence will dramatically impact every aspect of our lives, every industry on Earth, and how we think about our future. If you care about any of these, read this book!

So we are living in a new era where  Kurzweil's theory will change our life. Are we serious? Scanners are going to profoundly change our life? One reader posted the following to amazon's site:

In "How To Create a Mind," Ray Kurzweil offers a fascinating and readable overview of his theory of how the human brain works, as well as a road map for the future of artificial intelligence.

Really? Well, sometimes I wonder whether some people are getting paid to say such bullshit! All in all, I fully agree with McGinn's review and yes I do not believe there will be dramatic changes in our life because of  Kurzweil's theory.

Oracle Machines and the Verification Problem

Florent Franchette presented an interesting problem in his "Oracle Hypermachines Faced with the Verification Problem". Franchette argues that a physical oracle machine cannot be used to prove that physical hypercomputers exist simply because we cannot verify the results computed by the machine. However, an answer to what can be computed by a form of oracle Turing machine is described in "Computational complexity with experiments as oracles" (see also "Computational complexity with experiments as oracles. II. Upper bounds"). Roughly, their oracle machine, which is called an analog-digital Turing machine, is an ordinary Turing machine coupled to an abstract physical experiment. The authors of these papers prove that this machines have computational power that goes beyond the Church-Turing barrier. Now, if one proves that a machine is actually a hypercomputer, then I think there is no need to verify results computed. After all, we trust the results computed by ordinary machines, so why shouldn't we  trust the results computed by a hypercomputer?

Can we predict the future?

It seems that some Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past. Whether this is possible or not is a big question. If we live in a deterministic universe, then it might be possible to predict things. However, I have to do some homework first in order to have a clear view of things...

Design Considerations for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Communication

On April the 1rst the following request for comments was submitted

Design Considerations for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Communication 

OK this is a joke but I wonder whether it would really make any sense to think seriously about such a thing?

There is nothing wrong with particles that travel faster than the light!

Judit  Madarász and Gergely Székely, in a paper that was recently posted to the arXiv and which is entitled The Existence of Superluminal Particles is Consistent with Relativistic Dynamics, examine whether particles that are supposed to travel faster than the light violate any physical law. Their conclusion is that the existence of particles that travel faster than the light cannot be ruled out by special relativity.
 

Non-Universality in Computation

Selim Akl has convincingly argued that there is no universal computer. This may come to a surprise to people since one of the first things we learn when studying computability theory is the notion of the universal Turing machine. But then again, we learn that there is a thesis that dictates what and what cannot be computed!

It seems the world is not discrete!

In a recent paper  entitled "Bounds on Spectral Dispersion from Fermi-Detected Gamma Ray Bursts",  Robert J. Nemiroff and his colleagues use scientific data to disprove the idea that space-time is "foamy" at the Planck scale. Apparently, this is really bad news for the aficionados of digital physics, phoilosophy, etc.