(Name: Andreea Ceausu)
I want to bring my own idea to this discussion of what happened to the
supervisor versus what didn't happen to the programmer.
I believe that what Cherniak's story relates is a world of people where it is
possible that minds are equal machines, i.e. that a mind can be modeled by a
machine because it is equal to a machine. So, in this world every person's
mind is a like a machine in that there exists a Godelian statement that throws
it off into an infinite cycle of proving and disproving -- i.e., the trance
and eventual coma. So, the reason a Riddle could affect one person and not
another, is because each person/each mind/each machine has its OWN Godel
statement that the mind cannot prove. Eventually, one by one, each person in
the universe read some statement that happened to be that person's Godel
statement and so threw it into the infinte loop. The infinite loop is the coma
everyone fell into. That's how I see it!
Quoting Andrei Banica <jaxul@yorku.ca>:
> To me the case of the supervisor that read the code after the agency
> relocated
> is the strangest. Whatever each of the people who got sick read triggered
> some
> type of switch that caused the mind to become inactive. The fact of the
> matter
> is that only people who understood the information became ill. I believe that
>
> if anything the generated code seemed to outsmart the human mind seeing that
>
> it caused for it to cease basically all functions. I also believe that
> the 'system crash theory' could be a viable one in this case. If we were to
> suppose that Cherniak's sotory were to become reality one day, would it prove
>
> that the human mind isn't so flawless after all and that the line between
> machine and brain has indeed become very thin?
> --
> Andrei Banica
> jaxul@yorku.ca
___________________________________________________________________
This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by Andreea Ceausu <ceausu@yorku.ca> .
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