Hello,
I have come to think that Cherniak wrote his "Riddle" story as support for
Lucas (among others with similar thoughts) that machines can never equal
minds. Cherniak wrote about this world, that is not ours, but where
these "people" have minds that CAN be perfectly modeled by machines. So, in
such a world, if minds can be modeled by machines, then each mind MUST HAVE a
Godelian formula that it cannot prove to be true. It is in trying to do so,
that the mind gets spun into this infinite loop of trying to process the
Godelian formula; hence, the coma that everyone falls into. The only reason
that Dizzard died was because it took a long time for people to discover him
and so he died of malnutrition and dehydration - anybody could die of this! As
long as the body is properly nutritioned, the mind will keep computing, even
for years and years, until that body is ready to die of natural causes.
So, these people live in fear of the Godelian formula sneaking up on them and
sending them into the loop. I believe that each of the people in this story
has their OWN Godelian formula that they will eventually come into contact
with; that's why the Autotomy Group could not find a universal Godelian
formula and isolate it and so save everyone. They had bigger problems: they
were faced with everyone's Godelian formula and so they searched for a general
solution. Such a solution would be, by definition of "autotomy," to cast off
some body part that could save the body from entering in this infinite loop. I
suggest that this body part would be some small part of their brain that they
don't really need; I don't know if you need EVERY cell in your brain to be
human. (Just think of people on drugs whose brains get fryed just a bit and
they're fine; and I'm not talking about major drug addicts... .) And so, these
people would then be saved by the Autotomy Group, had they worked fast enough.
But, it seemed that with their first case, Dizzard's coma, they ran out of
time.
That's my opinion! Anyone else see it like this?
~Andreea Ceausu.
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This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by Andreea Ceausu <ceausu@yorku.ca> .
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