Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #10833
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: robertm@idcomm.com (Robert Morris)
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:10:55 -0700
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: BEAM: Tendency toward miniaturization
At 03:16 AM 2/24/00 -0600, Terry Newton wrote:
> > To be sentient and aware of things
> >greater than ones self? Will a robot one day look to the stars and wonder,
> >"Is this all that I am? Is there no more?"
>
>Nope. This is why...
>
>Present in great numbers in every living plant and animal cell are
>these little things called "microtubules", which form a kind of
>nervous system for the cell itself. These things are why a simple
>single-celled animal possessing no brain or any processing facilities
>in the classical sense of a "network" can nevertheless seek food and
>avoid predators. All they are are tiny random decision-makers but
>the presence of a great many of them together causes a gross quantum
>effect to appear, consciousness. According to prevailing theory anyway.
>Personally I think of them as "cosmic receivers" that allow our souls
>to interface with our bodies, and it is the soul that provides things
>like personality, intelligence and infinite memory.
>
>Irregardless of what function is assigned to the microtubules, to
>duplicate the effects we see in higher animals one would need not
>only billions of neurons but also for each one of those billions
>to contain thousands if not millions of those quantum eightballs.
>
>But there is hope for robotists! Even though it is far beyond our
>technology to package together the number of elements required for
>consiousness (not that we'd even want to try!) the addition of just
>a few of these things can be beneficial to a robot's behavior.
>Perhaps even micro-consiousness, but we must not make the goal
>too high or it'll just be impossible.
Creating billions of artificial neurons may not be as far off as you think,
you might want to check out the work of Hugo de Garis at :
http://foobar.starlab.net/~degaris
or http://www.genobyte.com
He is a self proclaimed Brain Builder who is using FPGA's to
evolve large scale neural nets in real time. Currently he has a neural
network containing 75 million neurons and is hoping for a billion by 2001.
As far as the quantum microtubules being the seat of the soul, this may or
may not be true, but I don't believe that the possibility for robots to
make use
of this is a far-fetched idea. After all, using quantum mechanics for
electronics
and computation is becoming a pretty heavily researched thing these days.
One significant step toward quantum computers has been reached recently here in
Colorado where physicists have force atoms to appear in two different
places at the
same time.
So, if these two fields of research are combined, I don't see any reason
why a
human equivalent artificial life form could not be created. Sure it may be
50-100 years
away, but still possible.
Besides, if it can't be done, why are we and so many others trying?
Loving this discussion,
Robert Morris
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