So, let's look at your "nothing else!". What does it mean to say that the mind/brain is machine plus software plus "else"? It means that, in reducing the mind to its constituents, you end up with a list of elements we already know: particles, their interactions, plus that "else". Can this "else" in turn be reduced to its own constituents? If yes, then said else is a machine in its own right, built from those "else-parts". If not, then your quest to find stuff ends there.

Now suppose we find that consciousness is an irreducible. That in some way or another there are consciousnesses floating around that get linked to particles in the forming of brains. That being the case, actually understanding consciousness, how and why it works, developing new consciousnesses, improving them, even improving our own, all become unfortunately impossible. They are givens, to be, so to speak, harvested from the source of consciousnesses atomically as such, forever and ever locked in the state they came, unchanging, outside the domain of our technology, intelligence, hopes and wisdom.

That's an extremely sad outcome, which is why I sincerely hope our minds are indeed reducible to machine and software. If they aren't, we'll hit a insurmountable brick wall, and that'll be it.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don't think I disagree with you on anything important there. There are a few minor issues: is it reasonable to assume that anything that can be understood is necessarily amenable to being modelled in software, for instance. And I'm not sure I'd share your sorrow if some element of our minds does turn out to be irreducible. We'd still be left with an awful lot we can potentially hack, and I quite like to think that there's an element of mystery to the human condition.

However, I can be very hopeful that our minds are indeed machinery and software, to the point of sounding almost certain, due to the researches and advances made in biology, neurology, cognitive sciences etc. in the last few decades. They all point out strongly into this direction, so there's indeed great expectation the mind will be understood in a few more decades and thus opened up for betterment, and strong betterment at that.

I don't think there's much doubt that our minds are largely (perhaps very largely) mechanistic. And I'll accept that there's strong emerging evidence in support of that notion. I'm just not sure that the evidence is also evidence of "nothing else" :)

As for the matter of souls, I don't criticize technical versions of the concept, only naive religious ones that think of it as some kind of "non-matter matter". What I said above is all compatible with Platonic, Aristotelian and similar advanced concepts of the soul as truly immaterial.

I think I better take your word for it in this instance :)

Reality is most probably composed, as the sages of yesteryear figured, of matter (ordinary matter, energy, space and time) and form (immaterial math).

Interesting way of looking a it. Personally, I'd have put space and time under "form" since they are basically the shape of the universe rather than the substance thereof. I also find myself uncomfortable with the idea that every non-material entity in the universe can be reduced to mathetics. Unless "math" is a philosophical term of art that I've not encountered, of course. Both minor quibbles in any event :)

The soul of a thing is its mathematical structure, which doesn't depend on the specific particles that are following that structure. Back in the day it was thought this referred to the human shape, but nowadays science advanced enough to translated that fuzzy concept of "shape" into the far more specific notions of DNA, the structure of which (not the actual molecule in your cells) fits Aristotle's concept soul, as well as that of algorithms and software, the running of which in a hardware fits Plato's concept of soul.

That reminds me of Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy. He makes q good case for souls as software. I'm not sure it doesn't miss the really interesting question though. Let me tell you how I see it.

The thing that interests me is consciousness. I know from personal experience that my existence has a strong subjective component. The question that really interests me how can we get an AI to share that experience, and if we can, how can we possibly be know?

Now, and engineer would probably approach the problem through functional equivalence. If the behaviours are the same under all circumstances then we can call that "good enough" and assume that equivalent behaviour indicates equivalent processes. From what you've written so far in this discussion, I'm guessing that you're broadly of that opinion yourself. For my part, I think that's just avoiding the issue.

This is what I meant by "magically self aware clockwork". Any combination of hardware and software can be modelled entirely in software by writing a software emulator for the hardware. It works both ways: any piece of software can be executed entirely in hardware. So whatever the program, there's no reason it can't be recreated in clockwork, along the lines of pre-Babbage calculating machines.

So let's try a thought experiment: suppose you reduce a human mind to software, and then re-implement that software as a clockwork calculator, albeit an extremely large one. Is that collection of cogs conscious in the same way that I know myself to be conscious. And if it is, by what process did that conscious come to reside in all that moving metal? Is there a critical number of cogs after which the machinery becomes capable of apprehending the beauty of a sunset (as opposed to merely recognising it as something humans would find beautiful). Or is that self awareness intrinsic in all clockwork to some lesser degree, such that a clock on a mantelpiece is actively enumerating seconds as they pass, rather than just mechanically moving over time.

And if you're happy with the notion of conscious wristwatches, how do you feel about simpler machines still? Do pulleys and levers also have some dim awareness of their condition? And more to the point, where do you draw the line, short of adopting Animism and declaring that all matter is alive and aware? Because I think that's a notion that many in the AI field would find deeply disturbing.

And then of course you might consider that, at a particle level, the distinction between the clockwork and the building that houses it is more or less arbitrary. Does that mean the building is conscious while the clockwork is running? Maybe we should extend that to the planet, or further still. Is there a line we can draw before we run into some sort of universal consciousness and start debating whether or not it should be labelled "God"?

On the other hand, if that internal subjective experience is not a component of all clockwork, that why does it suddenly arise? And by what mechanism? I think a lot of AI reserchers would very much like to draw a black box at this point, label the issue MAGIC and tell us all to stop asking awkward questions. Personally, I'm no happier with black boxes than you are.

The trouble is that Science is founded on the rigorous elimination of the Subjective. That, to my way of thinking makes it a poor tool for investigating Subjectivity. Science can find the footprints of the subjective world (electrical activity in the brain, behavioural statistics, etc etc) but it can't address the actual subjectivity directly. This leads a lot of scientists to dismiss the subjective as unimportant, or worse to deny aspects of its existence. I think that's a mistake - Black Boxery of the worst kind, if you will.

There's a lot more I could write on that subject, but I think I've rambled on for long enough. I suppose it all boils down to two questions: if you emulate me perfectly in software, does my emulation have the same subjective experience as I have in my daily life - or indeed any subjective experience at all? And whether it does or not, how can we possibly be sure? I don't have any answers, only questions.

Thanks again for the thought-provoking response :)

"This is mysterious! It can't be known! Stop asking the difficult questions!"

Sorry, but no, we won't. :-)

Needless melodrama aside, I think you've got that exactly backwards. You're the one saying "The Brain is a Machine and our Minds are Software, and Nothing Else!"

I'm asking the hard question: "How can you possibly be so sure?"

And to avoid answering that hard question, you're drawing black boxes around everything, and then blaming them on me.

Not unless you go to the trouble of defining your terms. The problem is that words such as "soul", "consciousness", "self awareness" etc. work as black boxes with a "don't look inside" sign hanging from them

Interesting way to look at it. I wouldn't have thought "consciousness" to be particularly awash with ambiguity, given that pretty much every person on the planet would seem to experience the phenomena on a daily basis. "Self awareness" is a little fuzzier, granted, but I'd still have thought the meaning was clear, given the context.

Still, you're quite right in that problem lies with the definitions. Without a definition of "consciousness" (your term, by the way) it's going to be very hard to point to any evidence that the phenomenon arises either "arises from individual particles interacting" or even "from a higher level of organization such as synapses signaling".

So feel free to define your terms and raise the level of the debate. Or if that's too much like hard work, maybe we can argue informally without carping about definitions. Either way is fine by me :)

"On the other a purely MAGIC view of MAGIC where any sufficiently MAGIC must necessarily become MAGIC by some MAGIC? I think there's probably room for some middle ground there. It should be possible to question the idea of MAGIC without bringing OTHER MAGIC into the debate. I also find that in the absence of any evidence for either proposition, I really don't find MAGIC any less convincing as a hypothesis than MAGIC."

I like that! I wonder if there are any other poorly defined sentences where we could apply that approach? :D

"Your brain is MAGIC. It can be MAGICKED, MAGICKED, MAGICKED, MAGICKED and MAGICKED. You're already MAGIC running on appropriate (and at some point in future becoming outdated) MAGIC."

Great fun, but it doesn't really advance the argument, does it?

At the end of the day, "consciousness" is an intangible abstraction that defies any sort of physical measurement. The only evidence for its existence is either annecdotal or purely subjective. As such I still doubt that you have any evidence to support your assertions over any sort of MAGIC[1], or vice versa for that matter. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that.

[1] Where "MAGIC" can be taken to mean "self awareness" , "computational processes", "souls", "particle physics" or "Great Aunt Elsie's Fondue Cake".

Your brain is a machine. It can be understood, decompiled, analyzed, improved and reimplemented. You're already an AI running on appropriate (and at some point in future becoming outdated) hardware.

Unless you believe in souls. Do you believe in souls?

Are those the only two options then? On the one hand a belief in "souls" with (I assume) all the associated religous baggage of supreme beings, afterlife and organised worship? On the other a purely mechanistic view of consciousness where any sufficiently complex piece of clockwork must necessarily become self aware by some as yet unknown process?

I think there's probably room for some middle ground there. It should be possible to question the idea of purely mechanistic awareness without bringing religion into the debate.

I also find that in the absence of any evidence for either proposition, I really don't find "souls" any less convincing as a hypothesis than magically self aware clockwork. But that's probably just me :)

Microsoft will NEVER make money on the XBox platform overall. They lost close to 8 Billion dollars before they started _small_ quarterly profits which will never ever recoup the money lost.

Thanks. That was more or less my understanding of the matter, but I couldn't back it up and I didn't have time to dig out the numbers.

... worked great for BlackBerry.

Past tense. It worked so well for Blackberry that they tried to reposition themselves as a maker of social media devices. Then when that didn't bring in enough money they went looking for someone to buy them out.

I'm not denying that they once made an awful lot of money. I'm just saying that the market place would appear to have moved on since Blackberry's heyday.

What a great idea you have got there!

Use it freely and with my blessing :)

This wouldn't be the first time that MS has come from behind: Word utterly crushed Word Perfect to become the standard in the early 90s, Excel pushed Lotus 1-2-3 into has-been status, Internet Explorer killed Netscape as a viable company, and people were surprised when MS released the Xbox and went on to make a fortune in the console industry

Hmm. Of course most of those victories were achieved at least in part by leveraging MS' control of the underlying operating system. Admittedly the Xbox didn't have that advantage. That said, while the platform is certainly making money, it's still not clear that MS have recouped the massive investment they needed to brute force their way into the market.

This situation is different again. MS aren't competing against Apple, Google and Samsung. They're competing against Apple and Android. Every hardware manufacturer in the far east is eyeing Android and thinking "we could sell our phones under our own brand". So all the hardware guys that usually support are potential competitors. That's on top of Apple, Google and Samsung.

Even worse, they're pretty much tied to the windows brand for whatever phone they use. So the symbol that everyone sees when they're bored at school in computer class and the one that everyone sees when they're bored at work and wishing they were elsewhere doing something, anything else ... that's going to be the brand on the phone. All the Nokia ads I say downplayed the Windows brand as far as possible, which I think was clever of them. But I don't think MS' corporate pride will allow that.

What might save them in this market is big business. If they can get some large corporations to declare themselves as winphone shops and make everyone use the platform for all work related activities they could use that to make inroads into education and home use. But the business dudes all have iPhones or Android already and it works for them. It's going to be hard work getting them to give up those machines for windows. Especially with BYOD as an emerging trend.

If you ask me, their best hope might be to launch an Xbox phone. Xbox users tend to like the platform; load it up with plenty of free mobile games and they could build a user base pretty quickly, to say nothing of finally finding takers for their app store. But that wouldn't get them a "serious" offering so I don't think they'll do it.

Fair enough. I thought you were just being deliberately and needlessly snarky, so I responded in kind.

Now if you want to seriously discus the relative impact of health and safety regs vs exchange rate on outsourcing, let me know. But that wasn't the impression I got from your post.

Offshoring works to a large extent because the jobs are being moved to a country with a much weaker currency.

Also weaker health & safety laws.

And weaker civil rights.

And weaker pay scales.

And a weaker fourth estate.

But yeah, weaker currency, that's the ticket.

*sigh*

Whoops, my bad. Obviously there has to be an evil reason why outsourcing is possible.

What was I thinking?

Personally, I'm in favour of pressuring the countries that are the recipients of those jobs to institute minimum wage laws, too... rinse and repeat until we run out of places for exploitative practices to hide

Won't work, sadly. Offshoring works to a large extent because the jobs are being moved to a country with a much weaker currency. Which means that the employer can pay far less than he would pay a domestic employee and the employee still sees a higher standard of living.

If you force such countries to pay minimum wages pegged to the dollar, then most of the local employers won't be able to employ anyone at all. Which means they'll either abolish the law or else turn a blind eye when all the business ignore the legislation.

Which isn't to say I approve of off-shoring. Just that the proposed solution doesn't seem likely to work.

his desire to prioritize the "freedom" of systems over those systems actually doing anything useful is totally unreasonable

It's more like a desire to prioritize the freedoms of software users over those of software distributors. He's not against software doing "useful" things, except where the usefulness lies in somehow exploiting the software user.

Software freedom is so much less importsant than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.

Of course, freedom from slavery is clearly much less important than freedom from murder. I mean if you are enslaved you can regain your freedom, but if you're dead you're dead. Should we then legalise slavery once again so we can concentrate on the big picture? I'm sure there are lots of other pesky laws that we could get rid of while we're at it. Always assuming your logic of prioritising freedoms holds water, obviously.

The only people who can stand to listen to him are those who forgive those traits because they already agree with what he says.

Counter example right here. I don't agree with everything rms says. I don't believe that proprietary software is necessarily a bad thing, and I take particular issue with him on the "GNU/Linux" thing. In this instance, however, I think he's got it about right.

You can't expect to grow a movement that way, even if your movement has a purpose that makes sense.

So you're saying that popularity is more important than principle? Presumably rms should abandon his notion of the Four Freedoms and adopt something less controversial, like maybe "oxygen is good" in the expectation of seeing the GNU movement expand dramatically. Personally I think it's his refusal to compromise his principles that has gained him so many followers.

Clearly voting for a major party candidate is more pragmatic than voting for a third party candidate

I think that depends on the timescale.

If you don't like the common agenda of the main parties and you keep voting for one or another of them, you send the message that what they are doing is acceptable. At one time you could have responded to this by boycotting the election or spoiling your ballot, but that doesn't work any more. Not voting at all is simply seen as apathy, and spoiling your ballot makes you indistinguishable from an idiot at party HQ.

If you want the political landscape to change, you have to vote for third-party candidates. It won't happen overnight; it may not happen in your lifetime. But if you want change it's a lot more pragmatic than validating existing practice.

Also free speech as I define it only truly exists in the US so I'm not interested on what other countries did.

Now that's an interesting approach.

So, following your methodology, if I don't like what you're saying I can redefine "intelligence" as something that occurs in people other than yourself and that allows me to disregard anything you say. How useful is that?

Admittedly, it's only formalising an approach that's already ready widely used, so I don't suppose I can claim any great novelty here. Maybe I should redefine "innovation" as something that only happens when I do it. That would work ...

For that to be true MSFT would have had to plan that 1.- Nobody would buy WinPhone...okay I see that one, 2.- Nokia would leave them with a product to sell in that gap...which if they wouldn't buy WinPhone on Nokia a change of brand name sure as hell isn't gonna help move units, and 3.- The gap wouldn't just be absorbed by Google, with the CCC Android 2.x phones taking the low end while the more expensive Android and Apple units take the high.

So anyone who proposed such a strategy without taking these factors just wouldn't be all that smart, then?

So you see this is the problem I have when people describe Bill Gates kind of evil moves at MSFT....Ballmer just ain't that smart.

Hmmm ... Explain the problem to me again? :)