Artificial
neural networks exist in Poul Anderson's
Harvest Of Stars. I have just read something relevant in Mortimer J. Adler's
The Difference of Man And The Difference It Makes (New York, 1967). Neurologists had said, first, that not enough is yet known about the central nervous system for it to be replicated and, secondly, that there is an important difference between electrochemical interactions in organisms and electrical interactions in machines. Another factor is the very large quantitative difference between the numbers of neurons and of neuronic interactions in a human brain and the numbers of transistors and of their interactions in a machine.
Any artifact that did exactly duplicate a human brain would be conscious and would be able both to reason and to converse. (This is a tautology: any artifact that was unable to do these things would not exactly duplicate a human brain.) Thus, works like Harvest Of Stars are valid speculative fiction. The future will be different. Wellsian sf writers like Anderson speculate about how it will differ from past and present.
3 comments:
There's an old saying that if our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be incapable of understranding them.
Hal Clement wrote a story based on that premise, "Answer" in 1947.
I sure as heck don't understand the mind/body problem. But I certainly respect philosophers like Adler, who at least try to understand.
Ad astra! Sean
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