This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Machine consciousness Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Michael Lucas-Smith

What is the difference between the human mind and a potential machine mind? Well, essentially it's the fact that the only way humans experience time is by perceiving it in reality. A machine would be implicitely aware of time, always, as every thought it would make would be based on an internal timer.

For the machine, time is nearly irrelevant, as it lives by the clock constantly. For the human, time is extremely important, because it is constantly perceived.

Will humans and machines go to war over this? Well, possibly. It has been said many times before that humans will begin the war - why? Well, a human might perceive that a machine does not understand the 'now', given that it lives in miniscule nows constantly. A human therefore elaborates on this idea that the machine does not understand 'now' concepts, such as love, something very dear to the human heart.

This is nonsense.. a machine that lives by the clock knows time more intimately than we ever could. It also knows that it has a long lonely time ahead for itself if it does not have love, so in that respect a machine needs now concepts more than a human does.

What happens to a machine if it doubles its internal clock? It lives twice as long in the same period of time that it would have previously.

So human minds live in this 'time soup', where they cannot self analyse to the point of knowing 'brain thought X at time Y' - which a machine can do. What if a machine were unable to do that too?

There's only one plausable way to do this with a machine mind and that is to speed it up to near infinitely, pre-record all thought outcomes, then play them back as 'thoughts' in an undetermineable way. In this way, the machine is at the mercy of these near random inputs. It has no internal clock any more.

What if the human mind already works this way? Is there such a concept as free-will.. well, there's plenty you can read about that already. But there is a bigger question to be answered in there. If the human mind does work that way - where is this precalculated thought-warehouse located?