It reminded me of the Flurby (copyrighted by FlurbyTex,ltd)

Yea, this topic is tapering off, but it was a good discusion.

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I ASSUME that I am sentient.

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I KNOW that I am sentient. "I think, therefore, I am" - Descartes (sp?)

You''re other points are good though.

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- I know that I have no idea what a "Snorgoflax" is, though I might be able to draw some conclusions based on the context of the usage (think Tolkien and the many words the races had for each other). No AI does that that I know of.
- I know that you seem to know what a "Snorgoflax" is, and that might in turn elicit questions from me to you about it.
- As a h uman I also know that you could well have just made that up. AIs ususally aren''t built to consider "bad data"....something which NPCs will have to cope with as MassMOGs get more intricate and include more people.

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My first thought was an animal of some kind, not exotic since it sounded to made up for that

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It reminded me of the Flurby (copyrighted by FlurbyTex,ltd)

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I was thinking of some type of Dr. Seuss animal when I thought up the word.

Invader X
Invader''s Realm

a snorgoflax is similar to a grogroy, but with shorter hair and a longer snout.

I''d just like to add a thought of mine about the validity of randomness, or more relative to this topic, random numbers.

A significant majority of you seem to believe that computers cannot generate any value truely "random", but that humans can. I would like to argue against that idea.

As one of you said earlier, by simply staring straight foward and hitting a lot of number keys on your keyboard, you''re outputting random numbers. You would assume these numbers are random because you are not putting any CONSCIOUS thought into which keys you are actually hitting. Therefore, you are suggesting that it must be random.

How do you know that somewhere in your subconsciousness, your brain is actually producing numbers based on favor, or given conditions around you?

A human''s conscious cannot (as of yet in evolution) manipulate anything involving our brain''s subconscious. For instance, I would be impressed to see if you could, at this moment, stop the flow of blood throughout your entire body by shutting down your heart. Or, to consciously send a cluster of white blood cells in your body to another various location and attack it. You cannot.

No one knows exactly how or why our brain functions. We can think for ourselves, and we can consciously think and ponder. The conscious part of my brain is forcing my body to type this post up and submit it, and my brain can make all the assumptions it wants about itself, but it does not truely no anything. My brain is thinking on its own, yet it doesnt even know HOW it is thinking. Strange, isn''t it? I will only realize how my subconscious works once a group of scientists can prove (with evidence), on how it works. Otherwise, my brain will not know anything about itself. If you tell an infant that we are all made of magical dust, it will believe it until given reason not to. Understand my point?

I know I''ve went far off topic, but going back to the random number point... With what I''ve said, how do we know that we are not subconsciously creating completely UNRANDOM numbers? For all I know, my brain could be simply reporting the position of my organs relative to my skin in nanometers, and those values are quickly being outputted by sending signals to the various fingers which will be typing them into a keyboard. Whew, get my point?

The property of being "random" can be nothing more than an adjective describing a series of values that have no PRESENTLY KNOWN origin.

Ok, I''m rambling, so I''ll stop now. Please try and make sense of what I''ve said.

What''s the difference between a computer and your brain?
As it is now, your brain''s got more bits (or cells =),
but generally it''s the same thing. If you can thing, dream and imagine, why can''t a computer do so also?

Electron: Since no one decides what the brain do the brain can imagine things and dream things. Since the computer only do what we program it to do (i.e. we don''t program a computer to daydream we program it, on the most basic level, to solve different math equations or to amuse us (games and the like))

A computer doesn''t have the ability to daydream since a computer, believe it or not, simply is metal with eletricity running through it a computer can''t do anything except what we made it to do. (Please don''t say that we''re merely meat with electricity running through us now it''s getting kinda tedious)

// Shadows

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Original post by Shadows
A computer doesn''t have the ability to daydream since a computer, believe it or not, simply is metal with eletricity running through it a computer can''t do anything except what we made it to do. (Please don''t say that we''re merely meat with electricity running through us now it''s getting kinda tedious)

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It may be ''getting kinda tedious'' but it''s just as valid a point. I don''t think computers made at the moment have anything approaching concsciousness, but I don''t see why we couldn''t theoretically manufacture something with the same level of intelligence as a human some day.

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Original post by Invader X
Yea, this topic is tapering off, but it was a good discusion.

I ASSUME that I am sentient.

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I KNOW that I am sentient. "I think, therefore, I am" - Descartes (sp?)

You''re other points are good though.



I am curious as to whether you know the full context of this quote of Descartes. Many many people have heard of this quote and have used it (and abused it…eg: I drink, therefore I am!). What most dont realise was that Descartes was actually trying to prove the existence of God, not himself. Of course, during his musings (about wax and other such things!) he found that he needed to prove his own existence because, he assumed that if he existed, he must have been created by a God (that''s an immense paraphrasing).

Ultimately, his argument was flawed. I wrote a very nice undergraduate paper discounting his argument.

Anyway, as many have indicated, this topic is dying. Probably because ultimately the world is split into two groups. Those that believe only humans are conscious and those that dont.

Cheers,

Timkin

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I am curious as to whether you know the full context of this quote of Descartes.

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I actually do not.

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Ultimately, his argument was flawed. I wrote a very nice undergraduate paper discounting his argument.

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Interesting. How do you explain that your own thoughts do not indicate your existence? (You do mean the proof of his existence and not that of a God, right?) (Have a link or your paper on the net?)

Invader X
Invader's Realm

Edited by - Invader X on November 11, 2001 9:31:11 PM

His argument was flawed in that it did not prove God''s existence in a valid way. Of course, if Timkin did write a paper about this, he probably knows that proving that an argument is invalid does not automatically invalidate all of the premises used.
Yet another example of faulty logic being deliberately used to "prove" some point.