Memristor: Word for the Year
Project: The great enhancement debate

Through 'Engineers find 'missing link' of electronics' I found a link to a letter to Nature, The missing memristor found, not that i have access———————

———— so you see friends, when Turing invented our all coding machinery he basically sat down and asked himself 'How do I do mathematics?" and then wrote down what he did and codified it, i.e. he wrote out serially what steps he went through as it appeared to his consciousness and invented the Turing machine we now use everyday without much mental labour. Anyway, what Alan's brain came up with was a serial process that could be run on mechanical and electronic machines, in binary code that have as their big working parts electronic gates, in states of either 'on' or 'off', but Alan's brain is not like this at all, while he was attending to his consciousness in a serial way, his brain was actually working in a massively parellel way, for while consciousness is a serial sort of thing (especially if we write it down or talk about it, that's why it's polite in many cultures to wait your turn before blabbing) consciousness 'runs' on parallel hardware. Our computers on the other hand, well, they're mostly serial, and even when running in parallel they're a bunch of serial bits running in parallel, and so far programmers in Artifical Intelligence run code on serial hardware devices hoping to approximate some art of our consciousness, or at least intelligence, i.e. trying to mimic serial consciousness on parallel hardware (mind/brain) by running parallel software (neural networks) on serial hardware (the PC). I first learnt this in GEB two decades ago ————

WOW! electronic version of a neurone possible. Memristor, must remember that word. A memristor would allow massively parallel hardware in electronic form, and with electronic speeds, that would be an upgrade. I've never been a believer in Turing machines, that their model of me, that this code would actually be me. I would have to first believe that reading my poem would allowed you to become me first. Why would any description of me be me? Digital or depressively expressed? I could entertain that idea, sure, I could even appreciate it, but to trust it?
My gut, my vagus nerve refuses it.

Uploading might be actually possible with the memristor, it's more believeable that an analog copy of me will actually be me (or at least a version of me) and not some approximate digital model or sample of me, when my body craps out...

Fri, May 2, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate