Creating a Mind

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Recently, I read a review by Colin McGinn of Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. According to McGinn, the book reveals, at last, the secret of human thought which is pattern recognition! Kurzweil argues that one needs to build a machine that recognizes patterns in order to create a mind. Personally, I find this idea extremely naive because pattern recognition is just one of mind's many functions. On the other side, McGinn says that "the brain is causally connected to the mind and the mind contains and processes information", which seems bizarre. I always thought that the brain induces the mind but this statement implies that the brain and the mind are two separate entities. What is even more bizarre are reviews of the book like this:

Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain and artificial intelligence will dramatically impact every aspect of our lives, every industry on Earth, and how we think about our future. If you care about any of these, read this book!
So we are living in a new era where  Kurzweil's theory will change our life. Are we serious? Scanners are going to profoundly change our life? One reader posted the following to amazon's site:
In "How To Create a Mind," Ray Kurzweil offers a fascinating and readable overview of his theory of how the human brain works, as well as a road map for the future of artificial intelligence.
Really? Well, sometimes I wonder whether some people are getting paid to say such bullshit! All in all, I fully agree with McGinn's review and yes I do not believe there will be dramatic changes in our life because of  Kurzweil's theory.

PS In June 2012, the International Journal of Machine Consciousness published a special issue (Volume 04, Issue 01) on mind uploading. Currently, the contents of the issue are freely available.

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A comment on a comment

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Recently, "someone" posted a review of my book on hypercomputation on the Brains site. The reviewer argues that This area is full of problems, some of which are physico/mathematical and some of which are conceptual. Unfortunately, from a quick sample, Syropolous's book does not avoid common mistakes and confusions—some of which I've been trying to correct in my own work. First of all, I have to admit that back in 2004 I read a paper by this reviewer, but at that time I did not considered it interesting. However, after I read this review of my book, I read The Physical Church-Turing Thesis: Modest or Bold? , the reviewer's latest manuscript, in order to see what he meant by common mistakes and confusions and how he was trying to solve them. In this manuscript, the reviewer puts forth a number of criteria that every machine has to satisfy in order to be ``useful for physical computing.'' These criteria are: Readable Inputs and Outputs Process-Independ...
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Is the Universe a Quantum Computer?

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 The idea that the Universe (whatever we may mean by this) is a some sort of a computer is a recurring theme. Recently, Nature published an article by David L. Chandler that is entitled Could the Universe be a giant quantum computer? This article is actually a tribute to Edward Fredkin, who passed away last June. The main contribution of Fredkin to the philosophy of science is his "digital philosophy" that advocates the idea that the universe is a computer and everything in our universe is discrete. I would not like to argue against the validity of these ideas (I have done so in Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier and in Demystifying Computation: A Hands-On Introduction ) . However, I would like to point out that if the Universe is not a computing device, in general, then it cannot be a quantum computer, in particular. Also, what I did not like with Chandler's article is that it takes it for granted that the Universe is a computer. He did not e...
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