Thread: Can Computers Think?

seemed rather far fetched

like computers thinking?

I don't think computers thinking is particularly far fetched.

But i do think that consciousness being at its heart a quantum mechanical process is.

ok Clyde

But i do think that consciousness being at its heart a quantum mechanical process is.

Clyde is right though. I'm sure he can explain this better than I can, but the human brain is definitely NOT a quantum mechanical process. In quantum mechanics, every possible outcome exists. A 'digital' quantum mechanical computer would not have a bitset, rather every single place is both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. This is a rather abstract, but basically that bitset exists in that 1-0 state until some sort of a conscious (oh god) process observes it, and then the actual sequence of bits is set. What does this mean? This means that even if every single particle in the universe was a processor capable of a (excuse my crappy notation) million billion trillion calculations per nano second, even all of them combined would never be able to out process a single quantum mechanical processor. This topic is also discussed in the Age of Spiritual Machines.

Humans are capable of a lot of computaton, but when you come right down to it they still seem to be digital at their main core because each neuron is firing or it is not, but this seems to combine into a larger analog signal (neural net) that can be altered in various ways, thus explaining the different behaviors of different humans.