From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhb5c!mhb5b!mjs Newsgroups: net.ai Title: Re: Consciousness, Monism, and Brain as Machine Article-I.D.: mhb5b.121 Posted: Tue Feb 8 19:54:19 1983 Received: Fri Feb 11 06:05:31 1983 References: <274@houxf.UUCP> One point in your treatise struck me as unfounded (but not by much). You state that the human brain is capable of sustaining consciousness (no argument, mostly), but that a PDP-11/70 clearly is not. Well, it ain't all that clear. How many CPU hours (perhaps the proper measure is Gigainstructions?) have all the 11/70's in the world executed? How many Gigainstructions must a human execute after birth before it reaches consciousness? And what is the relative power of a human "instruction" vs. a PDP-11 instruction? As long as I'm playing Devil's advocate, can anyone prove that a Turing machine is capable (or incapable) of consciousness?