Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

I will use this as one example, but you are equally confused on a number of issues, to the point where the conversation isn't productive. I thought you were asking honest questions to learn something, but you appear to have some preconceived notions which you will hold onto in face of contradictory evidence.

I said: "Computers, minds, and the universe are different things that work by different laws".

You said: "The Church–Turing thesis directly says that computers can do anything humans can"

It absolutely doesn't say that. Nor does the Wikpedia article say that it does.

Wikipedia says:

"In simple terms, the Church–Turing thesis states that a function on the natural numbers is computable in an informal sense (i.e., computable by a human being using a pencil-and-paper method, ignoring resource limitations) if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine."

Maybe you are confused by the mention of human beings in that sentence. That is irrelevant -- it would only be relevant if doing calculations on pencil and paper are the ONLY things that humans can do. Of course humans can do lots of other things, like make movies and do their taxes.

If you want to philosophise, that's OK. If you want to talk about mathematics, you can't "think it's right". Your opinion doesn't matter. You are confusing philosophy and mathematics.

And you are not doing Wikipedia justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis#Ph...

It's accurate in saying whether the universe can be simulated by a computer is an open question. That's what I'm saying. I'm not denying it. I'm saying you cannot assume it's true to make FURTHER philosophical arguments, and then expect me not to object!

You would be basing your argument on false premises. I guess it could be worse -- you could base entire 300 page books on false premises.

I think it's good to be honestly interested and excited about these subjects, but it's clear you have a lot to learn. Sorry to be harsh, but I would like to direct your interest to better sources. You seem to be learning from sources that doesn't understand the primary material themselves. Even Wikipedia is an OK source, and quite accurate in this case, but you are not reading it correctly.

Now, clearly, if everybody is killing everyone beyond their immediate family, it is hard to have any sort of larger society. Living and collaborating under constant threat of immediate death wouldn't work. So we have a large set of social adaptations to limit the killing and restrain ourselves.

My point here, is that 'why do human kill other humans' is a less interesting question than 'why are the social adaptations that prevent killing not taking affect?' The problem of fighting isn't a moral failing, or some flaw in the human soul. Killing makes sense within the decision making scope of our conscious brains, and is the result of inadequate build up of collective structures of inhibition that are required to have larger groups of people in closer contact with each other, and as the groups get bigger and the contact becomes closer, we need to engineer new schemes for inhibiting the 'lets just kill them off and solve this once and for all' urge.