Friday, August 20, 2004

Who/What am I?

I am Body, Mind, and Spirit. But most of me is the spirit. The body is a machine... It has inputs and outputs and predictably(if one knows its state) maps one to the other. The same with the mind, though considerably more complex. However, the Spirit is the only thing about me that is not machine. It is not deterministic (unless it believes it should be). It is not even a state machine that changes with time. It is a will. It can decide to take the hard road even when that way is illogical. This is the one thing that is the difference between real and artificial intelligence. AI may fool us into thinking it is intelligence, but this is only the result of an input by a programmer. It is always logical, and given the knowledge of the mapping function, and the state of the machine at the time of the input, the output can be deduced and repeated. However, this is not so with the Spirit. Not realizing this fact causes Fatalism, Despair, as well as Laziness. Once one realizes that just because one choice is logically the right one (or the easiest, or all around the best choice) doesn't mean we have to take it, then one can be freed from one's inputs. Then one can cease being a product of one's environment and begin making our environment a product of our will. Written Friday August 20 (on my Palm) after watching I,Robot. These ideas are not really the point of the movie, though the movie got me started thinking in this direction.