Could a computer have a mind?

by N. Kateris

It goes without saying, that computers' skills and abilities are increasing exponentially. Who would expect a hundred years ago that a machine would be able to calculate solutions to differential equations, analyse the air flow around a moving vehicle and propose improvements to make the vehicle more aerodynamic, even respond to written answers similarly to a human? Many argue that computers already are or will be more powerful than human brains. Nevertheless, should we say that computers have minds?

According to Wikipedia, a mind is the complex of cognitive faculties that enable consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception and judgment—a characteristic of human beings, but which also may apply to other life forms.

Most would agree that no computer displays these characteristics. And many people support the opinion that computers will never be able to think like us or be able to reason, judge, etc. Their main argument is that just like the Chinese room thought experiment, even if computers seem to understand what they are told and provide logical answers, they do not really have knowledge, they just follow an algorithm which enables them to give a solution to a problem, without the computer really understanding what the problem is about or why it must be solved. In addition, the computer is not able to discover a new way to solve the problem and sticks to the method, which programmers have taught it to follow.

Moreover, although systems such as cleverbot are successful at communicating with humans and sometimes go unnoticed, they are not believed to actually be communicating like we do. Therefore, even if cleverbot, or a similar machine, pass the Turing Test, they will do it by just retrieving files with answers to certain questions, not by a thought process. All computers understand is the syntactic properties of language, not the semantic properties. Never could anyone say that computers know the meaning of the answers they provide, the just know when to give a certain answer.

However, how do human brains work? A human brain (and animals' brains as well) consist of a large number of neurons that communicate by sending electrical signals to each other. This resembles the structure of a CPU, which consists of transistors that send electrical signals. Therefore, theoretically speaking, provided that the human brain is analysed and understood fully by scientists, a just as complicated computer might be made, with the same synapses as a human brain.

As a result, in my opinion, computers do not have minds yet. If a very complicated computer that imitates the human brain is constructed, it may have the same cognitive skills and abilities as us, since it will function in the same way as a human brain. Then, it may have consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception and judgment. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this will not happen very soon and by then we will probably not be using computers in the form we know them today. Who knows, maybe humans will be growing artificial brains in labs and using them as computers!

The Worst Pandemic in History

After years of sometimes bizarre research, why are scientists still baffled by the 1918 Spanish flu?

Ninety-five years ago in the little town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, a deadly new virus called Spanish influenza struck quickly and brutally. It killed 90 percent of the town’s Inuit population, leaving scores of corpses that few survivors were willing to touch. The Alaskan territorial government hired gold miners from Nome to travel to flu-ravaged towns and bury the dead. The miners arrived in Brevig Mission shortly after the medical calamity, tossed the victims into a pit two meters deep, and covered them with permafrost.

The flu victims remained untouched until 1951, when a team of scientists dug up the bodies, cracked open four cadavers’ rib cages, scooped out chunks of their lungs, and studied the tissue in a lab. But they were unable to recover the virus and threw out the specimens. Nearly 50 years later, scientists dug up another victim from the same site, this time a better preserved, mostly frozen, obese woman, and successfully extracted viral RNA. In 2005, a team of scientists finally completed the project, sequencing the full genome of the viral RNA. But they still don’t know exactly why it caused the Spanish flu pandemic.   

There’s no single reason why the deadliest pandemic in modern history is still mysterious. Scientists have pinpointed the origins of recent influenza outbreaks like swine flu and bird flu with relative ease, arming the international health community with an arsenal of tests and vaccines to fight back. And a flu virus isn’t particularly complex; it’s just a stretch of RNA transmitted between animals, human and nonhuman, that has evolved to mutate quickly enough to outpace any long-term immunity.

But one stretch of RNA can wreak a lot of havoc. Spanish influenza killed about 50 million people (estimates vary), including 675,000 in the United States, and up to 40 percent of the world’s population was stricken with the flu. Unusually for the flu, the pandemic afflicted the young more than the old. Scientists have since established that the disease triggered an overreaction by the immune system, thus turning a young person’s robust immune system against itself. (Bird flu and swine flu were similarly more deadly in young people.) Victims’ lungs overflowed with fluid while their skin, deprived of oxygen, became mottled and discolored. Many sufferers came down with severe nosebleeds—some spewed blood out of their nostrils with such force that nurses had to duck to avoid the flow. Those unable to recover eventually drowned in their own bodily fluids.

Horrifying as the flu was, its reign of terror was mercifully brief: By late 1919, the flu had largely disappeared. Although its survivors and their children faced lifelong health problems, those dark years were largely struck from cultural memory. (Downton Abbey did kill off a character with Spanish influenza, primarily as means to wiggle out of a messy love triangle.)

Scientists, however, never forgot the mysterious pandemic, and research into the 1918 flu experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. In addition to the exhumed Inuit, scientists have studied the organs of flu-suffering soldiers, including a long-forgotten piece of lung tissue stored at a military pathology institute in Washington. Just five years ago, British scientists exhumed the body of Sir Mark Sykes, a British diplomat who was buried in a lead coffin after dying of Spanish influenza in 1919. The scientists had hoped Sykes’ special casket might have preserved his body, allowing his organs to be studied and more potential flu RNA to be extracted and sequenced. But the coffin had caved in on the diplomat sometime between 1919 and 2008, and his body tissue was decomposed.

source:http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/pandemics/2012/12/spanish_flu_mystery_why_don_t_scientists_understand_the_1918_flu_even_after.html

Largest Mass Execution in US History: 150 Years Ago Today

December 26, 1862: thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history–on orders of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime: killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August.

The execution took place on a giant square scaffold in the center of town, in front of an audience of hundreds of white people. The thirty-eight Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows,” according toRobert K. Elder of The New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached, they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ ”

Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers. The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion.

Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Souix. A series of broken peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving” tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War” didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a military court sentenced 303 to death.

Lincoln, however, was “never an Indian hater,” Eric Foner writes in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He did not agree with General John Pope, sent to put down a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, who said “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” Lincoln “carefully reviewed the trial records,” Foner reports, and found a lack of evidence at most of the tribunals. He commuted the sentences of 265 of the Indians—a politically unpopular move. But, he said, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”

The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—from all of their lands in Minnesota.

Mankato today is a city of 37,000 south of Minneapolis, notable for its state university campus, which has 15,000 students. In Mankato, which has heretofore neglected its bloody past, a new historical marker is being erected at the site of the scaffold, at a place now called Reconciliation Park. The marker, a fiberglass scroll, displays the names of the thirty-eight Dakota who were executed.

The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul is currently featuring an exhibit titled “Minnesota Tragedy: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.” “You can’t turn your head from what is not pretty in history,” said Stephen Elliott, who became the director of the Minnesota Historical Society last May after twenty-eight years at Colonial Williamsburg. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Whatever we do, it’s not going to somehow heal things or settle it.” The impressive state-of-the-art exhibit includes the views of both white settlers and Indians, voices from the past as well as the present. “Visitors are encouraged to make up their own minds about what happened and why,” the official guide declares. The website and online video are particularly impressive.

The mass execution of the Dakota Indians isn’t the only fact missed in the Lincoln biopic. Check out Jon Wiener on “The Trouble with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln.’”

source:http://www.thenation.com/blog/171920/largest-mass-execution-us-history-150-years-ago-today#