TOK notes 1-23-02 Wednesday

We mainly talked about the homework questions. The most popular was

Can we ever build a machine to think?

Naturally, what is thinking comes up as an issue?
Most of our discussions focused on thinking as humans do.
Majority of people of course said that this type of thinking was not 
possible. The most common reason given was that machine could not truly
feel emotions. Also, humans act randomly...put them in the same situation
twice and different times they'll do different things. A computer program
doesn't seem to be able to model this. One thing to keep in mind is that
maybe no two situations are exactly the same, and we are more
deterministic than we appear on the surface. Also, how could a machine
come up with "creative" ideas? How could it propogate itself?

In any event, the "flip" view is that we humans are composed of cells,
all of which can not think. Each cell carries out very simple tasks that
in the end are no more complex than a machine's. So theoretically,
although the complexity would be enormous, we could at least emulate
human thought with many small machines that dictate how individual brain
cells work.

Other issues that came up: Can a machine have organic parts? How could a
machine evolve?

We also briefly talked about whether beauty was in the eye of the beholder
and whether atheists acquire their morals from.

In that discussion, a natural question that arises is, "Is there an
absolute right or wrong?"

But temporarily disregarding that question, generally, we can get some
ideas of how to act from our parents, the law, our friends, and just
plain paying attention to how our actions are received by others.