From: Kyriacou Elias (ek398@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 10:35:05 BST
> Mo:
> At this present date, animal cloning has been possible, and human clones are
> becoming reality. A robot's silicon chips, wires, tiny motors and cameras
> can all represent parts of the human anatomy, so you can build a robot to
> mimic human functions. A consciousness is different, a human clone can have
> exactly the same functionality as its cloned image. Someone's consciousness
> is individual to themselves.
Kyriacou:
I agree totally with the statement that each person has their own unique
conscious. Furthermore, if the goal of science is to artificially create a
thing which has a conscious, then cloning a human being achieves this
task. This is because we know that all humans have a conscious, irrelevant
of the fact that each one is unique, the cloned human will have a
conscious of its own.
This method of cloning a human to artificially produce a system that has
a conscious, that would not have evolved in nature, may be great science
and a huge achievement, but is it ethically and morally correct?.
> Mo:
> The human brain however complex, can now be modelled to accompany
> the processes that happen inside it. We understand the neuro-chemical
> processes, and the functions within the neurons and synapses. The
> brain can be modelled with neural networks, firing of action potentials
> and interconnectivity are measured using various values for a 'node' in
> a neural net and using adjustable weights (to allow for thresholding).
Kyriacou:
The knowledge that is obtained about the brain and how it works, only
describes a tiny fraction of the actuall working brain as we know it.
It is an assumed belief that if you replaced the number of brain cells
that an average person has in their brain with atoms, then there is not
enough space in the known universe to accomodate them.
This statement only compliments the fact that the brain is a very complpex
system which we do not really know a lot about, thus, making the task of
creating an artificial system, whether it be a robot or not, even the more
difficult if not impossible, since the thing it is meant to mimic, is not
fully understood itself.
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