run_zeno_run

More helpful would be to look up the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, aka the physical Turing thesis or strong Turing thesis. It is more intent in proposing that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, is computable. If you hold to this principle, then machine consciousness is obviously feasible. -------- Another way of asking your question is: why wouldn't machine consciousness be possible? Why would there be some special sauce in the brain that is off limits to being understood and/or modeled? -------- And lastly, to address you're worry of wasting your life, there are many, many applications of AI/Cog.Sci. that would improve the human condition immensely without needing fully 'conscious' artificial machines. Also, the main reason why I in particular am dedicated to AI/Cog.Sci (and really the best reason for devoting yourself to anything) is because it is the most damned interesting thing I've ever been exposed to, IMHO.

So it seems to me that alpha is going to try to create mathematical models from unstructured data found on the web and match them with similar models generated from natural language queries entered by the users. I'm sure probabilistic NLP methods are used extensively and I can see maybe how Mathematica can compute these quickly. But what the bleep is the role of NKS? From what little I know, I can speculate that he might have modeled statistical inference using CAs and so can constrain the probability space of matches?? Jebus I need to know more or forget what I know already, anything in between is frustrating.