“A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 4 (“Halo”), pp. 146-147

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British science fiction writer and blogger 1964

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“A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 4 (“Halo”), pp. 146-147

“One form of math denial is the belief in the ability to make computers that prevent copyright infringement. Computers only ever work by making copies: restricting copying on the internet is like restricting wetness in water.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

The FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn't make it possible http://theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/24/the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-only-it-can-use-but-wanting-it-doesnt-make-it-possible in The Guardian (24 February 2016)

“One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).

“In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. […] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28 1960s

“On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

Interview with Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio : A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, Duke University Press (December 1991)
Context: On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

“Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)

“Simulated evolution on a computer works but is no where near the gradual incremental process that is associated with Darwinian evolution. It's closer to dog breeding in terms of its computational complexity.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

In the universe, [besides] space, matter and energy, there is information. [Information hasn't yet] been [well] defined nor studied. Many times proponents of evolutionary computing … refuse to recognize the contribution of [the programmer's infusion of information] into the process. Association with ID (intelligent design) in any way is detrimental to one's career. Everybody who works in ID should first have tenure before they come out of the closet. My comments are as an expert in computational intelligence. I'm not a biologist. For me to talk about the details of biology is as stupid as a British biologist claiming expertise in religion. (A reference to Richard Dawkins.) Engineers actually design things. This is why [many] engineers are interested in the area of intelligent design "Well-Informed: Dr. Robert Marks and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab,", From an interview with Casey Luskin of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, July 20, 2007, 2010-05-06 http://www.idthefuture.com/2007/07/wellinformed_dr_robert_marks_a.html,

“Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

On the potential to improve human-computer interaction, in interview with Berkeley Groks http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~frank/BerkeleyGroks_Raskin.htm (3 March 2004)

“Without real experience in using the computer to get useful results the computer science major is apt to know all about the marvelous tool except how to use it. Such a person is a mere technician, skilled in manipulating the tool but with little sense of how and when to use it for its basic purposes.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

One Man's View of Computer Science (1969)

“My stomach flip-flops. No electronics? That’s heavy. In fact it’s more than heavy: to compute is to be, and all that. I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 7, “Nightmare Beach” (p. 143)

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