In order for anything to happen at all, there must be certain rules which govern the way things work. Such is the case for the physical world. If one considers the mind as part of the physical world, then it must be governed by certain rules which dictate how it works. For humans, these rules cause ends, and I shall call these ends "purpose", regardless of the intention (that word is too vague to use). This means to say that if a pile of mud manages to divert water away, its "purpose" is to divert water away, regardless of why it is there in the first place.

A computer program is something that obeys certain rules in order to achieve ends. By definition, I say that programs have purpose. However, ends are not always evident and they may be difficult to detect. One of the ways we try to find out the ends is through analysing the "means". The "means" manipulate the rules of physical world, in order to achieve the ends. In a computer program, the means are the programming language, the physical world is the compiler, and the purpose is whatever it manages to do(e.g. "hello world"). Or, the means of a set of dominoes is the set of dominoes itself, the physical world is the rules it obey (friction, gravity, normal force etc.), the purpose to fall. A falling apple's means is the apple itself, the physical world is the rules it obey (friction, gravity), the purpose is to fall.

So, if the means can make one physical world behave like another, then the same means can achieve the same ends, i.e., they have the same purpose. For example, if I vary the strength of an electromagnet in space, I can make an iron nail achieve the same ends as one on earth. The rules of magnetism are different from the rules of gravity, and the electromagnet is part of the means. This example shows one way which part of the means can make another part of the means behave as though it is in a different physical world. That object would have the same purpose as one in a different physical world.

By the analysis of the means and rules of the physical world the object is in, one can figure out the purpose of that object. Yet, sometimes even in the same physical world, an object with the same purpose may not have the same means. This means that if the means are not directly observable, and only the purpose are, one can only make a guess as to what the means are.

In a different physical world, one can emulate exactly the same purpose by injecting certain means in addition to the means that make that certain mean in the original world serve its purpose. An analogy would be an PS emulator program used to play PS games in computers. The PS would be the original world, the computer would be the new world, the emulator program would the set of means injected to make the original means, the CD, serve the same purpose as that in the original world.

Assuming the above are all true, it seems possible to emulate the human mind exactly using computer programs. Just like the physical world, the microchips contain rules which the hardware and software must follow. Codes can be inserted to make subsequent lines of code serve the same purpose as a ball dropping onto the table. As such, if the mind is part of the physical world, the mind can too be emulated perfectly using software, provided we know the means of the mind, and the rules of the physical world. The mind in the software would hence have the same purpose as the mind it is trying to emulate.

I see that the problem with all AI programs is that they produce the means to serve a known purpose. This implies that there can be many different means to produce the same ends, as long as the purpose is achieved it is a good program. Note that in my previous definition of purpose, the purpose is implicit, only the means are explicit. You can know everything about a pile of mud, but it only has a purpose when something happens to it and it reacts in a certain manner. In computer programming, the purpose is explicit. Thus, when AI attempts to emulate the way a gamer plays games, the programmer is fully aware that the program's purpose is to win the game, and the means are secondary. However, a real gamer doesn't have a fixed an explicit purpose. A real gamer is really what makes him up, not his purpose. It is what makes him up that cause him to try to win, to taunt the person whom he can pwn with his hand tied to front of the moniter, to get frustrated when he cannot win, and to leave the game when he wins so many times that he gets bored.

The speech emulation program that tries to learn how to talk like a real person, the jabberwacky, seems to have a different set of means from a real person. What makes up a real person cause him to get frustrated, it causes to be bored and want to be entertained, it causes him to be frustrated and type in all caps. The emulator doesn't do that because its set of means in inherently different. Anger is a means, not an ends, and the programmer must not program it so that is shows anger, but it must be programmed the same way that humans are programmed to be angry.

One can argue that if they have the same purpose, a different program having different means would be the ame thing. That may be true, but the problem is that the purpose of a human being is implicit, while the means of a human being is explicit. It seems to be more constructive to program a human being by examining the means than to examine the purpose.