CryoNet #32509 - #32510

CryoNet - Fri 26 Mar 2010

    #32509: Freeposiy & McCarthy & emergence [Ettinger]
    #32510: Identity [Jordan Sparks]

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Message #32509
From: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:12:59 EDT
Subject: Freeposiy & McCarthy & emergence

When I said a map of a city is  not the city, 
Freeposity replied that it would be if it were
detailed enough. Wrong, completely missing
the point. The point is that the map, however
detailed, and whether static or dynamic, is only
a collection of code. Likewise a simulation of a
person would be just a batch of code, with no 
life or consciousness or sentience. 
 
 
It may help some people to see a reductio
ad absurdum in the statement, attributed to
John McCarthy, that even a thermostat thinks
and feels. What does it feel? It's too cool in
here, or it's too warm in here, or it's just right
in here. What does it think? I'll turn up the
heat, or I'll turn down the heat, or nothing.
 
 
McCarthy was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence,
and may have coined the term. The attribution
above is over-simplified, but look at some of
his work on the Web and you will find there
is some truth in the claim of his anthropomorphism.
 
 
There is more truth in the attribution to McCarthy
and many others of the fallacy of "emergence"--the
notion that a computer (or animal) will become 
conscious without any special design, merely by
becoming complicated enough, something like
Skynet in the Terminator movies. It will  just wake
up one day, full of piss and vinegar.
 
 
Well, I can't prove that a computer will never
"wake up" just by accretion, but I can prove
that it could achieve any explicit computational
goal without waking up. See Youniverse.
 
 
Robert Ettinger


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Message #32510
From: "Jordan Sparks" <[email protected]>
Subject: Identity
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:10:46 -0700

> I deny that a duplicate of me would have the same value to me as the 
> original. I don't deny that someone who used the "Beam me up, Scotty" 
> routine might become accustomed to it, but that proves nothing. 
> People have become accustomed to misery and death.

Why do you deny that the exact copy constructed out of organic molecules
would not have the same value and importance as the original?  You seem to
accept that the copy would be conscious and self-aware.  I'm assuming the
destruction process on the sending end is not particularly painful, so what
misery?  There has been no death, since the information in the mind has been
preserved.  I would have thought that 40 years of StarTrek would have
settled the question.  They've rehashed that plotline many times, but I
think the claim that they are still alive is still the most reasonable.  If
Spock is not alive after his transport, then what is he?  A zombie?  Why is
he less important or valuable after transport?

I never said that a computer would become conscious along the lines of
Terminator.  It's quite silly, at least with the current crude computers
that we have.  Ask me again in 30 years if computers could become conscious,
and it might be more of a gray area.  Ask me in 100 years, and I'll probably
have to reply that the computers are indeed conscious.  Between now and
then, there will indeed be a lot of intentional effort to replicate the
design of the human brain.  Once they start adding algorithms that replicate
function of the thalamus, cerebellum, etc, it's probably going to become a
valid question.

You need to quit doing that reductio ad absurdum trick.  I could just as
easily say that cells can't possibly be alive because otherwise any random
biochemical reaction could then be defined as life.  Reducing the complexity
of the discussion is only serving to make your analogies absurd.  It doesn't
make the topic under discussion any more clear.

> No one has effectively disproven the necessity of physical continuity for
survival.

You're introducing an unneeded complexity.  I don't hear neuroscientists
talk about physical continuity.  They talk about chemical reactions,
concentrations of neurotransmitter, electrical pathways, and so on.  I've
never seen the slightest bit of evidence to suggest that physical continuity
is needed.  The burden is on you since you are the one adding the
complexity.  We don't have to tools to prove it one way or the other.
Thought experiments don't count as proof.  But there is overwhelming
evidence that standard biochemistry is sufficient to explain consciousness,
whether in an original or in a perfect copy.



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