RE: Where the I is

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 02:16:16 MST

  • Next message: Alex Ramonsky: "Re: Where the I is"

    Max writes

    > If there is no soul, as I am convinced. And if uploading is possible, as
    > I am convinced, then the I/mind is just the calculations taking place
    > inside the brain. It is not the brain itself.

    Yes, I would say that that is the more accurate way of speaking,
    but people (that we would agree with) can hardly be blamed for
    saying that computers feel or act when they mean the programs
    in them.

    > Well this has been obvious for me for a long time. But what freaked me
    > out a bit, is that it is not the flesh that has conscience but the
    > 'calculations' that is done in the flesh. And the flesh is only the
    > interface that allows us to experience the world.

    Yes.

    > And it is pretty hard to imagine mathematics that is self aware, but
    > that must be the consequence.

    Well, I don't go that far. We pious platonists believe (in the
    very worst way that Brett Paatsch describes) that the mathematical
    entities such as perfect triangles, the number seventeen, and all
    other mathematical ideas exist in a timeless platonic space; less
    figuratively and more concretely I describe this as a set of real
    constraints on possibilities in physical space. (For example,
    certain physical objects (computers) when set to methodically
    detonate a bomb when they find solutions for x^n + y^n = z^n
    for integers greater than two, will, it turns out, never explode.)

    But actual thoughts and feelings occur (I claim) only in
    *processes*, that is, successive states of physical entities
    in which information flows from one state to the next.

    > This is what makes it so hard to grasp unintuitively that
    > intelligence can take place there. The [Chinese] room
    > itself is not what is alive to intelligent, but the
    > calculations taking place on those paper pieces are.

    Well, it's interesting that the latter makes so much
    more sense to you that the former. I doubt that
    we disagree here, but I don't object to calling the
    room itself a system that is intelligent.

    > The room is just the interface with the world. A very bad interface. The
    > intelligence that could take place in those pieces of paper would have a
    > poor understanding of the world.

    Not sure that I understand you here.

    > So the amusing thing is that, given enough time, it should be possible
    > to run a program with a pencil, on a piece paper, that has intelligence
    > and conscience. If you stop writing the life ends and you kill your
    > 'creature'.

    Quite so! Or, better, you've just "suspended" your creature.
    But if you wipe out the information necessary to resume the
    computation, we then should say that then the creature has died.
    In the most pristine form of talking, we should speak about
    whether or not the entity gets run time. If you kill it,
    then, in our universe, it ceases to get run time nor (unless
    Tipler is correct) will it ever again. But as Hal Finney
    pointed out not so long ago, we may rest assured that it
    gets run time in other universes, provided that you join
    the physicists who believe in the Many Worlds Interpretation,
    and that that's right.

    > This opens up for all kinds of opportunities for where life can exist.
    > It makes you wonder if life can suddenly come into spontaneous existence
    > from the computations that is taking place on the net. I cannot see why
    > not. Surely it cannot be a worse medium than atoms in water. Unless it
    > is too deterministic.

    I agree---at some point computer life over our internet (perhaps
    later after it's thousands of times larger than now) may spontaneously
    evolve. But friends of mine have speculated that this may already
    be true of *nations*. One might argue (and they do) that nations
    are already complex enough to support thought and feeling. I demur.

    Lee



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