From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 05:14:59 MST
On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 09:14:58AM +0100, Max M wrote:
>
> 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.
Ah, you have become a functionalist! Welcome to our camp! :-)
> And it is pretty hard to imagine mathematics that is self aware, but
> that must be the consequence.
>
> To take an example: The famous chinese room.
> http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/chineser.htm
>
> It is not the room which is intelligent, but that calculations taking
> place inside the room.
>
> This is what makes it so hard to grasp untuitively that intelligence can
> take place there. The room itself is not what is alive ot intelligent,
> but the calculations taking place on those paper pieces are.
>
> 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.
But can you get information without matter? The more I have studied
information physics, the more information seems to be physical - it is
not something that floats around on its own, but something that has to
be encoded/implemented in matter of some kind to remain.
The intelligence of the Chinese room might have a poor interface to the
rest of the world, but that doesn't affect the quality of its internal
thinking (which we outsiders might view as slow and physically
inefficient, but that is another matter. We can always criticise each
other's brains).
> 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'.
Or rather, it is indefinitely suspended. A bit like placed in stasis.
> 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. Shurely it cannot be a worse medium than atoms in water. Unless it
> is too deterministic.
I saw a paper suggesting that the spontaneous creation of computer
viruses was not as small as commonly believed; with computers with
crashing code and memory overwrites simple viruses could presumably
develop on their own and start propagating. Not the likeliest occurence,
but once it happened it would spread. Cyberspace is on the other hand
already crammed with replicators, so it would probably be out-competed.
The step towards thinking is another thing. Again, there is too much
"pollution" from outside sources to make it visible if it exists. Maybe
one should start a SDI project: the Search for Digital Intelligence.
SDI@Home to analyse net traffic?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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