Re: Uploading, info theory, and threads of consciousness
Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Fri, 01 Nov 1996 11:24:04 -0800
At 17:04 10/31/96 +0000, you wrote:
>> >The problem is that people are viewing information as though it were
>> >physical matter. Information can never be moved, it can only be copied.
>> >Uploading is the transfer of information. The inability to move
>> >information (as opposed to copying) is a fundamental limitation of all
>> >information systems.
>>
>> >It appears that uploading should not be possible for these reasons. The
>> >best we might hope for would be to augment our existing systems.
>>
>> We can still live in a virtual world though with the laws of physics
>> altered at our whims and AI civilizations created and destroyed for your
>> entertainment. (Oh no! Here comes the AI civil liberties organization!)
>> In this scenario we do have the choice of either being a brain in a jar
>> with i/o streams feeding into a PC or we can augment our existing body
>> everyway we can think of and have a brain-PC interface builtin to our
>> genome such as communication with a PC via bat radar signals or tendrils on
>> the back of the neck which are a direct link to our brain. If this is true,
>> it doesn't matter much to me because I'd be satisfied with the 'greek god'
>> idea because I could still create entire universes in a virtual world as
>> well as have access to the continuously growing pool of human intelligence
>> plus gain immortality. Can silicon actually support life? If this is true
>> that we are required to 'move' data then Strong AI will never come about or
>> live in a quasi-consciousness where it continually lives/dies/lives/dies.
>> John, I'm looking for a reply on this one.
>>
>Being able to "jack in" to cyberspace is only marginally useful if
>you don't have the processing power to go with it. Sure, you may
>have access to vast quantities of information, but if you are still
>processing it or thinking about it at tissue speeds then you aren't
>much better off.
Why not come up with a bio/silicon brain which contains bits of both so as
to speed up the whole. Both bio and silicon both have their pros so why not
add both together and make one dual medium (dm) brain.