From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 02:16:16 MST
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 06 2003 - 02:12:46 MST