From: Stirling Westrup (sti@cam.org)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 07:06:33 MST
On 6 Feb 2003 at 9:14, Max M wrote:
> Well I guess that I am kind of dense that it hasn't occured to me
> before. But suddenly something clicked last night. You know, a kind of
> "blinding Flash Of The Obvious".
Congratulations. Yes, its blindingly obvious to some, and yet to others,
they never see the following point:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
Of course, if you *DO* want to believe in a soul, then its a little freakier,
since the only consistent definition of the soul is a thing attached to those
calculations. Ie, its the MATHEMATICAL PROCESS which has the soul...
>
> 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'.
Sure. One of the precepts of Strong AI is that any sufficiently powerful
computer can simulate a human brain and its thoughts, including intelligence.
And its an already established fact that any powerful computer can be
simulated (at a mind-numbing slowdown of speed) with pencil and paper...
But to pick at a nit: When you stop writing, say for a bathroom break, the
life you are simulating doesn't die, it just stops till you return. When you
continue the process, even if years later, the life's mind continues thinking
from where it was last. Depending on circumstances, it may never even notice
the gap in its conciousness. Its not until the paper with all the notes on it
is destroyed that the life is definitely gone. Even if you die, and your
friends bind all of your notes together and put the resulting book on a shelf
and forget about it, the life it represents is simply held in abeyance. One
day, perhaps in a few centuries, some curious sole might continue the
simulation...
>
> This opens up for all kinds of oportunities for where life can exist.
Last weekend, a friend and I were trying to invent the strangest intelligent
aliens we could think of. One of my friends entries was a carefully-designed
political system.
> 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.
Its way too SMALL so far. Atoms in water are MASSIVELY parallel. We're many
orders of magnitude away from an Internet of sufficient size that you can
expect that sort of thing to happen spontaneously. (And thats not even
counting the fact that in many ways the internet is a more hostile place than
the ancient seas were.)
-- Stirling Westrup | Use of the Internet by this poster sti@cam.org | is not to be construed as a tacit | endorsement of Western Technological | Civilization or its appurtenances.
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