RE: Cryonics and uploading as leaps of faith?

From: Jeff Davis (jrd1415@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 15:30:48 MDT

  • Next message: Brett Paatsch: "Re: Cryonics and uploading as leaps of faith?"

    --- Hal Finney <hal@finney.org> wrote:
    > We can combine Lee's proposal of a machine which
    > (potentially) destroys
    > and re-creates your consciousness 100 times a second
    > with the idea of
    > evolution evolving consciousness to produce a
    > horrific concept: a world
    > which has evolved consciousness which works like
    > Lee's machine!
    >
    > In this bizarre world (call it World X), animals and
    > intelligent beings
    > are conscious as they are in our world, but due to a
    > quirk of their brain
    > chemistry, their consciousness is destroyed and
    > re-created 100 times a
    > second. Yet this has no impact on their behavior,
    > because it happens so
    > quickly.
    >
    > Without their knowledge, slaughter and death is
    > occuring on a horrendous
    > scale, with every conscious being on World X dying
    > 100 times a second.
    >
    > The terrible part is, since this does not affect
    > their behavior, there
    > is no reason for evolution to avoid this outcome. A
    > being which has
    > continuous, connected consciousness, like us, has no
    > survival advantage
    > over one who suffers the fate of having his
    > consciousness constantly
    > being destroyed. Therefore there is a substantial
    > chance that worlds
    > where consciousness evolves may indeed be just like
    > World X. Thank
    > goodness that we were one of the lucky worlds!
    >
    > In fact, I just had a horrifying thought... too
    > terrible to share with
    > others... about our own world. I shudder to even
    > imagine it. But could
    > it be true?
    >
    > Hal

    Not only could it be true, but it **is** true(gasp!).

    Synaptic cycling--fire, pause to reset (horrors!),
    ready once again to fire--means we are kilt and
    resurrected every fraction of a second exactly as Lee
    hypotheticalized(egad!). Well, perhaps not 'exactly'
    so, since the synaptic firing may not be globally
    synchronized, every neuron marching in step.

    [Then again, I read not so long ago, that the neurons
    engaged in a coherent thought all fire in a
    synchronized fashion. I guess that means that, to
    whatever extent you're 'incoherent' and ego-less--I
    don't know how to describe this or if it even makes
    sense--like say with intention and active
    participation in the thought stream turned
    off--Oooooohm, oooooohm, oooooohm--then your identity
    is continuous since synaptic asynchronicity means some
    neuronal fraction is 'always on'--some firing, some
    resetting, some resting and ready to fire.

    Thus, if you--there's that troublesome little semantic
    conundrum: which 'you' or aspect set of a temporally
    and/or compositionally dynamic 'you' construct,
    slippery little devil, are we talking about here--are
    in 'thought-quieted' receive mode, that you, the
    thought-quieted you, is 'there' with uninterrupted
    continuity (except of course at the vastly shorter
    Plank time/quantized time 'interval', but never mind
    that). Only when 'you' (that problem again) intrude
    on this continuous asynchronicity by **responding** to
    the sensory input stream (and I haven't even bothered
    to consider about the automatic/reflexive
    'lower-level' processing of the input stream which
    that
    'unconsciously'(preconsciously?) filters and shapes it
    into grist for the mill of higher level thought slash
    'consciousness'), and forcing the trade-off of
    destructive/constructive synchronicity, only then do
    you 'suffer' the fate of millisecond scale cyclic
    identity extinguishment/reinitialization.

    Just a thought, ...a thought, ...a thought, ...a
    thought,...a thought, ...a thought, ...a thought, ...a
    thought,...a thought,...a thought, ...a thought, ...a
    thought,...a thought, ...]

                   <SYSTEM FAILURE>

    Best, Jeff Davis

    "That's the whole problem with science. You've got a
    bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of
    unimaginable wonder."
                     --Calvin (& Hobbes)

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