X-Message-Number: 11099 From: Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 11:41:07 EST Subject: two comments In Message #11084: >It was actually I who first used the fuzzy logic terminology in relation to identity. Tony B. Csoka, Ph.D. With all due respect to Dr. Csoka, as well as Bart Kosko, Lotfi Zadeh, and other mavens of fuzzy logic, the mere notion of fuzzy logic is neither profound nor of recent origin, and of course the term itself, while useful, is not very important. The idea of multi-valued logic or a continuum of shades of gray existing in real-world phenomena, rather than a dichotomy of black/white or yes/no in logic and in perception, goes back to antiquity. (In quantum theory, we again have to surrender the continuum, but retain intermediate discrete values.) The real contributions of the modern exponents lie in development of specific mathematical tools, moving from philosophy to engineering; I certainly don't belittle those (although I dispute the manner in which some writers suggest that Aristotelian logic is thereby superseded or made irrelevant). As to recognition of the possibility of a quantitative (fuzzy) approach to the problem of identity (or of criteria of survival), I explicitly articulated that in 1962 in the preliminary version of THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY, and in the succeeding commercial versions. --------- In Message #11091, from George Smith: >recently Professor Ettinger wrote a bit more regarding his concept of a "self-circuit". I find this concept fascinating and important. I still don't understand exactly what he means. It is always sobering and useful to realize that I haven't been as clear as I thought I had. Although a full appreciation of even "simple" ideas may require a considerable build-up or development of background, which I try to provide in my book in progress, Ill try once more to clarify the proposition a little in a few words: In 1962 I saw only four serious possible considerations in making decisions about identity or criteria of survival. These were identity of physical material, continuity of physical material, identity of personality and memory, and continuity of personality and memory. I found none of these, nor any combination, to be satisfactory, and recognized as a possible tentative solution the quantitative (fuzzy) approach, that we must settle for recognition of degrees of identity along useful dimensions. But this was not satisfying either, for many reasons, and in later thinking I realized that I (and apparently everybody else, as far as I was aware) had failed adequately to consider a central issue, namely the locus or machinery of awareness, the seat of subjectivity, the anatomy/physiology of feeling or qualia, which distinguishes life-as-we-know-it (LAWKI) from "automata" or non- sentient systems. (Yes, living people are also "mechanisms" and yes, computers can be "intelligent" and exhibit goal-directed behavior; but there is still a profound difference between systems that feel and systems that don't.) Almost everybody has seemed to believe that feeling and awareness somehow arise more or less automatically at some "emergent" level when computers (or programs) or nervous systems reach a certain degree of complexity. Daniel Dennett, among many others, takes this view in his absurdly titled book, CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED. But it seems highly probable to me--virtually certain--that feeling resides in or arises from a very specific, currently unknown, phenomenon in the anatomy/physiology of the brain, whether localized or distributed. I call this ground-of-being the "self circuit." As a vague conjecture, it might be something akin to a standing wave with feedback. Achieving or maintaining desired states (feel-good) would be the natural basis of all personal value systems, moving values to a considerable extent out of philosophy and into biology. Readers may be tempted to leap to the conclusion that this is too simplistic, and leaves no room for the known complexities and subtleties of life. Certainly it seems, at first, hard to reconcile e.g. with the fact that, by our behavior and verbalized feelings, we often seem to value abstractions such as patriotism over "basic" values such as survival; or that we often seem to hold values that are mutually contradictory. Resolution of these difficulties depends on discovering the precise nature and behavior of the self circuit, and the relation between basic values on the one hand, and derived values and habits on the other. I can't go into further detail today, but my main point is that these ideas are not just conversational haze or froth, but may help in some small degree to offer guidance to both experimentalists and theorists, and of course benefit from both. Robert Ettinger Cryonics Institute Immortalist Society http://www.cryonics.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11099