X-Message-Number: 11882 From: Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 23:28:15 EDT Subject: Quest for the Holy Quale, Part II QUEST FOR THE HOLY QUALE, PART II This is just another brief effort to clarify my reasons for thinking that unconsciousness in a book of a certain type implies unconsciousness in a computer-or that consciousness in a computer implies consciousness in the book. First, a personal note to those who may think I am misapplying my time, that I should be spending all of it on practical work for CI and cryobiological research etc. Besides the reasons I have previously given for thinking the discussion may have relevance and practical utility, this is one of the ways I have fun (I also have fun in physical ways), and I don't apologize for that. I want to live in the present as well as in the future. All right, let me recapitulate the thought experiment. We are talking about an ordinary sequential computer. It could even be a very advanced one of the future, but instead we envision it, for psychological reasons, as the ur-computer, a Turing Tape. One has a tendency to accord respect to a big, mysterious box with complicated innards of invisibly tiny and lightning-fast workings--gee, that might really think. But if we envision just a simple tape, with pencil markings on it, clunking back and forth under the direction of some simple mechanism--then the absurdity of attributing consciousness to it is more apparent. (No, I don't claim the apparent absurdity is itself proof of unconsciousness--just that the absurdity, once proven, is more easily accepted in the Tape than in an electronic monster.) The Tape is intended to emulate a living human brain. In the program and data store of the Tape we encode all that is necessary, and with sufficient accuracy, of the laws of nature and of the initial state of the subject brain, together with as much of the brain's environment as necessary to allow description or prediction of the future life of the brain for an agreed period. Now here again we have to be careful. Dr. Perry has mentioned the possibility of intervention by a programmer while the computer is running, and I have previously discussed some aspects of this. But this would lead us into a maze from which we might not emerge until the 22nd Century, because it could involve confusing recursions, cascades of subsimulations and virtual computers, etc. But for the purposes of our thought experiment I think it is permissible and necessary to keep the postulates simple, and assume that the future history of the subject brain will not involve anything like that. Surely we could achieve that just by agreeing to keep the subjective duration of the experiment short, which will not affect the argument. So we run the Tape, and it grinds out a prediction or description of (say) the next few seconds of the subject brain's life. In other words, the simple mechanism moves the tape back and forth, the head reads or writes, and the new marks (or successive internal states of the Tape) encode the changes in the subject brain, or its successive states. Now let's look at how the Uploaders claim consciousness in this succession of states of the Tape. Basically, the claim is that all mental processes, including feeling and consciousness, are essentially just relationships between symbols. This claim is by no means as ridiculous as a layman might first judge, and there are weaknesses in the arguments advanced against it by Searle et al. Searle argued essentially that the computer only works with symbols and therefore its "thoughts" have no semantic content, no meaning. For example, the same computer program could be used to find a definite integral, the accumulated charge on a capacitor, the area under a curve, or many other things--nothing would be different except the labels attached to the outputs, or in other words the interpretation given by the human operator. This was a good argument, but not perfect. After all, the internal workings of our own brains involve mainly signals which are just symbols, yet we successfully use these symbols to construct representations of the "real" world outside. An even stronger hint, in my opinion, is in the ingenious strategies that have been devised for communicating with aliens in a distant star system. I won't go into the fascinating details, but just sending a series of dots and dashes could allow one race to communicate with another without any Rosetta Stone-and this includes color 3-d video with stereophonic sound! And there are serious scientists who think EVERYTHING--including time and space--are just relationships, in a certain sense. (See e.g. Lee Smolin, THE LIFE OF THE COSMOS, Oxford U. Press, 1997.) In spite of all this, and in spite of our frequent success in thinking by analogy, the Turing Tape in my opinion cannot be conscious, if for no other reason because it does not act in time in any meaningful sense. *There is no time isomorphism whatsoever between the successive states of the subject brain and the successive internal states of the Tape.* The Tape is sequential, while some functions of the brain, including the qualia of the postulated Self Circuit, are parallel--physically parallel, not just computationally. The best you could do would be to LABEL a certain set of numbers, corresponding to a state of the computer, as the next state of a part of the brain, or as coincident with the next state of another part of the brain. Please ponder that carefully. (And I won't even dwell on the fact that the labels THEMSELVES have to be interpreted by the outside observer!) But now we get to the Turing Tome, a book written by the computer, each page containing the set of numbers representing a state of the Tape and of the Brain. Just as you could label a state of the Tape, you could label a page of the book. To improve the illusion, you could even arrange a simple mechanism to turn the pages of the book at a steady rate. Then--as far as I can see--anyone who claims the Tape is conscious must also agree that the Tome is conscious. I have yet to meet the Uploader who says yes, the Tome is conscious. Well, I tried again. Robert Ettinger Cryonics Institute Immortalist Society http://www.cryonics.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11882