X-Message-Number: 12657 Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 20:47:46 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Feeling, apparent and real Bob Ettinger, #12647, says > ... look at the many experiments involving human >subjects who do things, including answering questions and solving puzzles, >without knowing it. For that matter all of us, on many occasions, do many >things "automatically" without thinking about it or even knowing it. On these >occasions, is it not obvious that goal-seeking is divorced from feeling? > Not so obvious, in my view, because the brain is a most complicated mechanism. A "siamese twin" brain in your own head could carry on a life of its own, with feeling, without your direct awareness. It would not seem as if there was any feeling involved. And the brain (your real brain) may well contain "agents" whose functioning amounts to their having feeling (and consciousness), but which do not communicate that way to "you"--your consciousness. Actually, something very much like the "siamese twin" effect appears to occur with cerebral commisurotomy, in which the brain is split down to the brain stem, as a way to treat severe epilepsy. You get two, basically independent individuals within the one brain, which is still somewhat physically connected. >Maybe it will help a bit to look again at the robot that seeks an electric >outlet to recharge itself. Mike Perry says maybe it is indeed "hungry" in a >primitive sort of way and hence does indeed have a smidgeon of feeling. I say >there is no reason whatsoever to impute feeling to the thing, but set that >aside for now. > >Just think: What if it is programmed to seek that same outlet, but not to >plug itself in and "feed" itself--maybe just to win a race. Brer Rabbit seemingly wanted not to be thrown in the brier patch--that was his feeling on the matter--only it wasn't of course. But he did have feeling. In general I am strongly opposed to a point of view in which the mental states of a functioning system are to be judged solely by external effects--one needs to know the internal processes as well. However, with full knowledge of a system it should be possible to assess whether you would say it has consciousness and feeling, and what their nature would be. Moreover, if its external behavior, well tested, suggests it has feeling, I am inclined to think it does, even if it could be deceiving us as to the particular feeling involved. Put another way, I don't think there could be a system that convincingly imitates having feeling without some real feeling being present. At root I think this is probably an unprovable assertion, but so is the claim that other persons besides ourselves have feeling. There we are able to impute feeling based on a sufficient similarity to ourselves. In the case of a mechanism not based on protoplasmic, carbon-based life, we have less in the way of similarity, and are forced to consider more carefully what other features of "systems with feeling" might come into play. This has been thrashed out on this forum--to the dismay and disgust of some who think it is taking us too far afield from our main topic of cryonics (I and some others don't agree). I'll leave it for now, except to say that I have had some new and interesting thoughts. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12657