X-Message-Number: 13430 Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 00:17:23 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Robot Desires George Smith, #13422, refers to an interesting article on insectoid robots in *Smithsonian* magazine, summarized in *The Immortalist* (Jan.-Feb., starting p.6). The mechanical beasties are doing things suggesting desire, volition, and having short-term memory, not all of which were programmed in beforehand, and not all of which have been well accounted for. Apparently one issue is that it is especially hard to explain this performance in digital terms. But my feeling is that, after all, these things are still made of atoms, and on that level at least their behavior can be explained in terms of discrete state transitions (thus basically digitally, broadly understood). I see no particular challenge here to a materialistic theory of what is going on. If the robots have short-term memory that wasn't programmed in, well, there are all sorts of ways that could happen without invoking mysticism. Quantum mechanics gets pretty complicated, with all the particles involved in the things that happen at the macroscopic scale. An interesting possibility is that there may be quantum effects operating here that would be impossible to simulate efficiently in a classical computer. In practice these effects could thus be out of the reach such devices though still theoretically explicable in terms of such devices. In particular this would mean that we cryonicists don't have to worry that we are *not* fundamentally, machines whose identities are captured if we are sufficiently well-frozen. I have to say that I am a skeptic of the view that George expresses that there are "memory fields" not involving the usual atoms and their electronic configurations, or other material effects, but apparently something paranormal. When paranormal effects are objectively verified, I'll start believing in them, but not until. As for "paradoxes" in quantum physics, I'm not sure what is referred to here unless it is the non-locality issue. This does present a challenge to relativity theory, but it can be resolved without invoking Goswami's "self-aware universe" or a cosmic consciousness. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13430