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

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