X-Message-Number: 14745
From: 
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:40:28 EDT
Subject: Clark's questions

Again, this is mostly for newcomers who may not yet be sick of this go-round.

John Clark (#14739) writes:

>it would be nice if it [the "self circuit"] shed a little light on 
something, anything.
 
It offers, as I have explained, a possible new notion of how subjective 
experiences arise. It could be wrong, of course, but it is not vacuous. If 
feeling stems from modulated standing waves of some sort in the brain, then 
we are no longer restricted to an apparent choice between "homunculi" and 
"emergence."

Clark goes on:

> Explain why a standing wave creates subjectivity. Maybe I'm a little thick 
but it's >not obvious what one has to do with the other. 

The physical basis of feeling has to be something which is not just a symbol 
or a representation of something else; it has to be the thing-in-itself or 
ding-an-sich. Experiment will decide whether my idea is correct, if we find 
the standing waves (or something similar) and correlate them with reported 
feelings.

>And to repeat, a standing wave of what?
 
To repeat, electrical or/and magnetic or/and chemical waves.

Then:

> The Turing Test doesn't proved anything, it's just the best thing we have,
 in fact it's the only thing we have to study consciousness other than our 
own.
 
For the umpteenth time--obviously not true. Study of consciousness is not 
restricted to (a) external observation of gross behavior or (b) 
introspection. Studies of internal brain functions, and their correlation 
with reported subjective states, is proceeding apace.

Next:

> And if the self circuit does things other than generate a feeling of self 
as you say >then it makes as much sense to call it a self circuit as it does 
to call the RF >generator in my radio a Beethoven circuit.
 
The radio receiver converts radio signals back into sound. The radio doesn't 
know or care whether the sound is Beethoven's music or somebody's fart. The 
self circuit, on the other hand (and it must exist, whether a standing wave 
or something else), besides interacting with other aspects of the brain, 
CONSTITUTES feeling. Since it does (or is) something unique and uniquely 
important, it certainly deserves a name.  

Then:

>so it would be easier to make a conscious computer than a non conscious one. 
[Because it "could provide rough-and-ready or quick-and-dirty solutions"]
 
Non sequitur. Elegant solutions are not necessarily the first developed, 
either by nature or by people.

And:
   
> I seem to remember Marvin Minsky saying that we already have sentient
 >computers but we don't have intelligent ones. I don't know it that's true or
 >not but I certainly can't prove him wrong.
 
Minsky, Dennett, and a few others claim to have made inroads on the problem 
of sentience, but I (and most others) do not agree. In effect, they merely 
restate the "emergence" notion of sentience--that when an information 
processing system becomes complicated enough, somehow sentience is just 
there. That doesn't cut the mustard.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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