X-Message-Number: 14761
From: 
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 13:42:14 EDT
Subject: Clark's confusions

John Clark (#14760) wrote in part:

>You propose a black box, you call it a self circuit, and say feeling comes
>from there. I don't see how this idea makes us any wiser.

A standing wave is not a black box, only gray at this point. The possible 
utility of the idea is to give a hint of direction to the experimentalists. 

Also:

>Premise: Consciousness must be causes by some thing. Conclusion: 
>Consciousness is caused by standing waves.

Come on, John. You know perfectly well it's not a conclusion, only an 
hypothesis.

Next:

[Ettinger]  > >Experiment will decide whether my idea is correct, if we find 
the >>standing  waves (or something similar) and correlate them with reported 
feelings.

[Clark] >We already know of certain chemicals that correlate with reported 
feelings,
>sulfuric acid and pain for example, but that fact doesn't immediately cause 
a theory >of consciousness to spring to mind.

You're grasping at straws and confusing necessity with sufficiency, among 
other things. I'm talking about reported feelings and observed internal brain 
activity.

Then:

>I don't see how it [the hypothetical standing wave] could be electric or 
magnetic, a >brain subjected to even very intense fields has little effect on 
its operation.

Very intense electric fields are used as capital punishment in some states. 
Anyway, it all depends on the details, yet to be investigated. But there are 
reports that birds and fish can use the earth's weak magnetic field for 
navigation.

Then:
  
[Ettinger]> >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.

{Clark] >You said the word yourself, REPORTED! Reported means you're observing
>the sounds somebody else made with their mouth, their actual subjective
>experience is entirely a matter of speculation.

Total and utter nonsense, a reflex reaction of John's hangup on Turing. 
Correlations between what is observed in the subject's brain, and what the 
subject reports verbally, are unquestionably relevant, even though the 
interpretation is not always simple. 

Then:

>you seem to be saying that approximate solutions are harder to obtain than 
exact >ones and that doesn't seem right.
   
Yes, procedures to obtain approximate solutions are sometimes harder to 
develop than procedures to obtain exact solutions. An old story about one of 
the famous mathematicians--young Gauss maybe--tells how his class was asked 
to find the sum (9 x 1 + 9 x 2 +........+ 9 x 10. Only Gauss had the 
perception to get the answer in a few seconds, by multiplying 90 times the 
obvious mean of the sequence. (90 x 5.5 = 495.)  In this case Gauss' solution 
was exact, but if the mean had not been obvious he could have guessed an 
approximation to the mean and used his method to find a quick approximate 
solution.

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

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