X-Message-Number: 15261
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2001 23:52:40 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Mental speedups and slowdowns, and so forth

Thomas Donaldson, Message #15243, says:
>For Mike Perry, again:

>In your latest reply you continue to propose the merits of revival as
>a creature living so slowly that it could not live in the current world.

I'm not proposing the "merits" of reviving a creature who has to live more
slowly than normal. I'm not proposing to attempt to revive a creature with
some feature that would be a handicap, such as having only a sequential
processor, which might slow down its operations.  You need to distinguish
between what I consider as a thought experiment, for purely philosophical
reasons, and what I think might end up being of real concern. I think it
*could* be of real concern whether we reanimate a person, say one who has
been cryonically suspended, in some type of artificial, computational device
rather than flesh and blood. A nonbiological substrate could be satisfactory
in every normal sense, including speed of performance, yet differ in some
important ways from biological devices, and some might question whether we
have a "real" person or not. 

>Given the billions of years until we slow down that much, the proposal
>that we simply wait looks kind of weak.

Mainly, the reason I brought up this possibility is by no means to suggest
"we simply wait" but to strengthen the argument that a slowed-down person
would still be a person (by suggesting that we may be forced eventually to
slow down ourselves, whether we like it or not).

>Second, although you do mention some of the ways in which a Turing
>computer (or at least one which matches the original Turing computer)
>you completely fail to mention the differences between brains and 
>neural nets. 

These details are real and important at the practical level, but are not so
important philosophically, which is what my main focus has been. 
Here I'll suggest, as a thought experiment only, to imagine a really *fast*
Turing machine or sequential device. Say we have this as the brain of a
robot. Is there anything you can imagine a real brain doing, by way of
input/output operations (and not in terms of internal workings, just i/o)
that this one can't? And as for those internal workings, don't you think
these too could be imitated in software?
...

> brains work far faster than any
>single computer in the real world. (And remember too that the really
>fast computers, guess what, are PARALLEL!).

No argument. So what?

...

>Just why is it bad that not every machine, or even every machine which
>shows signs of intelligence, cannot be imitated by a Turing machine?

Not bad necessarily, but I don't think it's true. And if, in fact, a simple
computational model explains things like consciousness, as I think it does
(if suitably scaled up, which involves considerable scaling) we have gained
rather than lost, in my view.

Mike Perry

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