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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15261