X-Message-Number: 21460 Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 07:48:14 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #21401 - #21406 For Mike Perry: Do not confuse what I will be saying here with what Ettinger says, though I do think he has a point. The problem with computer awareness is that computers are more like books than like living things. Books are symbolic: if you do not know how to read the book, it remains a stack of paper with meaningless marks on the pages. Computers, again, perform programs, which have a meaning which depends on the background of the person using those programs. I note that books, too, are not self-aware in any but the most speculative of senses. As purely symbolic entities, programs and the computers which run them cannot be aware... no matter how involved that program may be. It is WE who attribute such properties to them because they may behave like a creature that is aware. And given tools like fMRI, it's quite illegitimate to restrict our examination of a computer program versus a human being solely to external behavior. (It may once have seemed reasonable, but it is no longer reasonable). It's not that internal activities in a creature must be identical to our own, but that we should somehow find awareness in those activities, just as we have begun to find it in human brains. If you wish to be philosophical, you may argue as much as you want about whether or not the awareness we might find in your brain using tools to look into living working brains really corresponds with the awareness you feel. So when you fall asleep or act groggy, you're really aware of ... what? Nor is this an argument against the possibility that we might build creatures that are aware. It is an argument that we cannot base such creatures on computers; but then computers are hardly the only kind of machine in existence. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21460