X-Message-Number: 25113
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 00:56:50 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Patternist View of a Person

Dear Richard,

You wrote:

>Dear Mike,
>
>I well understand your view of the soul, as a pattern. However,
>this viewpoint suffers from the many problems I have brought up:
>
>1. A pattern cannot experience anything. Fundamentally, we are
>experiencers of a subjective inner-life---of this thing we call
>consciousness. Since a pattern cannot have this property, we cannot
>fundamentally be a pattern.

I'm not sure you understand how I mean a person can persist as a pattern or 
body of information. I distinguish between what I call (1) the conservation 
of identity and (2) the expression of identity. Conservation occurs through 
information describing the person. Expression occurs if that information is 
loaded or imprinted in a suitable device and it "runs" or "executes" the 
person. At that point the person (not the device) has new experiences and 
adds to the store of memories and so on. The body of information describing 
the person is enlarged, or otherwise edited. Clearly expression is needed 
for consciousness and qualia experience to occur. But again, I would say 
that the device that "runs" the person (I can't think of a better term) 
doesn't experience anything, the person does. As for the possibility that 
somewhere there is another device with a similar "program" which, in effect 
is running the same person having the same experiences, the two make two 
instantiations of the one person, not two separate persons.


>2. A pattern has no objectiven existence. Your brain pattern is
>encoded into a rock and many other things in this universe,
>according to various interpretive schemes.

If any algorithm qualifies as an "interpretive scheme" and all are treated 
on an equal footing, you are obviously right. However, I submit that this 
is not reasonable at all but that there are what we can consider reasonable 
interpreters such that the information content will be far from arbitrary 
but instead be interpreter-independent and intelligible as some definite 
thing, *if suitably structured.*

The reasonable interpreters might correspond to curious, highly intelligent 
space aliens who had no knowledge of human culture or languages but found a 
very long record consisting of many bits imprinted on some storage medium 
and wondered what it might mean. We may assume this record is linearized to 
a string of bits. A possible approach to make a reasonably intelligible 
record would be to encode a sequence of still pictures or a movie or 
several in a simple format. We might use a format in which the bits come in 
groups, say, of 2^24 (16,777,216), with each grouping representing a 
monochrome bit image with dimensions 4,096 x 4,096, equivalent to 2 
megapixels of data. We would need to cue the aliens that the record 
represented a succession of scanned images. The trick would be to use 
certain patterns of bits repetitively in certain ways to suggest the 
structuring. We would have to have ways of representing bits within a 
scanned line of each image, and within the image as a whole. We would also 
need a convention to separate images. All this should not be hard to do in 
a way that intelligent creatures could guess. Each image, for instance, 
would be exactly the same size and could be bordered by some bit pattern 
that would always be repeated. The repetitions would be easy to spot. We 
could make sure that border-repetitions occurred for strings of length 2^12 
which in turn would fall within strings with different border-repetitions 
of length 2^24, suggesting square arrays with the desired dimensions. Gray 
scale within an image could be represented by setting rather than clearing 
a bit, with the desired probability. The aliens should soon suspect that 
the repetitive groupings referred to pictures in a square format, and try 
projecting the resulting images. Voila! A first picture might show a simple 
geometric pattern to tell them they were onto something!

 From there you could proceed to many other things, including details 
relating to a specific person. On the way you could give a tutorial to 
explain your natural language, using mathematics and various scientific 
disciplines which the aliens should understand, and branching into other 
areas of knowledge. In all, I submit, a decipherable record could be 
produced that would describe a person or a whole civilization or whatever 
you wanted to describe. This is one possible approach, in effect using a 
movie format. You might use others, starting with simple mathematical 
relationships, for example which would be evident from the patterns 
recorded. (Math could be a stepping-stone to other areas of knowledge, and 
perhaps a good place to start for creatures of unknown background.) So, if 
it is suitably done, a record can be self-decipherable and 
self-explanatory, which will not occur with arbitrary information patterns 
such as the molecular details of rocks.

Best wishes,

Mike Perry

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