X-Message-Number: 32898 Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:56:43 -0700 From: Edgar Swank - ACS President <> Subject: Reply to Ettinger Reasons Why Uploading Is Unlikely, Ever Rea... Robert Ettinger writes > A simulation in a digital computer is just a coded description. > With unimportant exceptions, a description of a thing is not that thing, > and encoding the description makes it worse. One of those exceptions, and an important one in my estimation, is that a description of information is exactly information. Information is exactly what the contents of a brain is. A computer with the traditional inputs (keyboard, mouse) and outputs (screen) certainly can't emulate a whole person, but it can, at least theoretically, emulate a person's brain. A computer's representation of an apple is not an apple, but neither is a brain's. Break open someone's head and look, there's no apple in there. If we can write a computer program to simulate a single neuron, then it's just scaling up to emulate a whole brain. If the simulated brain can pass a Turing test, then as far as anyone can tell, they're conversing with a real person.. If the simulation of you responds the same as the real you, they are practically identical. If my brain simulation has my memories, and responds as I would, c'est moi. -- Edgar W. Swank <> President - American Cryonics Society http://AmericanCryonics.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32898