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

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