X-Message-Number: 3603
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 09:51:56 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS uploading yourself
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"Bruce Zimov" <> Quotes Parfit :
>Can this be the difference between life and death? Can my
>fate depend on this difference in the ordering of removals
>and insertions? Can it be so important, for my
>survival, whether the new parts are, for a time, joined to the old parts?"
It don't think the order or speed of brain replacement makes any
difference philosophically. The only advantage is a practical
one of letting you know early if any errors are being made
during uploading and it makes some people less squeamish.
Science has never been able to find a difference between one
carbon atom and another so it is hard to see how replacing one
with the other could make the slightest difference. The only way
I could be wrong is if we posses some inner non material
quality (and not just information) that can not be duplicated by
nanotechnology or even detected by the scientific method, in
other words if we had a soul. If I believed that I would be much
more interested in the mumbo-jumbo of conventional religion than in Cryonics.
> As Searle in Rediscovery of Mind points out, that during the
>upload process: "We imagine that your conscious
>experience slowly shrinks to nothing, while your
>externally observable behaviour remains the same"
So, we wouldn't really be conscious we'd just think we were.
Sounds good enough for me.
Turing proved that any input / output relationship can be
reduced to an algorithm ( except one generating true random
numbers) but I admit he said nothing about subjective experience.
I can prove your intelligent but I can't prove your conscious.
However nobody could live their life that way, so I just have to
assume that when something acts intelligently ( input / output )
its conscious. We should remember the immortal words of Socrates
( or was it Plato ?) who said " If it looks like a duck, walks
like a duck , quacks like a duck then its a duck".
The Turing test is not perfect but it's the best way we have to
find consciousness and were not likely to find a better one. If
the Turing test is good for intelligence( Searle's externally
observable behavior) but not for consciousness that would mean
that consciousness is not needed for intelligent behavior, so
how did Evolution ever come up with consciousness in the first
place? Evolution is interested in our internal mental states
ONLY if they impact behavior. Even if consciousness arose by
pure chance (extremely unlikely to say the least) most would
have lost it by now because of genetic drift, like the eyes in
fish that have lived in dark caves for millions of years. If
Turing is wrong then so is Darwin. On the other hand perhaps 98%
of human beings are no more conscious than a rock but they act
just the same as the conscious ones, or perhaps you are the only
conscious person. I feel that if your really serious in your
rejection of Turing these are questions you must ponder.
In #3590 (Thomas Donaldson) Wrote:
> We may create more synapses, true, but not as many as we'd
>need if LTP were a permanent store of memory
We need hard numbers before we know if that is true, like how
much memory we need to live and how many synapses are needed to
record one bit.
>Neurons don't just pass impulses through electrical currents.
>They also use chemicals. Some may be released very
>precisely at just one synapse, others (such as the
>neurotransmitters NO and CO which are gases) will affect nearby
>cells.
I don't see chemical messengers as a sign of sophisticated
design on natures part, rather the reverse . Artificial neurons
could be made to release neurotransmitters as inefficiently as
natural ones if needed but you'd probably want to find a faster
way. If you need to inhibit a nearby neuron there are better
ways of sending that signal then launching a GABA molecule and
waiting ages for it to diffuse to it's target. The essential
point is that the information gets transmitted from cell to cell
so pick the best method. Why send smoke signals if you have a
fiber optic cable?
Biology never uses a simple solution if a complex one can be
found , take LTP for example. The alterations in neuronal
structure that characterize LTP are triggered by calcium ions (
Ca++) in the cell but they can only get in the cell if the NMDA
channel is open but for the channel to open it must be in the
presence of the amino acid glutamate from the presynaptic
activity and receive a retrograde message of nitric oxide ( or a
less negative charge across the local membrane if an older
theory still has some truth) from the postsynaptic activity.
There are more straightforward ways for a neural network to
undergo Hebbian learning.
I know it's a bit heretical to say that nature doesn't always
have a good reason for doing things it's way but there's no
reason to think that evolution will always come up with the best
solution, being better than the competition is good enough.
There are a lot of good designs that evolution never came up
with. Aluminum is light, strong, and the most abundant metal in
the earth's crust but I know of no animal that has an aluminum
skeleton. Why don't we see animals with wheels or tank treads?
Some micro organisms have propellers, why not fish or birds? I
think the answer is there are some solutions that are
inaccessible to evolution. You just can't get to there from
here. A jet engine works better than a prop engine in an
airplane. I give you a prop engine and tell you to turn it into
a jet but you must do it while the engine is running, you must
do it in one million small steps and you must do it so every one
of those steps improves the operation of the engine. You might
eventually improve the engine but it wouldn't be a jet.
Evolution has no foresight, it doesn't understand one step
backwards 2 steps forward, it only cares if it leads to a better
organism NOW. It's no wonder it took 4 billion years to produce
us, now it's our turn and we can do a better job.
A year ago the atoms that are now me were in cows and fish and
spinach plants, a year before that they were in carbon dioxide
, free nitrogen and water. The fact that natures nanotech isn't
as advanced as what Drexler has in mind is not surprising.
Evolution is a slow , clumsy, mindless process but until
recently that was the only way complex structures could be
built, then the first stone tools were made and everything
changed. I don't know how long in will take us to get up to
speed on nanotechnology but in engineering ,intelligent planning
will always beat trial and error so I'm sure it will be less
that 4 billion years, a lot less.
>Then, to add to the problem, a significant chance exists [...]
> that as a result of our experience our nervous system remodels itself,
I would be very surprised if it didn't and my artificial neurons
wouldn't be much good if they couldn't do the same , either by
physically making new connections or varying the strength of a
large number of existing connections.
> So what does this say about imitating a brain with
>nanotechnological devices? They'd have to be rather complex devices
Yes, they certainly would be ,but less complex the
nanotechnological cell repair machines that are cryonics only
hope of working. I hope I didn't give the impression that we
know enough about neurons to make a functional equivalent now
but I do insist that however complex they are,there vastly
simpler that the brain as a whole and we don't need to
understand the entire brain to upload it.
>If you really want to do this, it might make more sense to try
>setting a brain up as software in a highly parallel computer.
Understanding the logical structure of the brain well enough to
recompile it for a different architecture is a much more elegant
solution than the one I proposed but it is also much more
difficult. Eventually it will be done but not with the first uploads.
Jonn K Clark
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