X-Message-Number: 3620
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 19:26:42 -0500
From: 
Subject: SCI. CRYONICS awareness etc.

First, an umpteenth  effort to explain why the Turing Test is
nonsense--neither necessary nor sufficient to prove humanity or LAWKI
(life-as-we-know-it):

Even some presently existing programs can fool some people some of the time.
 In any duel between a clever programmer (or even a very stupid but massive
and very fast computer) and a maybe-not-so-clever auditor, the programmer
might win. Therefore passing the Turing Test is not a sufficient condition.

An impaired human might fail the Turing test; therefore this test is not a
necessary condition.

The main problem seems to be that too many people equate LAWKI with
intelligence. The criterion of LAWKI is not intelligence; it is  FEELING, the
subjective condition, qualia, the capacity to experience pleasure and pain,
to be aware. 

Can there be objective criteria for subjective conditions? Certainly. You
don't have to be a cow to say "cheese." When we know the physiological basis
of feeling in humans (and other mammals), we will know how to spot it. This
will not rule out the possibility of the subjective condition having other
substrates, but it will probably give us clues to other possibilities, if
any.

John Clark raises interesting questions about consciousness and
evolution--and almost answers them himself.

How could consciousness evolve if it provides no advantage--why would we not
have just the input-output algorithms without the consciousness? 

Mr. Clark himself points out that nature/evolution is not necessarily
efficient; it does many things accidentally or incidentally and with Rube
Goldberg apparatus. 

More specifically, it may well be that feeling IS efficient in some sense.
The "feeling" filter may well be a mechanism that allows MANY types of
stimulus/response reactions to develop effectively.  Instead of having to
develop separate algorithms for "lion-avoid," "bad-food-avoid,"
"rough-path-avoid," etc., all of these fall under the rubric "feel-bad" and
then are shunted to more specific subroutines. Having feeling in ADDITION to
the stimulus/response algorithms may provide no survival advantage at a
particular moment, but feeling COULD be useful in DEVELOPING the algorithms.
 

Needless to say, I agree heartily with Mr. Clark that we can outdo Dame
Nature in improving ourselves, and on a tremendously accelerated time track.
But anyone who relies on uploading for survival might as well rely on
Tipler's Omega Point. 

And one more reminder on marketing--or, more generally, progress in cryonics.
Speculation is fine, and we can use good new ideas--but the MOST important
thing most people can do is what we KNOW we can do, namely, make our own
cryostasis arrangements and then pitch in with our own little bit of work and
financial support. The tortoise sometimes pases the hare, and he CERTAINLY
will pass an IMAGINARY hare.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society

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