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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3620