X-Message-Number: 3625
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 23:56:25 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS uploading yourself
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I'm going to try to answer the points raised by Bruce Zimov in
his post but please understand I am working under a severe
disadvantage, I never saw his original post, I wasn't watching
him when he typed his message into the internet . All I have to
work with is a copy of his message and we all know that's just
not the same thing.
>when the surgeon has excavated your entire brain, and all that
>is left is an empty skull, where are you?
In the same place a computer program is when you turn off your
machine, in the same place you are when they freeze your brain.
If the computer is turned back on it will be the same program,
if your brain is repaired it will be the same you.
>>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.
>Wrong. [...] EEG traces are much better evidence,
Much better evidence!!! Better than behavior?? I know of no
theory that says consciousness must produce brain waves but for
the sake of argument I'll say you have such a theory and I'll
give you a sophisticated brain analyzing machine. One day you
feel sad and analyze your brain with the machine. You develop a
reasonably sounding theory to equate the state of the neurons in
your head to your subjective experience. How do you test your
theory? Well, you try it on me. You notice that the state of my
neurons is similar ( but not identical) to yours when you felt
sad and from this you use your theory to conclude that I am
experiencing sadness just like you did. As proof your theory was
successful you point to the fact that I have tears in my eyes
and I made a sound with my mouth that sounded like "I feel sad".
In any other area this would be sufficient proof that your
theory was correct but in this one area ,for reasons I don't
understand ,people demand a level of rigger not seen in any
other human endeavor, not even pure mathematics. A skeptic could
correctly point out that the state of my neurons were not
identical to yours only similar ,we are after all different
people with different brains. The differences could be crucial,
you really felt sad but it's different with me, I get tear
production elevated and the nerves in my mouth stimulate my
tongue to make a noise like " I feel sad" but really I feel
nothing . The only way to know for sure what its like to be me
is to turn your brain into an identical copy of mine, but then
you wouldn't be you you'd be me.
>Your evolutionary argument is a non sequiter,
If consciousness changes behavior then the Turing test works .
If consciousness does not effect behavior then science can not
explain why we have it.
In Message: (Thomas Donaldson) Wrote:
>Animals don't have wheels because they are designed to
>walk on terrain which is a great deal less smooth and flat than roads.
Stephen Jay Gould is considered by most to be the leading expert
on evolution alive today, everybody would put him in the top 5.
I quote from his famous essay " Kingdoms Without Wheels".
" A vulgarization of evolution, presented in many popular
accounts, casts natural selection as a perfecting principle, so
accurate in its action, that animals come to embody a set of
engineering blueprints for optimal form [...] natural selection
slips into God's old role as perfecting principle. [...] Wheels are
not flawed as modes of transport; I am sure that many animals would do far
better with them. The one creature clever enough to build them,
after all, has gotten some mileage from the invention."
If you really want to defend biological design, it would help if
you studied a bit more biology.
>One major problem with aluminum is the energy required for
>its manufacture
As I said, some solutions are not available to evolution
> a lot of engineering by human beings came from studying the
>way animals or plants did it.
Soon after Francis Crick co- discovered the DNA double helix he
started to think about the genetic code. At the time only a few
of the base triplets that map to amino acids were known, he
thought he could find the remaining ones by theory alone ,
without experiment. When a ribosome reads a piece of RNA it can
contain many millions of bases ATCCGATTC... and NO commas. Crick
reasoned that just starting at the beginning and reading 3 at a
time would be crazy. If you ever get out of phase by one or two
you'd have no way to detect the phase error and the ribosome
would make the wrong protein. It'd be like reading a book with
no punctuation and nospacebetweenthewords, no engineer would
stand for such a foolish design. Crick devised a code that if
read in the correct phase all the triplets make sense, if read
out of phase all the triplets would be nonsense, that is, they
wouldn't map to any amino acid. Now the cell would know when it
was reading RNA out of phase. He thought he understood why life
only used 20 amino acids, his scheme would work with 20 amino
acids in wouldn't work with 21. Cricks code was simple,
efficient, elegant, fault tolerant and completely wrong. The
real genetic code was found by experiment a few years later.
Incredibly the ribosome really does just start at the beginning
and plod along 3 at a time, if it gets out of phase and makes
the wrong protein, well, that's life in the big city. It's a
pity Francis Crick wasn't around 4 billion years ago ; so much
for "you can't improve on nature".
In #3620 Wrote:
>Can there be objective criteria for subjective conditions? Certainly.
I'm quite certain your wrong about that, see above.
>it may well be that feeling IS efficient in some sense. 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.
Your correct but you don't go far enough, feelings are more than
useful their absolutely essential and not just for us but for
anything that displays intelligent behavior.
John K Clark
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