X-Message-Number: 3977
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 21:17:07 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Uploading

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 (Thomas Donaldson) Wrote:

	   >Perhaps I didn't explain myself as well as I might have. The
	   >important point is this: focus on that experience and how it    
	   >works, not on the symbols.
	   
Impossible,  and that's not a word I often use. When you think
about the sun you don't have access to the sun itself, it weighs
two octillion tons and just wont fit inside your head. All you 
have access to is data from your senses, but you can use that
data to make symbols and one of those is the symbol for the sun.
When you think about the sun you are manipulating that symbol
but you aren't doing anything to the sun.
	   
	   >Without that experience the symbols mean nothing.
	   
Experience implies memory and memory is just another symbol. 
If you witness a spectacular lightning strike you'll probably
remember it for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean
that a million amp current is circulating in your brain. The
details are not known but a PHYSICAL change of some sort must
have been made in the brain and that change symbolizes the
lightning strike.    
   
	   >And we need much more to have that experience than a simple
	   >ability to  manipulate symbols.
	  
You also need senses, there the reason a relationship exists
between the symbols in the brain and the outside world.    
	  
	 >A test: devise a language-learning robot which learns to use
	 >its language not just in response to other language but in response 
	 >to events in the   world. What kind of processing must it do? 
	  
High level information processing, and that is symbolic processing. 
What other kind of processing could it be?
	  

				  John K Clark               

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