X-Message-Number: 415
From att!Venus.YCC.Yale.Edu!LEVY%GARY Thu Aug 29 18:25 EST 1991
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1991 18:25 EST
From: LEVY%
Subject: CRYONICS #409/Alan Lovejoy
To: 

I very much enjoyed Alan Lovejoy's well-considered discussion about uploading 
and its relation to information theory.  I would like to add the following 
comments:

Based on my experience as a student of linguistics, computer science, and
(to a lesser extent) digital signal processing, I have come to the 
conclusion that the whole information theoretic approach to human 
behavior is severely flawed.  In essence, any theory that attempts
to describe the brain in terms of bits and symbols is just cutting
things up the wrong way (kind of like trying to do surgery with a 
meat cleaver and a baseball bat).  Unfortunately, thanks largely to
the influence of Chomsky in both information theory and psychology,
the symbolic/information approach has come to be a standard and is
accepted as _the_ approach in a number of fields.  Of course, it is only
one way of viewing things.  In contrast to the symbolic approach (and
to Alan's claim that "human minds do not experience reality directly"),
there is a well-developed body of ideas, due primarily to James Gibson,
that considers human (and animal) perception to be direct.  I would urge
anyone who is seriously interested in downloading and consciousness to
look into that work. (I will provide references if prodded.)  I will only
say that it is a much more physically based, conservative way of looking at
things; its focus on physical law makes it (in my opinion) more likely to
yield insights of use to cryonics.  

Symbolic approaches, on the other hand, are grounded in the Cartesian
framework, which is in turn grounded in the Western religious tradition
of dualism.   Furthermore, attempts to relate human behavior to symbol
manipulation have focused almost exclusively on a single part of that
behavior, namely, declarative and interrogative sentences.  It is much 
harder to answer the sorts of symbolic/non-symbolic issues Alan describes, 
when you look at other types of verbal activity.  (What, for example, is
the truth value of the sentence "Gee, it's awfully hot in here" when
it is uttered in an attempt to get someone to open a window?)  So it seems
to me that most attempts to answer the really tough questions
have been hindered by unwarranted assumptions (the existence of a soul)
and by oversimplifications (focusing on one type of verbal behavior).  

Therefore, in my opinion, uploading will be successful to the extent that
it departs from symbol manipulation and information theory and moves more
toward a physically based view.  (Simply viewing our neurons, or their
interconnection, as "containers" of information is not enough.)
Given that many of us have signed up to freeze our brains (and not our
symbols, souls, or truth values), I think the prospects for such a shift 
are very good.  

-- Simon Levy

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