X-Message-Number: 4169
From: 
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 21:25:40 -0400
Subject: SCI. CRYONICS comments

Thanks to Marvin Minsky for his kind comments, and to John Clark for
forwarding them.

I look forward to his new book and its chapters on pleasure and pain. My
initial impression, however, based on THE SOCIETY OF MIND and his recent
brief posting, is that he thinks feeling represents (roughly speaking) a
group of higher level brain phenomena  emerging from the tug-of-war among
evolutionarily developed agendas. This is certainly possible, and the
relative ease of reconciliation of this approach with evolution is a point in
its favor.

However, my own inclination is to view feeling and consciousness and
subjectivity generally as qualitatively distinct and not just an emergent
property of a complex system. This is mainly because they are so strikingly
different. Feeling is the ground of being, the difference between a Robot and
a Sentient. Since it probably exists in many lower animals, it should be
found primarily in more primitive parts of the brain or in relatively simple
functions....Even if this is right, of course, it isn't by itself much of a
contribution, unless it helps steer some of the investigators in the right
direction.   

On a slightly different note, I have read part of a new book edited by Peter
Baumgartner and Sabine Payr: SPEAKING MINDS; Interviews with Twenty Eminent
Cognitive Scientists, Princeton U. Press, 1995.
Dr. Minsky is not one of those interviewed (for many possible reasons
including logistics) but he is often mentioned. My impression is that most of
those interviewed regard traditional Artificial Intelligence as a dead end or
even a dead letter, and Minsky is frequently reminded that he was too
optimistic too soon--but some have a different view.

Robert Wilensky thinks AI is not the only approach to cognition, but has
something to contribute, perhaps as much as the biological and psychological
approaches.

Herbert Simon says the rumor of the demise of AI started with an essay by
Hubert Dreyfus (around 1970?)  and in later books; this view became popular,
but there is no evidence for it and the field is not stagnating. Some early
predictions were over-optimistic, and many problems turned out to be much
harder than once thought, but the field--like molecular biology--can support
many workers and still has enormous potential.

Incidentally, my impression is that most of the people interviewed think the
Turing Test is of little interest or use.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute


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