X-Message-Number: 7875 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet #7862 - #7870 Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 11:20:57 -0800 (PST) Hi again! 1. While I certainly hope the Oregon situation resolves itself in a way favorable to cryonics, the suggestion that autopsy may be REQUIRED raises serious problems for cryonicists --- and not most others interested in this possibility. Ultimately we must somehow find a way to allow cryonic suspension on its own merits, not as one more form of suicide. If anything, even the ability to preserve and revive brains may help us to do that. 2. Computers, computers, what then are computers? I raised this issue in my last posting, but it deserves more amplification. If we say that a computer is any finite state machine, then in what way is a Model T automobile not a finite state machine? In what way is a ROCK not a finite state machine? (Yes, it may have only one state, but one is a finite number). We have lots of machines all around us and do not call all of them computers. First of all, since many of these machines exist in a real world which is NOT digital, someone may answer that the Model T is not a finite state machine because (in the world, not just as an isolated object) it can take an infinite number of different states. Of course, our brains too have that characteristic. (Nor for that matter do our brains operate in a digital manner). Since attempts to emulate nondigital phenomena such as weather, or even the motion of the planets (in detail) with a digital computer will go awry over time, there is one problem with uploading into a DIGITAL machine. (I am not referring to quantum mechanics or anything basically mysterious. Many physical systems have the property that they will AMPLIFY rather than damp down small errors --- this is the origin of "chaos" that so many people talk about now. And of course there is no way a digital machine can match perfectly the parameters of one which is NOT digital. Just how soon the emulation runs off the track, of course, depends on the machine we're trying to emulate. Certainly we can keep this from happening for any set time ... by increasing the accuracy of our calculations. But that automatically means more memory and more calculation). Furthermore there is a serious question at the heart of the whole idea of emulation or simulation. A simulated Model T takes you nowhere. It fails in the basic purpose of a Model T. Forgetting for the moment the issue of chaos which I just raised, let us suppose that we have a PERFECT simulation of a person. Is this simulation the same as the original? Sure, it will (by definition) fool any third person into thinking it is the original. But if you are brought back as a simulation will you know you've been brought back? The simulation doesn't even think, it just simulates thought. Not only that, but when we look at its insides we find a computer program running the simulated neurons so that they simulate the action of neurons. We do not have a real brain but instead a very large computer program. Somehow this does not look to me to be enough, even if (theoretically, remember!) such a simulation were good enough to simulate YOU and fool me into believing it was you. As it stands now, I think that this possibility is theoretical only and will remain so indefinitely, for the reasons I've already given. And if it does not, then YOU can go first. I do not mean by this that we cannot improve ourselves or improve our neurons. All we need do is to make machines which will behave like neurons, not simulating them but actually doing the activities involved. As I said before, that is far from impossible. And I would not insist that these novoneurons use the same chemistry and other features of our present neurons.... a generalization is quite good enough. Or we could modify our own neurons into something better. Nor does this argument suggest that we cannot STORE the configuration of our neurons and whatever other features and properties turn out to be important in a digital computer. Sure, there will be a certain inaccuracy, but if that information is then used to BUILD another brain rather than simulate it, it will revive you or me, close enough that I would not complain. Are we then computers? Let us say, nondigital ones? Well, our neurons do not act simply by moving around bits of electrical current, and they grew, they were not built. You can decide this question however you wish --- I do not wish to argue merely over definitions. But unless you wish to claim that everything is a computer, and thus make the word meaningless, you (and I too) should look carefully at the actual objects we are discussing. Long long life (in whatever form) Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7875