X-Message-Number: 7930
From: 
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 09:26:00 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Fwd: Tao & misc.

---------------------
Forwarded message:
Subj:    Tao & misc.
Date:    97-03-23 00:22:47 EST
From:    Ettinger
To:      

1. Peter Merel (#7911) mentions "Cramer's transactional interpretation" [of
quantum mechanics]. Peter, could you provide a reference?

2. On "Taoist notion of identity": It does not seem at all mystical, but--

Certainly my mind uses and interprets symbols to interpret the world, with
the senses as intermediaries. The only things I can experience directly are
the qualia in my self circuit. (A computer, having no qualia, cannot
experience anything.) My self circuit, when active (experiencing), is the
essential me--and perhaps also when quiescent, as in deep sleep or under
anaesthesia, although there are unresolved philosophical problems. It may
also turn out (it's too soon to be sure) that the notion of the essential me
must be expanded to include some other parts/aspects of the brain, such as
memories and habits, possibly even continuers and predecessors, even
duplicates. 

The Taoist view, as briefly given by Peter, that one's identity is just one's
map of the world, modeled in the brain in terms of feeling and doing, seems
to share a good deal with my (greatly condensed) view above. But I think that
Taoist view (if I interpret it correctly) misses two things. 

First, it glides past the crucial distinction between symbol manipulation and
feeling, more or less implying that the computing part of the brain needs
nothing more than raw sensory data to generate qualia--whereas, it seems
certain to me, it needs a specific feature of anatomy/physiology to provide
subjectivity, which I have called the self circuit. 

Second, and as a result of the first lack, it suggests that hardware is
secondary. In my view hardware--the self circuit--is primary. The information
paradigm suggests that the program is everything, and can run in principle on
almost any kind of hardware; I think almost the opposite--that the physics or
anatomy/physiology of the self circuit is the sine qua non, with many
possible software packages that could do the rest of the work. 

3. Olaf Henny (#7913) makes me wonder if I bungled in skimming the news on
Dolly. Olaf says the offspring was from an egg (sheep B), tickled by an adult
udder cell nucleus from sheep A, then gestated in sheep C, and that the DNA
in the udder cell was not expressed or passed on. Am I confused? If the above
is correct, it would not be cloning at all--just another slight variation of
parthenogenesis. My understanding was that the udder cell nucleus was the
sole provider of the genetic material of the offspring--that's what made it
cloning, use of an adult somatic cell to reproduce its own genotype. 

4. Thomas Donaldson continues to offer good comments on map vs. territory.

5. I have to disagree, at least in part, with Mike Perry on whether there are
"correct" survival criteria (to be discovered or proven, as I think) or
whether such criteria are more or less arbitrary and leave room for
disagreement or individual taste. (Same applies to values; valid values are
not arbitrary.)

It is possible, of course, that there is no such thing as simple or
all-or-none survival, i.e. some variation of the quantitative view may be
correct. But I think there must be absolute CRITERIA FOR CRITERIA. If we
agree on biology and physics, and have sufficient understanding of these, and
we agree on logic, then we must agree on criteria of survival. If we fail to
agree, then at least one of us is wrong. 

Robert Ettinger 

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