X-Message-Number: 7943 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet digest Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:12:34 -0800 (PST) Well! Lots of things to answer and little time to do it. To Mr. Lynch: It really would help if you would read a bit more about this consciousness question. It would also help if you were not quite so full of yourself, but that's much harder to cure. First of all, you don't really answer the point of Bob and my own comment about attribution of awareness. Yes, we think women are close enough to us to have awareness too (though quite seriously there have been past societies which may have doubted this, and a few present societies may still doubt it). The comment about a twin brother suffering from a clot in his arteries is just plain off the mark. When I make a decision that someone is aware, I do make a judgement, but I hardly ignore obvious signs of illness etc. As for the issue of the Turing Test, you have only been dogmatic, you have not justified a thing. Did you do this because you wished to convince me or because you wished to state a quasi-religious premise? For a start, analyze the Chinese room situation I described. Finally we come to the chaos issue. Here I should have explained myself a bit better. If we set up a (slightly faulty) copy of you, not only will it simply not behave like you, but it will go very badly awry, breaking down after a short time. I do not believe that you are going to break down in the same way or in a short time. It's true that even if it does not break down (I think that unlikely) then it will behave SIMILARLY to you --- but if you were present and able to judge, you would not say it emulated you at all. Years ago I read a science fiction story with a similar theme: a man finds a build-a-man set, and builds a copy of himself. The set had somehow gone back in time, and along came time police to fix that problem. They looked at the copy and the original, and decided that the original was faulty --- and so the copy lived on, with tastes that the original knew (before his demise) simply did not match his own. Finally, Lewis Carroll's story catches very well what I was trying to say. I am surprised you did not notice. We cannot use only symbols to deal with the world. At some point we must stop that and deal directly with the world. That symbols are also physical objects does not vitiate my point. And any system which only uses symbols will not be conscious. However, if you really believe that Carroll's story represents my own argument, something has gone badly wrong in our conversation. You might begin by telling me what you think my argument is. To Dr. Strout: Yes, you might consider that I was using the word "computer" in a different way. Since I don't want to get involved in arguing about right and wrong uses of words, I will say this: "computers" of the sort we are differ a great deal from Crays, PCs, etc --- not matter how large and elaborate such machines may become. I believe that is an essential distinction. I have even explicitly said that I am NOT arguing against the possibility of artificial intelligence or artificial awareness --- I am discussing the kind of computers which may have it versus other kinds which cannot have it. Shall we call one kind computers and the others something else? Perhaps. But whatever else we do we should be clear about the distinction. To Mike Perry: Now look here. Are you really saying that everything is symbolic? Not representable by symbols, but actually symbols themselves? I doubt that completely, unless perhaps you have decided to redefine the world "symbol" so it includes everything... in which case you are saying nothing at all. Who attaches meaning to these symbols, anyway? Without that, you have no symbols. As to whether or not we are finite state machines, I remain dubious. One issue coming directly from quantum mechanics is that not ALL measurements (in theory) have a quantum character. For instance, momentum is a vector, and its value as a vector -- a direction in space --- is not quantized, though the relation between position and momemtum is. That alone raises questions about whether quantum mechanics says we are finite state machines. In practical terms, our components undergo constant renewal, so that their quantum states will constantly change. This means to me that any attempt to really list the finite number of states we are in will fail --- not because of its number, but because it changes all the time. Sure, we can make generalizations, but then we will lose that finite character: an infinite set of molecules can be in the right conformation to produce ME or YOU. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson D Cd D D D D Ddd D D B One major distinction between (say) Crays and human beings comes down to the issue of whether they operate with symbols or work in the world without using symbols (at root). I am saying that this distinction is key. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7943