X-Message-Number: 7983 Date: Mon, 31 Mar 97 13:04:55 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #7974 - #7980 Dave Pizer writes: > I believe that there is a better chance for getting religious people > interested in cryonics by going through the church than by going direct to > the lay persons. I just don't know how to do it - yet. I think you are dealing with a worldview problem. The "church" people have a different worldview than we do, as indeed, almost everyone else does too. Getting them to change will not be easy. Eric writes, > > But, call me old-fashioned, but the *second* somebody says, "It seems > to have worked. Two things that are identical in all ways are the same > thing. A *IS* A. We might as well dispose of the original..." well, he'll > be over THERE, and *I'll* be out the goddamn door. > A true (interchangeable) duplicate, however, must have your exact perceptions, intentions, etc. You couldn't be "out the goddamn door" unless he was running along with you, or thought he was running. Thomas writes > Well, there you go again. In the first place, your universal language has > very simple problems. It assumes that the "intelligent beings" have senses > which work much like our own, and in more or less the same priority. Wrong. This was not my intent, at any rate, though perhaps some of my postings are confusing in this respect. For example, did not assume, as an absolute requirement, that they must have vision, though I did devote space to that possibility. (You could then encode movies into the language and expect them to decipher them, which could convey a lot of complicated information fairly easily.) Instead what I assumed as a minimum was "ability to do mathematics on bit strings." Without this ability, I would argue, one's intelligence is limited too. I'm assuming the aliens are *smart* but not otherwise specially talented. (I *am* assuming they have a sense of time, however, and of a bit stream as a "temporally ordered sequence of symbols over a two-letter alphabet.") > Suppose > that rather than vision they worked on smell. Your sequence of prime numbers > would be quite bewildering. Not necessarily. But if it would be, the aliens would arguably not be very smart--perhaps cabable in specialized ways but not truly "intelligent." >And if you tried to communicate with them >using odors, then you would be using arbitrary odors to do so. At the level of individual symbols, the odors would be arbitrary, but not at the level of patterns of symbols, which is what is important here. In the same way, for a message made up of 0's and 1's the 0's and 1's individually are arbitrary--they could just as well be X's and Z's for example, or I could interchange the 0's and 1's--but the patterns would persist. > > In the second place, the fact that we can see patterns in objects and the > world does not of itself mean that the patterns are there. Either they are there or we are "seeing things"--which is not a sign of intelligence. As we get smarter we can recognize optical illusions for what they really are, and replace or correct our mistaken theories. > Only a little > history of science will tell you that. IF some other intelligent nonhuman > beings work similarly enough to us, and IF they found your patterns > expressed in a way they could perceive easily, then they MIGHT be able to > see the same patterns we see. However they might just form their own > phlogiston theory and totally misinterpret what we were trying to say. > Again, not a sign of intelligence--and I'm assuming some level of "intelligence" for us too! > I'm not saying that it is wrong to try to see patterns in the world, just > that is wrong to believe that they are in the world rather than in us. And > I even think it is dangerous, as I explained in a previous message. If we > cannot shake ourselves loose from the idea that phlogiston explains > combustion, we have a real and serious problem. One way that can happen is > if we believe the pattern is THERE, we did not invent it. > I think patterns can be "in the world." Did we invent the prime numbers, or discover them? "Discover" seems more reasonable to me. The prime numbers are unique, and I'm sure they've been noted independently at various times by different people. > For that matter, experimental science is based on the idea of testing these > patterns we think we see. That has proven to be a very good idea indeed, and > so long as we do this testing we will find ourselves emending those > patterns. But behind the entire idea of experimental testing is the idea > that patterns we think we see just might be illusions ie. they are in us, > not in the world. > Again, I doubt if ALL the patterns "we think we see" are just "illusions" that are "in us, not in the world." > And finally, I even include mathematics in that. I find room for disagreement. > Mathematics relates to the > world in a different way from physics, however. Sure, we can set up a > mathematical theory, and prove theorems which must be true given the > postulates of that theory. HOWEVER it can fall down badly still: if we > want to use that mathematical theory to do something other than make more > mathematics, we must somehow use it APPROPRIATELY. Euclidean geometry was > perfect within itself. The problems with it came because empirically we > found that it wasn't always the most appropriate mental tool to use. In > short, sure you can make your theories always true, but then they may cease to > be relevant rather than be shown false. You get to take your pick. > Euclidean geometry is still highly relevant, even if we have found it sometimes inadequate. Older mathematics in general hasn't ceased to be relevant even if newer branches have also been found important or necessary at times. And that I think is more reason that an alien intelligence would also find the same branches of mathematics relevant that we do. Of course we don't know under what conditions intelligent life may arise. The (weak) anthropic principle puts some constraints on it however. In a way I think my position is a statement that "intelligence" is in some sense a "universal" talent. If you deny that, you may as well say there is no true "intelligence," just specialized talents for specialized domains. But again, the anthropic principle (we would think) applies a filter to the domains in which life might be found, and in which "talents" will be meaningful. Another point to make, however, is that (I'm assuming) we are more interested in things closer to home than in arbitrary, unknown aliens. The "aliens" we are really most interested in are our artificial devices, including devices of the future. These we *could* equip with a reasonable sensory apparatus comparable to our own, i.e. vision, hearing and the rest--though we don't have to, to be within the constraints of "universality" as I've imagined it. Such devices can process bit strings already, and I think, could be instructed about all facets of reality, if only they were "smart" enough to easily grasp our mathematics. > A universal language? Come back when you can prove to me that you understand > the universe, and then I just may listen. We don't even understand the > phenomena involved in quantum mechanics or relativity --- otherwise we'd have > a theory which includes them both. > We still have things to work out of course. But I'm optimistic. To John K. Clark: It looks as if your "double" was not really your double (he was to your left, you were to his right, and both were presumably aware of the difference). But I would say that, if you turned out to be the "copy"--well, you are just as legitimate a continuer of what you were before the copying took place as the now-deceased "original." If we wanted we could resurrect that original, minus a few minutes' worth of memories, by making another copy and erasing the extra memories (and any additional memories after that). Or if we were more ambitious, we might try to reconstruct the original's last memories based on surviving information. Mike Perry http://www.alcor.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7983