X-Message-Number: 8024
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 20:16:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Nanotechnology and stuff

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In #8015   On Mon, 7 Apr 1997 Wrote:
         
        >If you [Mike Perry] claim that almost any kind of information       

        >processing is "consciousness" of some kind or in some degree, then
        
        >you have simply made "information processing" the definition of
                >consciousness. 
            
What's wrong with that, consciousness must be a subset of information  
processing, unless of course I have a soul.
        

        >This is totally at odds with common sense
            
Not my common sense, unless of course I have a soul.



        >and in any case useless since it leaves no room for experimental
                >verification. 


Some truth in that, you are your consciousness, so I can never experience 
your consciousness directly, if I could I wouldn't be me I'd be you by 
definition. You want to define consciousness as similar to the feeling of 
self that Robert Ettinger experiences, but the trouble is that truly leaves 
no room for experimental  verification, at least information processing 
you can test for. It's regrettable but we will NEVER have a theory of 
consciousness without making use of some rather large axioms, but the ONLY 
alternative is solipsism.
             


        >As for survival criteria, [...] I see no way to resolve the problems
                >with ANY proposed criteria
             

Not even your own? You don't know if you died yesterday or not? I say if you 
THINK you've survived then you have. Probably.
                     
In #8016   (Thomas Donaldson)  On Tue, 8 Apr 1997 Wrote:
                     

        >I do hope you have noticed that neurons, as are all cells, are
                >almost the classic case of nanomachines    
        

Classic in the sense of being an antique. We can design things much better  
and much smaller than nature can because random mutation and natural 
selection are not intelligent, human engineers are. 
          

       >and to raise the issue of nanotechnology here is just a little      

       >absurd. They are, in fact, the current best example of what such
              >machines might do 
                 

And death is the current best example of what life can do and it's not good 
enough for me. Drexler's work is certainly fantastic leading to strange world 
unlike anything we have today, but I would be quite interested in knowing on 
what basis you brand his work "absurd". Have you discovered a new law of
Physics that renders Drexler's Nanotechnology impossible, or do you just 
think that people are not as smart as a cosmic ray producing a random  
mutations so we'll never be able to figure it out? 

I'm going to repeat something I said in my last post because it's hard for 
the magnitude of it to sink in and I can think of nothing, absolutely nothing  
more relevant to Cryonics, it's what convinced me that Robert Ettinger's 
incredible idea might actually work.

How big would a rod logic Nanocomputer need to be to equal the power of a  
modern mainframe? Drexler figures it would need to have about 150 billion  
parts (atoms), a cube 1000 nanometers on an edge would do it, that's about as  
big as a mitochondrion.  You could fit well over a thousand such mainframes  
into a human cell of average size.

Please understand, this is a very conservative design, I'm not talking about 
a Quantum Computer or even an Electronic Computer that operates on some  
exotic principle, this is rod logic people, Charles Babbage would have  
understood its operating principle perfectly 150 years ago, he just didn't  
have the engineering ability to build one, we still don't, yet.
                        


        >and I note that no one has yet actually built anything to match them,
                >despite all the theory.
                    

Immortality has not yet actually been achieved either and for exactly the 
same reason, we don't yet have the technological capacity to put a large 
number of atoms exactly where we want to put them, and the position of the 
atoms is the only difference between a healthy body and a rotting corpse. 
We don't need a scientific breakthrough, we don't need new laws of Physics, 
we just need engineering on a scale previously realized only in nature.
                                                     
                                            John K Clark      

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