X-Message-Number: 8115
Date:  Mon, 21 Apr 97 01:06:48 
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: CRYONICS Values, Emulation

Bob Ettinger, #8111, wrote:

>I see I still haven't made my point about values clear to 
>Mike Perry, and therefore no doubt to many other people.
>
>My contention is that VALID values are not arbitrary--in 
>general, if you start from solid premises (your own 
>anatomy/physiology and history) and apply logic and a 
>sound knowledge of natural law (physics), then 
>disregarding borderline cases you will always find one 
>value or set of values, or one goal or set of goals, to be 
>correct while the others are incorrect (or less correct). The 
>basic criterion is the desired maximization of personal 
>satisfaction over future time, with the obvious necessity 
>of appropriately discounting potential gain in the distant 
>future relative to the near future.

I find myself, despite my somewhat lengthy dispute to date 
over this issue, in basic agreement here. In par-
ticular, I am not a moral relativist. I think that, for impor-
tant questions, best answers can be found by diligent 
inquiry and careful consideration of all relevant issues. 
A great many factors may have to be taken into account
beyond what would be considered for a typical
"scientific" problem, however. We cannot 
resolve the question of whether solipsism ought to be 
accepted merely by making measurements, for example.
This is true too of the closer-to-home question of whether
memories are (or ought to be considered) important for survival.


On the emulation question, I can now see an issue too that 
I've overlooked. We have been considering various prop-
erties of possible systems that emulate other systems. 
To "emulate" means to have behavior that is equivalent or 
isomorphic in some sense. In particular some of us have 
been advocating that a person could be emulated in a 
digital device. In this case the emulation would be equiva-
lent to the original down to the point of having actual, 
comparable mental states or feeling. (This position basi-
cally is strong AI.) One argument for this has 
been that, based on the Bekenstein bound, etc. a function-
ing person can be described at the quantum level by a finite 
state machine. So a big enough computer could carry out 
an exact simulation--an emulation--of a person for a finite 
amount of time. (We can also include any finite portion of 
the environment we want in this, the whole Milky Way 
galaxy, for instance.) It seems reasonable to some of us that 
such an emulated person would experience real feelings, 
just as they would seem to be doing, independently of the 
device doing the emulating, while others (Bob Ettinger for 
instance) raise doubts.

A possible counterargument to the emulationists, supporting 
Ettinger, would be that a process that emulates another one 
in terms of quantum states still may not capture every 
feature, and in particular features that in some way are 
undetectable, such as subjective states. That is, unless two 
processes are exactly alike, a doubt could be raised whether 
they are equivalent in ways we can never directly observe, 
such as reproducing the same feelings. Our digital process-
-a functioning person viewed at the quantum level--may in 
reality be only a "digitally-guided" process. By this I mean 
that a digital description of the process would exist, from 
which we could construct a replica process that would 
exhibit all the characteristics of the original. (In this case 
we would achieve this by actually making another con-
glomeration of atoms in the same quantum state and letting 
it run or somehow causing it to go through the same succession
of quantum states.) On the other hand, the process would
have a "non-digital residue" that would be necessary for the
subjective states, and would not be guaranteed to be replicated
in an emulation even though correct at the digital level. In other 
words, any digital system whose observable states were in
one-to-one correspondence with the original, despite its
equivalence in that sense, would not necessarily have an
equivalent residue, and thus might not reproduce the same
subjective states.

If this "non-digital residue" sounds like a form of vitalism, 
I agree. I think it is probably a chimera and I remain an 
advocate of strong AI and an emulationist, but I'll allow 
that it hasn't been disproved. Moreover, I think it is a 
different idea from the more usual "spiritual" concepts that 
sometimes are cited against cryonics. For instance, some-
one may object that even if the frozen body is restored to 
perfect health and the brain is fully functional, the original 
person would be gone because "the soul has already left the 
body." Clearly this "residue" is not a "soul" in that sense. 
Whatever it would be, it must be present when the same 
atoms (or identical other atoms) are present in the same 
configuration and condition--and presumably nearby
configurations and conditions would reproduce it with high fidelity 
too. So it, or something close, would reappear upon resuscitation
from a frozen state, if successful in the usual medical sense.


Mike Perry

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