X-Message-Number: 8256
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: On Waking
Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 23:24:13 +1000 (EST)

Hello folks, sorry to be away so long, but I've been having quite a time
here dealing with being through the looking glass. I suspect my
experience emigrating to the US may bear some slight resemblance to the
experience that some of us may enjoy (?) upon waking, so I think I
should provide a few notes while it's still fresh in my mind.

First, the things you'll recognise will trip you up far more easily than
the things that seem radically different. Familiar things will cause you
to make bad assumptions, and worse, your guts are determined to have you
act on those assumptions even when you can see rationally that they're bad.

Second, in the same vein, small things will bother you more than large things.
For example, one of the things that keeps taking me by surprise here is
salutation rituals; Australians favour an abrupt, even insolent, hello, but a
big warm goodbye; Americans, or at least Southern Californians, favour a big
warm hello, kind of "Hail fellow, well met", but a small, dismissive goodbye.
Until you get used to peoples' ettiquette, misconceptions about interest
and sentiment can easily derive from such small things.

Third, you will panic. By this I don't mean you'll "run in circles, scream and
shout", but that you'll make mistakes, and then your corrections will become
bigger mistakes - the more you try to correct, the deeper the troubles you
cause. For example, within 5 minutes of arriving here, I had managed to

- let my cats hide in the fireplace, covering them with soot
- pull them out again, tracking soot all over white carpets
- cover myself with soot attempting to dust them off
- stop up the toilet with a great wad of sooty toilet paper I'd
  tried to use to clean all and sundry
- overflow the toilet
- tip over a large bowl of water in the laundry
- tip over the cats' water bowl
- break the kitchen tap
- etc.

In short, Chaplin couldn't have made a better job of it. How? well, neither
fireplaces, toilets, laundries or kitchens here work quite the same way as
they do 12,000 miles away. Fireplaces have glass doors that cats can open;
toilets flush dramatically, and have no overflow pipe; kitchen taps don't have
knobs to turn, but levers to lift; drying machines have water bowls to cut
down the humidity. And melatonin is not a perfect cure for trans-hemispheric
jetlag ... everything I tried to do to fix matters was a new disaster.

Obviously, this small comedy isn't a patch on what can be managed with the
assistance of an internal combustion engine. Happily, being used to driving on

the other side of the street, I didn't attempt the use of same. I have, however,
twice narrowly escaped death crossing major streets looking the wrong way.

And I've spent many hours frustrating my wife, who does drive here, by
misreading maps: in Sydney, the ocean is in the east; in San Diego, the west.
In Sydney, highway exits to the west are on the left, and to the east on the
right of the highway; in San Diego, almost all exits are on the right of the
highway. Worst of all, roads are laid out logically here, so most navigation
is done by the compass, whereas Sydney roads are spaghetti, and can only
be navigated by understanding left and right. I understand the compass, in
theory, but I navigate by experience ...

Little things, but when they cost you half an hour and you're trying to be
prompt for business meetings, they no longer seem so little. They can be
very costly.

All these cautions should not mislead anyone about my attitude to my new home -
this is a truly marvellous city, more beautiful, varied and planned
than Sydney, full of gentle, helpful, well socialised people, and with great
surprises and delights around most corners. I am SO happy I made this move, I
can't tell you.

But my experience suggests some basic strategies to adopt on waking:

Distrust the familiar;

Move slowly, think twice, reserve your judgements and words - be VERY cautious;

When you find yourself making disasters, stop and let others help you;

Don't attempt to use any technology more powerful than a toothbrush without
adult supervision.

--

On the recent debate:

I'm with Charles on not understanding why this debate is going on.
Identity is hardly a physical property; it's a value judgement, and
that's the point of Turing - not that his test is somehow perfect, nor
that democracy can define intelligence - but rather that if the effect
of a mechanism is appropriate within a context, then the mechanism is
useful in that context. Is this person really intelligent, or really the
same as he was yesterday? Those are meaningless questions. All we can
say is that this person is useful, or useful in the same way as that
person.  This isn't a flaw in Turing, because Turing's test is a philosophical
illustration, not a falsifiable hypothesis.

I hate to agree with Perry :-) in this, but I think there are plain parallels
here with religion vs. agnosticism.  I said it some time back, but I'll repeat
it: the difference between self and other, or now and then, is nothing more
than the difference between left and right, or long and short. How long is a
piece of string? <==> What's my identity? 

Waking in the future, in a strange place, can we expect to preserve our
identity by our relation to the past? I feel that we can, so long as we
can still find use when we wake - even if that use is simply that
someone will play us in their toy universe like a kid listening to an
old 45.

--

On simulations, perfect or otherwise:

Plainly, the world we each construct in our heads is a simulation. It is not
the same as what's really going on, but it's sometimes a fair approximation.
To build a machine that can do the same, and then host uploads within this,
seems no more impossible than that humans can dream.

Dreaming, it seems to me, involves three essential mental facilities. The
first, and most obvious, is experiential: while dreaming, even lucidly, we take
the dream for reality, and act within it. The second is generative: we are
producing hypothetical scenarios within which to experience. The third is
critical: we choose series of events and, as per waking reality, force our
experiential facilities to endure them. The extent to which dreams work
depends on their internal consistency, not their relationship to waking
reality.

What is being simulated in a dream? Physics? Unless you are a physicist,
I don't think so. What is simulated is drama - just as people construct
their lives dramatically, so they test these constructions in dreams. To
simulate drama seems to involve little chance of an infinite regress of
simulation; timeouts on calculations, which I guess we experience as that
fog of ignorance and dispassion that surrounds our sensorium, can easily
limit the scope of the simulation.

Of course this doesn't help with the question about whether it was
Chuang Tse dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was
Chuang Tse :-)

Nevertheless, our simulations of the world, both waking and in dream, function
usefully in many contexts, and give us a tremendous biological advantage over
the other large species on the planet; so too, uploads may not inhabit a world
grounded in real physics, but one close enough to be useful enough to give them
a biological advantage over meat creatures ...

They might not be perfect, but they might be more perfect than us.

Peter Merel.

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