X-Message-Number: 8526 Date: Tue, 02 Sep 1997 23:00:16 -0700 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Sorry to come in late but I just got off a plane. >The _only_ thing a computer does is flip switches. A computer flips switches in response to events in its environment, and directly affects its environment via various devices too. Computers, in their environment, are constantly growing, interconnecting, proliferating and sharing information. Flipping switches is their fundamental, but not necessarily their most significant activity. Ignore their interactions with their environment, and you may as well have no computer at all. Turing knew this, of course; a Turing machine has an infinite paper tape to distinguish it from some lowly FSM. Without the infinite tape all the fundamentals of Computability theory, including the general halting problem, could not be deduced. Whether your hangup is switches, bits, or flashing lights, if you ignore the environment that affects and is affected by a computer, you're not considering a really truly Turing-equivalent device. [...] >No, our minds are not tools. WE are the ones who will things, and >choose things. We design our tools to do for us what we want. That we do fabrication and programming work for computers does not suggest that they cannot become vehicles for our minds. On the contrary, this use is itself a kind of uploading: Here we come perilously close to cryonet's bane, and that makes us nervous. The wretched question of identity has generated so much more heat than light, we press lightly on the keys for fear of waking the beast. Let us leave the unanswerable question - whether identity lies in the abilities, the essence, or the context, and stick to the facts. There is a perceived difference between the natural and artificial; this difference cannot be quantified, and so is worthless in the world of fact. I think Most cryonetters will recall Heinlein's epigram on this: "The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" -- but beavers and their dams are." In the world of fact, Turing's test is not the philosophical vagary detested by so many here. The Turing Test provides us with a real litmus for determining the success of an upload: if the upload is adequate to give its original no reason to think that it is not his equivalent, then it is a success, so far as he is concerned. Isn't that the whole point of the exercise? Thomas suggests that it is by our will that we may distinguish ourselves from computers. But a lack of will would be a glaringly obvious flaw in any upload. Even in our new world-beating chess computers a lack of strategic and purposeful thinking would be fatal. But there is more to this. The embittered Gary Kasparov remarked of his first loss that Deep Blue was constructed specifically to match *Kasparov* in chess, and that therefore it was not the general chess powerhouse it seemed. If we credit this, perhaps it is fair to think that, at least in part, Deep Blue is the first successful upload? Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8526