X-Message-Number: 9287
Date:  Sun, 15 Mar 98 16:58:17 
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #9283

Bob Ettinger has raised concerns about whether an emulation of 
a person or persons, in some type of computational
device, would be able to 
experience feelings and consciousness like "real" persons. 
The emulation might be done in any of a large variety of devices, all 
assumed to be of an information-processing nature, i.e. computers.
To satisfy me, though, it would 
have to be a "sufficiently good" emulation. I'm not sure what would 
be "sufficiently good" but would provisionally accept modeling, 
particle by particle, at the quantum level. This, I think, could even 
be done by a classical Turing machine on a simple, 1-dimensional 
tape, slowly working its way back and forth over who-knows-how-much 
time, keeping track of a multidimensional environment of enormous 
complexity. (This, of course, is presented as a thought experiment, 
not a practical project!) The whole emulated system, it appears could 
adequately be described, for an arbitrary finite time interval,
by a very long, finite but growing, string of bits. The 
machine would "emotionlessly" simply change one bit (at most) at a 

time, sequentially. I submit that persons modeled in such a system would 
experience 
genuine emotions, again, if the modeling was accurate enough. I don't 
see that individual particles--electrons, quarks, and 
photons--have "emotions" either, yet we who are made up of them do. 
Emotions and consciousness seem clearly emergent properties, that can 
be supported by an emotionless substrate. The emulator and emulatee 
are quite different things. Especially, I think, when we are talking 
about absolutely enormous amounts of processing--perhaps 10^60 or so 
bit-changes per emulated second!

In particular, I should be able to talk to an emulated person, by 
bringing about appropriate changes on the Turing tape and waiting to 
see what further changes the patient emulator-machine makes over 
time. (We could also allow other changes in the tape inscription to 
be made from the outside, to model other "outside" interactions, and 
the Turing machine itself might be probabilistic to model 
randomness.) If I 
talked to an emulated person, say, and asked "How do you 
feel, George?" and the reply was "Not bad, though the weather has been rainy 
of late here, and I have a slight cold, which is beginning to annoy me," 
and over a long period asked many other such questions and got 
reasonable answers, and was asked reasonable questions in turn,
and found certain other appropriate features,
it would seem reasonable that I was addressing a 
being with real feeling.  I would think then that "there is a quantum of 
consciousness in every bit that flips"--and in fact this is how I do 
think.

Bob asks, somewhat in relation to the emulation scenario, if a 
description of a picture would BE the picture. But I think this 
overlooks who is assumed to be looking at the picture. A picture in 
one isomorphic domain will be represented very differently in another 
one. If you "belong" in one of those domains, and you "see" a 
representation from the "wrong" domain, it may not look or seem at 
all like what you think it should.

Though it would take more argument than I reasonably have space for 
here, I don't think it's foolhardy to commit to the "info view" and 
have done so, provisionally of course, in my recently completed book.
 
Mike Perry 

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