X-Message-Number: 9289
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 19:52:41 -0800
From: "Joseph J. Strout" <>
Subject: Re: story telling
In Message #9283, Robert Ettinger <> writes:
>Once more, the info folk claim that an emulation of you (and your activities
>and environment) in a computer would BE you (and your world). Never mind that
>the computer may only be a Turing tape, with nothing happening physically
>except a tape jerking along with marks made and unmade on squares of the
>paper.
It seems that you're trying to make this view look ridiculous, by proposing
a ridiculous implementation of it. Similarly, in the days when a few
scientists were trying to denounce vitalism, a vitalist might have argued:
"These mechanist folk claim that a living, breathing person is really
nothing more than a collection of tiny machines, and that any appropriate
collection of machines and mechanisms can be considered alive. Never mind
that the machines involved may be only steam boilers, and levers, and
wooden gears creaking along like some dusty grandfather clock."
I really think the argument today about the nature of consciousness (and,
by corollary, personal identity) is quite analogous to the argument decades
ago about the nature of life. It seemed obvious to everyone at the time
that living things were fundamentally different from nonliving ones; living
creatures were animated with a life force that could depart, never to
return. The notion that there was no such life force, that creatures are
"simply" molecular machines obeying the laws of chemistry, seemed quite
absurd.
Today, it seems obvious to most people that conscious creatures are
fundamentally different from nonconscious things; that we are gifted with
some mystical quality ("soul", "self circuit", etc.) that a functionally
identical construct might not have. The notion that there is no such
mystical quality, that we are "simply" very complex information processors,
seems absurd to some:
>For many readers, this info faith is so ridiculous as not to require any
>counterargument, and these readers will wonder why sensible people even bother
>to talk about it.
And yet, like the mechanistic (vs. vitalistic) viewpoint, this "ridiculous"
faith is quite likely true, despite the intuitive notions many readers may
have.
>Now my new (?) analogy or slightly different attack tack. "A picture is worth
>a thousand words." But are a thousand words--or a million--as good as a
>picture? Would a lot of appropriate words, taken together, CONSTITUTE a
>picture?
It would -- consider, for example, the wedding picture stored on my hard
disk. It is merely a large collection of 8-bit words. Each word (byte)
specifies a bit of information about the picture. When these are displayed
in the proper form and in the proper sequence, I can clearly see that they
constitute a picture. If they are displayed in a different form (e.g., a
table of numbers), this is less obvious, since my sensors are not prepared
to accept visual data in that form. To another visual perceiver, such as a
computer, the raw numbers might work just as well.
>Story telling! If I could tell your story with enough detail and fidelity,
>that story would BE YOU and your experience, according to the info paradigm.
I think this is incorrect, or at least absurd. If you spent a few million
years accurately describing the position, character, and attributes of
every synapse in my brain -- and if this were all recorded -- then I agree,
the description would constitute me, just as my frozen brain in a dewar or
the same information on a backup cube constitutes me. It would be an
*inactive* me, however, just like a frozen cryonics patient. (It would
also be an incredibly dull story -- "data stream" would be a better
description than "story".)
We are data, but we are only active, conscious beings when we are, well,
active and conscious. That means emulating all the normal brain processes.
You, as a human story teller, could not hope to do that if you lived to the
end of the universe. A very powerful, special-purpose computer could
probably do it -- but then, it's not telling a story. It's emulating a
person.
The trouble with the reductio ad absurdum argument is that it is easy to
make nearly anything sound absurd, if you reduce it to a situation that
could not possibly take place. In this case, telling a story so accurately
that it constitutes a complete brain emulation. If you could reduce the
information paradigm to a cow jumping over the moon, it would be no more
ridiculous than this!
Best regards,
-- Joe
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| Joseph J. Strout Department of Neuroscience, UCSD |
| http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/ |
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