On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:33 AM, Lawrence Crowell < [email protected]> wrote:
> >> So I take it you believe in the magical carbon theory, the idea that >> particular element has mystical properties that the element silicon lacks >> even though the scientific method can not see nothing of the sort. I think >> that theory is not only wrong it is lethal to those who adhere to it. > > > *It is not about believing anything.* Our beliefs determine our actions. For example: I believe my chances of surviving after my brain has been cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures is less than 100% and greater than 0%, but my chances of surviving after my brain has been burned up in a crematorium or eaten by worms is precisely 0%, so I signed up. You have not signed up so you must believe something different. > *> Our brains operate not just as switching systems of neurons, but > neurons are themselves biological.* Most of what neurons do has nothing to do with thinking or consciousness or any sort of information processing but just involves the dull basic metabolism needed to keep operating, the exact same thing that skin cells do, and kidney cells, and large intestine cells. > *> The real computer analogue I think extends down to the molecular level,* Maybe, although there is little evidence for that. Even if true I don’t see how that’s a show stopper, a combination of glutaraldehyde fixation and cryogenic storage should keep most molecular level information intact too, or at least keep it from being scrambled so chaotically that even a Jupiter Brain couldn’t unscramble it. > *> I think it is a very extreme proposition to advance the idea that > emulating a brain on silicon or similar solid state physics systems will > conserve consciousness.* I think it is a far far more extreme proposition to advance the opposite idea because the immediate implication would be that Charles Darwin was dead wrong. However important consciousness is to me to Evolution its irrelevant because Natural Selection can’t directly detect consciousness any better than I can directly detect consciousness in other people, but both I and Natural Selection CAN detect intelligent behavior. So consciousness must be a byproduct of intelligence. That’s why I get so impatient with consciousness theories that just ignore intelligence. After saying consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently there is nothing more to be said about consciousness. I suppose it could be argued that maybe Evolution just got lucky and came up with a sort of consciousness circuit by accident, but such a part would not be stable. Consciousness by itself confers no adaptive advantage, only intelligent behavior does, so even if consciousness emerged by pure chance millions of years ago today it would be long gone due to genetic drift, just as the eyes of creatures that have lived for thousands of generations in dark caves have disappeared. And yet here I am, and although I can’t prove it to you I know for a fact that I am conscious. So if the “consciousness circuit” does nothing but generate consciousness it would be gone by now, but if it changed behavior too then the Turing Test also works for consciousness and not just intelligence. Finally a critic could say that maybe Evolution came up with consciousness because it was the simplest path (but not the only path) to intelligence, but if so then we will also find it easier to make a intelligent conscious computer than a intelligent non-conscious computer. > *> I can very well imagine this could emulate the brain activity of a > person, but I think it is a bit much to voluntarily agree to death so your > brain can be uploaded in a machine.* I agree, I wouldn’t want to be the first, I’d rather wait until they worked out the bugs in the process; unless of course I was already on my deathbed and the only alternative was to be eaten by worms. > *> I suspect consciousness involves some sort of uncomputable Godel type > of number.* If so then its very very odd that nobody has even found a natural phenomenon that can solve a NP-hard problem in polynomial time, much less found a natural process that can solve uncomputable problems. Quantum Computer expert Scott Aaronson found a simple demonstration of this fact: *"taking two glass plates with pegs between them, and dipping the resulting contraption into a tub of soapy water. The idea is that the soap bubbles that form between the pegs should trace out the minimum Steiner tree — that is, the minimum total length of line segments connecting the pegs, where the segments can meet at points other than the pegs themselves. Now, this is known to be an NP-hard optimization problem. So, it looks like Nature is solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time!* *Long story short, I went to the hardware store, bought some glass plates, liquid soap, etc., and found that, while Nature does often find a minimum Steiner tree with 4 or 5 pegs, it tends to get stuck at local optima with larger numbers of pegs. Indeed, often the soap bubbles settle down to a configuration which is not even a tree (i.e. contains “cycles of soap”), and thus provably can’t be optimal.* *The situation is similar for protein folding. Again, people have said that Nature seems to be solving an NP-hard optimization problem in every cell of your body, by letting the proteins fold into their minimum-energy configurations. But there are two problems with this claim. The first problem is that proteins, just like soap bubbles, sometimes get stuck in suboptimal configurations — indeed, it’s believed that’s exactly what happens with Mad Cow Disease. The second problem is that, to the extent that proteins do usually fold into their optimal configurations, there’s an obvious reason why they would: natural selection! If there were a protein that could only be folded by proving the Riemann Hypothesis, the gene that coded for it would quickly get weeded out of the gene pool." * By the way I highly recommend Aaronson's book "Quantum Computing since Democritus". > *> I can see some plausible prospect of removing a brain or CNS from a > body and putting that in another body.* Or connecting your brain to a virtual body, in fact that could have already happened to you for all you know. And if you’re not already a brain in a vat you’re certainly a brain in a box made of bone. > *> Even there I suspect the experience might be terribly disorienting, as > bodies have a sort of "body brain," which involve a dog's brain worth of > neurons, and one would not just have a new body so much as you would > neurologically negotiate with the new body for a while.* So did Stephen Hawking die today or did he die in 1973 when he started to lose control of his body? I am not a world class athlete so if I woke up and found that had changed and now my body had the strength of a sumo wrestler the endurance of a marathon runner and the muscular coordination of a gold medal gymnast I wouldn’t be very upset. > *> I am not sure many of these things will happen. * Do you need to be certain of the outcome before you take any action? Suppose you were on a sinking ship in a hurricane and the radio is out so no SOS has been sent and you’re very far from the nearest land. There is a lifeboat but it's small and the waves are mountainous and the ocean is huge. So, would you get into the lifeboat? As for me I agree with Dylan Thomas and would rather not go gentle into that good night and would prefer to rage against the dying of the light. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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