On 9/18/2018 1:00 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 12:04:25 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 12:52 AM Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<javascript:>> wrote:
/>Is that even relevant. Brains are presumably
psuedo-classical objects. But they can't be strictly
classical, so it seems likely that it is impossible to exactly
duplicate a brain. /
Brains can't be duplicated exactly nor can any physical object,
but mind is not a physical object and if mind works on digital
principles, and I think it must, then mind could theoretically be
duplicated exactly. If the duplication was not perfect, if it was
way way off then it COULD feel the split, the copy would say to
itself, "something just changed, I feel very differently than I
did 2 seconds ago", and he probably wouldn't like the change
because imprecise copies are usually (but not always) worse than
the original not better.
/> So there will be a quick diveregence at the quantum level
and that will eventually (30sec ?) be amplified to some
classical/computational difference. /
That's true but I don't see the relevance of randomness (aka a
event without a cause) if your talking about intelligence,
consciousness or self determination. It's as if on rare and random
times for no reason whatsoever a Turing Machine prints a 0 when
the rules say it should have printed a 1.
> /But no matter how great the difference there's no reason to
suppose "the split" will be "felt".
/
I agree, provided the digital data was copied perfectly or near
perfectly.
John K Clark
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/april13/rorty-041305.html :
"How did we ever get the notion of the mind as something distinct from
the body? Why did this *bad idea* enter our culture?"
[At] some point in prehistory, our ancestors got into the habit of
pursuing projects of social cooperation by making marks and noises at
each other so as to organize themselves, he said. "That turned out to
be a fruitful survival mechanism." Eventually our ancestors developed
social norms—such as if you grunted "p" you had to grunt "q," or else
explain why you didn't grunt "q"—which we call following the laws of
logic and making valid inferences, he added.
There was doubtless a genetic mutation somewhere in the background
that allowed this neat adaptive trick, he said. But "once that you've
seen that a certain neurological twist was necessary to get the
process of using marks and noises instead of force as methods of
enforcing social cooperation, you have given the only answer that
there is to be given to the question, 'What is the relation between
the mind and the rest of nature?'"
*The "mind" simply is the ability to engage in linguistic behavior,*
he said. "If you can talk about things, you can also think about
things. But you don't talk about things because you have first thought
about things. You didn't have any thoughts before you had language to
think the thoughts with."
I can imagine things like a play or a diagram without language. My dog
clearly has thoughts about things and even dreams. Octopuses have
curiosity. Rorty is kinda right but too simplistic. He seems to write
polemics instead of philosophy.
Brent
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