X-Message-Number: 13014 Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 01:31:20 +0200 From: Stasys Adiklis <> Subject: Reply to Ettinger about uploading Hello, This is my first post to cryonet (i've been hanging here for about a year now). If I find some free time i'll itroduce myself later. Also, I would like to apologize for my poor English. > Anything that such a computer can do, a human mathematician can do also, in > principle--or could, if he lived long enough and had a very, very large > supply of pencils and paper, assuming he knew the laws of physics, and if he > had enough detailed information as a starting point. Lets assume that this mathematician simulates the brain and body, but all the "surrounding world" information takes from the real world. If this mathematician is fast enough - he works with his pencils and paper in "real-time" - you'll be able to talk about life and family to that "virtual" mind in that virtual brain. (Just a replacement of biological brain to artificial one - "uploading" or should i say - the formation of mind in an artificial brain). To put it short - i'm not interested in the insides of brain - be it biological neurons, silicon, optics or any other "mathematician". If the information being processed by that brain comes to it from real-world - there is no reason to believe that the mind is fake. Oh yes - there _is_ one "real" reason - religion :-) Also, consider a perfect human-machine interface. "The cinema" but not in our current primitive way, but wires attached to nervous system and sending signals to it in a perfect way. The real human won't have a chance to distinguish this simulated world from a real one. The "world" will be fake, but his feelings - _real_. > Further, he wouldn't have to work with the data pertaining to real people and > their environment. He could make people up, using the possibilities in DNA > and in the world. He could "play God," because--if the uploaders are > right--the mere fact of his writing down these sets of numbers would > CONSTITUTE the creation of these people and their world. (This is just > slightly reminiscent of Hubbard's "Typewriter in the Sky.") > > Let that soak in. A computer, running a simulation, just generates sets of > numbers. If they (or some subset of them) are the right numbers, then > supposedly they not only represent the future history of people and their > environment, but they CONSTITUTE living, feeling, thinking people in a world > that is fully real to them. > > Do you believe that, if you write down the right successive sets of numbers > on yellow foolscap, you will create living, feeling, thinking people? > > If this makes any impression on any uploaders, I would be grateful to be > informed. You just mixed those two cases in one. You now have artificial world with artificial minds, and those minds don't even have a clue that their world is "somewhat" fake... Uploading is not about creating fake minds or fake world. It's just about replacing one real biological brain to another real artificial brain. If you won't destroy the original body/brain you'll have perfect twins (psychologicaly). Of course, only at that very first initial moment after copying. It's just a replacement of MATTER, not INFORMATION (mind). At the end of my post you'll see what i mean here. > The computer would be generating sets of numbers corresponding to earlier > and earlier quantum states of the subjects and their environment. > Would the subjects then be "living" in reverse? What would that feel like? I don't know. Any volunteers to find out? :-) About parallel/sequential. On one hand - computers are parallel. You have various parts working (CPU, graphics processor...) in parallel. Also, inside CPU you have millions of transistors working in parallel. Blue Gene will have processors (computers, to be precise, cause these processors have individual, independent memories. cpu + memory = computer) working in parallel. On another hand - brain is sequential :-) Read on: === http://www.eetimes.com/story/technology/advanced/OEG19990908S0001 Verdict is in: brain is serial image processor By R. Colin Johnson EE Times (09/08/99, 10:48 a.m. EDT) IOWA CITY, Iowa - Since the emergence of machine vision in the 1960s, debate has raged over whether a parallel or serial architecture is best. Researchers modeling visual processes in the brain observed parallelism in neural structures, but didn't know enough about how visual information was being represented to resolve the issue. Now University of Iowa researchers say they've solved this vision research question: Does the brain operate in parallel or serially? "We are the first research group to show definitively that the human brain processes images serially-paying attention to only one object at a time and shifting rapidly from object to object," said University of Iowa professor Steven Luck. According to the new insights, the brain does perform many tasks in parallel, such as muscle coordination for walking in the park while simultaneously listening to birds chirping. These are cognitive operations that involve separate processing on different types of data. For such diverse tasks it is clear that the brain does operate in parallel. But when it comes to tasks involving similar data items, the brain appears to time-division multiplex, that is, focus its attention on one object at a time so quickly that the conscious mind is not aware of it. "It's counterintuitive because it seems to our conscious mind that we are comparing objects simultaneously, but we now think that the brain's parallelism is similar to a computer's-that is, a computer has millions upon millions of simultaneously acting transistors, but at the functional level it is operating serially-one instruction at a time," Luck said. The new theory says that the brain operates the same way at the functional level; it processes information serially, even though the underlying neural hardware is operating in parallel. Luck was able to determine whether the brain's processing was parallel or serial through an experiment he performed in 1994. This experiment identified a pattern in brain waves known as N2PC, which stands for the second negative peak (N2) of the posterior contralateral (PC). The N2PC identifies the location of brain waves as emerging from either the right or left side of the brain. By arranging the experimental situation, Luck was able to use N2PC to identify whether a person was processing visual signals one at a time or simultaneously. He enlisted the help of graduate student Geoffrey Woodman to perform the experiment and study the collected data. The experimental setup presented to subjects a landscape-shaped display of different colored blocks, most of which were black except for a red block on the left side and a green block on the right. The subjects were instructed to find the block with a nick in it and told that it was probably red but could be green. Those instructions allowed subjects to either process all blocks in parallel, focus their attention on just the red and green blocks simultaneously or search for the correct block in the same order each trial-that is, red, then green, then black. "It was important that we knew the order in which they paid attention to the colored objects, because the N2PC works by correlating the brain waves coming from each side of the brain over many statistical trials, so we had to always have them search in the same order," Luck said. By observing the brain activity of the subjects performing the search and recognizing tasks using N2PC, Luck and Woodman discovered that the brain turned its attention from one block to the next at intervals of about 1/10th second. "There wasn't a single subject that did the task in parallel," Luck said. ===== About information. > Yet again: If I write down on paper a quantum mechanical description of a > water molecule, have I created a water molecule? As far as I can see, all I > have done is store information which could help me or someone else think > about water molecules and describe their behavior. I have not--in any > sense--changed the amount of water in the universe. Put your ideas to the web and let hundreds of people to read them. Now your ideas are multiplied and are "spinning" in hundreds of brains, but the amount of matter has not changed in the universe. How this can be? :-) Water is matter, information is not. Information is patterns not matter. Just think about it being trasferred from your keyboard to memory, to cpu, to modem, to network medium, to satellite system, to... Matter basis is of course necessary for that information to exist. But changing of a pattern IN PAIR with the interpreter of that pattern does not destroy the logical link between them. All the coolness of information (your brain is processing INFORMATION, it does not have any mechanical function as your heart, bones or any other organ) is that it is not bind to any matter in any sense. You can draw a pattern "2" on any surface you like... you can transfer bits on any kind of network medium... information survives. Whatever means of information storage and processing the brain uses, be it electricity, chemistry, mechanical interaction, it can be replaced by any kind of matter. It's information, NOT matter is important. > If Corbin were very gradually changed into a frog, would the end result > still be Corbin? [skipped a bit] I'm not familliar with those characters, but i'll answer. If you (computer disk) were dissolved in acid, would the end result be you (disk) or acid? ;-) Acid is the right answer. > Continuity-even if truly achievable-is not the same as identity. Think about INFORMATIONAL continuity, not material: If info on disk would be copied to (you may fool-around with than info if you wish - send it to satellite wirelessly or write down on paper and let someone else to type it back to a file...) CD it would survive. If mind on brain would be copied to another brain it would survive. Any speculations about "standing waves", "self-circuits" and such should be cut-out by Occam's razor without any sentiments. Daniel Crevier does a good job on this in his #13009 post. Hope this will change your mind, Ettinger. I hope your neural net is still capable to change (it's not a time to grave yet ;-) Just kidding. A joke. I hope to see Your answer. I hope to find out who is right. I'm prepared to change my net. And you? Again, exuse me mine poor English. Bye. -- ICQ: 43912181 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13014