X-Message-Number: 14775
From: "John Clark" <>
Subject: Identity and stuff 
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 00:37:07 -0400

In  #14761   Wrote:

    >A standing wave is not a black box, only gray at this point.

It seems pretty black to me as you give absolutely no reason why
standing waves are more likely to create consciousness than
a birdbath or a hand puppet or any other of a infinite number of
things that exist in the universe.

    >I'm talking about reported feelings and observed internal brain activity.


I know you are, but reported feelings are not what's of interest, actual 
subjective
feeling is, and to investigate that you must assume the Turing Test works
most of the time. There is simply no alternative.


    >Very intense electric fields are used as capital punishment in some states.
    
Most people who have experienced electrical currents only slightly weaker and

survived have lost their short term memory but they don't feel like they've lost
their

identity. Well ok, they report they don't feel like they've lost their identity,
I assume

they're telling the truth. There was a story on the TV about a man who 
accidentally
touched a power line about a year ago, his arm was burned off, yet today he
seems to be doing pretty well, he sure doesn't look like a zombie to me.

    >Correlations between what is observed in the subject's brain, and what the
    >subject reports verbally, are unquestionably relevant


Yes, it's certainly true that brain activity can be correlated with the movement
of

the tongue,  but the state of a person's brain or tongue is of no interest to me
unless I can make a connection between that and his subjective experience.
There is one way and one way only of doing that, to assume intelligent behavior
is linked to consciousness.


I notice that  when a brain made of silicon says it's conscious and has emotions
you don't believe it, but when a brain made of meat says the same thing you do.

I would find that rather annoying If I were made of silicon, doesn't seem quite 
fair.

    >Yes, procedures to obtain approximate solutions are sometimes harder to
    >develop than procedures to obtain exact solutions.

Evolution must have found it easy to make structures like the limbic system in

our brain because it figured it out about 150 million years ago. The limbic 
system

seems to have a lot to do with fear, love, hate and sexual drive.  It's our 
grossly
enlarged neocortex that makes the human brain so unusual and so recent, it only

started to get ridiculously large about one million years ago. It deals in 
deliberation,
spatial perception, speaking, reading,  writing and mathematics. If nature came

up with feeling first and high level intelligence only much later, I don't see  
why the
opposite would be true for our computers.

In  #14765 david pizer <> Wrote:

    >Location has someting  to do with identity.


Location of what? Certainly not of the brain, by itself it has no way of knowing
its

position or velocity, it could be anywhere going anywhere. Nor has it any way of

detecting the passage of time, it could stop, restart, or even go backward and 
you'd

never know without some reference to the outside world. To make any sense at all

you have got to talking about the position of the brain's transducers, like 
eyes, ears,
and hands.


     >No *one* thing can be in two places at the exact same time in this 
     universe
     >that I know of yet.

Not strictly true according to quantum mechanics, but that's a small point.

Much more important is that I am not a thing, I am not a noun, I am a adjective.
I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John Clarkian way.

         John K Clark     

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