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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14775