X-Message-Number: 14875 Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2000 23:52:44 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Turing Tome, Immortality, Consciousness Bob Ettinger writes in #14842 (as noted by Lee Corbin, #14865): > >Let me repeat my Turing Tome counterexample, in part, >with a slightly different emphasis. Imagine a huge book, >containing code for a person and his lifetime (or a large >segment of it, including his environment). Is the book >alive? Does it have feelings? Is anything happening? >It must be alive and feeling, if you believe that isomorphism >is everything. And you can't escape by saying the program must be running >in an active computer. If isomorphism is good enough for >space and for matter, why isn't it good enough for time? One thought is that the Turing Tome could never isomorphically model immortality (or an immortal being) because it would have to be an infinite record. (That is, an infinite amount of experience, meaning an infinite amount of information, would have to figure in a reasonable notion of immortality, by my criteria, which are also echoed in Tipler's book.) By appearances, such is impossible in our universe--any constructible record would have to be finite. It might grow with time, but that would make it part of an active process, not just a static record. So in this case time must be modeled with time--space alone won't do--and I would say it's far and away the most important case, if immortality itself is possible in our universe. More generally, in confronting the Turing Tome problem (and somewhat echoing thoughts that Lee makes in his posting), I find myself fallling back on intuition. Suppose I could engage in some reasonable interaction with a being who seems conscious both on external behavior and internal states which map isomorphically to states of a system that I already accept as conscious (e.g. a normal, functioning brain). Then I see no reason not to accept the being as conscious *in my universe*, or perhaps I should just say, relative to my frame of reference, whatever it might be. Clearly I can't interact this way with a book (or what appears as a book or static record, relative to my frame of reference), though I might well do so with a computer program, especially a sophisticated one of the future. But it will not be necessary to answer the question of what attributes of consciousness we should, must, or must not attribute to the book to decide whether an active system such as a non-meat computer is conscious. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14875