X-Message-Number: 3721 Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 23:11:46 -0500 From: "Bruce Zimov" <> Subject: SCI.CRYONICS: Uploading John, I'm going to take the Ettinger route and avoid point by point comments on everything we disagree on or misunderstand each other on. Most of your points about interpretation are pretty old. See Quine WORD AND OBJECT, and Quine PURSUIT OF TRUTH. As far as identity goes, you've created a false choice between subjectivity as 2 objects, or as one process "written" twice. At the distances and momenta of 2 brains across the room from each other, the Quantum effects are not going to bail you out of the logical problem of identity. Plug the numbers into the equations and see for yourself. We exist now without an external interpreter, if we are only information then an external interpreter is required to "read" the processes. Since the definition of qualitative and numerical identity has been asked more than once, I reproduce it here from Parfit REASON AND PERSONS p.201: "There are two kinds of sameness, or identity. I and my Replica are qualitatively identical, or exactly alike. But, we may not be numerically identical, or one and the same person. Similarly, two white billiard balls are not numerically but may be qualitatively identical. If I paint one of these balls red, it will not now be qualitatively identical to itself yesterday. But the red ball that I see now and the white ball that I painted red are numerically identical. They are one and the same ball. We might say, of someone, 'After his accident, he is no longer the same person'. This is a claim about both kinds of identity. We claim that he, the same person, is not now the same person. This is not a contradiction. We merely mean that this person's character has changed. This numerically identical person is now qualitatively different." As for the Turing test, EEG tests can be more indicative of conscious brain activity than behaviour, and I believe we should develop EEG-like techniques to apply to computer neural networks to measure their collective effects. I have done this with small neural networks and have identified epileptiform and non-REM sleep states, but no wake states, or REM sleep. The negative result so far is either due to scale, viz. too few neurons, or organization, i.e. less randomly connected. I also think that EEG traces should be run on brains in cryonic suspension to try to detect the existence of any super-conducting eddy currents, their half-life, and path at those low temperatures, to either measure degradation over time, or detect low-temperature brain activity due to electron-coupling in Cooper pairs. Bruce Zimov Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3721