X-Message-Number: 3854 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet #3846 - #3850 Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 13:51:58 -0800 (PST) More on uploading for Mr. Clark: 1. If you include everything that our brains do in "information processing". what you say is valid. But of course that means that an internal combustion engine does "information processing", trees do "information processing",even a rock (in a sense: think of all the molecules in the crystal structure) all do "information processing". Well, OK, if that's to be your definition. Don't be surprized, though, if others mistake your meaning. 2. The moths flying into light are an illustration of the speed with which adaptation occurs, not the opposite. It's only recently that we had so much energy at our disposal that lights became a danger to moths. No doubt with time they will evolve away from that. As for the "poor" abilities of evolution, I assume you have heard of genetic algorithms? One major reason people downmouth evolution comes from the fact that all those animals and plants out there evolved to propagate themselves. They did not evolve to serve our purposes: and so some people get frustrated with them. As for electronics, I wasn't speaking against electronics at all: the point was that it simply did not turn out to be the exclusive way animal neurons send messages to one another. It behooves you then to wonder why that is so. (Just as a help, chemical messages seem to play the largest role in making more long term changes than electrical ones, which seem to work mainly for very short term events). But just because evolution has not produced things to suit OUR values is not a reason to believe that it is ineffective. 3. What you MAY want to say when you talk about uploading is that someday we human beings will be able to do better. I'd even agree. And redesign ourselves to suit better our present purposes, too. I doubt, though, that any computers we use then will have very much resemblance at all to those we use now... and they may differ so drastically that someone schooled in computer science (of today) would have trouble even seeing that they were computers at all. All such notions of computer tie us in to a particular time and place, which is fast disappearing. Computers once were design (a la Turing and von Neumann) to do many "information processing" jobs, of great variety. That is slowly disappearing, now, as our computers grow more powerful for particular jobs and more adapted to them along the way (it's one of the changes parallel computing has brought). Nor do I believe that silicon has a really long lifespan ahead of it in computers. The two best alternatives right now are optics and biochemistry, with macromolecular chemistry a close third. And if computers no longer behave alike, then the whole notion of information processing, which after all came from computers, will disappear too. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3854