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

   





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