X-Message-Number: 3995
From: 
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 00:17:39 -0500
Subject: SCI CRYONICS  symbol/substance 2

Since fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and since I'm tired of doing
my "real" work tonight, let me try again to clarify symbols vs. substance.

Thomas Donaldson, John Searle, and many others have tried to  point out the
difference between syntax and semantics, and insisted that mere manipulation
of symbols cannot be all there is to thinking, if "thinking" includes
consciousness and feeling. Unfortunately, some of their allusions seem to
disregard the fact that external reality must, indeed, be represented somehow
as symbols in our brains; the fact that (disregarding some remote
possibilities) we can only "know" the world through symbols which represent
it through some kind of limited isomorphism.           

The uploaders, on the other hand--especially John Clark in recent postings on
Cryonet--insist dogmatically that symbol manipulation is, indeed, the only
important or characteristic thing that brains do--that mind is essentially
symbol manipulation, and that you ARE just a certain type or style or program
of symbol manipulation, together with a memory store. Unfortunately, they
never explain the basis of this assertion--how they know it to be true. When
pressed, they just wander off into examples of some types of brain activity
that could be explained in terms of symbol manipulation. If pressed hard
enough on how they explain feeling, they just retreat into a mantra or
statement of faith that it MUST be an "emergent" property of a sufficiently
complex symbol-manipulation program. (This despite the fact that, for all
they know, some very simple organisms may have feeling.)

Thomas Donaldson points out that what a can opener does has nothing to do
with symbol manipulation, and John Clark replies that people are not can
openers. I think Thomas is nearer right  than John. 

The world (in effect) consists of matter/spacetime AND information; some
functions or activities have more to do with one than the other.
Matter/energy in transformation or motion always involves, or can be thought
of as involving, transfers of information; but pure or abstract information
only "exists" in potential. The falling tree makes a sound (air and ground
vibration) even if no one is there to hear it; but numbers and arithmetic
operations have only a contingent existence--real in some sense, but not
independent. (Let's not get started on whether the laws of physics "exist"
apart from the matter or spacetime on which they operate or through which
they express themselves.)

John purports to rebut Thomas' can opener example by saying that a can
opener, or other inanimate object, "just reacts" (instead of processing
information in some computer-like way). What does that mean--"just react?" If
it means "just obeys the laws of physics," well, so do we, and so does any
physical computer. How can John know that the self circuit, the seat of
feeling, isn't more like a can opener than like a computer? 

Conceivably, a feeling (typically of pain or pleasure) could just be a
CONDITION or state of some part or aspect of the brain--just some special
configuration of chemistry and electromagnetics in the tissues...Of course,
this gets us into the very murky waters of continuity and its paradoxes,
whether experience could consist in a single state or whether a single
subjective experience could span states over time, and so on; but let's pass
that for now, since the same paradoxes arise, and in exacerbated form, in the
information paradigm.

Once more, perhaps the bottom line for at least the POSSIBILITY of
subjectivity being more than information processing is as follows: It is
surely conceivable that feeling and consciousness might require a
SIMULTANEOUS real-time confluence of conditions/events that no Turing tape
could provide.

Robert Ettinger



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