X-Message-Number: 7924 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: reply.previous.cryonet.msgs Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 11:36:45 -0800 (PST) Hi! This is my reply to the LAST set of cryonet messages, not to this one. Apparently my net node has been fixed. Mike Perry might send a copy of this same reply, which need not be read. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Hi again! Here I go again, with a few minutes stolen from my current work on PERIASTRON. 1. Mike, the REASON why digital does not work is not mysterious. You are inevitably making a symbolic representation of a person if you use a digital computer. Neither of us is a symbolic representation; I do not need your recognition of me to be aware, nor vice versa. It is certainly also true that chaos will cause any such representation to behave differently from its original, I suspect in a very short time. This is because it cannot really start out with EXACTLY the same parameters as the real person. And ALL numbers used in a computer are symbolic representations, models of how numbers really behave. 2. We are not computers and when we normally think we are not computing. True, we can imitate computers, do arithmetic, and so on. But the difference is essential. I sit here thinking out what I am to say, as a description (very distant) of the physical state of my own brain. That physical state depends not just on mental entities such as numbers, but on the fact that something scratches my thigh, I hear a fan overhead, I feel a bit tired, and many other things. To say that we perceive would be more accurate, though of course we act on the world and thus change our perceptions. Computing of any kind occurs always within a system invented by human beings. Long ago we invented numbers, and have gone on from there into much complexity. But that system remains symbolic only, and its relation to reality comes not from anything intrinsic to it but because we human beings find it useful when considering reality. Some day we may even find some better way yet unimagined. For a long time there has been a strain of AI which assumed that if we can get our computer to handle all the symbols just right, it will become intelligent. And the programs such people created could indeed, in very restricted special cases, handle the artificial "reality" presented to them. Put them into the real world, and they crashed almost at once: too many parameters, too much computation. We are beginning to work our way out of that problem with hybrid devices such as neural nets, which are not programmed but learn from the stimuli presented to them. As real creatures we deal ALWAYS with events which can only be symbolized with difficulty... even when we do physics or math. And note the main feature of neural nets: they can recognize objects (say handwriting) which would be virtually impossible to characterize in any dictionary or with any set of symbols. (And note that I am not saying that artificial intelligence, or even just artificial awareness, is impossible. They are possible. It is just that you will no more get them through computation --- no matter how elaborate and extensive --- than you can swim to the Moon). 3. As for computers, yes, at best they can "just (clumsily) go through the motions". There seems to be an assumption here that the word "(clumsily)" which I interpolated should not be there. One of the philosophers on this question, discussing the Turing Test, proposed that we do the interrogation in Chinese (on a suitable keyboard) and on the other side of the wall there would be a person very highly trained from a Chinese dictionary --- not one giving English equivalents, just one giving Chinese definitions of Chinese words --- to pick out the proper ideographs in answer. That is, this person could play properly with all the symbols, but had not the vaguest idea what they might MEAN. (Yes, the person would have to be superhuman in a special way --- or perhaps a large and very fast computer. WE learn words by figuring out what they mean, and see when to use them because we live in the world and recognize various real events and their structure. The computer, however, does not do it that way at all -- so much the worse for the computer, which may have to do billions of machine instructions to work out the answer to "Good Day" in Chinese). If this computer is aware, I'd like to know just how and why it is aware. And even more important, what is it aware of? It certainly isn't aware of any conversation in the sense we are aware. I think of Mr. Lynch as aware basically because I believe that he has a physical structure and brain structure close enough to mine that he will have the same awareness (not of the same things) as I. Perhaps I am mistaken. Well, when I was less than 5 years old, I thought that the Santa Claus I saw at Christmas time was the real Santa Claus. It proves very little to say that I might be mistaken. Bedtime now. I am sure that none of you will be convinced. But good night. And long long life, Thomas Donaldson --AAA19616.859106116/blacklodge.c2.net-- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7924