X-Message-Number: 8141
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 21:20:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: CRYONICS The "Self Circuit" and other Phantoms

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In #8134    On Thu, 24 Apr 1997 Wrote: 
          
        >Yes, I am sure you are conscious because I know I am  conscious and 
        >I know that other people are very similar to me biologically 
         

Why do you think I'm a person or even biological? We have never met, the only  
thing you know about me are the sequences consisting of 26 Digital letters  
and 10 Digital numbers I have produced, and you say that's garbage. I could 
be an AI program, or a mutant cat dancing on my masters keyboard when he's at
work, or just a noisy telephone line that was lucky enough to produce a 
random signal that your computer interpreted as ASCII characters and you 
mistakenly interpreted as consciousness. OK, these theories are pretty 
bizarre, but you don't have enough information to prove any of them wrong, 
however you do have enough information to prove them silly. In the real world 
it's necessary to abandon the insistence of certainty and play the odds, 
and I know where I'm going to put my money.
         


        >It is not true that there is no possibility of proving that certain
        
        >changes in anatomy/physiology correspond to changes in subjective
                >experience. 
         
I profoundly disagree.
         
        >Suppose e.g. we do ascertain (by mammal studies) that certain        

        >modulations of certain potentials in certain regions of the brain
        
        >(NOT corresponding to sensory inputs) seem to affect subjective
                >experience in the experimental animals. 
         

Seem? You say seeming to be conscious is not good enough for you, 
it's garbage.



        >Suppose we satisfy ourselves that we can impose certain modulations
        
        >without harming the animal. We could then do it to you, and you
                >could tell us the result. 


Sure, I could flap my lips and make sounds with my mouth, but according to 
you the idea that it would tell you anything about what I'm really feeling  
is garbage.


        >Someone who didn't believe you could have it done to himself. 


No they could not. It's impossible to do exactly the same thing to my brain 
as is done to yours because my brain is different than yours, otherwise I'd 
be you not me. The difference might be quite small but it wouldn't need to be 
very big, after all, your self circuit has damn little to do. The self 
circuit has no effect on behavior, that's why The Turing Test is garbage, and 
Evolution is completely uninterested in it, so it might only take a very tiny 
thing, a subtle change here and there to render the self circuit completely
inoperable.  To make matters worse there would be no way to test for such a 
malfunction in others.                            

                                              John K Clark    

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