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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.i iQCzAgUBM2GA9n03wfSpid95AQF3yATwnVpbACot6vztpEiHmDDkX/mJeRWwks61 61/NNsvT1Lc0dv3WUKrN8WqYuVYLsRGwd2E8afcGy1Q/oXstzcQ/8li2kPt4MLF1 vb8voA1y+rsCnIMWj6dT0MHgbK5843DQrcnhQvYhOZh/lz5wCSbFT1aLWtibhjA1 f3ouW/rYeBqZMiRNTGsBK18Uw9/CCh05Nw6ahuG+1Yv1rGXW5so= =2B6L -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8141