X-Message-Number: 8154 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: CRYONICS Re: CryoNet #8007 - #8013 Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 21:26:01 -0700 (PDT) Hi Mike (and everyone)! I know this is a bit tardy, but I've been working hard on something else (Updates) and now other than running them off and getting the paper needed to do that they're done. And so I can return to the discussion. The fundamental error Mike makes, and it is an error, though a very common one, is to believe that the interpretation his brain (and yes, my brain too) gives to the world IS the world. Patterns are not in the world, they are in our brains. And yes, mathematics IS universal --- in OUR science and OUR technology, both of which proceed from (guess what) our brains as they meet reality, which we inevitably see quite indirectly. There is nothing at all supernatural here. We simply have no reason to believe that OUR brains, with their ideas and reactions to the world, are the only ways in which an animal can understand the world well enough to act in it. Just how such an animal might be put together, in its brain(s), how it might be structured, is something we can only discover if and when we confront some other life form which has evolved quite independently of all earth life. (And yes, I personally believe that if such creatures exist they must be millions of light years away, not even in our local group --- or otherwise we would have never existed: they would have settled the Earth long before mammals came to dominate it). Yet whether such creatures can be found in the universe or not, the problem remains. We might, someday, from close study of how we work, come to realize that there are quite different possible ways in which a living thing, even what we would consider an intelligent living thing from its ACTIONS, might be put together. That would be fascinating too. One thing I would suggest to anyone following these conversations is that they read some of the later works of Wittgenstein. We work in such a way that symbols play a tremendously dominating role in all our thoughts, yet these symbols come from us, not from the world. To identify them with what we see is an easy mistake; after all, all the brain processing which goes on before or prior to our awareness of something goes on unconsciously. It is those symbols which ultimately, among their other productions, gave us our mathematics. I want to make clear further that I am NOT claiming that we simply imagine the world, or that our sense impressions are in any way arbitrary. It's not that we cannot see, but that our brain puts layers of interpretation on what we see when we do --- some from our theories of the universe, some from much more basic responses. We know most of all that we look at more than our own imagination when we see or feel something we did not expect to see or feel. Good or bad, that does not matter. And that lack of expectation comes directly from the fact that our theories, inherited or created, or given to us by education, do not always fit the world. But regardless of any theory we or some other creature may believe, we can ACT. It is that which provides the best test of intelligence: not whether someone can speak, but what they can do. We can make computers that will play with our symbols endlessly, but utterly fail to cope with the world when we give them a robot body and ask them to do so. Most of all, that is good grounds for believing that no matter how elaborate and involved, our symbolic structures --- the ones we read into the world --- are not enough. The robot must somehow be designed to interact with the world on a level different from symbols and theory. If it cannot, it fails my test --- the Donaldson test, so to speak (though I don't really claim much depth here). And it is that which makes me very skeptical of Turing's ideas, though I would say that they were quite brilliant --- for their time and place, which is not our time and place. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8154