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

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