X-Message-Number: 8558
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 1997 21:10:06 -0700
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Photocopying Picasso

Thomas Donaldson writes,

>a Turing machine won't necessarily qualify for practical reasons. 

I don't believe anyone has proposed building a Turing Machine. 
The point of the TM discussion is that no evidence suggests brains
are not Church-Turing equivalent. If you've got such evidence, now
would be a good time.

>Since we are quite parallel ourselves,
>whatever we are uploaded into should also be at least as parallel. 

Parallelism can be emulated trivially on a serial machine; non-determinism,
however, cannot. It may be that our brains are non-deterministic to some
limited extent, but even if this is the case there seems nothing to 
preclude our building non-deterministic quantum computers of a 
similar capacity. So it's hard to see that this concern amounts to much.

Similarly on complexity: yes, execution time of algorithms is an area of
vital concern to engineers. Presuming the mush in our heads is executing
algorithms that would not be feasible to emulate in real time on a modern
computer, we'll have our quantum processors ready to handle the load in
due time. Determining the algorithms and building the QCs are tough 
engineering problems, sure, but only quibbles when it comes to feasibility.

>   We want to understand how brains work,
>   not just have speculations about it based on what we know of computing
>   We're going to have to get our hands dirty.

Yes, the more evidence we can gather about the way our brains work, the 
better we will be able to both specify and generalize alternative
implementations. But Minsky's book hardly detracts from such efforts, 
and neither does Minsky set out to detract from them, so what's the problem?

>   Even a little thought about real brains should convince most people that
>   they don't work like computers. [...]  I believe even the
>   notion of "computer" will have gone through so many changes that we can
>   forget about our contemporary machines in thinking about this issue. 
>   [...] Well, perhaps the problem there is that those who think it did 
>   a humanlike thing are the ones lacking a good idea of humanity

Um, that's fallacy ad populum, then "poisoning the well", followed by 
ad hominem. To clarify the well poisoning: we might well say that 
our notion of any theory at all will go through so many changes 
by some date that we can forget about contemporary results; that
doesn't discredit the results.

I understand you feel strongly on this issue, but let's keep it clean :-)

>But until we have a far better idea of just what a person is and how they
>work, and moreover, an idea proven by experiment, we aren't even at the 
>level of knowing what we want to do. 

You can take brains apart, analyze their chemicals, look at the 
interconnections between neurons, the number of dendritic branches,
the quantities of neurotransmitters, the firing patterns prompted by various
stimuli, etc. but this will get you no closer to understanding "a person" 
than a study of the mechanics of pigments, brushes, strokes, media and so on
will lead to an understanding of an artwork. 

Furthermore, though a study of pigments, etc. is necessary to construct
paintings of your own, to reproduce existing paintings a digital camera and 
output device are entirely satisfactory.

As to what to do, many of us understand ourselves sufficiently to adopt
the Merel Criterion as a standard; what uploaders want to do is plainly
to create a machine with which they can reproduce their minds to an extent 
that satisfies the MC. The MC doesn't tell us how to do it, of course.

>   I suspect those who want to come back
>   uploaded into a computer think of them as mythical entities capable
>   of many different things impossible otherwise. 

Oh yes, trying to do something that's not presently feasible, terribly 
silly. Chasing the moon, like those silly astronauts. Or like those 
silly cryonicists. Dangerous Loons, each and every one of them. :-)

Peter Merel.

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