X-Message-Number: 9292
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 18:39:37 +0300 (MSK)
From: Eugene Leitl <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #9283

the epic battle continues...

On Sun, 15 Mar 1998, Robert Ettinger wrote:

> First, I misspoke (or miswrote) myself in a post yesterday, saying
> Donaldson noted that parallel processors are better than sequential
> processors for recursive functions. Actually, he said that recursive
> functions must be

Evaluating recursive function has really got very little to do with
efficient cognition. Ok, in a pinch one could do a bit with lambda
calculus.

> handled sequentially. But the main point was that Turing computers are
> sequential, hence tend to be slow and unable physically to do more than one
> thing at a time. 
> [...]

Right. Sufficiently slow as to be useless.

> Once more, the info folk claim that an emulation of you (and your
> activities and environment) in a computer would BE you (and your world).

I'd like to point out that the 'info folk' crowd contains quite a lot of
nontheoretical scientists, not just nerdoid geeky freaks without a life. 
In regards of the emulation 'being you', it would depend on your
'youbeingness' metric.  Which measurement procedure have you had in mind? 

> Never mind that the computer may only be a Turing tape, with nothing
> happening physically except a tape jerking along with marks made and
> unmade on squares of the paper. Because an isomorphism or correspondence

This is a theoretical construct, as unimplementable as Searle's Chinese
Room. In theory, it would work. In practice, it would not. In theory,
mermaids could exist. In practice, I've never met one.

> can be shown between the marks and their changes on the one hand, and
> you and your changes of state on the other, the "information paradigm"
> requires that the tape "person" be considered just as real--just as
> conscious and feeling--as the flesh and blood person. 

If the duck is emulated well enough, I could as well roast and eat it.

> For many readers, this info faith is so ridiculous as not to require any
> counterargument, and these readers will wonder why sensible people even

It is interesting, inasmuch that sense of something being ridiculous has
shown itself to be constructive in the truth finding process. Horseless
moving coaches are ridiculous. Stones falling out clean blue skies is
ridiculous. A backpack carried device levelling a small city is
ridiculous. Mining water on the Moon is ridiculous. Playing silly spelling
games with xenon atoms is ridiculous.  Reversible cryosuspension is
ridiculous. 

> bother to talk about it. Part of the answer is that the paradigm does
> have some plausibility and some very bright people believe it. I don't
> even claim to prove it is wrong--only that it is highly suspect, not to
> put too fine a point on it. 

Relativistic physics is also highly suspect. You GPS handheld won't get a
position fix without taking it into account, nor would Mercury's
ephemerides be accurate, nor a particle accelerator work. I could go on,
but you probably got the general idea. 

> Now my new (?) analogy or slightly different attack tack. "A picture is worth
> a thousand words." But are a thousand words--or a million--as good as a
> picture? Would a lot of appropriate words, taken together, CONSTITUTE a
> picture?

I guess you mean a real, not a metaphorical picture.
 
> Surely I could, in principle, look at a photo or painting and then,
> laboriously, describe it in words, in as much detail as desired--as much

> detail as the eye and brain can discern.  I could write down this description,
> or I could just say it aloud. Would my description BE the picture? 

You are mixing the description levels. Your description put through a
suitable interpreter would make sense. The interpreter can be of arbitrary
complexity. A digital blob, consisting of a picture's bump map together
with the pixel values fed into a (hypothetical, since requiring drextech) 
phased array optics beamer would be indistinguishable from an original by
human sight alone. The same data fed into an (equally hypothetical, since
requiring molecular electronics, and an upload in working condition) 
artificial reality renderer resulting in the equivalent picture appearing
on the simulated retina, the simulated spikes traveling along simulated
axons activating according simulated representational subsystems until the
simulated you saw the picture. Not simulated picture, picture. Would I
tweak your realworld sensorics with (hypothetical, of course) Utility
Fogs, I could make you see, feel and smell whatever image I like. In fact
I already did, and faked you memories conveniently. Actually, the real
Ettinger never existed -- it's all has been a hoax, and I apologise to all
parties for the inconvencies. 

> Now jump from the photo to a video, and then to an actual living person
> and his environment. In each case, in principle, a sufficiently powerful
> being might describe the person or scene and the action in as much
> detail as desired. The realization of this could be the usual

The description alone is insufficient, unless the description also
encompasses time. You are confusing the self model of the thing with the
thing itself. You are living in an artificial reality, a product of your
senses. You are not a tethered tissue baloon, swimming in liquor in a dark
cranial cavity, aren't you? You could no more perceive the 'true' reality
with your senses than the scientists with his devices. You both are
restricted to work model level.

In fact I am God, and am dreaming you, the stones, skies, and the
butterflies. 

> super-computer, with the "description" being the successive internal
> states of the computer; or it could be words on paper; or it could be
> words spoken in the form of a story. 

The description form is really meaningless.

> Story telling! If I could tell your story with enough detail and
> fidelity, that story would BE YOU and your experience, according to the
> info paradigm.  And then I could change the story, or embellish it, give
> it happy or tragic twists, by changing the environment. And YOU
> [according to the info folk] would enjoy or suffer those experiences! At
> least, you would do so in the same sense [with just as much reality]
> that a flesh and blood construct, initially just like you, would have
> those experiences in those environments.

Of course you are living in just such a story, told by me. Feel free to
prove me wrong.

> This reductio ad absurdum seems pretty devastating to me, so why don't I
> claim it is a proof that the info paradigm is wrong? Because there
> remain unresolved "philosophical" questions about the nature of reality

Maybe we should dump philosophy together with argumentation and just see
who turns out right? If cryonics does not work we also won't get too
disappointed with our nonbeing. Can it be, a no-lose proposition?

> and criteria of survival. We just don't know enough yet. But I think we
> do know enough so it should be recognized as foolhardy to commit to the
> info view.

Fortunately, the 'info view' is currently fully compliant with canonical
cryonics, incremental in vivo uploading being science fiction just now. 
Freeze, slice, scan. Since nobody will do the next two stages just now,
you can float in the Dewar quite relaxed (I'd die to see your face after
resuscitation though, when you are told you're just a simulation, and the
fact is demonstrated with a great flourish).

> Note: I have cut off the discussion without getting into certain
> features some may consider important, such as the distinction, in a
> computer, between emulation of the laws of physics and emulation of

Oh, we'd be in a tight spot if we had to emulate the stuff at some low
lawbanging level. Infinite precision floats are pretty hard to come by. As
are systems with infinite number of quantum levels, but I digress.

> arbitrary data or specific scenarios or personas. Perhaps an info person
> might claim that the emulation is the person only if we include the full
> emulation, including the laws of nature. I don't think this invalidates
> my example, but enough is enough for now.

Indeed. This entire argument is so deliciously funny! We must positively
make a soap opera from it, one day.

ciao,
'gene

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