From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2001 - 23:14:11 MDT
Rafal wrote
>Samantha wrote:
>> Does it? A Tale of Two Cities is a set of words/ideas. It is a
>> story. A printout of this story exists in spacetime. But many
>> different versions can exist with arbitrary locality as long as
>> the ideas/story can be found within them. I don't believe I know
>> the *me* as simply as I know this story.
True, but an advanced AI might be able to. Ve could identify
Samantha Atkins's among all physical objects just as well as
you can take physical objects and tell whether they are the
Tale of Two Cities, close replicas, one's with grammatical
mistakes, one's with insignificant plot differences, etc.
>> So I don't see how I can make the query very objective. In
>> principle it is ok but the particulars get pretty squirrelly.
and Rafel responded
>
##I would think that the me-recognition engine in your mind (and in mine)
works
as follows:
There is a number of agents and processes dealing with various aspects of
identity. They provide input, receive feedback, and come up with a decision
which can be quite unequivocal (my chair is not me, me tomorrow is still me),
[These are what I want to cling to!]
tentative (demented person who cannot speak, remember, is incontinent, lost
90%
of hippocampal neurons - is not really me anymore, I think), or befuddled (a
construct made of my left hemisphere and Ronald Reagan's right one - I really
don't know how I would call it). The limbic system (including the insular
cortex) votes on the basis of visceral input (hunger - if I feel it,
through the
activity of the insula - it's part of me). Parts of the parietal cortex
vote on
the basis of a model of space, which contains a few specialized maps: damaging
them in a stroke can produce neglect of the opposite side of body, with the
patient denying that his arm is a part of his body. Parts of the frontal
cortex
(the frontopolar cortex, putatively responsible for moral reasoning) would
vote
on the basis of moral belief analysis (if my cryonics scheme went slightly
wrong and I were resurrected with all my explicit memories, as well as a firm
belief in, let's say, Raelianism, maybe due to temporal cortex dysfunction, I
would disavow any links to such a botched copy). The ACC is detecting
[ACC?]
discrepancies between the various agents, and directs attentional (read:
computational) resources to their resolution. With ACC damage patients are
unconcerned about pain (although they still feel it) and somewhat cognitively
impaired. And then of course there are other units - the supplementary motor
cortex, the secondary somatosensory cortical areas, and others we know even
less about.
<
As I say, I'm interested in what is "really true" (please
forgive me if that idea is over the edge), ...say from an
extremely advanced alien's point of view, or God's or
whatever. You have, however, presented a fascinating
picture of how it presently works with the world's best
computers, namely human brains.
Do you think that the concept of "I" really has integrity?
By that I mean, given that if in the future we are able to
manipulate all these various functional modules (or their
uploaded equivalents), will (or should) a concept like "I"
continue to survive? Or is it sort of a delusion?
The answer has grave implications for "Progress: What does
it mean to **you**?".
Lee Corbin
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