From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jun 17 2002 - 00:01:13 MDT
Phil writes (though following his attributions isn't easy)
> John W Haggerty wrote
> > That sounds silly. Characters are just characters and
> > have no life of their own.
>
> Gee. THAT sounds logical. ;)
For some of us, I guess it's just obvious that characters
in books and movies don't *actually* have experiences.
> I think his point was that Rand's choice to kill off
> "people" in her novels, which she had herself declared
> to be an idealized projection of her view of reality,
> logically reflected her own character - murderer.
> Similar to the Christian view that a la Jimmy Carter -
> "Lusting after a woman in one's heart" is just as bad
> as actually committing adultery.
I'm not sure how you're coming down on this, Phil. It's
crazy to even begin to equate whatever Rand does to a
non-living non-breathing character to a murder of a
real person!
> What happens when - instead of novels - we create MUDs
> with characters that evolve more and more toward a
> verisimilitude with real people, exhibiting character,
> apparent volition, deliberation, etc., as I described
> in another recent post. (Could the gamers be the
> actual route to true silicon intelligence?) When
> these characters have bargaining power and start
> demanding participation in the "REAL" universe, and
> take out life insurance policies, THEN will it be
> murder to kill them? At what point will it be murder?
It will be murder *only* when there really is someone
who is being deprived of life. No mere portrayal can
be deprived of life because portrayals aren't living.
Think of each portrayal as a puppet on strings controlled
by a puppeteer. The master may get you to believe for
just a minute that the puppet is alive, has its own
voice, and has inner emotions, but SURELY even a second's
reflection by a five year old puts a lie to it.
An *emulation* on the other hand, is a program that
might look like a puppet, a robot, or just a piece
of computer code, but which independently calculates
its subsequent states just as surely as ours are
calculated from moment to moment by the laws of physics.
I'm not saying that it will be easy to always determine
when a program has experiences or feelings, but there is
a reality to the question, a fact of the matter. At some
point we will know (or have a good theory) why animals
have the feelings and inner experiences that they do,
and why trees don't.
We will strive for the necessary and sufficient conditions
in nervous systems (or programs) just as our ancestors
strove for the necessary and sufficient conditions for
what caused water to fall from the sky.
> (Hopefully this line will elicit more rational and
> productive responses than the infanticide thread -
> altho that was fun for a while, too.)
Yes. My hope is that with practice people will be able to
think about "the unthinkable", to understand that there
is a difference between talking about, say, infanticide,
and the actual death of babies, to come to realize the
incredible gulf that separates the purported suffering
of a character in a book from real, tangible, horrible
suffering of animals, people, and programs---and to be
able to rationally discuss those things without
becoming physically ill, or becoming as emotional
as they would if it wasn't just talk.
Lee
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