From: Max More (max@maxmore.com)
Date: Sat Jun 19 1999 - 12:20:56 MDT
At 06:56 PM 6/18/99 -0700, Hal wrote:
>
>It would seem to follow, then, that the entire enterprise has been
>a folly. Either all possible mental states are existing all the time
>just due to random neural firings in disconnected brains all over the
>world,
Hans Moravec takes this view even further and believes that minds exist
everywhere given a clever enough interpretation. You don't even need
neurons to have a mind. He ends up giving up any need to upload, falling
into a Platonic black hole.
>So, what do you think? Were they producing mental states by stimulating
>those neurons? And if so, are they still produced when they just stand
>their and let their brains do the work of firing neurons?
Without the appropriate causal connections (which I'm going to avoid even
trying to specify), I think there cannot be mental states or qualia. Some
simulations will not produce qualia (such as those that used a gigantic
look-up table to simulate the input-output relations--though I doubt that
such a means of simulation would be workable). It may be hard to say where
in Zuboff's story, consciousness is really lost, but I think it happens
when causal connections are lost and the firings merely simulated. Since I
believe that mental states are processes embodied in physical structures
and that the causal interaction of the underlying physical processes
matters, a mere simulation that ignores those causal relations will not
have mental states.
I don't have any developed view of how far an emulation of brain processes
can stray from preserving the original causal relations without losing
qualia. I see no reason to think that replacing biological neurons with
synthetic neurons with the same connections would be a problem. (So I can't
agree with Searle.) I'm not sure whether I would be willing to upload into
a computer that ran a simulation of my mind in serial manner, though I
wouldn't worry if the computer was a true artificial neural network (rather
than just simulating one as most do today).
That still leaves a large gray area that I'm not sure about -- I don't know
whether the ANN needs to emulate each neuron so that the causal relations
between the processes in each neuron are preserved. Maybe emulating groups
of neurons (where the processes in the computer differ significantly from
the processes in the original neurons) would be fine. Probably much of the
biological detail is irrelevant. But just how far up the scale of cognitive
function you go before losing important causal relations I don't know. I
think we may be able to answer that question with more confidence when
understand much more about how awareness arises in the brain.
Max
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Max More, Ph.D.
<max@maxmore.com> or <more@extropy.org>
Implications of Advanced Technologies
President, Extropy Institute: http://www.extropy.org
EXTRO 4 Conference: Biotech Futures. See http://www.extropy.org/ex4/e4main.htm
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