From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 00:04:31 MST
At 04:55 PM 19/12/99 -0800, Ken wrote:
>
>John Clark
>By the way, John, not being a Zombie, have you given up hope on being
uploaded? Was that what
>you meant by the "Life is too short" part? Do you think that we are going
to fail in our
>attemts to make life quite long? Or perhaps you are hoping to hold on
just long enough for us
>to find a way to program weird ineffable stuff?
I'm sure John will answer in his own crisp way, but I'm repeatedly startled
at the way this discussion buzzes back and forth over the tops of
everyone's ears. John Clark has no truck with weird ineffable stuff, he
just reckons that the kind of molecular machines we know (and are), which
act as minds, *have experiences*. Information processing *generates
awareness* inside these atomic constructs. Since these machines have
evolved via a fairly brutal selection sieve (despite its cost-benefit
incapacity to weed out a lot of free-riding junk DNA), it is extremely
unlikely that this aspect of their functioning is not part of what has been
evolved. That is, it's probably not a mere `spandrel', a side-effect with
no purpose of its own. Hence, once we emulate these machines in silico,
those emulations will probably also share this characteristic of being
conscious. Another way of putting that is to speak of `qualia', a kind of
reification or chunking or lexical compactification of the experiencing
process. `Heat' (my example) is just such a reification of the motion of
molecules. Ditto `wetness', given the appropriate atoms. There is nothing
weird or ineffable about heat or wetness. In a complexly programmed toy
world, heat and dampness would also be emulated, and its sim inhabitants
would presumably feel their qualia. So I suspect we all agree - Dan and Ken
thinks we are zombies since this is the case, John and I think we're not
because this is the case. Weird, man, but so it goes.
Damien Broderick
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