From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 19:55:04 MST
Rafal Smigrodzki
> Subject: the organizational invariance principle
> In my idle perambulation across the net I recently found
> a very thoughtful article on the question of qualia in machines, with some
> implications for uploading and copying of personalities. While the
arguments
> seem to be of the general kind that was previously extensively analyzed
> on this list, the article is useful in bringing them together in a
> coherent and quite compelling manner.
> Here is the link: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/qualia.html
> Thus it appears there are good reasons to believe that all intelligent
> machines will have qualia.
> Rafal
Qualia present some interesting issues for uploading/downloading. Chalmers
paper, (with its thought experiments using the classical replacement of
neurons with silicon equivalents) could be construed as being entirely about
uploading/downloading, except that the result of a download is still a
humanoid (in Chalmers case, a Robot) presumably with all the sensory and
actuation gear indentical to a human, and living in good old 3D reality as
we know it. As such the complete functional equivalence is maintained,
presumably with that, all of the hormonal actuation gear within the brain
itself, which is an intimate part of short and long term function of the
brain.
In this context, uploading into a non humanoid form - say purely
computational - would require a kind of software 'wrapper' to be present
that completely replicates spinal cord sensory/actuation plus all intra and
extra cranial sensory/actuation. On top of that the wrapper then has to be
placed in a virtual environment that provides the stimulation of the senses
and close the feedback loops that are necessary for normal operation in the
world - the world that is responsible for the training-in of all the
functions in the mind existing pre-upload.
The alternative - a non-computational environment - is where the wrapper is
a humanoid robot providing the same facilities, only this time without the
necessity to provide a virtual environment.
Failure to provide a sohpisticated wrapper would result in the uploadee
experiencing para/quadraplegia or motor-neurone disease and any one of a
million disorders in between (say starvation), which would presumably result
in the brain declaring symbols (qualia) like pain and nausea or chronic
pleasure or other abnormal states.
There's an interesting engineering issue here. If an upload wrapper is to be
tested fully, then I would be constructing and artificial brain to inhabit
it, to see what experiences result. The conclusion is that creation of an
artificial human mind is mandatory prior to viable uploading . Not a
generalised artificial mind, but an artificial _human_ mind, with all the
functional structural nuances from evolution. Only then would the upload
transition be seamless and a starting place for an uploadees subsequent
self-evolution.
In the light of this, I'm starting to think that the Kurzweil version (no
doubt borrowed from elsewhere!) of uploading may be nicer or easier (see the
CEO semiar video
http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D875
where cell size nanos, one or more per neuron, inhabit the brain and
sequester it's target neuron's function). They facilitate real/virtual world
switching and presumably are a perfect map for an upload and also vehicle
for the prior testing thereof. (How these would replicate, say, a Purkinje
cell with 200,000 synapses, beats the hell out of me!)
It would be even niftier if the nanos could be constructed from the
uploadee's own stem cells (or maybe glial cells - assuming, as Chalmers
notes - that they play no part in brain function. Personally I doubt this).
If all this technology is available, presumably one is able to fully repair
the human body anyway - so why bother with upload? Your new intra-cranial
cellular grid would facilitate all sorts of add-ons and 'out of body
experiences' including the most intimate virtual involvements possibly
imaginable and yet we can return to corporeal humanity whenever we want.
Options. Options. Options.
Cheers
Colin Hales
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