From: Joseph Sterlynne (vxs@mailandnews.com)
Date: Sun Sep 12 1999 - 13:09:57 MDT
> Brian S
>Since we have many people knowledgeable on the subject
>of how the brain works or at least semi-knowledgeable.
>I thought I'd ask a few questions about sleep.
There are some good references available. Consider
Hobson, J. Allan. _Sleep_. _Scientific American_ Library series.
Hobson, J. Allan. 1994. _The Chemistry of Conscious States_. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company.
Anch, A. Michael | Browman, Carl P. | Mitler, Merrill M. | Walsh, James K.
1988. _Sleep: A Scientific Perspective_. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Prentice-Hall.
Michel Jouvet and William Dement (sleep research pioneers) have recently
come out with popular works.
>3) Would an uploaded person need to sleep? an SI? Why
>or why not?
This is an excellent question. There are several theories as to why we
sleep; they are not all necessarily mutually exclusive---sleep most likely
offers several benefits. Since we don't really know the exact purpose of
sleep we can't be entirely sure whether animal-level intelligence requires
it or not. I suspect that sleep is not required for certain kinds of
(human-level or above) intelligence. There is probably more than one way
to solve certain processing requirements, for one thing, and there may be
architectures which simply have designs which do not require the sort of
processing that occurs during sleep. (Such minds might not closely
resemble the human mind in some ways.)
This sort of question is useful because it encourages us to organize our
observations in a systematic way. Arranging known systems in a meaningful
way can tell us which systems might be possible if not currently observed
or extant and can provide insight into the internal structure of systems
which are not fully understood. The periodic table is a model for this
notion.
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