On 19 Sep 2015, at 19:41, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> You need an infinitely expanding brain to live an eternity,
if not, you will cycle.
To prevent cycling a mind wouldn't need to be infinite just
unlimited, whenever you start to run low you just add more memory
banks, but at ANY given time the mind would be of only finite size.
So we agree.
> You might count that as a kind of immortality though
Some might, but I wouldn't.
Oh, we agree on this too. Of course the machine can have no cycling
extension somewhere in arithmetic.
>>> you will eventually die from some accident.
>> That's why you'd need lots of backup copies stashed in
lots of different places, and with nanotechnology that would be
easy.
> Only if you suffer from some local attachment.
But you don't, otherwise you'd become a different person every
time you cross the room. And what exactly are your spatial
coordinates, the place your brain is at or the place you are
thinking about, that is to say the place you seem to be?
Consciousness is all about seeming to be so I'd guess the second.
>> You will never die of illness if you have the ability to
ensure that the atoms in your body always remain in their correct
orientation, and with nanotechnology that would be easy.
> You need to bet on some level of description,
You need to know how generic atoms should be placed in relation to
other generic atoms.
That is a low level, but in principle we cannot be sure, may be we
need the string level. You are just telling me your choice of level,
but other people can make different choice.
> then it is "easy" is very large sense of the term.
And Nanotechnology is the ability to move individual atoms to
different positions relative to other individual atoms. Doing this
is easy scientifically, no new physics is required, but it is not
easy technologically, at least not yet.
>> Uploading is very well defined
> Once we bet on a description level.
What other sort of bet did you have in mind? If you know the
relative position of all the generic atoms in something there is no
scientific reason you can't make a second one with generic atoms,
although you may encounter technological difficulties.
Quite plausible, but from a logical pov, we cannot claim to be sure.
> I would ask they take into account the glial cells.
What difference does that make?? Glial cells are made of 20
different types of organelles just like neurons and just like all
the other 200 different types of cells in the human body; and the
only difference between one of those 20 different types of
organelles and another is the relative position that generic atoms
have with other generic atoms.
Yes, right, if you copy yourself at the atomic level, you will have
the glial cells right, but some neurophysiologiqte have cmaim (they
are changing their mind right now on this) that the glial cells have
no other role that being some stuff to protect the neurons, ans so a
doctor might, for reason of economy, only copy the neurons. Today,
evidences accumulate that glial cells do communicate, between each
others, and with the neurons, and that they might have some rôle in
(chronical pain.
But we agree, if you chose the atomic level, that is very plausibly a
good low (and thus expensive) level.
>> it's just not achievable yet for technological not
scientific or philosophical reasons: Uploading is the
functional equivalent of a biological brain in electronic form.
> Assuming computationalism
And only a fool would not make that assumption.
Why? Mathematically, we can conceive a transfinity of weakening of
comp. I agree that "omega-computatiionalism" (the usual one) is much
plausible, and that there are no evidence for a weaker form of it, but
when we do a theoy, we put *all* the assumption on the table. That
includes ides like the fact that ((A & B) -> B), that x + 0 = x, and
of course, computationalism is a much less obvious assumption than the
preceding one.
To be sure, the G/G* theology remains correct for a vast variety of
"non-machine", which also live in arithmetic, and I am not sure if
they can access different "physics" than the omega-machine physics.
But we can do the math and compare with nature.
> With a bad choice, someone can believe having survived
"rather well" for some weeks, and then realize that there is a
problem, the long term memory is not handled well,
If long term memory, or short term memory, or anything else is
not working well then generic atoms have not been placed in the
correct orientation relative to other generic atoms. And the exact
same thing happens when your computer is not working well, or your
can opener for that matter.
You can wish that, but you cannot pretend to know that. Maybe the
brain needs dark matter. I don't find that palsuible, but sometimes
agao, I would not have believed that drak matter is possible. But of
course, you can do such assumption and say "yes" to the doctor, but
you can't impose this to another, and treating him as fool does not
ring right to me.
> or a feeling that something is different
The cause of that different feeling could only be that something
IS indeed different, the arrangement of generic atoms must be
different. Correct that error and put things where they are supposed
to go and that unpleasant different feeling will go away.
> but they can't figure it out,
Then they're dumb.
...or they have understood something that we don't have (yet)
understood ourself. I mean that *certainty* in such matter is ... a
priori dumb.
Bruno
John K Clark
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