Re: Revisiting Kurzweil

I wrote:
> > Subjective experience is about higher-level organization.  If you replace
> > organic neurons with ones that "mimic the measurable physical behaviors",
> > subjective experience will continue unchanged.

"Ed van der Meulen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I don't think so, it's only an idea,  please prove what you are saying.

I have exactly as much proof for my idea, as you do for yours.  That is,
none at all.

You're the one who was claiming that, if you replace a brain's organic
neurons with artificial ones, that subjective experience would disappear.
You claimed this with no evidence, and in fact without even a good
understanding of what subjective experience really _is_.

All I did was provide an alternate theory, also consistent with known facts,
which implies that nothing at all would change.  I don't have any proof for
this theory.  I'm just demonstrating that you don't have any proof for yours
either.

> Why didn't you react at my posting, am I a nut?

Yes, you got it.  I didn't react to the rest of what you said because you
are a nut.

> The lower LODs (levels o detail) are the fundament of all that is
> happening.  Change a property of a quark and we have another world. We even
> don't know what it will become.  Please argue against this.

OK, sure.  Are you familiar with computer networking?  OSI's network model
defines seven different layers for a single computer network:
        http://www.csie.nctu.edu.tw/document/CIE/Topics/15.htm
_Any_ of the seven layers could be replaced by a functionally equivalent
mechanism that uses a completely different implementation, and the other
six layers would continue unchanged.  For example, some students recently
implemented a fully-compliant TCP/IP network using the physical medium of
... bongo drums!:
        http://eagle.auc.ca/~dreid/index.html

The same is true in physics.  The whole science of chemistry relies on very
little of the complexity of physics.  You didn't need all those subatomic
particles (except the big four: protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons).
The hundreds of odd particles don't affect the ordinary world much.
Relativity (special and general) isn't too important: the world would have been
much the same even if the speed of light hadn't been constant for every
observer.  It's a very, very rare observation that can tell the difference
between Newtonian physics and relativistic physics.

Similarly, biology relies on only a tiny subset of chemistry.  Much of
chemistry could have been different, and biology could still have been pretty
much the same.

You're right that if you left everything in physics the same, but only
changed some fundamental constants about a quark, that the whole world would
be radically different.  This just shows that you don't understand what
"functionally equivalent" means.  You can't replace a layer with some random
structure and expect the rest of the organization to still work.  You must
replace it with a new structure that implements the same (required)
functionality!

But once you do that, the higher layers couldn't care less which particular
implementation you happened to use.

Getting back to the original point: we understand so little about what
"subjective experience" really is, that nobody has any way of judging whether
it depends on micro physics properties or not.  However, we do have a lot of
experience building complex systems.  The way to do it reliably is almost
always to create independent abstraction layers.  This is obvious in artificial
devices, and it is also clear in the most complex parts of the natural world
that we do understand (e.g. DNA encoding, or the layers of visual processing
in the retina.)

It seems highly likely that "subjective experience" is one of these beasts
also, and that the complexity will come from how it is built from primitive
components, not so much how to make the components themselves.

        -- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis                  http://don.geddis.org/               [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tae Kwon Leep is the wine of purity, not the vinegar of hostility.
Meditate upon this truth with us.  -- "Boot to the Head", The Frantics