Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: autodesk!peb@uunet.uu.net (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Is uploading suicide? Message-ID: Date: 12 Jan 91 03:31:27 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 41 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu This raises difficult and ancient questions like: 1. What is Life? 2. What is Consciousness? For the first question, I have not encountered a single compelling argument that Life must be DNA based--definitions of life that include DNA do it because that is the only example we have at hand. Because of this, we have Artificial Life for life forms that exhibit all aspects of the general term Life, but are simulated in a computer. (At the Artificial Life Conference, a new term popped up: Real Artificial Life, i.e., Artificial Life simulated using Real proteins.) The second question impinges upon uploading--can an artificial life form be conscious? If one accepts that artificial life is just as alive as real life, then this is easy to accept. On the other hand, the DNA bias is strong, so we can introduce the term Artificial Consciousness to describe all simulated consciouness'. This argument is simply that we have a DNA bias for the general terms Life and Consciousness due to their usage for the past hundred or thousand years (my OED is at home...) Because of this bias, it is a good idea to use new terms like Artificial Life and Artificial Consciousness. In the case of converting an Artificial Consciousness to a [Real] Consciousness, the Turing Test can be invoked. The upshot of this would be the conclusion that "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." I think die hard dualists that believe something is lost when up/down loading will end up like Dr. McCoy on Star Trek muttering about the teleporter (better not do it *too* often! ;^) Anyroad, explorations in AI, AL and AC are going to give us much better ways of thinking about these things, and these ancient questions may disappear and be replaced by more specific questions. Paul E. Baclaski peb@autodesk.com