Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: bfu@ifi.uio.no (Thomas Gramstad) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Is uploading suicide? Message-ID: Date: 15 Jan 91 02:10:15 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 53 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu This discussion seems to presuppose some commonly held, yet questionable philosophical assumptions about the mind-body issue: (1) Epiphenomenalism; the idea that the mind is only an effect of the brain -- thus, copy the brain (cause) and you will get the mind (effect). While the existence of a mind presupposes a brain (or some other physical/structural equivalent), it is a non-sequitur to conclude that everything in the mind is caused by the brain -- the opposite relation -- the mind as causal agent and some neural event as effect -- is possible also. It's a two-way street. (2) Symbolic representation of knowledge; it is assumed that any knowledge is or can be represented symbolically. While I'd be hard put hard to suggest any other fruitful approach, it should be kept in mind that this assumption is debatable. If a representation or simulation were made, it might be very different from the original. If humans are born tabula rasa and acquired knowledge is not stored symbolically, then an artificial replica of the adult brain may be psychologically empty -- the mind mechanisms would be there, but not the adult personality, the replica would in effect be a new baby (at best), not a copy of the original person. What reasons are there to believe that structurally replicating the brain would give another result (psychologically) than cloning? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Gramstad bfu@ifi.uio.no --------------------------------------------------------------------- [I disagree with both points. Epiphenomenalism is a "solution" to the mind-body problem, which arises when you assume that there are two different orders of reality, "mind" and "matter", and worry about how the two affect each other. The philosophical view represented here is closer to "naive realism", which assumes that there is only one order of reality, the physical world. Replacing "mind" in this view is information, patterns, and information processing systems which can exist use different representations for the same data. "Symbolic repesentation of knowledge" is a phrase which is usually used to talk about AI, and it generally is taken to imply information structures that map onto predicate calculus and/or mathematics. At the very least, the information in the brain is represented in more distributed, intermixed patterns evocative of "neural nets", but one can imagine more subtle encodings yet. However, none of this means that the information wouldn't be reproduced correctly in a sufficiently fine simulation or reconstruction of the brain. For those who missed the discussion when it came out, let me recommend Calvin's "The Cerebral Symphony" for a better overview than I can give of the state of knowledge about how the brain works. --JoSH]