Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!know!news.cs.indiana.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: landman@eng.sun.com (Howard A. Landman) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Is uploading suicide? Message-ID: Date: 21 Jan 91 18:22:51 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca. Lines: 60 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article franz@cs.washington.edu (Franz G. Amador) writes: >It seems to me that the concept of uploading has a fundamental and >unavoidable flaw. Namely, there is no way to tell if an uploading has >been successful. By "successful" I mean that one's consciousness has >been copied into the computer, not merely one's behavior patterns. Raymond Smullyan has written a number of entertaining and enlightening essays on and around this subject. Here's a thought experiment: suppose someone invents a potion that destroys "consciousness" while leaving "behavior patterns" intact. (Mr. Amador insists that it must be possible to have one without the other.) A friend of yours takes the potion. You ask her how she feels. She answers "Nothing's changed! This potion doesn't work!" as indeed she must (since that's what her behavior pattern would have been had she been conscious). You try to convince her that she is mistaken, the potion is scientifically proven to eliminate consciousness, but she stubbornly insists that she is still conscious, arguing that she is clearly self-aware, able to respond to both you and her environment, remember everything she knew before, feel the same feelings, etc. Patiently, you explain why she is wrong. (What *exactly* do you say?) Finally, she gets disgusted and storms off in anger. What's wrong with this scenario? Is such a potion inherently just not possible? Might it be because the distinction between consciousness and behavior is a false one? Now replace taking the potion with being "uploaded". Now suppose that after your friend uploaded, the company making the machines issues a statement, saying that their first-generation machine sadly only uploaded behavior patterns, but their new improved machine can upload consciousness as well. People uploaded into either version behave exactly the same, however. Can you describe a way to tell one machine from the other? (How should the government, or even Consumer Reports, evaluate their claim?) And, suppose both potion and uploading exist: in what ways would a person who took the potion and then uploaded differ from a person who just uploaded without taking the potion? In one form of Buddhist logic, any distinction in a syllogism must be qualified by two examples showing that the distinction is a meaningful one. This prevents you from wasting time proving useless things (such as "every even prime greater than 2 is an elephant with less mass than a proton"!). For example: Where there's smoke, there's fire. Here there is smoke. (Like in a kitchen) (Unlike in a lake) Therefore, here there is fire. I challenge Mr. Amador to give two examples, one of behavior patterns with consciousness and the other of the same behavior patterns without consciousness. -- Howard A. Landman landman@eng.sun.com -or- sun!landman