Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site csd1.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!gummo!whuxle!pyuxll!eisx!npoiv!npois!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!floyd!cmcl2!csd1!condict From: condict@csd1.UUCP Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Re: the Halting problem. Message-ID: <124@csd1.UUCP> Date: Fri, 7-Oct-83 21:56:18 EDT Article-I.D.: csd1.124 Posted: Fri Oct 7 21:56:18 1983 Date-Received: Sun, 9-Oct-83 18:12:52 EDT References: <5837@cca.UUCP> Organization: New York University Lines: 136 Self-awareness is an illusion? I've heard this curious statement before and never understood it. YOUR self-awareness may be an illusion that is fooling me, and you may think that MY self-awareness is an illusion, but one thing that you cannot deny (the very, only thing that you know for sure) is that you, yourself, in there looking out at the world through your eyeballs, are aware of yourself doing that. At least you cannot deny it if it is true. The point is, I know that I have self-awareness -- by the very act of experiencing it. You cannot take this away from me by telling me that my experience is an illusion. That is a patently ludicrous statement, sillier even then when your mother (no offense -- okay, my mother, then) used to tell you that the pain was all in your head. Of course it is! That is exactly what the problem is! Let me try to say this another way, since I have never been able to get this across to someone who doesn't already believe it. There are some statements that are true by definition, for instance, the statement, "I pronounce you man and wife". The pronouncement happens by the very saying of it and cannot be denied by anyone who has heard it, although the legitimacy of the marriage can be questioned, of course. The self-awareness thing is completely internal, so you may sensibly question the statement "I have self-awareness" when it comes from someone else. What you cannot rationally say is "Gee, I wonder if I really am aware of being in this body and looking down at my hands with these two eyes and making my fingers wiggle at will?" To ask this ques- tion seriously of yourself is an indication that you need immediate psychiatric help. Go directly to Bellvue and commit yourself. It is as lunatic a question as asking yourself "Gee, am I really feeling this pain or is it only an illusion that I hurt so bad that I would happily throw myself in the trash masher to extinguish it?" For those of you who misunderstand what I mean by self-awareness, here is the best I can do at an explanation. There is an obvious sense in which my body is not me. You can cut off any piece of it that leaves the rest functioning (alive and able to think) and the piece that is cut off will not take part in any of my experiences, while the rest of the body will still contain (be the center for?) my self-awareness. You may think that this is just because my brain is in the big piece. No, there is something more to it than that. With a little imagination you can picture an android being constructed someday that has an AI brain that can be programmed with all the memories you have now and all the same mental faculties. Now picture yourself observing the android and noting that it is an exact copy of you. You can then imagine actually BEING that android, seeing what it sees, feeling what it feels. What is the difference between observing the android and being the android? It is just this -- in the latter case your self-awareness is centered in the android, while in the former it is not. That is what self-awareness, also called a soul, is. It is the one true meaning of the word "I", which does not refer to any particular collection of atoms, but rather to the "you" that is occupying the body. This is not a religous issue either, so back off, all you aetheist and Christian fanatics. I'm just calling it a soul because it is the real "me", and I can imagine it residing in various different bodies and machines, although I would, of course, prefer some to others. This, then, is the reason I would never step into one of those teleporters that functions by ripping apart your atoms, then reconstructing an exact copy at a distant site. My self-awareness, while it doesn't need a biological body to exist, needs something! What guarantee do I have that "I", the "me" that sees and hears the door of the transporter chamber clang shut, will actually be able to find the new copy of my body when it is reconstructed three million parsecs away. Some of you are laughing at my lack of modernism here, but I can have the last laugh if you're stupid enough to get into the teleporter with me at the controls. Suppose it functions like this (from a real sci-fi story that I read): It scans your body, transmits the copying information, then when it is certain that the copy got through it zaps the old copy, to avoid the inconvenience of there being two of you (a real mess at tax time!). Now this doesn't bother you a bit since it all happens in micro-seconds and your self-awareness, being an illusion, is not to be con- sulted in the matter. But suppose I put your beliefs to the test by setting the controls so that the copy is made but the original is not destroyed. You get out of the teleporter at both ends, with the original you thinking that something went wrong. I greet you with: "Hi there! Don't worry, you got transported okay. Here, you can talk to your copy on the telephone to make sure. The reason that I didn't destroy this copy of you is because I thought you would enjoy doing it yourself. Not many people get to commit suicide and still be around to talk about it at cocktail parties, eh? Now, would you like the hari-kari knife, the laser death ray, or the nice little red pills?" You, of course, would see no problem whatsoever with doing yourself in on the spot, and would thank me for adding a little excitement to your otherwise mundane trip. Right? What, you have a problem with this scenario? Oh, it doesn't bother you if only one copy of you exists at a time, but if there are ever two, by some error, your spouse is stuck with both of you? What does the timing have to do with your belief in self-awareness? Relativity theory says that the order of the two events is indeterminate anyway. People who won't admit the reality of their own self-awareness have always bothered me. I'm not sure I want to go out for a beer with, much less date or marry someone who doesn't at least claim to have self-awareness (even if they're only faking). I get this image of me riding in a car with this non-self-aware person, when suddenly, as we reach a curve with a huge semi coming in the other direction, they fail to move the wheel to stay in the right lane, not seeing any particular reason to attempt to extend their own unimportant existence. After all, if their awareness is just an illusion, the implication is that they are really just a biological automaton and it don't make no never mind what happens to it (or the one in the next seat, for that matter, emitting the strange sounds and clutching the dashboard). The Big Unanswered Question then (which belongs in net.philosophy, where I will expect to see the answer) is this: "Why do I have self-awareness?" By this I do not mean, why does my body emit sounds that your body interprets to be statements that my body is making about itself. I mean why am *I* here, and not just my body and brain? You can't tell me that I'm not, because I have a better vantage point than you do, being me and not you. I am the only one qualified to rule on the issue, and I'll thank you to keep your opinion to yourself. This doesn't alter the fact that I find my existence (that is, the existence of my awareness, not my physical support system), to be rather arbitrary. I feel that my body/brain combination could get along just fine without it, and would not waste so much time reading and writing windy news articles. Enough of this, already, but I want to close by describing what happened when I had this conversation with two good friends. They were refusing to agree to any of it, and I was starting to get a little suspicious. Only, half in jest, I tried explaining things this way. I said: "Look, I know I'm in here, I can see myself seeing and hear myself hearing, but I'm willing to admit that maybe you two aren't really self-aware. Maybe, in fact, you're robots, everybody is robots except me. There really is no Cornell University, or U.S.A. for that matter. It's all an elaborate production by some insidious showman who constructs fake buildings and offices wherever I go and rips them down behind me when I leave." Whereupon a strange, unreadable look came over Dean's face, and he called to someone I couldn't see, "Okay, jig's up! Cut! He figured it out." (Hands motioning, now) "Get, those props out of here, tear down those building fronts, ... " Scared the pants off me. Michael Condict ...!cmcl2!csd1!condict New York U.