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Laoch comments on "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar - Less Wrong
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I do not ascribe any magical properties to "my substrate", however I think it's extremely foolish to think of the mind and body as something separate. The mind is a process of the body at least from my understanding of contemporary cognitive science. My body is my mind is another way to put it. I'm all for radical technology but I think mind uploading is the most ludicrous, weak and underwhelming of transhumanist thought (speaking as an ardent transhumanist).
Well, OK, What if we change our pitch from "approximate mind simulation" to "approximate identity-focal body simulation"?
A simulation of X is not X.
That's not a reply to his point.
That's because I don't understand his point? I'd wager though that it implies that simulations of a mind are themselves minds with subjective experience. In which case we'd have problems.
Then you should be asking him more questions, not replying with dogma which begs the question; for example, is a 'simulation' of arithmetic also arithmetic? Then your formula would have been refuted.
Bump.
What's a simulation of arithmetic except just arithmetic? In any case PrometheanFaun what does "approximate identity-focal body simulation" mean?
Accidently retracted:
What's a simulation of arithmetic except just arithmetic? In any case PrometheanFaun what does "approximate identity-focal body simulation" mean?
I'm not sure that's the right question to ask.
I agree that Dave is partially implemented by a brain and partially implemented by a non-brain body. I would also say that Dave is partially implemented by a social structure, and partially implemented by various physical objects outside my body.
If Dave undergoes a successful "mind upload," we have successfully implemented Dave on a different platform. We can ask, then, how much of Dave's existing implementation in each system needs to be re-implemented in the new platform in order for the resulting entity to be Dave. We can also ask how much of the new platform implementation of Dave is unique to Dave, and how much of it is essentially identical for every other "uploaded" human.
Put a different way: if we already have a generic human template installed on our target platform, how much of Dave's current implementation do we need to port over in order to preserve Dave? I suspect it's a pretty vanishingly small amount, actually, and I expect that >99% of it is stored in my brain.
What question was I asking I think you replied to the wrong post. But for what it's worth brain is a subset of body.
No, I replied to the post I meant to reply to.
I agree that the brain is a subset of the body, and I agree that a not-insignificant portion of "mind" is implemented in parts of the body other than the brain, but I don't think this means anything in particular about the viability of mind uploads.
I can't disagree that there are no parts of the body/brain that aren't amenable i.e. non magical and thus capable of emulation. I guess where I'm having trouble is with 1) the application and 2) how and where do you draw the line in the physical workings of the body that are insignificant to the phenomenon of mind. What colours my think on this are people like von Uexkuell in the sense that what encapsulates our cognition is how we function as animals.
I'm not sure what you mean by the application. Implementing the processes we identify as Dave on a different platform is a huge engineering challenge, to be sure, and nobody knows how to do it yet, so if that's what you mean you are far from being alone in having trouble with that part.
As for drawing the line, as I tried to say originally, I draw it in terms of analyzing variance. If Dave is implemented on some other platform, Dave will still have a body, although it will be a different body than the one Dave has now. The question then becomes, how much difference does that make?
If we come to function differently as animals, or if we come to function as something other than animals, our cognition will be encapsulated in different ways, certainly, but whether we should care or not depends quite a bit on what we value about our current encapsulation.