From: Martin Striz (mstriz@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Nov 02 2005 - 10:44:57 MST
On 11/2/05, Heartland <velvethum@hotmail.com> wrote:
> As far as the brain structure goes, let me say something about mind
> structure. I view mind structure as a pattern or shape of mind-producing
> activity. It doesn't really matter whether I implement my mind structure
> using neurons, silicon or something else entirely or what configurations of
> wetware/hardware I choose to accomplish
> that. As long as I am able to transfer and support that same shape, how I
> implement that should be irrelevant to the nature of my being.
>
> To answer your question, ultimately, I would like to be concerned with bare
> activity and nothing else. But since activity cannot exist without matter in
> space and time, mind transfer must happen through the medium of matter in
> space and time as well to maintain that activity throughout the procedure.
This is the point that became clear to me after my last response. I
came to the conclusion that your "mind-producing activity" or
"potential for mind-producing activity" was really just another term
for the substrate, because in any realistic sense, it's some substrate
that must produce mental activity. In an abstract or hypothetical
sense, what you're saying is true: if you could just transfer the
thermodynamics of mental states directly from neurons to silicon (or
whatever), everything else *would* take care of itself. But you can't
do that -- at least not in any way that I can conceive of. Energy
transfers are coupled to transitions in matter states. Solving that
problem is probably harder than a Moravec transfer.
Martin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Feb 21 2006 - 04:23:19 MST