portegys@ihuxv.UUCP (07/18/83)
The recent discussion of the "golden rule" standard for morality
made me think of a story in the book "The Mind's I", (I forget who
wrote the particular story), which had to do with how one conscious
entity determines the subjective state of another one.
The application to the golden rule is this: If I am to produce
a subjective state in you which is the same as a state which I
value, then I need to know whether or not you are in that state
based on my treatment of you. So I need some way of measuring your
subjective state from the observations that I have of you.
Anyway, to briefly capsulize the story, a man is dying of a disease
which destroys the body but leaves the nervous system intact. He
agrees to a procedure in which his nervous system is removed from
his body and placed into the care of his friends, who happen to know
what sensory inputs produced pleasant sensations in the man in his
intact state, and thus they assume that by simply playing these inputs
into the man's nervous system, he will have the same experiences.
At some point an accident occurs, and the man's brain is split in
half (into the two hemispheres). Instead of repairing the brain, however,
his friends decide that they can simply supply each hemisphere with
the inputs, including inputs from the other hemisphere, to obtain the
desired state. After all, how can one hemisphere really "know" whether
the information coming into it comes from the other hemisphere or from
a simulated source. It shouldn't be able to know the difference.
Anyway, the story goes on as follows:
1. If the two hemispheres are really unaware of each other, how can any
neuron really be aware of those supplying inputs to it? This is
used as a rational to split the nervous system up into its constituent
neurons and geographically separate them. Each neuron is then supplied
the appropriate inputs when an experience is scheduled to occur.
2. After a time, the synchronization requirement is determined to be
unecessary, and is dropped. This requirement stated that the neurons
all had to be stimulated in the same time order as in the original brain.
After all how is one neuron to know if it is firing before or after
another, and what difference does it make, since it really doesn't
affect the stimulation of the others?
3. This story takes place over some centuries of time, and in due course
the orignal neurons wear out, and are replaced by new ones. After all,
what difference should this make, since if one were replaced in the
original brain, it should work just as well as the one it replaced.
What struck me about this story is that as soon as the man's nervous
system is detached from his body, his caretakers lose all normal means of
determining what the man's subjective state is. They can no longer see
his face, or hear what he wants to say. And from that point on each
transformation is accompanied by an assumption that it cannot have an
effect on the man's subjective state. Frequently in the story the idea
is brought up that if the man's mouth were still connected to his motor
nerves, it would tell them that everything was fine. However, this
plan is never executed.
This story truly puzzles me. Oh, by the way, I found out the title and
author: "The Story of a Brain" by Arnold Zuboff. Here are some of my
thoughts on it:
1. What is the nature of cause and effect? If neuron A causes neuron
B to fire, then if neuron A is removed in time and space from B,
the nature of the cause has changed. In the story, instead of a direct
electrical and chemical cause, the cause has become an assumed event.
This is too weak. There must be some evidence that the causing event
has occured. Malfunctions do happen. In the story, this
could have communicated by an arranged signal between neuron owners.
This would have produced the strange situation of the man's consciousness,
instead of being embedded in a network of cells inside his skull, would
be embedded in a communication network of people and cells spread out
across large distances.
2. On the subject of consciousness, the situation in which the
man's brain finally found itself ruled out the possibility of any
new or creative thought on his part. All he had become was a sort of
tape-player machine.
3. What if the man's subjective experiences really were preserved?
(of course how the hell do I know that's what I'm writing this about)
Then a sort of patchwork set of event occuring in time and space is
sufficient to allow such experiences to occur. That leads me to
ponder whether experiencing entities are not interwoven throughout
the universe. Maybe my left big toe and the star Sirius are someone
I'd like to know better.
Tom Portegys, BTL IH, ihuxv!portegys