MINSKY%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU.UUCP (02/10/87)
In asking about my qualifications for endorsing Eric Drexler's book about nanotechnology, Tim Maroney says > The psychology {in Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation"} is so > amazingly shallow; e.g., reducing identity to a matter of memory, > ignoring effects of the glands and digestion on personality. > ...in my opinion his approach is very anti-humanistic. It is not a matter of reducing identity to memory alone, but, if he will read what Drexler said, a matter of replacing each minute section of the brain by some machinery that is functionally the same. Naturally, many of those functions will be affected by chemicals that, in turn, are partially controlled by other brain activities. A functional duplicate of the brain will have to be embedded in a system that duplicates enough of those non-neurological functions. However, in the view of many thinkers concerned with what is sometimes called the "downloading" enterprise, the functions of glands, digestion, and the rest are much simpler than those embodied in the brain; furthermore, they are common to all of us - and to all mammals as well, with presumably minor variations; in this sense they are not particularly involved in what we think of as individual identity. I should add that it is in order to avoid falling prey to such conventional superstitions, as this one - that emotions are much harder to comprehend and duplicate than are intellectual functions - that it is the requisite if sometimes unpleasant obligation of the good psychologist to try to be as anti-humanistic as possible; that is, in the sense of assuming that our oldest beliefs must be preserved, no matter what the scientific cost.