macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod) (07/04/89)
Alan Lovejoy writes: In article <Jun.28.16.30.46.1989.12001@athos.rutgers.edu< GARY@maximillion.cp.mcc.com (Gary Knight) writes: ::And in the interim, what does this do to ideas of afterlife, reincarnation, ::and so forth? If the dead person can be reconstructed under assumption ::(1), then it isn't likely to be off somewhere reincarnated as another living ::thing is it? Or would the reincarnated life form just topple over when the ::resuscitation took place? Gets a little macabre, doesn't it? I suppose the ::memory/personality could be off in some Elysian field, or heaven, waiting ::for recall (but would it want to come back from paradise? And could it ::prevent being brought back?). So what does this say about theological ::theories of what happens when the brain is flatlined? :The empirical evidence is OVERWHELMING that consciousness is a function of :the brain. Blows to the head may knock you out. Drugs alter your state :of consciousness. Surgery on the brain can change you. Occams razor :suggests that the brain is the seat of consciousness. If your telephone is damaged and nonfunctional, do you conclude that the entire telephone network has gone down? As I read the evidence, the brain and consiousness are intimately related, but I'm not going to posit a cause and effect relationship. :If consciousness :were a manifestation of some "spiritual" phenomenon, then how could mundane :physical events, such as alcohol, affect it? If memory were spiritual, :how could a blow to the head cause amnesia? There are large parts of my current life that I don't remember, without having been hit on the head. If memory and mental functioning is mechanical, how can disabled patients learn to walk again when the regions of the brain associated with motor functions are damaged? If there was a one-to-one mechanistic correspondence, this should be impossible. Hypnotists have put subjects into trances and told them that they would be given a complex mathematical problem, of the type they normally could solve when fully conscious in several hours of work. They were also told that they would have several hours to solve it, beginning with a snap of the fingers and ending with another finger snap. When the hypnotists went >snap< >snap<, the subjects gave the correct answers. Occam's razor is a mental construct, not a natural law. I suggest that we reserve judgement about the true nature of consiousness until we have more facts. Nanotechnology promises to be an immense help in probing the evolution and responsiveness of consiousness, and I think great strides will be made. :I know for a fact that I remember no past lives. Without such memory, :it is irrelevant whether or not I ever "lived" before. Absent the memory, :what good does it do me? To wipe my memories is to kill me. If I do not :remember the past, then I did not live in it. If I forget the present, :then I have died. I know many people who have very detailed memories of past lives. As I mentioned above, I can't remember much of my own life, so I have no problem with the concept of amnesia. :Suppose you use nanotechnology to make a perfect copy of yourself. Which :"copy" gets your "soul"? This is really very related to the question of :what happens to the soul of a reanimated cryonics patient. The answer :is so obvious that most people can't see it: your "soul" is simply you. :If you make a copy of yourself, you make a copy of your soul--by definition. :Neither copy has precedence. Bacteria and other cells do this all the time. :If there is a spiritual "soul" that has some sort of existence independent :of the body, then IT IS INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. The "soul" would then be :analogous to a recording or copy of one's memories/personality/identity. :There can be multiple instances of the same soul, just as there can be multipl:tapes with the same recording. The "copy" of you that goes to heaven is not :affected by what happens to the copy of you that remains in your brain cells. :There is no reason why these copies cannot be played by different instruments :at different times at different speeds--in different universes. But why :would God bother making the last backup when the original copy isn't going :to be erased just yet due to cryonic suspension? Your analysis is, if you'll forgive me, superficial. What is all this about God and heaven? While belief in reincarnation is a widespread phenomena worldwide, believers completely disagree about the nature and existence of various deities and after- or between- lives. There is nothing which forbids reincarnation in a Godless universe, except the stark terror such an idea generates in theists and mechanists alike. I don't think anybody but Nietzche is confortable with living in a succession of material bodies for eternity. How does the soul's independence from the body imply that it can be recorded and taped and stored? Even if consiousness were an epiphenomena of the body, how does that make any kind of point-to-point mapping possible? Do those who lose a leg lose one leg's worth of consiousness? What do I think? Well, I have to interpret my own experiences as I can. Since I cannot prove them, they must remain in the realm of mysticism. I have experienced the act of separating >myself< first from my memories, then from my personality, and finally from my consiousness. I have memories, personality, and consiousness, just like I have a head and hands and feet, but I am not them. Now, here and there on the net there are those who dismiss me as an acid burnout who has lost his stack pointer. But let us return to the telephone analogy. Suppose your telephone was affected by some condition it was not designed for, analogous to taking LSD in terms of putting a foriegn neurotransmitter into the brain. Suppose the telephone still operates normally, but with the added feature that every time you pick it up to call somebody, they are there on the line waiting without your having to dial. How do you interpret this? That the telephone is broken? That it is operating incorrectly? That the people on the other end aren't really there? That your consiousness has been corrupted because such things "can't be"? Lost in this confusion is the fact that the telephone is really doing what you wanted it to do in the first place; it's just doing it in a new and strange way, which if you stopped to consider, actually simplified making telephone calls. Superficially, taking psychedelics causes a range of novel effects and experiences. The significance of the experience is more subtle; it is the perception of awareness of awareness. Even that is not the end: the most important realization seems to be the awareness of the intentionality of awareness itself. That is, the experience that the telephone went through did not simply rearrange its functionality into some random combination of matter and energy; nor did it become a turnip. That is, the telephone became an entity which carried out your >intention< in a better way; it is only your lack of perspective which interprets this as a damaged device or abberent behavior. What does this have to do with anything? I experienced the separation of >me< from memories and personality and consiousness completely without drugs, but I instantly recognized the separation effect from prior trips. Moreover, such separation is a major part of every kind of mystical and occult tradition I know of, though they approach it from all kinds of oddball directions and with all sorts of eccentric rituals. If it is in the end pathological, as Christian churches assert, then most of mankind has been wrong to seek the experience. By the way, it's quite wonderful to look at these faculties (memory, personality, consiousness) and to suddenly realize: these are not me. These are only my tools. The artist is the crucial link in translating the true reality of subjective experience into the true reality of objective experience, and such cognitions are of great use. Michael Sloan MacLeod (amdahl!drivax!macleod) [Indeed, there are quite a few people who remember being Napoleon in a past life. Some of you call them reincarnated; most of us call them insane. People on drugs often experience things that they *know* for a *certainty* are deep eternal profoundly insightful utter truths. I suspect this is due primarily to the fact that their facility for judging the importance of things gets randomly toggled and the most trivial notion can be accorded the aspect of divine revelation. Chemical and social aids are not necessary to sort your consciousness out from the rest of your mental equipment, though I doubt that one person in a hundred has the combination of intelligence, introspection, and open-mindedness necessary--particularly the ability to stare at a blank wall for hours while cataloguing their cortices. In my experience, this is roughly as useful in understanding the mind, on an hours invested basis, as reading published research in AI... --JoSH]
root@seismo.css.gov (Root Of All Evil) (07/07/89)
In article <Jul.3.20.34.50.1989.4694@athos.rutgers.edu> macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod) writes: >There are large parts of my current life that I don't remember, without >having been hit on the head. If memory and mental functioning is >mechanical, how can disabled patients learn to walk again when the regions >of the brain associated with motor functions are damaged? If there was a >one-to-one mechanistic correspondence, this should be impossible. The brain has some flexibility in recovering from damage because in some cases surviving tissue can learn to perform the lost functions. This phenomena is no disproof of a one-to-one mechanistic correspondence. >... When the hypnotists went >snap< >snap<, the subjects gave the >correct answers. While in some cases I can believe this has been demonstrated, I have no evidence that it can be a generally useful technique. I think it would be much more widespread if it were effective. >Occam's razor is a mental construct, not a natural law. This is a worthwhile point to remember, although it can lead to intractable and unprofitable paths of reasoning. >Even if consiousness were an epiphenomena of the >body, how does that make any kind of point-to-point mapping possible? Do >those who lose a leg lose one leg's worth of consiousness? One leg's worth of consiousness is not very much; it only has a little impact on some peripheral sensory capabilities. Studies of brain damaged patients do show that it is possible to lose particular aspects of consciousness and particular capabilities. However, as I stated earlier, sometimes a recovery can be made if a damaged area heals itself or if another part of the brain learns the function which was performed by the damaged area. There is some specific knowledge about which parts of the brain perform particular functions, so I think that indicates that an approximate point-to-point mapping is possible. The technical issue is how good is your approximation. >By the way, it's quite wonderful to look at these faculties (memory, >personality, consiousness) and to suddenly realize: these are not me. These >are only my tools. The artist is the crucial link in translating the true >reality of subjective experience into the true reality of objective >experience, and such cognitions are of great use. It seems that your realization that those things "are not me" involves consciousness (by my definition of consciousness). If you do have something left over after taking out memory, personality, and consciousness, what does that part do? I have thought of a model of thought processes where the thought processes are represented by a curve in some high-dimensional space (I haven't classified the dimensions), with one dimension being time. A person can be specified by giving one point (a memory state at one instant in time) and the derivative of the curve, which corresponds to personality. Personality is characterized as the dynamic response to events, and it can change over time (which is why second and higher derivatives might be interesting to look at). This doesn't take much account of reflecting changes in the world external to the person, which certainly has effects on memory and personality. The basic model is closer to a person in a sensory deprivation tank. This might actually tie into nanotechnology and recent discussions about personality backup. Say you have a full backup description of the memory and personality (perhaps the molecular arrangement of the person's brain). There was some discussion about bandwidths involved in transmitting backup copies. Perhaps a lower bandwidth channel could transmit just sensory data. If the original was destroyed, you could replay the sensory data to the full backup, and wind up with a close approximation of what the original was like at the moment of destruction. This brings up the issue of "Who cares about restoring a close approximation; if I'm the original I'm dead!!". One philosophical viewpoint might emphasize a sense of kinship between such closely related minds. After all, the difference between the backup restored from a sensory replay and the original at time of loss of sensory transmission would probably be less than the change in the original between one day and the next. If I feel some sense of identity with the person I was last year or yesterday, why shouldn't I feel a sense of identity with an even closer approximation. In fact, all people have some similarities to varying degrees; another philosophical view might be to consider us all as sharing one consciousness, but on different tracks (I don't remember what the name of that belief is). It seems that if nanotechnology brings us to an era of extremely long lives, people will probably grow more like each other because they will share information and hopefully reach a consensus view of things over time (perhaps billions of years). This reminds me of the story by George R. R. Martin, "A Song for Lya", which revolves around a choice between ordinary human existence and passage into another form in which identity is merged with many other beings. I look forward to having enough time to consider these issues in depth. Duke Briscoe Arpanet: briscoe-duke@cs.yale.edu Bitnet: briscoe-duke@yalecs.bitnet UUCP: briscoe-duke@yale.UUCP
alan@oz.nm.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) (07/07/89)
In article <Jul.3.20.34.50.1989.4694@athos.rutgers.edu< macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod) writes: <Alan Lovejoy writes: <:The empirical evidence is OVERWHELMING that consciousness is a function of <:the brain. Blows to the head may knock you out. Drugs alter your state <:of consciousness. Surgery on the brain can change you. Occams razor <:suggests that the brain is the seat of consciousness. <If your telephone is damaged and nonfunctional, do you conclude that the <entire telephone network has gone down? As I read the evidence, the brain <and consiousness are intimately related, but I'm not going to posit a cause <and effect relationship. How is the brain like a telephone? Who or what is calling whom or what? What information is being exchanged, over what medium (no pun intended!)? Do you use your brain as a "phone" to call "yourself?" Or is the "material world" on one end of the line, and the "spiritual world" on the other? I can see that damaging the phone might impair my ability to talk to you, but how would it cause you to forget something you already learned unless your memories were stored in the phone? And why would it cause you to experience total lack of consciousness? What scientific facts exist to corroborate this theory? Has experiment shown that the "line" can be cut by "jamming" the communications channel, perhaps with "shielding?" <:If consciousness <:were a manifestation of some "spiritual" phenomenon, then how could mundane <:physical events, such as alcohol, affect it? If memory were spiritual, <:how could a blow to the head cause amnesia? < <There are large parts of my current life that I don't remember, without <having been hit on the head. So? What does this prove, and why? <If memory and mental functioning is <mechanical, how can disabled patients learn to walk again when the regions <of the brain associated with motor functions are damaged? If there was a <one-to-one mechanistic correspondence, this should be impossible. Because neural networks can learn something more than once. As long as the net is not saturated, ANY PART OF IT can be taught--or retaught--new things. On May 11, 1988, a hearing of the United States Senate Special Committe on Aging was held. At that hearing, Dr. Carl W. Cotman, Ph. D., Professor of Psychology and Neurology, UC-Irvine, a leading brain researcher, testified as follows: "For years, it was believed that the central nervous system was incapable of growth or repair processes. This view was summarized by Cajal and was dogma for over three decades." "[Qoute from S. Ramon y Cajal, 1928 deleted]" "However, in the last several years it has become clear that this is not true. With the proper stimulus the brain has the capacity to rewire its damaged circuitry (e.g., synaptic plasticity). Even the aged brain has this capacity. The stimulus may be a perturbation such as trauma, or a metabolic insult, or it may be more subtle, such as a modification in behavior or learning a new task. The stimulus may also be a graft ("transplant") of neural tissue or a chemical (e.g., neurotrophic factor). Nearly whole neronal networks can be replaced by implanting fetal neurons into adult brain. The brain in its wisdom has a program to repair itself from its minor injuries. It is self repairing." "The observation of neural regeneration will help us to understand and develop strategies to treat the changes that occur in the aged human central nervous system. Reactive growth can maintain function if a portion of the circuit remains intact. As cells are lost, new connections are made by the remaining healthy cells that assume similar functions of the fibers from the same or converging pathways and may amplify weakened signals. This maintains functional stability despite the cell loss. The remaining cells assume more of a workload in order to keep the connections at their normal levels." "Neuronal regrowth also appears to occur in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), a disease previously thought to be degenerative with no reserve capacity in the brain cells. Generally, disease-induced neuronal loss in the AD brain acts as a stimulus [for cell regeneration] in a manner similar to that of specific lesions in the rat brain." [Source: Life Extension Report, July 1989] <Hypnotists have put subjects into trances and told them that they <would be given a complex mathematical problem, of the type they normally <could solve when fully conscious in several hours of work. They <were also told that they would have several hours to solve it, beginning <with a snap of the fingers and ending with another finger snap. <When the hypnotists went >snap< >snap<, the subjects gave the <correct answers. This proves nothing, since it has not been demonstrated that hypnotism inhibits neuronal functioning--or enhances the rate at which spirits think. If you are using "spirit power" to compute when under hypnosis, what prevents you from using it at other times? How do you know that it's not the brain which is the speedier one? This simply has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the self is an epiphenomenon of the brain. <I know many people who have very detailed memories of past lives. As I <mentioned above, I can't remember much of my own life, so I have no problem <with the concept of amnesia. As JoSH pointed out, memories can be false. My point is that forgetten memories are just as relevant as the "dream dinners" that Bilbo "enjoyed" in Mirkwood Forest. They are without meaning, value, purpose or effect. But since you say you disagree, can we conclude that you are perfectly willing to serve as the subject in a scientific experiment of complete induced amnesia? <:Suppose you use nanotechnology to make a perfect copy of yourself. Which <:"copy" gets your "soul"? This is really very related to the question of <:what happens to the soul of a reanimated cryonics patient. The answer <:is so obvious that most people can't see it: your "soul" is simply you. <:If you make a copy of yourself, you make a copy of your soul--by definition. <:Neither copy has precedence. Bacteria and other cells do this all the time. < <:If there is a spiritual "soul" that has some sort of existence independent <:of the body, then IT IS INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. The "soul" would then be <:analogous to a recording or copy of one's memories/personality/identity. <:There can be multiple instances of the same soul, just as there can be multipl:tapes with the same recording. The "copy" of you that goes to heaven is not <:affected by what happens to the copy of you that remains in your brain cells. <:There is no reason why these copies cannot be played by different instruments <:at different times at different speeds--in different universes. But why <:would God bother making the last backup when the original copy isn't going <:to be erased just yet due to cryonic suspension? < <Your analysis is, if you'll forgive me, superficial. What you really mean is that it does not hypothesize the existence of things for which there is nethier any evidence nor any need. Spirits, souls, heavens and such are not logically required to exist in order to explain any known, reproducible, scientifically-verified fact whatsoever. <What is all this <about God and heaven? It's my attempt to frame my arguments in the language of those who believe in spiritual souls, heavens and deities. It is not intended to indicate what I personally believe. Personally, I think that--with the POSSIBLE exception of "Deity"--it's all rubbish. But I think that if there is a Deity then almost all of our current ideas about It are probably a joke at best. I really hope there IS a Deity. But that's a hope, not a conviction. <How does the soul's independence from the body imply that it can be recorded <and taped and stored? My assertion is that the soul is nothing more than information. Put another away, the "active ingredient" of the self is information. The term "soul" refers to one's "true self" which is independent of the body. Scientifically, we have found something which satisfies this definition--the information stored in the brain. Those who find this unsatisfactory are like the Jews who still await the Messiah. They will wait forever. <Even if consiousness were an epiphenomena [sic] of the <body, how does that make any kind of point-to-point mapping possible? Do <those who lose a leg lose one leg's worth of consiousness? Why not ask someone who has lost a leg? Of course, the scientific community holds that consciousness is a function of the brain in particular, and only of the body to the extent that the brain depends on the body for logistic support. Alan Lovejoy; alan@pdn; 813-530-2211; AT&T Paradyne: 8550 Ulmerton, Largo, FL. Disclaimer: I do not speak for AT&T Paradyne. They do not speak for me. ______________________________Down with Li Peng!________________________________ Motto: If nanomachines will be able to reconstruct you, YOU AREN'T DEAD YET.
peb@tma1.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) (07/13/89)
In article <Jul.6.19.26.23.1989.10777@athos.rutgers.edu>, yale!root@seismo.css.gov (Root Of All Evil) writes: > > In article <Jul.3.20.34.50.1989.4694@athos.rutgers.edu> macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod) writes: > I have thought of a model of thought processes where the thought > processes are represented by a curve in some high-dimensional space (I > haven't classified the dimensions), with one dimension being time. A > person can be specified by giving one point (a memory state at one > instant in time) and the derivative of the curve... Interesting model, but I suggest you consider that not all functions have a derivative. You might want to update your model by studying non-linear dynamics (chaos). Paul E. Baclaski Sun Microsystems peb@sun.com [And even if it does, the derivative is likely to be a function as complex as the original function. The derivative *at the point* won't do you any good. Consider that there are an infinity of functions that go through the point (3,7) and have the derivative 1.5 there. --However-- there is a model useful for other things that is essentially this, called BSB (Brain State in a Box) developed by J. A. Anderson. See Laberge & Samuels (eds) "Basic Processes in Reading Perception and Comprehension", pp 27-90 (Erlbaum: Hillsdale NJ) and Rummelhart and McClelland, (eds) "Parallel Distributed Processing", v1pp66-68 (MIT Press). --JoSH]