> On 21 Jul 2020, at 12:45, Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Essentially it is a magical idea. This is being done by a genie, which is a
> magical being on par with angels and the like.
>
> If the brain were a hard wired systems it might make sense that a mind could
> be downloaded as a set of files and programs and transferred to another brain.
Yes, that is the mechanist hypothesis. It is implicit in Darwin, and in
Molecular biology. I discovered “computer science” in the bacteria Escherichia
Coli, thanks to the work of Watson, Crick, but also and mainly Jacob, Monod,
Lwoff, etc.
> However, brains physically adapt and change according to learning.
So does any universal machine when learning. Once you have a universal system,
it is easy to develop a universal system which modifies itself. Its existence
is provided and explained by Kleene’s famous second recursion theorem. I have
explained dit here from time to time.
> So the conscious being, while subjective, also appears tied to the physical
> configuration of the brain.
Assuming Mechanism, it is tied only to an abstract form, itself implemented in
the (unchangeable) subset of the physical laws used in its physical
implementation. If it needs more, it means that the choice of the substitution
level has been incorrect, or that Digital Mechanism is false.
> So the mind is not likely to ever be reduced to some information in a channel.
The mind is still reduce to the treatment of that information by some universal
machine (or you are claiming that Mechanism is false, which seems to me
premature to speculate).
> It is only likely this may happen if the brains of people are physically
> swapped.
Yes, and in that case, it is more like a body swapping than a brain swapping.
We can add some nuance to this, as we know today that there are much more
nerves and information treatment in the belly than we thought before. That last
remark explain why, in my proof, I use a generalised brain notion. By
definition, the digital brain is the part of the physical universe that you
have to emulate at some level to “survive” in the usual clinical sense. If you
decide that your brain is the cluster of galaxies around us, let it be. As
long as it is digitally emulable, the consequences will follow, and physics is
reduced to number psychology/theology/arithmetic.
>
> Of course a brain transplant, or maybe better put a body transplant, is
> science fiction at this time. There are around 10^{11} neural connections
> that have to be made correctly and this means there are around 10^{10^{11}}
> combinations. That is certainly not computable or tractable in a standard way.
The 3D printer have to evolve a little bit more, no doubt. The scanning problem
consists in finding a wave which can go through the brain without destroying
it, and be able to store in some holographical way the content needed to
restore you at the relevant level. It is hard to guess if this will take 100
years or 1000 years, but this belongs to our “normal futures”, and will make it
possible for us to explore the physical universe, and alternate versions of it.
It is far more easy to copy something than to create from scratch, like all
countries building atomic bombs know well.
Some people will never accept this mechanist brain prosthesis, and that’s OK.
Mechanism = “yes doctor”, but the ethics of mechanism is the right for adults
to say “no” to the doctor. How to handle the desire of the kids is more
problematic, a bit like with the kids of the Jehovah witnesses who die because
their parents refuse a sanguine substitution. That problem is very general: we
are not (yet) able to choose our parents…
Bruno
>
> LC
>
> On Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 12:18:50 AM UTC-5 Brent wrote:
> http://existentialcomics.com/comic/351
> <http://existentialcomics.com/comic/351>
>
> Brent
>
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