Spirits (was RE: [extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.)

[The Avantguardian]

--- "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
wrote:

> Someday you will understand how qualia work.  And
> when you do, you are 
> going to be WAY embarassed by the fact that qualia
> turn out to be PLAIN 
> OLD PHYSICS, not mysterious physics but ordinary
> physics, just like the 
> LAST SIX THOUSAND MYSTERIES that the human species
> encountered, from 
> stars to phlogiston to elan vital. That's what
> makes the mistake 
> EMBARASSING.

Yeah, phlogiston was wrong but it was close.
Phlogiston theory simply said that materials that
burned or corroded LOST a substance (phlogiston) as
opposed to the modern understanding in which they gain
a substance (oxygen). To me, this is like getting the
correct numerical answer with the wrong sign (i.e.
negative instead of positive). So while wrong, the
theory was not THAT wrong and it is only with the good
fortune of modern understanding that we have the
hubris to call it EMBARASSING. As far as elan vital
goes, I have never seen any disproof of it at all. In
fact, modern reductionism has almost lent credence to
the idea by its glaring failure to DISPROVE it.

After all, to this day, if you take a bacterium apart
molecularly using biochemical techniques then all the
king's horses and all the king's men can't put the
bacterium back together again. Why is this? If it is a
simple matter of physicalist mechanism, then it should
be simple to do so. Instead of disproving elan vital,
science found that life was composed of nucleic acids,
proteins, lipids, sugars, a few trace minerals, and
cofactors and thereby has taken on BLIND FAITH that a
living organism was no more than the sum of its parts.
I am an empiricist and so I don't take anything on
blind faith, even if it is the party line. Elan vital,
even by Bayesian standards, has a non-zero
probability.

 If you want to end elan vital's viability as a valid
hypothesis, then this is the experiment that must be
done - Take the simplest living organism you can find,
kill it, and bring it back to life. You know every
chemical constituent in the living thing, you know
about electrochemical gradients, and you have all the
thermodynamic data, so that is your head start. If the
physicalists are right, then it should be trivial. If
you can't do that, then create one living thing. It
does not have to be strong AI, it just has to be
unequivocally alive.    

Incidently, physics, in my opinion, has always danced
AROUND the question of life other than vague
thermodynamic descriptions of the phenomenon of life
that are so general as to be rather useless. (e.g "it
is an open thermodynamic system far from equibrium
that reduces its own entropy at the cost of increasing
the entropy of its surroundings") If it was that
simple, there wouldn't BE a field of science separate
from physics called biology.

In life and in science mistakes happen. If you waste
time being embarassed by your mistakes, you miss the
value of your mistakes entirely. If you can prove me
wrong about this, I will happily eat crow in my new
found enlightenment. I will personally hail you as a
genius. I wish you luck.

BTW on the question of spirit . . . what is it that
makes, in nearly all cases of identical twins that I
am aware of that live together and share an identical
environment, one twin dominant over the other? If it
is neither nature nor nurture, than what is it?
   


The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"If you fear death, you are not living right; if you don't want to live forever, you are not living well." - a sparrow outside my window.


		
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