[ExI] Coherent vs. Incoherent Fears of Being Uploaded

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Thu Jan 21 04:46:26 UTC 2010


2010/1/21 Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:
> 2010/1/21 Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com>:
>
>> Someone earlier was talking about why we might have these subjective,
>> experienced feelings at all, why would evolution use them? I think
>> that, whatever they are, they are part of a system developed back when
>> the brain was much poorer at information processing, in much simpler
>> organisms, and that system is still there, even though if you were to
>> start from scratch without it, you could probably make a fitter
>> organism. We're made up of all kinds of things like that.
>
> Do you really think it would be easier to make a device with
> subjectivity than without? I think it is more likely that the
> subjectivity is a necessary side-effect of the information processing
> underpinning it.

I don't know how subjective experience works at all. But notice that
we don't use feelings about things for any higher order cognitive
tasks; it's always used in "gut" (ie: instinctive)
reactions/decisions, broad sweeping heuristic changes to other parts
of the brains (eg: Angry! Give more weight to aggressive/punitive
measures!), simple fast decision making (hurts! pull away!).

When I think closely about what my subjective experience is, sans all
the information processing, I find there's just not much left for it
to do, except that it feels things (including "qualia"), and
communicates the results of that to the rest of the brain. How does
that happen? Buggered if I know. Why not just "simulate" feeling, in
an information processing kind of way? You've got me there, that's
exactly what I would do if I had to replicate it.

If you severely degraded our ability to think abstractly, our
sophisticated memory, our language abilities, other higher order
cognitive processing (?), what would the resulting brain function
like? We'd still have emotions, "qualia", pain/pleasure. We'd behave
just like less sophisticated animals do. And animals do behave as
though they feel things. I am convinced that they have first person
subjective experience of the world, like we do (but without the higher
order stuff that we have to think about that).

I guess what I'm getting at is, I don't see any reason that higher
abstract reasoning and subjective first person experience are related.
However that experience works, I don't think it's new to the most
intelligent animals; I think it's old, and its purpose is to help
drive an unsophisticated organism through the world.

This begs the question, why have subjective experience, when this
should be simple wiring stuff? Well, I don't know. Why make a bird
flap its wings to fly, that's *hard*. But it was the way natural
selection found to do it. Just like natural selection didn't manage to
invent spinning motors or jet engines, it also didn't invent the
digital computer. Instead, it invented something we have a hard time
even describing, the first person subjective experience "module", and
tacked that to other clever hardware to make early brains. However it
works, it's entirely function, it does things, so it's part of the
natural world of course. Fascinating!

-- 
Emlyn

http://www.songsofmiseryanddespair.com - My show, Fringe 2010
http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list