[ExI] The digital nature of brains

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 02:14:46 UTC 2010


2010/1/27 Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com>:

> The whole syntax/semantics/symbol grounding/consciousness debacle is
> too much of a memetically incestuous mess for me to lay all the blame
> on Gordon, but certainly it wouldn't exist if he stopped sustaining
> it. As far as I can tell, the situation is Gordon versus The World. It
> would be much easier to kill the thing by taking Gordon out than by
> taking The World out, and considering the fact that no one seems to
> have anything better to gain here but pride I am strongly in favor of
> bringing about a conclusion as swiftly as possible.

I can understand your frustration because Gordon keeps repeating his
claims without rebutting the arguments or counterclaims, but it's not
as if we are debating whether the world is flat or not. These are
difficult and important philosophical problems, and especially
important for anyone interested in transhumanism. You may one day be
in a position one day of having a brain prosthesis or uploading your
mind to a computer. Do you think it's just trivially obvious that that
would be OK, or have you arrived at the conclusion through extensive
reading and thinking?


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list