[ExI] Continuity of experience.

[Spencer Campbell]

Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>:
> Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com>:
>> I would not consider electrical charge distribution to be a structural
>> property. That's an electrical property.
>
> How can you separate one from the other?  Think of a bunch of charged amino acids joined together.  Can you change their charge distribution without changing their structure?  No.  The two are inextricably bound together.  Good thing too, or life wouldn't even exist.

It doesn't work on molecular scales! I was talking about cellular
scales, which-- ah, forget it. Trying to argue for clear
categorization is never a winning proposition. "It's all arbitrary",
is always the conclusion. We're already a couple layers of trivia away
from the topic, anyway.


John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
> I'm measuring with the only tool any of us have in detecting other minds,
> the way they act; admittedly this tool is not perfect but it's all we have
> to work with.

So, you observed my behavior. Well of course you observed my behavior!
That is, as you say, literally the only way to measure anything. I was
interested in what you were looking for *in* my behavior to indicate
the presence of mind-like activity.


John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
> And you sure didn't act like you had a mind on Tuesday, so
> with as much confidence as I can say anything about minds other than my own
> I can state that objectively your mind did not exist on Tuesday.

See, you take for granted that I "sure didn't act" like I had a mind.
I had a pulse, didn't I? What could possibly make my heart beat in
just that way aside from my mind? (Don't get clever! I know you could
just build a machine.)

This is why I gave such a broad definition earlier. In other words:


John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
> ... and a mind can not exist without thoughts ...

A mind can exist without thoughts. The brain does more than think, and
the mind is the aggregate of all that the brain does. Therefore, the
mind is more than thinking.

I don't think, "oh, now I'm blinking" every time I blink. That would
be a huge waste of processing power. My mind just automatically sends
a periodic bare-minimum "blink" signal to my eyelids, based on all
kinds of factors that I don't know about (or need to know about).


John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
> If you changed a biological neuron to a electronic neuron once a second it
> would take about 3000 years to change over the entire brain to the
> computerized version. That may seem like a long time but it depends entirely
> on the time scale used, from a cosmological viewpoint 3000 years would be
> virtually instantaneous. And there is no preferred time scale, it's just as
> valid to look at natural phenomena at the nanosecond level as the billion
> year level.

I see nothing to disagree with. This is just one of those "more
gradual uploading methods" I was talking about.

Syntax dictates that I should have expected an argument, here, which
supports the statement: "if mind scanning does not preserve objective
continuity, then there must necessarily be a preferred rate of change
in the universe".

I accept unconditionally that there is no preferred rate of change in
the universe, but I also believe mind scanning fails to blah blah
blah. Therefore, I am forced to conclude that that statement is false.


John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:
> Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com>:
>> The rate of change doesn't really matter as far as I'm concerned. What
>> matters is whether or not the old brain is in constant communication
>> with the new "brain" right up until the old brain is completely gone
>
> I agree, otherwise the new electronic brain would be missing the last
> thoughts the old biological brain had.

Whoa whoa! Hold on. Not necessarily. The whole premise behind mind
scanning is that we can copy thoughts from one medium to another. This
would mean that you can copy all the thoughts out of brain 1 and into
brain 2, whether or not the two brains are in communication.

Maybe you're implying that an operation of that sort would qualify as
"communication" in and of itself. That isn't how I was using the word,
though. I'm talking about a complex ongoing neural interaction, not a
one-way data dump.

P.S.  I'm responding to a couple three-day-old posts here. Good thing
time scales don't matter!