<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:13.7143px"><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font size="4"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> "Do human beings other than me feel?".</font></font></div></div><div style="font-size:13.7143px"><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> </font></div> <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="font-size:large;color:rgb(34,34,34)"> John K Clark</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Ah yes, the solipsism question arises.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">The answer, I think, is that you cannot know for sure that others are not puppets or even alive in the sense that you are, so you have to infer.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">You infer from emotional expressions that are universal (lists of those on web). A grin (not a fake smile, which is detectable) is universally known and accepted as depicting a certain feeling. Other expressions, including body language, for pain, fear and so on are observable data you can infer from rather reliably.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">But what about all those sex scenes on soap operas? Can these be acted out and not experienced? Yes, but...... It turns out that 'fake it till you make it' has real meaning in the area of emotions. Smiling really does make you happier. Listening to jokes with a pencil held in your teeth prevents smiling and thus prevents some enjoyment that occurs without the pencil (from journal studies).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Take that you AI people. If you want an AI to experience feelings, you'll have to provide them a body that reacts the way we do with all the feedback mechanisms from body to brain we have. It's just not enough to mimic the brain activity. Take out part of the loop and you deaden the emotion. (Yes, that applies to botox injections.)</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">To all those mechanists who thought that thinking was just subvocal speech, you could temporarily paralyze the speech centers and see if they could still think.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 9:15 AM, John Clark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span class="m_-6586076288765494350gmail-im" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.8px"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 Rafal Smigrodzki </span><span dir="ltr" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><<a href="mailto:rafal.smigrodzki@gmail.com" target="_blank">rafal.smigrodzki@<wbr>gmail.com</a>></span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"> wrote:</span><br></div></span><div class="gmail_extra" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.8px"><span class="m_-6586076288765494350gmail-im"><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>QM gurus are hereby invited to say more about the dimensionality of the QM state space - does it allow for an infinite number of interactions as time goes to infinity?</blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4">I'm a pretty poor guru but I will say as its presently constituted QM says there are only a finite number of states that something can be in, however that may (or may not) be due to the fact that quantum theory doesn't include gravity. As it's presently constituted QM can't say what happens in places smaller than the Planck Length of 1.6*10^-35 meters or what changes during times shorter than the Planck Time of 5.4*10^-43 seconds. Maybe QM can't say what happens when things get that small or time gets that short because there is nothing to say about them because space and time are quantized. Or maybe something does happen but QM doesn't know what is is because QM doesn't include gravity. There is no convincing experimental evidence that space or time is or is not grainy, and until we have a theory of everything it's hard to even make an educated guess. </font> </div> </div><span class="m_-6586076288765494350gmail-im"><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>I know, you actually have the opposite intuition, treating even physically distinct minds as indiscernible, and you treat multiple similar but physically separate minds as equal in value to a single mind. For me this is a very surprising intuition.</blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font size="4"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">It wouldn't be surprising if you treated mind as an adjective and not a noun. Mind (an adjective) is what a brain (a noun) does; and I'll bet you think it intuitively obvious that 2 different racing cars (nouns) are both fast (an adjective). </font></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font size="4"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font size="4"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">And in addition to the question asked in the title of this thread I'd like to ask another, "Do human beings other than me feel?".</font></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> </font></div> <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4"> John K Clark</font></div></div></div></div>
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