[extropy-chat] The Story of a Brain

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

Hal Finney wrote:

>
>So, what do you think?  Were they producing mental states by stimulating
>those neurons?  And if so, are they still produced when they just stand
>their and let their brains do the work of firing neurons?
>
>  
>
### The work of producing the admired man's mental states is done by the 
impulse cartridges! As stated above, the cartridge provides the "same 
signals that would have been produced by the opposite hemisphere, but it 
computes them inside itself.". I would venture that computations which 
faithfully replicate the neural firing patterns of living brains must, 
unavoidably, produce qualia equivalent to the qualia experienced in the 
brain itself. Therefore, in the case above, there are many trillions of 
copies of the brain all over the world, in the form of impulse 
cartridges, and the extant admired  neurons are but an infinitesimally 
small admixture to the pool of admired computation, at least as long as 
their outputs are fed back into the programming of the impulse 
cartridges (or modeled there to begin with). The firing of neurons in 
the brains of the admirers, however, doesn't produce admired mental 
states - after all, their neurons are not connected to the impulse 
cartridges, they are a part of networks which do the job of admiring, 
not being admired.

All this assuming it is indeed possible in principle to build the 
"impulse cartridges" faithfully replicating what would have been if the 
Admired One was alive.

Rafal