http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... ai_7675133
Marvin Minsky - Is the Body Obsolete? A Forum
Marvin Minsky
Human beings are essentially machines. However, the word "machine" isn't very evocative because when you say "machine" people think of simple things like typewriters and cars. The word doesn't communicate the complexity of the thing. The word "machine" means "a physical system that you understand," and since people don't know how the brain works, the word has the wrong implication. Now if you tell somebody they're a machine you're saying, "You're so simple, I understand you." But that's not a problem of the machine, that's a bit of autobiography. Someday there'll be machines so smart they'll understand us and they'll say, "People are machines, but we aren't."
Consciousness is just having certain kinds of short-term memory registers that describe a little bit about what you were recently thinking. In fact, consciousness in humans is not very strong. We can't remember very much of our thoughts. When we can solve all the other technical problems, it will be easy to make machines that are much more conscious than we are. Increasing the availability of short-term memory would be a first step. No one knows why we have such limited short-term memory, but I suspect it's because our short-term memory systems are actually large, expensive pieces of brain and we only have about a dozen of them. When part of your brain operates, like the part that makes sentences, there isn't another part of the brain that remembers how it did it. That's why people can't explain their grammar. That part isn't conscious. You have to have scientists work for years and years to find out even a little bit about it. If we were truly conscious, we would know right off how we made sentences as we made them.
If it was possible, I would have myself downloaded. Why not? The idea of not dying just after you've learned almost enough to solve a problem is compelling. It doesn't have to be immortality, but it would be nice to live 500 years, wouldn't it? Right now, there's too much known for anyone to understand in a single lifetime. And there's no reason the systems should break down if you use modern reliability techniques because you could replace each of the parts. The trouble with biology is that it tries to fix things, but it isn't very good at it. If you look at the error checking in the cell-repair part of the genetic code, it's really contemptibly low-grade compared to what we could do now if we redesigned the whole thing. Of course, immortality has its own problems. Overpopulation and that sort of thing. I don't see any real problems except that one huge mind could use up the universe. And you could make two copies of yourself in case one didn't work. Perhaps send multiple copies of yourself out to lead different lives.
When it comes to downloading, you could make up ethical problems easily enough. There are always ethical problems with anything. Ethical problems depend on people's ethics. I don't believe in any absolute ethics anyway. Ethical problems are actually political and evolutionary problems. "Thou shalt not kill" is senseless if you think in terms of competition between species. I think the importance of downloading is just allowing evolution to proceed. And evolution seems to be leading us to a machine consciousness.
Marvin Minsky is a Donner Professor of Science at MIT and one of the original pioneers in Artificial Intelligence research. In his book, The Society of Mind (SIGNAL p. 202), Dr. Minsky explains his theory of bow a mind can be constructed by linking individual components, none of which are conscious on their own. This essay was excerpted from a phone interview.
Richard Kadrey
COPYRIGHT 1989 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
And this here
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.a ... ation.html
Permutation City
If it's a page-turner you're looking for, Egan's Permutation City beats Connes' Noncommutative Geometry hands down.
— John Baez, sci.math
SynopsisPaul uncovered his eyes, and looked around the room. Away from a few dazzling patches of direct sunshine, everything glowed softly in the diffuse light: the matte white brick walls, the imitation (imitation) mahogany furniture; even the posters — Bosch, Dali, Ernst, and Giger — looked harmless, domesticated. Wherever he turned his gaze (if nowhere else), the simulation was utterly convincing; the spotlight of his attention made it so. Hypothetical light rays were being traced backwards from individual rod and cone cells on his simulated retinas, and projected out into the virtual environment to determine exactly what needed to be computed: a lot of detail near the centre of his vision, much less towards the periphery. Objects out of sight didn't “vanish” entirely, if they influenced the ambient light, but Paul knew that the calculations would rarely be pursued beyond the crudest first-order approximations: Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights reduced to an average reflectance value, a single grey rectangle — because once his back was turned, any more detail would have been wasted. Everything in the room was as finely resolved, at any given moment, as it needed to be to fool him — no more, no less.
Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and baling out on him, shutting themselves down.
Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she's unemployed and running out of money, but she can't stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”.
Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.
Jennifer has told us earlier that she would like to have an exictence as an uploaded "software" or similar.
As I had found these webpages I thought it should be mentioned here.
(I'd read a german webpage and it had the links to the both pages.)
