If you grew up in the society Egan describes, would you “switch over” to the jewel/computer brain in your head?
If someone you loved “switched over,” would you feel grief for their having died? If so, how would you reconcile those feelings with the person who remains, acting just like the person you cared about, seeming to remember all of their life, and thinking of themselves as still being the same person?
Egan ends with the lines: “I ought to be able to empathize… yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me… I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow. After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own.”
What do you think about this? Should the organic brain people and the “jewel-heads” that they become (or are replaced by) regard each other as unknowable mysteries? Should we regard other organic brains as unknowable mysteries, or people of other genders, ethnicities, life backgrounds? If you say no to the latter questions, why should the jewel-heads and the organic brains say yes about each other?
The Tortoise describes a process by which one can use the book to carry on a “conversation.” Would this process merely create a simulation of intelligence and understanding? Or would it generate it, in the way that turning the handle on a hand-cranked record player generates music?
Would it make a difference whether:
Consider the following passage:
Achilles: I am beginning to be puzzled… who am I talking to in that book? Is there somebody alive because it exists? Where are those thoughts coming from?
Tortoise: From the book. You know that very well.
Achilles: Well, then, how can he say how he’s feeling? How does a book feel?
Tortoise: A book doesn’t feel any way. A book just is. It’s like a chair. It’s just there.
Achilles: Well, this isn’t just a book — it’s a book plus a whole process. How does a book plus a process feel?
What do you think of this exchange? Compare Achilles’ final question here to the “Systems Reply” to Searle’s Chinese Room argument. Does Achilles’ question make sense? If yes, what might one say in answer to it. If it doesn’t make sense, explain why not.
If you think that operating the book in that way would enable you to carry on a genuine, two-sided conversation with another intelligence, then answer this: Would it be Einstein himself that you’re talking to? Or merely someone who thought and responded the way he would? What reasons might be offered for either answer?
Achilles and the Tortoise discuss recording Achilles’ neural structure into a book, too, to make it easier for Achilles to carry on conversations with the Einstein-book. What would happen if several copies were made of this Achilles-book? Which of the copies would be Achilles? None of them? All of them? How would you defend your answer?
If the Tortoise is right about our nature, if our existence really is just the existence of a certain neural structure which might be encoded in a book, then would we have any real control over what we do and what goes on in our minds? Would the Einstein-book have any real control over what it was going to think or say next? As things really stand, do we have control over what we do and think?
Consider these passages from Leiber (the computer is speaking):
I have followed your debate about me and tried to score [evaluate] what helped and hurt my cause. Yet now you dismiss this, saying that I am ‘just programmed’ to do this. What can I say? Of course I know that I was designed and built and programmed by humans but also by robots themselves so structured. So what? Each of you has much built into your genetic design and much of what you know has been ‘input’ by your parents and teachers. When I review my thoughts and techniques I often cannot tell — indeed there may be absolutely no truth to the matter — whether some particular was intended by some designer-programmer or not. I am sure you have the same problem when you try to figure out whether a thought of yours is original. But do you then doubt whether it is a perfectly genuine thought or whether it is your thought? Of course you don’t. Why ask me to meet more stringent tests? I have thoughts and they are mine, all right, though doubtless most are not original. (p. 59)
Peter’s argument is that I don’t really possess any of my cognitive skills or thoughts because they were explictly (or at least tacitly) possessed or thought by some human before me. (Perhaps it is also part of the argument that you constructed me, and used precisely these skills in constructing me.) Don’t you see that if this argument were any good, you humans wouldn’t really possess your most basic cognitive skills or thoughts either? When Counselor Goodman saw his child, over many months, put together her marvelous visual and muscular system, so that she could find and manipulate objects and run about through the environment, did he then think, “This, however, is not real finding, manipulating, or running because monkeys have done this long before?” When his daughter first mouthed “Dada” or “milk,” did Counselor Goodman deny that she was really communicating or signaling because varieties of animals have developed such systems long before? (p. 62)