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> the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate? Copying the m

> the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate? Copying the mind is not like copying a hard drive at rest. It's more like copying a hard drive while somebody is actively writing to it at random, inserting new sectors, shaking it, etc. I believe that to perfectly copy the mind, you have to make an instantaneous perfect copy of the entire human.

Smaug123 9y ago
Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.
- hacking_again 9y ago
  Ok sounds good, but why differentiate between mind and substrate? Doesn't the pattern / substrate model reduce the mind to just information, and the brain (or body) to just machinery? For me the substrate and the pattern are the same thing, like a vinyl audio recording. There's arguments each side of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Sure, this is basically just amateur late-night fireside chatting based on stuff that has already been hashed out in much more detail by much more competent people :) But yes, there is a sense in which they're definitely the same thing: changing the substrate would change the pattern encoded on the substrate. There's a sense in which they're different: the pattern could in principle be copied off the substrate and encoded on a different substrate. (I'm a reductionist, so in my opinion this holds for my self, as well as recordings on vinyl.) The reason I differentiate here is so that I can be more flexible when weird situations come up, like the notion of me living as an emulated human on a different computer system.
    - hacking_again 9y ago
      I've always thought that strong AI needs to model emotions, and that for emotions you need biochemical modelling. It reminds me of what happened with analog synthesizers. After many years of a divide between digital and analog synthesis, in the 2000s they started making virtual analogs (VAs), which are analog synths modeled in software and available as plugins for your audio software or as physical keyboards with VA insides. (You probably know all this.) For many people these were/are good enough but a purist could always tell the difference. Less warmth, character, etc. In the end I think a Turing test-passing emulation is possible but it would help a lot / be necessary to model the substrate. However since you know yourself better than anyone else I'm not sure if you could pass your own Turing test. Probably there are lots of things written about this too :)

Smaug123 9y ago

Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.

hacking_again 9y ago
Ok sounds good, but why differentiate between mind and substrate? Doesn't the pattern / substrate model reduce the mind to just information, and the brain (or body) to just machinery? For me the substrate and the pattern are the same thing, like a vinyl audio recording. There's arguments each side of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Sure, this is basically just amateur late-night fireside chatting based on stuff that has already been hashed out in much more detail by much more competent people :) But yes, there is a sense in which they're definitely the same thing: changing the substrate would change the pattern encoded on the substrate. There's a sense in which they're different: the pattern could in principle be copied off the substrate and encoded on a different substrate. (I'm a reductionist, so in my opinion this holds for my self, as well as recordings on vinyl.) The reason I differentiate here is so that I can be more flexible when weird situations come up, like the notion of me living as an emulated human on a different computer system.
  - hacking_again 9y ago
    I've always thought that strong AI needs to model emotions, and that for emotions you need biochemical modelling. It reminds me of what happened with analog synthesizers. After many years of a divide between digital and analog synthesis, in the 2000s they started making virtual analogs (VAs), which are analog synths modeled in software and available as plugins for your audio software or as physical keyboards with VA insides. (You probably know all this.) For many people these were/are good enough but a purist could always tell the difference. Less warmth, character, etc. In the end I think a Turing test-passing emulation is possible but it would help a lot / be necessary to model the substrate. However since you know yourself better than anyone else I'm not sure if you could pass your own Turing test. Probably there are lots of things written about this too :)