From: erich@dehn.mth.pdx.edu (Erich Boleyn)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Re: Multiple Experiences
Date: 23 Jul 92 01:03:49 GMT


hsr4@vax.ox.ac.uk (Auld Sprurklie) writes:

...[quoted articles deleted for brevity, and some beginning text]...
>minded entities, each is also free to make decisions based on what it has
>experienced, then when the time comes to bring the parts together and meld them
>into a 'whole', how would one resolve the inevitable conflicts ?

>If clone A and clone B have drawn different conclusions from their similar
>experiences (where those experiences by chance coincide or overlap), a complex
>choice may have to be made by the 'primary' individual (or, perhaps better, by
>some supervisor) to resolve the conflicts.

   The idea has been addressed (philosophically) in the AI community by
several individuals (I am not sure of any articles on the topic) in
discussions.

   In one of the formalized approaches, there is a centralized "database",
"knowledge base", whatever you want to call it, an "overmind" of sorts, and
then many "slave AIs" that use what portion of the "knowledge base" that
is necessary.  The implication is that the "slave-AIs" don't *have* to
have all of the attributes of the "overmind".  For example, reading news
and integrating it into your "knowledge base" is not something that
requires absolutely all of you capabilites.  Of course, at this point,
the idea can fracture into several viewpoints, one of which being that
something being in memory and it being part of your normal thinking process
are two different things (this essentially misrepresents the argument,
but it is too detailed to go into).  There are also some versions of this
that don't include any "overmind"...  and some more radical ones that
don't include a centralized "knowledge-base" at all.

   This raises a point related to an earlier topic.  Is it necessarily
important to preserve the existing ontological basis for our minds
anyway?  Why not design a "group" mind or something similar?  It sounds
quite interesting.  Of course, as mentioned at some earlier point, this
could be a scary thing to contemplate, and may grate against certain
survival instincts, since it may involve such radical mental changes.

>I guess the result of not resolving those conflicts before joining the parts
>together to update the whole, will be a catatonic state.  The primary will be
>unable to function because one or more internal conflicts will occupy its
>mind entirely.

   This seems to be making the assumption of "ontological deadlock", by
which I mean that concepts go into conflict and don't stop.  Fortunately,
this happens very rarely in real people who claim to believe things that
are obviously contradictory.  There are many "features" of the human mind
that seem designed to prevent this, like the mechanism that seems to
cause the bahavior of boredom, another is the idea of "looking at it in
a different way", for example using functional instead of moral ways of
interpreting societal structures (this is much preferred by myself,
for instance ;-).  It would be quite interesting to see what would happen
and if it was possible to trace the paths of the "deadlock".

   All this is assuming that the level of the mind of interest is the
ontological, or "concept" level.  Perhaps I am biased from studying some
neuroanatomy, but it seems that "mixing" divergent experiences together
would not take place on such a level.  True, actual conclusions that were
made would seem to need resulution, but I don't think that is the real
problem.  The temporal lobes (apparently the places of long-term memories,
assuming a few simplifications) in different people don't map exactly
to each other neuron for neuron by any means, and if a brain were
"split" for any length of time, it may be the case that the dentritic trees
would have diverged to the point where some real, ahem, "creative"
mappings were necessary to put them together.  Oh, well, this is off
topic.

>Since what we appear to be talking about here is not the primary holding an
>audience with its clones, listening to their separate discourses, and choosing
>which to take on board, but a primary being 'brain-dumped' with a combination
>of the experiences of the clones, I can't see that it would be viable.

   Well, again, this assumes that "ontological deadlock" could take place.
One of the models of human experience and memory that appears to have some
possibilities is one calling memory a kind of evolving "context".  A simple
justification of this idea is that memories are usually recalled by and
"linked with" everything else you were doing, recently thinking, feeling,
smelling, etc. at the time.  One could imagine a kind of "amnesia" model
where they are just recalled with simply no reference to each other, and
the re-integration process is just trying to take a bunch of information
from each and correlating them together.

>[The telegraph and telephone are over a century old, but we're just now
> learning to synthesize voices with any verisimilitude.  I expect the
> same phenomenon in the nanofabrication of thinking machines patterned on
> the brain--we'll probably be able to build working ones that are a copy
> of an existing one long before we're able to do things like "mind-melding" 
> (if ever).  So don't be surprized if the best known way for your clones
> to get their info back into your head is nothing better than talking.
> --JoSH]

   JoSH's point is well taken...  that my examples may lack practicality...
oh, well...  at least there are some of us who are working on it now ;-) !

   Erich

--
             "I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where it is."
    / --  Erich Stefan Boleyn  -- \       --=> *Mad Genius wanna-be* <=--
   { Honorary Grad. Student (Math) } Internet E-mail: <erich@dehn.mth.pdx.edu>
    \  Portland State University  /      WARNING: INTERESTED AND EXCITABLE