As arundelo said, it was frustrating how he wouldn’t commit to specific predictions. I get the feeling he had some philosophical idea about “but is a copy of me really me?” that was influencing him even when you were trying to keep things on a more concrete level. (This isn’t totally unreasonable on his part because there are sometimes disputes over this issue even here). Aside from the unlikely-to-be-productive tactic of telling him to read the sequences, perhaps you could have emphasized that you were interested in the objective behaviour and not the “identity″ or subjective experience of the worm? I think you were trying to do that but maybe the contrast could have been more explicit?
Basically, it seems he was jumping ahead from thinking about worm uploads to thinking about human mind uploads and getting tangled up in classical philosophical dilemmas as a result.
Actually, most of that seems like a straightforward false dichotomy (between “connectome” alone and a dynamic model with constant activity). Or I may misunderstand how he’s using the phrase “information flow,” eg it may stand for some technical point that Paul and I don’t understand at all.
I was pretty frustrated by the neuroscience prof’s reluctance to speak in terms of predictions—of what he’d expect to see as the result of some particular experiment—but you did great at politely pushing him in that direction, and I can’t think how you could have done better.
Unfortunately seems that the inferential gap was not crossed.
In which direction? :) and do you think you can say anything about what was said in a way that would help close the gap? Thanks!
As arundelo said, it was frustrating how he wouldn’t commit to specific predictions. I get the feeling he had some philosophical idea about “but is a copy of me really me?” that was influencing him even when you were trying to keep things on a more concrete level. (This isn’t totally unreasonable on his part because there are sometimes disputes over this issue even here). Aside from the unlikely-to-be-productive tactic of telling him to read the sequences, perhaps you could have emphasized that you were interested in the objective behaviour and not the “identity″ or subjective experience of the worm? I think you were trying to do that but maybe the contrast could have been more explicit?
Basically, it seems he was jumping ahead from thinking about worm uploads to thinking about human mind uploads and getting tangled up in classical philosophical dilemmas as a result.
Actually, most of that seems like a straightforward false dichotomy (between “connectome” alone and a dynamic model with constant activity). Or I may misunderstand how he’s using the phrase “information flow,” eg it may stand for some technical point that Paul and I don’t understand at all.
I was pretty frustrated by the neuroscience prof’s reluctance to speak in terms of predictions—of what he’d expect to see as the result of some particular experiment—but you did great at politely pushing him in that direction, and I can’t think how you could have done better.