Larry Fitzpatrick sent a long, thoughtful message responding to an article in the Jan 5 1998 JOHO about the difficulty computers have with the notion of attention. Here is an edited version of our correspondence. Larry's stuff is in blue.
JOHO wrote:
What does it mean to record my entire life experience? Let's keep it simple. As I watch my computer monitor, for example, do we have to record every glowing phosphor? There are 307,200 pixels in a standard VGA screen; if I switch to a higher resolution monitor, do I have more "bits"
The problem is simplified if we say that we only care about information that reaches your brain. Yes, we eliminate all that processing that goes in the periphery (and in some organs, peripheral computation is substantial... like the ear and the eye, silly), but hey, for the sake of orders of magnitude closeness... So, there are twelve cranial nerves and your spinal cord. Lots of the signals coming into the brain are internally generated, however that might even compensate for the loss of peripheral processing and put us closer to reality. We need to tap those! What's the signal rate? That is, what sampling rate do we need to record the signal? You know, be sure to avoid the Nyquist frequency by some appropriate multiple (like a CD at 44Khz does pretty well for the ear). Physiologists do this (measure experience in bits) all the time.
This equates neural excitement with attention. Or maybe it just says that the former is the basis of the latter, or is a sign of the latter. Or at least that there's a correlation. I'm not convinced of this. The mind/body question is so unanswerable that the terms have to be wrong.
To show that I used to be a programmer, I'd immediately (prematurely of course) try and optimize the problem. I'd want to know what signals are ephemeral... that is, don't ever get recorded. For the signals that don't result in a state change of the organism... trash it. It didn't happen. Is that the conclusion that a philosopher would come to? I don't know that we can know this in the general case, but I bet there are special cases that we can ignore (we know for example that some signals are severely attenuated during sleep). For the ones that do result in state change, record only the state change (so there's the compression).
Philosophers aren't trying to do what you're trying to do. You're thinking about actually capturing the state info required to reproduced the mental state. And what you write is (to me) fascinating. But the philosophical question (well, one of them anyway) is the relation of the state info to the mental state. If you took the mental state info of any particular moment in your life and reproduced it in me, would I have precisely the same experience? Would I become you for that moment? We don't say that if we reproduce our other physical state info, e.g., I assume precisely the same physical position as you. I have no idea what the answer to this question is, but at its heart is the question of whether experience is an informational state (i.e., consists of information that can be abstracted from the physical individual) or whether it somehow inheres in the physical. I know the above is confused. I'm not as smart as I used to be. But it does seem to me that in recording all the neurological activity -- using the Lef Compression Technique -- we may not be recording experience at all.
I'm running on 15 year old biology, degraded by time spent in unstable media. Hey, maybe there's an optimization... what's the decay of memory? If you cannot remember something happening did it really happen? I'd vote strongly "Yes" on this one. I still believe in something like a real world, i.e., one independent of consciousness. Especially if you cannot attribute any lasting state change to it. You'd have to make sure that it didn't have some momentary (short lived) effect that facilitated something else creating a state change. (How come philospher's never ask about the sound of the axe hitting the tree that fell in the woods that nobody heard? What if the sound of the axe were heard but the tree falling wasn't... did it fall?)
Again, put me down for Yes.
What do philosophers think about biologists encroaching on their turf? (e.g., the evolutionary epistimologists). Philosophers hate them and would kill them if they could do it without their Freshman Ethics class hearing about it.
JOHO wrote: Eventually, we won't be able to tell where the Web begins and where our computer ends. And that's as it should be.
Really? Wouldn't some mega-companies just love for you to believe that everything on your hard disk belonged to them ... including the stuff you just wrote. And pretty soon, we won't need door locks, and car keys, and we won't need to watch our kids in crowded places, or carry any form of currency, or get paid for work.... life will be one continuous Mardi Gras -- interrupted once a year to synch and houseclean the os. Okay, make that daily. Well, maybe a few times a day at unpredictable times... Good point. Funnily put. And while I'm doing self-promotion by plugging other people's products, here's a comment from Henry Lewkowicz in regard to our previous discussion of the importance of metadata which said you can navigate metadata by browsing through categories, through full text searching, and through hyperlinks: An important and presently overlooked (at least in corporate walls) way to navigate metadata is by referral. A referral (recommendation) from one person to another is the communication of a piece of metadata. Depending on how much you liked the referral determines to what degree you consider it spam (or push... interesting how the lexical difference between s-p-a-m and s-p-u-h is not that far... it's sort of like "push" is a 1 year old trying to say "spam"). You wouldn't by any chance be working on such a thing, would you??? (And, of course, the other side of referral is knowing that the community of people referring this to you is a community you respect. If you're ever looking for a group of a couple of hundred people to test this on, I'll be happy to run your beta stuff on the JOHO home page ....) Hope my lengthy reply wasn't all spam...
Not hardly! I loved it!
Best, David W.