Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
Message-ID: <1994Nov8.050237.13714@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <39bl8t$gjs@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <39f9ruINNbo1@life.ai.mit.edu> <39lf4g$9rg@coli-gate.coli.uni-sb.de>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 05:02:37 GMT
Lines: 63

In article <39lf4g$9rg@coli-gate.coli.uni-sb.de> sean@mpi-sb.mpg.de (Sean Matthews) writes:

In article <39f9ruINNbo1@life.ai.mit.edu>, minsky@transit.ai.mit.edu
 (Marvin Minsky) replies to me:

	Although it would seem that you're a confirmed
	deathworshipper, would you care to mention your objections to,
	say, two of my "speculations"? > These particular two
	newsgroups normally operate on a higher content level than "I
	just plain don't like X's ideas".

>I'm very impressed; I'm not sure what exactly `confirmed
>deathworshipper' means in this context beyond `someone who disagrees
>with Marvin Minsky', but I can appreciate a strongly expressed and
>deeply felt insult when I see it.

See below

>..no discussion anywhere about where the necessary science that might tell
>us whether this can be done or not is, and there is no hint about where such
>information might be found.  The bibliography lists Minsky's books `The
>society of mind' which is not a science textbook, never mind an engineering
>textbook, but a collection of short speculations...No pointers to
>titles like `An engineering introduction
>to the neural foundations of wisdom'.  

Well, you may not see S.o.M.  as such a textbook, but some others do.
Don you always judge books by their titles?  Anyway, the sections were
made short because the interconnections between them were so
complicated that I was afraid most people wouldn't be able to tease
out the various theories -- or, as you call them, speculations.  Quite
a few of them have already been confirmed by neuroscientists.

>Now, I should say again that I do not see any a priori reason why we
>should not turn into superbrained cyborgs (specifically I don't want to
>get labeled with some sort of essentialist position on intelligence).  I
>personally probably wouldn't want to...then that's their gig, and I
>hope they have fun  (does this confirm that I'm a
>confirmed deathworshiper?) 

Indeed it does.

>Anyway, I think even Minsky would admit that I'll be
>gone long before the opportunity to make to make the choice arises, so my
>feelings about it as a personal destiny are not relevant to the debate.

Well, sure it is, because the cryonics community expects
nanotechnology to deal with this.

>To summarise [hopeless ranting deleted].

>Since you ask: No.  I didn't realise that `Engines of Creation' was
>Drexler's thesis, and while I found the book an amusing read, I certainly
>wouldn't have awarded the author a PhD on the strength of it.
>NOTE: I can't speak for what he has written or done since then, since 
>I haven't read it, and certainly doesn't mean, and shouldn't be read to mean,
>that I don't find some of his ideas interesting - a different issue 
>altogether.

It isn't a different matter at all, you silly thing, because it was
his later book, Nanosystems, that was the thesis!   It won a
distinguished prize as 'best computer science book of the year' -- I
think it was 1992.
