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2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

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Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#71

Post by JulianMorrison »

wlievens wrote: post #54
notahacker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming there's no trivial way of mapping our neural networks to hardware chips running binary code, writing the emulator might prove beyond the human mind. Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?

Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate (neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it. That may be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.

Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#72

Post by nooneelse »

arethuza wrote: post #20
rue wrote: post #18

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

Greg Egan's Permuation City has an interesting examination of what might happen to "copies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

I found David Brin's novel Kiln People to be an fun enough read and an interesting take on thoughts related to human consciousness copying. He uses an entirely different technical mechanism to get the copying, thus allowing a different angle in the thinking.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#73

Post by arethuza »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #71
wlievens wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate (neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it. That may be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.

Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch. http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...

Thanks - that looks like a really interesting report.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#74

Post by jamesjyu »

bgurupra wrote: post #50

I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singul…

Well, you'd need to include the rest of the body in that size estimate for the brain, since it needs that in order to function properly :)

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#75

Post by lukeschlather »

bgurupra wrote: post #50

I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singul…

How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think.

Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#76

Post by mchouza »

arethuza wrote: post #20
rue wrote: post #18

I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

Greg Egan's Permuation City has an interesting examination of what might happen to "copies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

An interesting animation about this topic by John Weldon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#77

Post by loup-vaillant »

grellas wrote: post #69

Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back t…

> I am a theist because I believe that [we] derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than [us].

Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good? It sounds like you want to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd like to test that, so please forgive the following troll.

God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is that strong).

Now, is your belief so strong that you feel the urge to respond something like "no you're wrong, God does exist"? I don't ask for evidence (the internet has plenty), just a yes or a no, followed by your estimated probability that God exists if you wish.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#78

Post by twfarland »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53
twfarland wrote: post #22

Sometimes I think we are driven by our animal instincts, and that intelligence is just 'processing power' that modulates or assists those instincts. I wonder, would a system with unlimited processing power even 'want' to develop and expand if it didn't have any 'urges?' Or would there be a chance that it would happen upon the creation of its own arbitrary 'instincts?'

This is actually very insightful. Our brains are NOT a computer, we are NOT just thinking machines. An 'intelligent' computer may be no more comprehensible to us than an intelligent amoeba, intelligent tree or intelligent stellar gas cluster. Sure we could learn to communicate with it by math, or clicks or something. But can we ever communicate at a meaningful level without ANY common ground? Will it 'want' what we w…

Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here. They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally incomprehensible to them.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#80

Post by jasongullickson »

wazoox wrote: post #58

> W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body. Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculou…

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human

I'm curious as to how you support this statement?

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