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2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

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Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#91

Post by philwelch »

jasongullickson wrote: post #80
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?

For one, it wouldn't have an endocrine system.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#92

Post by markkat »

I think we put far too much human bias on what 'intelligence' means. I don't suspect that we will have 'Data' of Star Trek', or a rise of the machines.

My guess is that something wholly unexpected will result. A different consciousness will probably interact with the universe in a unrecognizable manner, probably more defined by its unique needs and limitations than by anything we can relate to.

I'd wager that new AI will quickly begin to ignore us, to the extent that they are able.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#93

Post by kenj0418 »

jasongullickson wrote: post #80
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?

Do Futurama episodes count as references?

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#94

Post by AffableSpatula »

wlievens wrote: post #51
AffableSpatula wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it." You've posed the question and then immediately explained why it's fruitless to ask. Even if you are right that there must be limits; if you have no idea when his models are likely to break down then your skepticism is no more solid than his prediction.

> then your skepticism is no more solid than his prediction. But the onus is on the predictor

Sure, I think Kurzweil does a decent job in framing a future within which there's plenty of room for innovation with no 'limits' to exponential growth in sight.

This whole issue of limitations is a separate prediction in and of itself, and it's not his.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#95

Post by andywood »

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 don't think the part about immortality and the solution to all human problems has anything to do with faith or science. It's about motivation. These are things humans want. The question then is how best to achieve a future in which those goals are fulfilled. Transhumanists think about how to reach those goals via technology - by the technical manipulation of the strictly material world. Sure, you can say that it takes some amount of faith to believe that these goals are achievable via technology before it has happened, but I think it's closer to having a vision (in the same sense that Apple had a vision for what tablet computing could be like). But that is very, very different from believing that one actually attains the goal by having faith.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#96

Post by notahacker »

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...

That's a very interesting paper and appears to confirm that computational power is the least of all the problems - whilst even in 2005 it was possible to run a simulation based on 10^11 random neurons, even the scanning technology we have available at present isn't yet adequate.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#97

Post by pavel_lishin »

DanI-S wrote: post #62
dfranke wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If even the new consciousness isn't able to know, then what does "same" mean and what part of that definition aren't you satisfying? More acutely, why should you care about satisfying it?

It means you think you just spent $500m on your 'upload' when in reality you just committed some elaborate suicide, launching some other (very similar) chap into immortality. Selfless, but unintentional.

From the "other chap"'s point of view, he just spent $500m to kill a doppelganger.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#98

Post by [deleted] »

jasongullickson wrote: post #80
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?

[deleted]

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#99

Post by jodrellblank »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52
albertzeyer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain. But you are right that we could be more far away from that than what we think. And also that it may be that the limit of intelligence of some machine might actually not be so much be ahead of human intelligence. (Whereby, personally, I think that it should be theoretically and practically p…

>Building some intelligent machine is still possible within this limit. There is an example that it is possible: the human brain. Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

"Nothing is 'mere'" - Richard Feynman

http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#100

Post by grammaton »

Out of curiosity, what, exactly, are Kurzweil's qualifications to be making predictions like this? I see that he's done a fair share of building music synthesizers. Neat! But I don't see how he made the leap from qualified to make a synthesizer to qualified to make broad predictions about computing and biotechnological trends over the next three decades....
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