2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal • Hacker News Board

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#131

Post by loup-vaillant » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 9:15 AM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #118

loup-vaillant wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body. Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness…

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small deviations soon start overshadowing the original guiding principles. The unsolvable three body problem, the flow of sandpiles, turbulence in water. Chaos has been far from solved. Your argument will hold when you provide an actual , experimentally verifiable reduct…

> Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy.

No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different (not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very different results.

> In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable.

It does hinges on reductionistic assumptions (there's only one territory out there, only maps are multi-level, and ontologically basic mental things don't exist). I doubt those are easily debatable, however. Up until now those assumptions worked, and I see no reason why they should break down some day. I am fully aware that the problem of conciousness has not been solved, but since we discovered that the mind is made of neurons, I think it is reasonable to believe it is solvable (though intractable at the moment).

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#132

Post by gimpf » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 10:37 AM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #117

gimpf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dualist priors have not yet been shown to be useful.

Neither have non-dualist priors. The nature of consciousness is as mysterious as it ever was. We have cracked a wide range of the soft problems, but the hard problem remains.

The "hard problem" of consciousness only exists if you start out with a dualist prior. Otherwise it is mysterious in the same way as the non-symmetry of matter and antimatter is mysterious -- it is not explained.

Lightning may look perfectly suitable for scientific investigation now, but it was as much a "hard problem" in other times.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#133

Post by Confusion » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 11:30 AM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #131

Confusion wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small deviations soon start overshadowing the original guiding principles. The unsolvable three body problem, the flow of sandpiles, turbulence in water. Chaos has been far from solved. Your argument will hold when you provide an actual , experimentally verifiable reduct…

> Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different ( not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very…

  No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy.

There is no such thing in experimental physics. You are glossing over a number of experimental details surrounding these 'experimental measures'. This experiment does not succeed all the time. The measures are taken a million times and the results averaged. You don't know the results of the switch of two individual particles. Hell, you can't even know for sure you actually switched them. That's a nice conundrum.

And your claim that this notion can 'of course' be extended to larger things is begging the question.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#134

Post by JulianMorrison » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 11:47 AM UTC

SimonPStevens wrote: post #103

JulianMorrison wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his proposition is roughly, that a singular technology grows on an S-curve, but as each one technology slows another picks up the baton and runs with it, and the totality (sum of S-curves) has historically looked exponential, and promises to continue.

Ahh, now that is an interesting angle, but that would suggest that the rate of introduction of new technologies is linear and that every new technology must have a period of exponential growth initially. (Or I suppose... That the rate of introduction of technologies with initially exponential growth rates is linear. You could ignore those without exponential growth rate provide that a constant number did.)

I think basically at any one time there are a lot of competing new-born technologies, and it's only in retrospect that we can see which of them will go exponential through a feedback cycle of improvement and growing adoption.

It's not so much that technology always goes exponential. It's that in retrospect, we notice the ones that did.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#135

Post by foljs » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 1:06 PM UTC

SimonPStevens wrote: post #15

All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth. That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth…

> All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth.

Even worse... most are based in confusing exponential growth with qualitative enhancements.

As if, for example, the fact that we could get a computer with a mega-gazillion of transistors would necessarily translate in us being capable of designing smart enough algorithms to take advantage of it.

It's a variation of the old "we might lose in every sale, but we can make it up in volume"...

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#136

Post by Confusion » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 1:07 PM UTC

gimpf wrote: post #132

Confusion wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither have non-dualist priors. The nature of consciousness is as mysterious as it ever was. We have cracked a wide range of the soft problems, but the hard problem remains.

The "hard problem" of consciousness only exists if you start out with a dualist prior. Otherwise it is mysterious in the same way as the non-symmetry of matter and antimatter is mysterious -- it is not explained . Lightning may look perfectly suitable for scientific investigation now, but it was as much a "hard problem" in other times.

The hard problem does not depend on our scientific understanding of the material world. Comparing the current situation in philosophy to the situation in physics 400 years ago is a false analogy, which doesn't take the fundamental difference between science and philosophy into consideration. Philosophy is about how we humans conceive the world, while physics attempts to describe a world seperate from our perception. As the failure of the object-subject duality has shown, that is impossible. There is no 'real', 'external', 'absolute', 'underlying' world to describe, because talking about it doesn't make any sense. We aren't brains in an 'absolute reality'. If you keep thinking about it in that way, you fundamentally misunderstand the key philosophical issues surrounding the hard problem.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#137

Post by foljs » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 1:10 PM UTC

gimpf wrote: post #57

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52

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. Assuming the human brain to be a mere machine.

Dualist priors have not yet been shown to be useful.

What has not been "shown to be useful" has not also been shown to be false.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#138

Post by Eliezer » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #133

loup-vaillant wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different ( not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very…

No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. There is no such thing in experimental physics. You are glossing over a number of experimental details surrounding these 'experimental measures'. This experiment does not succeed all the time. The measures are taken a million times and the results averaged. You don't know the results of the switch of two individual particles. Hell, you can't even know for sure you a…

I'm afraid you just don't understand the QM experiments in question. For there to be a secret difference between the two particles requires observed reality to be a lie.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#139

Post by pfedor » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 5:25 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #130

pfedor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir Roger Penrose has written at length on the topic of consciousness, and his views are very far from yours or Eliezer Yudkowsky's, and you can't deny that he probably also knows a thing or two about Quantum Mechanics. Which is not to say Penrose is right, but clearly, the matter can't be as clear cut as you make it sound. Personally I'd say it's not a good sign if you find yourself invoking Quantum Mechanics to sup…

I use QM in my argument because it is a direct cause of my believing that cut & paste transportation is in principle possible. Before I knew about that, I was in fact quite worried: philosophical arguments (like the Generalized Anti Zombie Principle) make sense, but I trust physics better. I don't know of the views of Penrose. Do you recommend a link?

Penrose believes that the nature of consciousness is connected to a physical phenomenon which happens in our brains but not in computers, therefore he does not believe a computer can posses consciousness no matter what software you put on it. He's written several books on the subject as well as given a number of talks which are available on YouTube, but I don't have one link which I'd recommend above others. Sorry.

I don't think the properties of identical particles in Quantum Mechanics bring much if anything to the discussion at hand. Even if we lived in a classical universe, in which every atom would be unique and numbered, we could come up with thought experiments, in which, say, (a) a mad scientist makes an exact copy of your body including brain, (b) then kills you and feeds your ground body to your unsuspecting copy as hamburgers, and (c) all the atoms from your digested body make it to the same spots in your copy's body that they used to occupy in your own. (That last part might seem like a stretch, but really, is it more of a stretch than postulating that you and your copy would be identical in a sense you invoke in QM?) The end result from the world's point of view is exactly the same as if nothing happened to you.

And all that has not even that much to do with the question of what happens when you upload your brain to the computer, let it run for a while, and then recreate a physical brain with the updated state from the computer, since then the final state is emphatically not identical.

Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

#140

Post by Confusion » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 5:26 PM UTC

Eliezer wrote: post #138

Confusion wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. There is no such thing in experimental physics. You are glossing over a number of experimental details surrounding these 'experimental measures'. This experiment does not succeed all the time. The measures are taken a million times and the results averaged. You don't know the results of the switch of two individual particles. Hell, you can't even know for sure you a…

I'm afraid you just don't understand the QM experiments in question. For there to be a secret difference between the two particles requires observed reality to be a lie.

I think I understand these experiments pretty well, having executed experiments of their kind myself. The mathematics tells us the particles are indistinguishable. The physics tells us that the mathematics describes the observations pretty accurately. But they remain observations with an experimental error and they leave room for the especially interesting options of

1) small deviations that are amplified when you increase the scale of the problem and

2) small deviations that simply occur only 1 in a billion times, for whatever reason (the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, time-invariance, and so forth are dangerous assumptions).

No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. You certainly cannot conclude it obeys the same mathematical relations used to predict the observations.

We can't solve a trivial 3-body problem and the deviations in numerical approximations are problematic for some purposes. As we get more ambitious, those deviations will become smaller, but may remain too large for the goal. We don't know whether the law of gravity contains an exact exponent of 2. The Voyager spacecraft seem to suggest there may be more involved and nobody has offered a decent suggestion in the past decades. We can't predict the flow of sand rolling of a dune and we may never be able to do that, because the complexity of the problem may turn out to exceed the theoretically possible computational power of the universe.

As for the second sentence: it's not observed reality that lies: it is our overinterpretation of the observations that are lies. We extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. There are too many trivial puzzles unsolved or even proven unsolvable. How can you possibly trust or accept a description with those defects to be the say-all, end-all description of our universe? I have every reason to believe that my universe defies complete description, modelling, simulation. How about yours?