71–80 of 384 posts
I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…
We've already had the plague this year, bring on the intelligent monkeys... Where do I buy tickets to an Elon Musk rocket now?
I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…
Honestly, though the ethics are certainly dicey, I do wonder whether recreating a bridge intelligence between man and animal would raise appropriate societal questions that we've chosen not the think about all of modern history (lacking any sort of Neanderthal cohabitant). It might help us all be in more relation with the world. Our lack of relation feels to me to be part of what's driving us into this extinction eve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our track record for messing with the fundamental fabric of reality is creating antibiotics, and over the period of a century saving so many lives that wars of earlier periods are negligible in comparison. A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic f…
It's also such things as nuclear weapons, genetically engineered virii, patents on life, tampering with ecosystems, plants designed to be sterile to ensure a seed market, lakes full of sterile fish stocked for sport. >No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion o…
And this gene cluster is aiming to master the rock that is the Earth through modifying other gene clusters. And you can't stop it. Because through modification it grows stronger and more able. And it has rallied the memome and the hologenome to its cause. This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round. Change is inevitable. Understanding is overrated. Control does not require it.
Transformation Theology has subsumed this world. You live in an ether floating in it. You cannot choose the path of no change. No such path exists.
I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…
I’m curious if you feel this way about human abortion?
This is something different, this is the first time this has been done, there was signs that their brains were going to be similar to ours, meaning possibly self aware and intelligent, I dunno, like i say, i'm not even sure which I feel like is the ethical choice...
Like I say, I find it hard to describe how I feel about it all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our track record for messing with the fundamental fabric of reality is creating antibiotics, and over the period of a century saving so many lives that wars of earlier periods are negligible in comparison. A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic f…
It's also such things as nuclear weapons, genetically engineered virii, patents on life, tampering with ecosystems, plants designed to be sterile to ensure a seed market, lakes full of sterile fish stocked for sport. >No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion o…
"It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"
Can we improve our own brain this way? I mean, brain of our kind, not some already living person. What if we can create a creature smarter than us?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious if you feel this way about human abortion?
No, that's why I find it hard to describe how I feel. I'm pro choice. It's not my place to tell someone what to do with their bodies or the fetuses they're carrying(please don't get into an abortion debate because of this, i'm not going to answer any comments going on about that to avoid things getting out of control), but this still makes me feel uncomfortable. This is something different, this is the first time thi…
This reminds me of "The Secret of NIMH" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/
The large brain is necessary as a harness, to control the intelligence, and enslave it to evolutionarily beneficial ends. Probably not just hardwired instincts, but also learns - probably, similar to animal intelligence.
Like a giant finite state machine, that prevents a turing machine from running certain programs that never halt. Of course, it can't catch all such programs, and a turing machine can transcend any such bound, but lowering the probability of running one is good enough.
Note that turing equivalence, the highest possible computational power, emerges from even the slightest complexity (apart from the infinite tape part).
Thus "intelligence" has appeared in countless individual animals: mammals, birds, spiders, perhaps plants too and bacteria (and is still so appearing), but it doesn't confer a survival advantage, so disappears. Many such creatures just sit there discerning patterns instead of surviving. Others do survive but by instinct, so the intelligence makes no difference.
The difficulty is putting freewill in the driver's seat.