Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

corticallabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#81

Post by barrysteve »

sparrowInHand wrote: post #3
trulyhnh wrote: post #2

Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.

To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.

And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures.

Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#82

Post by bratbag »

caskstrength wrote: post #78
falcor84 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.

But once they pay $$$ and turn on the uploaded consciousness won't they be like "Hey, why I'm still here in my meat body and not in Amazon Brain Cloud(c)"?

Daily backup with a final scan after death, if possible.

Then your mind is booted into a simulation from your memories, instead of being booted into your pillow from your memories.

Functionally not much different to waking up after loosing some time from being blackout drunk.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#83

Post by tempmac »

barrysteve wrote: post #81
sparrowInHand wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.

And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures. Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?

> didn't indulge in fake cures.

maybe he WAS afraid of death, but didn't trust the modern stat-based medical methods?

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#84

Post by anonymouszx »

anon-3988 wrote: post #73
anonymouszx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a fundamental difference between such physical concepts, which I can ultimately describe mathematically (at various scales and levels of accuracy), and conscious experiences. For instance, I can sensibly ask "what's it like to be a cat?". But "what's it like to be a rock?", or "to be a hot rock?", or "a cold rock?" doesn't make much sense since there's presumably nothing t…

> I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a fundamental difference between such physical concepts, which I can ultimately describe mathematically (at various scales and levels of accuracy), and conscious experiences. You can describe heat mathematically the same way you can describe the interactions of every atoms in a brain mathematically but neither yields/explains why it is the way it is. It just is. > For in…

>You can describe heat mathematically the same way you can describe the interactions of every atoms in a brain mathematically but neither yields/explains why it is the way it is.

My whole argument was that I don't think one can describe the interactions of every atoms in the brain in a computable form. But actually, I would go further and say they likely can't even be described mathematically.

If this sounds crazy, consider that most mathematical objects are not describable (i.e. can't be singled out). For instance, most real numbers cannot even be imagined, and this stems from the fact that we can only describe things in a finite number of symbols, i.e. in bijection with the set of natural numbers, which is (infinitely) smaller than the set of real numbers.

>I don't understand this analogy.

This wasn't an analogy but an example to show the fundamental distinction between nonconcsious things, which can be dissected, described mathematically, and simulated (although it might be possible for something to be nonconscious and noncomputable at the same time, but we have no reason to believe that such things exist), and conscious things, which, at least in some very small part of them, cannot.

As for a rock being conscious or not, I choose to assume it's not for simplicity and because that seems sensible, but I'm not totally against panpsychism in principle.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#85

Post by Kon5ole »

analognoise wrote: post #49
TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the billionaires . Boogeymen of our times. The scourge of all us crabs living here in this fine bucket.

Billionaires shouldn't exist; to continue the crab metaphor, they're already outside the pot and it's disingenuous to suggest that we're trying to pull others down by removing the flaws that allow such extreme accumulations of wealth - that's the kind of divisive talk they're all for. Don't carry water for them.

>Billionaires shouldn't exist;

People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.

I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#86

Post by aa1234556 »

barrysteve wrote: post #81
sparrowInHand wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.

And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures. Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?

[dead]

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#87

Post by lyu07282 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #47
sparrowInHand wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.

I think there's a good reason that trying to cheat death and meeting a grim end as a result is such a common trope in mythology. Even in ancient times I think people generally recognised the profound harm refusing to accept the inevitability of death does to a person.

We have religious mythologies promising eternal afterlife since ancient times too, I think it's more an irrational coping mechanism to deal with it's inevitability. Everybody grows old and dies, that doesn't make death less horrific, it's the worst aspect of the human condition. We just often pretend it's not in various ways to better deal with it. But that shouldn't prevent us from trying to cure it the same way we are trying to cure cancer.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#88

Post by barrysteve »

tempmac wrote: post #83
barrysteve wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures. Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?

> didn't indulge in fake cures. maybe he WAS afraid of death, but didn't trust the modern stat-based medical methods?

maybe so. 2010 was a different time and science still had a positive reputation.

the quality of evidence required, to culturally settle an argument or otherwise allow for positive action, has dropped off a cliff.

evidence my older brother would scoff at, is coming out of trained professionals' mouths.

the justification for big risks on little evidence flows waaay too easily lately.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#89

Post by gat1 »

v4dok wrote: post #72
falcor84 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.

There would be no way to find out if that would be true however. The person in the vat might say they are the same person but you don't know if they really are. Also what happens if you create a copy? Is that two people or is there some kind of shared consciousness? If it is, how do they communicate?

Same with teleportation, you cannot know for sure if the person after the teleportation is the same as the one before, they can just be a copy.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#90

Post by kyleyeats »

mofunnyman wrote: post #40
falcor84 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.

Not to mention that nearly all of the atoms in your body are replaced every decade, meaning most of you went into sewage treatment long ago.

We actually breathe out most of our previously-us mass.
Post reply on HN