471–480 of 604 posts
while history has shown that we can still make things happen without fully understanding it, our current understanding blinds us from seeing the bigger picture.
lots of fool's gold being tossed around. there will be AI aluminium flaunted by tech bros.
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I replicate things I don't understand all the time. I replicate bread. I haven't a clue why it turns into bread. I just follow the instructions and it becomes bread. We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consc…
If you think about the bread example, what you do is to follow a very well known recipe even if you don't understand yeast. In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tas…
I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation.
Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.
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Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you. The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure,…
> Communication is about being understood. This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information. What happens to that information after the transmissions is beyond scope of communication. Don't get me wrong -- we have communication companies and classes named "business communication" and fields of inquiry titled "communication." Yet, the common trend to each of these is wrapping the transmissio…
Even if you're correct you've just taken my words at their absolute meaning without trying to understand what I'm saying. If all you care when communicating is transmitting information you will not find much happiness in communication.
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In this book, I think: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393899945799 - 108 Tips for Time Travellers by inventor and Professor Peter Cochrane, 1999, one of the essays is him asking his wife if she would still love him if he had false teeth, a false leg, etc. bit by bit until she stops the conversation saying "I'm not having you dying by installments!". When you replace a heart with a pump, you don't get a human heart. When…
To be honest, I don't really care if I get a human brain or not as long as I stay conscious. I – and I'd wager most people – would be fine with some level of alteration to their being if it meant they wouldn't literally die , and that they would get to spend some more time with their loved ones. Change is a part of life, and this would just be another one.
There is no technology I can see which would convince me that a mechanical replacement hand was my hand and my hand was not literally dead. Only Prof. Michael Levin's work of regrowing real limbs might do that - see https://www.popsci.com/body-electrician-whos-rewiring-bodies... and he has given many video talks, I saw one of him presenting at Facebook about his work triggering regrowing of frog's legs, but there appear to be many more videos of him - TED and Lex Fridman interviews.
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> I think the real crux of the matter would be the difference between rights versus stuff that costs people money. A human child costs a lot more than a dog or cat does, and yet society grants the child vastly greater rights than the dog or cat. The difference is due to cognitive capacity - a smart five year old can give a lecture about how you are allegedly violating their rights (e.g. “making me go to bed on time v…
I do not think cognitive capacity is the motivation here: human children are our offspring. It's simple favoritism of ones offspring, which would seem to be a primary motivator here.
> It's simple favoritism of ones offspring, which would seem to be a primary motivator here.
But some random child on the other side of the planet isn't one of my offspring.
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Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?
Just curious, why do you write like that? Reminds when I was 11 and wanted to sound smarter on the internet.
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In this book, I think: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393899945799 - 108 Tips for Time Travellers by inventor and Professor Peter Cochrane, 1999, one of the essays is him asking his wife if she would still love him if he had false teeth, a false leg, etc. bit by bit until she stops the conversation saying "I'm not having you dying by installments!". When you replace a heart with a pump, you don't get a human heart. When…
Let's assume that the replacements are perfect replicas from the outside, only the inside is different. Why would it not work? The examples you listed are current technologies that don't remotely approach the primary nor secondary functions of the originals.
As a thought experiment I'll go with "atom by atom replacement would still be you". But I won't easily go with "therefore we modern humans could actually do it in reality, and replace the parts with fakes, and then with simulated fakes, and then extract the simulation to run elsewhere for the uploading part, and even God couldn't tell the difference" just by asserting all those extra bits to be true. When have we ever made perfect replicas with the inside the same, of anything non-trivial at any scale?
Physical impossibility (it would work but we can't do it) argument, see here for long discussion of how hard the engineering problems of just Neuralink are: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
Physical "doesn't make sense" argument; we model brains as 80 billion neurons but bodies are not neatly separate organs and neatly separate pieces. The brain isn't separate from the body - nerves are basically brain matter spreading down to your spine, guts, arms, legs. Are 80 billion fake neurons surrounded by layers of scar-tissue reconnections going to be the same? What sense does it make to suggest a simulated sperm could mate with a real egg?
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This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality. There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
And the reason that it is overrated, is because it has to feel special for the bearers because it makes them prioritise their survival. Consciousness is largely a way to have a reward function for set of behaviours that keep you alive through reason. It appears at a level where reasoning is intelligent enough that you need a more complex reward function.
It seems that not everyone values the having of a consciousness as something special. Survival works pretty well with a good appetite, some muscle for clobbering enemies, and a good sex drive. How does (thinking about) consciousness add an advantage here?
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Why?
Because the evidence strongly indicates so: we haven't found a single instance in the entire universe of a conscious entity that wasn't also a living being.
A hundred years ago computers didn't exist and now they've been beating us at chess for some time. That you haven't seen a conscious computer yet in no way proves that it's not possible is principle.