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Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

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Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#41

Post by confluence »

btilly wrote: post #37
confluence wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis. You sure about that? I thought most business plans were thrown out upon any contact with the customer and morphed in feedback to the customer, after a crazy idea was attempted. Of course I could be wrong - but it feels like a false division between bu…

You have your scientific history wrong. I'm fairly certain that you confused Mercury with the bending of light by the Sun, and you are confusing general public recognition with the attention paid by scientists. Here is a timeline. - 1859: Mercury's precession is recognized as not fitting Newtonian predictions. - 1887: The Michelson-Morley experiment shows the speed of light not varying as expected with motion. - 1905…

So when were Einstein's theories empirically supported. Was it 1919 or 1905 or 1908?

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#42

Post by thirdtruck »

RivieraKid wrote: post #31
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Why can't we explain why it hurts so much?

We can describe the entirety of an operating system down to its individual ones and zeroes. Do you posit that some irreducible "Tuxness" state exists that computer scientists just refuse to acknowledge?

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#43

Post by thirdtruck »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #24
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Max Planck

What is this ultimate mystery?

If you posit "why anything exists instead of nothing", then I will have to ask whether "why" even makes sense in this context.

From what we now know of quantum physics, "nothingness" itself might be either less likely than having anything or perhaps nothing but a fiction born of our mental heuristics.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#44

Post by thirdtruck »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #13

Kurzweil is the epitome of [reductionist, emergentist] materialism. The essence of this sentence is not in the individual letters.

What does "essence" mean in this context?

Once we dive deep enough into the functioning of the brain, and its heuristics in particular, the very idea of "essences" looks more and more like mental JPEG compression artifacts and less and less like pyramids on Mars.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#45

Post by btilly »

confluence wrote: post #41
btilly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have your scientific history wrong. I'm fairly certain that you confused Mercury with the bending of light by the Sun, and you are confusing general public recognition with the attention paid by scientists. Here is a timeline. - 1859: Mercury's precession is recognized as not fitting Newtonian predictions. - 1887: The Michelson-Morley experiment shows the speed of light not varying as expected with motion. - 1905…

So when were Einstein's theories empirically supported. Was it 1919 or 1905 or 1908?

Depends on which theory.

In 1905 the theories published then all fit experiment.

1919 was special because it was the confirmation of a prediction that contradicted widely accepted theory. It was made more special because it came at an extremely fortuitous time for the news cycle.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#46

Post by cb18 »

btilly wrote: post #30
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patt…

Well, here we have an interesting demonstration of a quirk in the human mind. I guess you could call it a misattribution of word memory.

Your description of "FOXPRO2" interested me enough that I searched wikipedia for it after reading your comment, then found out FoxPro2 is a programming language and database management system, ha, a fitting misattribution for this crowd.

Then using google's implementation of a collective phrase memory(search suggestions) I determined you likely meant - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#47

Post by jacquesm »

briggers wrote: post #33

> Hierarchical Temporary Memory Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo. He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened. He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machi…

> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50.

But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people.

The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever.

Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it.

It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#48

Post by ashcairo »

I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#49

Post by Nevaeh »

sarah2079 wrote: post #15
NathanKP wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".

I actually remember reading an article in the New Yorker about Elon Musk a few years ago that portrayed him as a bit crazy. Looking at the plans for Tesla and SpaceX at that time, there seemed to be only a slim chance they would succeed, and if I remember correctly Elon had invested a big fraction of his fortune in these ventures (at least in Tesla maybe?). Today you wouldn't call him off kilter since he has really d…

Elon himself has contemplated this apparently. In this interview below, he admits he is a bit crazy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uegOUmgKB4E#t=1m47s

Elon: "I think I probably am a bit crazy. But I think maybe that’s sort of a healthy sign. Because there’s a point at which you can conclude that you're not crazy at all, then you probably are. It's sort of a recursive thing."

At the risk of invading Elon's personal life, one could go further and investigate his father Errol Musk, who was an electrical & mechanical engineer back in South Africa, to see if there is a biological explanation for any potential personality disorders.

Elon said this about his father: "Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." Source: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/200901/elon-musk-...

Does this mean that Elon is crazy? I have no idea, but I think that he's a very logical person with life experiences that makes him a huge risk taker. For example, he tweeted briefly about the benefits of near death here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/152394000857448448 On his google plus about page, he wrote "Not dead yet" on his bragging rights section. So really, his worst case scenario is dying. That's his mental trick of making so many crazy risky decisions, as long as they are based on logic. That mindset cannot simply be attained by anyone, you have to experience near-death to truly get it. Mike Lazerow is another good example of such an entrepreneur. Background Story: http://www.lazerow.com/2012/06/a-new-beginning.html#tpe-acti...

Also he thinks that people should be less risk averse (8m10s) because even if they fail, it's not like they're going to starve. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nMQ0-1jqFs#t=5m55s This is probably based on his college experiment of eating for just $1 a day without getting scurvy, or perhaps his direct observations of starvation in South Africa. I honestly have no idea, just pure speculations.

So yeah, I hope that helps enlighten a little bit of how Elon can be such a risk-taker.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#50

Post by orangecat »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
briggers wrote: post #33

> Hierarchical Temporary Memory Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo. He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened. He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machi…

> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people. The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever. Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear…

the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death

"Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." - Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com)

The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years

True. The difference is that science might actually work.

I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.

Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.

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