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Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

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Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#41

Post by aikah »

ForHackernews wrote: post #3
fuligo wrote: post #2

Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness. Consciousness is a poorly defined concept with many unfortunate connotations, but let's assume in this context it's the same as self-awareness. I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evol…

> it's very likely that nature didn't evolve conscious brains by accident, it's probably a byproduct of making an intelligence that can reason about itself and its environment. Strictly speaking, everything in living nature is an "accident". Natural selection acts on "accidental" random mutations. It's not a directed process.

You realize that randomness and "accident" are man made concepts, they don't exist in nature. Something we can't predict isn't random at all, with enough data one could forsee anything, even the fact that you were about to write that message and the exact words I would use to answer you.

It's beyond science, but I don't believe in randomness or chaos, which doesn't mean I believe in religion either( which are just a collection of myth, which says absolutely nothing about the fundamental nature of 'god').

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#42

Post by qsymmachus »

"In terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history's highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important."

This is what futurologists actually believe

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wwweston wrote: post #8
narrator wrote: post #5

The point of technological progress is to lower the cost of things. Eventually everything will be free or negligible cost. We're already there with music.

Tangent, but... we're not there with music. We're pretty much there with the cost of copying/distributing music. And we're partway there with the falling cost of production tools, and wider affordable/free availability of instructional materials. But creating music -- particularly creating good music -- still takes a significant investment of time in the immediate act of creation and another order of magnitude of tim…

True.

Not everything is a market commodity, and assuming it is is not intelligent behaviour.

Unit price is not a useful metric for assessing social and cultural value - and I don't mean value in some abstract classical-is-better-than-pop sense, but in terms of (e.g.) the quantifiable social benefits of culture, including improved mental and social health, improved cognitive skills from arts training and practice, and so on.

So it's not just about investment of effort, it's the fact that reducing everything to commodity pricing misses out a huge amount of relevant information about value.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#44

Post by api »

reasonattlm wrote: post #39
karmacondon wrote: post #35

When people in the 1940s looked into the future they saw flying cars, spaceships and cities in the clouds. When we look into the future today we see AI, a post-labor economy and the end of death itself. I'm not sure if technological progress has increased, but we're definitely dreaming bigger. I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't…

People in the 1940s were riding the top of an energy revolution, an enormously rapid upward trend in energy production that, had it continued unabated, would today see us with the output of a nuclear powerplant generated by threads in our clothing for a dollar or two. They didn't foresee information technology, for the most part. They foresaw solar system-wide travel and simple mechanical computing devices like slide…

It's also possible that had energy generation capability continued to increase forever at that rate it would have led to self-destruction in any number of forms.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#46

Post by neilk »

reasonattlm wrote: post #21

Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a wealthy elite. This is far from the case. If you look at the SENS approach to repair therapies [1], treatments when realized will be mass-produced infusions of cells, proteins, and drugs. Everyone will get the same treatments because everyone ages due to the same…

A complex system with millions of nodes and trillions of potential interactions with external and internal factors, working perfectly with no oversight and no unexpected outages.

Do you live in this century?

P.S. I'm not saying that this is impossible, or even unlikely, but it's probably going to be something that requires constant and possibly very expensive maintenance.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#47

Post by agumonkey »

rivd wrote: post #14
fuligo wrote: post #2

Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness. Consciousness is a poorly defined concept with many unfortunate connotations, but let's assume in this context it's the same as self-awareness. I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evol…

The word "Consciousness" is almost like the word "God". Many people seem to know what it is, no one can actually define it, and it has never been measured, located or proven to exist. Maybe we should stop using it altogether.

I root all these things into survival. So far computers are 2 years old, without humans to lay infrastructure, renew, fix computers would stop functioning pretty fast.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#48

Post by foldr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
ForHackernews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test) > They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to…

I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same . Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that? The p…

That's a very bad argument. Indistinguishability doesn't entail identity. One obvious way to show this is to note that only the latter is a transitive relation. In other words, if A = B and B = C, then A = C; but if A is indistinguishable from B and B is indistinguishable from C, it doesn't follow that A is indistinguishable from C.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

ForHackernews wrote: post #31
Retra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. [...] How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? Because p-zombies are self-contradictory. The definition of a p-zombie is a contradiction. It's like saying "suppose 1 = 2 and 1 != 2. Call this a p-zombie quality." When you suppose that the behavior of a thing is separate from th…

> yet measurably identical in all aspects > behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity. You've shifted your definition of "behavior" now. I thought we were talking about behaviors that impact survival and are acted on by natural selection, not minute differences in MRI scans. For purposes of the thought experiment, I certainly don't care if the p-zombie has a slightly different brai…

Does this unit have a soul?

I answer, yes.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#50

Post by easong »

wwweston wrote: post #8
narrator wrote: post #5

The point of technological progress is to lower the cost of things. Eventually everything will be free or negligible cost. We're already there with music.

Tangent, but... we're not there with music. We're pretty much there with the cost of copying/distributing music. And we're partway there with the falling cost of production tools, and wider affordable/free availability of instructional materials. But creating music -- particularly creating good music -- still takes a significant investment of time in the immediate act of creation and another order of magnitude of tim…

Not necessarily. As a counterexample, people (many of whom are very creative and talented) put staggering amounts of time and dedication into playing and becoming skilled at video games for no reason other than personal entertainment. Videos of people playing games are freely available and no profit is typically expected.

A similar phenomenon might be observed with music, where players of music dedicate large amounts of time to playing music and upload the fruits of their efforts to the internet for the enjoyment of their peers.

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