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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

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

foldr wrote: post #48
TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't? Why? We're talking about indistinguishability in principle, by any possible form of measurement/observation.

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

#52

Post by foldr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #51
foldr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't? Why? We're talking about indistinguishability in principle, by any possible form of measurement/observation.

Yes, I know. Indistinguishability in that sense is not a transitive relation. Imagine e.g. that we have detectors which can distinguish As from Cs, but no detectors which can distinguish As from Bs or Bs from Cs. There is no contradiction in that scenario. In contrast, there is no consistent scenario in which A = B and B = C but A != C.

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

#53

Post by arxii »

But at the end of the day, what is life and death anyway? Merely a self repeating pattern of some atoms...maybe consciousness is just a collection of concepts which our brain uses to reinforce its self identity? Maybe consciousness is just as valid as religion and our existence really holds as much meaning as the existence of a tree in an infinite universe? and considering the fact that the majority of people would value a nice diamond more over a tree, a well sculpted rock might just have more meaning than "life" itself.

maybe intellect,in itself, is merely a small bump in the fractal nature of the universe itself, after all...there is a universe in everything and nothing is everything.

Only with that in mind before i die, would i upload my mind...

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

#54

Post by reasonattlm »

neilk wrote: post #46
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.

Your body performs that maintenance when you are young.

The damage repair approach to treating aging suggests that if we remove the fundamental differences between old and young tissue, then the body will continue to maintain itself as it does when it is young. There are not all that many types of fundamental damage.

So this doesn't require maintaining the whole system; it requires removing the spanners in the works. These spanners are well known and well characterized. For example, cross-links in the extracellular matrix that degrade blood vessel elasticity, that causes hypertension, cardiac remodeling, and microstrokes, and so on. Break down the cross-links with designed drugs (and deal a few other items that also contribute to stiffening) before the point of serious remodeling and all of that goes away, because it is the stiffening that drives this dsyfunction. There are a number of other items that have similar roles, but not so many that it is unfeasible to think of producing effective therapies on a time scale of the next two decades.

Think of damage of this sort as rust in a fantastically complex metal sculpture. You don't have to understand the sculpture, just how to rust-proof it, and how to remove the existing rust. Rust is simple, and the complexity of the sculpture doesn't much matter when it comes to how you approach rust-proofing and removal.

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

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

qsymmachus wrote: post #42

"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

It might sound self-centric and limited, but giving it a second thought, I think it's also true - because the "events in Middle East" are important only as much as they threaten to spin out of control and lead to the collapse of technological civilization. There are no important technological advances coming out of this conflict. It's unlikely that the existence of ISIS will lead to an important new political insight, a piece of social technology being developed. It's just, like often in history, a case of groups of humans failing to get along very well with each other.

This is how I see war, nowadays. A stupid, useless distraction. "We're building amazing things here for everyone with our technological civilization, so would you kindly please pause for the moment, and don't ruin everything because of some idiotic dispute?".

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

#56

Post by woodchuck64 »

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…

> I assert 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.

I think you're exactly right; Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness it that it starts as a necessary function for modeling the attention of an agent and turns into awareness when the brain itself is modeled as an agent. First, a specialized brain function for agent modeling of predator/prey/rival/mate evolves as a good trait for survival. Part of that function entails modeling what an agent is attentive to. However, once this agent model discovers the brain it is running on, a new agent is recognized, and attention now becomes redundant and is instead reported as awareness of attention, which has to feel subjectively like a secondary aspect of primary sensory information. It's a nice logical progression. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/

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

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

foldr wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't? Why? We're talking about indistinguishability in principle, by any possible form of measurement/observation.

Yes, I know. Indistinguishability in that sense is not a transitive relation. Imagine e.g. that we have detectors which can distinguish As from Cs, but no detectors which can distinguish As from Bs or Bs from Cs. There is no contradiction in that scenario. In contrast, there is no consistent scenario in which A = B and B = C but A != C.

Imagine that we have bunch of As, Bs and Cs in one place. Start testing every one against another. You'll quickly discover two groups - An A tests positive with other As and Bs, but tests negative with Cs. A C tests negative with As, but tests positive with Bs and other Cs. B is the one that tests positive with everything.

Here, I distinguished them all. Doesn't that contradict your argument about indistinguishability not being transitive in general?

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

#58

Post by nicklaf »

arxii wrote: post #53

But at the end of the day, what is life and death anyway? Merely a self repeating pattern of some atoms...maybe consciousness is just a collection of concepts which our brain uses to reinforce its self identity? Maybe consciousness is just as valid as religion and our existence really holds as much meaning as the existence of a tree in an infinite universe? and considering the fact that the majority of people would v…

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

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

#59

Post by nicklaf »

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…

Do you believe that it would be possible, in principle, to build a robot that looked and acted extremely similar to a human being? It could carry on conversations, make decisions, defend itself against antagonists, etc. in a similar manner to a human being? In your view, would such a robot be necessarily a conscious entity?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708807/

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

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

jkaunisv1 wrote: post #17

I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post-singularity would be like. I get his point, it's so different that we can't really get it. But we have ample science fiction that still explores the possibilities and gives us a starting point for imagining it. Also surprised he doesn't mention basic income when discussing the decreasing value of the individual and the problems that could cause. He'…

> I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post-singularity would be like.

It's by definition - the singularity is defined as the moment when technology advances so fast that we just can't keep up with it. If you can still reasonably predict how will it look like, it's not singularity yet.

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