Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Nothing is 'mere'" - Richard Feynman http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/
Funnily enough I was going to say 'mere' but checked myself and suppressed my inner pedant.
eh? You did say 'mere'...
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
121–130 of 147 posts
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough I was going to say 'mere' but checked myself and suppressed my inner pedant.
eh? You did say 'mere'...
I mean I was going to say "'mere'" as in emphasise that the the use of mere wasn't belittling as the scope of machines working on established physical principles is clearly pretty huge.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If even the new consciousness isn't able to know, then what does "same" mean and what part of that definition aren't you satisfying? More acutely, why should you care about satisfying it?
This is an interesting question because as-is, I don't think anyone can really understand what it means to be someone else. For this purpose, I can say my consciousness is something that exists currently and has memories from before, but there is no way to verify that the memories were recorded by the same consciousness. There could have been a different person that no longer exists. Perhaps a good alternate angle is…
If you make an exact copy of me at time t, then until the original and the copy part ways and have distinct thoughts and experiences, they're both just me_t, one no more so than the other. At t+1, me_t doesn't exist any more; this is true regardless of how many copies of me_t once existed.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'm saying may be wrong about the short term and he certainly can't be right indefinitely." Sure he can, since you're the one who added the claim that it will continue indefinitely. What he says instead is that progress will continue until well beyond our point to predict what the resulting society will look like, due to the claimed fact that it will for instance include things like true AIs and brain uploading. I d…
Ok, so your saying that Kurzweil's prediction is simply that exponential growth will continue until beyond the singularity? If that is the case I don't really see how there is any logic in his claims. I understand that he has extrapolated an exponential curve, and I can see the potential of future tech if that exponential growth was to continue, but I don't really see what basis he has to claim that the exponential c…
"Ok, so your saying that Kurzweil's prediction is simply that exponential growth will continue until beyond the singularity?"
Why don't you stop waiting for me to tell you and spend some honest time with the ideas? Of course you don't see how there is any logic to his claims, you haven't seen his claims at all.
Or, alternatively, realize you don't know what they are and decide not to worry about it. This is fine too. No joke. There are all kinds of times when I take this option. It's not bad to not know somebody's opinions, or criticize them when you know them; the problem is in the criticism when you don't actually know them.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#125I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.
> But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.
If you read the Mars trilogy, the subject of excessive long life spans is discussed (at least from a sci-fi fictional perspective). The characters do indeed live out lives that exceed 200 years.
One of the questions that then arises is: can the human brain (or as being hypothesized here, a synthetic brain) be able to handle 200 years worth of memories ?
I can remember a couple of things from when I was 3. I am now over 50. As the years pass, some of those older memories become slightly fuzzy. I do wonder about the capacity to deal with 200 years worth.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#126> W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body. Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculou…
I think that taking zoloft is what helped me to realise, deep down, that I really am a simulation running on a meat substrate.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#127I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the same person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know. … But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.
Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body. Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness…
Sir Roger Penrose has written at length on the topic of consciousness, and his views are very far from yours or Eliezer Yudkowsky's, and you can't deny that he probably also knows a thing or two about Quantum Mechanics.
Which is not to say Penrose is right, but clearly, the matter can't be as clear cut as you make it sound. Personally I'd say it's not a good sign if you find yourself invoking Quantum Mechanics to support your opinions on subjects like the nature of consciousness, the existence of God, etc.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#128All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth. That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth…
I think with the advent of quantum computers a limit in computing power is still far way. Nonetheless, what has brute computing power enabled us to do so far? There have been a few prestigious projects, ie. deep blue, seti, cern, molecular folding, etc. which take advantage of this power. But most research projects profit little from an increase in computing power. I think new software and algorithms play a bigger ro…
DNA sequencing, and everything we do with it, would be pretty painful without the computing power we have.
We've also gotten the ability to do much better fluid dynamics modeling, astrophysics simulations (whether you believe them or not), climate models (likewise). I've made use of the processing power we have now to do a bunch of "experimentation" in representation theory, though that's not obvious from the resulting writeup, which is more or less algebraic proof.
In general, for a lot of research areas where we think we have a decent model of some of the things that are going on more computing power means more ability to use a computer to look for things to actually try in the lab (and thus refine the model) as well as more ability to collect and handle data.
And then there's the mundane bits, like being able to find existing work more easily, being able to typeset and disseminate your papers more easily and so forth.
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think. Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least n…
Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I…
The thing with nature is that it's "design process" if one can call it that is really dumb. It tries random stuff and then basically hill-climbs. Significant redesigns are very improbable as a result. There's no direction to the optimization search.
I would certainly hope that we can do better than nature in this regard.
Oh, and while we can't synthesize ribosomes yet, we can in fact custom-design DNA and inject it into an existing cell: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium
Re: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body. Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness…
Sir Roger Penrose has written at length on the topic of consciousness, and his views are very far from yours or Eliezer Yudkowsky's, and you can't deny that he probably also knows a thing or two about Quantum Mechanics. Which is not to say Penrose is right, but clearly, the matter can't be as clear cut as you make it sound. Personally I'd say it's not a good sign if you find yourself invoking Quantum Mechanics to sup…
I use QM in my argument because it is a direct cause of my believing that cut & paste transportation is in principle possible. Before I knew about that, I was in fact quite worried: philosophical arguments (like the Generalized Anti Zombie Principle) make sense, but I trust physics better.
I don't know of the views of Penrose. Do you recommend a link?