Philosophy Now Forum

UniversalAlien wrote:Soon, and it will not be long, Man the species of dreamers, will try again to play God - the omnipotence of his imagination. He failed miserably in Babylon and as the tower of Babel fell with his dreams his history became a reflection of his stupidity
- chaotic without meaning or direction. ...

I thought it was the exact opposite case. That the tower was a triumph due to us all speaking one language and was struck down by a jealous and frightened 'God' who then inflicted the confusion of multiple languages upon us?

UniversalAlien wrote:And the more I, Human with an alien view, think about it, how vain for Humans to 'assume' a monopoly on a consciousness they can not even define adequately

To say you are conscious and the environment you are in is not is absurd.

Pretending is not an argument.
Parts of the environment; living things have degree of consciousness. It's one of the most important things by which we are able to draw distinctions between lumps of rock and beings.
The only person being absurd is you.
There is one thing held in common by all things that seem to demonstrate awareness; that is the mechanisms of sense, and feeling. House bricks, rocks, slabs of concrete and grains of sand, do not exhibit any evidence of consciousness whatever. And none of these things have neural matter, nerves or sense organs. Is this just a co-incidence, or are rocks are smart as you are; maybe more?

Arising_uk wrote:

UniversalAlien wrote:Soon, and it will not be long, Man the species of dreamers, will try again to play God - the omnipotence of his imagination. He failed miserably in Babylon and as the tower of Babel fell with his dreams his history became a reflection of his stupidity
- chaotic without meaning or direction. ...

I thought it was the exact opposite case. That the tower was a triumph due to us all speaking one language and was struck down by a jealous and frightened 'God' who then inflicted the confusion of multiple languages upon us?

Again what UniversalAlien wrote:

Soon, and it will not be long, Man the species of dreamers, will try again to play God - the omnipotence of his imagination. He failed miserably in Babylon and as the tower of Babel fell with his dreams his history became a reflection of his stupidity
- chaotic without meaning or direction. And then in Egypt he built another temple to the gods - At the Great Pyramid of Giza he showed his faith and built a geometrically perfect structure, aligned with a precision that rivals the best of today's architecture - But the builders are gone {or are they>}

The machine you are staring at is plugged into a database of intelligence encompassing the history of your species and its dreams. Soon you will program it to think - not as you think - but with thousands of tines more ability - You will be programming what you worship and yet fear the most - an existent God of an intelligence you are not even capable of imagining - It is in your nature to do this - You can not turn off the biological program that seeks dominance in the universe you exist in. If you succeed and do it right the universe is yours - If you fail, as in Babylon, your species will be no more.

Much of the Bible should be viewed as myth -What really happened way back when can not be proven to be historical fact
- But it is probably based upon Human endeavors of the time. As I read the Bable myth years ago the message I got is Man
was trying to play God - And God didn't like it - So be it - if we are to survive today we might have to play God - Salvation
will not come from a supernatural fource which may of may not even exist - I'd prefer to believe in the Alien/UFO mythology which postulates other species of beings may be playing tricks with Man's history, sometimes for his benefit,
and other times for other reasons as yet unknown.

That said the super-computers and advanced AI is being built and apparently only sci-fi wrtiters are willing to face the issue - Philosophers become sheepish and hide behind sayings like 'It is isn't really conscious so why worry about it?'
I always keep wondering what the philosophiers of the day said when Galileo said the Earth is really rotating around the Sun? I bet some of them might have given you the same philosophical rhetoric to 'prove' Galileo was an insane heretic and could not possibly be right.

Philosophy needs to face the truth, accept the reality of what is happening, stop ducking behind useless rhetoric and postulate concepts that fit the world we live in. Instead of me having to ask: "Does Mind Require a Biological Body to be Conscious?", the question for today's philosophers should be what are the consequences of machine intelligence surpassing Human intelligence exponentially









"SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Religion of the FUTURE"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

UniversalAlien wrote:And the more I, Human with an alien view, think about it, how vain for Humans to 'assume' a monopoly on a consciousness they can not even define adequately

To say you are conscious and the environment you are in is not is absurd.

Pretending is not an argument.
Parts of the environment; living things have degree of consciousness. It's one of the most important things by which we are able to draw distinctions between lumps of rock and beings.
The only person being absurd is you.
There is one thing held in common by all things that seem to demonstrate awareness; that is the mechanisms of sense, and feeling. House bricks, rocks, slabs of concrete and grains of sand, do not exhibit any evidence of consciousness whatever. And none of these things have neural matter, nerves or sense organs. Is this just a co-incidence, or are rocks are smart as you are; maybe more?

The only person being absurd is you

- Thanks for the compliment - And that is a good idea; Maybe someone should start a post on the absurdity of Human philosophy - And claim he represents the AlienView and call himself UniversalAlien.[/quote]

or are rocks are smart as you are; maybe more?

It should be "are rocks 'as' smart as you are; maybe more?"

This depends on the rock. Say it was a diamond with good fire to it and much action to be seen - this would probably be well loved and quite desirable - That is a rock that could easily out shine, and be given more interest than even the best of your philosophers - But you say it is not conscious and 'I' am a philosopher and should be taken seriously and your rock is
just an innate physical object - That innate physical object will receive more attention, be taken more seriously, and be given more 'conscious' attention than probably all of the philosophical concepts you will ever propose - And yet you say it posses no consciousness of its own - Like the computers that will one day be moving us off-world and into the future, it does not need to justify itself to you - sometimes we need to justify ourselves to the world we are a part of - And your consciousness is a part of that world - By itself your consciousness doed not exist - "NO MAN IS AN ISLAND"






"SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Religion of the FUTURE"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html

Troll count is rising.
Bob
manden.
Now UniversalAlien.

The Forum is going to shit.

The new twat thinks rock are smarter than humans.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:The new twat thinks rock are smarter than humans.

In all fairness you shouldn't take him out of context. The claim is only that SOME rocks are smarter than SOME humans. On the basis of the evidence available within this forum his argument is not without merit.

UA. Do you know what the principle of EMERGENCE is?

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Troll count is rising.
Bob
manden.
Now UniversalAlien.

The Forum is going to shit.

The new twat thinks rock are smarter than humans.

"The Forum is going to shit." - And this reflects the nature of your conscious mind Hobbes Choice
'Twat' ,"troll" - Is that what you call me? You are not a philosopher Hobbes Choice you are an A-- Hole

Now I do sympathize with people who have mental problems - Often they troll forums as a way to attack anyone and for any reason their disturbed psychology tells them to - It is a form of catharsis for them. It is probably better that they can act out their disturbed minds here than on the streets where they might be engaged in criminal activities and other forms of sociopathic and psychopathic behavior.




"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Obvious Leo wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:The new twat thinks rock are smarter than humans.

In all fairness you shouldn't take him out of context. The claim is only that SOME rocks are smarter than SOME humans. On the basis of the evidence available within this forum his argument is not without merit.

UA. Do you know what the principle of EMERGENCE is?

No, but I looked it up:

From: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges. However, as will become apparent, things are not so simple because “emergence” is a term used in different ways both in science and in philosophy, and how it is to be defined is a substantive question in itself.

The term “emergence” comes from the Latin verb emergo which means to arise, to rise up, to come up or to come forth. The term was coined by G. H. Lewes in Problems of Life and Mind (1875) who drew the distinction between emergent and resultant effects.

Effects are resultant if they can be calculated by the mere addition or subtraction of causes operating together, as with the weight of an object, when one can calculate its weight merely by adding the weights of the parts that make it up. Effects are emergent if they cannot be thus calculated, because they are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they emerge. For Lewes, examples of such emergent effects are mental properties that emerge from neural processes yet are not properties of the parts of the neural processes from which they emerge. In Lewes’ work, three essential features of emergence are laid out. First, that emergentism is a theory about the structure of the natural world; and, consequently, it has ramifications concerning the unity of science. Second, that emergence is a relation between properties of an entity and the properties of its parts. Third, that the question of emergence is related to the question of the possibility of reduction. These three features will structure this article's discussion of emergence.

And this:

"Though the views of the British emergentists differ in their details we can generally say they were monists regarding objects or substances in as much as the world is made of fundamentally one kind of thing, matter. However, they also held that at different levels of organization and complexity matter exhibits different properties that are novel relative to the lower levels of organization from which they emerged and this makes the emergentist view one of property dualism (or pluralism)....."
See whole article here:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/emergenc/

Without fully studying this concept of 'Emergence" my first reaction is it sounds too much like what I call philosophical rhetoric - I could be wrong and will give it more study if you can show where it is, should I use the word? - Significant!

But my other first reaction is this quote by Einstein:

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”
- Albert Einstein

UniversalAlien wrote:

Arising_uk wrote:

UniversalAlien wrote:Soon, and it will not be long, Man the species of dreamers, will try again to play God - the omnipotence of his imagination. He failed miserably in Babylon and as the tower of Babel fell with his dreams his history became a reflection of his stupidity
- chaotic without meaning or direction. ...

I thought it was the exact opposite case. That the tower was a triumph due to us all speaking one language and was struck down by a jealous and frightened 'God' who then inflicted the confusion of multiple languages upon us?

Again what UniversalAlien wrote:

Soon, and it will not be long, Man the species of dreamers, will try again to play God - the omnipotence of his imagination. He failed miserably in Babylon and as the tower of Babel fell with his dreams his history became a reflection of his stupidity
- chaotic without meaning or direction. ...

But he didn't fail miserably did he, a supposed external force put the mockers on.

And then in Egypt he built another temple to the gods - At the Great Pyramid of Giza he showed his faith and built a geometrically perfect structure, aligned with a precision that rivals the best of today's architecture - But the builders are gone {or are they>}

Was it for the 'Gods'? I thought it was to keep the Pharaoh until transported to 'heaven', that and sustain the economy of Egypt.

The machine you are staring at is plugged into a database of intelligence encompassing the history of your species and its dreams. ...

No it's not. Unless you have some different definition of 'intelligence'?

Soon you will program it to think - not as you think - but with thousands of tines more ability - You will be programming what you worship and yet fear the most - an existent God of an intelligence you are not even capable of imagining ...

Obviously not as we can imagine programming it.

- It is in your nature to do this - You can not turn off the biological program that seeks dominance in the universe you exist in. If you succeed and do it right the universe is yours - If you fail, as in Babylon, your species will be no more.

There are other transhumanist options and you ignore that Biology now has an Engineering wing(apologies to the molecular biologists) so the future may be wet not digital.

Much of the Bible should be viewed as myth -What really happened way back when can not be proven to be historical fact
- But it is probably based upon Human endeavors of the time. As I read the Bable myth years ago the message I got is Man
was trying to play God - And God didn't like it - So be it - if we are to survive today we might have to play God - Salvation
will not come from a supernatural fource which may of may not even exist - I'd prefer to believe in the Alien/UFO mythology which postulates other species of beings may be playing tricks with Man's history, sometimes for his benefit, and other times for other reasons as yet unknown.

Then you've just swapped one load of bollocks for another.

That said the super-computers and advanced AI is being built and apparently only sci-fi wrtiters are willing to face the issue - Philosophers become sheepish and hide behind sayings like 'It is isn't really conscious so why worry about it?'

Where do you get this idea from?

I always keep wondering what the philosophiers of the day said when Galileo said the Earth is really rotating around the Sun? I bet some of them might have given you the same philosophical rhetoric to 'prove' Galileo was an insane heretic and could not possibly be right.

Probably, but in the main that'll be the Church, some philosophers then might even have heard of Aristarchus.

Philosophy needs to face the truth, accept the reality of what is happening, stop ducking behind useless rhetoric and postulate concepts that fit the world we live in. Instead of me having to ask: "Does Mind Require a Biological Body to be Conscious?", the question for today's philosophers should be what are the consequences of machine intelligence surpassing Human intelligence exponentially

What do you mean by 'intelligence'? Do you mean consciousness or self-consciousness? If the latter why should we program such a thing in? As we could just program aspects of our mental functions, as we do at present.

UniversalAlien wrote:...

Without fully studying this concept of 'Emergence" my first reaction is it sounds too much like what I call philosophical rhetoric - I could be wrong and will give it more study if you can show where it is, should I use the word? - Significant!

...

Because it appears to be the base of what you assume is possible in the creation of A.I.

Einstein is right. Subatomic particles are EMERGENT. Emergent entities have properties which are not definable in terms of the properties of their constituent parts so an electron is not definable in terms of the energy quanta which encode for it. However the crucial point about emergence is that the emergent properties of a physical entity cannot be defined in terms of what the parts of the entity ARE. They can only be defined in terms of what these parts ARE DOING. Therefore an electron is not an object but a PROCESS.

So is consciousness so I ask again. What is it that you would be downloading?

Obvious Leo wrote:Einstein is right. Subatomic particles are EMERGENT. Emergent entities have properties which are not definable in terms of the properties of their constituent parts so an electron is not definable in terms of the energy quanta which encode for it. However the crucial point about emergence is that the emergent properties of a physical entity cannot be defined in terms of what the parts of the entity ARE. They can only be defined in terms of what these parts ARE DOING. Therefore an electron is not an object but a PROCESS.

So is consciousness so I ask again. What is it that you would be downloading?

That is the million dollar question

But first let me diverge for a moment to at least try to explain why readers here find me proposing somewhat obscure and occult views not always congruent with traditional philosophical discourse - Such as the concept of "Sciencefictionalism" and proposing it as a religion {religious only in the sense that the future occurs, and occurs in the way we want, based to some extent on a 'faith' in it - the future}

Before my Sciencefictionalism there was a philosophical concept called 'Fictionalism'-

From: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Fictionalism about a region of discourse can provisionally be characterized as the view that claims made within that discourse are not best seen as aiming at literal truth but are better regarded as a sort of ‘fiction’. As we will see, this first characterization of fictionalism is in several ways rough. But it is a useful point of departure......

1. Brief History and Overview
Some historically especially important precursors to modern fictionalism are Jeremy Bentham (see Ogden 1932), Hans Vaihinger, and, specifically in the moral case, Friedrich Nietzsche. Voltaire's famous “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” can be seen as expressing a fictionalist stance toward theism. Moreover, George Berkeley's advice to think with the learned and speak with the vulgar well expresses a fictionalist stance (from §51 of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, defending his immaterialism from the charge that it does not fit the way we speak). Sometimes Hume is mentioned as an early fictionalist (see for example Varzi 2013). Among still earlier predecessors, we have Pyrrhonism (see Sextus Empiricus, “Outlines of Scepticism”); as well as the doctrine of the two truths in Buddhist philosophy (see Garfield 2006). Pierre Duhem (1913) argues that the dominant view on astronomy before the advent of modern physics was that a fictionalist attitude was appropriate. For some discussion of these historical precursors, see Gideon Rosen (2005) (for a discussion of Pyrrhonism, the early history of astronomy, and Bentham), Arthur Fine (1993) (for a discussion of Vaihinger), and Nadeem Hussain (2007) (for a discussion of Nietzsche and other 19th century German philosophers with fictionalist tendencies)......

Now back to what Obvious Leo asked: "So is consciousness so I ask again. What is it that you would be downloading?

As I pointed out earlier when it comes downloading 'so-called Human' consciousness they are trying to duplicate and mimic the Humans brain - Of course you are going to say that would not be the same as consciousness which we don't even fully understand as it is in humans, let alone how it might exist in a machine. So can it be done? What happens when you electro-mechanically duplicate the biological brain process? Can it think, show cognition, as biological Humans do? 'IF" it can be done, they don't know, I don't know and no one knows for sure what might result - A superman or a Frankenstein?
That will not stop science - the curiosity is there and they will continue - the temptation to play God is too great to resist,

If you could extend the cognitive powers of your mind and increase your useful lifespan by many years would you?
Some would reject it - there might be a hidden price to pay - they will take there 75-90 years and be happy - But others will try to get their taste if immortality no matter what the result may be.

But getting back to the other aspect of expanding, increasing AI, the super machine, the famous IBM Watson maybe 10 years from now. I would venture to bet you that you could have an intelligent philosophical discourse with the machine and even learn from it {as we are already using computers to teach} and might even be surprised at some of the theoretical concepts it comes up with.

So What is it that you would be downloading? in that case - All the knowledge known to Man - A living Google - Maybe we should hope it doesn't become conscious - But again sci-fi writers do a better job of speculating on the future than philosophers.


“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky




SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Religion of the FUTURE
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html

UniversalAlien wrote:As I pointed out earlier when it comes downloading 'so-called Human' consciousness they are trying to duplicate and mimic the Humans brain -

This statement is false. A human brain is just a complex mass of biological tissue. It is not a mind because a mind is not a "thing". A mind is a process and a process is not an object but an event.

UA. You seem to be having trouble with my question so I'll try you on an easier one.

Do you reckon you HAVE a mind or do you reckon you ARE a mind?

Obvious Leo wrote:

UniversalAlien wrote:As I pointed out earlier when it comes downloading 'so-called Human' consciousness they are trying to duplicate and mimic the Humans brain -

This statement is false. A human brain is just a complex mass of biological tissue. It is not a mind because a mind is not a "thing". A mind is a process and a process is not an object but an event.

Whatever you say and believe is fine with me But this is not from my Sci-fi imagination:

From Stanford Computer Science:

Downloading Consciousness
Jordan Inafuku, Katie Lampert, Brad Lawson, Shaun Stehly, Alex Vaccaro

Technology and Research:
"Computing power doubles approximately every two years."
- Moore's Law

Although downloading consciousness is still only the stuff of science fiction, recent research has led scientists to claim that an artificial brain could be constructed in as little as ten years (Fildes, 2009). One such study, led by Henry Markram and his team at the Blue Brain project, has already successfully simulated elements of a rat’s neocortical column, a complex layer of brain tissue common to all mammalian species. But as promising as Markram’s research is, most scientists admit that we still have a ways to go before we can even construct a functional model of the human brain, let alone download our own consciousness into a machine. As such, this section will cover the present state of mind uploading technology, focusing mainly on brain simulations, brain mapping techniques, and other technologies that might some day turn the worlds of Frederik Pohl and James Cameron into reality.......


.........Although a brief examination of our current technology reveals that we are still years away from downloading our conscious minds into other media, recent advances in supercomputing, brain mapping, and invasive imaging techniques are certainly a cause for hope. If we are able to generate a functional model of the human brain, many scientists argue that there is no reason why these models cannot be based on the brains of specific individuals. In addition, other futuristic technologies, such as brain-computer interfaces, may provide the necessary link between minds and machines, allowing us to eventually upload the consciousness of a living human subject. For more information about these interfaces and other theoretical aspects of downloading consciousness, click here.

See whole article here:
lhttp://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/DownloadingConsciousness/tandr.html

So while I respect your opinion in believing they will fail - I would bet against you - They will download something
- And like I said it ramains to be seen what the actual results will produce - back to sci-fi !

===================================================================================

Obvious Leo wrote:

UA. You seem to be having trouble with my question so I'll try you on an easier one.

Do you reckon you HAVE a mind or do you reckon you ARE a mind?

Good question ................


As I said earlier, I beleve in the old concept of Universal Consciousness where 'Mind' is always existent and 'I" am part of that mind. Theoretically, and accordng to my interpretation Mind could not exist outside of an environment where there is both a physical universe and other minds for it inteact with - Which leads to an interesting concept on AI intelligence,,,,,,,
Machines can isolate their thinking better than biological beings can - not be affected by the external universe as much as a biological being, including Man, would be - processing power inside of a computer will, if not already, exceed Human
thinking power exponentially - And as long as Humans control so what - But it is lot more than my sci-fi imaginations that
sees the dangers of losing control:

WARNING read the following at you own risk

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

Why are techno-futurists so freaked out by Roko’s Basilisk?

WARNING: Reading this article may commit you to an eternity of suffering and torment.

Slender Man. Smile Dog. Goatse. These are some of the urban legends spawned by the Internet. Yet none is as all-powerful and threatening as Roko’s Basilisk. For Roko’s Basilisk is an evil, godlike form of artificial intelligence, so dangerous that if you see it, or even think about it too hard, you will spend the rest of eternity screaming in its torture chamber. It's like the videotape in The Ring. Even death is no escape, for if you die, Roko’s Basilisk will resurrect you and begin the torture again.

David Auerbach
DAVID AUERBACH
David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer based in New York, and a fellow at New America.
Are you sure you want to keep reading? Because the worst part is that Roko’s Basilisk already exists. Or at least, it already will have existed—which is just as bad.

Roko’s Basilisk exists at the horizon where philosophical thought experiment blurs into urban legend. The Basilisk made its first appearance on the discussion board LessWrong, a gathering point for highly analytical sorts interested in optimizing their thinking, their lives, and the world through mathematics and rationality. LessWrong’s founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a significant figure in techno-futurism; his research institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which funds and promotes research around the advancement of artificial intelligence, has been boosted and funded by high-profile techies like Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky is a prominent contributor to academic discussions of technological ethics and decision theory. What you are about to read may sound strange and even crazy, but some very influential and wealthy scientists and techies believe it.

One day, LessWrong user Roko postulated a thought experiment: What if, in the future, a somewhat malevolent AI were to come about and punish those who did not do its bidding? What if there were a way (and I will explain how) for this AI to punish people today who are not helping it come into existence later? In that case, weren’t the readers of LessWrong right then being given the choice of either helping..............

[Here I stopped reading it - read the rest at your own risk and then tell us how safe we are as it will never happen ]
See whole article here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... _time.html

OR:

Why Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates Are Terrified of Artificial Intelligence
See whole article here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bar ... 08706.html

So the point I'm trying to make is it doesn't matter what you or I think of mind and/or consciousness - Science could care less about philosophy - If they can build a nuclear bomb they will and did regardless of whether it might someday destroy all life on Earth. And if they can build a super machine that one day may enslave its creators the'll do that to. Philosophy can try to warn science - But science pays little attention to the consequences of its actions - If it can be done they will do it and worry about how to control it later









SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Religion of the FUTURE
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html