I was not talking about AI. I never said one word about AI. I know Kurzweil thinks and talks about AI, but all our little exchange was talking about was copying/mapping consciousness. Getting it functional in another environment will probably involve a degree of AI, but that phase was implicit at best. You don't seem to know how to carry out a conversation without blatant strawmen. Disappointing, but all to common on ye olde/.
You keep harping on 'wishful thinking' as though there has been experimental data that casts doubt on the concept. You seem to act as though 'we don't know' is an excuse to disparage hypotheses, which is ridiculous. Until experimentation is done, the concept as a hypothetical is valid. True 'wishful thinking' would be clinging to a theory that has been disproven. You're leveling a baseless charge as a personal, subjective fit of pique. I wonder if you can honestly and publicly answer the question, 'What makes you so personally uncomfortable about transhumanism?'
When I said 'daguerreotypical' I was making an adjective out of daguerreotype, the first common method of photography. If you told Louis Daguerre in 1839 that in little more than a century we'd be taking pictures of astronomical events that span back through 95% of the time this universe has existed, physical waveforms travelling a mere three thousandths of a percent slower than light itself, and constructing cameras with lasers (not that he would understand those) that would take 6.1 million pictures/second. (Not to mention atomic force microscopes imaging atomic structures.)
I'm sure that faced with all that, Louis Daguerre would be agape. Seminal technologies are fantastically underwhelming compared to refinements (Exhibit A vs. modern computers). I would say that given current technological trends in neurological imaging and analysis, the mere idea of mapping and copying is conservative. Most likely there are even more advanced applications that haven't even been conceived that will rear their heads in a century or two.
Everytime somebody says something like 'the world is going to end up like Idiocracy' it leaves the realm of comedy and becomes a serious discussion of sociological futures. Too many people (Absolut187 is neither the first nor the last) have looked at that movie and not only took it seriously, but thought it was right.
I would argue that if reincarnation is real, it underscores, not undermines, the possibility of transferring consciousness. If the natural/supernatural world does it already, than doing it artificially may again just be a matter of process.
While I don't put much stock in 'such research' (if you want to call interviews and hearsay research, but then you must when there is no tangible, physical process or evidence for one), whether reincarnation may or may not happen is irrelevant to the issue.
Whether you like it or not, definition and measurement are coming. Researchers are already able to use MRI to learn how different patterns of thought represent certain abstractions. This is the nascent, daguerreotypical beginning to a long process of improving that technology. It's a matter of time before mechanical and procedural improvements make mapping and copying brains just another footnote in history. But anything we can't do RIGHT NOW is absurd, of course.
What makes your assumptions better than mine? "If consciousness is *also* a hardware process" and "we can't simply assume that it can be emulated" indeed. Why can we not assume that it can be emulated, but you can assume that it cannot be emulated? You're just pushing an opposing hypothetical, but because we're not technologically at the right place yet, there's no testing to prove which is right.
Idiocracy was both a terrible movie and riddled with faulty assumptions based on deliberately ignoring thousands of years of sociological trends. People have always tended to mate more or less laterally in the IQ department. Also, regardless of the nature/nurture debate, the bell curve is undefeatable, and consequently by the random interaction of genetic material, geniuses are still occasionally born to idiot parents and vice versa. Once those kids grow up, they tend to copulate with their own intellectual 'kind'. The top minority of the curve has always ruled the bottom minority, and it always will. As Cicero once said, 'One good man is worth ten thousand imbeciles!' (Somewhere in one of his dozens of letters to Atticus, but I can't find it at the moment.)
Consciousness has both continuous and instantaneous characteristics. It's just like any other material thing in space-time. There is the present actuality, a limited span of potentials that will become the next actuality. Those limits create a kind of continuity. With most people experience over time narrows the likelihood of options. Most people end up becoming almost fatalistically linear.
You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'. This is a scientific problem. You have a human consciousness. In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special. It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer. Given that assumption, it is a natural step to find some way to copy it, intact and functioning, to a more resilient inorganic, silicon-based computer. The difference between this and all the various soul-based afterlife nonsense of religions should be obvious to anybody. This is a potentially plausible objective hypothetical physical/material process. It's an idea based on hard facts that may actually work given enough research, testing, and further advances in hardware and software design.
If 'any reasonable person' would find it unconstitutional, this legislation should have never been proposed in the first place. These people are supposed to have taken an oath to protect the Constitution, not deliberately undermine it.
I can't find the source of the quote at the moment, but I remember reading once something to the effect of "Software/media companies made a huge mistake by calling the violation of their copyrights 'piracy'. Everybody wants to be a pirate. They should have called it something like 'software faggotry'."
Kidding aside, piracy has been romanticized in the Western collective consciousness for more than a century. Society today has a positive perception of romantic piracy at all levels, from the movies of Errol Flynn influencing the elderly all the way to that Lazytown song 'You're a pirate' being made into a flash animation meme influencing the internet generations. Aside from 'real pirates' like in Somalia, pirates are (however wrongly from a historical perspective) almost universally held in favorable regard.
I think that if the Pirate Party changed its name, people would feel it was less genuine, like it was trying to hide its true nature and repackage itself in a pandering sort of way. I think that as it stands, the Pirate Party can capitalize a lot on the inherent human desire for unique and even rebellious expression/identity.
I would be incredibly disgusted by that if I didn't already know that quantitatively there are more genetically-unrelated organisms in a given human being than that person's own genetically-related cells. Without micro-organisms our digestive tract wouldn't even work, and so micro-organisms working over things like cheese is little more than external pre-digestion. (For that matter so is cooking, which anthropological studies have been linking to be one of the more significant factors in the transition of early humanity from being 'just another primate' to the most advanced animal the biosphere has produced.)
Yeah, they're so fake that they're currently the largest party in Sweden that's not represented in Parliament, and that's likely to change in the next two years when all the tens of thousands of new members hit the polls.
Wow, apparently people are missing the point. They obviously aren't trying to emulate 'new CRTs' what would be the point of that? Have you people forgotten what a 12" MCGA or EGA display from over two decades ago used to look like? I used to have one (MCGA) in working condition as recently as two years ago, and I can say the emulator is pretty close.
Damn kids don't remember what shit used to look like before VGA, SVGA, XGA etc. came along and spoiled 'em. When I was growing up, I had one color! ONE! And it was the nastiest shade of amber ever conceived! At least I could play Airborne Ranger...
If a one backward idea is conflated with another in a forest and nobody hears it, does anybody give a crap?
I mean seriously, human/dinosaur coexistence and creationism both fly in the face of scientific evidence, and because creationists cling to the former so desperately to find some way to wrap their tiny heads around the fossil record, they have effectively made it a subset of their own claptrap. Who cares? Why would anybody want such an unsound 'theory' to stand by itself anyway? Nobody's rushing to pick up that one alone at baggage claim.
Defining terms like this becomes something of a gray area. For my part, during an occupation I would not consider a business selling goods or services to occupiers as 'collaborators'. To me a collaborator is somebody who sells out the interests of a resistance movement--personnel, logistics, whatever--to occupiers. That also makes them, as I said before, partisans. They are doing more than simple, innocuous business, but rather are deliberately, directly and primarily reducing the efficacy and endangering the people acting in resistance while increasing the efficacy and helping to secure the people acting in occupation. If I rat out somebody for my own gain and an occupying force executes them, I'm as much a partisan as if I had shot them myself. Any honorable person would accept the responsibility that goes with a decision like that.
As for your example, I would ask how 'numerous' these instances were, and how many people at what level were complicit. I doubt very, very much that such behavior was planned and authorized by Charles De Gaulle or any others high in the command structure. This is a key difference between Western resistance vs. insurgent groups in the Middle East. Groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq commit atrocities at the behest of their top leaders and organizers, whereas atrocities when they occur in the West are usually the action of individuals who are exceeding their authority and their orders.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh ho ho, well played.
Speaking as somebody with 4 shelves of Star Trek books, piss off. Trekker sounds totally gay. I am proud to call myself a Trekkie.
I agree the timelines are arbitrary and far too optimistic.
I would wager at this point they are all out of ass.
I wish I had mod points for you.
I was not talking about AI. I never said one word about AI. I know Kurzweil thinks and talks about AI, but all our little exchange was talking about was copying/mapping consciousness. Getting it functional in another environment will probably involve a degree of AI, but that phase was implicit at best. You don't seem to know how to carry out a conversation without blatant strawmen. Disappointing, but all to common on ye olde /.
You keep harping on 'wishful thinking' as though there has been experimental data that casts doubt on the concept. You seem to act as though 'we don't know' is an excuse to disparage hypotheses, which is ridiculous. Until experimentation is done, the concept as a hypothetical is valid. True 'wishful thinking' would be clinging to a theory that has been disproven. You're leveling a baseless charge as a personal, subjective fit of pique. I wonder if you can honestly and publicly answer the question, 'What makes you so personally uncomfortable about transhumanism?'
Granted, but that's why I love USB numeric keypads. Good for other gaming as well IMO.
When I said 'daguerreotypical' I was making an adjective out of daguerreotype, the first common method of photography. If you told Louis Daguerre in 1839 that in little more than a century we'd be taking pictures of astronomical events that span back through 95% of the time this universe has existed, physical waveforms travelling a mere three thousandths of a percent slower than light itself, and constructing cameras with lasers (not that he would understand those) that would take 6.1 million pictures/second. (Not to mention atomic force microscopes imaging atomic structures.)
I'm sure that faced with all that, Louis Daguerre would be agape. Seminal technologies are fantastically underwhelming compared to refinements (Exhibit A vs. modern computers). I would say that given current technological trends in neurological imaging and analysis, the mere idea of mapping and copying is conservative. Most likely there are even more advanced applications that haven't even been conceived that will rear their heads in a century or two.
Everytime somebody says something like 'the world is going to end up like Idiocracy' it leaves the realm of comedy and becomes a serious discussion of sociological futures. Too many people (Absolut187 is neither the first nor the last) have looked at that movie and not only took it seriously, but thought it was right.
I would argue that if reincarnation is real, it underscores, not undermines, the possibility of transferring consciousness. If the natural/supernatural world does it already, than doing it artificially may again just be a matter of process.
While I don't put much stock in 'such research' (if you want to call interviews and hearsay research, but then you must when there is no tangible, physical process or evidence for one), whether reincarnation may or may not happen is irrelevant to the issue.
Whether you like it or not, definition and measurement are coming. Researchers are already able to use MRI to learn how different patterns of thought represent certain abstractions. This is the nascent, daguerreotypical beginning to a long process of improving that technology. It's a matter of time before mechanical and procedural improvements make mapping and copying brains just another footnote in history. But anything we can't do RIGHT NOW is absurd, of course.
What makes your assumptions better than mine? "If consciousness is *also* a hardware process" and "we can't simply assume that it can be emulated" indeed. Why can we not assume that it can be emulated, but you can assume that it cannot be emulated? You're just pushing an opposing hypothetical, but because we're not technologically at the right place yet, there's no testing to prove which is right.
Idiocracy was both a terrible movie and riddled with faulty assumptions based on deliberately ignoring thousands of years of sociological trends. People have always tended to mate more or less laterally in the IQ department. Also, regardless of the nature/nurture debate, the bell curve is undefeatable, and consequently by the random interaction of genetic material, geniuses are still occasionally born to idiot parents and vice versa. Once those kids grow up, they tend to copulate with their own intellectual 'kind'. The top minority of the curve has always ruled the bottom minority, and it always will. As Cicero once said, 'One good man is worth ten thousand imbeciles!' (Somewhere in one of his dozens of letters to Atticus, but I can't find it at the moment.)
Consciousness has both continuous and instantaneous characteristics. It's just like any other material thing in space-time. There is the present actuality, a limited span of potentials that will become the next actuality. Those limits create a kind of continuity. With most people experience over time narrows the likelihood of options. Most people end up becoming almost fatalistically linear.
You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'. This is a scientific problem. You have a human consciousness. In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special. It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer. Given that assumption, it is a natural step to find some way to copy it, intact and functioning, to a more resilient inorganic, silicon-based computer. The difference between this and all the various soul-based afterlife nonsense of religions should be obvious to anybody. This is a potentially plausible objective hypothetical physical/material process. It's an idea based on hard facts that may actually work given enough research, testing, and further advances in hardware and software design.
My favorite Rogue-like will always be Ancient Domains of Mystery. The control system is so much better than Nethack.
If 'any reasonable person' would find it unconstitutional, this legislation should have never been proposed in the first place. These people are supposed to have taken an oath to protect the Constitution, not deliberately undermine it.
I can't find the source of the quote at the moment, but I remember reading once something to the effect of "Software/media companies made a huge mistake by calling the violation of their copyrights 'piracy'. Everybody wants to be a pirate. They should have called it something like 'software faggotry'."
Kidding aside, piracy has been romanticized in the Western collective consciousness for more than a century. Society today has a positive perception of romantic piracy at all levels, from the movies of Errol Flynn influencing the elderly all the way to that Lazytown song 'You're a pirate' being made into a flash animation meme influencing the internet generations. Aside from 'real pirates' like in Somalia, pirates are (however wrongly from a historical perspective) almost universally held in favorable regard.
I think that if the Pirate Party changed its name, people would feel it was less genuine, like it was trying to hide its true nature and repackage itself in a pandering sort of way. I think that as it stands, the Pirate Party can capitalize a lot on the inherent human desire for unique and even rebellious expression/identity.
Heh I didn't know there was a website for the US party. I'm on board.
I would be incredibly disgusted by that if I didn't already know that quantitatively there are more genetically-unrelated organisms in a given human being than that person's own genetically-related cells. Without micro-organisms our digestive tract wouldn't even work, and so micro-organisms working over things like cheese is little more than external pre-digestion. (For that matter so is cooking, which anthropological studies have been linking to be one of the more significant factors in the transition of early humanity from being 'just another primate' to the most advanced animal the biosphere has produced.)
Yeah, they're so fake that they're currently the largest party in Sweden that's not represented in Parliament, and that's likely to change in the next two years when all the tens of thousands of new members hit the polls.
It means your browser sucks at unicode for EUD.
Wow, apparently people are missing the point. They obviously aren't trying to emulate 'new CRTs' what would be the point of that? Have you people forgotten what a 12" MCGA or EGA display from over two decades ago used to look like? I used to have one (MCGA) in working condition as recently as two years ago, and I can say the emulator is pretty close.
Damn kids don't remember what shit used to look like before VGA, SVGA, XGA etc. came along and spoiled 'em. When I was growing up, I had one color! ONE! And it was the nastiest shade of amber ever conceived! At least I could play Airborne Ranger...
If a one backward idea is conflated with another in a forest and nobody hears it, does anybody give a crap?
I mean seriously, human/dinosaur coexistence and creationism both fly in the face of scientific evidence, and because creationists cling to the former so desperately to find some way to wrap their tiny heads around the fossil record, they have effectively made it a subset of their own claptrap. Who cares? Why would anybody want such an unsound 'theory' to stand by itself anyway? Nobody's rushing to pick up that one alone at baggage claim.
Defining terms like this becomes something of a gray area. For my part, during an occupation I would not consider a business selling goods or services to occupiers as 'collaborators'. To me a collaborator is somebody who sells out the interests of a resistance movement--personnel, logistics, whatever--to occupiers. That also makes them, as I said before, partisans. They are doing more than simple, innocuous business, but rather are deliberately, directly and primarily reducing the efficacy and endangering the people acting in resistance while increasing the efficacy and helping to secure the people acting in occupation. If I rat out somebody for my own gain and an occupying force executes them, I'm as much a partisan as if I had shot them myself. Any honorable person would accept the responsibility that goes with a decision like that.
As for your example, I would ask how 'numerous' these instances were, and how many people at what level were complicit. I doubt very, very much that such behavior was planned and authorized by Charles De Gaulle or any others high in the command structure. This is a key difference between Western resistance vs. insurgent groups in the Middle East. Groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq commit atrocities at the behest of their top leaders and organizers, whereas atrocities when they occur in the West are usually the action of individuals who are exceeding their authority and their orders.