Of course the new option would be very reminiscent of the old Apollo space capsule instead of the tricked out shuttle currently planned.
Methinks that even the author didn't RTFA... The shuttle-based plan is the new contingiency plan. And both plans would involve the same "Apollo-like" Orion capsules. I guess that if no one else does, then its misguided to even expect authors to RTFA?
The worrying part of this design is that the same orion capsule would be only able to carry 2 astronauts at a time during launch, presumably due to fuel constraints. While the rest of it sounds like a pretty reasonable bet, this bit just makes me think "well what's the point?"
I reserve my right to speculate, and I agree that we know far too little to make an accurate determination either way about something that may not even ever exist. I sought only to counter the perceived claim that such a thing would not ever be possible, as this itself is mere speculation.
I agree that it seems likely that AI would likely have to obtain "fully human" sentience, and slowly become socially accepted, before non-human sentients would be accepted as such.
I agree that people are too easy to fool, but that swings both ways - if you were trapped in a box and could only communicate through text on a screen via a keyboard, I'll bet that there would be some people that could be convinced that you were nothing but a very sophisticated chatbot, regardless of what you said.
We would appear to be in agreement on more things than might initially be apparent.
Like an ultra-sophisticated chatbot?
No, not like a chat bot. Like the original person. Exactly like them, because the mechanisms of their consciousness would have been transferred exactly. Or duplicated, if you prefer.
That's an incredibly unbelievable assumption. Brain cells are chemical, computers are electrical.
I'm well aware that we're not debating in the realm of the soon-to-be-possible. That doesn't stop me from considering it an interesting, if currently irrelevant, topic.
Much brain cell activity is electrical, but I consider that to be beside the point; if the same information is transferred between data centres that produce the same outputs as the originals would, then I see no reason to distinuish whether the net system is alive based on what those information centres are made of.
what if "thought" and "feeling" are nothing more than chemical reactions (which they actually are). When you die, death would not be the peaceful slumber or nothingness people assume...
Technically they're mostly electrical, but there's plenty of chemical reaction going on in there too - that doesn't affect your "chilling thought," though. I doubt many people expect to consciously experience decomposition after death, and I certainly don't.
Star Trek has considered the very question you asked... If you're asking "could we some day understand how the brain works and mimick it", well, possibly.
My objection to using Star Trek as a philosophical reference is that due to its nature & format, it is only capable of considering such matters in an extremely superficial way. I fully agreement with you about the prospect of mimicking the human brain in the distant future being a "well, possibly." I also consider it a theoretical possibility that this mimicking could be done in such a way that neither external observers or the conscious entity themselves could tell the difference.
In such a circumstance, I would very much be in favour of that kind of entity being awarded full human rights. However, I would rather there were lesser criteria than "indistinguishable from human" for being treated by the law as free entity, as Star Trek et al. have envisaged many not-quite human sentiences.
However, I have not the slightest suggestion as to what such criteria should be.
If you replaced a person's whole brain he would be dead, computer or no. It would be no different than as a brain dead person on life support
Even if you were able to interact with this person, in a completely normal manner? What if his brain was slowly replaced, cell by cell, with a non-organic equivalent, and he remained conscious throughout the entire process? Assume that the replacement 'cells' performed an identical function.
If your argument is that a person is completely dead by the point that such a process is complete, then at what point in the process did the person 'die?' When the very last brain cell went? When the majority of brain cells had been replaced? When they're still talking to you, insisting that they're very much alive? That wouldn't seem to sit very well with a binary view of life and death, with no intermediate stages.
I can't think of any reason why you would object to the notion, unless you a) watch too much science fiction and b) don't understand how computers work.
Debating the philosophy of technologies not yet invented is generally considered 'science fiction,' but there's no need to bring star trek into this. And this has nothing to do with how computers work, and everything to do with how conciousness works. There's nothing magical about the brain, it's just exceedingly complex.
It is the substrate on which mind and consciousness are run. But I see no reason to believe that a similar process could not run on a different substrate. Yes, I have read science fiction - would it not be strange for someone with an interest in such things to do so? My thoughts are my own, however, not forced upon me by fiction overload.
In such a brain-replacement scenario, of course the original material of the brain would no longer be being used. But the overall archetecture on which the electrical impulses of neural activity operate would remain fundamentally unchanged, except for a single cell at a time being replaced. If the thought patterns were never distrupted - since (I presume) the electrical impulses of thought, combined with chemical interactions with the body and memory are what make a mind, how can they be said to have died?
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes, from those which do not
Wow, so life is the distinction between things that are alive and things that are not? Way to go with the first line of wikipedia, that really tells us nothing. If you scroll down the page just a little to the Definitions section, you'll see what I'm referring to:
It is still a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms... Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the consensus is to attempt to describe it.
And really, I'm not anthropomising anything; you're the one mentioning toasters, cars and the like. That's not helping.
Why not just tax fuel more? If fuel use is going down and more tax money is needed, why not just increase the fuel tax? Such a system would be many times more efficient, and doesn't require sticking GPS and net access into every car.
If they're worried about electric cars, simply taxing more on electricity would work, you know? Same with any other alternate fuels
What if that computer was a brain implant? What if it replaced a component of a person's brain, or even all of it? Do you really think that there is a point on the road to total physical prosthesis that someone stops being a person? In every possible case?
I agree with all of your examples, but still object to the notion that something must think in analogue, or physically be(?) analogue, (and not digital) to be alive.
Last I checked we didn't even have a good definition of alive anyway, at least one that didn't disqualify impotent people. Just to be clear, I completely agree that 'killing' any computer game opponent is not 'killing'. But some day there may be an AI (or non-organic posthuman) that I would consider the destruction of which to be equivalent to 'killing'.
You sir, are a binary bigot.
Simply being able to reduce something to binary data, or destroy it by turning off a switch doesn't make it less alive. If I'm on a ventillator, and its possible to destroy my life by turning that off, that doesn't mean I'm not alive. If at some point in the future its possible to create a digital copy of a person's mind, that can be run as software in a completely turing-compliant way, I for one would have qualms about pulling the plug.
Now I'm not saying anyone should feel bad for 'killing' computer game opponents... I'm saying you need better justification.
The guy is coming from the UK.
Chances are he's only seen a white christmas once in the last 10 years, if even that.
So "barely even have a winter" is, by UK standards, a winter several times more intense than what he's used to.
30 seconds?:(
Mine are more like 5, and they were pretty damn cheap. No idea who made them though, and I'm too lazy to climb up and look for a manufacturer. UKian btw.
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Unfortunately, not really. All street signs still measure distance in miles, and eighths of miles, and the like, and half the population think that the metric system is (like the euro) just another damn frenchie scheme to undermine our sovereignty. We have a long history (this, for instance) of coming up with crazy conspiricies to demonstrate why the imperial system is our God-given right, and why the French would like nothing better than to force their evil organised system of measurement upon us.
Meanwhile, for at least a couple of decades now, kids grow up being taught nothing but metric, and wonder why the grown ups still insist on using imperial, and what on earth a fluid ounce actually is. Cos everyone seems to use it, but I don't think anyone under 25 has actually been taught it.
American "trouser" pants, or british "underpants" pants? I imagine its the latter, but this being primarily an american site, it seems best to confirm. Or at least to point it out.
You know fine well that columbus's motivations were inherently financial - he was seeking a new trade route to the far east.
While I would love to see a greater human expansion beyond LEO, if its done wrong, without the proper infrastructure, it will fail! And I for one don't want to see that.
Ok, counter-example. NetDevil a small studio, and are only working on Jumpgate Evolution afaik. Even if they have another secret project, thats "1 or 2"... and they're not indie.
Independently of a 3rd-party publisher.
A publisher being an entity that provides money up front in exchange for rights related to the game (sales money, IP ownership, etc).
big. Big is probably irrelevant, I used this to distinguish between the dev's grandma giving them £10 for a pizza during one night of development and EA giving them £500'000 for the rights to the game. But its a needless distinction.
Indie music is music published independently. Indie games are games published independently.
If an indie game is taken up by a big publisher, its no longer indie.
But on a less obtuse note, its nothing but daft wishful thinking to assume that something is possible, despite all the evidence being to the contrary, just because we know there are some incomplete parts of our physical theory.
If you're going to say that exotic matter with negative mass "may well" exist, then thats you're perogative, but its a crazy postulation, and certainly an unsafe assumption.
They ran a numerical simulation of the solar system through more than a billion cycles of the Earth's orbit... presumably thats a trillion time steps of their simulation, at the very least (1000 steps per orbit would give poor accuracy over that many iterations), and preferably more like a quadrillion time steps. Even with that, I'm suprised anyone thinks that so few iterations can be relied upon to give meaningful results over such a long time.
Since Nature actually published them, I wonder if perhaps the chance of Earth colliding with Mars / Venus isn't actually the focus of their paper, and that the Beeb has just turned tabloid on us yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
You're doing it wrong!
Of course the new option would be very reminiscent of the old Apollo space capsule instead of the tricked out shuttle currently planned.
Methinks that even the author didn't RTFA... The shuttle-based plan is the new contingiency plan. And both plans would involve the same "Apollo-like" Orion capsules. I guess that if no one else does, then its misguided to even expect authors to RTFA?
The worrying part of this design is that the same orion capsule would be only able to carry 2 astronauts at a time during launch, presumably due to fuel constraints. While the rest of it sounds like a pretty reasonable bet, this bit just makes me think "well what's the point?"
Yikes, I had no idea they charged to [i]receive[/i] ... thats crap! Do they charge you to receive calls too?
I reserve my right to speculate, and I agree that we know far too little to make an accurate determination either way about something that may not even ever exist. I sought only to counter the perceived claim that such a thing would not ever be possible, as this itself is mere speculation.
I agree that it seems likely that AI would likely have to obtain "fully human" sentience, and slowly become socially accepted, before non-human sentients would be accepted as such.
I agree that people are too easy to fool, but that swings both ways - if you were trapped in a box and could only communicate through text on a screen via a keyboard, I'll bet that there would be some people that could be convinced that you were nothing but a very sophisticated chatbot, regardless of what you said.
We would appear to be in agreement on more things than might initially be apparent.
Like an ultra-sophisticated chatbot?
No, not like a chat bot. Like the original person. Exactly like them, because the mechanisms of their consciousness would have been transferred exactly. Or duplicated, if you prefer.
That's an incredibly unbelievable assumption. Brain cells are chemical, computers are electrical.
I'm well aware that we're not debating in the realm of the soon-to-be-possible. That doesn't stop me from considering it an interesting, if currently irrelevant, topic.
Much brain cell activity is electrical, but I consider that to be beside the point; if the same information is transferred between data centres that produce the same outputs as the originals would, then I see no reason to distinuish whether the net system is alive based on what those information centres are made of.
what if "thought" and "feeling" are nothing more than chemical reactions (which they actually are). When you die, death would not be the peaceful slumber or nothingness people assume...
Technically they're mostly electrical, but there's plenty of chemical reaction going on in there too - that doesn't affect your "chilling thought," though. I doubt many people expect to consciously experience decomposition after death, and I certainly don't.
Star Trek has considered the very question you asked... If you're asking "could we some day understand how the brain works and mimick it", well, possibly.
My objection to using Star Trek as a philosophical reference is that due to its nature & format, it is only capable of considering such matters in an extremely superficial way. I fully agreement with you about the prospect of mimicking the human brain in the distant future being a "well, possibly." I also consider it a theoretical possibility that this mimicking could be done in such a way that neither external observers or the conscious entity themselves could tell the difference.
In such a circumstance, I would very much be in favour of that kind of entity being awarded full human rights. However, I would rather there were lesser criteria than "indistinguishable from human" for being treated by the law as free entity, as Star Trek et al. have envisaged many not-quite human sentiences.
However, I have not the slightest suggestion as to what such criteria should be.
Even if you were able to interact with this person, in a completely normal manner? What if his brain was slowly replaced, cell by cell, with a non-organic equivalent, and he remained conscious throughout the entire process? Assume that the replacement 'cells' performed an identical function.
If your argument is that a person is completely dead by the point that such a process is complete, then at what point in the process did the person 'die?' When the very last brain cell went? When the majority of brain cells had been replaced? When they're still talking to you, insisting that they're very much alive? That wouldn't seem to sit very well with a binary view of life and death, with no intermediate stages.
I can't think of any reason why you would object to the notion, unless you a) watch too much science fiction and b) don't understand how computers work.
Debating the philosophy of technologies not yet invented is generally considered 'science fiction,' but there's no need to bring star trek into this. And this has nothing to do with how computers work, and everything to do with how conciousness works. There's nothing magical about the brain, it's just exceedingly complex. It is the substrate on which mind and consciousness are run. But I see no reason to believe that a similar process could not run on a different substrate.
Yes, I have read science fiction - would it not be strange for someone with an interest in such things to do so? My thoughts are my own, however, not forced upon me by fiction overload.
In such a brain-replacement scenario, of course the original material of the brain would no longer be being used. But the overall archetecture on which the electrical impulses of neural activity operate would remain fundamentally unchanged, except for a single cell at a time being replaced. If the thought patterns were never distrupted - since (I presume) the electrical impulses of thought, combined with chemical interactions with the body and memory are what make a mind, how can they be said to have died?
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes, from those which do not
Wow, so life is the distinction between things that are alive and things that are not? Way to go with the first line of wikipedia, that really tells us nothing. If you scroll down the page just a little to the Definitions section, you'll see what I'm referring to:
It is still a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms ... Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the consensus is to attempt to describe it.
And really, I'm not anthropomising anything; you're the one mentioning toasters, cars and the like. That's not helping.
Why not just tax fuel more? If fuel use is going down and more tax money is needed, why not just increase the fuel tax? Such a system would be many times more efficient, and doesn't require sticking GPS and net access into every car.
If they're worried about electric cars, simply taxing more on electricity would work, you know? Same with any other alternate fuels
What if that computer was a brain implant? What if it replaced a component of a person's brain, or even all of it? Do you really think that there is a point on the road to total physical prosthesis that someone stops being a person? In every possible case?
I agree with all of your examples, but still object to the notion that something must think in analogue, or physically be(?) analogue, (and not digital) to be alive.
Last I checked we didn't even have a good definition of alive anyway, at least one that didn't disqualify impotent people. Just to be clear, I completely agree that 'killing' any computer game opponent is not 'killing'. But some day there may be an AI (or non-organic posthuman) that I would consider the destruction of which to be equivalent to 'killing'.
You sir, are a binary bigot.
... I'm saying you need better justification.
Simply being able to reduce something to binary data, or destroy it by turning off a switch doesn't make it less alive. If I'm on a ventillator, and its possible to destroy my life by turning that off, that doesn't mean I'm not alive.
If at some point in the future its possible to create a digital copy of a person's mind, that can be run as software in a completely turing-compliant way, I for one would have qualms about pulling the plug.
Now I'm not saying anyone should feel bad for 'killing' computer game opponents
The guy is coming from the UK. Chances are he's only seen a white christmas once in the last 10 years, if even that. So "barely even have a winter" is, by UK standards, a winter several times more intense than what he's used to.
30 seconds? :(
Mine are more like 5, and they were pretty damn cheap. No idea who made them though, and I'm too lazy to climb up and look for a manufacturer. UKian btw.
I have a microUSB cable that plugs into the wall socket. I use it to charge my phone. Its not that crazy!
But I thought that was actually kinda funny. At least, thats the impression I got from skipping through it with no sound.
Ouch. Here was me hoping that all relevant files would just be run through an automatic conversion app.
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Unfortunately, not really. All street signs still measure distance in miles, and eighths of miles, and the like, and half the population think that the metric system is (like the euro) just another damn frenchie scheme to undermine our sovereignty. We have a long history (this, for instance) of coming up with crazy conspiricies to demonstrate why the imperial system is our God-given right, and why the French would like nothing better than to force their evil organised system of measurement upon us.
Meanwhile, for at least a couple of decades now, kids grow up being taught nothing but metric, and wonder why the grown ups still insist on using imperial, and what on earth a fluid ounce actually is. Cos everyone seems to use it, but I don't think anyone under 25 has actually been taught it.
American "trouser" pants, or british "underpants" pants? I imagine its the latter, but this being primarily an american site, it seems best to confirm. Or at least to point it out.
You know fine well that columbus's motivations were inherently financial - he was seeking a new trade route to the far east.
While I would love to see a greater human expansion beyond LEO, if its done wrong, without the proper infrastructure, it will fail! And I for one don't want to see that.
Ok, counter-example. NetDevil a small studio, and are only working on Jumpgate Evolution afaik. Even if they have another secret project, thats "1 or 2" ... and they're not indie.
But some very big studios only work on one or two games at a time.
Independently of a 3rd-party publisher. A publisher being an entity that provides money up front in exchange for rights related to the game (sales money, IP ownership, etc).
big.
Big is probably irrelevant, I used this to distinguish between the dev's grandma giving them £10 for a pizza during one night of development and EA giving them £500'000 for the rights to the game. But its a needless distinction.
Indie music is music published independently. Indie games are games published independently. If an indie game is taken up by a big publisher, its no longer indie.
True, it is. But its not to early to say that it looks very, very unlikely.
It kinda is, in spherical polar coordinates.
But on a less obtuse note, its nothing but daft wishful thinking to assume that something is possible, despite all the evidence being to the contrary, just because we know there are some incomplete parts of our physical theory.
If you're going to say that exotic matter with negative mass "may well" exist, then thats you're perogative, but its a crazy postulation, and certainly an unsafe assumption.
It wasn't bioware though. Thats why.
They ran a numerical simulation of the solar system through more than a billion cycles of the Earth's orbit... presumably thats a trillion time steps of their simulation, at the very least (1000 steps per orbit would give poor accuracy over that many iterations), and preferably more like a quadrillion time steps. Even with that, I'm suprised anyone thinks that so few iterations can be relied upon to give meaningful results over such a long time.
Since Nature actually published them, I wonder if perhaps the chance of Earth colliding with Mars / Venus isn't actually the focus of their paper, and that the Beeb has just turned tabloid on us yet again.