Exactly, the really sad part is that someone as smart as Kurzweil could delude himself into thinking that memories from his father could be sufficient to "recreate" him. I think at that point that gives us the right to dismiss any of his claims in the field as crackpottery, even if his strange delusional beliefs don't necessarily imply that he'd be wrong all along, it's safe to assume that he would be.
Well claims can be verified, which is what that guy did, anyways the point was, if reincarnation happens, then it kills the idea that the mind is just a software running on the bioelectrochemical computer that is our brain, which would mean you probably can't just emulate it. The other point is, we don't actually have that many certainties about the nature of our "minds", so saying we're 20-40 years away from emulating them is preposterous.
It's impossible because we have no idea how it could be possible to begin with. Of course that doesn't mean it's definitely impossible, but it's impossible until we prove it is. By the way, I fail to see how your first 3 paragraphs supports your point.
As for immortality, I think it'll never happen, not because it's impossible, but because I think we'll understand why it's undesirable before we make it happen.
As I said in another post, you're making a variation of the "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument. His predictions are baseless, if they aren't then tell me what they're based on.
As TFA says, Kurzweil as been trying to collect anything about his dead father he could in the hope that one day his dead father could be simulated. Besides the sad and creepy aspects of this, it shows part of what his predictions are fuelled by, and that's no good.
Yes, no matter what function it would have naturally tended to be, the who self-predicting aspect of the law skews what we've done into trying to keep up with the pace.
I honestly don't see why anyone would want to live much longer than they're going to, mostly if it's to live a disembodied life. I'd rather take my chances with natural death and cross my cold fingers that the next thing I realise is that I'm in a woman's womb.
And as I said in other posts, I think that before wondering how many transistors we'll need for that Singularity thing, I think we should wonder what we'd do with these transistors to begin with. Not like having an immensely powerful computer will make sentient beings pop out of thin air.
I appreciate your insight, but I very strongly doubt it's just a matter of simulating a bunch of neurons. If we did, where's our strong AI bug simulation? You know, a bug that would learn to walk and eat without being programmed to do it? I think the problem is an algorithm problem, and "putting a whole bunch of identical (simulated) neurons together" doesn't seem like it's gonna cut it. I think the question is whether or not this is at all theoretically possible. I think you're being too quick at claiming that sentient AI is inevitable.
Yeah, sure. But someone wake me up when we come up with an even stupid strong AI. Or any idea how to travel back in time.
Strong AI is our era's flying car, 50 years from now we'll think to ourselves "well that shit never happened, on the other hand the other stuff we have that we didn't see coming we wouldn't want to go back to living without it".
You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'.
Yeah, that, that's a variation of the classical "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument.
In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special
Yeah because in a "secular, materialistic worldview", we know almost anything about pretty much anything. How does your "brains are computers" view explain such research? Oh wait I forgot that our beloved aforementioned worldview consists in denying such things in the face of evidence, because it doesn't fit our frozen and well defined view of what's possible and what's not.
Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential (linear in the log domain) progression. It is bound to slow down and eventually stop, yet it fails entirely to take that into account.
What I think is that instead of being linear (well, actually exponential) it's more like a Gaussian function (a bell-shaped curve). It started far in the negatives, and now we're getting closer to the centre and its maximum, so we're feeling the slow down, and eventually it'll crawl to a halt. Although maybe it won't and then it'd be more like another function, the point being, it can't go on exponentially like this forever.
All of this being said, I think that Kurzweil's predictions are not flawed in that we'll have a tough time accessing the necessary hardware, but it's more theoretical, we have no fucking clue how we'd make any of that happen, right now it's a problem of theory and algorithms, not of computer power. We know better how to make time travel happen than how to make strong AI pop up.
Computers become smarter than humans. Human consciousness becomes downloadable...ermm...somehow... and we live forever as computers.
The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.
I don't really believe the whole "Mac OS would get a virus problem if it had a bigger market share". I think considered it's current marketshare there are more than enough incentives to create malware for it. Like I said, the only OS that gets a virus problem (an actual problem, not just a few sparse experiments) is Windows. No matter what you could speculate, it's currently a Windows only problem.
Wait, of all the modern OSes out there, tell me again, which have a virus problem?
By the way, why do we care about a random Slashdotter's idiotic musings, but more importantly, what do you have to do to get some shit like that on the front page?
lol, I hope you realise it's a very poor point. There was no search giant at the time. All of these guys had just been in it for a few years, had little momentum, and so on. All that was needed back then to compete was a decent algorithm and a janitor closet full of hardware
That's exactly like saying "Ford automobiles blew up overnight with its model T, hence you can do it again and take over the automobile market using the same formula".
God fucking damn stop taking every damn thing so literally. That was just 3 words in the whole fucking post and wasn't even part of the point I was making.
Seriously, this fucking site is crowded with mosquito fuckers.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, the really sad part is that someone as smart as Kurzweil could delude himself into thinking that memories from his father could be sufficient to "recreate" him. I think at that point that gives us the right to dismiss any of his claims in the field as crackpottery, even if his strange delusional beliefs don't necessarily imply that he'd be wrong all along, it's safe to assume that he would be.
Well claims can be verified, which is what that guy did, anyways the point was, if reincarnation happens, then it kills the idea that the mind is just a software running on the bioelectrochemical computer that is our brain, which would mean you probably can't just emulate it. The other point is, we don't actually have that many certainties about the nature of our "minds", so saying we're 20-40 years away from emulating them is preposterous.
Tell the mods.
Oh, so you have no example of a work of vulgarisation that became a classic? I accept your apology.
Time travel implies strong AI? How so? I thought it was more about wormholes and black holes, although I think that it's been proven impossible.
I'll be astounded if we're not successfully simulating brains in 30 years.
Hahahahaha you bes' be high nigga.
It's impossible because we have no idea how it could be possible to begin with. Of course that doesn't mean it's definitely impossible, but it's impossible until we prove it is. By the way, I fail to see how your first 3 paragraphs supports your point.
As for immortality, I think it'll never happen, not because it's impossible, but because I think we'll understand why it's undesirable before we make it happen.
As I said in another post, you're making a variation of the "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument. His predictions are baseless, if they aren't then tell me what they're based on.
As TFA says, Kurzweil as been trying to collect anything about his dead father he could in the hope that one day his dead father could be simulated. Besides the sad and creepy aspects of this, it shows part of what his predictions are fuelled by, and that's no good.
Yes, no matter what function it would have naturally tended to be, the who self-predicting aspect of the law skews what we've done into trying to keep up with the pace.
I honestly don't see why anyone would want to live much longer than they're going to, mostly if it's to live a disembodied life. I'd rather take my chances with natural death and cross my cold fingers that the next thing I realise is that I'm in a woman's womb.
Ah yes I guess a sigmoid is more like it!
And as I said in other posts, I think that before wondering how many transistors we'll need for that Singularity thing, I think we should wonder what we'd do with these transistors to begin with. Not like having an immensely powerful computer will make sentient beings pop out of thin air.
I appreciate your insight, but I very strongly doubt it's just a matter of simulating a bunch of neurons. If we did, where's our strong AI bug simulation? You know, a bug that would learn to walk and eat without being programmed to do it? I think the problem is an algorithm problem, and "putting a whole bunch of identical (simulated) neurons together" doesn't seem like it's gonna cut it. I think the question is whether or not this is at all theoretically possible. I think you're being too quick at claiming that sentient AI is inevitable.
Yeah, sure. But someone wake me up when we come up with an even stupid strong AI. Or any idea how to travel back in time.
Strong AI is our era's flying car, 50 years from now we'll think to ourselves "well that shit never happened, on the other hand the other stuff we have that we didn't see coming we wouldn't want to go back to living without it".
You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'.
Yeah, that, that's a variation of the classical "they said Galileo was wrong when he was right, you say I'm wrong therefore I'm right" argument.
In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special
Yeah because in a "secular, materialistic worldview", we know almost anything about pretty much anything. How does your "brains are computers" view explain such research? Oh wait I forgot that our beloved aforementioned worldview consists in denying such things in the face of evidence, because it doesn't fit our frozen and well defined view of what's possible and what's not.
Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential (linear in the log domain) progression. It is bound to slow down and eventually stop, yet it fails entirely to take that into account.
What I think is that instead of being linear (well, actually exponential) it's more like a Gaussian function (a bell-shaped curve). It started far in the negatives, and now we're getting closer to the centre and its maximum, so we're feeling the slow down, and eventually it'll crawl to a halt. Although maybe it won't and then it'd be more like another function, the point being, it can't go on exponentially like this forever.
All of this being said, I think that Kurzweil's predictions are not flawed in that we'll have a tough time accessing the necessary hardware, but it's more theoretical, we have no fucking clue how we'd make any of that happen, right now it's a problem of theory and algorithms, not of computer power. We know better how to make time travel happen than how to make strong AI pop up.
Computers become smarter than humans. Human consciousness becomes downloadable ...ermm ...somehow... and we live forever as computers.
The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.
..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".
I don't really believe the whole "Mac OS would get a virus problem if it had a bigger market share". I think considered it's current marketshare there are more than enough incentives to create malware for it. Like I said, the only OS that gets a virus problem (an actual problem, not just a few sparse experiments) is Windows. No matter what you could speculate, it's currently a Windows only problem.
Wait, of all the modern OSes out there, tell me again, which have a virus problem?
By the way, why do we care about a random Slashdotter's idiotic musings, but more importantly, what do you have to do to get some shit like that on the front page?
Stop taking things so fucking literally and STFU.
lol, I hope you realise it's a very poor point. There was no search giant at the time. All of these guys had just been in it for a few years, had little momentum, and so on. All that was needed back then to compete was a decent algorithm and a janitor closet full of hardware
That's exactly like saying "Ford automobiles blew up overnight with its model T, hence you can do it again and take over the automobile market using the same formula".
a monthly injection of testosterone
Sure, what could possibly be wrong about regularly injecting yourself with testosterone?
Cool story, bro.
God fucking damn stop taking every damn thing so literally. That was just 3 words in the whole fucking post and wasn't even part of the point I was making.
Seriously, this fucking site is crowded with mosquito fuckers.
What? Aren't you making the same point as I'm making?