It's a new edition of one of the standard textbooks on Biology adopted by the most important Universities. It contains the basics, that which is agreed upon by the vast majority of researchers the world around. You can read the introduction to the previous edition in Amazon, but the gist of it is that life isn't defined as a property of things, something they can have or not, but as a process they can be a part of. Some lump of matter going through the process is a living thing, some other lump of matter not going through it isn't, and other lumps going though a part of it but not the entirety of it are in an intermediate state. As for the detailed description of this process called life, that's what the whole book detailedly explains and shows.
If you're going to impute "will" to natural selection, the quantity "desired" is not *number of offspring* but number of VIABLE offspring.
It isn't just that parameter I refer to, but all of them. If we were to depict evolution's means and "goals" as that of an actual thinking mind rather than a mere process, the end result would be clearly non-human and horrifying in several ways. A few of its "end results" would align with our preferences although for entirely different reasons, while for the most part they wouldn't. If anything we'd be at war with it, CthulhuTech-style.:-)
the government does NOT have gag-powers over anyone (well, they can beat you up and lock you, but they cannot legally order you to keep quiet).
Actually, they can. There's no absolute freedom of speech here in Brazil. Now and then something gets censored by the courts and that's it. You find the usual suspects in the silencing list such as Nazi books and other such hate speech, but also pretty idiotic stuff such as unauthorized biographies of celebrities and investigative journalism of misdeeds by politicians, as if said celebrities/politicians hear something they might dislike is going to be published they can get a judge to block it and that's that, the work enters judicial limbo for years. At least afterwards the media can loudly complain about the censoring, even if having to workaround the subject so as to carefully avoid triggering specific judicial restriction, such as a prohibition to name someone or to paraphrase whatever the original text was trying to say.
You're the one saying "The Brain is a Machine and our Minds are Software, and Nothing Else!" I'm asking the hard question: "How can you possibly be so sure?"
It's important to understand what one means when saying the brain etc. are mechanistic, of which being machinery and software are particular instances. What it means is simply that any complex effect of something is a result of its components interacting with each other. The complexity can be reduced to that interaction, and that interaction in turn supports and produces that complexity. Sure, at some point in the reduction process you end up with some irreducible basis, but that's expected.
So, let's look at your "nothing else!". What does it mean to say that the mind/brain is machine plus software plus "else"? It means that, in reducing the mind to its constituents, you end up with a list of elements we already know: particles, their interactions, plus that "else". Can this "else" in turn be reduced to its own constituents? If yes, then said else is a machine in its own right, built from those "else-parts". If not, then your quest to find stuff ends there.
Now suppose we find that consciousness is an irreducible. That in some way or another there are consciousnesses floating around that get linked to particles in the forming of brains. That being the case, actually understanding consciousness, how and why it works, developing new consciousnesses, improving them, even improving our own, all become unfortunately impossible. They are givens, to be, so to speak, harvested from the source of consciousnesses atomically as such, forever and ever locked in the state they came, unchanging, outside the domain of our technology, intelligence, hopes and wisdom.
That's an extremely sad outcome, which is why I sincerely hope our minds are indeed reducible to machine and software. If they aren't, we'll hit a insurmountable brick wall, and that'll be it.
However, I can be very hopeful that our minds are indeed machinery and software, to the point of sounding almost certain, due to the researches and advances made in biology, neurology, cognitive sciences etc. in the last few decades. They all point out strongly into this direction, so there's indeed great expectation the mind will be understood in a few more decades and thus opened up for betterment, and strong betterment at that.
As for the matter of souls, I don't criticize technical versions of the concept, only naive religious ones that think of it as some kind of "non-matter matter". What I said above is all compatible with Platonic, Aristotelian and similar advanced concepts of the soul as truly immaterial. Reality is most probably composed, as the sages of yesteryear figured, of matter (ordinary matter, energy, space and time) and form (immaterial math). The soul of a thing is its mathematical structure, which doesn't depend on the specific particles that are following that structure. Back in the day it was thought this referred to the human shape, but nowadays science advanced enough to translated that fuzzy concept of "shape" into the far more specific notions of DNA, the structure of which (not the actual molecule in your cells) fits Aristotle's concept soul, as well as that of algorithms and software, the running of which in a hardware fits Plato's concept of soul.
Contemporaneous materialism has great metaphysical depths. Naive materialists don't recognize it because they think of themselves as opposed to religion. I have many deficiencies, but that one isn't among them.:-)
Take off your reductionist blinkers for a moment my friend. What is a soul? You seem very sure it doesn't exist, but what is it?
Actually, I don't oppose the concept of soul as such, only the naive religious interpretations of the term. I've developed this more on replies to other posts in this thread.
The article mentioned great implication for quantum computing for example. From a leaf.
Do you have a link? It seems interesting.
So - if it happens there, who's to say it doesn't happen in the brain?
That's valid, but to be sure we must test the hypothesis that the brain is "non-QM-powered" so to speak, and then, if that doesn't work, go forth seeking other explanations. What we can't is to just say that maybe it's all mysterious-QM-effect-based, shrug and conclude, "Ah, too bad, let's not research then". That kind of attitude isn't very positive, you certainly agree.
why is it human observation alters some physics experiments? consciousness?;)
It doesn't. "Human observation" means "these particles coming from that huge mass of particles called a human". Our particles don't alter things any more that those from a rock, the influence is exactly the same.
before you take kurzweils book too seriously, do the maths.
Actually, I'm not in Kurzweil's camp. I'm with those who believe we'll discover the actual mathematic laws of cognition so that they can be implemented as efficient algorithms much simpler when compared with what our own minds are built upon. Exponential growth means in this sense optimization more effective that that we can do ourselves, since while we're many orders of magnitude faster than nature in doing stuff, we're still bounded by the limitation of not being able to change our own hardware to become even faster. An AI won't have this problem because it'll be able to devise a specialized hardware appropriate to best optimize any given task, rather than having to work from scratch. Besides, for a few cycles at least those machines will also be able to optimize the cognitive science we built.
So, yes, while at some point the exponentiation will hit a ceiling, it's still going to be an extremely high ceiling. Afterwards things will just keep moving at cruise speed, not at this slug speed of ours, just pretty much like we ourselves don't move at the geological speed of evolution.
what happens when evolution evolves beings with minds and those beings affect selection. does evolution not then effectively acquire a mind?
No, because what we do goes counter what evolution "wants" done. For example, we take the sexual pleasure evolution provided us as a means of nudging us towards reproducing in the range of dozens of children per woman and up to thousands per man and, while still enjoying it, refuse to reproduce more than a one to four times per couple, or even to reproduce at all. If evolution gained a mind through us it'd have to be a pretty schizophrenic one at that. In fact, had it a mind shaped following the values it show and it'd most certainly consider humans one of its biggest mistakes, wondering what went wrong and why.:-)
I don't think you understand natural selection as well as you think. Sure, we can reproduce the human brain. All we need is a rock the size of earth, a solar system around it, and several billion years.
Like we needed several billion years to develop artificial flying? Nope, when you have a recursive system analyzing something it takes orders of magnitude less trial and error. Evolution is slow, we're fast. 400 years of scientific inquiry and we've surpassed most of its achievements. A few more decades and we'll have surpassed all of them.
More than in science actually. Machine blueprints tend to survive deep changes of theoretical formulations and to continue working through any number of paradigm shifts following their original development. In many case they even drive those.:-)
Interesting way to look at it. I wouldn't have thought "consciousness" to be particularly awash with ambiguity, given that pretty much every person on the planet would seem to experience the phenomena on a daily basis.
That's precisely the problem. We experience it intuitively as much as we experience color intuitively. It took centuries for us to open that black box and pull out most of its contents, revealing the cause behind the perception. But black boxes usually contain other, smaller black boxes, in this case the subjective perception itself. And because we're so attached to this deeper level of intuition, it's very difficult for us to distance ourselves enough to notice that that too is a problem in need of a solution.
So, yes, "consciousness" is awash in ambiguity. The fact that you can use it all the time is no different from you using any other ability, from breathing to walking to seeing colors to whatever else you came equipped with, without having the smallest clue about what it actually is. Our approach to these matters is very similar to that of someone to whom it was asked "Why does the electric lamp emits light?" replying: "Because the moved to the on position." We love to talk about the switches, they're easily at hand, everyone has tons of them, pressing them works very reliably, so what's all the fuss?
I like that! I wonder if there are any other poorly defined sentences where we could apply that approach?:D
LOL! But not, it only works with actual black boxes. The terms I used aren't such, all of them are very well understood in their operation, no magicking involved.
At the end of the day, "consciousness" is an intangible abstraction that defies any sort of physical measurement.
Now, that's a black box. "This is mysterious! It can't be known! Stop asking the difficult questions!"
I depends if you take "machine" to mean a set of logical properties, as I do, or not. It also depends whether you consider such a set to be transcendent or not. When I talk (derisively) about souls I mean them in the naive religious sense of the word, not in more philosophical ones. In fact, as far as "mere" transcendentality is concerned, the concept of the human (or the hidrogen) as a reimplementable can be as much transcendent as its negation, after all there are materialistic formulations for the concept of soul, including ones based on Aristotelian metaphysics (an algorithm can be thought of as a modern reinterpretation of yesteryear's metaphysical notion of form) that don't see a problem with that. As such discussing the matter on this is meaningless.
It should be possible to question the idea of purely mechanistic awareness without bringing religion into the debate.
Not unless you go to the trouble of defining your terms. The problem is that words such as "soul", "consciousness", "self awareness" etc. work as black boxes with a "don't look inside" sign hanging from them. You can literally replace those with the word "magic" and your phrase won't gain or lose meaning, what shows how empty of any useful content they are. See for yourself:
"On the other a purely MAGIC view of MAGIC where any sufficiently MAGIC must necessarily become MAGIC by some MAGIC? I think there's probably room for some middle ground there. It should be possible to question the idea of MAGIC without bringing OTHER MAGIC into the debate. I also find that in the absence of any evidence for either proposition, I really don't find MAGIC any less convincing as a hypothesis than MAGIC."
No, the proper approach is to take those black boxes head on and actually go and open them. Only once they've been properly understood, without recourse to other black boxes, can one come and say that such or such approach is invalid. Until then, everything must be tried, with an emphasis on what we actually know to work on other domains.
It is quite easy to come up with a physical system that is impossible to copy/clone perfectly.
You suppose we need to copy/clone perfectly. We don't. We only need sufficiently precise generalities as to implement relatively precise variations. In fact, no science has infinite precision. Everything measurable ends up always in the form "x±y with z% confidence", and still reimplementations do work very, very well.
Also, have you seen how much damage any brain can sustain with minimal effect on it's overall functioning? Our tech can and will be more precise and accurate than anything in the show of horrors that is nature's way of doing things.
Ask the impersonal one then. Or, failing that, the Absolute Emptyness of Non-Being beyond all duality so that the non-self that I delude myself as a me can also attain parinirvana.:-)
None of that achieves consciousness. I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in consciousness. Can it be said that consciousness is a form of singularity? The point is, to achieve consciousness you will need "calculations" of a different order than anything we have now.
You can't say any of that until what we already have is exhausted. Until then it'd be just a way to pretend to be wise while avoid the hard work involved in using our present knowledge to its full extent and feeling well at that. Now, once we exhaust the current venues, if those hadn't resolved the issue then we can start actually looking for the "everything else" to that which we already tried in actually meaningful ways.
well thanks for your good humor man...I think its all mumbo-jumbo but you defend it with enthusiasm and for that I tip my hat;)
Glad to be of help. I look at all these matters as being a good source of intellectual pleasure or even outright fun. If reality proves to work in some other way, well, even more fun down the line then!:-D
If you never got cold, or tired, or hungry, or horny, or frightened - what would you spend your time thinking about?
About all those new engineered emotions appropriate to a sentient being who doesn't feel cold, tiredness, hunger, lust or fear. Given that natural selection developed in us these emotions for evolutions' specific purposes, once we take the reins we'll do the same, but focusing on our own human values rather than on evolution's inhuman ones.
Slashdot Mirror
The book is not released yet...?
It's a new edition of one of the standard textbooks on Biology adopted by the most important Universities. It contains the basics, that which is agreed upon by the vast majority of researchers the world around. You can read the introduction to the previous edition in Amazon, but the gist of it is that life isn't defined as a property of things, something they can have or not, but as a process they can be a part of. Some lump of matter going through the process is a living thing, some other lump of matter not going through it isn't, and other lumps going though a part of it but not the entirety of it are in an intermediate state. As for the detailed description of this process called life, that's what the whole book detailedly explains and shows.
If you're going to impute "will" to natural selection, the quantity "desired" is not *number of offspring* but number of VIABLE offspring.
It isn't just that parameter I refer to, but all of them. If we were to depict evolution's means and "goals" as that of an actual thinking mind rather than a mere process, the end result would be clearly non-human and horrifying in several ways. A few of its "end results" would align with our preferences although for entirely different reasons, while for the most part they wouldn't. If anything we'd be at war with it, CthulhuTech-style. :-)
the government does NOT have gag-powers over anyone (well, they can beat you up and lock you, but they cannot legally order you to keep quiet).
Actually, they can. There's no absolute freedom of speech here in Brazil. Now and then something gets censored by the courts and that's it. You find the usual suspects in the silencing list such as Nazi books and other such hate speech, but also pretty idiotic stuff such as unauthorized biographies of celebrities and investigative journalism of misdeeds by politicians, as if said celebrities/politicians hear something they might dislike is going to be published they can get a judge to block it and that's that, the work enters judicial limbo for years. At least afterwards the media can loudly complain about the censoring, even if having to workaround the subject so as to carefully avoid triggering specific judicial restriction, such as a prohibition to name someone or to paraphrase whatever the original text was trying to say.
You're the one saying "The Brain is a Machine and our Minds are Software, and Nothing Else!" I'm asking the hard question: "How can you possibly be so sure?"
It's important to understand what one means when saying the brain etc. are mechanistic, of which being machinery and software are particular instances. What it means is simply that any complex effect of something is a result of its components interacting with each other. The complexity can be reduced to that interaction, and that interaction in turn supports and produces that complexity. Sure, at some point in the reduction process you end up with some irreducible basis, but that's expected.
So, let's look at your "nothing else!". What does it mean to say that the mind/brain is machine plus software plus "else"? It means that, in reducing the mind to its constituents, you end up with a list of elements we already know: particles, their interactions, plus that "else". Can this "else" in turn be reduced to its own constituents? If yes, then said else is a machine in its own right, built from those "else-parts". If not, then your quest to find stuff ends there.
Now suppose we find that consciousness is an irreducible. That in some way or another there are consciousnesses floating around that get linked to particles in the forming of brains. That being the case, actually understanding consciousness, how and why it works, developing new consciousnesses, improving them, even improving our own, all become unfortunately impossible. They are givens, to be, so to speak, harvested from the source of consciousnesses atomically as such, forever and ever locked in the state they came, unchanging, outside the domain of our technology, intelligence, hopes and wisdom.
That's an extremely sad outcome, which is why I sincerely hope our minds are indeed reducible to machine and software. If they aren't, we'll hit a insurmountable brick wall, and that'll be it.
However, I can be very hopeful that our minds are indeed machinery and software, to the point of sounding almost certain, due to the researches and advances made in biology, neurology, cognitive sciences etc. in the last few decades. They all point out strongly into this direction, so there's indeed great expectation the mind will be understood in a few more decades and thus opened up for betterment, and strong betterment at that.
As for the matter of souls, I don't criticize technical versions of the concept, only naive religious ones that think of it as some kind of "non-matter matter". What I said above is all compatible with Platonic, Aristotelian and similar advanced concepts of the soul as truly immaterial. Reality is most probably composed, as the sages of yesteryear figured, of matter (ordinary matter, energy, space and time) and form (immaterial math). The soul of a thing is its mathematical structure, which doesn't depend on the specific particles that are following that structure. Back in the day it was thought this referred to the human shape, but nowadays science advanced enough to translated that fuzzy concept of "shape" into the far more specific notions of DNA, the structure of which (not the actual molecule in your cells) fits Aristotle's concept soul, as well as that of algorithms and software, the running of which in a hardware fits Plato's concept of soul.
Contemporaneous materialism has great metaphysical depths. Naive materialists don't recognize it because they think of themselves as opposed to religion. I have many deficiencies, but that one isn't among them. :-)
Take off your reductionist blinkers for a moment my friend. What is a soul? You seem very sure it doesn't exist, but what is it?
Actually, I don't oppose the concept of soul as such, only the naive religious interpretations of the term. I've developed this more on replies to other posts in this thread.
The article mentioned great implication for quantum computing for example. From a leaf.
Do you have a link? It seems interesting.
So - if it happens there, who's to say it doesn't happen in the brain?
That's valid, but to be sure we must test the hypothesis that the brain is "non-QM-powered" so to speak, and then, if that doesn't work, go forth seeking other explanations. What we can't is to just say that maybe it's all mysterious-QM-effect-based, shrug and conclude, "Ah, too bad, let's not research then". That kind of attitude isn't very positive, you certainly agree.
What a boring finite state universe you propose.
On the contrary, what an exciting unbounded amount of states manyworlds multiverse I propose. :-)
why is it human observation alters some physics experiments? consciousness? ;)
It doesn't. "Human observation" means "these particles coming from that huge mass of particles called a human". Our particles don't alter things any more that those from a rock, the influence is exactly the same.
before you take kurzweils book too seriously, do the maths.
Actually, I'm not in Kurzweil's camp. I'm with those who believe we'll discover the actual mathematic laws of cognition so that they can be implemented as efficient algorithms much simpler when compared with what our own minds are built upon. Exponential growth means in this sense optimization more effective that that we can do ourselves, since while we're many orders of magnitude faster than nature in doing stuff, we're still bounded by the limitation of not being able to change our own hardware to become even faster. An AI won't have this problem because it'll be able to devise a specialized hardware appropriate to best optimize any given task, rather than having to work from scratch. Besides, for a few cycles at least those machines will also be able to optimize the cognitive science we built.
So, yes, while at some point the exponentiation will hit a ceiling, it's still going to be an extremely high ceiling. Afterwards things will just keep moving at cruise speed, not at this slug speed of ours, just pretty much like we ourselves don't move at the geological speed of evolution.
what happens when evolution evolves beings with minds and those beings affect selection. does evolution not then effectively acquire a mind?
No, because what we do goes counter what evolution "wants" done. For example, we take the sexual pleasure evolution provided us as a means of nudging us towards reproducing in the range of dozens of children per woman and up to thousands per man and, while still enjoying it, refuse to reproduce more than a one to four times per couple, or even to reproduce at all. If evolution gained a mind through us it'd have to be a pretty schizophrenic one at that. In fact, had it a mind shaped following the values it show and it'd most certainly consider humans one of its biggest mistakes, wondering what went wrong and why. :-)
I don't think you understand natural selection as well as you think. Sure, we can reproduce the human brain. All we need is a rock the size of earth, a solar system around it, and several billion years.
Like we needed several billion years to develop artificial flying? Nope, when you have a recursive system analyzing something it takes orders of magnitude less trial and error. Evolution is slow, we're fast. 400 years of scientific inquiry and we've surpassed most of its achievements. A few more decades and we'll have surpassed all of them.
So you believe in machines?
More than in science actually. Machine blueprints tend to survive deep changes of theoretical formulations and to continue working through any number of paradigm shifts following their original development. In many case they even drive those. :-)
Interesting way to look at it. I wouldn't have thought "consciousness" to be particularly awash with ambiguity, given that pretty much every person on the planet would seem to experience the phenomena on a daily basis.
That's precisely the problem. We experience it intuitively as much as we experience color intuitively. It took centuries for us to open that black box and pull out most of its contents, revealing the cause behind the perception. But black boxes usually contain other, smaller black boxes, in this case the subjective perception itself. And because we're so attached to this deeper level of intuition, it's very difficult for us to distance ourselves enough to notice that that too is a problem in need of a solution.
So, yes, "consciousness" is awash in ambiguity. The fact that you can use it all the time is no different from you using any other ability, from breathing to walking to seeing colors to whatever else you came equipped with, without having the smallest clue about what it actually is. Our approach to these matters is very similar to that of someone to whom it was asked "Why does the electric lamp emits light?" replying: "Because the moved to the on position." We love to talk about the switches, they're easily at hand, everyone has tons of them, pressing them works very reliably, so what's all the fuss?
I like that! I wonder if there are any other poorly defined sentences where we could apply that approach? :D
LOL! But not, it only works with actual black boxes. The terms I used aren't such, all of them are very well understood in their operation, no magicking involved.
At the end of the day, "consciousness" is an intangible abstraction that defies any sort of physical measurement.
Now, that's a black box. "This is mysterious! It can't be known! Stop asking the difficult questions!"
Sorry, but no, we won't. :-)
Correction: "on this is" -> "on this basis is".
I depends if you take "machine" to mean a set of logical properties, as I do, or not. It also depends whether you consider such a set to be transcendent or not. When I talk (derisively) about souls I mean them in the naive religious sense of the word, not in more philosophical ones. In fact, as far as "mere" transcendentality is concerned, the concept of the human (or the hidrogen) as a reimplementable can be as much transcendent as its negation, after all there are materialistic formulations for the concept of soul, including ones based on Aristotelian metaphysics (an algorithm can be thought of as a modern reinterpretation of yesteryear's metaphysical notion of form) that don't see a problem with that. As such discussing the matter on this is meaningless.
we don't know what the thing that makes it "alive" is as we don't even know what "alive" means.
Incorrect.
It should be possible to question the idea of purely mechanistic awareness without bringing religion into the debate.
Not unless you go to the trouble of defining your terms. The problem is that words such as "soul", "consciousness", "self awareness" etc. work as black boxes with a "don't look inside" sign hanging from them. You can literally replace those with the word "magic" and your phrase won't gain or lose meaning, what shows how empty of any useful content they are. See for yourself:
"On the other a purely MAGIC view of MAGIC where any sufficiently MAGIC must necessarily become MAGIC by some MAGIC? I think there's probably room for some middle ground there. It should be possible to question the idea of MAGIC without bringing OTHER MAGIC into the debate. I also find that in the absence of any evidence for either proposition, I really don't find MAGIC any less convincing as a hypothesis than MAGIC."
No, the proper approach is to take those black boxes head on and actually go and open them. Only once they've been properly understood, without recourse to other black boxes, can one come and say that such or such approach is invalid. Until then, everything must be tried, with an emphasis on what we actually know to work on other domains.
It is quite easy to come up with a physical system that is impossible to copy/clone perfectly.
You suppose we need to copy/clone perfectly. We don't. We only need sufficiently precise generalities as to implement relatively precise variations. In fact, no science has infinite precision. Everything measurable ends up always in the form "x±y with z% confidence", and still reimplementations do work very, very well.
Also, have you seen how much damage any brain can sustain with minimal effect on it's overall functioning? Our tech can and will be more precise and accurate than anything in the show of horrors that is nature's way of doing things.
You do know what the A in AI stands for, right?
Yes: a false dichotomy.
I never said I believe in a personal God. :-)
Ask the impersonal one then. Or, failing that, the Absolute Emptyness of Non-Being beyond all duality so that the non-self that I delude myself as a me can also attain parinirvana. :-)
None of that achieves consciousness. I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in consciousness. Can it be said that consciousness is a form of singularity? The point is, to achieve consciousness you will need "calculations" of a different order than anything we have now.
You can't say any of that until what we already have is exhausted. Until then it'd be just a way to pretend to be wise while avoid the hard work involved in using our present knowledge to its full extent and feeling well at that. Now, once we exhaust the current venues, if those hadn't resolved the issue then we can start actually looking for the "everything else" to that which we already tried in actually meaningful ways.
well thanks for your good humor man...I think its all mumbo-jumbo but you defend it with enthusiasm and for that I tip my hat ;)
Glad to be of help. I look at all these matters as being a good source of intellectual pleasure or even outright fun. If reality proves to work in some other way, well, even more fun down the line then! :-D
You *believe*, from your heart, without proof, in the idea that the brain is a machine
Not without proof, no. There are decades of scientific research on this.
Artificial Flowers vs Flowers
Artificial Sweetener vs Sugar
Artificial Insemination vs Sex
Meaningless distinctions.
False dichotomies.
Extremes of a scale full of shades of gray.
Nature != Someone
Evolution lacks a mind, but it has clear intentionality and stops at nothing to impose it.
If you never got cold, or tired, or hungry, or horny, or frightened - what would you spend your time thinking about?
About all those new engineered emotions appropriate to a sentient being who doesn't feel cold, tiredness, hunger, lust or fear. Given that natural selection developed in us these emotions for evolutions' specific purposes, once we take the reins we'll do the same, but focusing on our own human values rather than on evolution's inhuman ones.