Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours'

Charlie Prime · Jan 31, 2015

Oakenwulf said:
sounds like fun

You might not say that if you ever worked in a psychiatric hospital and witnessed first-hand the horror of a person who screams in terror at the top of their lungs from dawn till dusk, everyday, non-stop.

Christopher O'Brien · Jan 31, 2015

Yeah, many interesting questions. My initial compulsion to post this was to find out from everyone who in their opinion deserved this style of sentance and for what crimes. Ya know: a fun thread w/ irony, but noooo everyone has to get all philosophic and and moral! LOL

Life_Model_Decoy · Jan 31, 2015

I think the idea makes for great science fiction but would not work out as well as researchers would like in really life application. Psychology as proven that there is different types of memory. If we manipulate someone's episodic memory artificial, the new memories wouldn't have the same associations that really memories would have. What I mean by this is that in classic experiments with subjects with anterograde amnesia (couldn't create new memories) despite the fact that new memories could be created they could still be taught new simple skills such as knitting, and when a doctor would shake their hands daily with a tack hidden in their hand, they would quickly stop shaking hands with that doctor. They would invent reasons to explain how they knew not to shake hands or how they picked up these new skills but it illustrates how complex and layered memory is. This procedure sounds like it would give prisoners the equivalent of a very long dream or nightmare.

Constance · Jan 31, 2015

Life_Model_Decoy said:
I think the idea makes for great science fiction but would not work out as well as researchers would like in really life application. Psychology as proven that there is different types of memory. If we manipulate someone's episodic memory artificial, the new memories wouldn't have the same associations that really memories would have. What I mean by this is that in classic experiments with subjects with anterograde amnesia (couldn't create new memories) despite the fact that new memories could be created they could still be taught new simple skills such as knitting, and when a doctor would shake their hands daily with a tack hidden in their hand, they would quickly stop shaking hands with that doctor. They would invent reasons to explain how they knew not to shake hands or how they picked up these new skills but it illustrates how complex and layered memory is. This procedure sounds like it would give prisoners the equivalent of a very long dream or nightmare.

I have what @Christopher O'Brien might see as an overly serious response to the idea proposed in this thread, as I do to all actual attempts going forward today to erase memories, implant false memories, manipulate and control human minds, and place the planet's future under the control of artificial intelligence. In my view, our species has as yet achieved no comprehension of what consciousness and mind are, and no reliable understanding yet of the nature of the 'reality' in which we live. Technological advances in our time enable us to do immense and irremediable damage to ourselves and all sentient life on this planet. There may be no way to stop this given the institutions that are in control, but we can recognize and attempt to get others to recognize what is at stake.

Constance · Jan 31, 2015

Hi Steve. Good to see you back.

smcder · Feb 1, 2015

Constance said:
I have what @Christopher O'Brien might see as an overly serious response to the idea proposed in this thread, as I do to all actual attempts going forward today to erase memories, implant false memories, manipulate and control human minds, and place the planet's future under the control of artificial intelligence. In my view, our species has as yet achieved no comprehension of what consciousness and mind are, and no reliable understanding yet of the nature of the 'reality' in which we live. Technological advances in our time enable us to do immense and irremediable damage to ourselves and all sentient life on this planet. There may be no way to stop this given the institutions that are in control, but we can recognize and attempt to get others to recognize what is at stake.

"algorithmic regulation"

Why the internet of things could destroy the welfare state | Technology | The Guardian

boomerang · Feb 2, 2015

Consider one hundred years of nothing to do but watch neurally induced reality TV. Cruel and unusual punishment certainly.

smcder · Feb 2, 2015

cybernetics (n.)
coined 1948 by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) from Greek kybernetes "steersman" (metaphorically "guide, governor") + -ics; perhaps based on 1830s French cybernétique "the art of governing.

The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. - Norbert Wiener "God and Golem, Inc." (1964)

smcder · Feb 2, 2015

Summa Technologiae — University of Minnesota Press

"From the acclaimed author of the science fiction novel Solaris, a pre-Dawkins exposition of evolution as a blind and chaotic watchmaker
In Summa Technologiae, Stanisław Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades this work has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance, resonating with contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.

At the end of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologiae, an ambitious compendium of all orthodox philosophical and theological knowledge about the world. Seven hundred years later, science fiction author Stanisław Lem writes his Summa Technologiae, an equally ambitious but unorthodox investigation into the perplexities and enigmas of humanity and its relationship to an equally enigmatic world in which it finds itself embedded. In this work Lem shows us science fiction as a method of inquiry, one that renders the future as tenuous as the past, with a wavering, ‘phantomatic’ present always at hand."

...

"Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical."

That's a pretty fair description of Yahweh ... eh?

"Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity."

Below see the table of contents for both books (the contents for the Summa Theologiae is posted separately as the forum only allows 40,ooo word posts and the table of contents of the Summa Theologiae runs to over 35,000 characters, without spaces ...)

Summa Technologiae runs to 440 pages ... the Summa Theologiae to 3,500
Lem wrote 17 novels ... the Saint wrote between 11 and 13 million words in less than three decades, that's about a thousand good words a day:

The works of Thomas Aquinas are tremendous both in number and in philosophical and theological depth. Few philosophers or theologians have written so much of high quality in the amount of time used by St. Thomas: a little less than three decades.

Yes, but why do we care about a 700+ year old theologian ... ? I'm glad you asked!

Many modern ethicists both within and outside the Catholic Church (notably Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre) have recently commented on the possible use of Thomas's virtue ethics as a way of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian "sense of duty" (called deontology). Through the work of twentieth-century philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe (especially in her book Intention), Thomas's principle of double effect specifically and his theory of intentional activity generally have been influential.
*In recent years the cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, in a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter entitled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas."*
Thomas's aesthetic theories, especially the concept of claritas, deeply influenced the literary practice of modernist writer James Joyce, who used to extol Thomas as being second only to Aristotle among Western philosophers. Joyce refers to Aquinas's doctrines in Elementa philosophiae ad mentem D. Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici (1898) of Girolamo Maria Mancini, professor of theology at the Collegium Divi Thomae de Urbe.[134] For example, Mancini's Elementa is referred to in Joyce's early masterpiece Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[135]
The influence of Thomas's aesthetics also can be found in the works of the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, who wrote an essay on aesthetic ideas in Thomas (published in 1956 and republished in 1988 in a revised edition).

Shall we take bets as to who will be read in another 700 years? To be resolved of course by our descendants as I will lay heavy bets none of us will be around then ... if you plan to live forever, you'd better plan on it the old fashioned way ... you'd better earn it.

....

Summa Technologiae

Contents
Translator’s Introduction. Evolution May Be Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts, but It’s Not All That Great: On Lem’s Summa Technnologiae
Joanna Zylinska
Summa Technologie
1. Dilemmas
2. Two Evolutions
Similarities
Differences
The First Cause
Several Naïve Questions
3. Civilizations in the Universe
The Formulation of the Problem
The Formulation of the Method
The Statistics of Civilizations in the Universe
A Catastrophic Theory of the Universe
A Metatheory of Miracles
Man’s Uniqueness
Intelligence: An Cccident or a Necessity?
Hypotheses
Votum Separatum
Future Prospects
4. Intelectronics
Return to Earth
A Megabyte Bomb
The Big Game
Scientific Myths
The Intelligence Amplifier
The Black Box
The Morality of Homeostats
The Dangers of Electrocracy
Cybernetics and Sociology
Belief and Information
Experimental Metaphysics
The Beliefs of Electric Brains
The Ghost in the Machine
The Trouble with Information
Doubts and Antinomies
5. Prolegomena to Omnipotence
Before Chaos
Chaos and Order
Scylla and Charybdis: On Restraint
The Silence of the Designer
Methodological Madness
A New Linnaeus: About Systematics
Models and Reality
Plagiarism and Creation
On Imitology
6. Phantomology
The Fundamentals of Phantomatics
The Phantomatic Machine
Peripheral and Central Phantomatics
The Limits of Phantomatics
Cerebromatics
Teletaxy and Phantoplication
Personality and Information
7. The Creation of Worlds
Information Farming
Linguistic Engineering
The Engineering of Transcendence
Cosmogonic Engineering
8. A Lampoon of Evolution
The Reconstruction of the Species
Constructing Life
Constructing Death
Constructing Consciousness
Error-based Constructs
Bionics and Biocybernetics
In the Eyes of the Designer
Reconstructing Man
Cyborgization
The Autoevolutionary Machine
Extrasensory Phenomena
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

smcder · Feb 2, 2015

smcder · Feb 2, 2015

smcder · Feb 2, 2015

Christopher O'Brien · Feb 2, 2015

Holy freakin shit. Welcome back smcder. All hail sci-fi and how...
"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside...."
What up w/ yer umm links? :rolleyes:

Charlie Prime · Feb 2, 2015

smcder said:
"From the acclaimed author...

...

...

Dude.

smcder · Feb 3, 2015

Christopher O'Brien said:
Holy freakin shit. Welcome back smcder. All hail sci-fi and how...
"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside...."
What up w/ yer umm links?

... Hi Chris, do the links not work?

Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours'

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