I don't see "down-sides" to your proposal for balanced, judicious, rational applications of AI technology for the purpose of enhancing human life and life in general on our home planet. No doubt Kurzweil would see 'limits' in it that would interfere with his fantasies of a posthuman future. Your vision of the future has the immense virtue of contemplating AI and transhumanism from the perspective of the history of our species' development of skills in situ and comprehensive insights into the nature of the reality in which we exist. Unbridled, unregulated AI risks the loss of our conscious ability to evolve further in the ontological situation within which we are naturally embedded and out of which we have in a short time already built worlds of thought, purpose, and value. We need to understand all of that more fully before we pull the plug on our existence.
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Substrate-independent minds
- Thread starter mike
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I don't see "down-sides" to your proposal for balanced, judicious, rational applications of AI technology for the purpose of enhancing human life and life in general on our home planet. No doubt Kurzweil would see 'limits' in it that would interfere with his fantasies of a posthuman future. Your vision of the future has the immense virtue of contemplating AI and transhumanism from the perspective of the history of our species' development of skills in situ and comprehensive insights into the nature of the reality in which we exist. Unbridled, unregulated AI risks the loss of our conscious ability to evolve further in the ontological situation within which we are naturally embedded and out of which we have in a short time already built worlds of thought, purpose, and value. We need to understand all of that more fully before we pull the plug on our existence.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
@Pharoah 's HCT model addresses this. Starting from elementary particles onward, all that exists must be tuned to the environment in which it exists, otherwise it will cease to exist.
The physical structure of any object therefore — as far as it is tuned to its environment — embodies information about the environment.
Thus, say, aliens might be able to discern a lot of information about the environmental niche of a crocodile just by examining its body and behaviors.
So, yes, humans carry with them a lot of innate information in the structure of their body-brains — the collective unconscious. Information that is ultimately carried in our DNA.
The idea that a human "mind" could be uploaded into a non-humanoid body and remain sane is dubious. A human mind would require human sensory input, including internal sensations. In the absense of human sensory input, I imagine a human mind would go insane. (This is one reason I also question the paranormal concept of disincarnate minds that nevertheless appear to have access to sensory input in the absense of a human body.)
Having said all that, there does seem to be a sense though in which the mind is able to transcend the body. There is something about human imagination and creativity that seems to transcend the physical body and its experiences.
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smcder
Guest
"Having said all that, there does seem to be a sense though in which the mind is able to transcend the body. There is something about human imagination and creativity that seems to transcend the physical body and its experiences."
Expande-moi, por favor.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
We touched on it earlier, and you seemed to disagree: my thought is that human creativity and imagination lends itself to our behavioral and cognitive adaptability.
Human creativity/imagination evolved because it was adaptive and art, culture, and spirituality just came along for the ride. This creativity/imagination allows us not to just learn from personal experience, or even the observed experiences of others, but we can imagine ourselves doing novel things in the future and form hypothesis about potential consequences and choose our actions accordingly.
That's not to say that other animals don't have this mental ability, but certainly not to the extent of humans.
At least that's the reductive, just-so story. Perhaps human creativity/imagination stems from a different source.
Seconded. Let's go there. Going there will, of course, take us into an examination of the history of psychic, para-normal, and spiritual experiences of humans and the changes in ideas and behavior that they have inspired in a considerable portion of our species. These too have been aspects of the evolution of our species, not yet accounted for by physics or biology and ignored in materialist science and philosophy. That discussion could appropriately be moved back to the Consciousness and the Paranormal thread where these subjects have been discussed intermittently in the past.
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In the past you've brought this question back to a focus on matter as the fundamental ontological primitive from which we are required to somehow account for the subjectivity and creativity of living organisms in some form of monism. We've reviewed the various theories in philosophy of mind that attempt to produce a satisfactory monistic account of how consciousness, mind, value, creativity, and imagination arise from matter without success. That is, these theories all remain generalizations couched in abstract concepts, and information theory as employed by Tononi and Koch has -- until this latest version -- been one of them).
Human creativity makes no sense without first establishing some range of freedom in human thinking and behavior, which Doyle recognizes. Yesterday I posted in the C&P thread some extracts from Doyle's 'information philosophy', which achieves a "two-stage model of freedom and creativity" that he finds to be well-expressed in James's later philosophy. Doyle's expansive and still expanding website surveys other two-stage models, not only in philosophy but in science. His information philosopher website might be our best first guide to understanding the difference that life makes in physical being as incipient in the natural evolution of the physical universe, recognizing its seeding of potentiality for change including the change that occurs with subjectivity, consciousness, and mind.
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smcder
Guest
I can always seem to disagree ... if I think it's useful.
I'm also on a personal campaign to eliminate the phrase "just" - especially to reduce one very complex thing (art, culture and spirituality) into another (creativity/imagination).
I often like to imagine myself as an alligator.
I read once where it was said, by a female author, that the most accurate description of child-birth (from the woman's point of view) in literature was written by James Joyce.
S
smcder
Guest
Did you listen to Peterson's talk about Monkey See, Monkey Do ... NOT! ? = he talked about how mimicry was a human trait.
Why don't we see a continuum of intelligence (in the sense we measure it) with creatures 50,60,70,80,90 ... human IQ? Same with language and other traits that appear to be discretely present in one (existing) species?
I like that. Empathy requires imagination, the ability to see experience from others' points of view and so to exercise one's feeling and thinking toward other interpretations and visions of the world than the one we're schooled in. And imagination is born in the openness of subjectivities to the world beyond them. That openness of consciousness -- an openness that depends on the prereflective sense (recognition) of the world's and the subject's reality as temporal -- is the key to understanding the phenomenology of consciousness and mind. Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "imagination is present in the first human perception."
And yet you use that same internet, im guessing everyday, to positive educational effect
Yes I do, because I can select my own purposeful searches for information in pursuit of the subjects and issues I'm personally working on. I can't see how one could do that better by having the entirety of the www downloaded (and necessarily continually refreshed) into my brain. In fact, most of what was downloaded would be an immense distraction and likely make disciplined thought impossible. How do you understand the purpose and advantage of downloading the www to the 'brain' of an artificial substrate (or a biological one for that matter)?
As Steve pointed out last night in his theory of how transhumanism should more rationally proceed, the www could continue to be what it already is -- a resource, a tool, that humans use as and when they need it, rather than flooding, even consuming, the brains of computer-human hybrids with information too vast and varied (and unreliable) to form a basis for thinking.
How does
if in 50 years we have the internet wired to our brains.’"
Equate to having the entirety of the WWW downloaded into your brain.
Shes simply saying the connection will be direct, which is a logical extension of how we connect to the internet.
First it was acoustic couplers dialing individual bulletin boards, then modems hard wired to PC's then wireless and hand held devices, now google glass and eventually
this kind of screen-on-the-eye technology could displace the smartphone as as the dominant way people access the Internet and connect to each other.
Computers have been getting smaller and closer to our eyeballs since their beginning. First they took up whole rooms. Then they moved to desks. Then they were in our laps. Now, they’re in our palms.
Why would they stop there?
They won’t.
THE END OF SMARTPHONES: Here's A Computer Screen On A Contact Lens | Business Insider
The next logical step will be to have the "screen" feed directly into the optic nerve, no need for smart contact lenses. Likewise the WiFi of the time will connect directly with the brain, a true wireless BCI.
You no more need to DLoad the whole WWW, than you do now on your PC or hand held device.
Wireless contact lens display now a reality | ExtremeTech
This system will likely be the first step in direct brain to brain data swapping aka the hive mind.
S
smcder
Guest
Norton anti virus expires in 30 days
Pop up adverts are annoying as it is ... Imagine them inside your head.
Premium users of course can subscribe and then have only select pop ups show in consciousness ... but how will we regulate unconscious advertising?
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S
smcder
Guest
The next logical step will be to have the "screen" feed directly into the optic nerve, no need for smart contact lenses. Likewise the WiFi of the time will connect directly with the brain, a true wireless BCI.
Wireless contact lens display now a reality | ExtremeTech
This system will likely be the first step in direct brain to brain data swapping aka the hive mind.
No thanks. I already spend too much of my time indoors sitting in front of a computer screen. I don't want to look at the world through a computer screen. Nor do I want to become a cog in a hive mind. Really, I don't know what you see in these ideas.
S
smcder
Guest
I'm "just" being a good Darwinist ... Trying to plant memes and ideas that might preserve not only my rickety old genes ... but possibly genes in the biological sense period.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I appreciate the way you're doing this, more than I can say. Speaking of Darwin, I wonder what his response would be to the plans of the mad AI theorists and posthumanists. Biologists seem to find a lot of fault with this program. An evidently major contemporary biologist and neuroscientist has written that Kurzweil "does not understand the brain." I'll try to find the quote.
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smcder
Guest
We've already made a lot of decisions about what to take into our bodies ... we have evolved to absorb parts of one another physically and mentally and I think psychically and we have psychological and biological protection and limits at work even in this conversation.
These vary ... disgust and enthusiasm are both probably "natural" reactions to this topic ...
I do want to hear a personal vision from @mike ... day in the life of
From my POV enhancing technology while keeping it on the outside seems reasonable and that means keeping an eye on those who think otherwise ...
I don't see the inevitability of hive minds, Transhumanism etc nor the if we can do it we should or we will ... Although there's historical precedent ... On the other hand we haven't blown ourselves up yet ...
it falls under risk management and that's a field that draws some serious minds
Ours is the hand that rocks the cradle.
We aren't the first instantiation of our kind of intelligence on the planet ... the answer as to what happened to the Neanderthals seems to be in part that we absorbed them and now carry some of theIr DNA.
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Here it is:
Pharyngula
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.
His latest claim is that we’ll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we’ll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He’s not just speculating optimistically, though: he’s building his case on such awfully bad logic that I’m surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil’s assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I’m very disappointed in Terence Sejnowski for going along with that nonsense.
See that sentence I put in red up there? That’s his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false. Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It’s design is not encoded in the genome: what’s in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn’t even aware of the magnitude of that problem.
We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!
Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil’s calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain.
First up is RHEB (Ras Homolog Enriched in Brain). It’s a small protein, only 184 amino acids, which Kurzweil pretends can be reduced to about 12 bytes of code in his simulation. Here’s the short description.
MTOR (FRAP1; 601231) integrates protein translation with cellular nutrient status and growth signals through its participation in 2 biochemically and functionally distinct protein complexes, MTORC1 and MTORC2. MTORC1 is sensitive to rapamycin and signals downstream to activate protein translation, whereas MTORC2 is resistant to rapamycin and signals upstream to activate AKT (see 164730). The GTPase RHEB is a proximal activator of MTORC1 and translation initiation. It has the opposite effect on MTORC2, producing inhibition of the upstream AKT pathway (Mavrakis et al., 2008).
Got that? You can’t understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No. It had to be worked out operationally, by doing experiments to modulate one protein and measure what happened to others. If you read deeper into the description, you discover that the overall effect of RHEB is to modulate cell proliferation in a tightly controlled quantitative way. You aren’t going to be able to simulate a whole brain until you know precisely and in complete detail exactly how this one protein works.
And it’s not just the one. It’s all of the proteins. Here’s another: FABP7 (Fatty Acid Binding Protein 7). This one is only 132 amino acids long, so Kurzweil would compress it to 8 bytes. What does it do?
Anthony et al. (2005) identified a Cbf1 (147183)-binding site in the promoter of the mouse Blbp gene. They found that this binding site was essential for all Blbp transcription in radial glial cells during central nervous system (CNS) development. Blbp expression was also significantly reduced in the forebrains of mice lacking the Notch1 (190198) and Notch3 (600276) receptors. Anthony et al. (2005) concluded that Blbp is a CNS-specific Notch target gene and suggested that Blbp mediates some aspects of Notch signaling in radial glial cells during development.
Again, what we know of its function is experimentally determined, not calculated from the sequence. It would be wonderful to be able to take a sequence, plug it into a computer, and have it spit back a quantitative assessment of all of its interactions with other proteins, but we can’t do that, and even if we could, it wouldn’t answer all the questions we’d have about its function, because we’d also need to know the state of all of the proteins in the cell, and the state of all of the proteins in adjacent cells, and the state of global and local signaling proteins in the environment. It’s an insanely complicated situation, and Kurzweil thinks he can reduce it to a triviality.
To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.
I’ll make a prediction, too. We will not be able to plug a single unknown protein sequence into a computer and have it derive a complete description of all of its functions by 2020. Conceivably, we could replace this step with a complete, experimentally derived quantitative summary of all of the functions and interactions of every protein involved in brain development and function, but I guarantee you that won’t happen either. And that’s just the first step in building a simulation of the human brain derived from genomic data. It gets harder from there.
I’ll make one more prediction. The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat, Kurzweil, no matter how uninformed and ridiculous his claims get.
(via Mo Constandi)
I’ve noticed an odd thing. Criticizing Ray Kurzweil brings out swarms of defenders, very few of whom demonstrate much ability to engage in critical thinking.
If you are complaining that I’ve claimed it will be impossible to build a computer with all the capabilities of the human brain, or that I’m arguing for dualism, look again. The brain is a computer of sorts, and I’m in the camp that says there is no problem in principle with replicating it artificially.
What I am saying is this:
Reverse engineering the human brain has complexities that are hugely underestimated by Kurzweil, because he demonstrates little understanding of how the brain works.
His timeline is absurd. I’m a developmental neuroscientist; I have a very good idea of the immensity of what we don’t understand about how the brain works. No one with any knowledge of the field is claiming that we’ll understand how the brain works within 10 years. And if we don’t understand all but a fraction of the functionality of the brain, that makes reverse engineering extremely difficult.
Kurzweil makes extravagant claims from an obviously extremely impoverished understanding of biology. His claim that “The design of the brain is in the genome”? That’s completely wrong. That makes him a walking talking demo of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Most of the functions of the genome, which Kurzweil himself uses as the starting point for his analysis, are not understood. I don’t expect a brain simulator to slavishly imitate every protein, but you will need to understand how the molecules work if you’re going to reverse engineer the whole.
If you’re an acolyte of Kurzweil, you’ve been bamboozled. He’s a kook."
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain – Pharyngula
Pharyngula
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.
His latest claim is that we’ll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we’ll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He’s not just speculating optimistically, though: he’s building his case on such awfully bad logic that I’m surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil’s assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
I’m very disappointed in Terence Sejnowski for going along with that nonsense.
See that sentence I put in red up there? That’s his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false. Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It’s design is not encoded in the genome: what’s in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn’t even aware of the magnitude of that problem.
We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!
Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil’s calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain.
First up is RHEB (Ras Homolog Enriched in Brain). It’s a small protein, only 184 amino acids, which Kurzweil pretends can be reduced to about 12 bytes of code in his simulation. Here’s the short description.
MTOR (FRAP1; 601231) integrates protein translation with cellular nutrient status and growth signals through its participation in 2 biochemically and functionally distinct protein complexes, MTORC1 and MTORC2. MTORC1 is sensitive to rapamycin and signals downstream to activate protein translation, whereas MTORC2 is resistant to rapamycin and signals upstream to activate AKT (see 164730). The GTPase RHEB is a proximal activator of MTORC1 and translation initiation. It has the opposite effect on MTORC2, producing inhibition of the upstream AKT pathway (Mavrakis et al., 2008).
Got that? You can’t understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No. It had to be worked out operationally, by doing experiments to modulate one protein and measure what happened to others. If you read deeper into the description, you discover that the overall effect of RHEB is to modulate cell proliferation in a tightly controlled quantitative way. You aren’t going to be able to simulate a whole brain until you know precisely and in complete detail exactly how this one protein works.
And it’s not just the one. It’s all of the proteins. Here’s another: FABP7 (Fatty Acid Binding Protein 7). This one is only 132 amino acids long, so Kurzweil would compress it to 8 bytes. What does it do?
Anthony et al. (2005) identified a Cbf1 (147183)-binding site in the promoter of the mouse Blbp gene. They found that this binding site was essential for all Blbp transcription in radial glial cells during central nervous system (CNS) development. Blbp expression was also significantly reduced in the forebrains of mice lacking the Notch1 (190198) and Notch3 (600276) receptors. Anthony et al. (2005) concluded that Blbp is a CNS-specific Notch target gene and suggested that Blbp mediates some aspects of Notch signaling in radial glial cells during development.
Again, what we know of its function is experimentally determined, not calculated from the sequence. It would be wonderful to be able to take a sequence, plug it into a computer, and have it spit back a quantitative assessment of all of its interactions with other proteins, but we can’t do that, and even if we could, it wouldn’t answer all the questions we’d have about its function, because we’d also need to know the state of all of the proteins in the cell, and the state of all of the proteins in adjacent cells, and the state of global and local signaling proteins in the environment. It’s an insanely complicated situation, and Kurzweil thinks he can reduce it to a triviality.
To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.
I’ll make a prediction, too. We will not be able to plug a single unknown protein sequence into a computer and have it derive a complete description of all of its functions by 2020. Conceivably, we could replace this step with a complete, experimentally derived quantitative summary of all of the functions and interactions of every protein involved in brain development and function, but I guarantee you that won’t happen either. And that’s just the first step in building a simulation of the human brain derived from genomic data. It gets harder from there.
I’ll make one more prediction. The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat, Kurzweil, no matter how uninformed and ridiculous his claims get.
(via Mo Constandi)
I’ve noticed an odd thing. Criticizing Ray Kurzweil brings out swarms of defenders, very few of whom demonstrate much ability to engage in critical thinking.
If you are complaining that I’ve claimed it will be impossible to build a computer with all the capabilities of the human brain, or that I’m arguing for dualism, look again. The brain is a computer of sorts, and I’m in the camp that says there is no problem in principle with replicating it artificially.
What I am saying is this:
Reverse engineering the human brain has complexities that are hugely underestimated by Kurzweil, because he demonstrates little understanding of how the brain works.
His timeline is absurd. I’m a developmental neuroscientist; I have a very good idea of the immensity of what we don’t understand about how the brain works. No one with any knowledge of the field is claiming that we’ll understand how the brain works within 10 years. And if we don’t understand all but a fraction of the functionality of the brain, that makes reverse engineering extremely difficult.
Kurzweil makes extravagant claims from an obviously extremely impoverished understanding of biology. His claim that “The design of the brain is in the genome”? That’s completely wrong. That makes him a walking talking demo of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Most of the functions of the genome, which Kurzweil himself uses as the starting point for his analysis, are not understood. I don’t expect a brain simulator to slavishly imitate every protein, but you will need to understand how the molecules work if you’re going to reverse engineer the whole.
If you’re an acolyte of Kurzweil, you’ve been bamboozled. He’s a kook."
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain – Pharyngula