Substrate-independent minds

[smcder]

On the Record: Bets - Long Bets

 

[Constance]

If there is not just one way the brain works, not one code (like DNA) that will unlock the brain’s mystery box, then we are in a situation where many people will develop partial answers.

Or develop and apply wrong ones.

However, those answers are tentative, and there is no clear framework for integrating them.

I don't know how tentatively partial 'answers' found by Kurzweil et al will be applied (my guess is not at all tentatively), but it's certain that there is no clear framework for integrating what seem to be 'answers' that then get applied in AI labs across the globe. I mean a framework overseen by a large body of biologists, physicists, humanists, psychologists, social theorists, economists, and environmental experts that would not only mutually educate one another in the risks involved in mounting a general artificial intelligence machine that could self-replicate, but that would also have authority to overrule implementations that the majority of the body believes to be dangerous.

Actually, I don't think unregulated AI and the selling of AI to a naieve public constitutes a 'normal academic situation'.

 

[smcder]

That was more in response to @Soupie's idea that you can look at an isolated organism and infer a lot about its environment ... it made me think of the article on the brain as alien technology ... it has a back story of contingency and necessity, but it might be only one of many ... you might get to a similar brain from many different histories ... it's like saying you can read the last chapter of the book and infer the first thirty chapters.

 

[Constance]

That appears to be little more than a rant focused on a technicality that was probably taken out of context. In his "How To Create A Mind talk on TED, Kurzweil says, I've been very consistent in predicting 2029 as the point in where computers will match human intelligence." That isn't the same as "reverse engineering the brain", but it goes to show that there's obviously more to the picture when it comes to Kurzweil than the author of the rant is telling us. I've read some Kurzweil, and although he may be somewhat over optimistic, I'd hardly put him in the "kook" category, and he has had a fairly good, though not perfect track record. The man is very intelligent and a visionary.

The man is very intelligent and a visionary.

There are a lot of other very intelligent and visionary people in the world today who think his ideas are dangerous.

 

[smcder]

I'm looking too at the history of technology and how it's been sold to the public ... that's part of my skepticism.

So we have basically computers that can run software to beat a chestmaster on our phones, or close ... I have an app that you can take a picture of an equation and it will solve the equation and show you the process step by step ... I have several language learning apps, I have access to the entire Pali Canon ... all of this, are people walking around speaking multiple languages? Can they do math better? Are they better informed? Or do they talk to one another endlessly about the details of everyday life, as they did before, and use their phones to listen to music, play Angry Birds or watch porn ... actuallu, these would be the early adopters ... the first Transhumanists ... so maybe I shouldn't be worried after all!! ;-)

Like the war machines in War of the Worlds - the Amish rebels will upload a virus and some Transhuman soldier will catch it while looking at porn during the middle of the battle and it will be instantly transmitted to the entire hive-mind ...

 

[Randall]

The man is very intelligent and a visionary.

There are a lot of other very intelligent and visionary people in the world today who think his ideas are dangerous.

Being skeptical is certainly fair when anyone starts making fantastic claims, so I'm not surprised. ( I've read what they have to say BTW ), but you have to admit that the tone of the whole article appears to betray some negative bias, and there certainly isn't sufficient evidence in it to justify calling Kurzweil a "kook".

 

[smcder]

Again, I think we fail on imagination, not intelligence ... here's a scenario:

We achieve Transhumanism - with greatly expanded or infinite life spans and unlimited powers and no biological commitments, no needs, no wants - everything is at hand, we have no reason to make war, nothing to fight over - great compassion and much to offer ... we don't need the Earth and fixing it is almost an afterthought, practically no effort - so we clean the place up, fix the major problems and most of the minor ones - and give a few stern warnings based on our greatly expanded intellects to the few who elect to stay behind, extracting a promise from what's left of humanity that they will take care of the place and then take off for deep space.

Maybe a few, call them 80dh15@ttv@5s ... decide to stay behind and help humanity along. Maybe a tweak or two here and there ... but the challenge would be akin to that found in the old computer game SimLife ...

Instead we get ... adopt or die out?

 

[smcder]

I asked Google (Ray is director of engineering)

"is Ray Kurzweil a kook?"

Al Fin: Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain

 

[smcder]

Al Fin: Pity the Fools Who Blindly Believe "The Science"

came up in the search results ... some interesting points and concerns I've had long term, with the way science is done ... not "science" itself, about which I think, like Gandhi as regards democracy in America, that it's a good idea.

 

[Randall]

I asked Google (Ray is director of engineering)

"is Ray Kurzweil a kook?"

Al Fin: Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain

Good commentary. Did you read it?

 

[Constance]

Being skeptical is certainly fair when anyone starts making fantastic claims, so I'm not surprised. ( I've read what they have to say BTW ), but you have to admit that the tone of the whole article appears to betray some negative bias, and there certainly isn't sufficient evidence in it to justify calling Kurzweil a "kook".

It's a blog. Why don't you read up on the credentials and research of the neuroscientist who wrote it and then decide. "Negative bias"? It sounds more like intellectual outrage to me

 

[smcder]

Good commentary. Did you read it?

yes si ja

 

[Constance]

80dh15@ttv@5s

; )

 

[smcder]

This part, not the ax the author has to grind:

We are all drowning in a sea of information overload. It is impossible for anyone to master all of the new information in one's own field. How much harder it is to comprehend and properly integrate all of the new, significant findings which crucially affect us and everyone we know. And so, naturally, we and everyone else -- including scientists (and markets) -- become caught up in FLOOPS (feedback loops)__via_Gogerty_via_SimoleonSense.

Having once made the slightest commitment to a particular point of view or hypothesis, it becomes easier to integrate new information which supports that hypothesis. If we are not provided with honest data and feedback from the actual testing of the hypothesis against real world conditions, we are helpless to know what is likely to be true.

This ties in with the article I posted a while back from Wired magazine ... it talked about Big Data and how that was replacing theory in science ... so you can put data together and make predictions now without a theory, theory slows you down - before it helped because you didn't have the computing power ... you used theory to extrapolate and guess, now you can use raw power to do the same thing ... minus the guessing.

The concern was cutting a swath through data, using any given path to any given conclusion ... it's always been a problem, because that's the nature of the discursive mind ... there will always be facts to find and bring in, and the mind will happily do this indefinitely until something steps in and stops it - but whereas big data is a playground for the discursive mind - for the judging mind, the part that puts the big picture together, it's a night mare ... again, the world's always been this way ... what I think folks like Kurzweil and Ventner and Jobs do is make that big picture decision AND they manage to sell it to someone who can then sell it to the world ... my sense of it is that these aren't always the people with the very best ideas (good ideas, yes) ... but likely the best ideas ever had are still sitting on the shelf somewhere

 

[smcder]

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

 

[smcder]

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of

dimensionally agnostic statistics.

It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

 

[smcder]

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.
Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws.

**The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.**
In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

 

[Randall]

It's a blog. Why don't you read up on the credentials and research of the neuroscientist who wrote it and then decide. "Negative bias"? It sounds more like intellectual outrage to me

Simply having credentials doesn't automatically make one right, and when it does, it's because there is evidence and critical thinking going on, not name calling and ranting.

 

[smcder]

@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.

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.

A simple example is pain ... I have some experience with this, the practice in mindfulness and awareness

Bhikkhu Thanissaro - Using Meditation to deal with Pain , Illness and Death

there's a lot in that article but two main points:

As you strip away all the mental paraphernalia surrounding your pain -- including the idea that the pain is yours or is happening to you -- you find that you finally come down to the label that simply says, This is a pain and it's right there. When you can get past this, that's when your meditation undergoes a breakthrough. One way is to simply notice that this label will arise and then pass away. When it comes, it increases the pain. When it goes, the pain subsides. Then try to see that the body, the pain and your awareness are all three separate things -- like three pieces of string that have been tied into a knot, but which you now untie. When you can do this, you find that there is no pain that you cannot endure.

This is what I asked myself last night during some intense pain - and the answer is yes, even in the more intense moments, there is an awareness that is not the pain, that is not, itself, in pain. So when I stop "I"dentifying with the pain, with "my" pain - then it's not a problem and I went to sleep.

Second point:

And finally we come to the topic of death. As I said earlier, one of the important stages of meditation is when you discover within the mind a knowing core that does not die at the death of the body. If you can reach this point in your meditation, then death poses no problem at all. Even if you haven't reached that point, you can prepare yourself for death in such a way that you can die skillfully, and not in the messy way that most people die.

So this idea that in meditation there are unlimited worlds, there is the ability to deal with pain, physical and emotional - to be in equinamous states or states of rapture - there's less interest in being Transhuman ... and with the above sense, because this awareness is at once the most personal and impersonal aspect of "myself" - then death isn't a problem either, certainly immortality as smcder doesn't have any kind of appeal to me - but there does seem to be this "knowing core" mentioned above with a bearable kind of immortality.

This core, getting into this state of awareness - takes relaxing the body and the mind ... its the state I would go to when I want to know the right thing to do - there's access to insight in this state ... its the state I would want to be in when I face death, even sudden violent death ... and there's a lot of martial arts that would back me up ... the Samurai trained to go into battle a dead man, with no hops and completely relaxed, only then could he act with a totally spontaneous response in battle ...

but a calm, relaxed state, a state that requires years of disciplined training to implement in battle, doesn't seem like it would be selected for its survival value, given the flight or fight response ... so how did this kind of state, this capacity or ability evolve? Maybe along a separate track and someone figured out it was useful in other situations ... dunno ... but it seems imagination is closely related.

 

[Constance]

Simply having credentials doesn't automatically make one right, and when it does, it's because there is evidence and critical thinking going on, not name calling and ranting.

You've never seen smart people lose their tempers before? I've seen a number of academics who've done that when they encountered inadequately informed and dangerously wrong-headed thinking.