|
I really enjoyed Blindsight and the follow up Echopraxia, but they are both written from the perspective of a depressed scientist author. the relevant fact is that while we don’t understand consciousness or sapience, we developed it and kicked the poo poo out of the entire planet with it, so there’s obvious survival value in it oh and we don’t need to create sapient machines, the “dumb” machines we build will do it for us. there’s no (non-religious) reason to believe that the emergent complexity of our consciousness is unique to naturally evolved biological entities Wheeee fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Feb 4, 2018 |
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 03:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 03:20 |
|
|
also the whole “sadbrains” thing is a pretty gross dismissal of depression and of mental health in general
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 03:53
|
|
|
ftl is impossible under already established principles of special relativity, sapience is demonstrably possible.suggesting that it can only be 'organic' is absurdist nonsense. the action potential of neurons is governed by mathematical laws, and any mathematical system can be modeled. you're also creating a special distinction between living matter and non-living matter, but from the perspective of the universe, no distinction exists.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 04:01
|
|
|
Wheeee posted:also the whole “sadbrains” thing is a pretty gross dismissal of depression and of mental health in general What about smoothbrains?
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 04:29
|
|
|
smoothrich brains
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 04:32
|
|
|
anyone watch babylon berlin on netflix? its pretty good, features a bunch of trots being slaughtered
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 04:44
|
|
|
Wheeee posted:also the whole “sadbrains” thing is a pretty gross dismissal of depression and of mental health in general Sounds like you got sadbrains, fam
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 12:41
|
|
|
rudatron posted:ftl is impossible under already established principles of special relativity, sapience is demonstrably possible.suggesting that it can only be 'organic' is absurdist nonsense. the action potential of neurons is governed by mathematical laws, and any mathematical system can be modeled. you're also creating a special distinction between living matter and non-living matter, but from the perspective of the universe, no distinction exists. lol, just lol, if u think sapience is possible. every1 knows theres no intelligent life on earth, and there never will be.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 16:43
|
|
|
"Communists are those who believe in the sanctity of private property, the Church, the family, and the integrity of Greece's boundaries" - unnamed American military attaché at the Cairo conference, 1943
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 20:59
|
|
Wheeee posted:also the whole “sadbrains” thing is a pretty gross dismissal of depression and of mental health in general "Sad Brains" is a cultural critique, not personal.
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 21:29
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/960269373129805824
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2018 23:46
|
|
|
lol remember when I said rudatron was the Eliezer Yudkowsky of C-SPAM and I was only half joking
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 00:20
|
|
|
believe it or not, arguing against 'only biology can be sapient' doesn't actually make you a singularity nerd, it's just something that fairly obviously follows from what we know about the universe, i.e. it's a directly consequence of materialism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 01:34
|
|
|
Dreddout posted:All I have stated is that for all we know sapience is unique to biology in general and humanity in particular lmao yeah and only humans have souls and all dogs go to hell
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 03:22
|
|
|
lollontee posted:lmao yeah and only humans have souls and all dogs go to hell It's the other way around hth
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 03:24
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/nickmullen/status/827220411356217345
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 03:25
|
|
|
so how many years are you in on your neurobio masters?
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 03:25
|
|
|
we should do review article together or something. im sure your views on the role of signal degeneration in recursive feedback loops would be loving fascinating
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 03:34
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOXp2oyZJIc
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 04:00
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/Trillburne/status/960375342044246016
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 16:11
|
|
|
I'm doing the dissertation for my neuroscience degree atm and I'm pretty sure they haven't described any sort of neurological basis for consciousness in my course. From the stuff I've read (in neuroscience and philosophy of mind) it doesn't seem very clear that we even have a good definition for what consciousness is. All of the examples of conscious systems that we have access to (and recognize as conscious) are living things, and there are some pretty convincing philosophical arguments that consciousness requires a living substrate as a sort of basis for the subjectivity underlying the self. Not necessarily organic, just some sort of self replicating self maintaining pattern; I think Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela called a proto-self, because of how the active maintenance of an internal structure and form creates a functional distinction between the material components comprising an organism and those not comprising it (ie the environment the organism exists within). As far as creating a conscious AI, I'm pretty skeptical. Even assuming you could, the processes that gave rise to human consciousness were a very specific series of selection pressures that occurred over hundreds of millions of years, and then after that hundreds of thousands of years of cultural development. Our consciousness is very specifically suited to the environment we exist within, and to how we exist within it, and any theoretically conscious AI we created would be so different to us I doubt that we would even be able to understand it. Crows and dolphins and octopi are probably near sentient, and we have no way of communicating with them, and their way of conceiving of the world is so different to ours it might be the case that meaningful communication isn't even possible. And those intelligences share the most of the same biological underpinnings as ours! And then as far as singularity stuff, even assuming that we could create an AI, and it was somehow similar enough to our style of thinking that we could comprehend it and communicate with it, and it had access and awareness to the structures comprising its consciousness such that it could alter them, who's to say that that process would be linear? We don't know enough about general intelligence to be able to say whether it scales linearly with processing power or whatever. Maybe intelligence is asymptotic and there's a hard limit to how intelligent (in the sense that we understand the word) something can be. Though to be fair, it's probably more a diminishing returns sort of deal for most cognitive processes, rather than a hard limit. But I think more importantly who's to say that a certain intelligence level is intelligent enough to make itself more intelligent? We could probably make ourselves more intelligent, if we were able, but maybe at higher levels of intelligence there's a hard (or soft) barrier to further improvement. I don't really have a background in this and I'm not a mathematician, but I do know other people who work in AI tend to say that this is a problem with the whole idea of iteratively self improving AI. And for another thing, why would we even create a conscious AI? What incentive do companies have to create a conscious AI capable of general intelligence when they can pay some guy to make a bog standard AI that's specifically trained to whatever task they need completed? I say companies because I doubt public institutions will have anywhere near enough funding in the near future to pursue this sort of thing seriously. I'm not saying that I think artificial consciousness are impossible, but I don't think we're going to see them any time in the near future (and personally I don't think humans are ever going to create them), and if we could create them, I'm not sure they would be comprehensible to us; not because they're god like in comparison to us, but because the underpinnings of their consciousness would be so different from ours. I think we're going to see lots more artificial intelligence, just because it has utility as a kind of automation of certain kinds of cognitive tasks, but it's not going to be conscious in any sense that we would recognize, I don't think. A Spherical Sponge fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Feb 5, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 16:42
|
|
|
A Spherical Sponge posted:I'm doing the dissertation for my neuroscience degree atm and I'm pretty sure they haven't described any sort of neurological basis for consciousness in my course. From the stuff I've read (in neuroscience and philosophy of mind) it doesn't seem very clear that we even have a good definition for what consciousness is why would you expect science to be able to understand or define consciousness that's shamans' business
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 19:26
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/mmalloyboy/status/960620380900610050 https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/960645637799927808 Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Feb 5, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2018 22:25
|
|
|
welcome back pener I can't see how a 'living substrate' is a necessary condition. A 'body' maybe, that can act as a mediating agent between the world and self, but why should the exact internal nature of the 'body' determine the nature of self-consciousness? It would be the phenomenological experience of the body and the functionality of the body that matters, not it's unobserved, internal dynamics.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 03:33
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGwz1s1E1aw
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 05:35
|
|
|
rudatron posted:welcome back pener Hmm well it's been a while since I read the book that laid out the argument, but from what I remember, and some google searching, the argument is basically that life entails a kind of proto-consciousness facilitated by a functional distinction between the living system and its environment, and the active maintenance of the existence of the living system (ie metabolism, homeostasis, all that sort of stuff), which imbues things in the world with meaning relative to the living system because the living system has a sort of teleological basis to its interactions with the world, based on the drive of all living things to continue to exist and reproduce. So yeah, a body is necessary as a mediating agent between the world and the self, but the material existence of that body, and the fact that the body itself is composed of living things which have certain teleological orientation towards phenomena in the world acts as a kind of foundation for the structure and content of a conscious mind. I think it has something to do with how the teleological orientation of living cells in multicellular organisms get subsumed into the larger teleological orientation of the multicellular organism itself, and how the mind is just a particularly complex example of that, but I'm not particularly confident on the particulars of the argument. Edit: there's a sort of summary of the book made by the author here if you're curious, he can probably make his argument better than I can, though of course he doesn't say anything about the feasibility of AI A Spherical Sponge fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Feb 6, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 17:02
|
|
|
we can backsolve from marx to deduce that an agent is conscious if its labor has value
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 17:49
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:we can backsolve from marx to deduce that an agent is conscious if its labor has value 
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 17:50
|
|
|
Currently at Arise Advocacy day, there's around 200 of us clogging up the state capitol trying to convince our legislators who are fighting such things tooth and nailquote:Extending pay day loan repayment periods from 10 days to 30 days. Virtually this reduces interest rates from 456% to around 220%(lawmakers oppose) Turns out the reason we can't get payday loan reform is that there are huge contributions from these loan agencies to the heads of the senate banking committee and financial committee I want to guillotine almost every representative I've talked to so far. SSJ_naruto_2003 fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 6, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 18:34
|
|
|
SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Currently at Arise Advocacy day, there's around 200 of us clogging up the state capitol trying to convince our legislators who are fighting such things tooth and nail what state?
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 18:47
|
|
|
hello, this thread i was reading the diaries from one of my favorite documentaries from my childhood, michael palin's pole to pole, and he passes through the ussr two weeks before it collapsed. he describes leningrad and its pretty depressing: unmaintained roads, trams falling apart, dilapidated hotels, goods shortages, a general feeling of malaise. i got a buncha questions on all o this and was wondering if someone could point me to good sources on this: was the ussr just as bad in the late 70s/early 80s pre gorbachev? was there ever a period where living standards were comfortable, roads were maintained, etc? to what extent did gorbachev's privatizations and price control removals contribute to it, or did they in fact help/do nothing to an inevitable collapse? people keep talking about brezhnevian 'stagnation' but what does that mean exactly - and why did it need to be combated? are there any lessons to be drawn here that could be make a command economy viable ever again?
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 18:47
|
|
|
Karl Barks posted:what state? Alabama my b
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 18:54
|
|
|
tekz posted:hello, this thread I'm not the right person to answer most of these questions but please keep in mind when reading about the USSR that Russia was endemically a poor to middle income country that was forced to develop an expensive, cutting edge military-industrial apparatus at the expense of domestic consumption -- first to beat back imperialist aggression (ultimately in the form of Nazi Germany) and then to defend itself and its interests against the US / NATO.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 18:57
|
|
|
tekz posted:hello, this thread you're going to get a bunch of different takes on this but here's mine. yes there were periods like that - the 50s-60s were prosperous, much like they were in the United States though not to the same degree. the USSR was laser focused on heavy industry and related industries, so their consumer goods were a lot worse. they did make attempts at improving them (especially after kruschev's visit to the US in the 50s) but never really managed to succeed. people were provided housing, healthcare, and education tho, and unemployment was "officially" 0. depending on who you ask, the malaise really started to set in in the early 70s and was exacerbated by the oil crisis (actually.. also like the United States). I think the USSR was probably toast by the late 70s and Gorbachev's changes wouldn't have fixed anything regardless. if you're a dead serious communist, you probably blame kruschev's "revisionism", and that the USSR was doomed the moment Stalin died. having said all that, the USSR's growth rate in the late 70s and 80s was like 2%, so not far off from our current predicament. edit: i should mention that i think a huge reason for the USSRs collapse is their leadership got old as gently caress towards the end. pretty much everyone in the politiburo and levers of power was like 80 years old. remind you of another country hm???????? Karl Barks fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 6, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 19:06
|
|
|
Karl Barks posted:you're going to get a bunch of different takes on this but here's mine. yes there were periods like that - the 50s-60s were prosperous, much like they were in the United States though not to the same degree. the USSR was laser focused on heavy industry and related industries, so their consumer goods were a lot worse. they did make attempts at improving them (especially after kruschev's visit to the US in the 50s) but never really managed to succeed. people were provided housing, healthcare, and education tho, and unemployment was "officially" 0. hmm, i was always under the impression that the ussr, as a large oil producing power, benefited from rising oil prices in the 70s and it was in fact the oil price crash caused by the 80s glut that did em in
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 19:09
|
|
|
tekz posted:hmm, i was always under the impression that the ussr, as a large oil producing power, benefited from rising oil prices in the 70s and it was in fact the oil price crash caused by the 80s glut that did em in they were already on a downward slope when the oil crisis hit, it just gave them a few extra years. they tried to rely on the oil prices, and it ended up backfiring Karl Barks fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Feb 6, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 19:15
|
|
|
SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Currently at Arise Advocacy day, there's around 200 of us clogging up the state capitol trying to convince our legislators who are fighting such things tooth and nail lol if you think peaceful protest brings about political change
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 21:06
|
|
|
self unaware posted:lol if you think peaceful protest brings about political change Well we have gotten a few things passed in the history of Arise, but i guess leaving the house is too difficult for some people.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 21:12
|
|
|
SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Well we have gotten a few things passed in the history of Arise, but i guess leaving the house is too difficult for some people. why would someone leave the house to pretend any legislators in government give a gently caress about "protestors"
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 21:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 03:20 |
|
|
self unaware posted:why would someone leave the house to pretend any legislators in government give a gently caress about "protestors" Because we've gotten a few things passed that otherwise wouldn't have been, and those things were important. Imo it's like I should do everything that I can
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2018 21:26
|
|