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twodot posted:I have no clue what you mean by embodiment, but are you seriously saying you can't imagine a context where "cooperation of the environment" isn't a bottleneck to achieving a goal? When you say environment do you just mean "the totality of physical reality including the actor"? Like use your example: I'm a computer that has a goal of processing as much video as possible and can only process 24 fps, I have a source of video that comes in at 48 fps, creating a backlog, how does the environment being more cooperative increase my throughput? Uh, I think I'm saying the opposite and agreeing with you? I think something is getting confused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI The throughput of this system depends on the capacities of Lucy, Ethel, and the belt. If any part under performs, the throughput of the whole system goes down. It would be a dramatic mistake to see this situation and think "we're not producing enough chocolates, better make the belt run faster!" The belt is not the bottleneck. Imagine we are delivering chocolates down fiber optic cables at light speed. Doesn't loving matter. The point is that success is a cooperative affair, ALWAYS. You are as bright and capable as you are, because you've interacted with hundreds (thousands? millions?) of people providing social feedback and evaluation on your behavior, and supporting your various actions, goals, projects, needs, interests, and identities. You are the autonomous, self-aware person you are because you are embedded deeply in vast organized webs of causally interdependent systems, crisscrossing scales and distributed widely through space and time. The success of any subnet in this rippling web depends entirely on its situation wrt the rest. In this context, the question of AI is not about superintelligence, or even about alignment with human values. It has entirely to do with the situation those AI are put in. Trump didn't become any smarter or more or less aligned with humanity by becoming president, but he sure poses a much bigger threat now. So what role do we want these machines to play? What spaces can they enter freely, where might they be restricted, and how do we make these decisions? These questions deserve to be asked long before any machine deserves to be called a person.  edit: I'll pay pet tax for the new page. This is Alan! I brought him home from the shelter a few days ago. He has a cleft palate and had been dropped off by a family who said he was bad luck. When I got to the shelter there was a group of vets around cooing and screaming "what is it? it looks like an alien!" It was obviously immediately that he was the cat for me. Eripsa fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 20:45
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Eripsa posted:My argument again is that processing speed is not always the bottleneck to problem solving. Often it isn't. In my desktop, hard drive read-write speeds are a far more constraining bottleneck than CPU speed, and ratcheting up CPU speed twice as fast won't change tthat Raine fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 20:53
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Eripsa posted:
I was sad to not get quoted on the rights issue, but glad you seem to arrive at the same conclusion as my UN friend. Hi Alan!  How old is he? Does he need any special care because of his cleft palate? I invite you to post him on this, the best thread of the forums: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3769444 Congratulations and I hope you spend many happy years together.
WrenP-Complete fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 20:56
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Personhood being a better basis for rights was my entire point. Just saying "Well if we don't use personhood and instead use something else then I'm right!" does absolutely nothing to address what I said.
Who What Now fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 21:30
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I also think Soma was a very good game. Ok it was a mediocre game but had great story/concepts.
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Jun 2, 2017 21:37
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LeoMarr posted:Okay what about it becoming manditory to do the gene therpy required for dmt? Try riding a horse on the highway. Or any roadway that hed to be horse compatable. There will be no place for our biomass. In 1000 years. Who are you including in "our" biomass? Mammalia has seen worse climate change over its history than we're likely to see, and birds aren't going anywhere. Bloated human corpses will clog the desolate urban landscapes of the posthuman future, while rats and possum rule this garbage heap and crows soaring the skies. The point of the Chiang story is that even when there is a radical divide of capacities and interests, human science and culture can continue along almost unphased. The post-humans in that story don't care about humanity one way or the other, at it puts them at the status of old gods like Volcanoes and the Ocean: beasts of extraordinary scale and power, an idol to worship and scrutinize. Not a direct threat, but another manifestation of a cold and inhuman universe where we are but a mote.
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Jun 2, 2017 21:45
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Who What Now posted:Personhood being a better basis for rights was my entire point. Just saying "Well if we don't use personhood and instead use something else then I'm right!" does absolutely nothing to address what I said. Infant children are not persons but they have human rights. It is literally false that personhood is widely accepted as a basis for rights, and no one believes this. Except you, apparently, in an effort to explicitly block robot rights. What do we call someone anti-robot, besides Luddite? Substratist?
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Jun 2, 2017 21:47
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The bad guy in Short Circuit 2 was named Oscar. Don't be a loving oscar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQMvlH39XA&t=2s
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Jun 2, 2017 21:49
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WrenP-Complete posted:Here's what she said. DIdn't mean to ignore this post! Was giving it proper consideration. =) Specifically hard to know how to respond to this passage: quote:I hadn't pondered how technology / AI fits into 3rd gen mostly because I would say it's defined predominantly by the fact that it's ecological and future focused as well as being communal, broad and non western Partly because my conception of tech is ecological to begin with: technology are the artificial aspects of our environments, the embodiment of sociality. Our communal art and music and dance comes through the media of our technologies. This is as true of indigenous populations as it is of western neckbeards and their smart watch vape pens. So the contrast between tech and eco seems a category error to my ears. I am looking at this from something like Kantian eyes, where organization is about the the organization of mechanisms. From section 65 of the 3rd critique: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-critique-of-judgement quote:For a body then which is to be judged in itself and its internal possibility as a natural purpose, it is requisite that its parts mutually depend upon each other both as to their form and their combination, and so produce a whole by their own causality; while conversely the concept of the whole may be regarded as its cause according to a principle (in a being possessing a causality according to concepts adequate to such a product). In this case then the connexion of effective causes may be judged as an effect through final causes. Kant is saying a machine stops being a mere machine and starts being an autonomous agent when its parts are mutually interdependent and self-sustaining. A biological organism like E coli, left in a bath of nutrients, can do everything it needs to do everything it wants to do (which is mostly spit out copies of itself). All the parts of the cell (the organelles, the DNA, etc) contribute to this process, and are supported and reinforced by all the others. When you have a network of self-reinforcing support like this, you have a self-organized autonomous agent. But Kant thinks this works the same way both in the human mind and in social world. Our cognitive system has lots of functional components, and these components engage in patterns of mutually reinforcing activity whose integration gives rise to our unified conscious experience. Likewise, the social world is made of a diversity of agents with varied interests and goals who are by necessity integrated into a common social fabric. And just as consciousness arises from the integration of cognitive roles, so to does the moral landscape arise from the integration of social roles. I know Kant will be dismissed as a western individualist colonizer, but my interpretation of his view treats autonomy as deeply pluralistic and integrated. From this perspective, recognizing the participation of our machines as social agents is not a radical shift of metaphysics. It is, instead, a rather clear case of correcting an oversight long overdue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8ioZkb-Sc edit: WrenP-Complete posted:Does he need any special care because of his cleft palate? The vets at the shelter said no, but the internet says he's at added risk for sinus infections and other respiratory problems. But right now he seems happy as a clam, sleeping off what was surely a hard week. Eripsa fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 22:48
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Eripsa posted:DIdn't mean to ignore this post! Was giving it proper consideration. =) quote:Kant is saying a machine stops being a mere machine and starts being an autonomous agent when its parts are mutually interdependent and self-sustaining. Taking notes for further bot development, thank you.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:03
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Eripsa posted:Infant children are not persons but they have human rights. Infants are not given the same level of rights that adults are, largely because they do not have the ability to fully exercise them. They by and large don't have the right to own property, and they don't have the right to vote. quote:It is literally false that personhood is widely accepted as a basis for rights, and no one believes this. Except you, apparently, in an effort to explicitly block robot rights. . See, you're so desperate to find an enemy that youve either forgotten, or perhaps never cared, that I support the case for rights of robots. I'm trying to treat you seriously, and yet you don't seem capable of doing the same. Why is that? Edit: A friend of mine has a cat that is missing a portion of their lips and cheek. Its not the same thing as Alan's cleft palate, but I can ask them if they have any tips for caring for a cat with a similar condition if you'd like. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 23:23
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Who What Now posted:and they don't have the right to vote. Oh cool, so you are saying that felons aren't really people.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:26
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WrenP-Complete posted:Taking notes for further bot development, thank you. I'm not sure if I've mentioned richROT in previous threads, but he's in the video and worth a mention here. I have field tested this solution to autonomy, and it works. hitchBOT was slain in August 1 2015, and Burning Man runs on Labor Day weekend at the end of the month. So we built richROT. It uses no electronics except battery powered lights (it was actually ticketed by the BM Artery for not having enough lights lol). It is mostly kitty litter inside to keep it from blowing away. It has a clipboard on top with nonsense instructions and a destination. We would drop it off places and wait to see if it got where we wanted it to go.            And it worked! In 2015 we made four complete trips over the festival week, taking it out about a mile from camp to popular attractions on the playa and telling it to go to others. I got worried it was lost and stolen at one point because it didn't come back for two days, but that was because another camp (Fort Whiskey, from Canada) say richROT, loved it, and partied the gently caress out with it over those days.   In 2016, we had it come directly back to camp after every trip so it wouldn't get lost. It made two successful trips, but then was cited by Artery for insufficient lighting. Anyway, for a trashcan full of kitty litter, it had a hell of a time as a burner. And it wasn't the only one! Another hitchBOT inspired bot, Burn 1E, was also on playa in 2015 and 2016! It is a very successful model in that supportive environment.  My favorite part of the story Is that richROT got better at navigating this environment as it went on. The people who reacted with richROT didn't just move the bot around, they also covered it in stickers, someone left a stuffed animal on it, they drew a mustache and a big dick on its face. This kind of stuff makes it cuter and more likely to attract the attention of someone who's going to carry it to the next destination. The same thing happened to hitchBOT of course. So the bot isn't just autonomous, it is self-improving. All without a single logic gate. It is a wonderful lesson that the lower bounds on autonomy are not internal constraints but the threshold of environmental support.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:41
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Membership in a community is impossible if you don't have at least the capacity for sentience. If you're incapable of thinking, you cannot engage socially with anyone else.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:43
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This thread was better before Eripsa.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:45
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rudatron posted:Membership in a community is impossible if you don't have at least the capacity for sentience. If you're incapable of thinking, you cannot engage socially with anyone else. Sentience is by definition the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. You probably mean sapience, the capacity for reflective thought and deliberation. Neither are conditions for membership in a community. An ecosystem is composed of members from all sorts of species and interests and capacities. Their membership in a common community pertains directly to the mutual constraints each agent imposes on each other, whether it is sapient, sentient, animal vegetable or mineral. A river is a participant in a community, and its changes over a season have dramatic impact on the wildlife in its environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
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Jun 2, 2017 23:54
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BTW, this list is noble savage bullshit. Australian Aboriginals used fire extensively to terraform the environment they found themselves, to make their life easier (in particular, hunting). That's 'domination of nature'. The elder stuff is an expression of political economy, and the fascination with youth in the west is just fear of death & aging. Suggesting that aboriginal society wasnt patriarchical, because of strongly defined gender roles, has got to be a massive loving joke. The rest is just political economy. rudatron fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 23:54
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Mulva posted:Oh cool, so you are saying that felons aren't really people. I believe personhood is a basis for granting rights. Not that granted rights are a basis for determining personhood.
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Jun 2, 2017 23:57
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Calling parts of a ecology 'members in a community' is a rhetorical metaphor, not a statement of fact. You can't personify inanimate things.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:02
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Who What Now posted:This is a problem that I have with Eripsa's argument. He claims that the definition of rights doesn't matter, and yet philosophical discussion are very much discussions about definitions. He jumped the gun with his first video; he should have clearly laid out how he was defining rights and exactly which rights he believes robots should have before going into why they should have those rights. In the YouTube intellectual thread I pointed out that robots already have some protections, or "rights", under the law in the form of property rights of owners. He does the same thing with his definition of intelligence. Like, yeah, you can choose to define intelligence as he does ("how effectively an entity can accomplish a goal"), but that definition certainly isn't agreed upon and can't be proved because, well, it's the definition of a word (and one that has a bunch of debate/controversy about how it should be defined, at that). Like, if he wanted to make a more honest/reasonable argument, Eripsa could say "assuming intelligence is defined as ______, etc etc", but instead he just flat out says "intelligence means X" when, uh, no - it doesn't. His argument completely depends on the acceptance of his assumptions - assumptions which are often controversial at best, if not outright wrong. This kinda seems to be a trend with Eripsa's arguments.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:04
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rudatron posted:You can't personify inanimate things. The body pillow market would disagree with you, I fear.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:04
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rudatron posted:BTW, this list is noble savage bullshit. I don't know enough about this to really contextualize, but I'll try and find more author's critiques to learn more. Hm... WrenP-Complete fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jun 3, 2017 |
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Jun 3, 2017 00:10
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rudatron posted:Calling parts of a ecology 'members in a community' is a rhetorical metaphor, not a statement of fact. You can't personify inanimate things. You totally can. I mean, it's dumb and weird, but it's a thing you can technically do and nobody can stop you.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:26
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hey look! It's something to not hate you for! ok, well, maybe hate you slightly less... oh wait, you're probably lying about the cat, right?
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Jun 3, 2017 00:29
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rudatron posted:Calling parts of a ecology 'members in a community' is a rhetorical metaphor, not a statement of fact. You can't personify inanimate things. Again, interaction in a community doesn't depend on personhood, so there's no personifying going on here. A metaphor is something that is literally false ("Juliet is the sun"). I'm drawing an analogy, which is a shared structural relationship between two domains. An isomorphism, a real dynamical structure. A social community is like an ecological community in a straightforward network-theoretical sense: they are composed of networks of interactions between interdependent nodes at various scales. This is literally and objectively true of both the social and the ecological sciences. FWIW, it's also true of the organization of biological life and neural networks (both natural and artificial), of economic markets and the division of labor, of patterns of city growth and spreads of disease. It is true of the dark matter network that organizes the cosmos and the quantum fields that compose the matter that dances hangs off it like tinsel. I haven't uttered a bit of personification in any of this. If you see it, it's because you're under the delusion that action originates from and involves only humanity, and that the rest of nature is but an inanimate machine. Such anthropocentrism leads you to the bogus conclusion that if objects are agents they must also be persons. The problem here is not that I've misjudged the importance of objects, but that you've misjudged the importance of persons.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:35
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WrenP-Complete posted:Whoops, I had the impression Ife was well respected. I apologize. I think the list has problems but I'd also recommend taking rudatron's opinions re: Australian aboriginals with a grain of salt.
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Jun 3, 2017 00:35
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stone cold posted:I think the list has problems but I'd also recommend taking rudatron's opinions re: Australian aboriginals with a grain of salt. I think my friend's point in sending that image was simply to encourage different creative thought about how to conceptualize personhood/humanity/rights, but I am not sure and the conversation seems to have move past that point. And neither one of us would want to perpetuate racist ideas about anyone. Shabbat shalom/a peaceful weekend to all. WrenP-Complete fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jun 3, 2017 |
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Jun 3, 2017 00:51
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Eripsa, you're weaseling with the definition of words. If you're using 'interaction' to mean 'any interaction, physical or not', then 'community' loses it's meaning as a social concept entirely - it just becomes the limit of the space-time light-cone that you happen to be in, whenever you think the community 'started'. It's stupid. Everything else you said is just pure word salad, of disconnected concepts strung together. You're like the canonical example of the 'science fan', who has a lot of familiarity with pop-sci words, but little understanding of what they actually mean. stone cold posted:I think the list has problems but I'd also recommend taking rudatron's opinions re: Australian aboriginals with a grain of salt.
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Jun 3, 2017 01:04
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WrenP-Complete posted:I think my friend's point in sending that image was simply to encourage different creative thought about how to conceptualize personhood/humanity/rights, but I am not sure and the conversation seems to have move past that point. And neither one of us would want to perpetuate racist ideas about anyone. Oh, absolutely, don't want to crack that can open for sure.
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Jun 3, 2017 01:21
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rudatron posted:Eripsa, you're weaseling with the definition of words. If you're using 'interaction' to mean 'any interaction, physical or not', then 'community' loses it's meaning as a social concept entirely - it just becomes the limit of the space-time light-cone that you happen to be in, whenever you think the community 'started'. It's stupid. What distinguishes a "physical interaction" from a "social interaction" are the parties involved. If we're talking about photons and neutrinos, then lightcones become relevant. But if we're talking about ambassadors and assassination attempts then the dynamics are relevantly different. Different scales of interaction demand different levels of emergent description. You can model both as abstract networks with the same organizational character, specifically a self-reinforcing character described by Kant. I don't know of any "science fans" making appeals to the third critique to defend a conception of robot rights, but if you can point me to them that's my people. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, I'm quite confident in my grasps of the concepts at play here. But I'm also pretty sure I understand the technical details. This is an image from a paper called The informational architecture of the cell.  What you're seeing is the protein interaction network involved in replication for a specific kind of yeast. Each node is a protein in either an inhibitory or excitatory relation with the other proteins this network of interactions allows the cell to undergo replication, to produce all the internal cellular structures that facilitate the replication process. This is a "closed" network, in that no other protein except what is in this set is needed to replicate, and everything in the set produces all the constraints needed by everything else in the set. But you don't actually need them all! The red nodes are called the "kernel". Those are the essential proteins; if they are present, most of the replication process will occur. The other proteins help the process along and make it more effective, but aren't strictly necessary to its operation. That kernel is not closed. The difference between the open and closed set of replication proteins is exactly analogous to the difference between an autonomous and a heteronomous system in Kant's terminology, and is exactly the relevant analogy for understanding the agency of machines. Don't complain to me about word salad, son, I got bots trailing me online producing word salad for me. Eripsa fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 3, 2017 |
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Jun 3, 2017 01:58
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But now your definition is circular: Membership of a community is defined by interaction, but the 'limit' of interaction, what you consider meaningful, is defined only in terms of the 'parties involved' - in other words, a community defines itself, i.e. something is a community because you say so.
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Jun 3, 2017 02:12
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rudatron posted:But now your definition is circular: Membership of a community is defined by interaction, but the 'limit' of interaction, what you consider meaningful, is defined only in terms of the 'parties involved' - in other words, a community defines itself, i.e. something is a community because you say so. My ontology is networks: nodes and relations. Define your sets of nodes and relations, and we'll talk about how to identify and individuate the communities therein. There are lots of ways to do so. edit: perhaps you're referring to the problem of system individuation? My buddy realityapologist and I have worked on this problem extensively.
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Jun 3, 2017 02:19
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So since 'nodes' have be defined before relationships between them can be described, you cannot assert something is a member of a community, before proving it meets the requirements of membership, i.e. you have to prove robots are human, before you can grant them human rights - otherwise the 'interaction' between them is not necessarily meaningful to the 'community' you're talking about.
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Jun 3, 2017 02:41
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After thinking about it for a bit, I think that what's happening with Eripsa is that he comes across some idea that intuitively "feels" interesting/important (and may or may not have been formed while under the influence of hallucinogens*), becomes attached to/invested in it, and then sets out to come up with some sort of logic proving the idea in question. So it's a sort of backwards discovery process, where he starts out with a conclusion that intuitively feels right to him and then sets out to come up with a formal proof. With regard to the robots rights stuff, I think that it's just a matter of him being enamored by the idea of a sci-fi inspired future (with talking robots and AR headsets, etc) and then coming up with ideas that attempt to unify our actual reality with the way he wants reality to be. So in this case, even though he realizes that robots currently (and for the foreseeable future) do not possess anything resembling sentience, he desires a future with sentient robots and thus tries to construct a philosophical framework that molds our current reality to his expectations/hopes for a future sci-fi reality. So you end up with stuff like "sure, robots may not currently be sentient, but perhaps we should treat them sorta like they are for this convoluted reason." *I think he may have actually said something along these lines in his last thread
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Jun 3, 2017 06:11
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I met Hitchbot, he had made it across the entire country and was treated with respect. No one thought it sapient, but everyone anthropomorphized it and ended up treating it like a celebrity or some sort of robo-ambassador. It was really nice because it showed that if robots ever did become "worthy" of rights, most people would be quite nice to them. Then it went to the USA and was nearly instantly murdered. The lesson is for robots to stay out of the US.
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Jun 3, 2017 06:31
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Ytlaya posted:After thinking about it for a bit, I think that what's happening with Eripsa is that he comes across some idea that intuitively "feels" interesting/important (and may or may not have been formed while under the influence of hallucinogens*), becomes attached to/invested in it, and then sets out to come up with some sort of logic proving the idea in question. So it's a sort of backwards discovery process, where he starts out with a conclusion that intuitively feels right to him and then sets out to come up with a formal proof.
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Jun 3, 2017 07:01
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Maybe, but when you start thinking a trash can with googly eyes counts as a 'robot' because people keep moving it, that's...that's another level.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:22
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Hey, don't have time to read the entire thread but just to be quick about this: the brain isn't a computer, even just individual cells are enormously complex dynamic systems that we can't model in their entirety just yet, neurons aren't transistors and neither are synapses, the electrochemical signalling that goes on in the brain is complex on multiple levels and non linear and makes use of a mix of analogue and digital signalling methods, and that's not even going into definitions of what your 'self' is which is a very contentious topic anyway. Uploading isn't going to happen. Neither is the theseus's ship thing, because you can't replace neurons with techno equivalents because neurobiological machinery is complex to the point that it's unlikely we'll be able to replicate its function with non organic materials. You're going to die, unless we invent biological immortality, and that's probably only going to be for rich people even if it does end up existing. Also transhumanism is basically just early christian eschatology reinvented for materialist technoutopianism. That article is pretty good but there are more academic ones that I can't be bothered to find at the moment.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:37
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Then, again, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on eripsa. So let's take this thread in a different direction. Anthropologists aren't sure when humans started farming, or why. A big theory is that people had domesticated some plants and such for a while, but they hadn't really started 'farming'. Then, there was some kind of crisis, that compelled people to transition from a nomadic to sedentary lifestyle. A big reason they think this is the case, is that the early farmers were worse off, nutritionally, than the hunter gatherers that preceded them, which you can measure in their bone remains. Then, once they started farming, and they got an increase in the population from that surplus, they were 'trapped' - unable to move back to a nomadic lifestyle, even if things got better, because they had too many mouths to feed. Here's my theory: trans/posthumanism is inevitable not because it fits into the godhood fantasy of dorks, or because it means that video games can become reality, but because it presents the path-of-least-resistance to a whole bunch of problems facing society. And once committed to, the path cannot be backtracked. E.g, suppose you're the government of a newly industrializing nation, like a future-china. Pollution is a big loving problem, but you need those factories. Low environmental standards are also what helps attract those factories anyway, but the net result is that you're trading the health of your people, for profit. Then, someone invents a 'machine lung', that allows people to breath lovely air without side effects. Well now, you can kill two birds with one stone. The flip side is that, for the poor sods who don't have or want a machine lung, you're out of work. So everyone's getting a machine lung, like it or not. In general, technology is not actually the product of individuals, but societies. It takes an entire society to cultivate knowledge, subsidize the lifestyles of enough people to work on these abstract problems, and produce the labor necessary to implement it. The result is that technology is always directed towards the crises, real or apparent, that societies face. No one has any reason to care about your second-life vr bullshit, because they've got other poo poo to do. But just as the railroads did more than just 'move poo poo long distances' (they had the knock on effect of allowing nations as we know them to exist in the first place), the development and spread of this stuff is going to have unintended side effects. Gender, in particular, is going to be an interesting battleground. Hopefully race as an issue is just loving gone by then, but that's probably being optimistic, in which case who the gently caress knows what this is going to do to it. Yet the most exciting possibility is what's potentiated, and what new structures are possible.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:47
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A Spherical Sponge posted:Hey, don't have time to read the entire thread but just to be quick about this: the brain isn't a computer, even just individual cells are enormously complex dynamic systems that we can't model in their entirety just yet, neurons aren't transistors and neither are synapses, the electrochemical signalling that goes on in the brain is complex on multiple levels and non linear and makes use of a mix of analogue and digital signalling methods, and that's not even going into definitions of what your 'self' is which is a very contentious topic anyway. Uploading isn't going to happen. Neither is the theseus's ship thing, because you can't replace neurons with techno equivalents because neurobiological machinery is complex to the point that it's unlikely we'll be able to replicate its function with non organic materials. You're going to die, unless we invent biological immortality, and that's probably only going to be for rich people even if it does end up existing. For one, it's not exactly clear what the 'mathematical' requirements for sentience is, from which you could manufacture a replacement, so there's no grounds to claim anything is optimal - but for another, life as it evolved has restrictions on what it can and cannot do. Living organisms are dominated by the requirement to self-replicate, but also to be constructed from proteins/polymers. Human constructed machines have neither restriction, and though human manufacturing ability at the nanoscale isn't as good as that of living organisms, once people do, it will be, because those same techniques can be applied to all materials people can get their hands on, metals, carbon allotropes, etc. If you want to say 'no uploading in your lifetime', I feel like that's a defensible claim that sounds reasonable-ish. 'No uploading ever' is wrong.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:56
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