We will clone you, download your brain to the internet of things. And then we’re going to upload your brain back into that clone and you will live forever.
Lady, let’s get one thing clear. “Altered Carbon” was not a documentary. That shit was on Netflix, not the Discovery Channel.
Radical is also being abused and mis-applied. It means getting to the root of the problem and was historically a progressive viewpoint. What it does not mean is extreme (the historical radicals were between the reformists and revolutionaries)
The closest and only way that radical could apply to the Trumpists is if you say that they are the root of the problem.
That’s another way to put it, yes. One of these days, when I have time, I’d like to actually study some philosophy. I’ve never even take a basic 101 class.
Now? She has been spouting this insane QAnon/John Birch/David Icke bullshit for years.
Anyone with ears should have abandoned her, and her “demon sperm” theory, long ago…
I think there’s a certain overlap here with Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment. Both seem to take an essentialist position that just because a complex system appears to be exhibiting conscious behavior doesn’t mean that it is conscious. Something else is needed. For Davidson, that “something else” is apparently a consistent history; for Searle, something rather more nebulous that’s difficult to pin down exactly.
Ironically, the arbitrariness of the positions taken by Searle and Davidson rather makes me lean toward the “if it looks like it’s conscious, it is” camp that their thought experiments aim to refute.
“the internet of things…” So Gates is living in your refrigerator? Reminds me of when Gilfoyle hacked Jian Yang’s smart fridge.
There’s the argument that the Star Trek transporter is murdering (and re-instantiating a clone) every single time a user “energizes” to a new location.
"Scotty, murder/reinstantiate me!" doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Yes, that’s the exact thing I said in my first comment.
(Oops.) Well, the flip side of Star Trek take on transporters is The Outer Limits S07E08 where instead of a tidy “energizing”, the person in the originating transporter is physically incinerated and reduced to ash. The plot of the episode essentially deals with predicament that arises when the machine malfunctions and there are now 2 perfect instantiations of the same person:
I always thought it was unfair that Thomas Riker never got promoted, considering that Will Riker got his first promotion for what he did right up to the point where they were transported into two people. I’m not surprised he joined the Maquis.
The biggest problem here is that we don’t know that what we write as code or run as byte strings is analogous to our own sense of consciousness. For example, the average number of connections neurons make in your brain is around a hundred or so whereas the connections that a transistor in a CPU is maybe 7 or so if I recall correctly. That’s a huge gap in connectivity and it should be stated that the connections that CPUs have with regard to transistors and other relevant substrate aren’t symmetric or changing like neurons can do. It’s why you can master the piano as a child but then come back to playing in your 40s and you can barely do simple melodies on it. Your brain changes throughout your entire life structurally and chemically, so even the concept of YOU or self is vague at best. We’re probably a century or so out before we get to that point with our ability to make computers analogous to neurons or even root networks of trees or fungi as these are probably the most feasible structures for us to emulate as computers and probably the most efficient ones too. I bring them up since trees have chemicals that are analogous to neurotransmitters and there’s plenty of evidence that trees and other similar organisms, like fungi, do work in a ‘cognitive-like’ fashion. Basically, we’ll have supercomputers more like fungi and trees before we’ll have supercomputers running AGI.
Then there was this: The Prestige (2006) - IMDb, but perhaps we’ve drifted a bit off topic?
There’s an awful lot of assertions being made there without any kind of evidence.
I’d say we’re not even able to satisfactorily define “intelligence” or “self” or establish a firm way of agreeing on whether any given thing or creature posseses or exhibits them.
That’s kind of why we have all these thought experiments.
This is what makes the idea of uploading a human brain to the internet so silly. We can simulate neurons using electronics. Our electronics has a lower connectivity but a much higher clock speed. But we cannot simulate the asynchronous noisy signal propagation of real nerves, so we can’t copy it, or understand it.
However, we can infer. For example, we know that we separate the reflection colours in a scene from the illuminant. This is often called ‘colour constancy’ and we are pretty good at it, which is why we think of ‘colour’ as a property of a reflective object, and not the object plus the illuminant (unless the illuminant is very non-white). I don’t know how the brain manages this. It is certainly very different to how a digital camera works. But it is the same goal, and we can model what it is doing, even if we don’t know how.
As for what makes you YOU, is the person that wakes up in the morning the same one as went to bed last night? There is a gap in the conscious memory. There is some editing of what we think, and how we think it. At least the Transporter made a perfect copy.
We can do something similar with digital cameras, but a digital camera has a good ‘sense’ of linear RGB light levels; our eyes have lost the any sense of linear RGB before the signals have left the retina yet, the brain somehow manages to reconstruct enough to make a good job of correcting, so we see ‘colour’ as a property of an object, and hardly ‘see’ the illuminant.
I think we are a bit better off than that. Back in the 1930’s people did not understand how life worked. Dirac suggested that the information may be shared when a cell divides but the chemical copying of some semi-regular quasicrystal. That’s not a bad summary, but they still had little idea of how the job was done. I think we are closer to understanding intelligence (if that is the right term, for how does an intelligence understand itself?) then people were at understanding cell division in the 1930s.
Making people you disagree with into inhuman monsters makes it easier to justify killing them.
Yes, it’s a time honored and easy to do, evidence abounds.
I have no proof that the me that went to bed entirely too late last night is the same me that got up, petted my cats, and drank my coffee this morning although at least in this case I have vague memories of dreams so my processes (apparently) never entirely shutdown. That said, I think back to an operation I had last Fall where I very clearly remember the moment when I turned off like a light switch. For me there was absolutely nothing between “Huh. I wonder when the anesthesia starts wor…” and my lights suddenly turning fully back on several hours later. For that, I really could be a different me from the before and I’d have no way of knowing. (Can’t very well look at the PID!)
As to this particular fool and her babbling … does she not understand that people plan for a future for other people to enjoy? Is this just not part of her world? I personally don’t expect to be around in 20 years myself (although I could be wrong) but I want to leave a good world for those that will. Which is one reason I oppose people like her at every change I get!
(Edit: altered verb tense to be consistent with other in the same sentence.)
“Where do you get your drugs?!”
