How can I know that I’m really making sense to any of you? Maybe you’ve found sense in what I’ve said, but is it the sense I intended?
Isn’t this a bit like asking if you see green like I do?
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Well, isn’t this what philosophers are all about, trying to figure out the moral, ethical, and social implications of these issues? Why should we imagine that technological changes are inherantly value neutral? Shouldn’t you go read that article over at slate that I posted to @miasm? Doesn’t it underscore why we should think about these things seriously, not just through a technological, but a humanities lens?
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Why need the signatures anyway? Or, if needed so hard, forge them to start with? Wouldn’t the engineers be more in need of said pizza, due to the rollout deadline death march anyway?
What for? So the ones that randomly came up to what later happened could crow how they were right and nobody listened to them (while the ones who MonteCarloed nonfitting predictions are suspiciously silent)?
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And doesn’t that hark back to the notion of subjectivity and if we’re ever able to overcome it for some sort of collective consciousness?
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Whilst I do believe that is a significantly likely possibility, being uploaded into some matrix and existing as code or whatever, isn’t what I’m suggesting more like a physical, prosthetic body into which conscious process would be quickened?
Shouldn’t I just take it one step further and posit a cloned body in the future to make the concept more amenable to sovereign personage? No need for synthetic anything, just really good telescopes and the ability to write pattern into neural tissue?
However, I digress, the interlinking consciousness model of which you speak does underlay many current notions of self, and isn’t the (modern, scientific) exploration of those concepts in its absolute infancy? Whilst I am amenable to the Buddhist (particularly Chen → Zen) concepts of collective fields of mind-streams displacing fundamental components of mind over a wide arena of interacting nodes (contained within physical, biological instances of persons), don’t I expect any such collective field to be generated by consciousness itself?
Do we have to be linked, through successive iterations of vehicles based on DNA blueprints, to the collective before we can be said to be conscious? And anyway, isn’t there a link through memetic transmission anyway? It’s all causal, isn’t it?
Couldn’t you be said to be altered by the mere perception of the potential for change through technological process? Isn’t that what we are all experiencing now? Wouldn’t changes in gestalt consciousness happen even without technology that can physically alter the substrate from which our consciousness emerges?
Didn’t it all change with the first word, or the first time somebody saw a bridge and then told their friend about it?
Isn’t it inevitable?
###Mister Anderson!?
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Isn’t the true beauty of philosophy in having enough Big Names with a wide palette of opinions that one can pick a reputable philosopher for just about any idea one needs to bolster?
Why should that matter? Can we even predict with any degree of reliability where things will go, with all the feedbacks and crosslinks?
Should I read it more in depth tomorrow, after skimming it roughly because having full hands of a 3d printer that finally seems to be accepting my attempts to calibrate it? (And why are the howto methods so hairy?)
Don’t the engineers have the final say anyway? Isn’t one hour spent in the lab at the end having more impact than a million hours of philosophical handwringing over any given problem? Isn’t the article quite close to why I am putting the stress (and own effort) towards making cheap lab instruments anybody can afford, so the garage/basement labs of single motivated individuals can rival the millions-dollars university and corporate facilities in the achievable results, without having to beg for grants and approvals and spending more effort on paperwork than on the research and experimentation itself?
Shouldn’t we have options, together with cheap tools and opensource frameworks, to tinker with humans, to create a transhuman species improved both by genetics and by direct interfacing with electronics?
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From the Slate article:
At the hypothesized point of the Singularity, when we upload our minds to the cloud and leave our bodies behind (or create new ones), the entire notion of an indivisible and distinct human individual will disappear, and we’ll become indistinguishable from software (or hardware)
…so I would argue that based on current holographic models of the universe this point is moot, we are already embedded within a framework of simulation, just the simulation of 4dimensional spacetime, inherent in the pattern of energy embedded within a 2 dimensional hologram entrained around a singularity… and yet here we are, do we not exist?
Why would any future simulation of our own (or perhaps of our AIs own) creation, be any different, so long as it appears solid to the senses being simulated in the simulated person, in that simulated environment?
Sean Carrol is a good un ain’t he:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/05/05/does-spacetime-emerge-from-quantum-information/
Anyone on the West Coast want to step outside with me for a few minutes? Back in a few?
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I’m not trying to avoid an answer, but aren’t I?
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At the risk of seeming dull, is he sharp enough to figure that out on his own?
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Look, there’s a line and sometimes that line is over here, and sometimes that line is over there, who am I to know where the line is all the time?
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Wouldn’t a probability distribution function be quite useful in this application?
Doesn’t Echo answer back “count the spoons”?
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But…they’re aren’t any spoons?
Isn’t that series so rewarding with the ideas, and so infuriating with the execution?
Don’t I think you would make a perfect character to appear in Rick and Morty?
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For me or for the line?
A simulated brain in an artificial bottle?
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Boltzmann ale?
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For you, of the line?
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