Re: Remember "Bit-Slice" Chips ?

On Fri, 20 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 20/12/2024 09:57, D wrote:

  On Fri, 20 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

 just neurons involved. 'Mind' is an 'environment'.

 This is the truth! I like transhumanists as much as the next guy, but sometimes I think their technology optimists comes too close to religion for my comfort.

  Religions and related philosophies often think of
 some kind of magical 'essence of being' that can
 drift around. It's from the dark ages and beyond.
 Great for horror movie plots though.

 So you don't think that we are all god, living in god, being gods parts and
components? ;)
 

>
Well that's Spinoza's hypothesis.

I know!

What you term the material world is just 'God, made manifest'
>
No more demented than any other metaphysical position.

This is the truth! I'm not a subscriber, but I'm a fan of it, because it is nice, simple and avoids complexities. It can even work, depending on your definition of god, for materialists! =D

 Quite often we see papers describing how any of dozens
 of 'helper' cells are modulating neuron activity on
 the large and small scale. Some have neuron-ish qualities
 unto themselves. The big blob of meat is a UNIT. You can
 digitize the fine state of every neuron and you'll just
 get an infunctional MESS on the other end.
  It's kinda All Or Nothing. We're not built like
 computers - 'evo-goo' instead.
  (hey, I *like* that term and officially claim it :-)

 Well, I see nothing that says we wouldn't be able to live in another kind of substrate if everything was simulated, but I find the
philosophical questions of if it would really be _us_ more
interesting (assuming it works, of

course).
>
Well yes. The human experience seems to be that of a consciousness bolted on to an unruly animal. And most religions seem to be a process of denying or repressing that, whereas the happier people simply accept there are two people inside them and try and reach an accommodation.

Denyning or repressing? You sound so negative! ;) How about refining, distilling or enriching?
Talking about accepting and accomodating almost sounds a bit Jungian.

I'm in the camp believing that if everything worked, and you have an uploaded intelligence that for all intents and purposes acts like
you, it wouldn't be you. I like conscious continuity, but many
transhumanists do not require that or believe that.
 

The position is simply the old idea of 'soul' rehashed into IT terms. The point is that there is the animal self, that it coexists with (or for you, from whence consciousness emerges)
Without that bag of biochemistry you wouldn't be what you are.
>
It might be life, but not as we know it, Jim.

This is the truth! And even though transhumanists brand themselves as the scientific choice (TM), when you challenge them or question them, I feel as if you trigger their religious reflex.
A lot of them like to pay a fortune to freeze themselves, with the slim hope of being revived. I don't know if anyone ever did some statistics on it, but I suspect that you might have greater success donating to your local church in order to get God on your side! ;)
Do you debate transhumanists? Do they like you? And, do you like them?

Yes, I see no reason that should make uploading impossible, in theory, but we have no clue about how the mind works, so there could be plenty of reasons it won't work. Add to that the enormous quantum leap (or multiple quantum leaps) in technology, before being able to even physically replicate it. But with the religious, once I try that conversational track, I am shouted down and bood. =(

   IM-possible, no - but you're not just gonna do some
 kind of fancy MRI and transport a "mind" into any
 one or any thing.

 Come on! You're being so negative. Show some faith!! ;) For me, the
big problem is that we don't (yet) know how to mind works and even
what consciousness is, so how can we replicate it?
 

We have done precisely that in creating computers.  They mimic our logical processes.

Mimic to a small extent, yes, replicate, no. It's a big difference, especially at scale.

So basically, they extrapolate from 1 + 1 = 2, to a billion trillion and often handwave away the steps in between. That is what makes some of them religious in my opinion.

  It's the 'hand-wave' thing that sunk the first AI paradigm.
 Marv Minsky (who posted on usenet for awhile) and friends
 saw how easily 'decisions' could be done with a transistor
 or two and assumed it would thus be easy to build an AI.
 AC Clarke used the Minsky optimism when fashioning the
 idea of "HAL".
  But it all imploded. Turned out there were billions of
 steps between input and that final, transistor-like,
 decision. A photo-lightswitch is not 'intelligent'.

 But now we have LLM:s! ;) What I find interesting is how different people view them. I find the free ones you can play with online to be
incredibly boring. I use them as a kind of search engine on steroids
for stuff that is not important (for entertainment purposes).
I would not trust them for anything business, there I must check manually to make sure all is correct.

>
*shrug* many people used to look it up in the Bible.
>

 

>

Then you have people who fall in love with their LLM. I find that incredible! Would they have fallen in love with Eliza?

>
Id fall in love with any AI that could actually understand me :-)

Really? No aesthetical or haptical preferences?

 As for "Robin Hoods" - there are many ways of looking
 at that paradigm. Who "deserves" what ... not so easy.

 Robin Hoods? You mean stealing from the government and giving to the people? The eternal libertarian hero?

  Um ... more 'commie' hero ....

 Ahh... that spin of Robin Hood. It is not so good. =/ I read two of
the older editions Pyle and McFadden (I think) and there he seemed to
be more libertarian/anarchist than commie, always fighting the
state.

>
Robin Hood, the Green man, Tom Bombadil, whatever, has always been a mythic country dweller who takes up the cause of the peasants against the ruling classes. He is a shadow of a pagan deity. The male spirit of the woods - of trees and forests and of the spring. The vital spirit that causes things to grow.
>
The first appearance of the Robin Hood legend seems to be in Piers Plowman, a sort of Paleo-Marxist tract from 1370 or so where the whole book is an allegory of the fight for the working class (rural peasant in those days) against the king and the church.

Very interesting, the lord of the rings guy I know, but the green man I will look up.

Definitely a 'fuck the kings deer! Whose king is he anyway? let's have some for ourselves'
>
The only difference between libertarianism and communism, is when each gets to power.

This is incorrect. The entire theory of property is a huge difference between them.

Libertariansims tends towards a small state and individual freedom whereas communism imposes  an egalitarianism using the biggest possible State, in fact  the ideal is to leave only the State and its employees.

Your "only difference" threw me off there. I'd say this is quite a big difference and not the "only" difference.

In communism you work for the state. In libertarianism you work for yourself

This is the truth as god intended! ;)