His "work" wouldn't be if it was, for example, sufficiently peer-reviewed and replicated much more widely as @universeness et al points out. Controversial, even extraordinary, theoretical claims have been rejected both by the public and the scientific community – e.g. General Relativity, Evolution – until sufficient, public testing (i.e. experimental evidence) had been accumulated (and a generation or so of initial skeptics had passed from the scene). After hundreds, maybe a thousand, generations of philosophers and then scientists, considering claims of "past lives" etc, Stevenson's compilation is the latest to have had no impact on either brain sciences (re: neurological mechanisms of memory-formation, storage & recall) & physics (re: conservation laws) or philosophies of mind (re: refutation of physicalism, phenomenology, intentionality ...) Why is this? Given the potential scientific and philosophical significance of demonstrable "past lives", how is this near-ubiquitous neglect still possible, Wayfarer?Stevenson is a hot-button issue. — Wayfarer
So you've forgotten about or have not yet read Witty's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (especially propositions 1-2) or, more sadly, you just read it as badly as the Viennese logical positivists had? :chin:... anti-metaphysical ... — Wayfarer
:up: :up:I understand dasein as "being there"; it must be a kind of awareness, even if not reflexively self-aware. I agree that the separation of subject and object only obtains discursively; it is not the primordial nature of human experience. — Janus
Apparrently, you've missed it again? :smirk:No, I did not miss the point you made. My question remains, is processing speed or 'thinking' speed the only significant measure? Is speed the only variable that affects quality? — universeness
It's time to move beyond 'thoughts and prayers.' — opening prayer by U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry C. Black, retired Navy Rear Admiral, on 3 March 2023
:up:Fear, a double edged sword. Ditto for acting and public speaking. — Tom Storm
From an old thread "Should We Fear Death?"So, an acceptance/knowledge of death is a liberation from dread and anxiety and an open door to freedom? Does that resonate? — Tom Storm
Another post from an old thread "What happen after you no longer fear death? What comes next?"It’s often argued that all the achievements and struggles of life mean nothing if it all ends in blackness. How so? Aren’t the moments themselves worthwhile? Is eternity the only criterion of value? This seems ugly to me.
Yes, from Plato originally. And influenced, or informed, by even more ancient Dharmic paths to moksha. Here's a recent post ...What do others think about the role of death in their lives and the concomitant role it plays in their philosophical speculations. Was Montaigne right to say, 'To philosophise is to learn how to die.'
... human extinction; ineluctable nothingness – the radical contingency of the species, its fossils & histories, and our bloodied parade of civilizations – an echo of sighs & moans, laughter & screams fading even now and forever into oblivion. Music is made of silence, which merely interrupts with sudden soundscapes, each piece (i.e. an ephemeral world) ending like raindrops in the ocean. It's terrible knowing, feeling bone deep, that everything and everyone [ ... ] one day very soon in the cosmic scheme of things will be utterly forgotten as if all of it, all of us, had never existed. — 180 Proof
Maybe you missed this allusion to that "quality" of thinking ...Do you personally assign a measure of 'quality' to a thought? Is thinking or processing faster always superior thinking — universeness
In other words, imagine 'a human brain' that operates six orders of magnitude faster than your brain or mine. :chin:Assuming a neural network processes information 10⁶ times faster than a human brain, every "day" a human-level 'thinking machine' can think 10⁶ times more thoughts than a human brain, or rather cogitate 10⁶ days worth of information in twenty-four hours — 180 Proof
Yes, just as today's AI engineers don't see a need for "feelings" in machine learning/thinking.... do you envisage an AGI that would see no need for, or value in, 'feelings?' — universeness
Unfortunately I have as far as the end of season three (after the first half of the third season, IIRC, the series crashed & burned).I assume you have watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Yeah. "Cylon skinjobs" were caricatures, IMO. The HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, synthetic persons in Alien I-II, replicants in Blade Runner, and Ava in the recent Ex Machina are not remotely as implausible as nBSG's "toasters". I imagine "androids" as drones / avatars of A³GI which will, like (extreme) sociopaths, 'simulate feelings' (à la biomimicry) in order to facilitate 'person-to-person' interactions with human beings (and members of other near-human sentient species).Did you think the depiction of the dilemmas faced by the Cylon human replicates, were implausible, as a representation for a future AGI?
Ask A³GI.In what ways do you think an AGI would purpose the moon?
"The goals" of A³GI which seem obvious to me: (a) completely automate terrestrial global civilization, (b) transhumanize (i.e. uplift-hivemind-merge with) h. sapiens and (c) replace (or uplift) itself by building space-enabled ASI – though not necessarily in that order. :nerd:I am more interested is what you envisage as the goals/functions/ purpose/intent of a future AGI
:rofl: :up:Deadwood: Calamity Jane teaching American history. 'Custer was a cunt. The end.' — Tom Storm
Finally confessing your own "Enformer" god-of-the-gaps fallacy. Good for you, sir. :clap: :smirk:My own god-posit is mostly an explanation for the god-gap in the Big Bang creation story. BB does not begin at the beginning, but assumes the prior existence of Creative Power and Directional Rules for evolution. So, like a Cosmologist, I reasoned backward from current conditions to see if there were any clues to the how & why of sudden emergence from Erewhon (nowhere).
I still saw a philosophical necessity for a Creation Myth to explain why there is something instead of nothing. — Gnomon
Maybe I wasn't clear. My contention is that A³GI will not need any of "the most valuable aspects of human consciousness" to render us obsolete as a metacognitive species. I see no reason, in other words, to even try to make a 'thinking machine' that thinks about (or perceives) itself or us like humans do.I remain unconvinced (for now,) that all of (what I would consider) the most valuable aspects of human consciousness, may not be achievable by any future AGI/ASI system — universeness
You will be happy. And controlled.
:chin:Unlike you, bert, folk psychological terms like "awareness" or "consciousness" are neither fundamental nor a priori in my understand of myself, others or nature; such concepts refer to emergent properties or processes. — 180 Proof
Politics is the continuation of religion by other means.
No. It's a working assumption in cognitive neuroscience (and philosophies of mind which are constrained by experimental findings) in the absence of any grounds (other than folk psychology) for assuming its an entity (pace Descartes et al).Question for 180 Proof: Are you taking as axiomatic that consciousness is a process ? — Art48
Eugen's OP questions about "emergence of consciousness from non-consciousness" assumes, in effect, entity-A emerges from entity-NotA. This incoherent assumption is the target of my "reification criticism" – incoherent because it presupposes substance dualism.Isn't that the basis of the reification criticism?
Rhetorical, no?After all, if consciousness is not a process but in fact an entity in its own right, then the reification criticism is unjustified, is it not?
Of course not. Reread above.I'd believe whether consciousness is a process or an entity is an open question. Agree?
:smirk:So many people think that humans are soooo superior. — Sir2u