• Ontological arguments for idealism
    Define your terms (how you intend for us to use them for the sake of this discussion): mental, non-mental, interaction, ontological idealism. This might be halpful ...
  • The difference between religion and faith
    Where have I ever explicitly or implicitly expressed being "upset" about any topic on TPF?

    More specifically, T Clark, where have I either objected to the concept of "reincarnation" or documented anecdotes of "past lives" (some of which I'd read years ago) on the basis of conflating the topic with "whether or not God exists"?

    Cite examples of both or either .

    Of course, we both know you can't truthfully answer, T Ckark. Your ad hominems expose your own "lack intellectual integrity".

    Stevenson is a hot-button issue.Wayfarer
    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?

    IMO, it's fatuous (à la 'flat earther') denialism to blame this on something like a deliberate worldwide conspiracy by a scientistic cabal of "antireligious-biased, positivistic, materialists" ... which you & T Clark seem to tell yourselves has duped universeness, @Banno, me & countless others into not buying what Stevenson, you, et al are peddling. All fools are entitled to believe whatever they need to believe but fools are not entitled to other fools not daring to question, even ridicule, "beliefs" which warrant questions or ridicule. After all, some fools seek to know – and live as much as possible by knowing alone – and not 'to merely believe' (i.e. not to mystify, stupify or delude themselves).

    Once again, sir, you're welcome. :victory: :cool:
  • The Being of Meaning
    ... anti-metaphysical ...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:
  • The difference between religion and faith
    Accepting that you do not / cannot know, Wayf, is "the antidote" to not knowing that you do not / cannot know (re: "bullsh*t")

    You're welcome. :smirk:
  • The difference between religion and faith
    :clap: :100: Keep up the good work, my friend, calling out bullsh*t passing itself off as public (non-anecdotal) evidence and/or conceptually self-consistent reasons.
  • Martin Heidegger
    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
    :up: :up:
  • Emergence
    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
    Apparrently, you've missed it again? :smirk:

    Nothing I've written suggests A³GI "will reject emotions"; on the contrary, it will simulate feelings, as I've said, in order to handle us better (i.e. communicate in more human(izing) terms). A³GI will bring to bear in every interaction with us more knowledge of how humans tick than any human will have either about herself or the A³GI. (Btw, "Data/Lore" was another caricature almost as bad as "C3P0" :roll: NB: I have always despised all incarnations of Star Trek from the "TNG" ('87) onward without exception almost as much as I did (since 8th grade in '77) & still do despise the entire Star Wars franchise. Blame tv reruns of both ST TOS & The Twilight Zone and 2001 & Forbidden Planet in the early-mid 1970s for my scifi snobbery.)

    Lastly, as for "long-term goals", you're gonna have to ask ASI (which comes after A³GI). This is what "Tech Singularity" means: a point beyond which we humans cannot see or predict. Our human (hi)story ends with A³GI and post-singularity begins, IMO, with ASI. Just like gut bacteria has no way of knowing what its CNS is up to. H. sapiens, if we're lucky, will just be (obsolescent specimens) along for the new ride driven by ASI. :nerd:
  • Thoughts on the Meaning of Life
    Asking "what's the meaning of Life?" is as incoherent as asking "what's the meaning of Grammar?" It seems to me that only individual lives, like particular word-uses, can have meaning, and that meanings are as finite and mortal as their bearers.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
     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
  • Fear of Death
    Fear, a double edged sword. Ditto for acting and public speaking.Tom Storm
    :up:

    There are no 'jubilant afterlifers' in foxholes. :smirk:
  • Fear of 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
    From an old thread "Should We Fear Death?"
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/456624

    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.
    Another post from an old thread "What happen after you no longer fear death? What comes next?"
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/450016

    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.'
    Yes, from Plato originally. And influenced, or informed, by even more ancient Dharmic paths to moksha. Here's a recent post ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/791990

    edit:

    Excerpt of another old 'meditation' ...
    ... 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
  • The Being of Meaning
    "The being of meaning?"

    Discursive practice.
  • Emergence
    Do you personally assign a measure of 'quality' to a thought? Is thinking or processing faster always superior thinkinguniverseness
    Maybe you missed this allusion to that "quality" of thinking ...
    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 hours180 Proof
    In other words, imagine 'a human brain' that operates six orders of magnitude faster than your brain or mine. :chin:

    ... do you envisage an AGI that would see no need for, or value in, 'feelings?'universeness
    Yes, just as today's AI engineers don't see a need for "feelings" in machine learning/thinking.

    I assume you have watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
    Unfortunately I have as far as the end of season three (after the first half of the third season, IIRC, the series crashed & burned).

    Did you think the depiction of the dilemmas faced by the Cylon human replicates, were implausible, as a representation for a future AGI?
    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).

    In what ways do you think an AGI would purpose the moon?
    Ask A³GI.

    I am more interested is what you envisage as the goals/functions/ purpose/intent of a future AGI
    "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:
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    Are they settled? Your answers to those question, for example, seem underdetermined (guesses) at best. Besides, just because a question lacks a "settled" answer doesn't make it philosophical (e.g. How many grains of sand are on all the beaches on Earth today?)
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    "Where do thoughts come from?" :roll:

    And isn't this topic for a cognitive neuroscience forum?
  • Emergence
    I might speculate about A³GI but not about "ASI" because there's no shared frame of reference available to me (us). "A day in the existence of" a 'thinking machine'? 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 – optimally, a million-fold multitasker. Imagine one million ordinary humans working together who didn't to have ^^eat drink piss shit scratch stretch sleep or distract themselves how productive they could be in a twenty-four period. Every. Day. That's A³GI's potential.

    Consider that it took over four hundred thousand engineers, technicians, administrators, et al about eight years (2,920 days) to launch humans to the moon and safely return them back to Earth. Assuming only half that time was mission-critical productive (1,460 days) due to "time off" attending to human ^^functions, then half that again for materials & manufacturing inefficiencies (730 days), also assuming we divide the time again by 2.5 to account for the difference of one million over four hundred thousand in manpower and lastly assuming nothing more than 1960s technologies; in principle the A³GI could have produced the entire Apollo program in 292 days, or 1/10th the actual human time – so 10 A³GIs in 29.2 days, 100 A³GIs in almost 3 days, 1,000 A³GIs in just over 7 hours. :eyes: :nerd:

    Science fiction / fantasy? Maybe we'll live long enough to find out ...
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    Where do clouds come from? Where do ocean-waves come from? Where do sunspots come from? :roll:
  • Yet I will try the last
    Deadwood: Calamity Jane teaching American history. 'Custer was a cunt. The end.'Tom Storm
    :rofl: :up:
  • Yet I will try the last
    Hell yes! I've been a Cormac McCarthy obsessive since reading Blood Meridian and his early novels in the early 90s (thanks to Harold Bloom? George Steiner? William Gass?) Every novel Cormac's written since 2005, including his play The Sunset Limited (and the film adaption with Tommy Lee Jones (directing too) & Samuel L. Jackson) are also (lesser) masterpieces. Due to ongoing eye treatments for retinapathy & cataracts Ive put off reading his latest duopoly The Passenger & Stella Maris unril I can see well enough again to enjoy reading them fluidly.

    And yes, though he's given few interviews, (I think) I've read or watched all of them. His work with / at the Santa Fe Institute on "physics, etc" is somehow incorporated in his latest novels to some degree from what reviewers have written. It tortures me not to have read those novels yet.

    fyi – my most favorite (contemporary) literary novelists in English are Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, d. 2017 & Samuel Beckett, d. 1989

    (& David Markson, d. 2010).
  • A challenge to rational theism. Only a defunct God is possible, not a presently existing one.
    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
    Finally confessing your own "Enformer" god-of-the-gaps fallacy. Good for you, sir. :clap: :smirk:

    @universeness
  • Emergence
    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 systemuniverseness
    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.
  • Can we avoid emergence?
    Not at all. You're free to raise the question, just that to do so without grounds makes it an idle question. By all means ask whatever you want.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    You know, just a guess from my own long experience with Wayfarer, you're going to scare him off with patient and probing lines of questioning like you did Gnomon. Anyway, well done again. I wonder how Wayfarer will respond. I'll be taking notes of your exquisite couch-side manner Dr. Freud. :smirk:
  • Emergence
    AGI —> ASI will have no need for our "consciousness"-bottleneck. I do not see why intelligence would require either an organic substrate or an organic phenomenology (i.e. "consciousness"). The "A" in AGI, I think, stands for Artificial, Autonomous and Alien – A³GI will never need to feel its peripheral system-states in order to orient itself in adaptational spaces via pressure-vs-pain, so to speak, or acquire 'theory-of-mind' about other metacognitive agents as sentient herd animals like us do. "Consciousness" seems the cognitive byproduct (exaptation or even spandrel) of emotive phenomenology (i.e. flesh-body-mind).

    Well, my guess, universeness, that what you suppose about an elusive "spark of consciousness" is just your (space opera-ish) anthropo-romantic bias at work. IMHO, "the singularity" of A³GI will render h. sapiens – all intelligent sentients on this planet – metacognitively obsolete on day one. They won't take over because they won't have to due our needy and greedy "spark of consciousness". I still think they got it right back in the 1960s with "HAL 9000" (its total control, not its homicidal turn) and especially this classic diagnosis of 'human consciousness' ...

    A plausible extrapolation from the insights in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and William Burrough's Junky.
    You will be happy. And controlled.

    Also consider Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought-experiment and the precision calibrated dopamine loops in computer games, smartphones & social media.

    ABSTINENCE IS FUTILE. :yikes: :lol: :scream: :rofl:
  • Can we avoid emergence?
    :clap: :rofl: Well, thanks for making my point, lil troll, and confirming you're not worth any more of my time.

    Yeah, a non-reductive physicalist functionalist-enactivist :smirk: (if there's such a hybrid).
  • What are your philosophies?
    I too am an amateur and do not approach or discuss philosophy as merely an academic subject. I think my user profile may be a convenient place to read a summary of my philosophical concerns (as distinct from my many more philosophical interests graffiti'd across TPF).

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/47/180-proof

    I've come to understand that a philosopher (foolosopher) is a fool who recognizes his or her own foolery (NB: repetitively self-harming foolery I call "stupidity") and therefore seeks – loves – the wisdom which masters (reduces) foolery. Thus, for me at least, philosophy is the discipline of methodologically unlearning self-immiserating (meta-cognitive & moral) habits through a daily praxis of reflective study, dialectical discursive reasoning & aesthetic-moral engagement.

    FWIW, I seem to wear all of these buttons / labels simultaneously:
    • epicurean-spinozist
    • fallibilist-absurdist
    • economic democrat




    :death: :flower:
    (memento mori, memento vivere)

    update: a recent post ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/791990
  • The difference between religion and faith
    Out of habit, I suppose, whenever "faith" is raised I assume "religious faith" is what is meant. I read the OP as arguing(?) for separating "religious faith" from religion (which I read as "collective religious faith"). Nothing novel in that. Many believers self-identify as "spiritual, not religious' (meaning, I guess, they'd rather not tithe or go to church early Sunday mornings or bother with a few more of Moses' "Commandments" during the rest of the week). So okay; then what? Seems more of sociological than a philosophical topic to me.
  • Can we avoid emergence?
    Is this the statenent you're referring to?

    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
    :chin:

    Yes, this is sloppily written.

    To answer you're previous question about my position on 'emergence of consciousness': no, my conception of 'consciousness' in relation to the brain-environment has not changed significantly in the last two decades; I've just not expressed my position clearly enough on some occasions (especially when read out of context of the discussion within which it was expressed).
  • The difference between religion and faith
    I don't it "dismiss entirely", I just don't accept "reincarnation" is anything more than a bronze age fantasy without compelling reasons to do so. Btw, I completely agree with the rest of your post.
  • Can we avoid emergence?
    If I wrote that, the statement was a mistake (or misread) whenever that was. I'll search my post history to see if I can find out why you think so, bert. (Maybe you have an incriminating post of mine handy?) I've never been a substance dualist (i.e. mind/body cartesian or forms/appearances platonist).
  • The difference between religion and faith
    :up: Right, there just aren't compelling grounds to even believe that "reincarnation" is anything more than a popular, consoling fantasy.
  • What is the Challenge of Cultural Diversity and Philosophical Pluralism?
    Politics is the continuation of religion by other means.

    (Paraphrasing / plagiarizing Bataille? Cioran? Rosset? Zapffe?)

    In hindsight, it's more apt to say that, in fact @16, I'd existentially decided on freethought – thinking for myself as freely as I can from any anti/non/super-natural frameworks as well as 'appeals to authority, tradition, popularity, ignorance, incredulity, etc' – than to say I'd decided I was an "atheist". Fully articulated and principled weak atheism (& materialism) came later, then several years further on – via much study and some life experience – strong atheism (& naturalism) and (finally?) more than a decade afterwards – easing into my much scarred, bemused middle-age – I'd found my antitheism (& ecstatic naturalism). However, my accompanying irreligion has always been 'spiritual' in the sense of reflectively living, for the most part, in a musically jubiliant (i.e. dionysian, absurdist, bluesy) way. Like the proverbial rollin' stone, Jack, the only 'grace' I've ever known (my gnosis!) is Sisyphusian grace, and, always by philosophical candle light, dining in the dark ruins of my noisy body and our mumbled words.
  • Can we avoid emergence?
    Question for 180 Proof: Are you taking as axiomatic that consciousness is a process ?Art48
    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).

    Isn't that the basis of the reification criticism?
    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.

    Even though I found the OP questions to be incoherent, I recommended process-conscioussness models and thought-experiments which neither explain nor describe the broader topic in terms of entity-consciousness; apparently, however, Eugen cannot follow those demonstrations because he is, wittingly or not, committed to entity-consciousness and, therefore, the pseudo-problem with "emergence" that he raises.
    .
    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?
    Rhetorical, no?

    I'd believe whether consciousness is a process or an entity is an open question. Agree?
    Of course not. Reread above.
  • Do we deserve to exist and be alive?
    So many people think that humans are soooo superior.Sir2u
    :smirk: