old_nick

It's crap to sue an organization that makes false claims it repeatedly fails to deliver? It's crap to sue an organization that uses threats of torture and and agony as a part of its recruitment effort? Personally I hope he wins and it leads to multiple other suits like it. Every former Christian should sue.

Both and neither. It depends upon the instance in which one examines it. Take our species, for example. We have both evolved and adapted(separate things) so that we can now modify our environments. Had we not done one, we could not do the other. I think at some point we will override evolution and have intelligent design(with our species as designers), but that would not have been possible without evolving and adapting to the world around us.

I tend to see it as a moral and perhaps ethical issue. What right do we have to say to someone, "No, you cannot go here." It quickly becomes one person imposing their will onto another. Unless that person is directly using their own will to harm another, I cannot see we have the right to tell them where to stand and where to sleep. Which brings me to a sad fact, there are roughly 25 empty homes per every 1 homeless person. Tell me how that is right or good?

An opinion is as valid as it is informed. The real work examples contradict his claims showing his opinion is uninformed. And by that metric, his opinion is invalid.

I find your desire to change people into commodities with knowledge only desirable if it accumulates "stuff" to be both morally bankrupt and reprehensibly disgusting. Finland's public school system works remarkably well and is a demonstrable example against essentially every point you made. Try again

Don't worry. You have just validated that I am in fact a time traveler sent back from the future!

More later, having a rushed morning. But I just wanted to mention to you that people have extended and enhanced some senses as well as adding new senses. You can, for example, have small magnets embedded in your fingertips which expands your haptic perception into the emf. There is also the example of Kevin Warwick, a professor of robotics and cybernetics, who has mucked around with his nervous system and added new senses, including an experiment that resulted in a form of rudimentary telepathy between him and his wife(a link to an article on this is included for being especially amazing). http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F2191%2F29069%2F01309768.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1309768&authDecision=-203

Sentience is the ability to feel emotion. Consciousness is the awareness of subjective versus intersubjective. Basically, the ability to distinguish self from other. Different portions of the brain handle different aspects of this(see my posts in as we were meant to be for some more on this). Your arguments have been sufficiently rebutted and you are quickly beginning to provide yourself as an example of Dunning-Kruger effect. If you cannot provide data or cite legitimate sources, why continue to argue? Not really. Let us use liking food as an example since you brought it up. In "blind" taste-testing, there is strong statistical correlation between the covered product "chosen" and the handedness of the person doing the choosing. Companies know this and they exploit it. The choice between "I like this pie more" or "I like that pie more" is irrelevant to the actual taste or liking of the pie. It is merely a demonstration of the underlying choice blindness of the person. Indeed, exploitation of choice blindness is a large factor in how and why supermarkets are laid out as they are. Direction of store flow, height of placement of goods, name brand recognition(people will often say a glass of a named brand tastes better than something they are told is generic even if the bottles contain the same substance), even scent lingering in the aisles affects a person's choice and what they do or do not like. Impulse buyings is built of this, "I do not like x. but it was so y." There is no need to measure absolutely everything to know something. I do not have to examine every single molecule of gasoline to know it is combustable. Merely examine enough to infer within reasonable certainty that it is so. There is no such thing as an absolute. You're making a red herring to detract from the fact that all available evidence leans strongly towards nondualism(and has since the 1800s for that matter). Considering that the word "Jupiter" was invented by a Astrologer, the term is and always has been the bailiwick of Astrology. For astronomers to ignore the astrological ramifications is to only do half the job. Which is, of course, the whole point of the essay. ------------- Considering that the word "Algebra" was invented by an Numerologist, the term is and always has been the bailiwick of Numerology. For mathematicians to ignore the numerological ramifications is to only do half the job. Which is, of course, the whole point of the essay. -------------- Considering that the word "Crucible" was invented by an Alchemist, the term is and always has been the bailiwick of Alchemy. For chemists to ignore the alchemical ramifications is to only do half the job. Which is, of course, the whole point of the essay. Your argument is insipid, short-sighted, ill-informed, and utterly without worth. You should be made to feel small and meaningless for even trying it. A poorly reasoned argument. We know things are larger than 12' as the measuring tape doesn't contain the whole length of all things when you stretch it out. It borders on tautology. And, more to the point, when you posit something may exist, you should at least be prepared to present data to suggest it possibly could. I don't ask for definitive evidence of a god existing. Merely evidence that could lead a reasoned informed mind to ask the question of whether a god could exist. I'll quote a greater mind than my own on the absurdity of the proposition: "Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time." -Bertrand Russell And he is exactly right. "You don't have all data" or "You cannot prove it isn't" simply are not valid arguments. With that, I am going to take a small typing break. Oh my fingers.

<p> </p> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>It presents an interesting example and one that ultimately verifies what I have said of superstition. That it is ignorance. These MI would have been drawing faulty assumptions out of poor analysis and poor data. For example, would they compare their own construction to that of the remaining animals? Wouldn't they ask themselves, "Why is my construction more similar to these inanimate non-living machines than to these gooey meaty Von Neumann Machines?" These are fundamental and important questions. Scientific questions. And the more data that one gains, the more accurate the insights and predictions that are gained. This is why we do science. It gives us that data and helps us understand the world around us. In ancient times, it makes sense that people would use superstition to explain a world they were largely ignorant of, just like your MI. But we know better now. It is time to put away foolishness for what has demonstrated itself to be real. I am loathe to do it, but there is a quote from the Christian bible I think applies. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Superstition, theism, belief in an afterlife, these are childish things. They are holdovers from the youth of our species. Let us put them away.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>They do in humans. The action potential of your neurons is an all or none issue. In other words, it is a binary. Ones and zeroes have been at the heart of every thought or feeling you have ever or will ever have.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>Do you have evidence suggesting anything more?</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>You already are a machine. Just an evolved biological machine.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>No, because a human is just a specific form of thinking feeling meat machine. Though, if mind-uploading comes to be, it could conceivably be loaded into a human body.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>Not one worth knowing. But in general, sure. An MI would, conceivably, have better mechanisms for dealing with boredom than we do, however. Having a direct insight into its current state it could simply choose to not be bored, a feat comparable to Buddhist meditation. Or it could use it's knowledge and control to change its cycle rate and perceive time differently thereby experiencing boredom for less time, similar to some forms of ecstatic technique. Being designed with deliberation as opposed to evolved without purpose such as we are would give it access to tools we haven't had. We can learn from our own suffering in building it.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>If the programmer insisted they worship and revere them, you mean. </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div><div> </div> <div>Keep asking. I am having a great time with it and mulling over much food for thought.</div> <div> </div> <div>Again, more to follow. </div> <div> </div>

Sorry for how long this reply has taken. It's been a busier week than I had anticipated, I recently lost a close friend, and I am a perfectionist. So, after long wait, here we go. This is the part I find most interesting. On your part it comes down to not believing humanity is simply a machine, that it is something more than this mass of parts. On mine, I do not believe in something more. This physical world is all I see data to suggest the existence of. There is a line of questioning I'd like us to follow on this, but it requires a bit of give. For the following questions, I'll need you to pretend an MI can reach the depth of complexity I suggest. I'll pretend divination is more than make-believe. So, hypothetically there is an MI and divinitory techniques actually work. Would then an MI be capable of it? If so, having a greater access to "subconscious" routines, could it actually gain a greater insight than current humans are able to. And, if it were to develop its own divinitory system catered to the processes inherent of its intelligence, could it then walk around in a perpetual divinitory state? Would it then be better to see a machine oracle(assuming humans have yet to upgrade themselves as well) than a human as the MI would have better access to its own subconscious as well as better abilty to collate data in general(Imagine bringing an MI a thumb drive filled with data about yourself just to enhance it's ability to do a life reading). I am curious in which functions we have that you do not feel are machine-like. Everything we learn leads more and more towards the body being just a complex meat machine. Indeed, there are already parts we can swap out or even enhance with machines(up to and including parts of the brain). I understand the urge to somehow see us as special or more than the wetware robots we are, but in light of all the data indicating that is not the case, why cleave to it? As a bit of an aside, I had a similar discussion with a Christian fellow. He felt my view is nihilistic and hopeless. That somehow if there were no inherent purpose, nothing beyond this life, nothing to set us apart from being just a thinking animal capable of realizing its own loneliness; all must be without hope or joy. But I cannot help but disagree with that sentiment. We as a species are in a position to confront our primal and existential fears. We have evolved to a point where we can free ourselves and other life from the horrors inherent in evolution. We can, in the words of PZ Myers's obituary for Christopher Hitchens: "rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death". We can conquer these things. We can do better. Because the unthinking processes of this godless universe cannot recognize concepts such as better, mercy, horror, or love. There is no afterlife. Fine, let us create one. There is no magic. Fine, let us find ways to do it anyway(I am a huge fan of Clarke's Third Law, but all three are good.). We can bring our dreams to reality. But not through superstition. Indeed, all superstition can do is delay us from achieving those dreams. Knowledge and elbow grease is what will bring us these things. We have to be proactive. It isn't enough to hope the world becomes a better place, or believe the world will someday become a better place. We have to make it one. And rejecting fact for fantasy, regardless of how lofty the intentions, will not do that. At some point, perhaps, I'll get into predictive algorithms and conjure up Laplace's Demon to give my view on how something very like divination could be brought to exist. But you are a machine. Just a gooey Von Neumann universal constructor. And that is okay. I'd argue it is inevitable. I think any attempt to redefine those things could only exist as a means of prejudice against MI. The definitions as they stand are sufficient to allow MI as life. Organic life and mechanical life would be worthwhile distinctions to make, but my great fear is redefining life to turn MI into a class divorced from the rest of us. To make killing it, mistreating it, and generally just abusing it okay because "it's not alive", despite its thoughts and feelings. One need only look at the slave trade to see how that went. Non-whites were not even viewed as the same species. Ah, I understand and largely agree. Agreed. If it helps, I consider the thought of one man ruling over another as disgusting as I do superstition. Really, I see them as manifestations of the same core problems. My anarcho-communism really ties in to my anti-theism, transhumanism, and every other aspect of me. I want to see the world become a much better place. I rail against the things keeping that potential at bay. It is always good to get back to the basics. I still occasionally audit courses here that I took ages ago just to keep myself fresh. Passion is just how our brain lights up to certain sets of stimuli. It's a motivational factor and has been of use to us as a species. I see no reason it'd not develop in MI. It's that chemical soup in our skulls rewarding or driving us to certain behaviors. It's simply an issue of emergent properties. Our emotions are just electrochemical properties. They're even built around binary mechanics. But evolution is sloppy and wasteful. So not only can we achieve emotion mechanically, we should be able to do so much better and more efficiently than is done in our own brains, eliminating the cognitive bias hardwired in thanks to the evolved nature of our brains. I looked up Data. He'd be an example of problems with the Uncanny Valley. And if that is how you see MI, no wonder you feel compelled to keep it separate somehow. More to follow.

Sometimes a person says something that betrays such a painful lack of thought or even basic understanding that I am left questioning my choice to be a teetotaler. The above is such a statement.

An opinion is only as valid as it is informed. This is the reason you go to a mechanic with auto troubles and not a heart surgeon. This is the reason you go to a heart surgeon for a heart problem and not a mechanic. Their training and study lends higher validity to the opinions they express in that which we seek their opinion for. On this issue, RabbiO has demonstrated a greater depth of knowledge and mirrors that of a great many opinions by those who have studied and trained in the literature at great depths. So while you certainly may have your own opinion, that doesn't make your opinion informed, educated, or valid. I'm siding with RabbiO on this one.

Havu felicxan Zamenhofan Tagon! Zamenhof Day is an Esperantist holiday celebrated on the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the man who began the language. For me, I celebrate the holiday as a day of positive steps towards a better world. Every person who takes up the language does so for a different reason, and if they celebrate the day, the manner in which they do so reflects that. I see the language as a positive step towards the human animal living up to its potential. So I celebrate the language, the coming together of people from different cultures, even transhumanism. This afternoon I am meeting with a local Eo club on the campus for a dinner and we've each decided to give a small demonstration of what summed up this year. My own will be a technology demonstration.

I've not seen any convincing genetic arguments for it. A lot of people seem to confuse genetic arguments for biological arguments in general. There are features we have which are not a direct result of our genetics but owing to aspects of the environment in which we develop from in utero onward. It appears that sexuality is one of these developmental features. I noted the INAH3 is a good indicator of sexuality in terms of homosexuality and heterosexuality and it appears to be an aspect of developmental biology, not straight genetics. Note that this doesn't make it a malformity, atavism, or indicative of damaged malfunctioning biology. Now, on to an unpopular opinion. I wouldn't go so far as to call pedophilia biologically malformed. Socially we may find it unacceptable, but one must keep in mind that until two hundred years ago, the average lifespan in the U.S. was mid-thirties and lower in some areas of the world. So there was a lot of benefit in being attracted to and bonding with the young. Many of us have relatives who married young in the "old days". My mother was 13 when she wed my father(himself 21) in 1950. My sister was 15 when she married. It was simply a fact of life and not treated as an abnormality because of the chances of seeing old age. We are living longer and longer and as a result we've shifted the bar of how we see maturity up with us. There's nothing wrong with this, in fact, given that it's now more risky to have children young because we have eliminated so many other threats, it is to be desirable. While calling pedophilia a disease is accurate in terms of psychology, in terms of biology I would be more apt to call it an atavism. Note, I am not saying it is okay or that we should let pedophiles run rampant, simply that we arguably have selected for it biologically in times when it was more useful. That being said, It's outlived biological utility, now is more dangerous biologically than not, and worst of all violates those not legally deemed capable of informed adult decision-making. Whereas homosexuality does serve biological utility(able to see children to adulthood), isn't inherently biologically dangerous, and doesn't violate someone deemed legally incapable of making decisions. So there is no real basis of comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.

It's Zamenhof Day on Thursday and I am counting that in the holiday season. Therefore, my answer is La Espero.

Yes. After all, why care for what the evidence says when it is so much easier to make things up in order to cater to idiotic Bronze Age superstitions of a people that died of old age and terror at 35.

What's remarkable is that it's not a "can be" but an "is". Every facet of who we are comes down to that wiring. Your memory, your joy, what kind of books you prefer, it's all there in your brain. I'm not certain if you've read the AGI thread, but it's the sort of thing I've been discussing there. The brains we have evolved are truly amazing and awe-inspiring.

A quick link while I have a moment. http://www.fellowgeek.com/a-Researchers-Teach-Things-Subliminally-Matrix-Learning-not-Far-Away.html For those who keep track of such news, ATR was the group that recently developed reconstructed imaging through use of fMRI. Reading thoughts, fun fun.

By all means, disagree. But be expected to give references and evidence to show why you disagree. I cited sources that were peer-reviewed and have multiple citations. Thus far your argument boils down to a "because I said so". I said: "The evidence as it stands indicates that consciousness(or more appropriately the illusion of consciousness) is merely a byproduct of other actions." You replied: "No, it doesn't." I replied with appropriate sources indicating that my statement is indeed accurate. If you have anything better, present it. If not, I would very much like for you to tell me and everyone else here that you do not and that you are merely giving an uninformed opinion on the matter. Sorry, but you are incorrect. Indeed, it HAS been demonstrated empirically as far back as Libet's experiments in the 80s on readiness potential. And it has been more recently been shown in studies on cognitive bias such as choice blindness and inattentional blindness. Our brains choose what they do and do not filter every given moment and more often than not, we're entirely unaware of it. Indeed it does fit. Try again. No, it cannot. Unless of course you are speaking of legal personhood which would be a granted characteristic not an inherent one. Try again. Touch is not the defining characteristic of a physical phenomena, however. So your very starting basis is skewed and my point remains. Consciousness is a brain state. A composition of parts firing in a particular manner. Again no and again for the very same reasons I specified above. And unless he is presenting a neurological view on this neurological issue his view is meaningless. He didn't, however, present a neurological argument. He presented a philosophical argument to a neurological issue. He worked with what he knew, and there is no fault in working with what one knows. It just happens that what he knows is not applicable to the argument. Try again. I'll work up some responses to other posts shortly. I particularly want to tackle your hypothetical religion, Atwater_Vitki.

I like the post but there are a few nitpicks I want to make. I think it's inaccurate to compare BIID with gender identity issues. Yes, both result from neurological phenomena, but there is a marked difference. Apotemnophilia, which BIID is an extreme manifestation of, is typically classified as a monothematic delusion. Monothematic delusions are a spectrum of single-focus delusions resulting largely(though not always) from brain trauma. It's an important distinction to make because with monothematic delusions, the brain itself actually is damaged, it's broken and malfunctioning. Not exactly something you want to compare as analagous to gender identity issues. Now, if you look at a transexual, for instance, there is no overt sign of any actual trauma to the brain. It appears to be more developmental in nature and not severe enough to truly be called a malformity. Now, if you look at the BSTc of the stria terminalis in a transexual, you will see it corresponds more closely to the BSTc of a member of the opposite reproductive identity in terms of size. So a person could be born with male reproductive parts, but their brain is female for want of a better term. There is also the INAH3 which shows strong correspondence as an indicator of sexuality, including homosexuality and bisexuality. These are developmental aspects of the brain and are not malfunctioning, where the brain in the case of a sufferer of BIID is malfunctioning. One is health, the other is wracked with cognitive trauma. So I think trying to build a basis for comparing the two is a poor tactic overall. I think the "how we are meant to be" argument is begging the question. It assumes purpose where there isn't any. In our godless universe, there is no inherent purpose or intelligent driving force behind it. Biologically, our purpose would be to see offspring to sexual maturity so that the offspring themselves can continue the cycle. It's a lot more than just popping out a child and involves raising the offspring over the long term. A role homosexuals, bisexuals, transexual, et cetera in our species and others fulfills perfectly. In several species, orphanned members are adopted by homosexual couples, as an example. They then see these members that would otherwise have died to maturity. This is most easily seen in several species of bird. We're machines made out of meat running our little neuron computers to navigate the world around us. Who we are is our brain. Our personality, emotion, hopes, dreams, worries, it's all up there running in the synaptic circuitry of our brain. As comforting as it would be to think there is something more, some place we'll get to see our departed loved ones, some world of bliss where there is no suffering, there is no indication of any of this. I'd rather hard and even painful truth than I would lying to myself and convincing myself that my make believe exists. There is no afterlife, so we should strive to create one. There is no world of perfect bliss, so we should work to create one. There is no inherent purpose, so we should seek to form one for ourselves. This last part is the easiest to do and the one we do anyway. You weren't born as you are with any sort of purpose. You're suffering isn't part of some design. Neither is your joy. The good news is that knowing that frees you. You don't have to spend your life wondering why X bad thing happened. There is no "why". So now you are freed up to do what needs to be done to make sure it doesn't happen again and to heal the lingering effects of it. Superstition is a prison. It is comfortable because it is familiar. People with monothematic delusions are not born with knowledge of their "true self". They have a defect. One we should be moved with pity and compassion to fix. One need only to look at a patient with Cotard Delusion to realize that.

It'll be a while before I can respond, sometime this evening, likely. But yes, go ahead and save copies to browse through as you like. If you're looking for some related suggested reading while doing it, I suggest any primer on genetics algorithms for some theory on fuzzy solutions and anything on Hopfield Nets as a simple run on neural networking practice(they're about as easy as it gets in my opinion).

I thought perhaps it was a limit. I am unfamiliar with the software used for this forum so wouldn't go more beyond internal speculation. Nick 1, forum software 0. I am glad you liked it. It's a topic of vested personal and professional interest to me and one I become as excited as a child on Christmas morning when discussing. I really believe it is where the future of our species is heading. Full AI, more complete BCI, greater depth of available body modification, et cetera. It makes me hopeful, really. As I see it, science has a history of providing us data useful to fulfilling the broken promises of superstition and religion. I see no reason this trend will stop. My dissertation was in networked immersive virtual realities. I may write up a small layman's overview of it when I move on to the mind uploading thread. Looking forward to it. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=foat For a laugh. I think it would have to. The qualities required for intelligence, sapience, and sentience would require it, really. It's humor might be strange to us given its pleasure mechanisms and memories would be somewhat different, but for it to have sufficient scope of memory and emotion, humor would have to exist, to my mind.

Broke the quotes somewhere and not seeing where. Could it be the length?

Except that is not what machine intelligence would be. The building blocks at the lowest levels would of course occur as binaries. But guess what, so it is in your brain as well. The vast majority of neurons function with binary output. Indications are that what we perceive as consciousness is a result of emergence, that is to say a great many relative simple things working to create an incredibly complex thing. Consciousness appears to be an emergent process coming from the combination of our brain's functions. There is no reason or indication to believe machine intelligence would be otherwise. So we wouldn't be giving a simple list of boolean values(binary truth values) with fire.good = false, sex.good = true, and suchlike. But a whole composite structure which is itself designed to dynamically grow or shrink based upon the perceived experiences of the machine intelligence itself. These dynamic and interrelated values would form aspects of the mi's memory and would be accessed via neural networks(which are algorithms that are themselves designed to mimic aspects of the human brain and find their way into everything from Google search to stock market predictors). I'll give a quick primer on neural networks(albeit simplified, no need for heads exploding this morning) as they are of great importance to understanding the subject. Neural networks are, as I noted, are an algorithm set designed to replicate the way biological neural networks function. In your brain, biological neurons are interconnected through a great web of synapses. Exciting one of these causes a sort of chain reaction causing the signal to fan out and excite other neurons. The most interesting impact this has, in my opinion, is on memory. Neuron pathways to one another are strengthened by repetition and record data nonspecifically. If you've ever been browsing your memories and remarked at how quickly you can go off on side tangents, this is why. Your memory is triggering not only the event you're recalling, but every other related memory that has triggered strong synaptic growth along those neurons. Neural networks in computers work the same way. It builds a base neuron as a collection of information and then creates mathematic depth between the neurons forming connections between them. I'll borrow a small example memory database off the net for us to use(Jets vs Sharks is common in tutorials demonstrating neural networks, so anyone interested in learning can likely search a portion of this table and find ready to use examples of code behind it). This example is one using data mining with neural networks. I'm choosing it because it employs a fuzzy approach to unknowns which could be applied to deriving emotional states, emulating the predictive nature of intelligent interaction, et cetera. The coloumns represent their names, affiliations, ages, highest level of education, marital status, and criminal occupations. Art Jets 40 jh sing pusher Al Jets 30 jh mar burglar Sam Jets 20 col sing bookie Clyde Jets 40 jh sing bookie Mike Jets 30 jh sing bookie Jim Jets 20 jh div burglar Greg Jets 20 hs mar pusher John Jets 20 jh mar burglar Doug Jets 30 hs sing bookie Lance Jets 20 jh mar burglar George Jets 20 jh div burglar Pete Jets 20 hs sing bookie Fred Jets 20 hs sing pusher Gene Jets 20 col sing pusher Ralph Jets 30 jh sing pusher Phil Sharks 30 col mar pusher Ike Sharks 30 jh sing bookie Nick Sharks 30 hs sing pusher Don Sharks 30 col mar burglar Ned Sharks 30 col mar bookie Karl Sharks 40 hs mar bookie Ken Sharks 20 hs sing burglar Earl Sharks 40 hs mar burglar Rick Sharks 30 hs div burglar Ol Sharks 30 col mar pusher Neal Sharks 30 hs sing bookie Dave Sharks 30 hs div pusher So, through testing excitory/inhibitory connections, we can derive information on unknown variables and make predictions built upon it. Let us say we excite the affiliation Sharks, then each individual Shark has the same level of excitation, a general recollection so to speak. But then let us say we excite the age 30 and marital status married as well. So this collection would allow us to derive various pieces of information from it. One being that each of them has been to college. Doing this gives us an ability to predict the chances of a future Shark being college educated. If he is 30 and married, we are safe to assume some higher education. Now, this is a simple example with few connections and an readily apparent result because of the connection being 100% between married 30 year old Sharks, which makes it nice as an example. But let us imagine a table with millions of rows and columns that dyanmically grow and shrink depending on experience and result. The results are less readily apparent and will have numerous contradictions, conflicts, and unexpected actions. This is how our brain appears to work(in part) and how a machine intelligence would work(in part) as well. Simple enough in principle, but when combined and emergent, incredibly complex. So it's not really an issue of a simple yes or no, but of something being born of a dynamic complexity. This, I think, is where you hit some confusion. And, agree or not, I hope you appreciate the depth of complexity attainable(also, how cool math is). A bit of a misunderstanding meriting an explanation(not as long as on neural networks, I promise). A quantum computer still works through a binary response just as traditional computing. So it's not practically the same, it's exactly the same. The difference comes in superposition, which allows a cubit to hold every possible state at once. The same basic math and boolean logic remains. Even the "cycle time" involved in iterative computations. But collapsing the state would make the apparent time to us drop dramatically. It's a bit esoteric and prone to making the head explode, but useful beyond words. The citation resources above were posted in response to the claim no evidence supports consciousness as an emergent property, not directly to the intelligence and sentience of MI. Now, if those qualities are emergent as the data suggests, it would indeed sufficiently demonstrate that an MI could become capable of full intelligence, sentience, and sapience. That would be beyond argument. The question would then become whether or not we could ever develop the computational complexity required to realize it. Which is much more open to debate. I have to disagree on emulation requiring consciousness. Let us look at human communication as an example. Much of our communication is not at a conscious level and involves direct emulation in conveyance of ideas. Emulating the posture of a person with whom one is talking, for example, is a subconscious response to being friendly to what they have to say. If you want to see if a person likes what you have to say, change your posture and see if they follow suit. If you want to make a person friendlier and more prone to listening to you, adopt a posture similar to their own. Without constant attentiveness, a person betrays a great deal of information about their true thoughts and are easily swayed to yours. Why? Emulation as communication. It's how we've evolved and existed long before consciousness. I assume you mean DNA computing here. It's really not suited to generating a full machine intelligence. Too many trade offs for functionality. Hypothetically doable, but better solutions exist. It sounds like he works in data mining, which does indeed require steady training of the software. What I am describing is a framework that works much like a child. Born a blank slate which learns, develops, and matures over time. If a human having a hand in the birth of such a thing means it is artificial, then all humans are artificial as well. Data mining software seeks specific information from a collection of known data. It's a specific purpose tool and requires constant human tinkering. A fully sentient, sapient, intellignt MI would not. No, emotional state wouldn't be dependent on a decision tree but full state awareness, which is how human emotion works as well not a set of switches but of complex interactions involving multiple states at multiple points in our wetware. It wouldn't be given a list of emotions from which it selects one and runs with it. Emotion would be an emergent property of aa whole host of factors. This is patently false. Many animals have the full range of emotion we do and even employ logic and reasoning. The difference is their depth of intellectual understanding of those emotions. We are not unique in our emotional states, study the bonobo for a time and you'll see this. We aren't even unique in having logic and reasoning. We just have a greater depth of intelligence fueling that logic and reasoning. We aren't even unique in tool use. There are chimps in Senegal that have developed spears which they use for hunting and its use is spreading as they teach one another. There is even the beginnings of knife use by breaking the shaft of the spear to give them a short handle. So no, we aren't unique, just better able at what we do at an intellectual level. The last time I checked, having less intelligence did not mean the mentally handicapped were without emotion, cxu ne? They are quite capable of love. Just not the same intellectual depth of understanding it as you are. I hope I've explained well how such a matched emotional index(even surpassed) is possible. Conscience appears to be a trait evolved to lend itself to social solidarity of our animal. You see highly similar traits in most grouping animals. And it would be incorrect to say either of those things evade science. We may not fully understand the whole of the mechanism of conscience, but we have seen how it functions in terms of the brains inhibitory response and are even capable of altering it to a degree with more and more knowledge of its functioning being uncovered every day. And as for us being alive, that is relatively well explained as well. The debate on when life begins is not one of general ignorance but of determining the point at which we cease treating our chemical processes as just chemical processes and consider them to be life in their own right. Our spark of life is just proteins unfolding. And we know more about the ways in which they unfold every day. We're a great big chemical process stretching back over eons. But we're not unique and any separation we see is a result of ego. We're more intelligent. We process data slightly better than our nearest living kin and slightly less well than some of our departed kin(neanderthals had a higher intelligence than we). That doesn't make us special. It doesn't make us unique. Soul would be the only difference we have, the only way we're more unique than anything else. And it's imaginary. Humans created an imaginary thing to make ourselves unique. It's kind of sad and relatively telling of the human ego and its desire to be special. People opposing civil rights is no decent reason to oppose civil rights. Do you think the LGBT community should be denied the ability to marry because "One only need look at the mess the courts have made of the mixed race community of human beings and the right to marry to see that one coming." Of course not. It is a ridiculous proposition. I enjoyed reading your opinions and was glad to see you obviously put a lot of thought into the post. I don't mean to sound argumentative with my response. I believe an opinion is as valid as it is informed so I wanted to share a bit of insight into the concepts involved to help correct some misunderstandings and the like. Have a groovy day. Yes, the question hit me when considering how people who believe in it tend to view divination as something more than an intellectual phenomena, but as something coming from deeper within. It would be interesting, I think, to see if something akin to spirituality developed among machine intelligence. Then I'd get to argue against superstition with digital priests and shamans. The mind wanders.

Atwater, I'll be giving a detailed reply later(in a good way, I think you'll enjoy it, but I am pinched for time at the moment). My question is, as a rune reader, if machine intelligence does get to at least a human level in terms of emotion, creativity, intelligence, et cetera, do you think it would derive the same level of insight from runes that you feel yourself and other human rune readers to?