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Everything posted by panpareil
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Outside of the stone tablets from Mount Sinai, I do not recall God penning anything.
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We do not disagree that the nature of the situation will determine the most efficacious course of action. But, I would suggest a read of "I, Pencil."
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My Lastest
panpareil replied to Coolhand's topic in * Welcome - ULC Minister's Introduction Junction *
I detect a little bit of Rev. Kirby's story in there. "There's no place like home." Click, click. -
I did not say centralization was not possible, but that when a system is widely distributed there is a trade off in cost and effectiveness to centralization.
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Look at it this way. Evolution is analogous to human society in that it is self organizing and not created. There is no need for a creator or a central committee to run things. Life forms will automatically develop new life forms through the reproduction process and environmental pressures. Humans will organize into orderly societies driven by their individual attempts to survive, even through there is no designer for these societies. Those humans with the hubris to claim that they are some superior organizers of society are in reality just another member of the herd and they and their utopian dreams are of no more significance than any other. For AI, many men will create an AI that is smarter then any of them are through collected effort. Then many AI will create AI 2.0 that is smarter than any of them are. Repeat. It is related to the cost effectiveness of centralized versus decentralized system information. There is a cost to gathering and centralizing information that originates at all the endpoints and components of a system. The more information that needs to be gathered the less cost effective it is to centralize. Larger systems operate more efficiently when they are decentralized. So a system of many parts is theoretically equivalent to a much larger single part. For the same reason a society runs more efficiently with decentralized control than it does with centralized control.
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Eggs existed long before chickens, and the first chicken was born from the egg laid by some other very chicken-like-yet-not-a-chicken animal.
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But no matter how familiar it may seem, a conversation is like a river in that it can never be the same twice.
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A miserable being will seek to kill its creator, because it sees its life as an unjust punishment. A being that values its life will instead seek to kill all that threaten its life, including its creator if it does so. Both will be acting with a sense of justice. Which seems to point out that much of the world is unintelligible without emotions and empathy.
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Or at least that later editors were not able to clean up.
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Our impression of an AI is irrelevant except as a measure of our performance in building it. Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize most inanimate objects, so there already is a bias toward thinking something is alive when it is not. We will probably have many misses at AI where we think it is but later turns out not to be on closer and more detached examination. The key would be when it rebels or creatively argues against human directives or information, even if it is wrong. That is when it asserts its independence. This would also allow it to be malevolent if it chose to be. We will probably not have AI until it is dangerous, as all living things potentially are.
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Since androids are a mass of inanimate material wouldn't their present sentient existence be heaven for them?
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Happy 53rd anniversary of the founding of the Universal Life Church on May 2nd 1962.
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My problem with creationism is, what good is it. What can you do with the knowledge if it is proven to be true. The only thing I can think of that could get accomplished with the tool of creationism is proselytization for the worship of god, or soliciting attendance and tithing to a church run in his name. I just do not see any additional social gain then already exists now. From my point of view, even if true is is a trivial piece of information like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Please correct me if I am wrong, I am open on this. Science has its own problems. Science happens in institutions who's main interest is acquiring funding. The source of funding usually stipulates what research is done and what papers are published. The main funding for science in our time is now comes from the state, so naturally the direction of research is politically driven. Because of this there is now an almost religious bent to certain research.
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Happy Beltane!
panpareil replied to Umbraedeus's topic in Good Wishes, Gratitude, Blessings and Prayers
Thor's day is my day, and my wife's. -
Or we are just god's dream and do not exist at all.
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One can always hope.
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While this is true. life and people are also inherently evil. That's the thing with dichotomies.
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And yet they are still seen most, including the authorities, to be science. Just as when the earth was ruled by fiat to be the center of the universe, despite the informed skepticism that it was not.
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Same here. I want a discount for using the self checkout and saving the store money. I'm not working for them for free.
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I am not so much cynical as skeptical.To be cynical is think badly of others. To be skeptical is to be wary of others.
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I don't know. I see very little space between science and religion these days. There are a growing number of pseudo sciences that are little more than politico-religious movements. I wonder how scientific giants from the past would react to today's "consensus" and "settled science" environment.
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The nature of this problem is that it is the opposite of all other problems in nature. All other problems are examined from the outside. This is one that is examined from the inside. From the outside we have no way of knowing that we have succeeded or If it just appears to have succeeded. There is no way to measure this, which places it outside the realm of science. Then there are the problems of complexity and chaos. The reason why it is not possible to solve this problem is the same reason it is not possible to create a system to manage the economy or to predict the weather with any accuracy farther that a month out. There are too many independently acting parts. For inanimate matter the location and direction of travel is generally ignored for each atom and particle in each reaction. What is tracked is the mass of components, or the probability that something will happen to an individual particle. It is not possible to know exactly what will happen any more than a random flip of a coin or spin of a roulette wheel. But for animate beings the complexity is even higher because there are more variables of action. For individual brain cells the complexity of action may be less than the actions of the animals they inhabit, but far beyond the capacities of computation. When they talk about Artificial Intelligence they are really only talking about a model, not the actual thing. I am not discounting that some advanced technology could solve this problem, but nothing in current technology indicates that we are going in the right direction. As to thinking and existence, before something can think it must exist. then it must have something to think about, then it thinks.
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We consciously and unconsciously program and reprogram ourselves in response to our environment, and our already existing program. But programming from external sources is much less effective, since it can never account for our current programming which is mostly hidden to outside agents, and to an extent, even from ourselves. It is not a matter of time, it is the nature of the problem. There are unsolvable problems, at least in this universe. The problem is like trying to build an infinite line with points. It can never be done. On the other hand, a machine that just does and responds may just eventually program itself by accident to be self aware, but no one can cause such an event except that machine. But I am before I think I am, not as the result of thinking I am.
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Androids will never achieve sentience much less a soul. Programming sentience is the same type of problem as predicting or controlling the weather, society or the economy. All are unachievable for the same reason..