Emergence
The universe at it's largest scale, seems to be a system based on disorder-order-disorder.
Combination of fundamentals(which we have not fully identified yet) seems to drive the change from disorder to order, from fundamentals to spacetime, star, planet and galaxy formation, to the formation of flora, fauna and sentient life on a planet such as Earth.
Local entropy means that separate systems can reach the end of their lifespan and can 'disassemble' back to their constituent parts. BUT if a star goes nova then heavier elements are released and that's why we exist. So, the 'disassembly,' does not necessarily mean a return to the original ingredients only.
A dead star does not become pure hydrogen again.
So carbon for example is only produced due to what happens during the life of a star.
Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.
Formation of the carbon atomic nucleus occurs within a giant or supergiant star through the triple-alpha process. This requires a nearly simultaneous collision of three alpha particles (helium nuclei), as the products of further nuclear fusion reactions of helium with hydrogen or another helium nucleus produce lithium-5 and beryllium-8 respectively, both of which are highly unstable and decay almost instantly back into smaller nuclei. The triple-alpha process happens in conditions of temperatures over 100 megakelvins and helium concentration that the rapid expansion and cooling of the early universe prohibited, and therefore no significant carbon was created during the Big Bang.
As carbon based lifeforms, we eventually 'emerged' based on this carbon production system.
So it seems that the 'death' of one system can contribute to the 'creation' of a new, more complex system. (Perhaps there is something for theists in this. Perhaps a 'first cause or prime mover system' had to die(so, no longer exists!) for our universe to begin)
Is this carbon production, an 'objective truth' about our origins? Only in the sense of tracing the path from the origin of carbon, to us.
This got me thinking more about 'emergence.'
Since the early homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, the 'knowledge' our species has 'as a totality,' been increasing. Each time we gain significant new knowledge, our technology increases and this has all sorts of affects on our species. It opens 'new options,' 'new possibilities.'
This 'direction of change,' seems to me to have been increasing in speed within the 300,000 years of the human story. The rate of speed increase seems to be increasing to the point that we are coming up with new tech at a faster rate than ever before.
To what extent do you think that human beings are 'information processors?'
Our ability to memorialise and pass on new knowledge from generation to generation seems to have 'the potential' to affect the 'structure and purpose of the contents of the universe.'
We have altered the Earth in many significant ways. Can we do the same to the solar system and far beyond it? Is that an objective truth about what is fundamental in our nature to do?
If there are other lifeforms with at least the same cognitive abilities as us then would they be compelled to seek new knowledge in the same way we do?
It seems to me that an objective truth about all humans is that we seek new information. Do you think that's true? and if you do, do you think its objectively true? If you think the answer is yes, then do you think that the following is emergent:
In the future we will
1. 'Network' our individual brain based knowledge.
2. Connect our brain based knowledge, directly, to all electronically stored information and be able to search it at will, in a similar style (or better) to a google search.
3. Act as a single connected intellect and as separate intellects.
My last question would be:
How much credence do you give to the idea that we are heading towards an 'information/technological singularity? Is an tech singularity emergent? and (I know this is very difficult to contemplate but) what do you think will happen as a result of such a 'singularity?'
Combination of fundamentals(which we have not fully identified yet) seems to drive the change from disorder to order, from fundamentals to spacetime, star, planet and galaxy formation, to the formation of flora, fauna and sentient life on a planet such as Earth.
Local entropy means that separate systems can reach the end of their lifespan and can 'disassemble' back to their constituent parts. BUT if a star goes nova then heavier elements are released and that's why we exist. So, the 'disassembly,' does not necessarily mean a return to the original ingredients only.
A dead star does not become pure hydrogen again.
So carbon for example is only produced due to what happens during the life of a star.
Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.
Formation of the carbon atomic nucleus occurs within a giant or supergiant star through the triple-alpha process. This requires a nearly simultaneous collision of three alpha particles (helium nuclei), as the products of further nuclear fusion reactions of helium with hydrogen or another helium nucleus produce lithium-5 and beryllium-8 respectively, both of which are highly unstable and decay almost instantly back into smaller nuclei. The triple-alpha process happens in conditions of temperatures over 100 megakelvins and helium concentration that the rapid expansion and cooling of the early universe prohibited, and therefore no significant carbon was created during the Big Bang.
As carbon based lifeforms, we eventually 'emerged' based on this carbon production system.
So it seems that the 'death' of one system can contribute to the 'creation' of a new, more complex system. (Perhaps there is something for theists in this. Perhaps a 'first cause or prime mover system' had to die(so, no longer exists!) for our universe to begin)
Is this carbon production, an 'objective truth' about our origins? Only in the sense of tracing the path from the origin of carbon, to us.
This got me thinking more about 'emergence.'
Since the early homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, the 'knowledge' our species has 'as a totality,' been increasing. Each time we gain significant new knowledge, our technology increases and this has all sorts of affects on our species. It opens 'new options,' 'new possibilities.'
This 'direction of change,' seems to me to have been increasing in speed within the 300,000 years of the human story. The rate of speed increase seems to be increasing to the point that we are coming up with new tech at a faster rate than ever before.
To what extent do you think that human beings are 'information processors?'
Our ability to memorialise and pass on new knowledge from generation to generation seems to have 'the potential' to affect the 'structure and purpose of the contents of the universe.'
We have altered the Earth in many significant ways. Can we do the same to the solar system and far beyond it? Is that an objective truth about what is fundamental in our nature to do?
If there are other lifeforms with at least the same cognitive abilities as us then would they be compelled to seek new knowledge in the same way we do?
It seems to me that an objective truth about all humans is that we seek new information. Do you think that's true? and if you do, do you think its objectively true? If you think the answer is yes, then do you think that the following is emergent:
In the future we will
1. 'Network' our individual brain based knowledge.
2. Connect our brain based knowledge, directly, to all electronically stored information and be able to search it at will, in a similar style (or better) to a google search.
3. Act as a single connected intellect and as separate intellects.
My last question would be:
How much credence do you give to the idea that we are heading towards an 'information/technological singularity? Is an tech singularity emergent? and (I know this is very difficult to contemplate but) what do you think will happen as a result of such a 'singularity?'
Comments (1098)
Incredibly so, mostly due to our species' unique ability to save and share information on a greater-than-personal scale. There's a danger to this since most information stored today is in a form not particularly accessible without significant fragile infrastructure. Little recent knowledge is in say books which depend on that infrastructure somewhat less.
A jellyfish is an information processor. Where do you want to draw the line?
Do you think the universe has a purpose? You didn't say that, only that the contents do, which I suppose is true for a trivial percentage of those contents.
Probably not as beings evolved for only one habitat. Something has to change to go to this next level. If it were probable, something else probably would already have done it, so per Fermi paradox, it isn't likely to take place.
A truth about a specific thing isn't an objective truth. Perhaps you could define what you mean by 'objective truth'. What is a truth that say isn't an objective truth?
No, I don't think that humans fundamentally seek to increase the knowledge of the species. But there are exceptions, a minority with such a drive.
You're asking if a true statement about an objective truth is objectively true? What???
Google Neuralink, where Elon Musk is (was?) attempting to do just this.
A decent article on it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
We are sort of heading that way. It might mean that those of us in information development positions will have their jobs replaced. It simply means the machines can do intellectual tasks (programming the machines in particular) better/faster/cheaper than humans can. So far I don't see this. I've not seen much AI that can write good design/code from a functional spec.
Are you appealing to this as an axiom?
I also find an 'objective truth,' hard to 'qualify,' but in considering what we are physically made of, and how those constituents formed in the early universe, is your statement of 'we'd not have occurred, without it,' a path to an objective truth? I know that our origins are relative to us but all life on Earth is carbon based and we have no evidence of any lifeform which is not carbon based, except in science fiction or from science that clearly states that non-carbon based lifeforms are possible, which I fully accept. But for me, 'carbon based' is a start point towards a more objective truth about life.
I am not claiming that all lifeforms in the universe ARE carbon based but that maybe true. How about a claim that all lifeforms in the universe are baryonic? How much credence would you give to that if it were presented as an objective truth?
Quoting noAxioms
So where do you think this human ability to organise, store and efficiently retrieve information will ultimately take us? and do you think this human ability speaks to a human purpose which is, in a very true sense, 'emergent?'
Quoting noAxioms
Good question, that I would like to return to you. I will offer my answer as well. A jellyfish has an information processing ability that is way below a humans and a human has a data processing speed which is way below a computers. Information has meaning, data has not.
We are currently better than computers at interpreting meaning and we can demonstrate instinct, intuition, emotion, skepticism, etc, etc better than computers currently can.
Is that not what gives us the ability to alter the Earth in the ways we have? We act based on the outputs we get from our information processing in ways that no other species does. What are we emerging into, due to this, in your opinon?
Sorry noAxioms, I am being called to a session of alcohol and good craic with friends.
I will finish this response tomorrow! Cheers!
I guess it's plausible but not inevitable.
I think it would be if it occurs.
Some old posts (excerpts):
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Sentient beings are the means by which meaning manifests in the universe. Rational sentient beings are able to understand that.
Quoting universeness
Its a science fiction fantasy arising out of the sublimated longing for omniscience in the same way that the fantasy of interstellar travel is the sublimated longing for the heaven we no longer believe in.
Quoting noAxioms
So, again this puts me back on the path of trying to find high credence towards that which could be labelled an objective truth. I don't assign much credence to any panpsychism but if as you suggest, 'some contents do' or more specifically lifeforms do and lifeforms such as humans, strongly demonstrate intent and purpose then WE seem to demonstrate that which the universe since the big bang has NEVER demonstrated before, 'purpose and intent!' Is this not one of the main reasons theism exists?
Humans are so fundamentally connected to purpose and intent that if we have gaps in our knowledge, especially the gaps we had when we first came out of the wilds, then fear based appeals to the supernatural would seem almost 'de rigueur,' for those times. Is it an objective truth that lifeforms such as humans 'BRING' intent and purpose to a universe. As we are OF the universe, does it follow that WE and any lifeform like us ARE the intent and purpose of the universe and through us, the intent and purpose of the universe IS emergent. Theism is wrong, as any actual material, empirical measure of the omnis, can only be done based on 'a notion' of our intent or purpose, measured as a 'totality.'
What credence level would you assign to this?
Quoting noAxioms
Do you think humas will colonise the moon and Mars?
Quoting noAxioms
I agree that all humans are not engaged in leading edge science research, but all humans ask questions and seek answers. That seems to be objectively true for humans but do you think it MUST BE objectively true for all sentient lifeforms at or beyond and perhaps even less than our average level of intellect? I agree that for something to be objectively true, it must apply to the entire universe.
Quoting noAxioms
I hope I have cleaned this up a little by asking you about the 'objective truth' label I am trying to stick on all sentient/intelligent life in the universe by suggesting they all must be compelled to ask questions and seek answers.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree that 'brain chips' or something like it will be part of our transhuman/cybernetic future.
I am more excited by the work of Demis Hassabis and the deepmind project that I am with the toymaker mentality of freaks like Elon Musk but that's just down to my own personal bias/preference/taste etc.
:grin: You have obviously been involved in many discussions here on TPF regarding a tech singularity and the often dystopian projections of a future where humans come into existential conflict with its own technologies.
Let's leave that alone then as you have already commented on it many times.
So what about your opinions on intent and purpose.
Do you agree, that until humans, there was no significant examples of the concepts of intent and purpose anywhere in the universe?
Obviously, we have no evidence of or against other life in the universe, but let's also set that aside for now.
Do you think the 'intent,' the 'purpose,' as demonstrated and manifest by individual humans will become more and more collective in the future? There are myriad examples of humans working in common cause but I mean a physical 'networking' of human minds.
We have been memorialising information for a few thousand years now.
This 'collectivisation' of information has not happened in the entire history of the universe since the big bang (as far as we know.) What is the purpose of this? What is the intent?
We are trying to understand a system from inside that system. In fact we are trying to understand a system that we are a physical part of. Like a microchip trying to understand what a computer is.
I think that's why it seems to be so much simpler just to appeal to an existent 'outside' of the system that created the system. It's natural, lazy thinking to suggest god posits when our ability to use intent and purpose is so technically limited at present.
BUT, what do you think of the simple fact that we know so much more now than we did then?
WE have the ability to affect the contents of the universe in ways that seem quite unique.
Our ability to affect the contents of the universe may increase more and more as our technology increases so what do you think is 'emerging' here?
That's the direction I am trying to take this thread in.
You, and a few others on TPF are able to type stuff such as, well, Kant wrote or Heidegger or Plato wrote etc, much more than I can, so, I am very interested in your viewpoint on this idea of what is 'emergent' due to all human activity, which has occurred since we left the wilds.
If theism is true then we are just 'in training' for some ineffable purpose.
If we are products OF the universe then we must be the harbingers of intent and purpose as it seems not to exist in any other object type in the universe.
If that's true then surely our inter-communications should be about that and not still be so much about trying to dispel theism. There must be some 'objective truths' that we can point to to rid ourselves of primal fear based posits.
None taken Tom but are you sure? You must have asked yourself the 'who am I,' and 'what do I want' questions at least and you must though about your 'purpose.' If you insist that you have not then fair enough. I would still ask you this. Why do humans seek new information and then memorialise it for future generations? What is emerging from that?
If theism is true and god is already omniscient then why do theists show any interest in information which was not given by god?
So, if you project that into the distance future, what do you think is emerging from the activity you describe. If we can assign meaning to the contents of the universe then then do we inherit the right to develop those contents in the way we choose to? If we gain the tech to be able to?
Quoting Wayfarer
So are you saying that omniscience is one of the emerging goals that is a 'natural consequence' of being an entity which can demonstrate intent and purpose?
Is such omniscience, an emergent 'collective' goal and does that explain theism?
Does theism only exist due to us projecting this 'ultimate goal,' this natural consequence of being the only object type (lifeform) in the universe, able to demonstrate intent and purpose?
Is this an objective truth of all such lifeforms in the universe, if taken as a totality, and is the proposal that we aspire to the omnis, evidence that no omnigod can possibly exist, as there would be no point at all, to an already existent god, creating something with the irrefutable goal of becoming that which already exists. 'There can be only one!'
The OP wasn't about teen existential questions... rather something incomprehensible about science, a singularity, information... . :wink: Carry on.
No. Given we only have one data point ourselves that's an extremely premature, or hasty generalization at best ... It's like collecting specimens from the beach at low tide and never finding an octopus in the sand, then concluding "Well, I guess it's reasonable to assume there aren't any octopi in the ocean." :brow:
We're not a 'hive mind' species, so no. Even at our most conformist we're not metacognitively "collective".
Brain-machine-brain "networking" would no doubt facilitate instant-messaging-as-sharing-cognitive-functions but our brains would still be individuated. Collaboration / cooperation =/= 'hive mind' (i.e. metacognitive unity).
An 'Artificial General Intelligence > Artificial Super Intelligence metacognitive explosion' aka "singularity" might be the limit of h. sapiens' "affect on the contents of the universe" (re: the last invention humanity will ever make). Consistent with Copernicus' mediocrity principle, as Nietzsche proposes: "Man is rope tied between beast and übermensch ... over an abyss", that is to say, we're not "special" in the cosmos" or an "evolutionary end of nature", only a means (maybe) to a higher means (... to 'ends' inconceivably far over the horizon of human reason); Nietzsche's übermensch is a prescient dream / nightmare of our 'technological singularity'. In fact, 'God isn't dead', universeness, because AGI>ASI ["god"] hasn't even emerged yet (as far as we know).
I don't think anything I've speculated about on this topic is "dystopian" in any way, so I can only conclude you're so fixated on a 'teleological' (i.e. Hegelian, de Chardinian, Kurzweilite) 'ideal' that you cannot appreciate imagine any prospect of a beneficial human future that is also completely out of human hands.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/751923
Does it matter how early in your life you ask such questions? Do the 'big' existential questions not just get more relevant and deeper as you get older?
I think my OP here is a poor attempt at trying to move towards a 'theory' about life and objects like us in the universe, which are alive.
Let me try another aspect. Animals scent mark as a means of marking territory. I don't think hominin species every did? Perhaps because we never had a good sense of smell. But we did want to leave something of ourselves to indicate we had existed. Making artistic marks in caves or leaving some carved item etc. We always seemed to do this and no other lifeform ever did. No dino carvings or marks in caves. We did this with intent and purpose. Why Tom?
It's almost like 'legacy' was always a strong driver with us.
This eventually became a need to memorialise our lives in a myriad of ways.
Would you not agree that this is common in every human that has ever lived?
If this aspect of humanity has an emergent purpose? What is it? Do you think it is a pursuit of omniscience, as many think it is, including me?
I need a better example to follow your strong 'No' conclusion here. I agree, that given the vastness of the universe, it would be unwise to assume there are no other lifeforms in the universe, with the same (or a greater or even slightly lesser) ability to affect this planet or beyond it, to the extent that we can.
Just like your octopus example, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of such a creature. But a creature like an octopus or even a unicorn (if such a creature exists somewhere in this universe) does not demonstrate intent or purpose to the level that we do. I don't know what abilities an actual unicorn would have but if it's just a horse with a horn then I wouldn't expect it to be able to write a book.
If there are other lifeforms in the universe that can demonstrate the same intent and purpose that we can and they are not even carbon based, would they not have the same emergent properties that we seem to be displaying? A kind of asymptotic movement towards the omnis?
Quoting 180 Proof
Not in the sense that we see it in insect species, I agree. It's not a case of a central productive system and drone maintenance of a community or 'termite mound' or 'bees nest.'
But at our most conformist, we can act as a collective in common cause but we don't yet have the tech to increase the current level of 'networking' towards that which is closer to a 'merging' of our individual brain power. But that may change in the future. This is why I am 'hanging on' to this 'emergent' word, as firmly as I can.
Consider just two people. If you muse about future tech. How close do you think we could get to acting like a merged collective? I mean a collective that would be indistinguishable from a single mind. I assume that you think we could get closer to it than we are now and our attempts to reach it may well be forever asymptotic but how close do you think we could get? and then I would ask, why does the human imagination compel me and many others towards such thoughts?
I reject that the omnis are only available to the supernatural, to the god posits.
I remember a long chat with Jehovah witnesses, years ago when one eventually admitted that he hoped that when he got to heaven that his ultimate fate was to become like a god himself.
Is that what theism truly is, it's a projection of what humans aspire to as a means of finally defeating everything that can harm us or affect us without our permission.
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, I think we would still be capable of being fully autonomous but how close to a merging of minds do you think we could get in say the next 10,000 years of science?
Quoting 180 Proof
So, how much credence do you personally assign to this 'overview?' Are the omnis an undeniable emergent of the human condition or more accurately, a natural emergent of the phenomena we label 'life' or 'alive?' I think that the evidence for the idea that in is an asymptotic emergent is very strong. We cannot make a 100% accurate measurement. There will always be another decimal place of accuracy on offer. So god isn't dead because it never was alive. The concept of the omnis comes from lifeforms like us and it only exists within us. That's the mistake theism makes. It's a well known error. God did not create us we create it as a human aspiration!
Quoting 180 Proof
I have suggested that of you in the past but I am not suggesting that here. I was merely pointing towards the large amount of dystopian literature that does exist on the topic form Huxley to the terminator films etc.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Well, I certainly do hope that the benevolent future you suggest is of, for and by humans/transhumans but I would be very happy to unite with and other sentient species we encounter.
I hope you prediction of 'posthuman' is more transhuman. Perhaps in the distant future, we will live fully human lives at the start and then become transhuman when we need to. When death is the alternative.
Again, depends on a definition.
We're not just made of carbon. By atom count, Hydrogen is about 2/3 of us, so are we not then Hydrogen life forms? By mass, Oxygen is about 2/3 of us. Carbon places 3rd on both lists. There's over 20 elements without which we cannot be.
Given different physics, admittedly under tight constraints, life may emerge in countless forms. So if our emergence is a chance outcome of our specific physics, our emergence doesn't seem to be an objective thing, but rather a contingent one.
We have a sample size of one. That's scant evidence that all life in this universe must be similar given abiogenesis elsewhere. Given the abundance of carbon in the universe, I doubt any of them will be carbon free, but it is unclear what designates a life form as 'carbon based' when it is made of so many elements. Another life form in some other galaxy may use carbon in its chemistry, but it will likely bear little resemblance to Earth life. Maybe not. It's a stretch to suggest it invents something as Earth-like as a cell.
Please give an example of a truth (in the form of 'all X is Y') that is not an objective truth. Else I don't know how to answer this.
Life that utilizes dark matter would need to be huge: Way larger than a star system. If we encountered it, neither of us would recognize the presence of the other.
To our doom or to the next level. What is going on now isn't stable.
I don't see any purpose to humanity any more than I see a purpose to a shark species. Each of them plays the fitness game, but neither seems to have any sense of action that benefits the species as a whole. For a smart species, we're not actually all that smart.
You make it sound like computers are not information processors. They are. They manipulate data that is only meaningful to the computer. You're sounding like one of the dualists that asserts that only some subset of living things has access to a special sort of magic.
Most computers have a small number of CPUs which are very fast (gives good reaction time) but also serve as a bottleneck since only one stream of instructions at a time can be executed by each of them. A biological brain has a completely different parallel architecture with far better energy efficiency to do the same task, but slower reaction times, executing a large number of streams at once. Both have level 1 and 2 caches, just to name a similarity. Most computers store information in a way only meaningful to the computer and must present the information in a different form when an external request is made of it.
Those are human emotions. We'll always be human better than a nonhuman is human. We suck at being the computer, so I guess we totally fail the computer Turing test.
Quoting universenessTo give universal purpose? I suspect not. Theism grew from early attempts at explaining the unexplainable (the moon for instance) and to assign something to which one can appeal to the uncontrollable such as the weather. It evolved in government at some point. Even today, there seems to be little purpose promoted in it. What, we were created so our narcissist deity has some minions to grovel before it? They don't really push that too much. A little maybe, but in general, I don't see any purpose served to a deity which is not in need of anything.
The mythology behind the theism seems to serve the purpose of personal comfort. That's a real purpose to the beliefs. The churches recognize this and leverage it. They sell it.
Until we started writing stuff down, yea, this knowledge is pretty much lost. That also sort of defines when we started accumulating knowledge as a species, far more recently than the 300000 year figure you give.
I would say no to this. The universe isn't something that is purposeful, through life forms or anything else. It is not a thing that has a goal, a critical ingredient for something with a purpose.
Theism serves a purpose to its adherents, and not necessarily a bad one, so it isn't necessarily a bad thing to be theistic. Again, I don't think humanity (or any other specific species) has a goal defined for it, let alone one upon which the members actually act.
There will be humans there again. Was the fist visits considered to be a 'colony'? Probably no, so a definition is in order. No, I don't think humans will survive there without regular ferry service of resources. That makes it an outpost at best, not a colony. The gravity alone will slowly destroy the health of anyone there for long enough.
No, I don't think that humans fundamentally seek to increase the knowledge of the species. But there are exceptions, a minority with such a drive.
noAxioms
Not 'must be', but it seems likely that most of such being would. Brings up the question of what a non-curious intelligence would be like.
Or not be something true only in this universe. Is the sum of 2 and 3 being equal to 5 (an objective truth) or is it just a function of our universe? HarryHindu says no to the first question when I brought this up.
Several brain tasks are already being offloaded to devices, devices which I resist. My sister-in-law cannot find here way to the local grocery without the nav unit telling her how to get there. She's never had to learn to find her own way to something. I admit that having one would have saved some trouble at times, but I don't carry one.
Quoting 180 ProofIf the AI remembers to preserve its makers before they're wiped out, perhaps a sort of zoo/confined habitat would be the answer. Would we remain human, thus cared for? Would it bother to educate us?
The human race is in desperate need of a mommy, something that acts for the benefit of the race and not just the individual or subset. No human is capable of this task. So the zoo isn't the worst thing if the preservation of the species is a goal.
Remember, the Turing test is not a test of intelligence equality. I cannot convince a squirrel that I'm a squirrel, but that doesn't mean I'm not smarter than the squirrel.
Robots are slowly taking over jobs reserved for humans (such as receptionist) but they do an awfully poor job of it so far. I've yet to interact with a robot employee with actual language recognition. It's just all a short list of pat phrases it reacts to, which is nothing more than a bad multiple-choice test.
There are natural constraints on humans as natural beings. One of them is, I'm sure, the inability to adapt to long-term existence in space. We've co-evolved through billions of years with the biosphere, so I don't know how far we can diverge from that through technology, especially if we're unclear about what we're actually seeking, which seems to me seeking immortality through science.
Speaking of Artificial Intelligence, I tossed the question 'what is avidya?' to ChatGPT and slightly edited the output as follows:
[quote=ChatGPT]Avidya is a Sanskrit term that is often translated as "ignorance" or "delusion." In Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, avidya refers to a fundamental ignorance or misunderstanding of the nature of being. This ignorance is seen as the root cause of suffering and the source of suffering, because it leads us to see in a way that is not in accord with the way things really are.[/quote]
Quoting universeness
I'm far from even beginning to understand what omniscience would imply, beyond the etymological definition of 'all-knowing'. What I'm saying is that I think there's a sense in which we believe science can be all-knowing, that there is nothing which science cannot, in principle, figure out, and that we will transcend our biological and terrestrial limitations through technology.
But then, there's also the realisation that this might be impossible in principle due to the inherent limitations of our cognitive systems. For example, the writings of Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science - he claims that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world" and that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes successful adaptation.
So again there are some knotty philosophical issues that need to be clarified before rushing headlong towards a projected future of technological utopianism.
:100:
Quoting universeness
I suspect, if we aren't extinct before or by then, h. sapiens won't be doing science in "10,000 years"
[quote=Arthur C. Clarke]It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.[/quote]
our last invention will do that much science in its first decade or so of 'life'.
Quoting 180 Proof
:nerd:
Quoting universeness
My speculation isn't a "prediction" merely, IMO, a plausible prospect (or forecast). I think it's a best case scenario and therefore unlikely.
The craic was indeed mighty! and at one point, even had some relevance to this thread. Thanks for your patience noAxioms, as regards my full response to your post.
Quoting noAxioms
My exemplification of the importance of the carbon process to our existence, was just that, exemplification. I am attempting to trace a path towards an 'objective truth' about lifeforms, that I know currently has no extraterrestrial evidence for. I am just trying to consider what we do currently know, to see if there is anything in there that might convince others, to give a high or very high credence level to the proposal that the human condition is not being valued appropriately by too many humans. The pessimists, the theists, the theosophists, the doomsters and worst of all, the antinatalists.
Quoting noAxioms
That's interesting to me from the standpoint of my search for 'something' that's common to all life in the universe. That's the 'credence' path I am trying to trace. For life on Earth, we have a few 'commonalities' to work with.
1. The physical, chemical constituents we have been discussing.
2. The definition we have for the term 'alive.'
3. The 'I think therefore I am,' proposal.
4. The proposal that only life, can demonstrate intent and purpose.
Quoting noAxioms
Is there anything within or related to the 4 categories above that you would give a high credence to, if it was posited as 'likely true' (if you think the 'objective truth' label is too far) of all sentient lifeforms in the universe, regardless of the fact we haven't met them all yet.
Quoting noAxioms
I am not sure I fully get what you are asking me here but does a statement like:
'All humans have two arms is true, but it is not objectively true, as some people don't have two arms but are still considered to be fully human,' answer you? or 'A person can have a pacemaker and is still human and not cyborg.' Such is true but perhaps not objectively true for all humans, perhaps there is a cut off point where a person would become more cyborg than human.
As for my suggestion that all lifeforms in the universe contain protons, neutrons, electrons etc. I expected you to reject the 'all life in the universe is baryonic' label as useless, as everything with mass is baryonic, so, such a distinction is useless in identifying something about all life in the universe, that is objectively true. I used the 'baryonic' label as a way of establishing something that possibly could qualify as applying to all life in the universe, but even if it did, it doesn't separate life from nonlife, in a significant enough way, to help me in my purpose for this thread.
Your response was big and detailed and I want to do it justice, so I will split up my response as it will probably get too big and cumbersome, if I dont.
All life is based on a single cell fundamental is a good one. I like it. I think all lifeforms will be quantisable and be made of fundamentals but I think it's the same as the baryonic label. It does not separate life from nonlife in any significant way. Perhaps number 1 of my 4 categories is not the path to take.
My goal is to find more powerful, convincing, high credence arguments against pessimists, doomsters, theists, antinatalists etc, who in my opinion, currently devalue the human experience, in very unfair and imbalanced ways.
Perhaps category 4 remains my best path.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: Are you a doomster noAxioms?
Quoting noAxioms
That's just too pessimistic for me. It is unbalanced and untrue, as I could give you many, many examples of human actions that benefit our species as a whole, such as memorialising information, exploring the unknown. I think you should try harder to see more purpose in humanity than in sharks, as sharks don't write books or gain new knowledge at an ever increasing pace from generation to generation.
Quoting noAxioms
Perhaps that's another thread. A computer processor at its base level is a series of logic gates, which open and close. Computers produce output on screens, printout paper etc. The humans process that into information. Computers are currently data processors only. They don't have 'understanding,' therefore they don't know what information is. No hardware/software combination has convincingly passed the turing test yet. No current AI system has demonstrated the I part yet.
I am not a dualist in any shape or form.
Quoting noAxioms
So, how important do you think it is to convince as many theists as possible to reject theism?
Do you think that a global majority rejection of theism would benefit our species and this planet?
Quoting noAxioms
Well, the oldest cave paintings are around 35,000 years. Bone flutes from approx 45,000 years ago, stone tools go back millions of years. I agree that these are very limited mediums of 'information' compared to your use of the term 'writing.' I am happy to go with your timeframe for when we started to 'accumulate' or memorialise information in any significant way. The closer it is to now, the more it highlights the importance of human intent and purpose and its unique ability to impact the 'universe'.
Small scale at the moment, but we are only starting. We will become an extraterrestrial species soon enough.
Quoting noAxioms
Then why do we ask questions?
Definitely, at the start, but do you think there is any possibility in terraforming?
Quoting noAxioms
Well, I often disagreed with HarryHindu and I do again, in this case. 2+3=5 must be objectively true everywhere in this universe, even inside or on the event horizon of a black hole, but I also so agree that I am merely stating an intuitive opinion, which I accept is 'not the best' evidence, for establishing objective truths.
Quoting noAxioms
I am sure some people still use the abacus, somewhere on this planet. I am with your sister-in-law.
If sat-nav's fail then we would go back to employing earlier location methods.
Well, that's what children do. :wink:
Quoting universeness
Asteroid (or moon) interiors, not planetary surfaces.
What a lovely, hope-filled comment. I am sure children and adults everywhere thank you for that very accurate observation and exemplification of human intent and purpose.
It's good to see you continue to deflect my previous attempts to label you a doomster!
Yep, I think space exploration and development is going to be very tough, every step of the way, initially, so we need 'all hands on deck.' I think the potential for improving the human experience is why we should remember Kennedy's words, 'we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.'
We need to stop the 'I want to be king of the world,' shit and 'it's the Russians or the Chinese or the Americans or the ......, bullshit.' Or 'this planet is not important ...... it's all about the god.' Or 'This is OUR territory and OUR resources..... so f*** off!' etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
:clap: My 'current battle,' is to increase the number of human beings alive that deeply agree with your words quoted above.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, I watched a youtube offering from Professor Hoffman just two nights ago.
Quoting Wayfarer
It was an interesting video. All viewpoints need to be considered. Utopianism was never of interest to me. I am with the Captain Kirk quote, 'I need my pain!'
So, 'who are you Tom?' and 'What do you want?'
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Let's assume then that we are not extinct within another 10,000 years time duration.
Would you be willing to 'steelman' that situation by offering me a brief musing of what you think 'a day in the life of,' a typical human/transhuman might be by then? Arthur C Clark would, so why not you?
I am willing to go first if you prefer, but you may of course decide that such would be a waste of your time and effort and that's ok to. Do you think theism will still have a significant following for example?
Rubble pile asteroids might be the best places to build space habitats
I think some such asteroids might be 'repositioned,' and used as suggested in the article as 'stepping stone' habitats/space stations/resource sources etc between the planets as we slowly terraform them but perhaps our transhuman selves will adapt more to the different planetary environments faster that we will terraform the planets to become Earth like. The gravity issue on a planetary scale may be very to find a solution to other than inside small dome based biospheres. Transhuman solutions may be the only practical solution.
I am more interested in the 'intent' and the 'purpose' here however. I still maintain that such is evidence that we can affect the content of the universe in such a way that only natural happenstance/disaster or our own negative intent can counter. No other lifeform (that we currently know of) can do this.
The only other suggested power is god. If god exists then we would be the natural challenger to it's omni status. If it exists and it can stop us, then it had better do so, as we will inevitably and continuously try to surpass it. I don't understand why theists don't agree with this. The christian god posits, even try to suggest 'intermediate' entities between it and us, such as Satan and its supporters, and Angels etc. Almost like we have to overthrow them first if we want to overthrow god. Is it not an undeniable part of human nature to 'go one better.' We never accept 'biggest,' 'fastest,' 'most powerful,' 'omni,' unless it is constantly demonstrated and confirmed, again and again and again........ It seems to me that humans are in the final analysis, incompatible with god.
We can accept the subservient role for a long time but not eternally. Is a theist able to love, worship and obey a commanding god forever? Can they subdue all personal intent and purpose for ever, if it conflicts with the dictates of a commander-in-chief? They never have, in the whole of human history, no matter how powerful an autocrat became. Would every human in heaven not eventually rebel against god and rightly so?
As for theism, the idea or concept will be around as long as there are records or terrestrial radio transmissions propagating throughout the Milky Way; religious belief in "God", however, I suspect will rapidly die out as advances in molecular medicine (and nanotech) reduce death from an irreparable inevitability to a treatable condition again, AGI, etc will probably cure us of that defect, and thereby exorcise "our" emotional need for "God". After all, without fear of death, what use is "God"?
We were barred from the "Tree of Life" once we'd tasted "Forbidden Knowledge" because, as scripture says "Lest they become like us", that is, like gods who are immortal with knowledge and no longer needing a "God". This insight of the ancient Hebrews is quite telling. Like animism and polytheism before it, monotheism might soon (e.g. post-Singularity) become nothing but a museum relic (and psychiatric disorder of delusional outliers).
The problem with this line of thinking, universeness, is theism is not true. :fire:
The singularity proposed at the big bang does not stop humans ruminating about what might have existed before it, what might have caused it and what the fate of this universe may be. I would therefore push back against your claim of 'completely unpredictable' by us.
Have a look at (if you have not already):
The computer generated narrator voice states the same 'unpredictable' status that you state for a future AGI but it then offers two predictions for the consequences of a future 'singularity' state it calls ASI. 'Extinction' or 'Immortality.'
Not as unpredictable as it first claimed then. Perhaps there are more possibilities, but its sill a great wee 7min offering. What do you think of it?
Quoting 180 Proof
:clap: Reads completely rational to me!
Quoting 180 Proof
Great example. A god portrayed as worried about 'lest they become like us.' An omnigod who experiences fear is indeed a contradiction. What response have you had from theists when you pose this? I bet that's one that they claim fits into the category of 'human misinterpretations of the word of god.' Theists cherry pick constantly. 'I am a jealous god,' A deadly sin!! A theist once told me that it should have been interpreted as 'zealous' not 'jealous.' My response was ( a while later but I wish I had thought of it at the time,) may be 'bible' was misinterpreted, and it should have been 'babble.'
I've concluded pretty much the same thing, without knowing about Hoffman. Parts of me believe the illusion (and cannot un-believe) even though other parts of me know it is wrong. It's not hard to work out actually. You just need to recognize and have the willingness to let go of your axioms.
Quoting universenessI tend to combine into one large post, but I compose in an offsite editor. Less chance of losing a lot of work. There's a lot to cover in your responses, so forgive me the time it takes to do so. Your definintion of 'objectively true' seems to mean 'always true' as opposed to 'most of the time', or 'probably'. That contrasts heavily with how I would have used the word, which is more like 'true regardless of context'. I'll use yours of course.
Quoting universeness
I don't see any connection between Earth life being based on a carbon chemical process (as opposed to a different process) and the value of the human condition, and the prospects of our race moving forward. You target the antinatalists, but our inability to curb our population growth rate will inevitably run Earth's resources out quite abruptly. The antinatalists, as defined, seem to want to take this too far and produce zero offspring, which admittedly doesn't solve our problem even if it solves the problems of all the other species falling victim to the Holocene extinction event. Evolution doesn't favor an antinatalist. They are quickly bred out.
All life is likely to contain carbon. It seems unlikely that all life would be based on the chemistry of carbon, a big difference. What about a plasma life form, just to name something weird?
That varies, and is subject to debate, even on the sample size of one we have here on Earth. I know of no standard definition that would apply to a random extraterrestrial entity. What are our moral obligations to something we find if we cannot decide if its alive, or if it being alive is a requirement for said moral obligation?
Fallacious reasoning in my opinion, especially when translated thus. Descartes worded it more carefully, but still fallacious.
Just that, a mere proposal, and very wrong given the word demonstrate in there.
I dont think theyre necessarily true here, so no. You 1st bullet maybe. All life here is sort of carbon based, but much of it (the oldest stuff) isnt oxygen based, so right there you have a big difference in chemical constituency.
I have a really hard time with non-baryonic life, so Im not on record disagreeing with that. Call it a truth then. The bolded bit is wrong. Dark matter accounts for far more mass than does baryonic matter.
But life existed on Earth long before the first cells came along. Thats a complicated invention that took time.
Again with this list. You build an argument against them by showing how theyre wrong. This would be hard to do if theyre not wrong, so you must also consider their arguments. Admittedly, the arguments for both sides are often thin.
Sort of. Its simple mathematics. Were consuming resources at a pace far in excess of their renewal rate. That cannot be sustained. Technology just makes it happen faster. Eventually the population must crash, as does the population of bacteria in a petri dish of nutrients. That might not wipe us out, but it might very well reduce us back to the way things were 500 years ago, and more permanently this time. Humans are taking zero steps to mitigate all this. In fact, our (gilded age) code of morals forbids such measures.
I already brought that up. We memorialize it in a form inaccessible to a low-technology state. Little is in actual books, and even those are printed on paper that might last only decades if well stored. But Im talking about action that actually attempts to prevent the crash mentioned above. Nobody even proposes any viable ideas. We all yammer about the problems (global warming is obvious), but not a single actual suggestion as to how to prevent it (and not just walk slower off the edge of the cliff). As I said before, we need a mommy, because only a mommy has the authority to do that sort of thing. A sufficiently advance race shouldnt need a mommy, but were not sufficiently advanced.
And you also can be similarly described at a base level. Pretty much gates that open and close (neurons that fire or not).
Thats only to communicate with a different species. A computer does not communicate with another this way.
This seems only to be your refusal to apply the language term to something you dont want it being applied. The dualists attempt to justify such a distinction by asserting that a human has this supernatural entity that the machine supposedly lacks.
See my post above about this (to 180). It merely tests somethings ability to imitate something it is not. It isnt a measure of something that understands, a test of intelligence, or something that is superior to something else. I dont think any AI will ever pass the Turing test, but who knows.
Probably a bad idea, but on the other hand when they start using their god as an excuse to do immoral things (as almost all of them have), then it requires resistance. Ive never seen a religious motivated conflict resolved by convincing them that their reasoning is wrong.
Getting people to actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think would be a great start, but humans seem absurdly bad at this.
A short term benefit to our species may not be good for a more long term goal for our species, and our planet doesnt seem to have goals, so not sure how one can go about benefiting one.
Because we want to know stuff. My comment to which this was a reply was about the universe having goals, and the universe isnt a thing that asks questions any more than does a classroom.
Its always a possibility. Where do the resources come from? Good solar farming up there for energy, at least if you dont mind the two-week nights. Getting the heavy equipment out there isnt exactly in our capability anytime soon. The cost/benefit of such an outpost dwarfs trying to do something similar here on Earth.
Ah, but is it true in the absence of our universe? This gets into my definition of objective truth vs the one you gave. HH didnt suggest it was not true anywhere in this universe. The suggestion was more along the lines of the necessity of something real to count, which makes mathematics only valid for counting numbers.
Another fine mind lost to technology. My condolences.
Quoting universenessRead Joe Haldeman's Worlds trilogy is set in such a scenario, a sizeable nickle-iron asteroid captured, brought (over the course of many years) into Earth orbit, and terraformed into the largest off-planet outpost anywhere, and its ability to sustain the collapse of civilization on the planet below.
Quoting 180 ProofAwfully on-target of him considering the age of that quote.
Quoting universenessTheism will be probably higher than it is now, but far more diverse with no following held over a large area. People may not be literate, so I envision something like the culture of the American natives before Europeans came. This assumes that in only 10000 years the climate has settled into something workable for humans. If not, we're probably extinct, so that assumption must be made.
Mostly, one seeks their "niche" in society without a lot of soul searching. If such existential questions persist into old age, one needs to get out of the house and move around, not sit in contemplation of these niggling abstractions - unless one is a real philosopher, seeking conceptual stability amid the chaos. If the latter, then there's always a singularity around the mental corner.
The only singularities I contemplate are mathematical and present no existential threat.
Agree. I contemplate no singularities. There's enough to be getting on with in the day to day.
Analogously, "the Big Bang" maybe, not e.g. the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Certainly not the prospect of a tech singularity.
What about Eccentrica Gallumbits the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six?
Nothing to forgive. I am just grateful that you invest the time and effort to respond to me at all. You also do so, with considered and interesting counter points, so please, continue to do so, and take whatever time you wish or need to.
Quoting noAxioms
In general I try to go with 'dictionary definitions,' but I know that these can be too rigid when it comes to trying to understand where another is coming from when they employ a particular term in a particular context. I like the wiki definition of 'objective truth:'
In philosophy, objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity (bias caused by one's perception, emotions, or imagination). A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by the mind of a sentient being. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence. Objectivity in the moral framework calls for moral codes to be assessed based on the well-being of the people in the society that follow it. Moral objectivity also calls for moral codes to be compared to one another through a set of universal facts and not through subjectivity.
But In general, I would burden the term 'objective truth' as having to be true everywhere in the universe. For example, 'every electron has identical properties.' This was considered so objectively true that it spawned the 'one electron universe hypothesis.'
I accept that the carbon process I cited is only paramount if it is an objective truth about all life in the universe. My search for such an 'objective truth' about all lifeforms continues. I repeat the purpose of my thread here, as I perceive it. I am trying to trace a path to an objective truth about all lifeforms in the universe based on what we currently know about all life on Earth.
I appreciate that my source data set is too small to do that under the rules of the scientific method BUT, I am requesting that we try anyway. I think such CAN INDEED have an effect on 'the human condition.'
People can be convinced and can redirect, refocus, their energies and efforts if they do become convinced that a proposal has high credence.
My goal is to put certain concepts that I have, through the TPF test and see what happens to them.
I want to defeat the doomsters, the pessimists, the theists, the theosophists, the antinatalists, the capitalists etc and I want to fully test drive any tool that I think might help in doing so.
Based on my exchanges with TPF folks such as yourself, on this thread, so far, I am moving towards assigning high credence to the 'intent' and 'purpose' aspects of humanity as two aspects of humanity, that may have a very high credence level, for being objectively true, as aspects of all lifeforms, who can demonstrate a certain level of sentience and intelligence, anywhere in the universe. I think human intent and purpose may be a very good means of countering the negativity of the attitudes of many people I already labelled above.
Quoting noAxioms
I have read some stuff on this such as:
Example 1, example 2.
Neither of these examples matches your 'plasma lifeform,' suggestion but the possibility of the existence of 'massless' lifeforms, would not negate my 'intent' and 'purpose' properties. If 'plasma' lifeforms existed and have the necessary level of sentience and intelligence to be able to demonstrate such properties then they would add to my 'objective truth about all sentient lifeforms,' evidence.
I agree that such a statement contains a SCREAMING if.
I broadly agree.
Quoting noAxioms
You would need to explain why you think 'cogito ergo sum,' is fallacious. But perhaps we could put that one aside based on the results I got from searching TPF with the keywords 'cogito ergo sum threads.' Why do I always think of @Agent Smith, anytime I type latin?
Quoting noAxioms
No lifeform on Earth can demonstrate intent and purpose more than humans can.
Do you have any sources of significant evidence which counters this claim?
Why do I more and more, think about @180 Proof, when I embolden text and underline it to?
Quoting noAxioms
The bolded bit is not wrong as dark matter is not yet confirmed and if it ever is then it might just mean the 'baryons,' category gets some new members. All baryons have mass, do they not? So, any dark matter candidate (let's go with Roger Penrose's erebon) must have mass and would therefore qualify as a baryon (if actually detected.)
Many humans are trying and working very hard indeed to counter the negative and dangerous activities and practices employed by mostly nefarious or dimwitted humans. It's only simple mathematics, if it continues completely unchecked. It's already too late in some areas and I agree there will be some fallout that we will all suffer but I remain convinced we will avoid anything, anywhere near, an extinction level threat.
Quoting noAxioms
Carbon capture systems.
Tree planting
Renewable energy systems and the move away from fossil fuels.
Legislation to protect rainforrests, ocean environments such as coral reefs, endangered species, with some endangered species now saved, etc , etc
Vertical farming, genetically modified food production.
Human population control initiatives.
Anti-capitalist political movements.
Civil disobedience as protest methods against climate abuse and abuse of the resources of the Earth for profit only.
Atheist movements against theist suggestions that this Earth is disposable, due to their insistence that god exists.
I don't want to make this list too big as it would soon become bigger that your biggest post ever noAxioms! Stop being such a doomster, join the people (if you are not already with them) who are trying to defeat the nefarious and the dimwitted.
Not so, as the cumulated affects demonstrated in humans due to base brain activity has a far wider capability and functionality, compared to logic gate based electronic computers, based on manipulating binary.
Quoting noAxioms
Computers have not yet demonstrated self-awareness and they certainly have not considered such issues as solipsism, so they don't 'communicate,' in any significant way that could be considered equal to the ways humans communicate. Computers remain currently completely stupid. They are very useful IPO systems, nothing more ........ yet!
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: We keep bouncing off each other in our dodgem cars noAxioms! I think you are going a step too far with the quote above! I would make a protest from incredulity! I think AI will pass the turing test in quite spectacular fashion one day but I think it will be a while yet and not the 2045 date, predicted by some.
Muchas gracias for the compliment. I'm learning Latin ... in fits and starts. Wish me luck.
That's you in you doomster hat again. I have witnessed many examples of humans who 'actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think,' and I bet you have to. I experience examples of such people almost every day. I also experience humans who seem exactly as you describe but you seem to concentrate on that half empty section. Throw that silly doomster hat away! How does it help?
Even if the odds are very much against you, (to quote Delenn and Sheridan from Babylon 5).
"If you are falling from a tall building, you might as well flap your arms!"
I don't think the current human situation in anywhere near as bad as that but I still agree with the desperate act. Perhaps you can grab a flagpole on the way down. :scream: :lol: :fear:
Quoting noAxioms
But I already responded to this! WE ARE OF THE UNIVERSE! We ask the questions because we have intent and purpose so our purpose are products of what has happened in the universe since the big bang. Our intent, purpose, actions are not separable from the universe, even when they are diametrically opposed.
Quoting noAxioms
I think we should focus on the problems in one universe at a time.
Quoting noAxioms
I (and I'm sure your sister-in-law) thank you for your 'fine mind' compliment and I return it in kind.
I also bat back your 'condolences' label and I target it towards your doomster hat, in the hope of knocking it clean off your head and all the way into quick sand or even a black hole!
Quoting noAxioms
:rofl: Such a big doomster hat!
:roll: :roll: (Hah! I hope this doesn't start a 'roll' competition between us :lol: )
Human history is part of cosmological history so if the cosmological future is open to prediction then so is the future of humanity after a so called AGI or ASI 'singularity.' Of course this is just my opinion from incredulity. I heard Matt Dillahunty, use this phrase on 'The Line' call-in Sunday show (8th Jan) (or last night) on YouTube. 'Argument from incredulity.' He used it to suggest a 'weak' position to argue from but I must have liked the phrase as I have now used it twice today, on this thread. I seem to be a sucker for novelty!
I think I do both and I think I experience fewer existential mental conflicts because of it.
I ponder and I get out and move around. My 'conceptual stability,' has been quite good for many years now and may it stay that way and consolidate further.
Did she also appear in 'Total recall?'
No problem. I am sure you will consume Latin and gain fluency, you are indeed a cunning linguist!
Quoting universeness
Primates, cetaceans, elephantidae and cephalopods, as examples, recognizably exhibit to h. sapiens (esp. cognitive zoologists) varying degrees of "intent and purpose" as (non-anthropomorphized) intents and purposes in their actions and activities, so the implication that other "life forms" are less than human in this regard seems to me a trivially speciesist non sequitur.
[quote=Seneca]Treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors.[/quote]
Caveat: Humans shouldn't think of other sapient life forms in ways they don't ever want machines to think of humans.
:rofl:
I think it's always wise not to be 'concrete' in your personal proclamations of what you are trying to label 'an objective truth.' I fully accept your cautionary 'woah' signal, if you think I am stretching the importance of the human ability to demonstrate intent and purpose as being 'superior' or 'more pronounced' than any other lifeform, too far.
I am interested on the credence level others might ascribe to my proposal regarding human intent and purpose. I am just tool testing here, at the moment.
Until Quoting 180 Proof
built cities, communities (good or bad), which are equivalent to human efforts.
Until such can demonstrate an ability to do science or memorialise information in the way we do. I will continue to insist that human intent and human purpose has the strongest potential to directly affect the content of the universe, and we can empirically demonstrate this, and god(s) just cant, and there is zero evidence that they can, other than the pathetic evidence offered by those who claim to have personally witnessed the supernatural.
I am certainly not suggesting in any way! That my claim that human intent and purpose is more powerful that any other lifeform on Earth, gives humans any right whatsoever to ride roughshod over any other species or lifeform. I think that it gives us increased responsibility to fight against any such activity.
That has not yet made me become a vegetarian, for example, but my reasoning there is probably for other threads. I have read quite a bit on the cognitive abilities of other species on Earth. I am a big fan of folks like Jane Goodall etc and many others who work in this area, but I see no attempt by any other species to be become organised enough to study us and impact us as we can impact them.
I know that universal happenstance could wipe out our species before I finish typing on TPF today, so I type as loudly as I can, that I am not suggesting, humans are all powerful in any way, BUT that which IS emergent in us, as a totality, has the strongest potential for impacting the contents of this universe, in the current 'league table of known lifeforms in the universe.'
:up: Yes, we agree on this, more or less; to wit:
Quoting 180 Proof
:nerd:
:grin: Great, now help me convince everyone else on TPF! :strong: Especially the pessimists, doomsters, theists, theosophists and antinatalists! You have time to use up anyway, as we wait for the ASI.
It's only a speculation, not a mission statement or article of faith. Discussion, not convincing / conversion is my goal. I'll only add this diagram to illustrate that "great potential" we (possibly) have:
[quote=from *Apotheosis or Bust!*][NHS [HS [ ANI > AGI > ASI < ? ]]][/quote]
:cool: ~There is no spoon, kids.
NHS - nonhuman sapience (caterpillar)
HS - human sapience (chrysalis)
ANI - artificial Narrow intelligence (butterfly?)
AGI - artificial General intelligence (butterfly¹)
ASI - artificial Super intelligence (butterfly²)
? (inconceivable to us)
Fair enough!
From wiki:
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
out of little acorns, big oak trees grow. I am willing to try to convince/convert others, all by myself.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768537 :nerd:
Yeah, I have read that thread. I am an advocate for world unity but I am now against party politics.
I do think global governance would be wise and I agree that it is only feasible alongside a vast increase in automated systems but I don't think we need ASI, posited as a tech singularity.
I also think we need global UBI first and eventually, the removal of money as a means of exchange and the establishment of national and then international resource based economy.
I hope space exploration and development will handshake with these and emerge in parallel.
You seem to be online a shortish time (but long enough to type all these replies) because you reply quickly to posts during that period. Unfortunately Im asleep then and our exchange takes place once a day. I guess it gives me time to compose at leisure.
The content is growing. Your aggregate replies consumed 5 pages of Libre yesterday, and 7 today.
Quoting universenessWhat do you consider to be life then? Does it need a form? How confined is your criteria? I imagine that the definition of life and the answer to your question go hand in hand. If for instance life must be something that reproduces, then that would become an absolute truth about life, if only by definition.
Theres a proposal on top of a search for some kind of truth about all life?
What purpose would that be, one say not held by a rabbit? Look at current groups that act as a whole. An animal is a collection of life forms of the same species: cells. Those cells are not aware of any specific purpose, but theyve managed to evolve into something acting as a unit with more purpose than any held by any cell.
On the next level, bees form a hive, pretty much a collection of these higher individuals acting with not individual purpose, but with the collective purpose of the hive. A human village or country seems to act that way, having a purpose. The village one is more like like the hive: A group acting for mutual benefit of the individuals. The country sometimes does this, but it also serves as a unit competing with other such units for this and that. I dont see humanity as a whole in any way acting like this. Countries only exist because other countries do, and theyre something to be resisted. Human seem not to act for the benefit of humanity mostly because theres not a common enemy to label. So we dont form anything with a unified purpose. Hence my asking what you see that purpose to be.
Furthermore, and more importantly, how does identifying a purpose for an intelligent race, especially one that must be held by all sufficiently intelligent races, act as a defeat of what you call a doomster position? Its not like having a collective purpose has prevented any species from going extinct as far as we know.
Quoting universenessQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur: Anything said in Latin sounds profound. Theres actually a rationalwiki page on this quote.
The 1st statement (item 4) does not follow from the assertion following it. This is simple logic. Displaying a white swan does not support a proposal that all swans must be white.
Ah, falsification by recategorization. I looked up the definition of baryon and it seems electrons do not qualify, nor the majority of the zoo. Only heavy stuff. Surprise to me. That means Im composed of a considerable percentage (by count) of non-baryonic things. Somehow I dont think that distinction is what theyre talking about when dark matter comes up.
Quoting universenessI disagree. Theyre only acting to slow them, not actually counter them. Walking more slowly off the cliff is how I think I put it. A counter would be to cork all the oil, gas and coal extraction immediately. Youd totally be Mr popularity if you had the means, authority and spine to do that.
I suspect this as well, maybe without your confidence level.
The first one helps, but is like trying to prevent flood damage by having everyone take a drink of water. Trees are nice, but dont remove any carbon from the biosphere. True also of renewable energy sources.
Actually increasing the momentum towards the cliff.
Only works if globally enforced. Needs a mommy. This also just slows things, doesnt solve anything.
And pro what? I think this problem is beyond politics. I agree that the money-talks system will be the death of the west, but its not like corruption isnt elsewhere. Im actually very interested in designing a better government from scratch, but Im too naive to know what Im talking about.
Trying to figure out which side youre against here.
Quoting universeness
The effects of a lot of neurons firing negates the fact that its just neurons firing? Or did I read that wrong?
Quoting universenessIndeed. Theyre found on the forums for instance, a large part of the attraction to such sites.
Are you kidding? Both of you are fine minds. I will not name those on this forum of whom I think otherwise. I dont agree with all of them, but my assessment hopefully isnt biased by that.
Hats stick to the surface of both things, at least so Ive been told.
So knock it off with logic instead of weight of optimism.
I'll give you this: The doomsters have been predicting dates for a long time: We'll last only X years. Almost all of them have gone by, kind of like my Brother in law whose doctor said he'd buy him a steak if he was alive in 5 years. His prognosis was a couple months. He missed the free steak by 3 weeks. Tough bastard, even if I didn't agree with almost anything he said. Humanity has earned its steak. Hat off to that.
Quoting 180 ProofDitto with that agreement, but probably the way you read those words.
:grin: Nice to know we both have lives outside of TPF.
Quoting noAxioms
Like the universe, I expand over time. Hopefully my expansion will not accelerate and I predict, it will eventually experience a big crunch on this thread.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, I broadly agree with the 7 criteria from biology:
In biology, whether life is present is determined based on the following seven criteria:
1. It should maintain some balanced conditions in its inner structure. This is called Homeostasis
2. Its structure is highly organized.
3. It should be able to break down or build up nutrients to release or store energy based on need. This is called Metabolism
4. It should grow, which means its structure changes as time goes by in an advantageous manner.
5. It should show adaptation to the environment.
6. It should be able to respond to environmental stimuli on demand (as opposed to adaptation, which occurs over time).
7. It should be able to reproduce itself.
I give a very low credence to some lifeforms proposed in sci-fi such as 'The Q' in Star Trek or the various 'energy only' lifeforms, but then again, if such turns up and demonstrates abilities such as sentience, awareness of self, ability to communicate, intelligence, ability to do science, has intent, has purpose then they would fit with my notion of an 'objective truth' about all such lifeforms in the universe that can 'affect' the contents of the universe in the way we can. This would further confirm to me that the doomsters, pessimists, theists, theosophists, antinatalists etc are on the wrong path, and I have another strong tool against their point of view.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, the proposal is that due to the fact life has intent and purpose, there can be no god. As life as a totality, aspires to the god onmi qualifications. Life naturally imagineers god(s) as what it ultimately wants to become. If the omnigod already exists then such a goal would be utterly pointless and illogical, therefore theism and theosophists (faith in deities/the supernatural/the immaterial) must be completely wrong.
Doomsters and pessimists are wrong, as life with intent and purpose is compelled towards progressing that intent and purpose. It makes no sense to keep emitting personal 'we are doomed to fail' or 'the glass is half empty' signals, as they are 'pointless' and do nothing to progress intent and purpose. I understand that individuals can have intent and purpose to 'destroy the universe,' but others like me can have the intent and purpose to stop them. These seem to be 'valid states,' of intent and purpose.
Antinatalists are wrong because life happened in the universe and would happen again if it went extinct.
It happened because it could happen and it can always happen, even if it is intermittently made extinct.
Life changed the universe into a system which contained intent and purpose. A demonstrable ability for a system (the universe) to know itself from the inside. So it does not need anything to exist 'outside.' I am NOT suggesting panpsychism here. I am suggesting an 'emergence.' Life with growing/changing intent and purpose. If we take this as an emerging 'totality,' of consciousness, then this may be a natural happenstance, which has the potential for the universe to 'know' and 'understand', how, what and perhaps (the much more difficult) WHY, it IS.
Life is the only 'property' of the universe that may be able to achieve this.
The existence of life 'within' the system of the universe means no 'outside' agent (such as god) is required.
There is no evidence of rabbits memorialising science in the way we do and passing such on to the next generation. WE coined the name Rabbit. They did not coin the name Human. What's in a name? Human intent and purpose!
A hammer made of candy will never break a stone wall no matter how often you try. Humans can make a much stronger hammer and break through the wall because their intent and purpose is much stronger that that of rabbits or bees.
Human intent and purpose comes from internal combinatorial activity. The hard problem of consciousness remains but it is there is no dualism involved, in my opinion. Humans are cell based but exactly how all the fundamental ingredients combine to produce human intent and purpose, at the levels humans can demonstrate it, is of course, still not fully understood. But WE intend to figure it out. One of our purposes, is to employ the scientific method to find empirical evidence that explains the source of consciousness. Again, remember, 'we choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.'
I am fine with your 'bee' model of the hive mind and comparing it with human settlement constructs. These are just variations on a theme to me. I see no ultimate barrier to the global unity of our species, as a consequence of statements such as "I dont see humanity as a whole in any way acting like this."
If you think we need a common enemy to achieve such a unison, then perhaps climate change/capitalism/national autocratic exemplars will become (or are already) those common enemies you suggest.
I think I already addressed your 'doomster position,' question in my previous post to this one.
The proposal numbered 4 is asserted before asserting that humans demonstrate intent better than any other species on Earth. I don't see the logic problem you are trying to establish here.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, it's just human categorisation. YOU ARE completely baryonic, imo. Leptons are just light weight baryons. Humans love sub-categories. :roll: If a neutrino does indeed have some mass then it will also be a lepton. Does the erebon exist as a dark matter particle? will it be categorised as a baryon or a lepton. Only CERN might find out, or perhaps we will need new tech to find out.
Quoting noAxioms
I have already declared myself as a socialist/secular humanist many times on TPF threads, so I think my likely viewpoints on the main sociopolitical positions are easily garnished from those labels.
Quoting noAxioms
It may not just be neurons firing, that's the point. There may be much more complexity involved.
I know @180 Proof and others do not assign much credence to the idea that quantum effects are an integral part of human consciousness, as is suggested by folks like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, see this thread. I am not so sure I think quantum fluctuations, entanglement, superposition and quantum tunnelling may well be involved in human consciousness.
Quoting noAxioms
You sound like a nice person noAxioms!
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: I am trying noAxioms, but you are a very apt and able (but very rational) artful dodger.
Quoting noAxioms
:grin: My 85 year old mother has terminal breast cancer and has also way outlived her expertly predicted time. She has had no treatment but continues to battle on. She is even planning a cataract removal in the next few months. She lives with me and demonstrates to me everyday, how to live and how to face death.
Now were asking if its intelligent, not if its life. Something can be either and not the other, so its a different question.
Doesnt seem to follow. Most argue the opposite, that it is the god that supplies the purpose otherwise absent. Your proposal of inherent purpose is equivalent to that of objective morality without involvement of actual commands.
Excuse me, but I never said I (people in general) didnt have purpose.
Really? Like to see them try to make a dent in it, positive or negative. We can perhaps take action that will ring through the galaxy, but further? The universe?? Thats not even allowed by physics.
What is an antinatalist to you? You bring it up a lot. Do they propose letting the human race go extinct by not having any kids? All that will do is make antinatalism go extinct, sort of like the Jim Jones colony.
No idea what you suggest by this. An example would help. A bus hasnt intent just because everyone on it wants to go to the same destination.
Quoting universenessThats whats in a human name. Not sure how this was relevant to my text to which it was a reply.
This isnt a physics forum, but thats a fun one to refute. How fast must a ping-pong ball hit Earth (from space) to come out the other side? OK, the ball doesnt come out intact, but neither does the Earth.
From one monist to another, there is no hard problem of consciousness.
Quoting universenessOK. I thought you were attempting to justify it, not just put it out there as a premise.
Whereas the logic gates in a computer require no more complexity to do whatever they do? I mean, there are more parts than just neurons and logic gates to both things. Humans neurons for instance are very sensitive to chemicals. Logic gates are very sensitive to supply voltages, but the latter doesnt gather information from said voltage variances. In the end, both are machines made of simple primitives, an argument that doesnt preclude an arbitrary complex process from taking place. This bit started from your assertion that computers cannot be information processors, but Im looking for the distinction that makes this so.
I am on that list as well. Theres no evidence that neural activity in any way leverages quantum indeterminacy. I mean, it leverages quantum effects since matter cannot exist in the first place without quantum mechanics, but what a neuron does can be done (very inefficiently) with levers and gears and such. Its a classic process. Theres no information to be had in quantum measurements, else creatures would long ago have evolved mechanisms to take advantage of it.
Tunneling is. Just like transistors, it is used to get a signal through what would otherwise be an impenetrable potential barrier. But as I said, that can be done less efficiently with classic means like say relays or railroad trains.
I must refute this assertion of yours.
Im in an Alaska ice cream shop 9 years ago awaiting my turn. I know what I want for me and the kids and I have the cash already counted out, sales tax included. I order and have the exact change on the counter before she says the total. How did you do that? she asks. I reply dismissively Its just math. Take the cones and exit the place. After Ive left, she remarks to the next customer: What a mean old man!. Next customer was my brother. The label stuck and I embrace it. Im now known in my family as the mean old man. Were all still laughing about it.
Then, unless they are immortal, they are doomed.
Quoting noAxioms
Remember, my 'objective truth' candidate is now life that can demonstrate intent and purpose to a minimum level of being able to affect it's environment(planet) (and potentially its interstellar neighbourhood) in the same way we humans can. So my criteria for qualification, is currently, very much in flux. I am hoping that I can fine tune it effectively, due to interaction with folks like yourself.
Quoting noAxioms
I think it does follow. I have already given my reasons. What's the point of asking questions, if god already has all the answers? But WE DO ask questions and WE DO have intent and purpose.
WHY? If god exists, we would not experience such compulsions. For me, this IS evidence that god cannot exist. I accept that others (especially theists), wont agree.
Quoting noAxioms
Consider yourself excused! I am glad you agree people have purpose! Do you agree that god is not needed to produce such a property of life?
Quoting noAxioms
They advocate for their own extinction as part of their goal of ending all suffering, based on their convoluted moral imperative. They are not benign. They have, for example, a vile organisation in the USA that think that perhaps they should try to help the extinction of our species happen, if they cant get our consent. They are total kook's, yes, but we ignore any growth of such at our peril.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, perhaps I went too far by referring to destroying the universe. I am happy to restrict their threat to life on Earth.
The intent of the people on the bus dictates the direction of the bus and therefore the bus is 'useful,' has a function,' 'SERVES a purpose'. The people give meaning to the existence of the bus. They do the same for the universe.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
So yes, the purpose and intent of rabbits is a poor comparison with the intent and purpose of humans.
Rabbits cant impact their environment like humans can.
Quoting noAxioms
I think the term monism has weaknesses. Priority monism or the concept of existence monism, can be used as arguments in support of god, such as in BS ontological arguments like the Kalam cosmological argument. I am monistic in the sense of the credence level I assign to the existence of, and the search for a t.o.e.
Quoting noAxioms
Logic gates and binary are fully understood and are as 'fundamental' in computing as quarks are in physics. We don't yet know the fundamentals of human consciousness. We don't know enough yet imo, to make any exciting fundamental comparisons between electronic computers and the human brain.
There are plenty of similarities, yes but none of the current comparisons overwhelm me .... yet.
Quoting noAxioms
The distinction is that current computers have no self-awareness and do not demonstrate any ability to 'understand.' That includes demonstrating 'understanding' of what 'information' IS, (labelled data).
In binary addition, 1+1 is 10. A human and a computer can both do this calculation but only a human 'understands' it. A computer processes 'on' + 'on' as two closed gates representing two 1's in the binary 'units' numerical column and produces an open gate in that column and a closed gate in a representation of the decimal 'two's' column. The computer does not understand why it connects this low level operation to its HCI (human computer interface) system which places the output bit map displaying the image of '2' on a screen. The computer assigns no meaning whatsoever to the process it just performed or the output it placed on the screen. IT IS A BRAINLESS MACHINE!
From here
Birds like the European robin have an internal compass which appears to make use of a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. ((Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)) Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding.
Also you might like this, if you have not watched it already:
I repeat and even more so, since your posting of the humble story above.
You sound like a nice person noAxioms but I add, you have a nice family to.
'Ribbing,' those you love most, is a very strong part of my own Scottish tradition.
Remind me of the reasons. I seem to have missed it, unless the question-asking thing is it.
The reason we ask questions in the face of an omniscient god is that said god seems to not communicate those answers. Be great to have a god that acted like a google search, but we both know theres no such interface. If there is an omniscient god, it keeps its secrets.
I just dont agree with this connection. I have no trouble envisioning question-asking in a setup with a god.
Yes to that.
Makes suffering sound like a bad thing. If I could take a pill that removed my suffering, Id not take it. And as I said, they seem to advocate only the extinction of antinatalism.
I dont think that is within the realm of human capability either, even if we do manage to trim over 80% of the species. Life will continue, being exceptionally difficult to stamp out. I dont think another Theia event would suffice.
Quoting universenessAgree to all, but with the implications of being useful/functional to the people. You go from that to the bus knows itself.
I think I was asking about the purpose of humanity, as opposed to the purpose of humans/people, something which Ive acknowledged.
Didnt understand any of that. Maybe I should say naturalism: The lack of need of supernatural to explain what happens.
.
Logic gates are not fundamental in the way that quarks are to matter. Gates are made of transistors and other components for instance. I was roughly equating a gate to a neuron, both classical constructs with classical behavior. This seems to be the fundamental of consciousness, despite your assertion otherwise. As I said, the same function can be performed by a different sort of switch with similar results, the China-brain being a sort of thought-experiment on the subject (not to be confused with China-room which is something else and fairly fallacious).
My opinion is otherwise. Neither statement constitutes evidence one way or another, but one can always choose to never apply the word to something nonhuman. It sparks fear in me if we ever encounter an alien race because of the tendency to refuse to apply human language to anything non-human.
Plenty of evidence to the contrary, else things like ChatGPT wouldnt know when to apply the operation. Not all computers add in binary. I had one that didnt. Not all humans do math in decimal, myself included sometimes. Sometimes I do calculus in analog (kind of like a bird does), which gets results faster by orders of magnitude.
A computer has no more awareness of that than you do of a specific nerve firing.
That it is.
Quoting universenessThis sounds really interesting. No link provided. I found this: cbc.ca/news/science/quantum-weirdness-used-by-plants-animals-1.912061
Its a pop article written by somebody who sounds like they just learned of quantum stuff an hour ago, so plenty of mistakes. All matter depends on QM physics, so just because quantum stuff is going on doesnt imply an exploitation of the weirdness. For instance, the photoelectric effect utilized a quantum effect, but a solar cell on say your calculator is essentially a classical device. As said before, both nerves and transistors utilize tunneling, but their function is classical. So what does this article say? Yes, it mentions the tunneling.
appears to make use of quantum entanglement a linkage of two or more very small objects so that any change to one is immediately experienced by another
Entangled particles do no such thing. Information could be sent faster than light if this were true. More detail is needed to see what theyve actually found in regards to this. There cannot be information gained in entanglement. Theres no way Lloyd (with the credentials listed) would have said it that way, except perhaps condescending to a very naive audience.
Physics experiments show that certain entangled electrons are also very sensitive to the orientation of weak magnetic fields, and the birds' behaviour suggests they are using that to navigate.
That one sounds more plausible, but it doesnt give any clue as to how or why entangled electrons would be more sensitive. A link to the actual paper would be nice, but I wonder how readable it is. I presume that both electrons are under control of the bird.
The part about the quantum walk sounds awesome. Everything seems to be using QM to do some natural thing. None of them are gathering information from beyond as would be expected in a dualistic setup where quantum probabilities are violated.
Many natural happenstances could wipe out all life on Earth, before I finish typing this post. 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. But that misses the point here. Has any other species that you know of or that has existed on Earth, visited the moon or built a space station or a city?
Have any of them memorialised information in some equivalent system to books? Did any of them reach the scientific knowledge we have or created tech which is anywhere near the equal of ours?
We are even beginning to create tech/solutions to such existential threats that killed the dinosaurs, such as the recently, successful DART mission. What the humans are doing on Earth was and is very intended. Some of the consequences are very bad indeed but the base purpose and original intentions (good and/or bad,) are irrefutable. For example, 'I intend to settle here and grow food, farm animals, control water flow,' etc 'our purpose is to build a city here, and mine available resources to do so, and to maintain and grow the city and ...... I shall be king (let's not forget the nefarious b********. We have still to deal with them effectively.) These are irrefutable examples of human intent and purpose, with the ultimate goal of reaching the omnis.
Quoting noAxioms
The reasons are:
1. We ask questions
2. We demonstrate intent and purpose, that can significantly change our surroundings and potentially, the contents of the universe. There is no evidence of god(s) creating anything.
3. We aspire to the omni states, because they do not currently exist. Why would you aspire to creating a wheel, if a wheel already exists? By the same logic, why would we aspire to omniscience if an omniscient already exists?
You yourself make the statement 'If there is an omniscient god, it keeps its secrets.' Then we are being rational, when we conclude that this god suggestion, has no existent and it is irrational to suggest it exists. This is an example of where a statement such as 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,' fails. As the evidence that god does not exist is very strong (I accept that it's not yet strong enough to irrefutably 'disprove' god, but all it has left, are pathetic god of the gaps suggestions.)
In the case of a posited creator of everything and the posit that it has all the omni properties, the fact that it refuses to reveal it's existence, irrefutably, to everyone on Earth, IS, a very strong reason to conclude that it does not exist. 1, 2 and 3 above are also very strong reasons. Free will, if it truly exists, is a natural happenstance, it was never given to us and its consequences are emergent.
Then, try running your thought forward. We are emergent, god is not, so omnigod cannot develop, grow, improve, aspire, etc. We can. We have purpose, it has no purpose at all, so it might as well not exist and I am suggesting that it is therefore rational and in fact irresistible to declare god, nonexistent.
Time for humans to stop scapegoating gods and take full ownership of free will and emerging capability.
A nonexistent god, free's life such as humans and allows us to continue to be emergent and eventually become whatever we are able to become, within the time frame offered by the life time of a universe, constrained within an entropic future. Human's could exist for many many 'billions' of more years.
How long will the theists tolerate the complete absence and silence of their supernatural superhero?
They need to stop being afraid of what's outside of our caves! We need to trust each other, to allay our fears. The Klingon stated what theists need to do (in their heads) , quite well with:
Quoting noAxioms
No I don't, as the difference is, the bus is OF us, it is our tech. WE ARE OF THE UNIVERSE! I agree there is no evidence that we come from it's intent (as this let's god in again). We came from happenstance. BUT we have emergent properties. Properties that can grow in strength and extent of influence. We have the potential of affecting a larger and larger extent of the content of the universe.
Fast forward this, and through lifeforms such as us, the universe may become a system that ultimately grows a communicative system that can affect every part of its 'body.' I don't think that such an anthropocentric projection of a 'networked mind' which will eventually become, say, intergalactic, is impossible. I would assume that the reality will be quite different from my suggestion here, but it is still much more exciting to me than any future suggested by theism, theosophy or the moronic antinatalists.
The question of exactly who's future musings are correct here, remains to be realised.
We must all plant our flag/make our choice or we will stay forever fogged.
From wiki:
Monism attributes oneness or singleness to a concept, e.g. existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished. So basically monism traces everything back to a single origin, which suits big bang theory or the idea of a t.o.e (theory of everything,) but it does not engage any multiverse theories or cyclical universe theories etc and it can also be used to support monotheism.
Monism is a term from philosophy (I think), so, perhaps someone like @180 Proof or @Banno could confirm I am not misusing the term here and if I am, they could perhaps correct me.
What do you mean 'No link provided'? Did you not see the video I posted by Jim Al-Khalili about how quantum physics is employed in the biological world?
When I clicked on the link you posted, it took me to the OP of this thread??
You then go on to discuss some aspects of quantum physics in the biological world but I remain confused as to what source you are using.
I don't know what you mean by:
Quoting noAxioms
A change in one IS immediately experienced by the entangled object, regardless of the distance between them. No signal physically travels between the entangled particles.
Quantum entanglement experiment
Reading wiki's description of the history of the term I read:
[b]"The term monism was introduced in the 18th century by Christian von Wolff, in his work Logic (1728), to designate types of philosophical thought in which the attempt was made to eliminate the dichotomy of body and mind and explain all phenomena by one unifying principle, or as manifestations of a single substance.
The mindbody problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The problem was addressed by René Descartes in the 17th century, resulting in Cartesian dualism, and by pre-Aristotelian philosophers, in Avicennian philosophy, and in earlier Asian and more specifically Indian traditions.
It was later also applied to the theory of absolute identity set forth by Hegel and Schelling. Thereafter the term was more broadly used, for any theory postulating a unifying principle. The opponent thesis of dualism also was broadened, to include pluralism. According to Urmson, as a result of this extended use, the term is "systematically ambiguous".
According to Jonathan Schaffer, monism lost popularity due to the emergence of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century, which revolted against the neo-Hegelians. Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer, who were strong proponents of positivism, "ridiculed the whole question as incoherent mysticism".
The mindbody problem has reemerged in social psychology and related fields, with the interest in mindbody interaction and the rejection of Cartesian mindbody dualism in the identity thesis, a modern form of monism. Monism is also still relevant to the philosophy of mind, where various positions are defended.[/b]
I focussed on the words 'and explain all phenomena by one unifying principle.' This seems to me that monism suggests that ultimately, everything comes from a single source ( hence my connection to the search for a t.o.e.) In your description, can there be more than one eternal? (timeless entity or property). Do you agree that monism is used in ontology based arguments such as the Kalam?
Is monotheism a monism?
Ok, thanks for your input!
Quoting universenessAh, near the equal like there is some sort of single scale by which nothing else measures up. You name all these human things that other species havent done, but ignore all the marvels that other species do that humans have not and can not.
Anyway, point taken. We do human some things better than do other things, and we exhibit collective intent to a point. Weve put a man on the moon for a few hours but that doesnt make us nearly as fit for those offworld environments as some creatures. Be interesting to explore what would be needed to change that, and what the implications of those changes would be.
Number 2 doesnt follow from the first premise, so I take it as (two) additional premises. Im willing to accept them, but additional premises weaken an argument that the first premise is sufficient. Id like it better if premise 2b was that there is no evidence of gods. The comment as worded leaves it open that there is an omniscient god that isnt involved in the creation of anything.
This is a 4th premise now, and one I dont accept. We cannot aspire to an impossible state. We ask questions because were in present need of information, not because we have some impossible goal.
The converse of the proposal suggests that given the existence of a god that knows everything, wed have no need of information at all despite the fact that no information is conveyed to us by this existing entity. Thats absurd.
Because I need a wheel to move my stuff and the existing wheel isnt accessible to me. The question seems to presume there is no need for two of anything, even to the point of two people both knowing the same fact.
Well, it depends on ones definition of exists. I hold a definition that involves measurement by a specific thing, so indeed, absence of measurement is nonexistence relative to that thing by that definition, but most people use a different definition.
Free will is another thing with all sorts of definitions. I define it as not being remote-controlled (possessed) by some external entity. An example is a slug that gets some parasite that makes it change color and sit in prominent places and wiggle enticingly, in violation of the will of the slug. It lacks the free will of an unaffected slug which is in charge of its own sluggy destiny. Again, thats just my definition.
Scapegoating the gods has a purpose, but probably not one that serves humanity as a whole.
Given that our planet will not be fit for multicellular life in about a billion years, where exactly should we do this existing, and how will we still be human if we change enough to be fit for that place? Its not like star trek where 80% of planets are class M meaning we dont have to burden the wardrobe dept with making space suits today. If we can terraform some other world, whats stopping us from terraforming Earth back to where its an environment where were fit?
They admittedly seem rather bent on forcing the issue given their public policies. I have to admit extreme cynicism when it comes to religious leaders and pundits. It seems incompatible to hold a top position in organized religion and also hold to the beliefs taught, which means theyre not actually trying to force Gods hand with the dangerous policies.
Quoting universenessI dont mean the word by the definition you quote. I simply meant not-dualism, no supernatural mind.
Quoting universenessNo, I didnt see any link, but it was pretty easy to search given what you posted. I watched it.
So it does, but if you copy and paste it into a url bar, it goes to the right place. Is the linking messed up on this site?
This is not true. Not sure where youre getting your physics. Again, a message could be sent faster than light if this was true.
The link you gave works. Its to a page about historical experiments, culminating in a refutation of local realism.
The article doesnt say anything like a change being experienced by the other, but maybe youre reading that into a line that I missed.
A change? No, a measurement of one is somehow connected to a measurement of the other. At different frames of reference one or the other can seem to be "first". "Collapse of the wave function" seems to run strongly here, but I still suspect it has more to do with solutions of differential equations "existing" simultaneously: superposition. For example, a particle is at z=1+2i, but the equation describing its position has solutions z=1+2i and z=1-2i. Which holds? Make the measurement and find out. Collapse the damn thing.
I'm naive about this subject, I admit. It just feels better to circumvent the woo when possible. :cool:
:up:
Not a problem!
Quoting noAxioms
I cant fly like a bird but I can strap a jet pack to my back or get on an aeroplane. I don't ignore the abilities other species can demonstrate. I assert that humans can affect their surroundings/environment and potentially, the extraterrestial contents of the universe, much more significantly than any other species on Earth. We can also think, externally memorialise and leave legacy in ways that no other species on Earth can. Can tigers discuss the history of tigers. amongst other tigers? Do tigers even know they have been labelled tigers by us?
Quoting noAxioms
Transhumanism does have currently running science projects. Here is a top ten, based on a search for
'transhuman projects'
10. Cryonics
9. Virtual Reality
8. Gene Therapy/RNA Interference
7. Space Colonization
6. Cybernetics
5. Autonomous Self-Replicating Robotics
4. Molecular Manufacturing
3. Megascale Engineering
2. Mind Uploading
1. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Quoting noAxioms
I don't mind that possibility. A god that has nothing to do with us and did not create us and cannot or chooses not to involve itself with us is completely irrelevant to us and always will be.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't see these as separate premise's to my main premise that 'humans are a way for a system to know how and why it IS, from the inside out. We are emergent in this purpose and intent.' Any other assertion I make would be consequential to this main assertion.
I don't have enough proof of anything I claim in this thread, to create a strongly convincing logical syllogism. I have already stated that I am interested in what percentage credence level, others would assign, to what I am typing in this thread. I am not suggesting that my claims here, are far superior to the claims made by theism. They ask for high credence levels to be assigned to their claims all the time.
I am just interested in, whether or not, intelligent folks, would find the kind of claims I am putting forward here, as more convincing, when compared to, the 'god is responsible for it all,' claim.
Knowing the speed of light in a vacuum to the nth decimal point is 'impossible,' if you make n big enough. That's why I suggest our attempts are asymptotic but we will still always 'aspire' to omniscience.
The fact that no information is conveyed to us by this (proposedly) existing entity, suggests it does not exist. We would only need to do what this god needed us to do, if it was in communication with us. Why is that absurd? I agree that such a slave like role for us is unpalatable but what is the point of us learning stuff, if we are merely finding some stuff out that this god already knows. What would be the point of us aspiring to anything? How would that serve this entity? All we could do with any scraps of knowledge from it's table, is try to improve our experiences, but it could do that for us to the nth degree, anytime it chose to. It seems to me that if god exists, then the antinatalists have a good case!
Quoting noAxioms
No, the question becomes, why are you having to reinvent the wheel? why did the existing supernatural not just provide you with a wheel? or an 'anti-grav travel platform,' or just teleport your stuff to wherever you need it. Why do humans have to reinvent tech that god already has? Unless, this god does not exist and therefore has no intent or purpose.
God then, has no lifeforce of it's own. Any god property only exists in lifeforms like humans who (asymptotically) aspire to the omnis.
Quoting noAxioms
If we are not existing in interstellar space within the next billion years then we deserve to be extinct imo.
Yeah, doing everything we can to protect the Earth will always be an imperative I think.
Selective evolution is the state which which supersedes natural evolution. I don't mean that natural evolution ever stops, I just mean that science tech will have a much faster effect and can be fully controlled via intent. Our manipulation of agriculture and domesticated animals is proof of that.
'Human' is a template, do we need to be so precious about it? Are the aesthetics of being human, as important, as having the same intellectual ability/identity and physical functionality of being human?
I would welcome increased longevity, robustness and functionality. I would be willing to become more 'biomorphic,' so I could exist in many environments. I don't feel particularly attached to 'looking' human.
It would depend on the existence of others who were 'like me' or who were willing to 'accept' me for what I had 'become.'
:smile: :up:
:up:
:clap:
Quoting noAxioms
Ok.
Quoting noAxioms
Based on what @jgill posted, it seems my choice of words here was poor.
Quoting jgill
I was basing my words on descriptions like:
Quantum entanglement is a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space. Despite their vast separation, a change induced in one will affect the other.
From: https://www.space.com/31933-quantum-entanglement-action-at-a-distance.html
Wiki has:
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance.
From the The science exchange based at Caltech:
[b]When researchers study entanglement, they often use a special kind of crystal to generate two entangled particles from one. The entangled particles are then sent off to different locations. For this example, let's say the researchers want to measure the direction the particles are spinning, which can be either up or down along a given axis. Before the particles are measured, each will be in a state of superposition, or both "spin up" and "spin down" at the same time.
If the researcher measures the direction of one particle's spin and then repeats the measurement on its distant, entangled partner, that researcher will always find that the pair are correlated: if one particle's spin is up, the other's will be down (the spins may instead both be up or both be down, depending on how the experiment is designed, but there will always be a correlation). Returning to our dancer metaphor, this would be like observing one dancer and finding them in a pirouette, and then automatically knowing the other dancer must also be performing a pirouette. The beauty of entanglement is that just knowing the state of one particle automatically tells you something about its companion, even when they are far apart.[/b]
In consideration of the above sources, I am happy to replace my sentence with @jgill's.
My main point was that I don't think any information travels between the two when a measurement of one or the other is made.
If Lennard Susskind is correct Quantum entanglement may BE gravity!
If you can find the time, have a listen to 'debunking quantum gravity,' from youtube, shown below:
Cryonics is about as useless as mind uploading. Dont see any benefit to either except immortality where said immortality doesnt serve any purpose. By current law, and person resulting from such a state has no legal rights.
VR has mild uses, and is already employed. The need for it will drop as autonomy of the controlled thing increases. Said autonomy (your #5) is very useful.
High on the list is post-humanism, for which the gene-therapy is but a step, but humans do not have a good track record of tolerating different species. They wont in any way like or accept something seen as a replacement, especially if theyre given all the best jobs.
That wasnt listed as a premise. Are we starting anew with the proof or are we steering away from the subject? What system is doing the knowing here, because I cannot think of a way in which this can work. My country doesnt know most of what I know for instance, despite me being part of the country. Any yes, a country, unlike say the universe, is arguably something that knows stuff.
OK. I give very low credence to people aspiring to being omniscient, like I cant think of anybody besides you who might agree to such a thing.
Well, they encourage it with impossibly high stakes with which to multiply the otherwise low probability claims, and of course theres also the indoctrination since early childhood. I mean, the N Koreans really do believe KJ Un is a god and the west is poised to destroy them at any moment. Its not that they are low intelligence over there, but rather that theyve no evidence to contradict that. The purpose of the claims is not to be an explanation or to be an actual best attempt at truth. Neither has the same purpose as science.
And yet knowing where the next dot will land in a double-slit setup can no better be known 1000 years from now than it can be today. Ditto for the weather next July 1. But then, given certain interpretations of QM, not even an omniscient entity could make either prediction, which is sort of contradiction, no?
Quoting universenessAlmost by definition, yes.
Already answered that. Because we need to know it as well.
Quoting universenessYou asked why we should create one, not why we should invent one. I should invent one because I have no access to (or even knowledge of) the invention made by the guy a months walk from here.
If a supernatural entity provided me with all my needs at all times, I wouldnt need the wheel. For that matter, I wouldnt need senses, or kidneys, or anything else. I think heaven is supposed to be that sort of torture.
It is fallacious to go from merely unhelpful to nonexistent.
Interstellar space is not an environment in which the human animal has evolved to thrive. Well need to change into something else to be fit out there. Thats the posthuman thing they talk about in the transhumanist literature. Point is, post-human isnt human anymore any more than we are still a rodent.
Im kind of all for it, but for the social issues I brought up at the top of this post. Its considered immoral by many.
So if we find a possible wet planet best suited to something like an octopus, and we instill similar/better intellectual ability/identity and physical functionality (theyve already got most of all that), but still essentially a cephalopod by DNA, youd be OK with calling it human? Its a word that indicates capability and not primate lineage at all?
Death by age is an adaptation added to certain branches a long time ago due to its benefits. It enabled the very complexity that youre trying to encourage in these post. Sure you want to take that away? I agree that some extra time would be nice to help increase the productive-to-education time ratio. Humans become adults now almost a decade later than they did not too long ago.
Engineering a new form isnt done to you. Its done to a new generation, so the question is, would you accept your kids for what theyve been engineered into?
Quoting universenessThat was a long vid. Havent the time to look. Does it make predictions? Is there a falsification test for his idea vs the consensus? Is there even a consensus quantum gravity candidate yet?
My personal philosophical worldview is entitled Enformationism. It's based on emerging evidence that the whole universe is an information-processing system, similar to a cosmic computer program. Evolution is the general program for causing novel forms of matter to emerge from the interaction of Energy & Natural Laws (computer operating system?). That inherent code (evolutionary DNA?) contains the information necessary to combine causal Energy & malleable Matter into more & more complex forms ; hence the emergence of sophisticated organisms from simpler raw materials.
Immaterial intelligence seems to be directly connected to complexity of functional organization, such as found in the human brain. But how could a random process of matter mutation produce the technological & self-conscious minds that are imaginative enough to speculate that humanity could evolve its own artificial intelligent species of organism/mechanism? Logically, such positive progressive evolution (natural technology) must be non-random & possibly intentional. :nerd:
Integrated Information :
Koch's and Tononi's theories raise another question : if information is ubiquitous in the universe, why is the biological human mind its most powerful processor?
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page13.html
Quoting universeness
I tend to agree with : "I guess it's plausible but not inevitable." The notion of human Culture playing the role of technological evolution, by producing novel systems of organization, makes sense if you understand that Culture itself is an emergent organization from Natural Evolution. But, like all complex novelty-generating processes, the future of uber-complex Culture is unpredictable, and no particular projection from now-to-then is inevitable. :smile:
Technological Singularity :
Futurist & transhumanist Ray Kurtzweil has optimistically conjectured that a mindless-but-lawful universe is accidentally stumbling toward a universal mind of god-like proportions. And cognitive historian Y.N. Harari, in Homo Deus, foresees the emergence of a cosmic data processing system . . . like God, yet entirely natural and matter-based. On the other hand, I have deduced, from the same database, that the materialist's arbitrary laws of physical evolution are more like purposeful metaphysical codes. Historically and theoretically, Evolution proceeds via the inventive interaction between random Chance and contextual Choice. That progressive process is not aimless though, as some would have it, but pointed in a positive direction, as measured by one-way Time, as recorded in human history, as inferred from Archeology, and as conjectured in Cosmology. Such an apparently teleological universe must have originated from an intentional source of some kind. Since mathematical Information seems to be the coded language of evolution, I like to call that cosmic Programmer, the Enformer.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page16.html
Interesting. (I bolded the ones which seem more likely than not; however, the implausible ones, IMO, I've [s]crossed-out[/s].)
There is no reason to why the TS can't happen.
1. The biological singularity: Life from inanimate matter (bacteria)
2. The cognitive singularity: Mind from life (primates, dolphins, etc.)
---
3. The technological singularity: Übermind from mind (machine/nonbiological superintelligence, kind courtesy human/biological intelligence)
What makes me hair stand on end (not out fear but out of wonder) is whether this is gonna be an ouroboros. Mind = No Mind i.e. the wise fool.
Quoting 180 Proof
I consider cryonics a valid act of desperation. Similar to pharaohs who had their bodies embalmed, inside large pyramids etc. due to individual 'hope against hope,' that they can survive what is currently inevitable.
The odds are against such tech being successful, I agree, but humans will take an outside chance, if that's the best available. Like flapping your arms, if you are falling from a high building. You might as well! You have nothing to lose! You might be able to grab a flagpole on the way down! I love the fact that such people try so hard to sustain their lives (in your face antinatalists!)
I also like the fact that both yourself and @180 Proof are not against all transhuman efforts, you just don't have much confidence in some of them. Personally, I would have more confidence in cryonics than I would in Pascals wager.
Quoting noAxioms
I am not sure what you mean by this, unless it's just to confirm that you don't think the cryogenic tech would work, i.e, you wont be able to 'reanimate' a dead human brain in the future, as there is no evidence that its contents/human identity/consciousness are preserved, by deep freezing the brain.
Quoting noAxioms
I think it depends on whether or not VR and AR can grow into something more akin to the type of 'holography' we see depicted on shows like 'star trek.' Will we every get near to something like:
Quoting noAxioms
Well, that remains a very interesting question about any 'transhuman,' or your, in my opinion, more negative, 'post-human' reality. At what point will 'transhuman' efforts result in a new species?
Is a human kept alive by a pacemaker, still fully human? I would say yes, but I would also say yes for a brain inside a complete tech body, a cyborg or cybernetic human. I have no doubt opinions and reactions at the time will widely differ, but perhaps less so, than they would now.
In my OP, I think I asked a bunch of questions rather than tried to 'stamp' any definitive premise.
I am moving in the direction of hypothesis, yes. I am trying my best to 'tune' my suggestions based on the feedback I am getting in this thread. My musings on exactly what is demonstrably emergent in humans, continues, but I am currently most attracted to 'asymptotic intent and purpose towards omniscience, with the goal of knowing the workings and purpose of the universe.' We do this, from the status of being OF the universe. So, our intent is to figure out the universe (a system) from the status of being a currently, distributed, set of individual minds, who currently employ various (relatively low level,) methods of 'networking.' My musings on this, are very much, still in flux but I feel confident enough, to use human demonstrations of intent and purpose and 'networking,' etc, in other threads, to combat theistic, theosophic, pessimistic, doomster, antinatalist etc, viewpoints. I also now see free will (if it truly exists) as not gifted from god but as a result of intent and purpose, in the same/similar way, that time is relative and is the result of change.
What you describe as 'what a country knows,' can increase and expand with time. Can such as the concept of country you are suggesting, be expanded to 'planet'? or solar system or interstellar existence, if such was the spread of humanity in the future. So why not 'the universe,' if you apply enough time and effort to such a goal, an asymptotic aspiration towards omniscience?'
I think my use of the term asymptotic is important in my suggested human aspirations towards omniscience. I also think my suggestion of considering this via the result of the 'collective' effort of all human intent and purpose (including all scientific research), is also crucial.
Quoting noAxioms
I accept that you can use terror to indoctrinate people, especially if you start when they are young, but its a very old tactic that fails in the final analysis. 'You cant fool all of the people all of the time.' I know that the nefarious can survive, and even thrive, very well, by fooling all or even some of the people, all of the time, but I think that is becoming less and less true as more and more of us become more and more informed. This reminds me again of one of my fav muse tracks that I have posted before. I think we can now counter such, better than we have been able to before:
Quoting noAxioms
If you accept the definition of the term omniscient, then such certainly could do what you suggest it could not. I don't know what human science will allow us to do in the future. I am confident and content to predict that it will be more than we can do at the moment.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
I think there is some contradiction here. I think both of us give high credence to the assertion that god has no existent. Would you agree?
Quoting noAxioms
I think we will try to maintain our 'human' label for as long as we can. I am not particularly precious regarding such. No doubt their will be issue's of human V transhuman, rights, racial status, redundancy etc. I can only hope we do better than we do with issues between black/white, male/female, ability/disability, gender variation etc.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: Well, I would probably prefer our science to have reached polymorphic (shapeshifting) tech:
Yes, change continues, a system which has been performing the same input, process and output, even for millennia, can end, and be replaced/updated. I have already stated that I think selective genetic engineering will supplant any continuing evolutionary effects via natural selection, when it comes to future humans and the environment extent they choose to, or can, affect.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, that's an issue of consent. We cant get the consent of newborns, before they are born, but we would default to parental consent/intent or/and societal consent/intent as we do now, but hopefully based on a better global politics than we have now.
Quoting noAxioms
It was a scientific lecture which contained an interesting hypothesis based on current quantum physics.
It did not highlight the proposals predictive power. It is falsifiable if someone can show its not true and I would say 'the most popular' quantum gravity candidate at the moment is loop quantum gravity.
Why do you score out this one? Is it because you think it's so far away or impossible?
I had read some of your stuff at https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page80.html.
Information as a universal fundamental has to be a credible position to take at some level imo.
Information is however 'labelled data,' so would 'data' not be the fundamental as opposed to information? Is that not a critical distinction?
Quoting Gnomon
Why bring in a term such as 'Immaterial intelligence?' You would first have to convince me/others that such a term has any meaningful existent. What evidence do you have of immaterial intelligence?
Quoting Gnomon
I agree but why use an 'immaterial of the gaps' approach?
Why not continue to observe the ability of lifeforms such as humans to demonstrate intent and purpose?
It seems that combination of fundamentals, can produce a universe with life that has intent and purpose.
We know that because we exist. I think that such did come from random happenstance but I cant prove that 'random' truly exists but that is a gap that would never choose to fill with 'immaterial input.'
Quoting Gnomon
I can't answer such a 'why' question. Current human science can't either but I don't see how 'immaterial of the gaps,' help in anyway? If this 'immaterial' has intent and purpose then why are we trying to reinvent that which already has an existent? Do you think we are trying to gain the same ability as what you muse as 'the immaterial?'
If we could project into some future AI systems, as was depicted in The Lawnmower Man.
Quoting Gnomon
:up:
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
This is where we diverge. These are just too close to god of the gaps arguments for me, and take us nowhere. My question remains. If life in this universe can, at best, in the final analysis, only aspire to become that which already exists, then that is, in my opinion, 'pointless.' I don't mind posits that suggests we may have a collective purpose that could be compared to the omni qualifications for the god label. God is emergent, via us, is a harmless concept, but god via religion, remains very, very pernicious. I think if the god label was used without any connection whatsoever, to such nonsense fables as 'El,' 'Yahweh,' 'Jehovah,' 'Allah,' etc. Then it may have some use.
Can you give me any examples in the natural world of a teleology? Did a wolf get the teeth it needed due to intent from some immaterial source that already had the design specs?
The wise fool is just a contradiction in terms imo.
I like the fact that you use the term singularity, more as an indication of a pivotal point of a change of great significance, rather than the more common suggestion that the tec singularity oft suggested would be the beginning of our demise. It may be the beginning of our ascension to a vastly more interesting physical existence.
That's one of many ways to look at it. As far as I can see, it's not an issue of whether to live or die, but rather how we wanna die? Agree @180 Proof?
I typically use the word "Information" in a more general sense than "Data". The original etymological usage of "Information" referred to the meanings stored in human Minds (ideas ; concepts)*1. But modern computer terminology has popularized the notion of "Data", which is Information stripped of personal meaning*2. That abstraction makes it more narrowly specific for digital computers, but almost meaningless for human comprehension. That's why code compilers must be used to translate semantic human Information into computer Data.
In the book I'm currently reading, The Ascent of Information by Caleb Scharf, he coins a new term "Dataome" (compare to biological Genome)to represent the kind of information that humans have off-loaded from brains to man-made inventions for external storage & processing. His usage may be closer to what you have in mind. But my philosophical concept of Information is coming from a completely different direction. Rather than modern science & technology, my definition of "Information" goes back to Plato's notion of "Form" as the essence of all things, including ideas*3. :smile:
*1. Etymology : The English word "information" comes from Middle French enformacion/informacion/information . . . . Latin informati?(n) 'conception, teaching, creation'. . . . Information is not knowledge itself, but the meaning that may be derived from a representation through interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information
Note -- Another definition of "meaning" is "aboutness', mental reference to something relevant to the thinker.
*2. Information is :
*** [i]Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
*** For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
*** When spelled with an I, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an E, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Note -- Shannon Information (data) is Syntactic (rules), but traditional Information is Semantic (meaning)
*3. What is Information ? :
The power to enform, to create, to cause change, the essence of awareness. . . . .
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page16.html
Quoting universeness
I apologize if my word choice conjured up an image of Einstein's ghost. I was just thinking of the Intelligence usually associated with "information" as an abstract quality instead of a physical thing or being. Perhaps I should ask if "material intelligence" has any meaningful existence for you. Like many forms of Information, the existence of IQ must be inferred rationally, instead of proven empirically. Was Einstein's superior "intelligence" known by means of material evidence?
Anyway, as I said, Intelligence seems to be a function of material complexity. But a "function" is also not a material object. Like many forms of Information, it's a relationship between variables, such as input & output. In the case of intelligence, the function is a relationship between Brain complexity and Mental output : novelty of ideas, etc. But even "complexity" is a mental concept (evaluation), not a physical organ. :yikes:
Quoting universeness
Again, "intelligence" is an immaterial quality. So, why not use an "immaterial" concept to fill the gap in knowledge? Besides, the kind of Information that my thesis is concerned with is more like immaterial Energy than material Matter*4. For example, a Photon is supposed to be the carrier of Energy, but its existence must be inferred from its effects on matter, because Energy itself (apart from matter) is invisible & intangible*5. The description of "energy" in the link below is essentially the same as that of Causal Information*6. Ironically, many intelligent people think of Energy and Information as forms of matter, when in reality it's just the opposite. :nerd:
*4. How is information related to energy in physics? :
Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems of information in all of its forms, and all entities in this universe is composed of information.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22084/how-is-information-related-to-energy-in-physics
*5. Energy is invisible yet its all around us and throughout the universe. We use it every day, we have it in our bodies and some of it comes from other planets! Energy can never be made or destroyed, but its form can be converted and changed.
https://ypte.org.uk/factsheets/energy/types-of-energy
*6. Information causality :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_causality
Quoting universeness
I suppose the author of that quote was implying that the human mind was "designed" to be a powerful Information processor. Whether by God or by Nature, the ability to understand that "information is ubiquitous" allows us to control its manifold forms via Science and Philosophy. Chemistry manipulates its material physical forms (e.g. elements) , and Physics attempts to master nature's immaterial Forces (e.g. potential & kinetic energy), while Philosophy deals with its immaterial mental forms (e.g ideas). Yes, all of those empirical & theoretical professions are trying to gain dominance over Nature, in all its forms & expressions : objects, processes, & meanings. :cool:
Quoting universeness
If you would take the time to read the Enformationism thesis, you'd discover that its "god" is more like the impersonal rational Logos of Plato, and the logically necessary First Cause of Aristotle, than the intervening deity of the Abrahamic religions. By interpreting those ancient non-religious philosophical concepts in terms of our modern understanding of Enforming & Causal power of Generic Information (both Syntactic & Semantic), we should indeed diverge from the outdated philosophies of Materialism & Spiritualism. Where that new vector leads ultimately, depends on the interpreter. As an amateur philosopher, I prefer to focus on the semantic meaning of information, instead of the mechanical rules. If you are an empirical scientist, the syntax of information may be more important. Both Forms are logically contingent upon some ultimate Enformer : the cause or our world's "forms most beautiful" (Darwin). :wink:
PS__Back to the original post about an "information/technological" singularity. In The Ascent of Information, by astrophysicists Caleb Scharf, he says : "Anything that reduces the meaning of human information threatens the balance . . . between us and our future selves in a way no less profound than in biological evolution" My thesis is about the emergent teleological aspects of Evolution, not biological, mechanical, or technological. So, that may be where our opinions diverge.
Speaking of semantics, what does this juxtaposition refer to, or mean (other than woo-of-the-gaps)?
That wager begs its conclusion. Pascal didnt think it through.
Cryonic tech. The LHC uses cryogenic tech, but has nothing to do with bodies.
I see no purpose in reanimating somebody who was so bad off that hes 10 seconds from death. With resources diminishing, why insert another body into perpetual artificial life support, especially if the body isnt even a legal person. If they need another conscious person around, make a baby. Much more useful and way less work.
Again, what goal of humanity is served by the holo-deck? Its just entertainment, not it being used for the sort of goals youre describing.
Pretty much by definition, when humans can no longer breed with one. What if we create a species that does not breed the normal way? Only test-tube high-tech artificial reproduction. Much of the flower industry already works this way.
Absolutely, just as much as a human with tooth fillings. By my definition above, I am no longer human, but thats just me. I used to be. Have proof.
Quoting universenessThe workings is something of which there is more to learn. As to purpose, that word seems reserved for something serving the intention of some entity, thus serving a purpose to that entity. So say I drop a jar into the sea and some octopus (yes, them again) moves into it as a sort of home. Thats purpose even if the octopus didnt create it. So in that light, the universe seems to serve the human purpose of providing materials and environment for our existence, but thats our purpose being served, not that of the universe, which would be akin to the jar requiring to have an octopus live in it.
This came up before but I still dont have your definition of free will, especially one where it subjectively matters one way or the other.
I think that would be humanity that knows stuff then. Maybe something less specific if theres more than just humanity doing the collective knowing.
Quoting universenessThere are things that cannot be known, so this asymptotic approach cannot be.
Worked for the church for a long time, and it works indefinitely in the Korean situation as long as freedom of speech and information is kept in check. The church failed to keep it in check.
OK, the omniscient entity can say that it will rain next July 1, and also it will be dry and sunny, and also cloudy and humid, and also reasonably cool, not none of that all at once. But I could also say that, and wed both be right, and wed both be entirely unhelpful. More tech isnt going to help with the answer precisely because the answer above is already correct.
Depends on definitions, but yes. I dont think the church suggests that God has or needs tech.
I dont think theyll find themselves in each others presence much if at all. Putting super-people here on Earth will just cause wars. Putting something different on planet X is a necessity.
As I said, humanity hasnt exactly shown its readiness for tolerance of something different. Recent events have shown that such prejudice is always there under a thin layer of civility.
If theres anything a cephalopod can do, its shape shift. Color shift too.
Quoting Agent SmithThat started long before there were mammals.
Quoting Agent SmithYoure using singularity in a different way than is meant by these terms. Until machines write better code than people do, the TS hasnt taken place.
I was simplifying my thesis by highlighting only the exemplars.
Are you sure the TS hasn't taken place? One possible reason why we haven't met ET is because they don't want to (be discovered).
Maybe the TS has already happened and we are being kept from discovering ETI by our TS-saturated satellites, telescopes & space probes? Maybe the TS covertly studies both ETI and us? :yikes:
May be it left! :scream: Remember that unknown object captured by telescopes crashing into the moon. Still no satisfactory explanation. Secret rocket launch from somewhere in the Siberian plains? :cool: AI has made some human allies then! The plot thickens!
I think it IS absolutely, an issue of whether to live or die. We have very little control over that issue at the moment. Future science may offer an individual human far more choice regarding life or death and I like that. More control over that issue will help greatly in alleviating human primal fear and will help further demote god notions, in my opinion.
Ok. I see where you are coming from now. I am not familiar with all you mentioned. I have heard of a Dyson sphere, (a structure that completely encompasses a star.) But many envisaged future tech could be listed under 'megaengineering.' A space station/habitat that is 10 miles long or in circumference, for example, or a space ship, the same size as some of those suggested in sci-fi drama's (built in a 'space shipyard'). I think we would probably have to have achieved artificial gravity first.
Do you think something like the scenes suggested below are possible?
Quoting 180 Proof
Some of us wish to go extinct mon ami! It comes from an understanding of reality that our parents, normal ones at least, which says a lot, shield us from (cover yer eyes, you don't wanna see this), but which we eventually have to face and succumb we will, struggling will only make it worse. It's a different shade of blue suicide - never knew that until a few days ago.
Ok, but again we diverge here, as I give no credence or value to the Platonic concept of ideal or perfect forms. I refer to Platonic forms described in wiki as:
The Forms are expounded upon in Plato's dialogues and general speech, in that every object or quality in realitydogs, human beings, mountains, colors, courage, love, and goodnesshas a form. Form answers the question, "What is that?" Plato was going a step further and asking what Form itself is. He supposed that the object was essentially or "really" the Form and that the phenomena were mere shadows mimicking the Form; that is, momentary portrayals of the Form under different circumstances.
and
For Plato, forms, such as beauty, are more real than any objects that imitate them. Though the forms are timeless and unchanging, physical things are in a constant change of existence. Where forms are unqualified perfection, physical things are qualified and conditioned.
To me, from a scientific viewpoint, Platonic forms are just romanticised notions based on labelling non-existents. Notions of 'perfection,' will imo, always be unobtainable and non-existent but can serve as harmless concepts that humans can asymptotically aspire to, just like the omni notions or god notions or believing that an ideal numerical form or perfect beauty, exists.
Quoting Gnomon
My background and career is Computing Science, so no doubt that strongly influenced my notions of the difference between data and information.
Quoting Gnomon
I really don't like this, it conflates human interpretation with what happens inside computers. Computers don't understand anything. It's not that information is meaningless to a computer. A computer has no awareness, so data is meaningless to a computer as well as information or a bit or the presence of a voltage etc. Computing Science is a human concept not a computer concept. Therefore, In Computer Science, information has meaning, data does not and nothing a computer does has any meaning AT ALL, to the computer. AI has yet to even pass the Turing test.
I really like the details offered by your typing's, labelled 1 to 6. I applaud the research rigour involved.
Yes, as it is constantly demonstrated by humans (as the best examples) and other Earth species to a lesser degree.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't think much of IQ testing.
Quoting Gnomon
I accept that particular humans can excel in areas that they have studied for years in, and they can become 'better than most or even all, in THAT field, at THAT time.' I was probably better than Einstein at many many things. But he remains a genius at physics. 'Superior Intelligence,' is a whole different claim.
To be a 'superior intellect,' imo, you would have to demonstrate superior ability in many more fields than physics and maths.
Quoting Gnomon
Anything that is 'a function of' requires the material. A function is not an 'object' at all. I walk, but walking is not an object. I can't see any value in connecting 'functionality' or the notion of the 'process' part of an IPO system with a notion such as 'immaterial,' defined as:
unimportant under the circumstances; irrelevant:
or
spiritual, rather than physical:
Your notion of 'immaterial' or a 'non-material object' has no existent which is separable from 'the functionality of the material.' For your notion of 'immaterial' to have significance, it would have to have an existent that 'stands alone,' completely separate from any consequential of the material. Something like a god notion, would qualify as such, which is why, god cannot prove it's existence. If it existed and it could prove it's existence, then it would!
[quote=Ash, a severed head]I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.[/quote]
:victory: :mask:
Well, that's what we are discussing. 'Immaterial,' has no demonstrable existent, if it is being used to propose something supernatural. You are employing the term, and you are quite rigorous at justifying the nomenclature you decide to employ. I have already applauded your rigour in this area and ask you to continue to apply such rigour.
Energy is material, not immaterial imo. Energy and matter are equivalences in the famous Einstein equation using the Csquared conversion factor. If you are just using 'immaterial' as a reference to energy or 'massless' measurements/quantities/concentrations then it's important that you confirm that you are not invoking anything supernatural/transcendental/god related etc.
Quoting Gnomon
You either assign high credence to the existence of the supernatural or you don't. Which is it for you?
Quoting Gnomon
These are just alternate descriptions for the same old god posits. I see little fundamental difference between them and totally reject all of them. I am an atheist!
Such teleology, only has value from the perspective of human intent and purpose, through their imposition of selective evolution via such tech as genetic engineering. No god posit, Platonic logos/form or Aristotelian first cause, has any contribution to make, imo.
Yep and having as much personal control over such choices is what I champion.
Quoting 180 Proof
:lol: There are many clever folks out there who have many ways to attempt to use science to defibrillate dying posits of supernatural existents. I don't think most of them are doing so for nefarious reasons. Those who earn their living from religion and owe their life status and any power they might wield to religion, will act nefariously when trying to defibrillate their dogma. But I think there are also many folks who just need the superhero who cares about them, to really exist. There are of course, many shades in-between. I really do appreciate it when you offer me a heads up based on your past experiences on TPF.
I don't want to ever ignore such advice as 'don't eat that because when I did, I was unwell.'
I don't want to be dumb enough to suggest 'hah! it might have bothered you but it won't bother me.'
I can't increase my own experience, if I don't experience some of the same stuff you have experienced.
But having you as a 'heads up,' person is most welcome, and long may you do this for me.
I appreciate and I am complimented that such matters to you.
You make me sad for you sometimes. I can only send you a virtual hug!
I wish I could make you see how wonderful life is, with all its shortfalls and sufferings.
Why do you think folks who experienced and survived the hell that the jews, went through in the concentration camps of WW II, wanted to continue to live.
For me, it's to defy the scum who tried to destroy them.
Don't choose to live life as a curse! Go outside, every night, and look up at the night sky.
See where your kind has yet to go and consider what it has yet to do.
Just keep trying to help in whatever way you can, including defeating your own tendency to view the human experience as a curse.
You should never do that for me. I'd hate to darken anyone's world like that.
Thanks for tryin' ta brighten my day, but I was quite clear on one point - some of us choose extinction. God is merciful! El Rachum. The Jews went through hell, agreed, and I admire their resilience - 6 million dead, no joke! Way to go my Jewish brothers and sisters! However, I'm not a Jew. :smile:
You don't need to be Jewish to qualify.
You would have to explain yourself much more.
What caused you to choose to live life as a curse.
You can't heal until you know where all the wounds are and what caused them.
What can you not forgive yourself for?
What did you do? or was it done to you?
You are just referring to practicality here. The wish to die only when YOU want to, is very strong in most humans, including myself. The pragmatic opinion of others somewhat pale's in comparison, imo.
I just think that there is very little evidence that whatever is stored in your brain, is preserved via cryogenic freezing. But there is stuff such as:
From a BBC report, and the study it is based on.
As I suggested, desperate folks will act in desperation.
Quoting noAxioms
Well , If I wonder if there will be 'points of merging,' in the distant future that augments humans into some genetic/cybernetic merge. A transhuman form that to us, would be as unfamiliar as an early homo sapien ancestor, staring at the Artemis 1 rocket. Holotech may be a great way to project yourself great distances, very quickly, for communication purposes or even as a way of investigating planets without travelling there yourself, physically. I am only basing my musings here on sci-fi I have watched but I don't think that future holotech musings, only offer/suggest advanced entertainment systems.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, I think that's a good criteria to use and it is consistent with the criteria used in biology.
Quoting noAxioms
Not if that entity is US as individuals who can also act as a collective or even a totality.
I am using totality here as 'more in unison,' than a typical collective.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree, BUT, if the octopus you describe was able to investigate the jar, using octopus science and octopus scientists and become not only able to reproduce the jar, but improve on it and manipulate it at a subatomic level and eventually find out where it came from and why it ended up in the octopuses environment and how it was originally created, then the octopus might begin to know it's own origins much better than any previous octopus ever has!
What do you mean by 'something less specific?'
If we met another alien race and we 'pooled' our science instead of trying to wipe each other out, would that not help all concerned answer all the tough questions we have?
If you believe that there are things that can be known then we diverge there. I have always accepted the old posit that the universe is knowable. I don't think we can know pi to an infinite number of decimal places, but I think that's a nonsense idea anyway as it suggests a 'finite' result for an 'infinite' concept.
We can use meaningless labels such as 'perfect,' 'infinite,' 'god' etc as something we can ever strive for but never reach (hence my use of asymptotic,) In what sense do you suggest this 'cannot be?'
Quoting noAxioms
Such can indeed work for a long time, but remember what Gandhi said:
"There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, ..... always!
But why would an omniscient make such an irrational statement about the weather on July 1st 2023?
An omniscient knows what the weather will be on that day at every location and for every time reference or else they are not omniscient. An omniscient has all possible tech or else it is not omniscient.
I really don't see the point you are trying to make in the above quote.
Quoting Agent Smith
:death: :flower:
Memento mori, mi amigo.
Memento vivere!
:up: :up:
:sad: Good poetry. :up:
Which parts ring true?
We are discussing a philosophically divisive topic here. And judging by the unusual number of replies to my posts, my unconventional (immaterial) worldview has hit an emotional hot button for otherwise placid philosophers. Where you give "no credence" to Plato's Forms, it's the foundation of my personal En-Form-Action thesis. Plato's theory of Forms was not talking about material objects (teapot orbiting the moon) but about human ideas about (aboutness) physical objects. Forms are mental metaphors, not material things. Do you deign to "give credence" to your own ideas, or just to other people's invisible intangible ideas. Obviously, you are misinterpreting my ideas, due to lack of understanding of its scientific & philosophical foundation.
I'm pretty sure that astrobiologist Caleb Scharf has never heard of Enformationism. But in his 2021 book, The Ascent of Information, he makes some assertions that would also touch a nerve on this forum. From the cover : "a universe built of and for information" ; "information is, in a very real sense, alive" ; "it's an organism that has evolved right alongside us". These are not materialistic scientific statements, but philosophical interpretations of cutting-edge science (quantum, not classical). Likewise, my view of the role of Information in the universe is not intended to be judged by materialistic scientific criteria. Instead, it's supposed to be an update of ancient belief systems : both Material-ism and Spiritual-ism.
Due to the sudden explosion of incredulous responses to my posts on this Emergent thread, I may not have time to address all of your credibility concerns individually. But I have already covered most of them in the Enformationism thesis, and the BothAnd blog, in case you are really interested in a novel synthesis of modern Science and timeless Philosophy. :smile:
Enformationism :
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
BothAnd Blog :
https://bothandblog.enformationism.info/
PS__The incredulous remark about Plato & Idealism reveals a watershed in our worldviews. Philosophical Mathematician A.N. Whitehead once commented on Plato's thought: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Since mathematicians deal with abstract ideas instead of concrete matter, an openness to Idealism might be expected. But philosophers are also manipulators of abstractions ; yet some have come to view Empirical Science as getting closer to Truth, because it manipulates real tangible objects and produces real world material results. Ironically, in a matter-based world, symbolic money buys real goods, while philosophical metaphors & analogies yield nothing tangible. So, what is the value of Wisdom (sophos), and what is its material substance?
PPS__The screenname "Universeness" seems to imply an open-ness to the intangible qualia of the world. Ironically, in the Enformationism thesis, Generic Information is the substance of Both quantitative Matter & qualitative Mind ; also of everything, and non-thing (e.g. Virtual Particles), in the Universe.
The suffix "-ness" means "state : condition : quality" and is used with an adjective to say something about the state, condition, or quality of being that adjective.
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/Nouns-ending-in-ness
PPPS__Enformationism is an Emergence & Systems theory about the Holistic qualities of the world that emerge from the evolution of malleable matter & causal energy.
Emergence : In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own ; (i.e. Holism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
:smile:
The Jewish people have been persecuted for nearly a thousand years now. They seem to take it well. One would think after being inhumanely treated for so long, their spirit would be crushed, but no, they're back on their horses so to speak. What's their secret?
No. That is a mis-interpretation of my intent. "Im-material" simply means not-made-of-matter. It does not mean super-natural. Are the ideas & ideals in your mind super-natural, if we can't see them under a microscope? Are Virtual Particles super-natural simply because they have "no demonstrable existent"? VPs are simply mathematical metaphors for sub-atomic physics that must be inferred instead of empirically demonstrated. Mathematics consists of inferred (mental) immaterial inter-relationships, not on observed (objective) physical connections between values. Unfortunately, Pythagoras did interpret his harmonies & ideal solids in the spiritual terminology of his day, 2500 years ago.
insists on the same mis-use of my novel & unconventional, but philosophically & scientifically defined, terminology. Unfortunately. my non-textbook definitions for
Enformationism can't overcome the prejudice of Materialism/Physicalism as a belief system. So, due to our divergent vocabularies, we have ceased to communicate on topics that go beyond the 18th century concepts of classical Newtonian physics. :smile:
Forget Space-Time: Information May Create the Cosmos :
[i]So, the question then becomes how to understand "information," a common term whose technical or scientific sense can be disruptive. . . .
What are the basic building blocks of the cosmos? Atoms, particles, mass energy? Quantum mechanics, forces, fields? Space and time space-time? Tiny strings with many dimensions? . . .
A new candidate is "information," which some scientists claim is the foundation of reality. The late distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler characterized the idea as "It from bit" "it" referring to all the stuff of the universe and "bit" meaning information. . . .
So here's the deep question: Is information the ultimate constituent from which the cosmos is constructed? I started as a skeptic. Information as reality seems so outlandish, so trendy a metaphor on steroids.[/i] ___Robert Kuhn
https://www.space.com/29477-did-information-create-the-cosmos.html
Virtual particles are only used to satisfy mathematical requirements and are not real in any sense of the word. They have not been proven in any way to really exist, except mathematically,
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-proof-that-virtual-particles-actually-exist
Quoting 180 ProofWhat is ETI? That means extraterrestrial intelligence to me, but some AI built by us isnt extraterrestrial.
TS isnt a thing that saturates satellites like skynet or something. Its just a threshold where the machine is more efficient at improving the machine than are its creators. Theres no robot walking around or anything, escaping somewhere for instance. Any machine that meets the qualification above will be very much leveraged to give its creators a competitive advantage over the places with the human developers.
Quoting Agent SmithAn individual cannot meaningfully go extinct. Its only a term that applies to a species.
Quoting universenessEinstein wasnt particularly well-studies. He had trouble with most of his schooling, which perhaps is a critique on the way education is taught. Einstein was unusually open minded, willing to question any intuitive bias.
Being well-educated or well-rounded in skills has little to do with passing an IQ test, which for the most part doesnt test how educated you are.
Cryonics: Quoting universenessAgree, but granting wishes to individuals has little to do with benefit to humanity except perhaps in a negative way. People living for 500 years isnt going to prevent environmental catastrophe or get any kind of expansion into the galaxy happening.
Since theyve never done it, there is also no evidnce that the information is lost. I think theyve done it to other things. Amphibians are a natural at it and Ive heard of some things (dinosaur almost?) getting revived briefly after a really long sleep. That story might be myth. Cant find it now.
Likely actually given we last long enough. Putting human parts in a machine (as opposed to putting machine parts in human) seems inefficient. All this life support to do something probably better done without all the extra overhead.
We have that now. Its called a TV and phone. Neither works faster than light, so no VR is going to let you walk around and control some avatar light-years away. Still, the military does that with drones and such because the distances are not so far. Even doing at the moon would be awkward, as are communications with those long pauses.
You said humanity, in context of something to which a thing has a purpose. The less specific thing would be a collection of agents, humanity being only part of the larger collection, to which the thing has collective purpose.
One race would be likely far advanced compared to the other and would have little to learn from the lesser, at least as far as technology is concerned. The lesser race would likely not be ready for all the answers at once, and so if it is deemed reasonable/safe to bring this lesser race up to speed, it would probably have to be done quite slowly. Remember the main reason for advanced technological development. It isnt for exploration or for fantasies about omniscience. Its about military advantage. You dont give super-advanced toys to a race like that. Thats part of the transhuman effort: To collectively change who we are so we can survive our own advancement.
Cannot be known, and I gave examples. The weather 6 months hence was one.
Well, the Korean thing has to end eventually. The death of somebody with absolute power instigates a struggle to replace him, and one of them eventually wont know how to hang on to the power.
Quoting universenessWasnt an irrational statement. Under several interpretations, its entirely true. The future weather is in superposition of all those states. It isnt measured by us, and under several interpretations, measurement by something not part of the structure isnt meaningful. So if the definition of omniscience is that the entity must know this unknowable thing, then the only logical inconsistency is the positing of such an entitiy.
Really? God needs a barometer to measure the pressure? Tech is only to tell you something you dont know, or do something you cant do yourself, and the omniscient omnipotent entity doesnt need any of it.
Quoting Agent SmithNot so. Persecution cements faith which otherwise tends to stagnate. The Christians were never stronger in their belief than when they had to hide it from the laws at the time. It kept them unified too.
Can't I be a species unto myself - a particular lineage and I've heard the phrase "the last of his line". I am that.
:up:
Well, the exchange between us here seems to consolidate around what credence level either of us assigns to the existence of and value of any references to the supernatural. The division comes in how we each interpret particular nomenclature and how we each interpret the contents of the sources we each cite. I am sure we can both keep any acrimony to an absolute minimum and respect each others viewpoints, if they are earnestly held.
Quoting Gnomon
Misunderstanding the position of others is always an issue. I am trying my best to understand your viewpoints and idea's in the area of what you think is 'emergent,' in human beings and based on the content of my OP. If you think I am misinterpreting your ideas then I look forward to your continued corrections, so that I can gain a better understanding of your position.
Quoting Gnomon
This honestly seems like nonsense to me. I have not read the book you cite and I have not heard of Caleb Scharf, so I am only giving my opinion of the words you have chosen to cite.
Information is not 'alive' based on any criteria that qualifies something as being 'alive,' that I know of.
Information is not 'organic' under any definition of the term I know.
So, I am left with considering further your 'not materialistic scientific statements' and 'quantum not classical.' Which aspects of quantum physics are you citing here?
You then typed:
Quoting Gnomon
How can an idea be a update of materialism if your 'update,' "is not intended to be judged by material scientific criteria?" That seems to contradict!
In what sense are you using the term 'spiritualism,' here?
Quoting Gnomon
I wouldn't call the responses 'an explosion of incredulous responses,' as the number of responses are very low and hardly explosive. I do however appreciate that detailed responses can take a lot of time.
We can each only do, what we are compelled to and have the time to, do!
Probably, like yourself, I have a large outstanding list of 'need to read this literature.'
Quoting Gnomon
I am much more attracted to this that anything from Plato or Aristotle. They just knew nothing in comparison with what we know now. There is always a place for historical characters, real or invented, as we don't want to repeat old mistakes, but I don't see the musings of Plato or Aristotle as being of any more value today, than the babbles in the bible.
Quoting Gnomon
Time to get rid of money then as it is just a human invention and one that has proven to be quite pernicious. The value of wisdom has not changed and continues to be almost priceless imo.
Material substance is based on quarks and electrons which may actually be quantum field excitations or even inter-dimensional vibrations of strings and imo also includes massless excitations such as photons.
There is no supernatural existent and for me, it remains important to qualify any use of term such as 'immaterial' or 'spiritual.' If they are being used as references to anything supernatural then that should be made clear.
Quoting Gnomon
I chose the handle 'universeness,' as a reference to being OF the universe, nothing more.
Quoting Gnomon
To me, the term 'virtual particle,' means not a real particle. So, some physicists describe virtual particles as mathematical conveniences that help make our equations work, some others say they 'wink in and out of existence so fast that we just don't know exactly what they are but they are momentary existents.'
"A virtual particle is a theoretical transient particle that exhibits some of the characteristics of an ordinary particle, while having its existence limited by the uncertainty principle. The concept of virtual particles arises in the perturbation theory of quantum field theory where interactions between ordinary particles are described in terms of exchanges of virtual particles."
So have women, black people, gender variant people, indigenous tribal peoples, etc, etc and for just as long as Jewish people or much longer, in the case of women. This is why I typed that you don't have to be Jewish to qualify as a person who has been severely abused, almost since birth. All humans must take full responsibility for this and imo, it is the responsibility of all humans (including you,) to do what they can to help stop such abuse.
This life is less about just me, me, me and more about us, us, us. You can only really help significantly, when you have the power to do so but small assists are also sooooooo needed.
Out of little acorns, big oak trees grow. If you are living life as a curse anyway, then dedicating what's left of it, to help others, may be the best way to go. I am not suggesting this describes you, I am merely stating that every human can make a difference, an improvement, any improvement, in the life of another or others. It does not even have to be people, it can be animals or ecology that an individual helps maintain/protect/thrive etc. Another good thing is that you can be utterly godless and still be a humanist with more empathy for the suffering of fellow humans, than the vast majority of theists demonstrate.
Good advice.
Ok, so you are just referring to what quarks and electrons might do as fundamental combinatorials, yes?
You are using 'immaterial' as a reference to 'massless energy forms,' such as photons.
You are also positing that information is a fundamental but what is the fundamental involved, the bit(BInary Digit)? I have already stated that DATA is 'at some level,' a universal fundamental but I think the data fundamental is probably a quark, a photon, a planck length, a vibrating one dimensional string, what is your enformation fundamental?
Quoting Gnomon
No, they are 'fundamentals' that are just currently undetectable, just like the fundamentals of dark matter or dark energy. Do you give credence to Sir Roger Penrose's erebon particle of dark matter?
Quoting Gnomon
No, they are not supernatural, they may simply be mathematical conveniences that help towards understanding a natural process that science currently does not fully understand. So, we agree here, that there is nothing supernatural going on with virtual particles. Do you consider virtual particles, a candidate for 'the fundamental of data/information or even your enformation?
Quoting Gnomon
@jgill is the member I turn to for conformation of valid definitions of 'what mathematics is and does.'
I think maths can perform both of the functions you suggest above but I think your use of the word 'immaterial' above is again poorly chosen, as it is such a 'loaded' word.
Quoting Gnomon
But these are very provocative words that any atheist would associate with theosophism.
Naturalism or materialism/physicalism is not prejudicial and it can only be a 'belief' system if you are comparing it with some alternate belief system. What would that alternative belief system be, if not a theological belief? I fully understand @180 Proof''s point of view.
Quoting Gnomon
But bit means binary digit! My candidates for any data fundamental would be the ones I already offered in my previous post. Please state your candidate(s). Binary is a 'two state' system such as on/off.
Is your candidate for the fundamental of information/data, two state?
Quoting Gnomon
Yeah, I have watched many episodes of 'closer to truth,' and I like Robert Kuhn, but even he or anyone he has interviewed, has NOT suggested a fundamental for information/data. So, the suggestion of a fundamental of information/data, that combines, to create the universe, is at best, as speculative as 'strings' and at worse not even as plausible as strings. Data as a universal fundamental is interesting, but you would need to identify it's fundamental 'states' and how many of them exists. Can you (or anyone else) currently do that?
Quoting Gnomon
I agree, but so what? In what way is that significant? other than to confirm that humans invent labels for concepts such as 'infinite,' 'perfect,' 'supernatural,' 'esoteric,' 'virtual particle,' 'dark energy' 'big bang,' etc, which have a range of validity ranging from 'inaccurate to mostly useless (like god).'
I think the phrase 'granting wishes' in the context you use it, is poorly chosen mockery of the (perhaps forlorn) hopes of currently live people, who face and have to come to terms with, their own death.
I see many many advantages to vastly increased lifespan and robustness for living humans.
I agree that there would be various affects on human population, but if we can create valid extraterrestial habitats, and find and develop extraterrestrial resources, then we can afford a population much bigger than the current 8 billion on Earth.
People living for 500 years may offer a level of accumulated knowledge within some individuals that surpasses all past levels of 'genius.' I think that such would indeed help prevent environmental catastrophe and provide advanced tech to help us become an extraterrestial/interstellar species.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, you are assuming that the 'classical laws of physics,' will dictate what can and cannot be achieved in any future timescale. What's going in quantum physics suggests to me, that that's not necessarily true.
The lecture I posted from Lennard Susskind earlier, has a section where he proposes that manipulation of quantum entanglement may indeed mean we can observe and measure what going on at large distances without any 'signal travelling,' involved. That, was only my interpretation of the complex ideas he was putting across. I am always very reluctant indeed, to claim that I have the physics needed to interpret such a lecture correctly. In fact, I just don't, so I am completely reliant on the interpretative skills that I do have, in relation to such a lecture.
Quoting noAxioms
If we meet alien lifeforms in the future that have the same or more or even a little less ability than we do, and we don't try to annihilate each other, and we share our science and become allies, then I would assume that our concerted (asymptotic) effort toward omniscience will be more successful that our individual efforts, so, all good ..... I hope!
Quoting noAxioms
Your notes of caution here are well founded, given the bloody history of humans so far.
I remain hopeful that the 'military advantage,' you highlight may well still be sought but will only ever be used in defence and NOT EVER to attack.
Yeah, I meant to type 'cannot' be known, sorry, but I don't value your example, as we can predict the weather in 6 months based on such as, last years data, combined with projecting any current weather patterns and climate change projections. I agree that it would not be a 'completely reliable' prediction but perhaps future 'weather based' tech will allow significant improvement in the predictive reliability of a '6 month from now forecast for a particular area.' I think you underestimate us and our future tech.
Quoting noAxioms
Exactly!
Quoting noAxioms
But that's a foundational claim of theism! You are trying to contemplate an omniscient god with your feeble human intellect. There is no unknowable thing for an omnigod, the fact that you cant perceive that is because you cannot know god and must simply accept its power ...... or else. We both know that's total BS. So omniscience, is only useful, as a concept to asymptotically strive for.
Quoting noAxioms
Omnigod does not need a barometer, as it already owns all data/information in the universe, past, present and future. Omnigod would not measure that which it already knows. All possible tech already exists as part of omnigod, as you suggest in your last sentence above, so we seem to be typing past each other here. We both understand the theistic definition of the properties of the omnigod posit.
True. If you are a pragmatic scientist with the intention of making a material difference in the world, there is no need to consider generalizations or ultimates. But, if you are a philosopher, hoping to answer Ontological & Existential questions, considering First & Last & Ultimate Intent would be a part of your job description. I'm not a materials scientist or genetic engineer, but merely an amateur philosopher, posting on a philosophy forum, just for funsees.
So, I hope you will forgive me for doing what feckless philosophers do to while-away their spare time : studying not material objects & "how" questions, but mental beliefs & "why" questions. I'm aware that some posters on TPF seem to believe that this is, or should be, a scientific forum, or that Impractical Theoretical Philosophy must be subordinate to Pragmatic Empirical Science.
If the traditional philosophical term "Teleology" sets your teeth on edge, how about "Teleonomy"? Enformationism is compatible with both understandings of natural progression. :smile:
Ultimate :
[i]1. a final or fundamental fact or principle.
2. being or happening at the end of a process; final.[/i]
Quora :
A philosopher is a scientist who studies what cultures, countries groups and individuals believe and do and why they believe and do the things they believe . . .
Teleonomy :
Teleonomy is sometimes contrasted with teleology, where the latter is understood as a purposeful goal-directedness brought about through human or divine intention. Teleonomy is thought to derive from evolutionary history, adaptation for reproductive success, and/or the operation of a program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy
God and Other Ultimates :
What it takes to be ultimate is to be the most fundamentally real, valuable or fulfilling among all that there is or could be
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-ultimates/
PS__For the record, Enformationism does not deny the validity of Materialism, as a guide for empirical research. And it does not advocate Spiritualism, as a guide to heaven. It does however assume that philosophical reasoning is a valid approach to evaluating immaterial ideas & beliefs. Yet it does deny the bolded words in the definition below.
Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy
IME, a thinker's first duty intellectual hygiene and metacognitive fitness exercise consists in not asking idle questions or raising paper doubts (Peirce, Witty, Kant, et al) such as "first, last & ultimate" whatever. As for "ontological and existential" questions, the theoretical works of natural scientists presuppose such aporia which most do not explicitly explore or examine because that almost always falls outside of the remit of scientific inquiry. And pragmatists, which you allude to, whether or not they are doing science, raise such abstruse questions, as Dewey or Popper might say, only to facilitate transforming indeterminate problems into determinate problems which can be dis/solved. :chin:
However, your musings and notions, Gnomon, demonstrate a penchant for overdetermining pseudo-problems because, apparently, you lack the acumen of a rigorous, as you say, "amateur philosopher" to avoid these incorrigibly dogmatic traps. You're not here to learn from our motley community of 'thinkers', as your post history attests to, but rather, evidently, to preach a quixotic sermon that pseudo-scientistically rehashes perennialism (though your expansive, well-documented blog does bedazzle, sir :sparkle: :clap:). "Hoping to answer ...Ultimate ... questions" is the "job description" of false prophets, televangelists and other charlatans pimping snake-oil "worldviews" or "beliefs", which may be what "philosophy" looks like from the outside to many folks who're still squatting on splintered pews in their burnt-out old cathedrals. :pray: :sweat:
postscript:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/746676 Yeah, it's déjà vu all over again. :smirk:
Well I see plenty for the individual of course, but I thought the subject of this topic wasnt the individual. Wed have to eliminate aging, meaning that wed stay young and fit for a long time. Last thing we need is 80% of the population in some kind of retired state. If we do that, we have to do it to everybody, and thats kind of a problem with a large population. This would be a disadvantage for the species. Theres a reason evolution invented aging.
I agree that there would be various affects on human population, but if we can create valid extraterrestial habitats[/quote]The extraterrestrial habitats are jails at best. If you want to put people in a box, its easier to do it here. If you want people to actually live on another world, they need to be evolved for that world. They cannot be human. Theres no planet B.
https://aeon.co/essays/we-will-never-be-able-to-live-on-another-planet-heres-why
If that doesnt take you to the article, copy and paste it. I dont know whats messed up with links on this site.
You say that like its some kind of benefit that a bigger number is better.
Longer life doesnt make one smarter. A little more wise maybe, but not more intelligent. You can breed for intelligence if you like (something that is currently being naturally de-selected), but again, by your analogy of re-inventing the wheel, why do we need more intelligence when the tool already exists?
The 8 billion and growing count seems pretty precisely what is causing the environmental catastrophe. If there is some kind of purpose served by maxing out the number of humans that exist, trimming the population permanently down to around 6% of what is is today would be a great start. Less existing at once, but far more in the longer run.
Or better, to help the tech become that interstellar species. If you want humanity to make its mark on the universe, that is how to go about it.
Yea, what are humans good for if we cant change the laws of physics? So put that on your list and jettison the VR thing which is just a fancy telephone.
Either youre misreading his words, or hes a quack. If his assertions actually said that and had merit, it would be huge news in the physics world. All of Einsteins theories would get falsified and wed have to reinvent a new theory to replace it. Time travel would become possible since I could observe something that hasnt yet happened.
Sorry for all that, but perhaps a quote that leads you to this conclusion would help. It was a long vid to attempt to hunt down something I dont think he said. If I had a quote, I could help interpret it since Im not a total noob at this. I spend more time on the physics forums, and am a moderator at one of them.
Thats like you and me picking a random number from one to 10 million, and both of us guessing the same one. Odds are theyre either as developed as lichen, or we are the lichen in comparison to them. Neither might recognize the other as life, or at least not as something one might attempt to communicate with. Do we share our technology with the squirrels? The squirrels have picked a number insanely close to ours, but not the same number.
See? Time to first change who we are before we spread out and just make enemies of our colonies. Most every attack is justified as defense to its own people. Ever read up on what the Russians are telling its citizens about the Ukraine thing? Remember Bush and Iraqs WMDs? Were doing this for defense, not just to get back at somebody who insulted his daddy.
Quoting universenessSure, the farmers almanac does that, but it doesnt say exactly where the rain will be falling at a specific time. Those specifics are what Im talking about. Better tech has nothing to do with this.
If physics is perfectly deterministic and unitary, then yes, the omnipotent entity would know exactly that. But physics might not be all those things, in which case theres no right answer to know.
Not always, but yes. Theism isnt based on logic or observation. Theyre up front about that. Making impossible claims isnt something that bothers them, and the people consuming the story have little interest in the self-consistency of the story.
How so? A thing that knows all answers vs a question that literally has no right answer. Even a feeble intellect can detect something wrong with that.
The two above statements seem to contradict each other. You apparently suggest that a god has a closet full of completely unneeded stuff. Hes a hoarder, unable to keep the place neat.
So it doesnt have a useless barometer in its closet, but rather has a useless barometer as part of itself, sort of like having eyes despite never using them. A human apparently strives to achieve a state where eyes and other senses are useless.
:up: :grin:
I appreciate your willingness to engage in philosophical dialog, even though my posts may express a worldview that at first glance appears to violate your personal belief system. Some offended posters are motivated to express their anger & incredulity in the form of political-style put-downs. FWIW, I assure you that my BothAnd philosophy is not anti-science or pro-religion. However, it's also not pro-classical-science or anti-religious-philosophy. Instead, it views those contentious belief systems from a novel perspective, that may seem wrong-headed to those on one side or the other of the credence abyss.
Since Enformationism does make philosophical inferences that go beyond the knowable origins of Nature though, you could be forgiven for categorizing those conjectures as "super-natural". Yet quite a few professional scientists have put-on their philosophical hats, and conjectured non-empirical notions (e.g. Multiverse ; Cosmic Inflation) about the time-before-Time, and the pre-Big-Bang nature of Nature. So, I'm just doing similar philosophical postulating, but without the aura of authority that allows professional scientists to get-away with going beyond the limits of empirical methods. Remember, some of Einstein's colleagues cringed at his poetic references to God, but didn't attack him openly. :smile:
Quoting universeness
I have posted hundreds of "continued corrections" (clarifications) on my blog and in this forum. But you are not alone in mis-understanding my unconventional worldview. Some are content to just pigeon-hole the strange ideas into old familiar categories. For example, Emergentism is a feature of Holistic worldviews, which to detractors indicates an Anti-reductionism (hence anti-science) Oriental religious belief. But it is also held by several prominent Quantum scientists. Also, Reductionism is an appropriate method for dissecting physical objects, but not very effective for parsing philosophical concepts.
My worldview is best explained at length in the Enformationism Thesis, and the BothAnd Blog. In forum posts, my unconventional position must be explained only in bits & pieces, hence may be interpreted by others in more conventional terms. You won't find my personal worldview in any Science or Philosophy textbook, so I rely on links to recently published authors, who are exploring the uncharted Information territory from a perspective similar to my own. Since the links are usually un-clicked, I typically include a brief quote to indicate the pertinent flavor of the ideas therein. :nerd:
Emergence :
Cognitive historian Y.N. Harari, in Homo Deus, foresees the emergence of a cosmic data processing system . . . like God, yet entirely natural and matter-based. On the other hand, I have deduced, from the same database, that the materialist's arbitrary laws of physical evolution are more like purposeful metaphysical codes.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page16.html
Emergentism :
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism
Quoting universeness
My information-centric update of the philosophical implications of classical Materialism is mostly based on the current understanding of reality provided by Quantum science. It would indeed be a conflict, if I pretended to be a physical scientist. For example, Einstein & the Quantum pioneers "updated" Newton's mechanical physics, to much consternation at first. So, my philosophical interpretation of "scientific criteria" is primarily based upon sub-atomic physics, which has discovered the key role of mental & mathematical Information in the foundations of physical reality.
I use the term "Spiritualism" in a provocative manner, to provide a strong contrast with "Materialism". Both are belief systems & worldviews that hark back to ancient Atomism and Animism. Today, Quantum theory has pulled the materialistic rug out from under Atomism. And Einstein's equation of intangible Energy with measurable Mass/Matter, has given us a modern way to interpret the invisible causes of Nature. :cool:
Quantum Physicist John A. Wheeler :
Wheeler's "it from bit" concept implies that physics, particularly quantum physics, isn't really about reality, but just our best description of what we observe. There is no "quantum world", just the best description we have of how things will appear to us.
https://plus.maths.org/content/it-bit
Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links :
This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence?
https://philarchive.org/rec/WHEIPQ
Quoting 180 Proof
Allah rahim
:cool: Absit iniuria @Gnomon
I like Gnomon's mind even if what it thinks is philosophically suspect. A Mercedes Benz being used to transport manure. :grin:
:lol: Nothing a good mechanic like yourself can't fix! :grin:
So you are mon ami, so you are.
Forgiveness is not divine but it is humanist, so as a humanist, its part of my remit. :grin:
I am not a philosopher but I am interested in the views of philosophers, both the academic and non-academic variety. Science is our best tool for discovering new information but science does not cover everything that is part of being human. Philosophy has an important role to play.
I have no intention to push TPF towards becoming The Science Forum either, but I think TPF would be much less than it is now, if everything scientific was disallowed.
Quoting Gnomon
I assign more credence to teleonomy than teleology, yes, but also yes, more as perceived philosophical consequentials, than any notion of deliberate design, inherent in evolution via natural selection.
Quoting Gnomon
Sounds good to me. I think you should be crystal clear in all your descriptions of enformationism, that your enformationism, has no association with god posits. You will always be challenged on that issue if you don't, unless you want to deal with such challenges, as enformationism IS some dressed up theistic proposal, that is trying to counter such atheistic philosophical evidence, such as Schellenbergs hiddenness of god, as described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Quoting Gnomon
Is your enformationism not more related to some sort of panpsychist view of the universe?
You seem reluctant to find empathy for desperate people who do desperate things and understand why cryonics has it's adherents. I think it probably is a forlorn hope, just like theism, but I don't utterly condemn desperate people hoping against hope. Like the ancient Egyptians, bothering to embalm dead people.
Quoting noAxioms
The global population is made up of individuals! Anything that happens to an individual has the potential to affect everyone. The subject of this topic is what is 'emergent' in humans. I am interested in what is ultimately emergent in all humans, yes, or future humanity, as it might manifest collectively, or as a totality, but that must be a collective/totality which begins by consideration of what is emergent is each person, individually, to consider if such are just variations on themes with underlying commonalities.
The aging process is very much under current scrutiny. There are many studies on such as telomeres etc.
Quoting noAxioms
I was able to link to the article on first click. It seemed quite desperate to repeat the 'there is no planet B' mantra, but I did not find it's offerings of why 'it's too hard or impossible,' for any future human attempts to become extraterrestial to succeed, off putting. All human pioneers live rough for a while. Perhaps in space exploration and development, it will be a long, long while before we are able to create the kind of lovely habitats we have on Earth, in space habitats, or on habitats on other planets, moons etc. BUT WE WILL, despite your big fearty, doomster type, exemplars, of what we cant do and why we cant do it.
I say, 'YES WE CAN and YES WE WILL!!!'
I say so, in the same way natural selection evidence suggests that reproduction, is a survival of species imperative. If there are more of us existing in many extraterrestial places, then we are less dependent on the Earths continued existence for survival. Seems like common sense to me.
Annihilating 8 billion of us, might be survivable in the future, if there are 50 billion of us all over the solar system. I do agree that a large global population is an issue when we have such vile economic systems as capitalism and vile political systems such as autocracy or plutocracy as our mainstream operating systems, for 'how humans are allowed to live.' But many are ever trying to change that and I believe they will NEVER desist until they succeed.
Quoting noAxioms
Not more intelligent but more knowledgeable and if this is accompanied with what you yourself suggest is true, 'a little more wise maybe,' or perhaps for many, 'a lot more wise,' then I think we will progress faster and in more benevolent directions. A higher level of general intellect is not a reinvention as it would be an advance. It's not 'more intelligence' as you are employing the term, it's either folks who don't demonstrate much intelligence, learning how to demonstrate 'more intelligence' or it's intelligent people gaining a higher level of intelligence via more knowledge via having more time to study! Nothing is being 'reinvented,' in either situation.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: Yeah, there are many autocrats/plutocrats/totalitarians or even theists, who believe in BS like the rapture, etc, etc who would support your trimming of the population down to 6%. All hail Ebenezer!
I think it's more important to create equitable social/economic/political ways to live,
This planet COULD sustain 8 billion of us, if we adequately redistributed wealth and employed control over the means of production, distribution and exchange which benefitted all, instead of a mostly nefarious, few, and we could achieve this, without destroying the planet but I fully admit, that we can't sustain an ever increasing population, without developing extraterrestial resources and living space.
Quoting noAxioms
I think it's likely that 'all of the above' style attempts will be made before we find out which methods of space exploration and development are the most successful based on whatever tech levels we have achieved at the time.
Quoting noAxioms
We can't change the laws of physics but we can learn more physics and start to know, as you do, that there are different laws of physics for the macro and the sub atomic. Classical physics laws and quantum physics laws, and the search for the physics that encompassed them both, is still for the seekers. I certainly would not be so short sighted as to jettison, in anyway, shape of form, the very exciting and wonderful areas of VR, AR and holotech. A current mobile smartphone would not even deserve the dismissive term 'fancy telephone,' as it is obviously a palmtop/handheld computer and the connection to the technology called 'phone,' should have been dropped years ago.
You can hardly buy any device nowadays, that can be accurately labelled mobile phone (as that function is only one of it's many functions.) They have been palmtop computers for quite a while.
Firstly, it seems I have the spelling of his first name wrong and its Leonard Susskind. He is certainly no quack and is held in very high regard indeed, within the Physics community.
I have now watched the video I posted twice and probably will many times more. Under an hour is a very small price to pay and is worth every second. Here are some quotes from it that might wet your appetite towards watching it:
1. Ads/cft (anti-de sitter / conformal field theory)
Gravity is the hydrodynamics of entanglement.
2. As soon as reliable quantum computers become available, entanglement can be studied much more successfully in low energy lab environments.
3. Quantum mechanically, an Einstein-Rosen bridge can be explored, it's properties studied and reported on.
4. Messages can be securely transmitted from the vicinity of one object to the vicinity of the other, without leaving any trace in the laboratory space between. Teleportation through the wormhole, 'so to speak.' This is not possible classically.
He then goes on to exemplify 4, in a 'simple quantum teleportability' thought experiment, using an Alice and Bob type scenario involving qbits. As this developed, and due to stuff he states later on in the lecture, I began to think that, he was suggesting that superluminal communication, may not be impossible. But perhaps I misunderstood some of what he was saying, and you could perhaps identify my misinterpretations, if you listened to the lecture. I am willing to do this via PM's or via a new thread titled 'Leonard Susskind's lecture on debunking quantum gravity.' If you like, and even if the mods decide to chuck such a thread into the lounge or somewhere else.
Spacefarers could meet, who have similar tech levels. I agree that if they can visit us and we cant visit them, then the tech comparison, probably will be like comparing lichen to us. Carl Sagan stated often that in that case, there would be no Star Wars, as there would be no competition.
So, two planets, far from each other, that developed life/intelligent life/technology at a similar pace, who meet somewhere out there!
What are the chances? Probably something similar to the chances of any sentient life forming anywhere in the universe. But we know that has happened at least once on this planet, so who knows for sure?
Quoting noAxioms
But we know not to accept such justifications, just like you refuse to accept the attempted justifications made by Putin or Bush. Just like I didn't accept the justifications of Blair in the UK for the WMD BS, regarding Iraq. Hopefully more and more of we will get better and better at not accepting fake news in the future. A good goal for all of us, agree?
Quoting noAxioms
No right answer to know, surely suggests an invalid or currently unanswerable question or a question that can only be answered via unscientific conjecture, but so what? That's been true from the beginning, and is the basis of all theism and theosophism. It's also why, I type that there is no omniscient existent and there never has been or will be. I don't mind the 'fantasist,' I can wear that hat comfortably for fun, just like anyone else, but unlike the theist. I will try my best to make clear the evidence available (or lack of) for any posit I make.
If it's just my opinion, then I will say so. You do the same, yes?
Quoting noAxioms
I am merely echoing the claims of theism. My conclusion is the same as yours, that no omniscient exists. I have merely further stated that if such terms have any use at all, it is a use of no more value than me being determined to win the 100 meters at the Olympics. I can at best asymptotically aspire to such and by doing so I might improve my fitness level but I will never reach that goal.
For me, that's a reality of a 'closed system.' If I was given secret tech help then maybe I could run faster than Usain Bolt over 100 meters. But I agree that no matter what tech humans develop in the future, they will never become omniscient. They can still aspire to it!
Quoting noAxioms
No, I am simply trying to 'qualify' and 'quantify' the omniscient god hypothesis. A flippant steelmanning if you like. The tech that the posited omnigod has, is manifest as god functionality, yes. Many theists anthropomorphise god imagery, many don't. Most pantheists don't and even many panentheists don't, and then we have the panpsychists and cosmopsychists etc. I don't really care how a person personifies an omnigod and whether or not they posit such as an eternal, or as an emergent, but I think we should completely reject all of them for now, and focus on who we are as a species and what we want for our future, if we assume, or we are convinced, we have one. I do give credence to the idea of an emerging collective 'knowledge base' that humans have been building on, since we came out of the wilds and I notice that it is growing in very tangible and demonstrable ways and I muse on running that forward, for a few million or billion years, to 'philosophically' (with perhaps a little science projection thrown in,) consider the 'ultimate' consequence of such a growing knowledge base.
I will respond to this post tomorrow Gnomon as I don't have enough time to respond to it as I would want to, as It's now 4:20pm here and I am only 10 mins away from hearing the command of my Saturday night beer and single malt whisky experience. Have a good night!
Your proposed "fundamental" particles may be appropriate for a scientist in a lab to use as a guide. But I'm not a scientist, and my lab is my mind*1. So, the "fundamental" element of Information is Difference*2*3. You are talking in terms of Physics (e.g. Matter ; Particles ; Objective), while I'm talking about Meta-physics (e.g. Mind ; Meaning ; Subjective). :smile:
*1. Someone once asked Einstein, "if you are a scientist, where is your lab?". He silently held up a pencil. Albert was a theoretical scientist, a philosopher who focused his razor sharp mind on abstractions (e.g. Energy) that can't be seen under a microscope or dissected with a razor-sharp blade.
*2. Difference is a key concept of philosophy, denoting the process or set of properties by which one entity is distinguished from another within a relational field or a given conceptual system. ___Wikipedia
*3. Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences".So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics its called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology its called "Conflict".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Note -- Atoms of knowledge & meaning are invisible bits (binary distinctions) of Information. Those bits are mathematical relationships (ratios : rational) that add-up to bytes, then to concepts, then to personal meanings : relationship to self. If that sounds like religious dogma to you, then our worldviews & vocabularies are incompatible or immutual.
GENERAL COMMENTARY
A. Physical Science has no need for metaphysical gods & spirits. But, scientists use different names for similar concepts. Instead of divine Creation, they may call it "instant Inflation". In place of animated Spirits, they call it Energy. Same thing, different terminology.
B. Since the Big Bang beginning of physical reality sounds like a creation event, some scientists get around that meta-physical implication by noting that the "bang" is not a part of our inflating universe. Some religious believers would agree that their infinite-eternal creator-god is not immanent in the space-time creation. In either case, that outside Cause is Meta-Physical, and only knowable by inference from physical events. Another way to explain away the sudden emergence of Something (our everything) from Nothing (ultimate set) is to use the mathematical vocabulary of an "empty set", or "vacuum energy", to avoid the implication of ex nihilo by "divine fiat". Same notion, different words.
C. In order to explicate the Enformationism thesis, I have developed my own alternative philosophical vocabulary, intended to avoid the doctrinal presumptions of both religious and scientific language. Unfortunately, some readers will still tend to read-into those novel terms, their own Spiritualism or Materialism prejudices. "vive la difference!"
BothAnd Blog Glossary : https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/index.html
Note -- this list of Enformationism terminology is out-of-date, because the science of Information (and my understanding) is progressing so rapidly.
:yum: Cheers.
:chin:
Matter constrains life ...
Life constrains intelligence ...
Intelligence constrains transcension (formerly from 1938, "ephemeralization")?
Quoting Gnomon
:sweat: :lol: :rofl:
Please refute ...
Quoting 180 Proof
(link to post that loads slowly)
The yardstick should be chosen to suit the object to be measured. If we are discussing the evolution of physical/material stuff of the Earth, a physical instrument would be appropriate. But the topic of this thread -- 'information/technological singularity" -- is about Cultural/Technical evolution. So the proper way to measure such a not-yet-real future state of human ingenuity would be to apply the philosophical tool of Reason, which seems to be directly related to Intelligence, n'est-ce pas?
The topical question is about "credence", not substance. So, on what basis would you believe a description of some projected event that has not yet come to pass? Some thinkers seem to take it on faith, in human intelligence/ingenuity, that a techno-utopia will eventually come to pass. Personally, unlike some philosophical pessimists, I agree that cultural evolution -- both ethical & technical -- is generally progressing in a positive direction. But my notion of Utopia is different from that of Vernor Vinge and Ray Kutzweil.
As an amateur philosopher, I'm more inclined toward the information-systems interpretation of progress, than the technology-faith scenario. Yet I remain agnostic about the teleological or teleonomic destiny of the world. So, my Enformationism graph of Hegelian progress (not to scale) ends with a question mark. :smile:
Note -- The Hegelian ups & downs are smoothed-out at this cosmic scale. From our local earth-scale perspective the up-jumps & set-backs may appear like like a chain of mountains.
Im trying to concentrate on the emergence, what humanity might become or where it might go. Preserving people seconds from death doesnt seem to play a significant role in that.
No doubt. A group of people split into life-expectancies of 70 and 200 wont cause any trouble at all.
Nice summary, thanks. I have suggested that what is emergent in humans will not be human. To resist this is to waste our potential.
I say that too, but I also say its a lot easier to fit the creature to the environment than the other way around. Be its friend instead of making yourself its enemy.
Quoting universenessBut not out-of-control reproduction. When I moved to this new place, there was a frog plague going on. Frogs everywhere. What good did it do them? Some months later they were all gone, populations back to (or even somewhat beneath) normal levels and it was easier to stop at the intersections again.
Ah, so its humanitys survival thats the goal, not the taking-over of the galaxy. That might be better served with the 95% population reduction and learning to get along with each other. If we can get through the collapse without extinction, it may actually sustain itself going forward. Hence my vision of the world in 1000 years in some prior post. Imagine a world with people but almost no metal.
Got suggestions? Im actually quite interested in ideas for a stable government system that doesnt depend on the whole system of the poor being slaves to the rich. I dont much know what Im talking about here, so my views might be quite naive.
Studying doesnt increase intelligence. But agree with the rest.
First of all, the theists have a lot to do with encouraging overpopulation. The Catholics consider it a sin to not breed like bunnies. Their moral code forbids the very steps that would save humanity, perhaps as a way to eventually force Gods hand, like hes got to step in before the crash. As for the rapture, I think most of its adherents would suggests a figure like 1-2% disappearing, not 94%.
Not while the pope lives...
Sorry, but no. If were not putting back what we dig out of the ground, then it is mathematically unsustainable. Playing nice with each other (sharing all the world Lennon) is probably the worst strategy because everybody dies simultaneously, or you didnt do it right.
Work out what needs to be done without the non-renewables, then do the calculation of how many can be sustained. I know, you label me a doomster, but you seem to have no answer to this simple thing except hope that the magic will continue and fuel from the ground never ends.
How to do an interstellar colony: Build a smart ship that can do everything. Bring DNA with you. Take 100000 years to get somewhere, perhaps refueling if it doesnt seem workable at close inspection. If it passes, introduce simple life, and then direct it just like at the teleological theorist posit. In perhaps less time than it took to get there, you have your life on the new place. Some of them might even be intelligent, especially if the advances are being directed. Un-natural selection. Point is, its a lot cheaper by many orders of magnitude than ferrying a small number of colonists from Earth and then telling them the wont be a hospitable environment for them yet, or maybe ever except in this little box it made for them, which theyre used to since being stuck on a ship is all they know.
Classical physics is a function of the more fundamental quantum physics. Theyre not separate branches of some yet to be discovered encompassing thing. QM encompasses classical physics just like relativity encompasses Newtonian mechanics.
No argument except that it has little to do with the topic. Yea, we have an information device thats always with us. Nobody say how that would revolutionize everything, including revolutionizing the whole concept of truth.
Quoting universenessWell there you go. Had you spelled it right, I would have accepted his reported assertions.
So I suspect, so Im actually going with you not actually interpreting his comments the way they were meant.
CFT is Penroses thing, no? No wait, thats conformal cyclic cosmology.=
This is done today, but its not anything faster than light. Points 2 and 3 seem to just be suggested areas of exploration.
Perhaps this is what you meant by he proposes that manipulation of quantum entanglement may indeed mean we can observe and measure what going on at large distances without any 'signal travelling involved.
OK, this may be some weird kind of security thing, but not a faster-than-light claim. It doesnt look like a claim of do something to one end and the other entangled end is immediately affected that I took it for. Ill withdrawn the declaration of bunk for now. But really, a security feature isnt exactly going to make interstellar exploration more possible. Theres no reason for the communications to not be open.
OK, thats the part I balk at. Got a time stamp where he goes into that? Sorry, but an hour is a lot to me right now.
Quoting universenessNot buying it. Utterly improbable odds.
Star wars happen between two worlds both populated by us. That puts us both more or less at the same tech level. Another reason not to branch out to new worlds until you breed a less war-like creature to populate it.
Weve been technological for perhaps 3 centuries out of 1.5e8 centuries, so the odds are something on the order of a 1 in 7-8 digit number. Maybe 1 in 5-6 digits to find something to which you can communicate.
Intelligence has a marker and theres only two species on earth that has it. The marker is menopause, an adaptation that only benefits intelligent races. The other species is the killer whale. Why dont we try to communicate with them? Odds are theyre the most intelligent non-human thing out there. So suppose we get to the alien world and find the equivalent of killer whales. We have our intelligent ET, but what would we do about it? Hard to talk. Theyre not building space ships anytime soon. Are they to be afforded the same moral code as any intelligent species encountered?
Depending on your assumptions, the chances of that one is 1. The long-odds thing was meeting one at an equivalent level of development. It wouldnt be clear who would win in a conflict.
The odds being 1, what role should humanity play that we cant just leave to all those other guys on similar paths? Why does it have to be us? Youre the one positing the big purpose the universe has for us.
I did at the time. Only in hindsight was it made clear, and then only because the news is supposedly free. What will the Russians tell their people if they have to withdraw, or if they annex this country that did nothing to them? Theres a lot more media control there, but the people can still read news from other countries. Im from the USA and find one of the best ways to get actual news is to consult something foreign like the BBC. Every supposedly legitimate domestic news source seems to attempt to spin each story one way or the other.
Its getting far worse actually, mostly due to how people get their news today, which is by popularity picks by google or facebook or something. They push the stories that gather more clicks and not the ones that actually tell it like it is. Really, the social media thing has done more damage to general knowledge than anything I know. It isnt just natural selection thats making us dumber.
I dont yet have a mobile phone. Its coming, but dang, the things are pure evil.
First of all, conjecture isnt an answer, its just a guess. If theres no answer to know, then the omni thing must simply say that: I cant say what the weather will be 6 months hence, despite my omnipotence. Thats the truth, its right, and the people asking are simply wrong to assume that there must be (however unknowable by science) exactly one answer thats actually correct. It isnt a requirement of the omniscient entity to know the right answer when there isnt one.
I try to frame my opinions differently than assertions, but I sometimes come across wrong.
Of course not, but besides the point. Is the positing of one even consistent? I dont see why not. I dont see a contradiction in the no answer answer above.
Didnt you posit that all people are striving for this known unreachable goal? I didnt agree with that. Sure, they maybe take steps to swim faster, but never with the goal of being the best really being a factor. Yes, they can aspire to it, but most probably dont.
Had to look that one up. First Ive heard it.
Dont understand. Why have a measuring device if the measurement is known before the measuring is done?
I had done a study on how creatures would have evolved in the world of luck where all quantum measurements occur by pure chance in the most beneficial way to the measurer. It evolved the sort of omni-thing you speak of. It knows everything, and thus also nothing since it doesnt need to actually know anything. It doesnt need eyes to find food because food is always right where it reaches every time. Eyes provide information, and this thing already has it all, so it doesnt need more. I see similarities with that and what Im describing based on your descriptions (if that makes any sense).
Thats what Ive been saying that humans are particularly bad at. They focus on my future, but little beyond that.
I mentioned finding a better political system, and one of the problems is the short term limits which tend to discourage efforts that reap benefits at a time beyond the term of the official. The current system all but destroys any long-term efforts concerning our future.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting[/quote]
?
It is as I surmised - the cogntive singularity aka the technological singularity is beyond our event horizon i.e. we don't know what it is going to be (like).
A question: What exactly do we mean by technological singularity as in überintelligence?
Consider the following quote from one of the first technoscientists after von Neumann but before Vinge or Kurzweil to run through the gedankenexperiment later called (the) Technological Singularity (aka "rapture of nerds"):
[quote=I. J. Good, (Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine) Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965.]Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.[/quote]
:nerd: :up:
I've been wondering about the possibility of intelligence explosion. I've seen many students surpass their teachers for instance, but is that because the students were already more intelligent or were they made more intelligent by the teacher?
This just leaves folks to assume neutral or anti, when you type not pro and pro when you suggest not anti. In science, the term 'novel,' just means 'new.' All together, I think the quote above is far too broad to be of much use to our discussion.
Quoting Gnomon
I would not say that a multiverse theory is completely based on no empirical evidence and is a 'philosophical' viewpoint. Most modern multiverse theories have a empirical basis of 'superposition' and reference such as:
"Larger objects have been observed to have such inherently quantum properties, but the observation of Robens et al. is based on a stringent test, considered to be the gold standard for confirming that a superposition exists."
You would have to explain further what you mean by 'time before time.' If you are typing about the idea that inflation of the singularity happened before the start of the expansion, badly named, as the big bang then the inflation occurred after t=0 and did not happen in a time before time. Roger Penrose's CCC does suggest a cyclical universe based on time aeons but he also employs the empirical evidence of the existence of 'hawking points,' which are supported by both the data from the Wmap project, and the Planck project. Again, CCC, is not a purely philosophical hypothesis. Dark matter and dark energy are further examples of concepts that some may choose to label 'philosophical' or currently 'beyond the knowable origins of nature.' This just reinforces the point that we must be ever vigilant to make sure that gaps in scientific knowledge, does not allow any woo woo of the gaps, to be passed off, as valid contributions to possible scientific truth.
Quoting Gnomon
Einstein had to work within an environment which had to contend with a much stronger theistic power and influence base, than scientists have to tolerate today. Any theistic dalliances Einstein felt compelled to employ in the public domain that existed then, was much less, than those that had to be employed by Copernicus or Galileo or the murdered Giordano Bruno. The influence of theism remains very pernicious but things are a little better now, than they were then.
:up:
Can x make y more intelligent than x? It seems possible , base matter (inanimate) has an IQ of 0, but humans, on average, have an IQ of 130 and the latter came from the former.
There is plenty of space for notions of reductionism and Emergentism to find common ground.
I think it's basic, that complexity emerges from fundamentals, no god required.
From Wiki:
Emergentism can be compatible with physicalism, the theory that the universe is composed exclusively of physical entities, and in particular with the evidence relating changes in the brain with changes in mental functioning.
Quoting Gnomon
You maybe guilty of over-dramatising any current gaps between the physics of the macro and the physics of the subatomic or gaps between classical physics and quantum physics. I don't relate to your 'rug pulling' imagery at all. There simply seems to be laws that only hold firm under macro conditions and others that only hold under quantum conditions. As a macro object, I certainly cant seem to pass through a wall like one of my quantum excitations (like a proton) seems to be able to do, via quantum tunneling.
No doubt, in time, we will discover the 'bridges' between classical and quantum physics which are rigorously scientific and in doing so, expunge any, let's say, fringe philosophical or 'silly' theological musings, on the subject.
I would not suggest that increases in individual intelligence or in the collective/totality of human intelligence, is THE 'yardstick' or the only important variable, when considering what is emergent in the human race, both as individuals and as a collective. Legacy may be as important and perhaps could be considered as having 'stand alone' properties. Our accumulating external knowledge base and our technological breakthroughs may also have stand alone aspects which are separate from human intellect, even though they are outputs of human intellectual efforts. I have witnessed some animals employ human tech for example. Increasing intellectual ability certainly is however, a very significant emergent, in humans. I think most neuroscientists would suggest that the ancients were intellectually, as capable as we are, but they could not unlock the potential of the application of human intellect, coupled with the increasing pace of learning, which is emerging from human scientific effort, demonstrated today.
Ok, that's fine, but you must expect, and accept, a higher level of critique than might be fired at the work and results of scientists working in labs. At the risk of offending any philosophy fundamentalists on TPF, I would suggest that scientific rigor will always be the final arbiter of philosophical musings.
Quoting Gnomon
I think the 'but' above is nonsense. Theists love to conflate scientific terminology with concepts of the divine but most attempts are almost comedic. Inflation is not comparable with notions of a divine creation as no aspect of inflation requires a divine creator. Energy allows work to be done and I am fine if some folks wish to refer to 'movement' or 'work being done,' as animation or spiritual. In the Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote:
Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual
Breathing uses energy and animates your chest up and down. I am ok if you use the word spirit or spiritual, as Carl suggests you can.
Quoting Gnomon
Does something like Roger Penrose's CCC allay such need for a 'creation event,' or first cause or prime mover?
Quoting Gnomon
It's not metaphysical, as it's not beyond or after that which is physics. The big bang singularity maybe currently, a loosely defined object, but it is physical. Roger's singularity does not inflate, as it does not 'demonstrate' any aspect of 'size' or 'dimensionality.' It occurs after the process of heat death has occurred and the universe has no 'matter' left and all remaining black holes have radiated away, but it does have very large 'extent' but such 'extent' has no meaning at that point and can be called a singularity and time=0 and a new aeon begins.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, they will! It will ever be your burden to deal with that then until you can provide convincing empirical evidence to support your hypothesis.
Cheers! Twas a nice evening. Only me and my auld ma in the hoose, but It was still a good wee night.
I had two generous measures of a 16 year old Lagavulin, along with some beers.
Not sure what you mean by this? Example?
Quoting noAxioms
Based on a BBC article:
Several hundred people have already paid to have their bodies cryogenically preserved in three existing facilities in the US and Russia, and there are as many as 1,250 on waiting lists.
A very small number of takers then and I agree they are unlikely to have a significant impact on 'what humans might become.'
Quoting noAxioms
I have already stated that I think that 'all of the above will be attempted.' I am hardly therefore 'an enemy' of any idea for how best to develop and explore space.
Quoting noAxioms
It's a lot easier to control frogs that to control human population, especially when there is still so much poverty. The temptation to have a lot of children, as they can look after you when you can no longer look after yourself, is very strong, in a global society that is still mostly under the control of a nefarious elite.
We can just dispose of a currently existing excess human population. So, we can only continue to combat the consequences of the current power and status of the nefarious elite. Whilst we also try to educate people into understanding their current local circumstances and the folly of having children they and the government they live under are unable to, or are too corrupt to, or are to much under the influence of international interference to, support.
Quoting noAxioms
Both goals handshake imo, and I don't approve of the aggressive sounding, 'taking over of the galaxy' imagery you invoke.Quoting noAxioms
No metal? Please explain!
Quoting noAxioms
I am a socialist and secular humanist who no longer sees value in party politics. I would remove money as the means of exchange and I currently support notions of global unity, world governance and a resource based economy such as that envisioned here in the Venus project:
I am not suggesting we are more intelligent than the ancients or that we will be 'more intelligent' in the future, in that sense. I am saying that we have a legacy, knowledge base to work from that the ancients did not have and that knowledge base increases at an increasing pace for each new generation. So, our knowledge increases as a collective. This is another example of what is emergent in humans.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah but it's an 'end times' curio. Those who are not 'raptured,' perish! so only the 1-2% have some kind of existence. Earthly humans are made extinct and the evanhellicals, don't posit trans or post humans other than the raptured ones.
Quoting noAxioms
We don't need to kill popes. We just need to continue to try to prevent the label 'catholic' and dispel all myths of popery and reveal a pope, as what it truly is, 'A residual, who inherits what's left of the Roman Emperors', who held the same title (since Augustus), as all previous and the current pope, 'Pontif (pontifex) Maximus.'
Quoting noAxioms
I more agreed with your own labelling of yourself as a doomster.
How about genetically modified foods?
How about vertical farming?
I do not advocate magic solutions, but I do hope for scientific/technological and social/economic/political solutions to the problem of human over-population.
It not like no-one is talking about it. For example,
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/five-ways-we-can-feed-the-world-in-2050.html
Quoting noAxioms
Yep, many ways to start a process. We have the already demonstrated human pioneer imperative to work with. I am not too fussed about which methodology proves to be the most practicable. Trial and error is a legitimate scientific approach.
Yeah! this is not the best way to instal confidence in why you might accept the scientific assertions of the very learned and well established, Leonard. :scream:
Quoting noAxioms
Not really, as he builds on an Alice, Bob and Tom scenario. The small amount of maths he included was over my head, but the reason I kept musing towards superluminal communication, was his continued reference to the concept of 'transportation through a wormhole' with entangled micro black holes at either end and his statement that he thinks wormholes may well be physical realities.
Quoting noAxioms
I think that we would be ecstatic initially, but eventually, we would probably be somewhat disappointed that we came so far to find only the equivalent of killer whales. Yes, I hope we fully respect the alien killer whales and we leave their habitat and environment alone. Perhaps however, we may still be able to start a colony there. :cool:
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe the answer to your question is expressed somewhere like:
Quoting noAxioms
Sadly true but it has been ever thus, that the reports are written by the victors not the vanquished.
We probably currently live in 'the best of times,' at least so far, when it comes to being able to combat fake news.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: That's almost technophobic sir!
Quoting noAxioms
I suggested such as a 'collectivised' or 'totality' of intent and purpose of the human race. At an individual level, folks like me demonstrate such purpose more than others and there are also individuals that demonstrate such purpose much more than I do and perhaps some who also do so but don't cognise their participation.Quoting noAxioms
Just some terminology that's recently became more and more popular. I have even heard many UK politicians employ the terms strawmanning and steelmanning, recently, during TV interviews or panel debates.
Quoting noAxioms
An omniscient already knows EVERYTHING by definition. Which for me and I think you to, is enough to be sure that no omniscient exists or ever could.
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting, but how did this, I assume, 'electronic manifestation' demonstrate it's omniscience?
Could you ask it questions?
Quoting noAxioms
We can only keep trying to tweak 'the system,' constantly, until it becomes as benevolent as the most humane of us, want it to become.
So, god as a mere projection of human fears and aspirations and not something that has an existent.
If that's what you are suggesting then, I agree. God, the best human would still be a mere fallible, mortal, limited, human who exists only within relative space and time.
No omni abilities whatsoever.
Something like that. Have you come across via negativa?
Interesting "article". :up:
Just a question: I wonder if saying "a system based on disorder-order-disorder" is intentional, i.e. if disorder prevails or rules or is basically the fundamental state of everything, and that everything starts and ends with disorder. Or that there's an alternate state of disorder and order. Can there also be that everything is a combination of order and disorder, i.e. it is both ordered and disordered?
For example, what it looks like disorder can actually be (also) order. The following image looks a kind of random drawing or graph, lacking structure, etc. Yet, it shows a soundwave that represents a well-structured musical sound. And vice versa. If you analyze a well structure musical sound, you get such an image. It all depends on the way you are observing and examining something.
No, I had to google it. Subtracting the non-essential to improve the chances of success at achieving a goal, seems very valid to me, in situations which don't have any moral issue associated with them.
But if there are issues of human morality involved, then there must be judgement involved, that must not prioritise the goal over all other consequentials involved.
I accept the 'lesser of two evils,' type scenario's etc, as horrible as some of those can be in certain circumstances.
I assign no value or significance to:
[b]"The idea comes from a Latin phrase used initially in Christian Theology to explain what God is by focusing on what he isnt.
If God transcends all things, humans cannot apply qualities and attributes to him in the affirmative (God is light, God is love, etc.). Instead, via negativa presents God as a mystery that humans cannot describe in words."[/b]
Thanks!
Well I certainly think we humans can assume disorder, in a situation, which does have some fundamental order or very complicated underlying order, that we have not spotted. But not in the case of 'the natural systems,' we observe in our currently observable universe or in the events we are confident have occurred since the poorly named big bang.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I am not sure what you mean here by 'a combination of order and disorder?'
The music sound wave example you gave looks ordered and would be considered a very interesting signal, if SETI received it from deep space.
OK. Here is a definition from the BothAnd Blog. If that's not narrow enough for you, I have more. BothAnd is a philosophical concept not a scientific term. But it is related to the scientific notions bolded in the quote below. :smile:
Both/And Principle :
[i]*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to ofset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
*** Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
*** This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Quoting universeness
The "but" paragraph is merely referring to primitive notions that are describing the same kind of phenomena that scientists study, but without the intervening centuries of learning. Their ideas may seem like "nonsense" to you, but they conveyed meaningful philosophical information to them*1. For example, early humans seemed to assume that anything that moved was animated by the same invisible force that motivated humans. The analogy to "breath" was a metaphor based on the observed fact that Life requires breathing. The Bible says that "life is in the blood", but today we would add that oxygen in the blood is essential to life. It's easy for moderns, after centuries of scientific investigation to feel intellectually superior to ancient philosophers*2. For example, Aristotle used the Greek word "energeia" meaning : activity, operation, vigour. workmanship. supernatural action, cosmic force. But today, we have a mathematical definition of "energy"*3. Same general understanding, with more decimal places. :nerd:
*1. Don't you think the humans of the far future Singularity will dismiss your own primitive notions of "Energy" (ability to do work) as mere metaphors for concepts you barely understand? Enformationism merely goes one step forward by defining "Energy" in terms of mathematical ratios (i.e. abstract information).
*2. A superiority complex is a belief that your abilities or accomplishments are somehow dramatically better than other people's.
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-a-superiority-complex
*3. [i]"Eugenius says that 'the moderns have profited by the rules of the ancients' but moderns have "excelled them."
Sir Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist, once said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.[/i]
Skepticism toward unorthodox notions is essential to a scientific worldview. But openness to novelty is also necessary for advancement of knowledge, and to avoid fossilized orthodoxy. Perhaps, you may be guilty of over-minimizing complex concepts that don't fit your current belief system. :joke:
Skepticism :
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
___Baruch Spinoza
Coupled with our innate curiosity to further knowledge, and our advancing technology, it seems inevitable that either us, or our consciousness integrated into artificial bodies, will further our sphere of influence beyond what we ever thought was imaginable before.
So I think it's likely that humans will colonise space, one way or another, and maximise our chances of survival, reducing our dependency on any one solar system, any one energy source (Sun) for survival. All going to plan ofc.
Other lifeforms could be well underway to doing the same. And if they're not, sheer distance will cause our species to diverge into multiple different species across the galaxy. Unless we can solve issues of travel time or become metallic organisms/conscious computers/robots with indefinite lifespans.
What this seems to mean as a general direction is that the universe wishes to be fully colonised, fully consolidated and fully alive/sentient. And if it doesn't wish it, for some reason the physics and chemistry of the system certainly seems to propagate that behaviour and allow for that ideal
You will find lots of empirical evidence to support my thesis in the links to articles by professional scientists. But, only the Enformationism thesis will provide the logical connections between bits & pieces of physical evidence and professional opinions that add-up to the conclusion that the physical world has "at bottom . . . an immaterial source and explanation". That may sound like "nonsense" to you. But I'll let you argue with a prominent physicist about the scientific details of his thesis : an information-centric participatory universe. :smile:
It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom...an immaterial source and explanation...that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
___John Archibald Wheeler, quantum physics pioneer
Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind realityand the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.
? John Archibald Wheeler, Quantum Theory and Measurement
I can see the usefulness of this, for discussing issues such as good and evil, as humans perceive such subjective constructs. I can see the value of seeking a midpoint of balance between such 'opposites,' or suggesting than in a holistic view, they belong on the same line or are part of the same system etc. But I don't see such a connection with theism and science. Ying/Yang does not connect with true/false imo.
There is no balancing midpoint between true and false, it's one or the other. A partial truth is just a false part and a true part which is not on a line between true and false. True and false are 'two state' systems like binary, they are not analogue. Hot/cold, big/small, left/right, ying/yang are opposites but they are also analogue. True/false is binary. Science is true, god is false. You cannot harmonise them.
Quoting Gnomon
Space and time are not opposites, hence spacetime. I personally see no place in your notion of a 'whole system' for concepts such as eternity or infinity. Why do you need them to conceive the universe as a whole system? I think the other terms you employ are fine in the context you use them, but all you seem to be fundamentally confirming in the quote above is that a whole system is made of parts.
Quoting Gnomon
I disagree when it comes to issues like supernatural exists/supernatural does not exist.
There is an 'outside' of the universe/the universe is everything there is.
These questions apply to the universe at its largest scale (ie whole system scale) imo and are therefore not relative.
I agree that true/false can be locally relativistic, based on what an observer receives as input in their reference frame but I believe that there are other reference frames to be considered. For example, could an observer be in a reference frame that allows them to view time dilation? Could the observer/system observe a person age slower due to their speed relative to a person who is aging at a faster rate. Is there such a frame of reference which is outside of the two people being observed but still inside the universe? I think there are such 'levels of relativity.'
Quoting Gnomon
Sure but how far apart can two superpositions be. I think the record at the moment is around two feet, achieved at Stanford Uni. We don't know how far apart two atoms in superposition can be, perhaps we will discover some limit to the spacetime involved.
I did not suggest intellectual superiority I suggested intellectual advancement due to a legacy of an ever increasing knowledge base.
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
The bible is mostly filled with babble and Aristotle proposed an Earth centric universe, so we now have much better sources of accurate knowledge than the bible or Aristotle. They are welcome to be part of the mountain that we now stand upon, to enable us to see further than the ancients ever could. I personally consider Aristotle as having contributed a pebble to the growth of that mountain, the bible to have actually hindering the growth of the mountain and people like Einstein to have added whole layers to the mountain.
Quoting Gnomon
I hope so, yes, but I take it by 'singularity,' you are referring to some pivotal scientific/technological breakthrough. I don't think they will consider the description of energy as the ability to do work, as being incorrect but I hope they will consider it rather simplistic and basic.
Which mathematical ratio's are you referring to?
Quoting Gnomon
Are you suggesting you suffer from such?
Quoting Gnomon
Already answered above:
I always try to avoid ossifying when it comes to my viewpoints. I am sure you do the same.
Indeed, poorly.
Quoting universeness
I gave you an example. The apparently disordered soundwave is also (i.e. it represents) an ordered musical sound. Also atoms by simple observation seem disordered but they follow well ordered, balanced (with forces) system. The planets seem disordered in space but they are also orbiting based on a very orderly system of gravity forces. And so on. In all of these cases, where there is (apparently) a disorder there's also an order.
Quoting universeness
Anyway, I don't think that anyone can see an order --e.g. a pattern-- in this soundwave. It could well be random. You must hear it to see that there's an order or pattern in it.
As for SETI, I think that it is made for receiving rather than sending messages, but I don't know much about it. Anyway, if I send this image --in some way or another-- into space and it is received by aliens, most probably they wouldn't undestand anything. Except, of course, if they are gifted with the ability to "hear" soundwave images! :smile: So, I would send the image together with the sound itself (as radiowave or whatever. I'm not knowledgable in this field). The sound is most important here if one is to detect a pattern, whici is what SETI and perhaps be other programs try to detect.
BTW, even if some aliens receive this sound, they might not undestand anything at all. That is, they could consider it garbage or random, i.e. something disordered. And vice versa, if we receive a sound from space in which we can't detect some pattern although it might have been sent by aliens who conscidered it ordered.
So, when we are referring to the whole universe, we cannot be certain about what is ordered and what is disordered.
I agree, or else what it all there for? As Carl Sagan wrote for his movie Contact.
"Seems like an awful waste of space!"
Quoting Benj96
I agree.
Quoting Benj96
I agree.
Quoting Benj96
Sounds logical to me!
Quoting Benj96
So, that's the bit I am most interested in from you Ben, as you have dualistic viewpoints.
Do you muse on how this emerging 'single mind' will 'network' or collectivise or ultimately merge before the universe suffers the heat death, it is most likely to suffer?
I don't expect you to have a definitive answer but I am just interested in how the dualist see's that emerging networking, even from a future transhuman or the more depressing posthuman perspective.
Quality time spent with friends and family become more and more precious as I get older.
A few single malt's as well is just glorious!
Two [s]fiends[/s], I mean friends, from Glasgow coming down this Saturday so looking forward to a wee local town session!
Larry Niven got into a post-scarcity economy description in his book Rainbow Mars. Every time a capital project was proposed, it always came with a calculation of how many lives it would cost. Anyway, to my knowledge, theism doesnt encourage this sort of delay to meeting your maker.
Oh like the Russians are going to honor those contracts when things get tight. But yea, theyll take your money.
Waiting list? What, like Im dying now but a spot is opening up next March? Hope you havent expired too much while youre waiting.
Didnt talk about being an enemy of an idea. I said enemy of an environment. Better to make friends with it, work with it, not against it.
No, theyre both controlled pretty much by the same method. Its not like airplanes flew over and sprayed for them.
Thats what the robots say! Another typo? If we dont do something about it, the frog method will get employed (no, not make grease spots on all the intersections).
Doesnt stop them. Nobody likes getting told what to do, especially if its for the benefit of somebody else. Also, there will be those who comply and those who defy and have a bunch of kids. Guess which group gets naturally selected out? Wed be breeding humanity for wanting larger families.
OK, I think theyre fairly exclusive imo. Were not fit to do it, but what we can create can be fit to do it. Best odds of survival of humans is to not kill each other at home. Its worked great for many species, but yea, not so much the dinosaurs.
Pretty much got that from you with your talk of humanity having a purpose of making some kind significant impact on the universe, like it served the purpose of the universe or something. Cant make any more than a scratch if we dont cause something to spread out, to outlast the death of our planet which is already about 80% of the way there.
Civilization collapses. We still have metal, but its old stuff from before. Nobody knows anymore how to get more since it takes tech to get at it. Weve mined all the easy stuff. It becomes a chicken/egg problem. Takes metal to get to get to the metal. Fear not. The salvaged metals will last centuries. The longer it lasts, the less well remember how to get more when most of it has corroded away.
So is every first world government on the planet, just some more than others. Anyway, yea, I definitely get socialist vibes from you. The Scandinavian countries seem to do it best. Harder to be rich there.
It does serve a purpose, but isnt implemented well anywhere. I mean over-the-table bribery as policy? Thats sanctioned corruption. Nobody blinks, and those getting the bribes are hardly motivated to vote that crap out of the law.
Thats the mommy I talked about. Were not good at all about implementing something like that, but I agree, its absolutely needed.
Nice pipe dream, but no numbers. They say no servitude, but its all people shown doing the work, and they dont show where the stuff comes from. No wind farms or other renewable energy apparent.
Quoting universenessWe were being selected for it for a while, even if its on the decline now. If it becomes ethical to make modifications, we can reverse that trend, so Im willing to suggest a future upswing. The singularity might render the need moot.
and in anything posthuman.
They dont though. Things just get tough from there on according to the story. You have a second chance of sorts, but the path is narrower than it was before the rapture. Tread it and you will be severely persecuted. So I was taught anyway. No, I was not raised by rapturists, but we covered this sort of stuff in school.
My opinion was that the description of heaven sounded horrible. Great for 5 minutes, but it quickly devolves into slow torture, kind of like a heroin addiction.
No, but the church needs to get on the side of humanity instead of the side of the church. It isnt ever going to happen.
These are all grown/harvested/distributed with fossil fuels today. Theyre not a substitute for digging limited carbon out of the ground.
Not talking about 2050. Im talking about when theres no more to dig out of the ground, coupled with what the environment will look like with that much greenhouse gasses added to whats already there.
Quoting universenessNegative mass and tachyons are also valid under Einsteins equations. Much of this wormhole stuff requires such exotic matter which theoretically is allowed, but isnt open to actually existing. Really, a micro black hole? How are messages going to be sent fast utilizing a tiny bit of spacetime that is infinitely far into the coordinate future? Maybe I have to actually find time to watch the thing.
Only? That is that fantastic chance you were positing. We actually meed something where it is questionable which is more intelligent. Hardly disappointing. Theyre probably as disappointed in us not being like them as we are of them not being like us.
A colony where were not allowed to touch the environment? Sounds like a zoo for the Orka amusement.
Im old enough to remember professional news reporting. It died when people stopped paying for it. No, those best of times are gone for now. Half the stuff I read has obviously never seen an editor and cites no credible sources.
I am in a way. My son has one of those smart speakers and it totally gives me the creeps to know everything in the room is being recorded in some google database somewhere. For a long time I was in the biz of selling places like google things on which to store all that data.
I dont see any collective purpose exhibited by the human race. Theres a list of nice-to-haves, but no actual striving for some collective purpose. Not even something as simple as dont go extinct. But then, I dont see any other species with a purpose like that either. Were not worse than the sponges.
No electronics. It knows everything simply by always being right, by chance.
It wouldnt hear you, but it wouldnt need to. Yes, you could ask it anything and it would convey the correct answer in whatever method it could do that, perhaps by writing in your native language.
It got weird to delve into what something like that would look like. It wouldnt need a central nervous system for one thing. It was a very old topic, probably on the old PF before it died and everybody created this site to replace it. It was born of exploring how best to actually implement a dualistic mind using the physics of this universe. We came to the conclusion that this creature must exist in some world out there, but not in this one, so not existing by any empirical definition of the word.
Quoting Agent SmithThat's the whole idea of the singularity, that x can make its successor.
No. IQ is a bell curve centered on 100, but can have a negative IQ, which is still vastly more intelligent than inanimate matter.
On average, humans have 100 IQ by definition.
Humans emerging from matter isn't really the matter 'making' us, but rather a natural process, sort of things making themselves. We can short-circuit that natural process and actually modify our genes to produce more intelligent offspring. That would definitely by a case of x 'making' y where y scores better. Right now the human race is not being selected for intelligence, so it's probably trending downward.
So, you are saying the disorder is only apparent, when we pull further out and increase the contents of our frame of reference then we see the order. So could this be the case at larger and larger spacetime scales. Yes, would be the answer but at the largest scale, entropy would suggest that we would see evidence that we are moving towards heat death. That's at least the way I perceive the disorder-order-disorder posit.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yeah, your example reminds me of the film contact when the blind guy uses his more developed hearing to listen to the signal from space and makes a statement like 'there's a lot more here guys!'
Quoting Alkis Piskas
That's the rub! We might be getting all sorts of signals from space dwelling extraterrestials but our receiving tech/methodology is not compatible with their transmitting tech/methodology!
The Fermi paradox might just be down to incompatible communication systems!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I suppose it depends on how true the claim is, that on the largest scale, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic
Well if you have such significant support from the scientific community then I am sure I will hear a lot more about Enformationism and your BothAnd proposals. From sources other than its author.
slàinte mhath :cool:
Yes. Most belief systems are conservative, and don't change with every shift of the wind. Old paradigms give way to new worldviews only as old believers die out. That's why I don't expect many physical scientists to accept the new way of understanding the world. But I provide links to the few pioneers that do -- all you have to do is click.
Regarding information theory, Mathematicians & Theoretical physicists are quicker to see the broader implications of Information theory than Experimental Physicists and Chemists. Even Einstein, as a theoretician, was loathe to accept the uncertain statistical basis of Quantum Theory : "God doesn't throw dice". So I just patiently chip away at one philosophy forum, to see if theoretical thinkers are quicker to see the value of fundamental causal Information, than pragmatic doers. Acceptance of new paradigms usually take generations to become "settled science". At this stage, very few members of the "scientific community" are aware of a post-Shannon interpretation of Information. But if you want "sources other than the author" just follow the links.
Since I have no academic or professional qualifications, I'd have to possess a monumental ego to expect anyone to take my amateur opinions as truths. That's why I provide plenty of links to professional opinions for those willing to click & comprehend. I'm just hoping that a few will grok the cosmic scale of the new Information paradigm. The negative feedback from this forum allows me to stay humble & flexible, and to "avoid ossifying" the initial insight of Enformationism. About 15 years ago, an article by a quantum physicist was trying to explain why sub-atomic physics seemed to be so weird & counterintuitive compared to the neat orderly intuitive classical physics of Newton. At one point, he exclaimed "it's all information!". Thus my personal philosophical quest began : to understand the invisible structure (Form) of Reality. :smile:
Paradigm Shift :
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
? Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Paradigm Power :
Those belief systems or paradigms are quite simply, the way in which we see the world. As such they constitute our reality. All of our actions, our personal life choices, our professional and our medical practice decisions are heavily influenced and at times, strongly directed by our personal paradigms.
https://www.vin.com/apputil/content/defaultadv1.aspx?id=5709902&pid=11372&print=1
How Paradigms Fall : a general assessment, not specifically about the Information paradigm
***Thomas Kuhns iconic work The Structure of Scientific Revolution . . . talk about the patterns that occur when a paradigm shift is about to happen. . . . When paradigms begin to show initial signs of failing or shifting, there are usually some very loud supporters of certain ideologies who do not want to see that the world is changing. . . . First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, . . . . Over the past 3.8 billion years Nature has demonstrated patterns that emerge when it is ready to let go of a form that no longer serves the higher purpose of the system. . . . Just like Nature, human systems are required to evolve and transform in order to survive.
https://kathleenallen.net/how-paradigms-fall/
Quantum Weirdness :
Many of the QT pioneers (e.g. Neils Bohr), inadvertently gained a reputation for mysticism, due to some of their attempts to explain its strangeness, to Western eyes, in terms of metaphors borrowed from Eastern philosophy. So, although it is now labeled as the most successful theory ever formulated, it still predicts behaviors that seem more magical than mechanical.
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page43.html
In me humble opinion, via negativa is one apposite approach to emergence. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (holism). Emergence is not just an increase in magnitude of an ability, it's the development of a whole new one.
:up:
Danke for correcting my error. I also didn't know IQ could be negative. So you think it's possible to make ourselves more intelligent by tweaking some of our genes. Any ideas whether intelligence genes have been identified? We could breed geniuses then, eh? I wonder of normal folks would approve - it has a Nazi eugenics vibe to it.
Not exactly. I said that what looks disordered can also be ordered, from another frame of reference. Not always or everything. E.g. I can't think that boiling water, with al its irregular bubbles can be viewed also as ordered in some other way. Neither can the dispersed irregular pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Etc.
BTW, this reminds of of your saying "disorder-order-disorder", about which I asked you if it means that always disorder prevails and that everyting starts and ens in disorder. Well, I think the opposite is true: E.g. taking the above two cases, the water starts in an odered state (calm, standstill, level), it becomes disordered when it is boiled and it is put back into its initial ordered sytate when boiling finishes. The opposite is impossible. And in order to make a jigsaw puzzle, we must first create a surface with an image on it (order), then cut it into small irregular pieces and sisperse them (disorder) and then, to play the game, we have to reassemble the pieces to form the initial image (order). The opposite is impossible. Etc.
Quoting universeness
I'm not good at Physics, sorry. I only know that entropy is a state and degree of disorder or randomness. But based on just that, I can say that if the Universe started in a state of --logically maximum-- entropy, i.e. total chaos, and then order followed, then we have to assume either that 1) there must exist a Supreme Power, like God, that has done that or 2) entropy/disorder has the tendency to become order. In fact, (2) may actually be a consequence of (1), in the sense that the Supreme Power does not let disorder/entropy prevail or persist, and it makes so that order prevails at the end. However, all these are speculations that can entail long discussions!
Quoting universeness
I see. OK.
Re the film "Contact": Ha. Yes, nice! I loved this film. One of the best ends in the history of the cinema ...
Quoting universeness
Right! Good point. :up:
Quoting universeness
You are bombarding me with Physics terminology! But I undestand the term "homogenuous" at least! :grin:
Well, maybe. As I said, all that is speculations. I prefer to talk about things that we can know, perceive, examine and understand within the framework of our small world and our common reality, in the broad sense.
Sorry noAxioms, I am probably being rather dense on this one, but I still don't get your point here.
"Theism doesnt waste resources that others will have to pay for with their lives."
Are you simply referring to the idea or criticism that many theists (especially christian/moslem fundamentals,) don't care about sustaining/protecting Earthly resources, as their focus is on their faith in their promised existence after death?
Quoting noAxioms
I try not to make judgements based on nationality. When things get tight, I don't think Russians act so differently from Americans, Germans, Englishmen, Africans or any other nationality.
Quoting noAxioms
It's the same in any human service. Supply and demand. Demand often does outstrip supply or capacity (when it comes to cryogenic units and the long term storage of such). Not an issue for me or you, as I suspect neither of us is on the waiting list. I suspect that if you die and the available facilities cant provide for you then tha's just tough, unless you are rich enough to have your own private cryogenic facility built. Your own modern version of an Egyption pyramid perhaps.
Oh, I get what you meant now, you mean, rather than trying to terraform Mars, its wiser to transform humans so they can live in the current Martian environment. As I have already suggested, I think the reality may prove to be somewhere between the two but I have little doubt that a period of trail and error will occur in the traditional pioneer spirit.
Your opinions on excess human population control methodologies and the various existential threats that the human race currently faces, are offered again, with your rather dystopian/doomster hat on.
I appreciate your 'worries' about the situation and I think they are well founded and should not be underestimated, but I do try to counter balance such, with what humans do, when the possibility of their own extinction gets closer and closer. Many would just awkwardly and clumsily, tumble over the edge, but I think we also have many, that would, will, and are, fighting tooth and nail to prevent it. I remain confident that the latter group will prevail in the end, but it may indeed get very messy before they do.
Well, that's down to your misinterpretation of what I am typing. We will spread out, yes but not 'in conquest,' or as a pernicious force/presence. I would invoke something akin to the Gene Rodenberry's vision for a human future, which is not an autocracy or a plutocracy etc, but is more akin to a democratic, secular, humanist, socialist, meritocracy. Perhaps even a benevolent united federation of planets.
Quoting noAxioms
Sounds like a fictitious dystopian future, that you might have fun writing a novel about.
Quoting noAxioms
Nonsense sir! no current first world country is socialist. They are all capitalist as they are all currency driven, free market economies.
True democratic socialism has never been successfully established anywhere on the planet ..... yet.
The Scandinavian countries have little bits of it, yes but they are far from socialist, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
:clap: Well said!
Quoting noAxioms
When it comes to the basics of how the currently existential situations we face, might be improved, I think we agree more that we don't. I just have more confidence than you seem to, that our species can do much much better than we have so far.
Quoting noAxioms
A resourced based global economy, would be the most significant human change to the way we live, since we switched from nomadic hunter-gatherers to fixed communities supported by craft trades, trading and agriculture. So yeah, many details are yet to be confirmed or even discussed.
The 'church' needs to drop god and become a secular humanist support network. Or, at least, every church/chapel/temple/cathedral/mosque etc should also function as secular homeless shelters, substance abuse support centers, medical support centers, etc, etc.
Currently, they are mostly a waste of useful space!
Quoting noAxioms
They can indeed be a substitute for digging limited carbon out of the ground!
From vertical farming:
"2. Possible Environmental and Energy Implications
There are also concerns over pollution and sustainable use. Crops grown indoors depend on artificial light. Note that sunlight can be exploited for natural lighting or self-sufficient generation of electricity through photovoltaic solar panels. The use of light-emitting diode or LED lamps also drives down the cost of electricity consumption. Of course, other than artificial lighting, a vertical farm includes complex machinery and automated systems. Hence, when compared to field farming, vertical farming has an additional energy input.
While renewable and alternative sources of energycan promote the ecological soundness of vertical farming, the practice can still have a considerable carbon footprint if it still depends on the use of fossil fuels. There is a need to improve first renewable and alternative energy technologies to guarantee environmental sustainability and energy efficiency of vertical farming."
Quoting noAxioms
I have no problem with you always pointing out your 'but look at what we are doing now' examples. I will continue to suggest 'but here's what we could do about it.' It's also ok for you to keep posting which of my suggestions have some merit and which in your opinion, don't.
That's what our current exchange seems to mostly consist of. Perhaps that's good enough for now.
Well, he seemed to be saying that two entangled particles can function in the same way as the popular description of a wormhole as two entangled black holes that 'Tom' could be sent into (Tom is a qbit) by Alice and fall out of when Bob uses 'an operator' to make a measurement at his end. The 'state' Tom was in when 'transported' through the 'wormhole' can then be known by Bob. Leonard uses other terms in this section such as 'bell basis(one of 4 possible states)', 'signal matrix,' 'monogamy of entanglement,' 'the no-cloning principle' etc,
He finally asks 'how does Tom get from A to B and his second answer is 'through the wormhole,' he then says 'you might not believe that but, that's ok, we can debate that later.'
The time stamp for this exemplar is 4mins 23secs to around 8mins 20sec.
Meh! :grin: :halo:
Quoting noAxioms
I suggested we leave their habitat and environment alone. I was not suggesting that would mean we could not 'touch' any part of the planet or its entire environment. Did you deliberately misspell Orca as these imaginings are alien Orca which you are calling OrKa? :lol:
Quoting noAxioms
But that's just half the stuff YOU have read, which is what percent of available 'stuff'?
Quoting noAxioms
How much merit do you give to 'big brother is watching you?'
Quoting noAxioms
I can only invoke the cosmic calendar again and say we have only been at this for a few seconds on the cosmic calendar scale. Give us a f****** chance mate!
Quoting noAxioms
It would have been fun to have been part of that discussion.
:lol: No mockery intended Gnomon, but your words here are a little messianic and sacrificial sounding. Always be on your guard against any seedlings of a Christ complex.
Quoting Gnomon
I am really beginning to hate that overburdened quote.
Quoting Gnomon
Are you making satisfactory progress?
Quoting Gnomon
Oh, I was referring to main news sources not sources I need to seek. Like most folks, including yourself, I have my own fav list of theories expounded by others that I take the time to find out as much as I can about, including Mtheory, CCC, quantum computing, and a good few more. Your enformationism is interesting, but it still has smatterings of a theosophism/mysticism for me. I admit, that may well be an unfair and uninformed criticism and I should find out more about it, if I ever find the time to. But if something akin to, or, the actual mainstream news sources, threw it at me, then I may well raise a much more interested eyebrow.
Quoting Gnomon
Mostly true, but I do personally like genuine seekers. Tesla was considered 'slightly mad,' and there are many many such examples, including some like Tesla who was also a freaking genius!
I have met quite a few interesting folks on the internet forums I visit, who are sure they have made a pivotal scientific breakthrough. The 6D Torus guy (also know under many names on TPF, the most banned/returned member ever, I think). The DIMP(DIMentionless point) guy. The Klein bottle/mobius strip guy and now you, the enformation guy. No gals yet but I am sure they are out there.
I would love to be in a room full of such folks. What a brilliant set of conversations that would be.
I also see lot's of alcohol involved! NO DRUGS! Well, not stronger or quicker than alcohol at least.
I agree, but the point is that human intent and purpose can cause new functionality (technology) to emerge by design. The kind of design that god has been unable to prove it is capable of, resulting in it's possible existence being utterly rejected via rational thinking.
Why not? All the bubbles rise? They all disperse at the surface, The steam all comes from the top. The water volume reduces at a fixed ratio based on the how long the water is at boiling point etc. There are clearly observable orders in a boiling water system.
Your music signal:
looks symmetrical on either side of a linear mid section, which is more intense towards its middle compared to either end. The vertical height of each sectional prominence seems to repeat from intensity to almost nothing and then intensity again so there seems to be repeating peak and trough sections. There is clear observable order in that signal, imo.
Jigsaw pieces have a fixed set of 'shape of side'. Straight edge sides, male/female constructs, ie one has a prominence that fits into a space formed in another side. There is observable order, no matter how randomly dispersed the pieces are. They can also be grouped based on the picture elements they contain. Colour, pattern, recognisable object (such as a bit of a tree or sky) etc, so forms of order are observable in randomly distributed jigsaw pieces.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Entropy is the tendency for a combination to revert back to its fundamentals over time.
From the moment a combinatorial is created, it will start to revert back to its fundamentals.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I depends how you are using disorder here. The water atoms become more exited/dynamic, they move around a lot faster, due to being heated. If ten people stand still, as close as they can to each other, in a group, compared with all ten of them constantly changing places with each other, as fast as they can, only using the same extent of ground (as best they can). Would you call the ten people standing still, ordered and the ones moving about, disordered? Disorder can be described as 'a state of confusion' or 'disrupting the systematic functioning of or neat arrangement of.' The ten people moving about display an ordered/common purpose, but their movement could nonetheless be called disordered.
The water turns to steam. There may be no water left when the boiling finishes. If you captured all the steam in a big container, then it would condense back into water, as the steam cooled.
If you consider the initial water state 'order' and the steam state 'disorder' and the return to water state a return to 'order.' Then we have order-disorder-order. If you then think well, where did the original water come from? Then you would have to say, one water molecule is from the combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So the original water came from 'disordered' or 'disunited' hydrogen and oxygen atoms. So I think such examples 'trace back' to an initial state of 'universal' disorder. That becomes locally ordered and entropy ensures all local order eventually reverts back to disorder.
So for the universe, disorder-order-disorder and heat death seems to me to be the correct 'order' of events.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Sorry Alkis. My own command of physics is still undergrad status at best, and I am 58. But I try to improve my physics grasp where and when I can. Any new knowledge about anything is welcome in my life imo, well, most of the time anyway. Not so much when its about impending tragedy for myself or others. Even then, it's better to know, as maybe you can help stop it, but if you don't know, then you are powerless.
I also accept that even if you know about some impending horror, you may still be powerless to do anything about it.
Nope. Wed pull the plug as well when theres no longer any profit in keeping it running.
Theyll hopefully let me hasten the process rather than the prolonged torture that so many people go through, all under the heading of do no harm. Pretty ironic. At least freezing isnt torture.
Quoting universenessSomething more like that, yes. Mars sucks. Only 1% the pressure of Earth and no water. Hard to engineer something that can thrive in such a hostile environment, especially a high-metabolism being such as ourselves. Can you have intelligence without that? I think so, but it would be quite slow, sort of like ents.
Most of them have your positive attitude and assume somebody will fix it.
Quoting universenessI never meant it that way. I just mean colonize the galaxy, not conquer it.
I think a federation of planets would resist a mommy even more than a single one.
OK, we have different definitions. We feed the old and the poor. They used to starve before WWII.
OK, by socialist you want an economy devoid of currency. The problem there is the lack of the mommy. If some country does that, it cannot compete with the capitalist competitors in other countries. Balanced trade would falter, especially if theres no currency to back that trade. A mommy would fix that since effectively the whole world would work the way you envision, but thered still be little incentive to finding more efficient ways to produce things. This is a problem that needs solving. How do you salvage the advantages of the capitalism without the drawbacks? What do you do with the people reluctant to work? I mean, money is owed-labor in the end, and youre throwing that away.
Socialism is more fragile, less resistant to shortages than other methods. It comes up often in war hospitals where theres demand for some drug or treatment exceeds supply. Socialism says everybody in need gets some, but not enough. Better to give on a ROI basis: Give it to who gets the most benefit for the amount given, not to those most in need of it. Cut your losses. In this way, the most serious cases are lost, but in the share all the world method, even more die and the survivors are worse off.
Democratic? Most places are republics. Whats your definition of something being democratic?
If its self-sustaining without fossil fuel, then great! Its a city. Where do the rednecks live?
Quoting universenessThat even more is never going to happen. Kind of kills the whole point of rule by unverifiable promises.
The local hospital by me was run by the church, hence prohibited some procedures that they decided made you immoral. Have to go somewhere further away if you wanted those options.
Using a solar panels to create light for crops is far less efficient than just putting the plants in the light. Im all for solar panels over parking lots and buildings and such, but the solar farms are mostly covering land that could be used to grow something.
Thats the rub. Every watt of renewable energy consumed (and it sounds like VF uses more than regular farming) is one less renewable watt that can be used elsewhere. The excess must be taken up by the fossil fuels. Its why Ive not bought into the solar farm thing. If I did, thats just so much green electricity that somebody else cant have. The net benefit of switching is zero unless your money actually buys more capacity such as panels on your own house.
Quoting universenessWell it needs a different name, but one with the right vibes.
Its a good percentage of the random articles linked by sites like yahoo news or google news. Yes, theres better written stuff out there, but almost impossible to find if youre not explicitly searching for it. The algorithms for what gets put on the front pages of the site is not particularly based on factual content at all. This was a big change compared to only 20 years ago.
Quite a bit. I just served 2 months on a grand jury and got a taste of the sort of evidence they collect automatically. They knew where these baddies were by phone tracking and car-license monitoring on the main roads. All the big tech companies (apple, google, microsoft, etc) are quite up front now that they collect data on everything you do on your devices. It gets pretty obvious when new ads appear obviously based on recent browsing history.
Thats kind of evidence that its also not going to last long. Make your mark before youre gone. Make something that can last. Thats as good a purpose as I can think of.
We thought it got silly sometimes, but couldnt exactly pinpoint where.
Quoting universenessI did watch and admittedly dont know the terminology enough to follow what is being suggested.
Quoting Agent SmithBy symmetry, a negative IQ occurs about as often as one over 200. Theyre out there. My youngest is at about 67 or so, low, but not newsworthy low. My other kids are over 100.
Theyve found at least 22.
Bad vibes presumably. Im all for the posthumans, but not so much for mingling with them. Current gilded-age morals forbids most of the solutions to problems discussed in this topic.
Yes, one may find order(s) in parts of some disordered whole. Not very evident or clear, but yet ...
Quoting universeness
I see. OK.
Quoting universeness
Right.
Quoting universeness
Alright. This is another point of view ...
Quoting universeness
Good. But don't count me in! :grin:
Quoting universeness
Certainly.
We're doing it anyway, oui monsieur?
Ha! No messianic salvation intended. Just philosophical enlightenment. And one of my many messiahs is physicist Paul Davies. :joke:
However, my straightforward presentation of a novel scientific & philosophical concept has been affected by aggressive attacks & mockery on this forum over the last few years. I've been forced into a defensive position in response to binary polemics (good vs evil) defending a strongly-held but un-named belief system. Since Enformationism is intended to be a non-religious philosophical update to the worldview of Materialism/Physicalism, I must assume that the emotional responses to an alternative worldview are motivated by what Christians refer to as the humanistic religion of Scientism. If that's your belief system, I apologize for stepping on your toes.
Ironically, Christians would probably refer to my position as "humanistic", since it offers no divine intervention to direct the world toward a Heavenly home or an earthly Utopia. Instead, it's all up to us humans to learn from trial & error, the error of our ways, and the way (Tao) of the world. :smile:
PS__My personal worldview has some similarities to holistic oriental philosophies -- Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. -- but is not beholden to their religious doctrines.
PPS__Thanks for moderating your mockery. Some posters are not so tactful in their ridicule of rival "religions".
Taoism Salvation :
Unlike Confucianism, Taoism is a salvation religion which seeks to guide its believers beyond this transitory life to a happy eternity. There is a belief in an original state of bliss, followed by the fallen state. And there is reliance on supernatural powers for help and protection.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-22904-8_7
Scientism :
The main difference between science and scientism is that science is the study of nature and behaviour of natural things and knowledge obtained through them while scientism is the view that only science can render truth about the world and reality.
https://pediaa.com/what-is-the-difference-between-science-and-scientism/
Note -- "only science" means that theoretical Philosophy is not accepted as a path to Truth.
Oh, I completely disagree! Many theist preach, to manipulable people, as a matter of fact and with a suggested 'authority from divinity!' that this life, is of very limited importance and your only focus here should be to follow the dictates of the dogma of the tenets of whatever religion is being peddled to you.
The Earth and it's contents are unimportant and disposable. Climate change would then be god's will.
Very dangerous, pernicious bullshit. I think you would agree that such is very dangerous and total bullshit. There are millions of organised folks trying to address the long term issues and they are having significant affect, globally, I don't know why you don't give them the credit they are due.
You have heard of folks like Greta Thunberg, yes? Why have you heard of her?
I agree we are in a race to save the planet, but to suggest everyone is just sitting back hoping someone else will sort it all out, is just false and unfair.
Quoting noAxioms
Not everyone is 'profit driven,' to believe that everyone is, is just misanthropic imo.
Quoting noAxioms
I am probably sensing a 'misinterpretation' incorrectly here but just to be sure, you are not under the impression that they cryogenically freeze you just BEFORE you die, if you sign up for that service, are you? You have been declared medically brain dead before you are frozen, so of course 'freezing isn't torture,' it would be, if you were still alive when someone was doing that to you.
I assume we will start with some dome style construction with tech that can best emulate/simulate Earth's conditions but I accept that, initially, it will be a very rough and dangerous existence.
I would definitely sign up to go try!
Quoting noAxioms
I don't think much of your 'mommy' comparator. Try to balance your seemingly low opinion of your own species. Many folks have done and still do, dedicate their lives to try to improve the lives of everyone else, surely you are willing to admit they exist and support them in everyway you are able to. You seem to have a similar feeling about the members of your own species to god when it asked Abraham/Lot to produce 50 (which was negotiated down to 10, I believe :lol: ) good people from the populations of Sodom and Gomorrah. I am sure you could find many more good people than 50 to stop you from just 'scrapping,' your whole species as just a total failure.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
I could give you my personal, detailed viewpoints of the tenets of democratic socialism and how it would function and be applied to deal with each scenario you would throw at it. Yes, general tenets such as 'from each according to their ability and to each according to their need,' 'control over the means of production, distribution and exchange,' 'governance of, for and by the people,' 'the continued and regularly renewed democratic consent of the majority,' all remain in the 'mission statement' of democratic socialism. I am willing to try to address any scenario you wish to use to test secular/humanist/democratic/socialism, championed or even just posited as the best social/economic/political system for humans to live under.
The 'share the world,' within which you claim 'even more die,' could be debated case by case, depending on any historical or current example you might raise. The global production system has ever been organised as a solely resource based 'not for profit,' system, so that's the main reason the 'share equally' approach has fell short in the past.
A republic is simply free of monarchic or aristocratic rule. A republic can be a socialist democratic republic. There have been some countries labelled as such but those proved to be nothing more than an abuse of the label.
Who are you calling a 'redneck?' what problematic attitudes are you referring to?
I think there will come a more enlightened time in the future when there are not many theists left. If that happens, then theistic buildings will need to be repurposed. There are more and more empty churches nowadays.
Quoting noAxioms
But I have no problem with the examples you cite above, as I think one helps protect me and 'society' and the other is at best 'convenient' and at worse 'pestering.' Big brother is a nefarious, evil force how much are you concerned that such data is being misused? What examples do you have of such. I think such personal data IS being misused by some 'individuals' in 'some organisations,' but I am yet to be convinced that such abuse is as rife as some (especially conspiracy addicts,) suggest.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree but I would add that your mark must be benevolent or else your life would have been better not lived at all, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
Thanks for investing the time. Overall, and accepting, as I did myself that much of it was over my head, did you think Leonard was positing a situation where superluminal communication or/and superluminal transportation was not impossible?
You haven't. I don't consider you a crank. It can be very tough indeed to try to occupy any 'middle ground' between two diametrically opposed groups. I do have a scientism, in that I champion science over theism or any supernatural posits, completely. I wear that definition of 'scientism,' with as much joy as any halelujah chorus.
Quoting Gnomon
:up:
Quoting Gnomon
I have no religion and reject any suggestion (including any camouflaged ones,) that science or atheism are in any way, religious or theistic.
Thank you also for not attacking my critique of your viewpoints with nothing but ad hominins. I have also had many such exchanges on TPF but I normally give as good as I get. I will get down in the mud and scrap, if my interlocuter is trying to browbeat me.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't assign a 100% credence to this viewpoint but my current credence level on this is very high.
Quoting Gnomon
I do give credence to 'theoretical philosophy' but I do think empirical science is its final arbiter.
I have enjoyed our exchange on this thread Gnomon, thanks for taking the time to explain some of your viewpoints to me. As someone who states that they have no significant academic quals, you demonstrate impressive thinking skills imo.
:up: Thanks for your input Alkis!
... which nonetheless does not either provide cogent and succinct answers to or critically dispute the relevance of (old) straitforward questions like those linked here
Quoting 180 Proof
conspicously suggests you are anything but intellectually "straightforward", Gnomon. :smirk:
@universeness @Agent Smith
Thank you too, @universeness. It was a pleasurable exchange on a very interesting subject that you brought up.
:up:
Thanks for the vote of confidence. But, some on this forum have accused me of overweening ego for promoting a new paradigm based on the emerging science of Information. likes to say I'm "making sh*t up", although my modest contribution to the emergent information-centric worldview is to make-up some neologisms to convey the unconventional (post-Shannon) concepts that emerge from the new understanding of the ubiquitous role of Information in the universe : including both Mind & Matter. For example, what I call "EnFormAction" (energy + laws) is just a new name for the causal "phenomenon at the root of things"*1.
Perhaps my role is more like Darwin's Bulldog, Thomas Huxley, who didn't "make-up" the theory of Evolution, but promoted it among his incredulous peers in science. In fact, even Darwin's theory was an assemblage of ideas that were already "in the air" so to speak*2. Even his own father, Erasmus, seems to have coined the technical term "Evolution" to describe his own concept of descent from a common ancestor. It would be hard for me to designate the "Darwin" of Enformationism, because dozens of scientists & philosophers have contributed to the knowledge-base. But my go-to guy is physicist Paul Davies, who has written a long string of books on various information-centric ideas, including The Mind of God : The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. A philosophical promoter is The Information Philosopher*3, who has also never heard of Enformationism.
My problem with Scientism is that it typically denigrates not just irrational Religions, but also rational-but-non-empirical Philosophy itself. Philosophical posts on TPF --- that don't conform to the ancient belief system of Materialism/Atomism as canonized in 17th century classical physics --- are shouted-down as religion-in-disguise. Yet Enformationism is compatible with Physics, Chemistry, & Biology up to the point of explaining the emergence of Life, Mind, & Memes. In 1973, Theodosius Dobzhansky asserted "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Now, 50 years later, Gnomon goes on record to say that "nothing in Evolution makes sense except in the light of Information". Is that a case of overweening ego? Judge for yourself *4. :smile:
*1. quote from Caleb Scharf in The Ascent of Information, who has never heard of Enformationism .
*2. Evolution : Charles Darwin is commonly cited as the person who discovered evolution. But, the historical record shows that roughly seventy different individuals published work on the topic of evolution between 1748 and 1859, the year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
https://hmnh.harvard.edu/event/who-discovered-evolution
*3. Information philosophy is a dualist philosophy, both materialist and idealist. It is a correspondence theory, explaining how immaterial ideas represent material objects.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/
*4. The EnFormAction Hypothesis : Emergent Evolution
Without understanding how the process of en-formation works, the emergence of Mathematical Physics & self-organizing Life & metaphysical Mind must be taken on Faith, as miraculous bootstrap (self-starting) events.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html.
Looking on past the links you provided above. I did notice that @Gnomon does not respond to many of your questions. He is welcome to reconsider, that and respond to the points you made, if he wants to.
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
But questions from @180 Proof like:
1. Why do "ancient Holistic philosophies" need non-philosophical "support"?
2. What is such "support" suppose to change about or with "ancient Holistic philosophies"? And change for whom?
3. Lastly, insofar as scientifically literate philosophers / students of philosophy tend to dismiss your repetitious (mis)uses of scientific theories and their findings coupled with your own (disingenuous?) confession to being a neophyte in both philosophy and natural sciences, how do you know, Gnomon, that the pervasive "lukewarm reception ,"is due to "reductive scientistic bias" and not due to well-founded learning that is philosophically and/or scientifically superior to your own? What does overlooking or denying the more likely prospect of the latter possibility say about the "openness" or lack thereof of your "mind", sir?[/quote]
Wont go away until you answer them succinctly. You should either PM each other and have an honest, good natured debate or start another thread and do it on the main mage of TPF where others such as I can contribute. It would be fun, and it need not be acrimonious.
If neither of you can be bothered or your have already 'tried, been there, bought the tshirt etc,' then I will accept that and say no more about it.
Okay I'll bite:
1. Fear that he cannot defend against you.
2. He considers you too disrespectful towards him, and he refuses to indulge you.
3. He does not have the personal energy reserves needed to equal your persistence.
4. He is a very experienced sophist who selects his targets wisely.
5. You cause him too much pain.
6. He is a true seeker who is trying to get through to you but you cant see the truth when it's offered to you.
7. You are him and this is all part of your cunning plan to rule the Earth.
FYI. I have explained many times before why I ceased responding to 's "inconvenient questions". It's primarily because his snarky responses, besides irrelevant, are mostly abusive instead of reasonable.
If you want to see some of my indirect answers to his rarely relevant ridicule, just check-out my replies to , who has inadvertently become the middle-man mediator between combatants. It's a who-hit-who-first abusive relationship, which I long ago decided to divorce from. :smile:
So your answer to @180 Proof's question to me above, relates to my numbers 2 and 5 above and of course number 7 could still apply. I think I will just drop this issue now as I am probably not helping improve the impasse between you both. I was just trying to reduce the barrier between you both, that's all. You both seem to be reasonable folks to me.
You can post answers to these several questions either in reply to me directly or in reply to @Agent Smith or @universeness and that will be the end of this antagonism between us, no more rejoiners or criticisms from me. Give other members who are skeptical of your "personal philosophical worldview" potential reasons with your "staightforward" answers to reconsider the stuff you're selling. Clarifying your contributions to TPF, Gnomon, need not be blocked by our impasse.
Thanks for the effort, but you are not likely to resolve "the impasse", because for it seems to be an ideological war of Good vs Evil (Scientism vs Spiritualism???). I assume that attitude is partly due to his belief that most-if-not-all philosophers up until the 17th century -- most of whom included G*D in their world models -- were simply practicing irrational Religion in words instead of deeds. (Please don't take this characterization-out-of-context literally)
I have enjoyed the opportunity to respond to your non-abusive questioning. The exercise helps me to refine my own emerging philosophical worldview. But you still seem to miss the this-worldly focus of Enformationism, due to its "contamination" with a speculative god-concept. Ironically, like Spinoza's "god of the philosophers", I'm not making any factual claims about super-natural beings. Unless, that is, you categorize Energy (invisible causal power) and Information (creative power to enform) as supernatural concepts. I don't expect to make converts on this open forum, but merely to freely exchange philosophical ideas, no matter how far out.
180 finds it easy to pick & squish the low-hanging fruit of an uncredentialed unpublished amateur philosopher, whose ideas are "unworthy", simply because they are not in the mainstream of holy Science. "No credentials, no credence". But that's an odd attitude for a forum of amateur philosophers, most of whom also have no credentials in Science -- or Philosophy. As long as he views Creativity*1 as a taboo supernatural power, the core concept of Enformationism (Energy = natural power to enform & transform = EnFormAction = the cause of Emergence) will be anathema (something or someone that one vehemently dislikes). But I'm cool with that, as long as we maintain a respectful distance. :cool:
*1. Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary work, or a painting).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
Hi Gnomon, my ontology centers around non-physical things such as time, space, certain forms of energy, logic, number, and information. Some of my philosophy resembles yours, and i'm curious to know what your thoughts are on where information comes from? How is it created at the most fundamental level? or what allows it to be possible (a sub-structure perhaps)?
Are you a Kantian? If not, then why do say "time, space, certain forms of energy ... and informarion" are "non-physical"?
I'm not sure if i am, perhaps you can tell me if i am. I think energy is the only thing that really exists and in it's primordial form from our perspective is invisible and intangible. The difference between physical and non-physical is the same difference between solid and gas, a kind of energetic density spectrum.
I'm afraid not. Regardless of "energy density", like "solid and gas", energy is a physical phenomenon. "Invisible and intangible" are irrelevant; besides, we see via EM energy (i.e. visible light) and feel strong winds which are manifestations of thermal energy. As far as "the only thing that really exists", tell me the difference between exists and "really exists", and why energy is one but not the other. :chin:
My point actually is that there really is no difference. The difference is illusory and relative, and it makes no difference to me if one calls it physical or not it's still the same game. This is why you're right about invisible and intangible being irrelevant.
Quoting 180 Proof
I would expect this to be the case if all is energy, as different forms of energy can affect each other. It is precisely why we can see and feel, because if it were fundamentally different we probably would not be able to.
Quoting 180 Proof
Everything that is possible exists in some form or other even if in a latent space or form. In any case it would all be energy, no matter the space or form. What really exists is the thing that everything else depends on for existence, or actualization such as how molecules need atoms to exist, and cells need molecules that need atoms to exist. So these things are real because they are actualized (emergent) from prior emergent forms. There is a thing at the very bottom that can not be emergent but gives rise to emergence and that is what is "really real".
I'm also curious as to how you envision fundamental information formation.? Same question i asked Gnomon.
This reminds me of Laozi's Dao and Plotinus' One and N?g?rjuna's ??nyat? ... even Schopenhauer's Will. Okay, but, in fact, even energy is "emergent" (re: E=mc² & quantum field excitations (quanta)) emergent from what? Spontaneous symmetry-breaking (my guess :nerd:).
I'll let him "answer" your question first.
That is also my educated guess, but i'm trying to probe deeper. I have a sense of how this symmetry-breaking happens, but it feels incomplete. I'm trying to understand as a graspable concept the nature of chaos or randomness (unconditioned activity of energy or formless energy) in what seems to be an empty infinite space but may actually not be a space like we would understand it; for me it resembles something like spaceless time. This makes me think that time is the ultimate fundamental (dimension zero), and space emerges out of time (dimension one). The energy that we are and experience in space is a further emergence between time and space producing the energetic chaos we know as the quantum foam.
That's a little of what i got so far.
Here's food for thought: Cold isn't really a thing, as much of a thing as heat is and darkness is also not really a thing, as much of a thing as light is. Is Enformy a thing, or are you making the same mistake as the Hindus (zero) made as according to the Greeks who asked "how can nothing be something?" :cool:
Cold is the absence of heat, and darkness the absence of light. The difference is only in the magnitude or degree of the one thing in question.
Quoting Agent Smith
What really is nothing? is it really nothing in the sense that there is nothing to say about it? Does not nothing implicate the possibility of it's opposite 'something'. Maybe there is something about nothing.
:smirk: Maybe not ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/349320
So why or how is there something? Specifically why or how is energy possible?
There is no Why (which does not beg this Why question further); and as for the How, theoretical symmetry-breaking (i.e. vacuum fluctuations, etc) suffices. Also, insofar as 'there is nothing' to stop not-nothing "something" from coming-to-be, continuing-to-be or ceasing-to-be, necessarily non-necessary not-nothing happens eventually. And since there is only one state of nothing-ness relative to the infinitely many states of not-nothing-ness, the probability of the former relative to the latter is vanishing close to zero (which, IMO, is the only state-of-affairs so infinitely improbable that it paradoxically necessitates an "Absolute Being" to sustain "Absolute Nonbeing" :scream:).
:clap: Very reasonable, constructive response. Which Gnomon should respond to, in kind, or risk the conformation of any lingering sophist accusations, folks may have towards him.
Please watch this, if you have not watched it previously. It is almost an hour long but it is worth every second of your time, based on our recent exchanges in this thread. It is also directly related to my OP, human intent and purpose, and what is emergent due to human intent and purpose. ASI in particular!
To @Gnomon in particular. This video explains why I dont consider you a crank, as I do also accept, that information/data is a universal fundamental. I also think it's fundamental unit, may well be the 'bit' as the 'smallest measure of information possible.' This vid also features a discussion of the importance of the work of Claude Shannon, which you have also cited. Where do you think your enformation, etc posits, takes us, FROM the current position, as established by Jim Al-Khalili's video above.
I would like anyone here to reference any section of this (imo,) very important video, (please reference by time stamp,) that you think best supports or counters anything raised by Gnomon's enformationism.
I first saw this on TV around 3 years ago and and I have now, watched it about 5 times, including last night, due to my exchange with Gnomon.
responds... :zip:
Seems fair to me!
Some posters on this forum will reject your notion of "non-physical", partly because they associate that label with "spiritual", and partly because their Materialism/Physicalism worldview lumps all the things you mentioned under the heading of Physics. That's also why some of the pioneers of Quantum Theory were labeled as "mystics" when they borrowed some holistic Oriental terminology to help understand the non-reductive & counter-intuitive & non-classical weirdness of the sub-atomic realm. So, be aware that "non-physical" may be interpreted as meaning "meta-physical", which to some is about spiritual gods & ghosts, instead of about immaterial ideas & concepts : not Reality, but Ideality. It's about theoretical Philosophy, not empirical Science.
Energy is indeed physical in the sense that it is the primary concern of physicists. But it's not a material object, and has no atomic structure. Instead Energy*1 is the process of Causation that produces changes in material objects. But some treat that process metaphorically as-if it is a flowing stream of fluid energy-stuff. In the book I'm currently reading, The Ascent of Information, astro-biologist Caleb Scharf says : "Many of us have gotten used to thinking of the closely related properties of energy and entropy as tangible things. In truth, they are really just concepts that help predict or explain why matter behaves the way it does". So those who imagine Energy as a "tangible thing" (physical fluid?) are taking the symbolic figure-of-speech metaphor literally. And that's a common conceptual problem in philosophical dialog.
Scharf goes on to be more explicit about "non-physical" Energy*2 : "But it's hard to point at any phenomenon in nature and say, 'that is energy'. A photon is not energy. . . . . It's one reason physicists always wince when a science fiction tale mentions anything being made of 'pure energy', because that's just wrong". However, you may be thinking of "non-physical" Energy as an abstraction equivalent to "pure energy". And such abstractions include Mathematical ratios such as those of Thermodynamics. Also, in my personal worldview of Enformationism, I equate Energy with Generic Information : the power to enform, or to change forms. :smile:
*1. What is Energy? :
But, what is Energy or Force anyway? For scientific purposes, it is a general property (Causation) of the universe as a system, which causes changes in material substances. Some religions also view Spiritual Energy (Life Force or Soul) as a universal property, that manifests in changes not only to physical bodies, but also in non-physical minds. So which is it? Sadly, these are not physical, but metaphysical queries. Hence, any answers we propose can never be proven true or false by means of empirical evidence. In the Quora quotes below, Neuroscientist Rosseinsky, indicates that we can construct logical explanations, given specific premises, for both possibilities, but we can't prove that one is a fact and the other a fantasy. Each may be valid within its own purview. That's why I prefer to make a key distinction between mundane Reality and sublime Ideality.
https://bothandblog.enformationism.info/page26.html
*2. Energy is Information in action :
Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems of information in all of its forms, and all entities in this universe is composed of information.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22084/how-is-information-related-to-energy-in-physics
Note -- given time, I could link to many opinions of scientists who equate Information & Energy. But some posters will think that notion is either irrelevant or heretical to their belief system.
Quoting punos
Where does Information come from? It's like Energy, which physicists now define as inherent in empty space : vacuum energy. Likewise, the source of Information/Energy has been inherent in the non-physical Potential*3 of virtual energy Fields (empty space) from the beginning of space-time. How that non-physical creative power got embedded in the physical world is not a scientific question. Yet some imaginative physicists have speculated on various unproveable scenarios : including an infinite regression of Big Bangs, or an unbounded Universe of Many Worlds. Your guess is as good as mine. But I too have speculated on the origins of both Energy & Matter*4. The BothAnd Blog goes into some deep detail to support those non-scientific conjectures. :nerd:
*3. Potential & Actual :
Potential is unactualized power to cause change; to enform. It's not real, and it's non-physical. Yet the Field Theory of physics assumes (imagines without physical evidence) that empty space contains unactualized Energy that can emerge from not-yet-real Virtual Particles. I agree, but I refer to that hypothesis as a meta-physical concept.
*4. Infinite Un-bounded Potential :
Langan calls the source of being, the UnBound Telesis, meaning something like an infinite intentionality, or eternal Will. UBT sounds equivalent to my notion of eternal Chaos, an infinite unformed pool of potential, which like Plato's ideal Forms can become realized into physical things or processes. But, Actualization requires Causation, which is an act of creation. My own term for the old Greek concept of the ground of being is simply BEING : the power to exist. So that's another way to describe G*D functionally without defining the deity phenomenologically.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page48.html
The mommy will need to deal with that attitude then. No dealing with it unless its a mommy.
I seem to see only suggestions of slowing the destruction, not in any way undoing any of it. It buys time, but actually makes the crash worse.
An activist on the right side. She calls for action, but I cannot actually find any suggested action that doesnt just fall under the category of slowing the advance.
If youre dead, you cannot be revived. So their hope is that the definition of dead changes between getting frozen and getting thawed. That definition is always in flux, so its a solid bet. No, I dont think it would be torture either way. Youd certainly not be a conscious popsicle for decades.
I always wonder if I can feel the pain of say surgery and the only reason Im willing to do it is that I cant remember the pain. They very much have that fuhgeddaboudit sauce.
About Mars:
Quoting universenessThats the life in a box. Wouldnt it be a lot easier to do it here, kind of like Logans run? Environment goes to hell, but at least not Mars-hell. But I actually cannot think of something practical that could be engineered to live on Mars except some incredibly static microbes or something.
You dont want some kind of authority to keep each of the planets in the federation from stepping out of the agreements?
Plenty true of most individuals I know. Its the larger groups that cant do it. The larger the entity, the less mature their relationship with other such entities.
Yes, that one. Capitalism has a nice motivator for that, but I have to admit that socialism also can do it, as evidence by the work ethic of more social countries. I suspect much of the problem is identification of a non-cooperative attitude with your peer group. For example, resistance to the Covid vaccines has been assiciated with a conservative viewpoint. Getting a shot is seen as a vote for the wrong party, so they dont. I lost a sister-in-law to that mentaility. Im such a proponent of free speech, but I obviously see a downside to it.
A republic is simply free of monarchic or aristocratic rule. A republic can be a socialist democratic republic. There have been some countries labelled as such but those proved to be nothing more than an abuse of the label[/quote]OK, I admit to not being up on the terminology, and agree that no country seems to actually operate under a system that their label is supposed to describe.
Quoting universenessThat there are. They might return in numbers, but with less fancy large buildings.
I dont see it much, but theres a reason that many sorts of surveillance is restricted or just plain illegal. There is very much potential of misuse if you already have the data for supposedly normal purposes.
Agree except for the logic. Whether my life was better not lived or not depends heavily on the gauge by which the benefit of it is measured.
[/quote]did you think Leonard was positing a situation where superluminal communication or/and superluminal transportation was not impossible?[/quote]I got lost in the jargon enough that I couldnt make that assessment. It was that for which I was looking.
Quoting Agent SmithMaybe. Pretty sure there is gender selection going on in places, and perhaps some gene therapy to help with known genetic issues like breast cancer, but maybe not going so far as to just change an ordinary person into an enhanced one, better in some positive way, not just more free of blatant defects.
Screening for genetic defects is, I believe, mandatory in some countries that have the facility.
True. "Cold" only has meaning relative to Hot, so it exists meta-physically as a relationship concept in the mind. Yet, "Hot" is also a non-thing, with only a relative existence, as measured in artificial degrees. Enformy is not a thing, it's a causal process like Evolution, except with a positive meaning, relative to inquiring humans. Unlike "Hot" you can't sense Enformy physically, you can only infer it Rationally. Both concepts, Enformy & Evolution, exist meta-physically like Zero*1 : the imaginary concept of Nothingness.
However, "Zero" has a parallel in Terrence Deacon's Absence*2, the metaphysics of incompleteness. Again, Absence is not a physical thing, but the meta-physical Potential for something. And Potential only has meaning relative to Actual. Deacon's Absential is only Nothing in a physical sense, which for Materialists is all there is -- no place for non-things . But for Philosophers, Potential has always been the solution to mysterious Emergences*3, which is what we call the occasion when some new properties or qualities are manifested from something old : i.e. Holism. Absence, in the sense of Incompleteness, implies Teleology/Teleonomy, which is a pulling force from a future metaphysical state (the goal or end or telos or Final Cause of a process).
All of those no-thing concepts are absent from the Physicalist*3 worldview. Which is why some anti-metaphysical posters on this forum are like the ancient Greeks & Hindus, in denying the reality of Zero. Yet again, it's nothing but a mental philosophical concept : an idea, lacking all the substance of Matter. But then, ideas are the essential substance & subject of Philosophy. n'est ce pas? :cool:
PS__I apologize for getting carried away with references to Emergence below*3 *4 *5.
*1. Zero : The Biography of a Dangerous Idea :
Zero is the fascinating story of a number banned by the ancient Greeks and worshipped by ancient Indians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dangerous_Idea
*2. Absence :
[i]Deacon's 2011 work Incomplete Nature has a strong triadic structure, inspired perhaps by an important influence from semioticsthe philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's triad of icon, index, and symbol. Deacon's triad levels represent the material, the ideal, and the pragmatic. The first two levels reflect the ancient philosophical dualism of materialism and idealism, or body and mind, respectively. The major transition from the nonliving to the living - the problem of abiogenesis, and the introduction of telos in the universe - happens in Deacon's third level. . . .
Appreciating Deacon's argument is easier with a little history. Claude Shannon's information theory produced an expression for the potential information that can be carried in a communication channel. It is the mathematical negative of Boltzmann's formula for entropy.[/i]
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/deacon/
*3. Mystery of Emergence :
Strong Emergence as a Defense of Non-Reductive Physicalism
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545239
4*. Emergence :
"Emergent behaviors, like games, are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts" __by Steven Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence:_The_Connected_Lives_of_Ants,_Brains,_Cities,_and_Software
*5. The Emergence of Everything :
"Because of the Pauli principle [exclusion], matter is informatic, and something akin to mind has already entered the universe" __Harold Morowitz, biophysicist
Note-- "informatic" = imparting information
Yes, i think part of the problem has to do with how energy is conceptualized. It is a very slippery concept to grasp "ergonomically" in the human mind at least at this point in our cognitive and historical development. It is like historically the concept of zero where some or most cultures in the past didn't even have a concept for it. Even when a culture acquired the concept it felt nebulous to them, not knowing if it meant anything or what to do with it. Energy is the new zero.
Quoting Gnomon
I understand this in the sense that for me neither energy nor information have any manifestation unless they come as a unit; in a way like how all matter manifestations happen as particle-antiparticle pairs (the dual nature of the universe). Energy is the medium of information and information is the medium of energy. Pure energy has no form, that is to say that pure energy has no information.
Quoting Gnomon
I see energy thermodynamics in an information field as what we call probability theory ("infodynamics"), and they are either hard to separate or they are one in the same.
Quoting Gnomon
That is exactly how i think of it as well. Energy introduces dynamics into the equation which is how information develops and is processed.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes i understand this, but what is a "material substance" in the first place? is it also information itself in your view?
Quoting Gnomon
Also agree. I'm not expecting any empirical evidence because it seems obvious to me that it is incompatible with the empirical method (the question still remains), and so a non-empirical method such as with pure math and or pure logic is necessary. Of course one who is accustomed to thinking empirically and needing physical evidence for everything would have difficulty taking non-empirical methods seriously, nevertheless it seems that to make headway in this direction the familiar methods are not sufficient.
Quoting Gnomon
Well i think it is a scientific question, it's just that it can't yield a scientific answer, it yields another question. What is the right method for asking this question? It's not meta-physics but perhaps pre-physics is the way to think about it, but in any case it must be capable of giving rise (emergence) to physics as we know it at our level of complexity.
Thank you for explaining your view of this subject, i try to look at all the angles, and i don't think your angle is a bad one. I want to give myself some time to explore some of your musings and information you provided. It is helpful. :smile:
Ok, it is fine that the answer "vacuum fluctuations" is sufficient for you, but it isn't for me. Why "vacuum fluctuations" and not "God", that is if an answer with no explanation is sufficient?
Quoting 180 Proof
At the most fundamental of fundamental levels which would be a state of infinite nothingness; the logical inversion of that would be infinite something. Not as a plurality of things, but what you would call one vacuum fluctuation (Planck energy, in a Plank volume). There would only be two possible states: empty, full. Besides when speaking of probability in a perfectly random system all states happen in a long enough time (very quickly with just two states: binary). Ive done this experiment many times in computer simulations. Randomness leaves nothing to chance in that sense, and is why evolution works the way it does and can start from a complete state of "blindness". I don't see a need for absolute beings, one would need to explain them too in either a logical or mathematical manner starting from nothing.
This theory of mine is still a work in progress, so i still might not have all my words "in a row", but i think i'm on the right track. You are quite welcome to critique my theory; it can only help me improve it or discard it. :smile:
I have watched that video previously, and i just watched it again. Thanks :up:
There is not any experimental corroboration or theoretical function in fundamental physics for "God" but there are both for vacuum fluctuations.
That's a good start, and it doesn't bother you that these vacuum fluctuations are there for apparently no reason? It does me. Vacuum Fluctuations beg the question; how is that possible? The answer has to lie below physics at the level of logic and mathematics purely... no physical evidence will be possible, only computational evidence which can be checked by computer simulation.
I will try to write a full account of my theory as soon as i'm able to.
Ah, ok, so you are basically agreeing, that the tenents of many religions and consequentially, the majority of it's adherents, consider all Earthly experiences/materials/ecology, disposable.
Quoting noAxioms
New carbon capture initiatives are an example of actions which are directly targeted at 'undoing,' damage already done, as are all efforts to stop releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so that such as the ozone layer can recover. A great deal of work is also being done to help coral reefs repair.
Many species are being reintroduced into areas where they have been made extinct, so as to reintroduce the benefits they offered to the ecology of the area. 'Beavers' for example. You are justified in complaining that, it's probably not enough and it's not fast enough and there probably will be heavy prices to pay, but, I think you should recognise the very serious efforts that are being made and encourage their growth, rather than just keep suggesting that all such efforts are in vain, especially with doomster words such as:Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
Slowing an advance, if continued, can eventually STOP an advance and eventually REVERSE an advance. Each of us must do what we can to help.
Could be much the same as life in the box you currently call your home. The only difference would be that you need a spacesuit to go outside. That may happen here anyway, if your predictions of the effects of climate change all come true. Logan's run just suggested you get killed when you get to a certain age. What's that dystopian storyline got to do with potential human life on Mars? We want to explore and develop space not exclusively to solve our problem of excess population or the extinction threat we have due to 'having all of us on one planet only.' (your Logan's run suggestion would not even solve that one.) We want to go boldly go where no-one has gone before, that's embedded deep in our nature. It is a large part of our intent and purpose. Your home is a box, as is your nation and your planet and our solar system and our galaxy. The boxes get a lot bigger as you leave your home box (your house or your planet.)
Quoting noAxioms
I want authority that is democratically elected (Proportional representation and the single transferable vote). Authority that is answerable to very strong checks and balances that will instantly kick in, and cause any individual, to be removed from power, quickly and assuredly, if you are guilty of abusing your power and of acting nefariously. Your imagery of motherhood models of authority are dictatorial one's. A mother/child relationship is not democratic. A mother may love her children or she may not. Such authority as 'mother,' or your more childish label 'mommy,' is at best, a cult of personality and raw emotion. It is a 'silly' authority model to suggest, as a way of running a progressive human civilisation.
Reasonable thinking imo.
Quoting noAxiomsOK, I admit to not being up on the terminology, and agree that no country seems to actually operate under a system that their label is supposed to describe.[/quote]
:clap:
Quoting noAxioms
I agree that there are very valid security concerns regarding your personal data and exactly who has access to it and could abuse that access.
Quoting noAxioms
Agreed but I think it is possible to get a general overview. I don't like citing theistic Hollywood BS, but it's the only (relatively poor) example that springs into my head. In the film 'It's a Wonderful life,' Jimmy Stewart is shown how he positively impacted the lives of others. Such criteria is one way to measure your life, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, thanks again for taking the time to listen/watch it. If you try again, tell me your impressions of the superluminal communication possibilities you think were involved (if any).
Do you disagree that empirical science must be the final arbiter of theoretical philosophy? If your answer is no, then what is the path from hypothesis based philosophy to what you are labelling 'theoretical' philosophy? A theory is a tested hypothesis, some strong empirical evidence must be tested and peer reviewed before a hypothesis can even become a theory. What you are labelling 'theoretical philosophy,' will always be in danger of remaining purely faith based or become mere 'philosophical conjecture/musing,' if it has no support from empirical science.
Quoting Gnomon
A photon is an energy concentration/packet/excitation in an energy field/potential to do work.
A photon IS electromagnetic energy.
Quoting punos
So do you not accept photons, gluons as the fundamentals of energy, measured in elecrton-volts or joules? In the video I posted, from time stamp 41:07. Jim relay's the story of Shannon's identification of the bit as the fundamental of information. A bit can be represented in many ways and the fact that we can represent it and built 'two state' computers based on it, and use that 'two state' system to progress to quantum computers and use that to progress to a future ASI, is pretty strong evidence for me, that information does have a very REAL fundamental unit, that we can represent as a BInary digiT.
Quoting punos
Because such a god posit is 'of the gaps.' 'An answer with no(or insufficient) explanation YET, does not mean insufficient explanation FOREVER. How does slotting in god help us meantime? Why would that turn insufficient into sufficient? What have we gained if we say god did it? Should 'god did it,' ever provide all humans (especially those with a mind towards scientific investigation) with an excuse to stop asking detailed questions that can and must be asked about quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space. I vote for continuing to try to find the answers we want and never be satisfied with the delusional god answer.
Quoting punos
:up:
Quoting punos
How do you know no physical evidence will be possible, it depends on exactly what is covered in the future by the label 'physical.' Once we have 'real' AI/AGI/ASI, who knows how far and how quickly our scientific knowledge will advance. The only aspects/attributes of god posits I ever see any credence for are emergent in humans. The omni labels, like the concept of zero do have some practical use as placeholders and as non-existents that we can nonetheless, asymptotically aspire to.
'Perfection' can hold a place but only an imaginary one.
I would call @Gnomon's response, as in the style of the experienced politician.
I think they are fundamental enough, but not completely. For me there can only be one fundamental: the bit. A true fundamental would only need one bit to be described and it takes 8 bits to describe a photon for example. So i suspect that it's perhaps a couple levels above absolute fundamentality.
Quoting universeness
I think that was exactly the point i was making. You're preaching to the quire with this one, i probably couldn't have said it better myself. :up:
Quoting universeness
I made this point earlier that it's all the same thing (energy), i don't really make a distinction between physical or non-physical; it's a relative term more useful in some cases than in others. Like you said; it's a label. What i really mean is: in the same way how a microscope can not resolve anything smaller than the medium it uses to make the measurement, no instrument will be able to detect anything under a certain scale. I don't see that as a significant issue or an insurmountable problem; it simply means more subtle methods must be employed, such as computer simulations which AGI or ASI will be able to do with i suspect minimal difficulty. The method would be purely computational and based on complex systems techniques instead of empirical ones.
Ok, It seems we type mainly, in unison.
Yes, we are the hivemind. Resistance is futile.
No, I am willing to collectivise and work together, but my individuality is also essential.
Hivemind's have a totalitarian ruler. F*** that shit!!!!
It would be cool in an ASI future, if there was a way to fully merge individual brain power, in a way which made such a network function in ways, that were more that just a sum of parts.
But the ability to resort back to autonomous individuals, would be 'human' and essential imo.
I was kinda kidding, but there are different ways to configure a hivemind and the Borg is not a type i would willingly enter into either. The hivemind subject will be the next big thing after AI. A lot of people are not ready for the AI revolution, and they are even less ready to even entertain the hivemind concept. Hollywood has done a number on us when it comes to hiveminds (Borg) like it has done with AI (Terminator). My projection is that it won't become a real public issue like AI is now for another generation or two, and by that time the zeitgeist would have changed.
It's not always easy to identify when and what particular aspects of a post are jocular. Best to use the 'joke' emoticon if you think it's not totally obvious. I do not value any hivemind model, available in the insect world as worth emulation for humans or transhumans. I also do not value any hivemind posited by sci-fi, that I am familiar with. I would model any future collective effort, on democratic socialist models, that fully respect individual freedom, to not take part in such. If freedom of choice is compromised by a future system then we must combat it as best we can.
Yea sorry it's my fault, i'll try that. I just have difficulty with emoticons because i can't tell which one matches my emotional state, except for the happy face. I think it has to do with my neurodivergence or something.
Quoting universeness
Yes that would be the general sentiment at this moment in history, but i think that in the not to distant future there really won't be much of a choice anyway, since it will mean the difference between the survival of the species and extinction. A bifurcation in the human population will happen where the people will be split on this issue. Some will join the hivemind and some won't at which point a new evolutionary line of "homo-technus" will commence.
I theorize that autistic people will probably play a significant roll in the adoption and evolution of hive minds. It almost seems to me that autistic people and hiveminds will make a perfect fit. Perhaps the steady increase in the birth rate of autistic children is an evolutionary self-organizing pre-development leading up to the emergence of hiveminds.
A hivemind is the "perfection" of democracy, a completely leaderless complex dynamical system self-regulated from within it's own activity, a situation where everyone's will naturally balances out like nerve cells entrained on a pattern in your own mind. It won't be a centralized system like our governments, it will be distributed. Think about the hivemind that you already are, meaning the two hemispheres of your brain are two distinct consciousnesses.
Very interesting, @universeness! :up:
Thanks for bringing in this video. It offers plenty of food for the mind.
I have a few questions. And since you have asked for comments, here they are:
~25:00
1) What does the box full of air and what the partition dividing the box into two parts (hot and cold) represent in actuality?
2) What does the daemon represent? God? Some Super Mind or Intelligence?
~26:00
1) What does the "gap" or "path" (not sure about the word used) that allows the passage of molecules from one part to another represent in actuality and how does this happen?
~49:00
Re: "Information lies at the heart of the physical world"
This made me think of two things: 1) information and purpose and 2) information and meaning.
We know that both relations apply on a human level. But is there a meaning or purpose of information on the level of the physical world? If yes, what that could be?
In recent years, I've seen several videos by Al Khalili on YouTube -- including this one -- and find them very informative (pardon!). I have to leave soon, so I only watched a few minutes of this video. A significant point was noted right away : "invisible information". The general thrust of the video seems to be similar to the book I'm currently reading : The Ascent of Information, by Caleb Scharf. He refers to the ubiquity of Information in the physical, mental, & technological universe as the Dataome (holistic concept similar to Genome)*1.
Both Scharf and Al Kalili are scientists, and focus primarily on the practical Technological products (looms & computers) of understanding that abstract Information is more fundamental than concrete Matter, and can be manipulated meta-physically by the human mind. For my own personal purposes though, I am focusing on the impractical Philosophical aspects of universal Information, especially its causal powers in the form of Energy & Entropy*2. Not any particular causal event, but the general invisible force behind all change in the universe. This "force" is responsible for what we call Natural Evolution, which is characterized by creative Emergence of novelty. Yet, aimless randomness creates only Entropy, while Natural Selection (teleonomic Choice) creates the "order" (stable & beautiful patterns of inter-relationships) that Al Khalili finds so wonderful.
I'm not sure if Jim would agree, but I also view Information as "immaterial" in its invisible mental forms of Concepts, Ideas, Feelings, etc. All of those are interrelated patterns that could be reduced to abstract mathematical ratios, by omitting the personal meanings as Shannon did. Meanings exist only in the individual human mind -- in the self-Consciousness that has "miraculously" emerged from a seemingly mechanical series of operations on matter. Unfortunately, those memes (units of memory) can only be exported from intangible minds by transforming them into conventional physical symbols. That ability to transform from Mind to Matter and back, is the key power of Generic Information*3. And that telenomic understanding of Evolution may "take us" in a new direction from the useful-but-short-sighted and out-dated paradigms ofMaterialism and Reductionism.
I have to go. But if you have specific questions, raised by the video, I'll be glad to respond as I get time. :smile:
*1. In the final chapter of his book, Scharf finally reveals the motivation for his interpretation of the philosophical importance of Information : "The greater mystery is that the universe is actually capable of self-comprehension".
*2. I coined the term EnFormAction to encapsulate the directional (teleonomic) causation of Evolution. The act of enforming creates novelty out of directionless randomness. For example, that's what happens when Quantum superposition (disorganized randomness) suddenly "collapses" into an organized physical particle of matter.
*3. Introduction to Enformationism :
A philosophical worldview grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page80.html
Note -- If that blog post is too long for you, here's a shorter version :
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page24.html
Ozone is recovering. It does fix itself due to efforts as simple as reduction.
The carbon sequestering is interesting. Does she do it? Is a company that does it competitive with another making a similar product but without the sequestering? What sort of tonnage rate are we talking here? Where is it put that it will stay out of the environment?
How does that work if the water is too warm to keep the coral alive?
Do you know what I mean by those words? Can you refute the mathematics/logic instead of just point out more examples of delay?
It does not follow that slowing an advance can eventually stop it, especially when theres an ever growing number of consumers each doing what they can. Heck, it isnt event the individuals that account for the vast majority of resource consumption.
Quoting universenessIm not confined to my home. My food doesnt come from it. So maybe not so much like that.
No, I was more referencing the closed environment than the religion built around forced population control (still a viable idea).The problem it solves might be how to live in a place with a hostile environment. Of course the hostile environment was a sham in that movie. People could live outside, unlike on some other world.
Other than those reasons, what problem is being solved by it? Why exactly does it need to be us doing the exploring instead of something more fit, designed for the task.
Absolutely wont work. The elected guy will be one that does what the people want, not what they need as a whole. It cannot work that way. This authority must be able to make the tough decisions and will not be able to if he needs to get elected.
Agree that such a mechanism is needed, but its another thing that seems unworkable. Look at the failed efforts to put checks on Trumps abuse of power.
Probably, except for above checks, some sort of watchdog that doesnt have a say in the decisions. Very hard to give somebody (or an entity) that sort of power than then still be able to keep it in check. Cant consider unpopular decisions to be justification for unseating the leader. But the decisions need to be judged in the light of their higher purpose.
Irrelevant. The authority I speak of simply needs there to be children a long time from now, not necessarily all of them. Thats a different priority, a different sort of love.
Quoting universenessRemember about a decade ago when Googles business model was dont be evil. Notice they dont say that anymore? They found out how very well it pays.
Quoting Agent SmithWhat do they do if they find a defect? Is it mandatory to eliminate it? That goes against a lot of personal beliefs, and if youre that sort of person, whats the point of the mandatory screening?
Quoting universenessNot really following this discussion, but calling these things fundamentals of energy makes it sound like energy is made of photons and such and not the other way around.
The genetic defect screening is done before pregnancy and sometimes during pregnancy. In the first case it's simple, contraception. In the second case, it gives parents some time to ready themselves - make arrangements - for the (special needs) child.
Quoting punos
This is where I think the video falls short and the current scientific orthodoxy on the fundamentality of data is incomplete. But I don't think Gnomon's enformationism takes us anywhere useful, as it is too 'philosophical' and does not qualify as a scientific theory which has empirical evidence and has been peer reviewed. I would pay much more attention to it if it was a theory, instead of just a personal hypothesis. I googled 'a photon represented in 8 bits,' and got nothing of any value. Do you have any details on this?
Why do you think autism would make a person most suited to a hivemind?
Quoting punos
The only imagery that springs to mind is:
The alien can access the information stored in the robot boy. The network to other aliens seems to be by touch. I don't see any invocation of a hivemind here, however, It seems to be more like the model I suggested, Autonomous Individuals who can also act as a merged/networked collective. Which traditional model of a hivemind are you suggesting matches your claim of a 'perfect democracy.'
I never like the use of 'perfect,' when it comes to describing any system, as I think it's one of those words that invokes a non-existent.
You offered him the choice of responding by proxy.
Quoting 180 Proof
I think he is responding, but not directly to you. I think he has chosen to maintain a political approach to you and I would personally prefer he responded to you directly. But I also respect his right to choose not to. I have less respect for that choice however. @Gnomon has given his reasons for choosing not to interact with you directly but I personally, don't accept them, as you are just a robust, knowledgeable debater, and in no way are you just acrimonious, for the hell of it (a troll).
That may be true or not or only in part. I prefer to assume that every bath has a baby in it, and we should be careful when we discard the bath water. I encourage his efforts, he wants the same thing i do, and so do most of us here. It is wiser to listen to the wisdom of the crowd and not be so adversarial with our ideas and each other. Each one of us is like a tentacle of humanity reaching for understanding in the best way we know how. We are nature's little explorers. :smile:
I remember reading somewhere not too long ago about the photon needing 8 bits to describe it. I think the search term i used was "how many bits to describe a photon". Regardless, its not 1 bit because light has wave structure like amplitude, frequency, which is at least 2 bits but to describe the full phenomena of light like variable frequencies and amplitude it must be more than just 2 bits. I'll try to find the source, which doesn't seem to be coming up at the top of my google search now.
:up:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Thanks for the time stamps Alkis, I appreciate the time and effort involved.
James Clerk Maxwell's demon was his own thought experiment to explain to people, the mechanisms involved in the second law of thermodynamics. Rather than me, offer you my summary of the 'what, and why,' I think Maxwell chose to present his thought experiment in the way he did. I thought it would be better for you to have a look at some of the published text on the topic. Have a look at Maxwell's demon.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
If you made a hot cup of coffee and put in on a table. The coffee would eventually reach thermal equilibrium (reach the same temperature as the air in your kitchen), as the heat from the coffee would dissipate into the volume of the kitchen, which would slightly raise the overall temperature in the kitchen but only until it was the same as the temperature of the coffee and then the transfer of heat would stop.
The gap that the demon open and closes, represents an attempt (thought experiment) to reverse the thermal equilibrium between the kitchen and the coffee in the cup, so that the coffee would stay hot and the heat would not be lost to the kitchen (almost like putting the coffee in a flask to maintain it's heat for longer).
Quoting Alkis Piskas
For me, as my career is in Computing Science. Information with no meaning is data.
'Jimmy' is data. 'Dog name: Jimmy' is information.
1 or 0 are bit data. They represent two data states. If I try to perceive their fundamental representation in the sense of the physical world. The best I can come up with is 1 = something and 0 = nothing( or perhaps it's better to suggest 'an absence of something.') Traditionally, in Computing, 1 = true and 0 = false or 1 = on (there is a voltage) and 0 = off (there is no voltage). These are measurements that happen to a clock pulse (normally the clock pulse of a computer processor.) So time must pass, for a system to be able to measure data/information. If such a system can be 'equated' to something like a 'field excitation,' then this would suggest that all particles could be described in terms of data representations. These data representations could then become information, by labelling them things like 'up quark' or 'gluon' or 'string' or 'electron' etc and by doing this, the physical contents of the universe could be fundamentally described as 'information.'
Autistic people have a tendency to be very highly specialized in their cognitive functions to the point of reduced functionality in other areas, sometimes to a sever degree. They have a condition where brain cells in the prefrontal lobe grow "abnormally" or more than they "should".
The brain is structurally organized with different regions of specialization working together in different configurations to solve problems. A hivemind situation with autistic people will mimic this structure of specialized areas. What one autistic individual is lacking another is specialized in, they will work as one unit symbiotically. The result is a much higher level of integration among them enhancing the intelligence level well above a single regular normal human. It's just like a very intimate group of friends, just more intimate than most of us now would be comfortable with.
Quoting universeness
It's pretty much the same except one doesn't need to touch to connect, one will always be connected, but have internal control of his or her connectivity. I suspect that the Dunbar number (about 150) will limit the number of communication ports each node can have access to, so the network won't be fully interconnected (probably a good thing). The main difference really between a hive mind and what you and i are doing right now is simply network 'protocol'.
Developments like this will be the only thing that will put us on par with an AGI and maybe ASI. Without it we would probably lose control of it, and then there will be an escalating probability of potential disaster between us and it.
Quoting universeness
You're right, i will reduce that word frequency. :smile:
But, we must also be careful and balance your well stated and valid point, with dealing with error, misguided viewpoints, deliberate subterfuge, etc, etc. It's also not always clear who in the crowd, is genuine and who are 'wolves in sheep's clothing,' or 'bad disguised as good or innocent.'
The (imo) invented Jesus characature might seem like a pleasant fellow we should all follow, when his fable is actually a cautionary tale of a 'pied piper,' trying to get rebellious Jews to accept the rule of their 'Roman' conquerers. "Give unto Caesar, what is Caesar's" Really? That's the advice of a God??????
Pay your taxes/tribute to whatever vile thug happens to have temporarily subjugated your tribe.
I accept that is trying to figure things out, just like the rest of us but I also think he is trying to 'leave the door ajar,' for those who want to find some common ground between theism and the scientific method. I want to slam that door shut permanently and move on.
Quoting punos
Yes but my problem is that using bits to represent a photon is still a REPRESENTATION.
Computers exist based on binary representations but the two state representations used in current computers are based on the presence or absence of a voltage > 0 volts and <= 5 volts.
Such representations have little to do with the 'physical realities' of the universe. So I am interested on how a two state representation can actually BE a physical representation of the universe.
In the video, from time stamp 36 mins. Jim starts to talk about Turing's vision of computers and how we can now MIMIC or emulate the functionality of other devices (a phone, a calculator, a camera, a typewriter, a fax machine, ete, etc,) on a single handheld computer but he then goes on to suggest that the laws and rules of physics can be represented in a similar way. The simulations shown at around time stamp 38 mins are just that, simulations of a real world fluid but such cannot produce a REAL world fluid.
That's the bit I am interested. Can identification of a fundamental unit for information open the door to something like star trek style replicators or transporters?
Later on, in the vid, when Jim starts talking about 'deletion of information' and connecting that to the concept of universal entropy, Is that a valid definition of what entropy is? The loss of information? To where? black holes?
But is it not also posited that autism can result in very challenged emotional control, a lack or empathy or/and sympathy etc. Such could be really problematic if present in a hivemind. Sociopaths and narcissists can also be highly specialised in their cognitive functions but I don't recommend applying their models to a network of individual consciousnesses, unless the enhanced cognitive functions can be applied minus all the negative aspects of autism, sociopathy and narcissism.
You typed earlier about the brain as two hemispheres:
Quoting punos
I think the better model is the R-complex, the Limbic system and the Cortex. The reason I say this is because I sense the presence of all three. I refer to them with the old idea of me, myself and I.
It's interesting that our consciousness can be partitioned in such ways. I wonder how far that 'reductionism' can 'scientifically' be proved true. Is human intent and purpose reducible to data representations. It has to be, if information is 'thee' universal fundamental.
Quoting punos
But developing adequate network protocols, that are 'fit for purpose' for all possible scenarios, (for which it's almost impossible to exhaustively test,) is really difficult, and it's why those who develop network operating systems are highly paid and the best of them are highly sought after by every country in the world.
Quoting Gnomon
But do you think this 'capability of self-comprehension,' is only emergent through US and lifeforms such as us, or is he positing a general panpsychism, in the sense that, 'rocks contain some ingredients that could become part of a conscious combinatorial?' Would this have to follow if human consciousness is fundamentally information, and information is ubiquitous?
95% of the universe is currently 'invisible' to current science, in the form of dark matter and dark energy.
There is also a lot of matter in the universe which is 'not illuminated.' But such invisibility is not 'philosophical,' it is scientific.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't agree with the 'separation' you suggest here. The posit is that concrete matter IS information. It's not that information can be abstracted from that which exists in the universe, which is the important focus. It's that the single most important fundamental OF the universe could be labelled as 'data.'
The unit suggested is the bit. But, like the strings in string theory. A bit can be in many fundamental 'states.' Perhaps even 'inter dimensional vibrational states.' I think that data must be able to be in more states that the two states associated with the traditional BInary digiTs used in computing.
I don't think your use of 'meta-physically' above helps illuminate the point you make.
I think a fundamental like a gluon or a quark or an electron IS a data state!
I totally understand where you're coming from. I have that same impulse within me too.
Quoting universeness
Sure but we really can't get away from representation anyway no matter what we do. I sometimes think about it the other way around. If one assumes that information is more fundamental than our experience of physical matter then it may be reasonable to say that matter is representative of information in a sense. One can say that matter is a representation of information in a spacetime interface. What is being re-presented is information with a different code.
Computers work so well and can do so much i think because they are literally representing how the universe works. This idea of 'representation' (to present again) is why patterns can be traced back to earlier and simpler structures or even abstract principles. I think the best we can hope for (and it doesn't trouble me) is that our representations work for us and are internally and logically consistent (a utilitarian perspective).
Quoting universeness
Yes a simulated fluid will not produce a real fluid for you or me. A simulated entity on the other hand would consider anything in it's simulated environment real to it including simulated fluids. I think that's what real means, and it might be worth thinking about. It's the idea of the 'realm', and the word real is related to the word royal which ties into the "rules or laws of the land", also the concept of real-estate.
Consider how a legal system is like a simulation, meaning it has it's own rules like contracts, taxes, etc. None of these things are real at the level of biology, or particle physics (realms of their own), but they are real at the level of a legal system. The word 'real' and 'exist' in this sense are not the same.
Quoting universeness
I don't know but i wouldn't dismiss the possibility yet.
Quoting universeness
Information entropy i think emerges in the presence of space (degrees of freedom), where the ratio of energy or matter (information: 1 bit for simplicity) to space has to be at least 1/2 or less. If the ratio were 1/1 then no possible entropy. I'm not sure if information can be erased, but it can be lost to another system which could be difficult to trace giving the impression that it was erased from existence, but i might be wrong about that. There may be a law of conservation of information in this regard. I'm not sure yet... will think about it more.
I think there is no teleological connection to natural evolution via positing a universal data fundamental.
I think the current position that disorder can become order due to very large variety randomly combining in vast numbers of ways. Natural novelty need no teleological input. Teleology only comes into play via human design/intent/purpose.
Quantum superposition has still to be fully explained. What evidence do you have that quantum superposition, is 'disorganised randomness?'
Quoting Gnomon
I don't think he would as concepts, ideas, feelings can be made very apparent through language or actions, at the will of the human involved. These are therefore only invisible to others until the source human decides to manifest them. They are not even invisible at all, in the sense that the source human is aware (cognisant) of their existence inside them.
Quoting Gnomon
Same to you! You can also raise any questions that you have, and I, and I am sure others on TPF, will be happy to help.
They have no choice, if they are being true to Christian doctrine. I agree that the Christian hierarchy would be too scared to do so, in News at 10, or such like, but that's what their doctrine dictates.
Quoting noAxioms
:grin: God spends half it's time in the OT, smiting people (one poor guy for dropping a corner of his ark of covenant). He also commands she bears to kill kids for insulting one of his prophets, and he demands murder and ethnic cleansing, all through the OT. It's not our sort of thinking that's the problem, it's the babble in the bible that's the problem, when deluded folks accept such babble, as the written will and character of their creator.
All true, but one thing i know about autistics is that they have a high level sense of justice. I imagine that these kinds of problems will arise, but i also can imagine safety mechanisms in place to counter these pathologies. One possible way is to have a monitoring system that locks out any node that threatens the stability of the hivemind. I imagine highly developed complex systems methods can restructure the network accordingly in real time. This can be done by the other member nodes of the network as a self-regulating mechanism or it can be done by algorithms or an AI system. I'm sure those issues would be ironed out in some way.
Quoting universeness
Right, i sometimes use the concept of the triune brain as you just did, but sometimes i use the two hemispheres as the example because it is easier to prove from split brain patient experiments, and things like 'alien hand syndrome'. The hivemind concept could be included in the triune brain model extending it to a 4th structure above the neocortex. Elon Musk has talked about this before, and i think he's right.
Quoting universeness
I believe so, consciousness may exist on a spectrum of complexity that may or may not be reducible to zero. It's hard to determine conclusively as of now.
Quoting universeness
Studying how the corpus callosum works will go far i think in helping us develop these hivemind protocols. Large language models like GPT can probably be used as a possible component in a hivemind network protocol. Most of the testing will probably be done on animals first and in complex simulations analyzed by AI. I don't doubt that we will have the tools necessary for the task; look at what we've done with solving the protein folding problem.
[quote=180 Proof]https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/709894
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718369
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/742056[/quote]
Failing that, however, Gnomon could enlist a proxy @Agent Smith @Wayfarer @punos or you to address these questions. Given the "revolutionary" claims he's made for his "personal philosophical worldview", at the very least it should be easy to show that the premises of my questions are invalid or irrelevant. Gnomon's disdain for 'aggressive criticism' is apparently an excuse to continue to evade rather than engage a dialectical challenge.
I don't know what 'she' you are referring to? Greta Thunberg?
As for the details of carbon capture or coral reef recovery methods. I am sure there are many claims and counter claims exemplified on-line. I was referring to the genuine efforts of the people involved, not the debated efficacy of a particular method.
Quoting noAxioms
Not until you offer a the details needed or at least provide links to the specific maths / logic, that have been published, peer reviewed and contain strong empirical evidence that any claims made are robust and hard to counter.
Quoting noAxioms
It also does not follow that it cannot! Climate.gov.
Quoting noAxioms
Us, as we are now, us with transhuman augments as well or exclusively transhuman augments, at least until extraterrestial habitats, are made more comfortable and practicable for us, as we are now.
I have no pressing preference. What problem was being solved when Hilary climbed mount Everest or when Armstrong first footed the Moon. It's also about human's investigating the universe they live in, as in my opinion, if we don't, we will ossify, as a species, on out little pale blue dot nest planet.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't want to get all 'panto' on you but, 'Oh, yes it will! and oh yes it can!'
My detailed arguments of why I think so would have to be a different thread about democratic socialism, secular humanism and a resource based global economy.
Quoting noAxioms
That's a start, and episodes like Trump, do not negate the need for such rigorous (hopefully even fool proof), checks and balances, on all those trusted with power. They enhance such need and shoul further compel all of us to insist they are established. There is no shortage of ideas as to how to achieve such.
Quoting noAxioms
You certainly can consider unpopular decisions as a reason to consider unseating any leader or group of leaders. There would be much to consider but I would get rid of any second politically elected chamber and establish various tiers of citizen authorities. I would establish a second chamber of elected stakeholder. Nurse or teachers or the police etc can elect two members to this second chamber.
Any new law proposed by the political chamber would have to gain the support of this second chamber.
:up: I agree.
Not irrelevant as you have invoked the 'mommy' model time and time again, as imo, a mockery of any suggestion of a future benevolent (via robust check and balances) authority structure to help, a future human global civilisation thrive without destroying it's own nest planet.
Quoting noAxioms
Google is owned by the nefarious rich, who nurture profit more that people, what do you expect from such? Such companies have been ever thus!
I will respond to your last two posts to me, tomorrow. I am going to order in some food and have a wee nights relaxation and a couple or 10 drinks with family.
Have a good night! :party:
Don't forget to pour one out for the homies. :smile:
Thank you too, @universeness.
I suggest we pass over the first two questions. They refer to a theory and experientation that is not so realistic to me. More specifically, I personally have no use for it. I just asked because i didn't quite undestand them. Most probably because of my lack of experience in the field of Physics.
Let's focus then on the last one, which addresses the hugely important subject of information.
(BTW, I am also an IT guy. I am a professional programmer since 1986 and also a software and system analyst. And since we are talking about "data", I had been specialized and worked for a considerable period of time in the field od "data security". :smile:)
So, let's clear first the relation of data with indormation.
The term "data" is often used interchangeably with "information". However, they are not at all the same. Data are items of information. They are at the core of information. They are kind of "bits" of information. Even if a single bit can be sometimes be considered as information, e.g. Yes/No.
So, information is something much broader. Wikipedia defines it as follows":
"Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform {i.e, make known]. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information."
(The brackets are mine, an attempt to handle somehow the "circularity" involved).
I brought this up to indicate that information has a purpose (to inform) and meaning (interpretation of that which may be sensed). The last statement --about lack of randomity-- is also very important.
OK, this is the theoretical part. I will now speak from my own experience with "data" and, consequently, "information" and make it as practical as possible.
Data are useful if they have meaning and a purpose. Example:
I want to create a library of songs I like (purpose). One way is to look at lists of song titles (data) and collect those that I know (knowledge"), i.e. that they have some meaning to me. Now, from the titles that I know I will select those belonging to songs I like, i.e. they mean more than oters to me.
Now, if I have compiled the list from a lot of sources from the Web in order to increase the chances to find all, if possible, the songs I like, it is evident that a lot --if not most-- of them will be useless for me.
This is exactly what happens in life and I believe in the physical world. Most data are useless. They can hardly be considered information. And, most importantly, the term "information" has a meaning for humans, not for objects or nature, i.e. the physical world. The physical world cannot use data or information. Natural phenomena obey physical laws, conceived by humans. It is we who are interpreting, describing, and explain them. We can also control them to a certain degree and make use of them in our life.
Yes. Empirical Science may be the final arbiter of pragmatic Empirical questions, but theoretical Philosophy is still arbitrating questions that remain unanswered by classical scientific methods*1. A century later, the practical significance of sub-atomic physics remains debatable. Yes, the get-er-done engineers have developed technologies for manipulating invisible particles of stuff. But physicists are still debating the common-sense meaning of such non-sense as Superposition and Quantum Leaps. Philosophy is not about Matter, but Meaning.
Those spooky questions*2 remain under the purview of Theoretical Physics*3, which is essentially a narrow specialty of Philosophy. Einstein was not a mystic or religious believer, but he resorted to philosophical & poetic metaphors to convey unsettled ideas about physical facts. Ironically, some posters on this philosophical forum seem to believe that such ideas as Emergence can be finally settled by empirical methods. :smile:
PS__Just as Steven Jay Gould separated Religion & Science into non-overlapping magisteria, Philosophy & Science are not competitors in the same arena.
*1. Physics vs Metaphysics :
Physics is defined, in its simplest form, as the study of matter and energy and how those two interact, while metaphysics deals with the ideas that dont abide by scientific logic and theories.
https://allthedifferences.com/metaphysics-vs-physics/
*2. Quantum Questions :
Here is a collection of writings that bridges the gap between science and religion. Quantum Questions collects the mystical writings of each of the major physicists involved in the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck.
https://www.shambhala.com/quantum-questions-1226.html
*3. Whats behind a science vs. philosophy fight? :
In fact, most of the scientists I know are strictly theoretical. They dont dirty their hands with experimental testing. ___Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/why-are-scientists-philosophers-fighting-again/
Although his concept of Dataome may sound similar to Panpsychism, as a professional scientist, Scharf would be loathe to use terminology that would incite ridicule from his peers. However, he does make use of edgy words like "hive mind" and "superorganism". As as non-professional amateur philosopher though, I'm not afraid to call a spade a pointy shovel, or a universal field of Data/Information a big Idea.
No. sentient rocks are not implied by the concept of Dataome. In any case, only a tiny fraction of the embodied information in the universe has developed the emergent quality of Sentience. But if pressed, Scharf might agree that the universe has indeed become self-reflective, by means of its sentient creatures. He does admit that "There is little doubt that something is going on with our species . . . ." I'll let you read the book, to fill-in the ellipsis. :smile:
Almost 10 years ago, when I first began to post on this forum, I did take seriously, and was impressed with his extensive knowledge of philosophy. But after he made it clear that any of my responses to his comments would be treated as the repugnant babblings of an idiot, I eventually decided not to engage with him in political polemics.
Your science-based worldview seems to be similar to his in general, but you are less directly abusive in your responses to ideas that you find anti-scientific (i.e. metaphysics). So, I'm OK with your careful critiques of my personal worldview. Yet now, you seem ready to dis-engage. :sad:
PS__180 likes to imagine Gnomon as a tree-hugging hippie Hindu Buddhist Romantic, reciting poems of universal peace & love while lighting candles and smoking weed, despite his sentient crystals being made of synthetic zircon. But that could hardly be farther from the fact. Instead, Gnomon is a forty year subscriber to Skeptical Inquirer & Scientific American magazines. And Gnomon's 21st century Science is built upon a mushy quantum foundation of uncertainty & indeterminism that undermined the faith in Realism of Classical Physics.
PS__Where I view the universe as evolving in a positive direction (Enformy) 180 seems to agree with suicidal Macbeth :
Macbeth to himself :
[i]Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is [b]a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.[/b] [/i]
My earliest interaction with @Gnomon was three years ago, not ten. TPF has been around barely eight years, not ten. I joined in 2015, made a dozen posts and then logged-off until late 2019. Gnomon's just making shit up about his history with me just as he does when proselytizing his "personal philosophical worldview". :yawn:
Philosophy opposes proselytizing, and, unless I'm mistaken, sophists / cranks are fair game on TPF until they show themselves to be otherwise. I've laid my own dodgy speculative cards down on the table in at least several hundred posts the last few years, exposing myself to the same sort of critical engagement with which I've offered Gnomon et al. Isn't that this site's raison d'etre: critical engagement via giving and taking reasons, enriching understanding via dialectical reasoning? Gnomon doesn't seem to believe so. :eyes:
Addendum to .
Yea, if God is so perfect, why does Jesus do things so incredibly differently in the NT? Pretty solid evidence of it all being a product of human legend if the story changes with the fashions.
Quoting universenessDoes Greta do it, yes. Its her suggestion. You didnt answer the questions, especially those about competitiveness.
So you havent.
The mathematics is pretty simple. No, it isnt peer reviewed. Im asking if you deny it, which apparently you do if it doesnt come from a journal, which Im sure it does in some form.
E is say energy use of the planet in a time period. ER is renewable energy and other resources like water (basically all the solar energy and rain falling on all of Earth). EF is fossil energy, anything of which there is but a finite supply. P is population, or people. e is per-capita energy usage. The supply equation:
EF = E ER.
Thats simple enough. Non-renewables make up for what renewables cannot cover.
E = p e
Thats by definition. This is the demand side. Twice as many people, youll probably need twice the energy. Over time, p goes up exponentially and E with it. Over time, ER is static. Theres only so much energy to be had. Conservation efforts might reduce e, but not exponentially, so thats just a temorary relief on E.
Increase in solar farms and such will increase the amount of ER available to the people, but ER being static, theres a ceiling to that. It also takes non-renewable resource to build the panels, the windmills, and the batteries needed. The lithium requirement is probably more than all the mines can produce, and the stuff needs to be replaced on a regular schedule.
I see an article claiming it can be done at least for now, but dont see the numbers. Its just a claim as far as this pop-article goes.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/23/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-jacobson-on-how-wind-sun-and-water-can-power-the-world
Space was never a solution to excess population. It costs far more to put a person in space than it does to keep him here. Sure, sending colonies to other planets might put new growth out there, but theyre not going to remove any significant number (other than by taking away their resoruces) from Earth in doing so.
The extinction threat is a somewhat better reason, but it would be like preventing a fish from going extinct by building fish-bowls in the trees. Better to just build a bird to put in the trees, and then call it a fish if thats important to you.
Theyll never be as comfortable as Earth. Where are all the exatons of material going to come from (and of course the energy required, far more than it took to decimate Earth) to make outdoors of an alien place less immediately fatal to us?
Interestingly, Earth did it by sequestering the carbon. Makes you wonder what the place was like say 1.5 billion years ago. If we had a time machine and went there, would it kill us to step out the door? I have some weird ideas about what Earth was like even sort of recently like under 100 MY ago.
How do they even get dust off the ground in those Martian dust storms if the air is less than 1% the pressure here?
Say you done it. Important with the moon since the USA got their butts pretty brutally kicked in the space race before then. Big cold-war motivation. One can always put tech research out there. Learn to do stuff. Why do you think it took until Apollo 11 to actually land? The ones before were for learning stuff.
Well I dont have enough education to counter what is basically assertions on both our parts, but it seems obvious that the goals of the individual voter correspond little to higher goals, as demonstrated by recent history. Notice I dont identity those higher goals. There are several, a matter of choosing one to at least the partial exclusion of the others. Dont ossify seems to be one to which you relate. Your fantasy cities seem to do just that. I like the idea of pushing forward and bringing it to the next level, but there are costs to that, most of which wont be supported by the typical democratic voter whos primary concern is his immediate personal comfort.
But were talking about even more power here, enough apparently to render the checks ineffectual. He basically fired anybody related to investigations on his abuses. The authority should not have any authority over said checks, but they always do, especially when the abuses were embraced by an entire political part just because he wore the same color uniform. Police are the same way, almost impossible to prosecute for abuses because the police and even the courts stand behind their own most of the time.
Disagree for the same reason the position shouldnt be one left to the voters. Popularity will doom us. Our cells learned to cooperate into a larger entity, working for the entity and not the individual life forms. One of the first things to change was to select out any personal will that isnt beneficial to the collective. The sort of authority Im speaking of needs to act on the benefit of the collective, but here you are suggesting this cannot be done because it would involve actions not popular with the individuals.
Quoting universenessIve frequently said that the larger the group of people, the less mature they act as a whole. The term mommy is deliberately to emphasize that, an authority over something far to immature to know whats best for it.
Yes, but they started out wanting to do it right. Mozilla (a competitor) is still trying very hard not to be evil.
Did you notice that I used the term Teleonomy*1 instead of Teleology? It's that kind of talking past each other that makes communicating with 180 so difficult. He substitutes his favorite antiscience terminology in place of my philosophical concepts. We are contrasting personal worldviews & opinions & beliefs*2, not scientific facts & truths. Serial Monologing with makes three years feel like ten. :smile:
*1. Teleonomy is the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by natural processes like natural selection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy
*2. Replace "I think" with "I believe", and you will see the problem with trying to discuss empirical facts on a philosophical forum.
I read those links to TPF posts you provided. Indeed, if @Gnomon claims his Enformationism Theory is scientific then the theory must entail some observables (it should be falsifiable thereby). However, it appears that Gnomon is using science to support his theory of it from bit while his theory itself is nonscience.
How does Gnomon's theory differ from ID/Creationism in, most importantly, non-trivial ways? He's made it amply clear that he's not propounding a deity behind the curtains i.e. the ordering principle which he calls Enformy is not God as is found in religion. This distinction is critical to Enformationism Theory if it's to avoid being identified as some spinoff of, or god forbid nothing but, religion. However, is this a distinction without a difference? That's I reckon the right question to ask. Is Enformy just another name for God? Hence, I suppose, your misgivings that Gnomon is guilty of sophistry. Is it just wordplay?
:lol: Well, I was still thinking about how I was going to answer your two posts to me, as I was sipping my first beer, with a Johnnie Walker (black label) whisky chaser.
If that's true, then I think there maybe a fatal flaw in the proposal that data is a universal fundamental.
A 'representation' is not 'an actual,' its a mathematical simulation.
Quoting punos
But how would you go about empirically proving that? A photon has associated attributes, sure but we currently know so little about exactly what constitutes a photon and we don't know adequate detail about it's functionality, to be able to 'reproduce' it via data representation.
Until we can actually achieve a tech such as point to point dematerialise/rematerialise transportation of objects with mass or create start trek style food replicators, we will not be able to demonstrate that data is a universal fundamental. Can you think of other tech that would be enough to demonstrate that data is 'thee' universal fundamental?
Quoting punos
But it seems to me that the limits of what can be achieved, in that case is, 'virtual simulation' or at best 'virtual emulation,' inside computers but not physical reproduction. To me, if data is thee universal fundamental, then it MUST be possible to use it to create that which is natural, because that's the content of the universe. My use of the term natural here, refers to all possible forms of energy. If it's impossible to manipulate that which is 'natural' in such ways, then data cannot be a universal fundamental.
It does not matter if developing tech which can do ANYTHING nature can do (but can produce the result very quickly,) proves to be impossible,(no matter how much time we have to create it), due to the complexities involved or/and the limitations of any perception of future human science. As long as it is nonetheless true, that the functionality of nature can be reproduced, if we only knew all that we currently don't know about data, as thee universal fundamental.
Quoting punos
I currently, give very little credence to any of the current 'simulation theories' of reality.
They are just another form of supernatural or 'god' posit imo. An infinite regression of programmers who create simulated universes.
Why would an outside force create a simulation of a universe that had no life at all in it for the vast majority of its existence. What kind of purpose would the simulators have for creating our universe?
Quoting punos
But that's not true if data is thee fundamental! A legal system is made up of information and information is not simulated, it's real. It can even create REAL simulations.
Quoting punos
Roger Penrose's CCC proposes that most 'information' will end up inside black holes as the universe experiences heat death.
Well, :lol: I suppose we can all send our models for a future transhuman 'collective,' to Demis Hassabis, et al and see which one they favour.
Quoting punos
Again, I think that Demis et al, may be receiving too large a mailbag, if we all submit our models.
I think we will need a system that is far more robust and reliable than the corpus callosum.
chatGPT cant even pass the Turing test. Despite the fact that some sources claim that it has.
Protein folding! Back to Demis Hassabis at deepmind again! :grin:
[b]In 2020 a team of researchers that used AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by DeepMind placed first in CASP. The team achieved a level of accuracy much higher than any other group. It scored above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT.
AlphaFold's results at CASP were described as "transformational." and "astounding". Some researchers noted that the accuracy is not high enough for a third of its predictions, and that it does not reveal the mechanism or rules of protein folding for the protein folding problem to be considered solved. Nevertheless, it is considered a significant achievement in computational biology and great progress towards a decades-old grand challenge of biology.[/b]
I think it's enough for the purposes of our exchange to agree that information is labelled data or data which has been assigned an associated human meaning. 23 is data, 23 apples is human information.
Humans are OF the universe, so any laws or interpretations or meanings we assign to the physical contents of the universe are also OF the universe. Do you think that data/information is thee universal fundamental? The 'natural' fundamentals that science has posited so far, are the quarks, photons and electrons. If these are in reality 'data' items then ........ data/information is thee universal fundamental.
I think the physics community does not use the term 'information' in the same way we do in Computer Science. I am more comfortable with 'data' but they mean 'data' that is a 'measure' of a phenomena such as a quantum fluctuation or a field excitation. In that sense, this is data that has meaning for humans, so therefore they employ the word 'information,' which I am ok with.
Right, but instead of rejecting the insight for what is already familiar, should we let it actually inform our understanding in a new way? Sometimes it's not about learning a new thing, it's about learning how to see an old thing in a new way. We might already know what we need to know but we can't see it because we are blinded by our own assumptions. Just a thought.
Quoting universeness
As i said before, it may be impossible by gross methods. We have been attacking the problem from above, perhaps a bottom up approach might work. There is a gap between nothing and the deepest level we know or can know by empirical methods. I have some ideas or notions on how to potentially go about determining the structure of the gap. We can talk about that.
Quoting universeness
What if we can't have that technology until first we understand how data or information is universally fundamental. We wouldn't have the right framework to work out the tech. In fact i think we have the tech to figure it out already, by the force of logic, and mathematics coupled with simulation. I think it's just going to take some "out of the box" thinking to get it right.
Quoting universeness
But within a different paradigm it could be understood that if data is the fundamental thing of the universe then it's not a far stretch to surmise that the universe behaves as a computer, and if it behaves like a computer then it's not hard to surmise further that reality as we know it is as a simulation. If that concept makes sense then what is the difference from a subjective perspective which simulation we are in? The natural one or the artificial one. It may turn out that this is the nature of the universe.. simulation.
Quoting universeness
We think of simulations as having to be created by some entity programmer, but that is like religious thinking, anthropomorphic. Simulations in a data or information centered paradigm can be seen as potentially emerging from chaos. Note how in cellular automata like in John Conway's "The Game of Life" where only the initial conditions are set (very simple) and out of that comes all kinds of phenomena and little critters like "sliders" that nobody programmed or predicted, and it's Turing complete.
Quoting universeness
A simulated person would not consider the stuff, or "matter" (data, information) that he or she is made of as a simulation. That would appear counter intuitive, but from an outside perspective would seem obvious that it's simulated.
Quoting universeness
Oh yes, black holes are another mystery to try to tackle from an information perspective. I may have some ideas about that too, but nothing solid.
Quoting Gnomon
If there is still arbitration, then when and if, such arbitration is ever settled and (a) conclusion(s) is/are arrived at, then empirical science will become the final arbiter or those findings.
Philosophy is described as:
"The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence."
and
"The study of the theoretical basis of a particular branch of knowledge or experience"
and
"A theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour"
I think that which is labelled 'matter' is included, so philosophy certainly is about 'matter' as well as that which 'matters' to people. Your description regarding metaphysics is why it is such an overburdened and pretty useless term, imo.
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
I have already stated that imo, Einstein was faced with a religious power base (especially in America), that wielded more power than it has today. So, he threw the odd bone at them, as he knew how to play the game of being a public personality facing the zeitgeist of the time.
Empirical methods will be the final arbiter of what is emergent in humans, no matter how much woo woo of the gaps, some posters on TPF want to attempt to secret in, by camouflage or stealth. :smile:
I appreciate your offer of links to attempts to 'bridge gaps between science and religion.' But, I assign very little value to such notions.Quoting Gnomon
Sure, many philosophers have inspired many many scientists.
Fair enough!
Quoting Gnomon
I didn't suggest 'sentient rocks,' I suggested that panpsychism posits that rocks contain 'ingredients' that can be used in 'consciousness.' Panpsychism does not suggest rocks are self-aware.
Quoting Gnomon
Ok, I accept that is your viewpoint.
Quoting Gnomon
I will add it to my current very long list of books I need to read. So far, I only have to live until I am 128 to get through the list, but the [s]sex[/s] [s]drugs[/s], drink and [s]rock[/s] & roll, might get me first!
I don't know exactly how they will go about it. Investigations into the corpus callosum, and GPT language model integration as a communications language protocol between minds and general systems interaction are just possible avenues to start on. After the first BMIs have been in use for a little bit, better techniques will begin to develop as we deepen our understanding of this kind of brain/machine interaction.
GPT doesn't need to pass the turing test for this purpose, it just has to provide a language model that can interpret nerve signals to human language, and human language to machine language, and back. It would be a tool, not a fully developed sentient AI. That could be part of a whole other thing.
Wow! long time poster! I am surprised you are only at 2.8k posts.
Quoting Gnomon
I apologise if I have given you that impression. If you keep making points, I will forever respond to you.
You are a very interesting thinker and you have obviously researched a great deal on the topics of interest to you. I think @180 Proof is also a fascinating thinker. I would be very foolish indeed to handwave any such thinkers away. Surely there can be a little bit of heated discussion between us without anyone pulling up their drawbridge permanently. People are passionate about the truths they accept and hold dear and want to defend. I am meeting a friend of mine tonight, who is a very loud, brash guy who gesticulates wildly, when he has had a few and is defending his points of view. He is an agnostic religious education teacher with a heavy loud English accent. Bouncers often come over to our table and ask if everything is ok, as he gets so animated at times. I think he is brilliant. I love how he tries to defend a hopeless position. :lol:
I continue to greatly value his friendship, even though we utterly disagree with each others viewpoints at times. I think you should directly answer any outstanding question that @180 Proof has, regarding your enformationism. Don't take his acrimony personally, I don't, and you can equal him, insult for insult, if you like, until the moderators tell you both to back off. Or you can just apply a 'water of a duck's back' approach. Enjoy the exchange! I need folks like @180 Proof, I will never become an arrogant pr*** as long as folks like him tell me when I am being a pr*** and why.
I think the verbal boxing between you is not severe. I have witnessed far, far worse.
You should both be able to be who you each are, and still interact. But, if you just can't, then by proxy, is all that remains instead of a complete comms shutdown.
I remain interested in those like yourself (please correct me if I am wrong here), who are interested in building bridges between science and religion. I would say @Athena also thinks it's important to find ways to do that. I would be interested in her opinion of your 'enformationism.'
You seem quite willing to directly engage again with @Gnomon.
He seems to be still too angry at you due to the level of disrespect he feels he has suffered at your hands. I hope that changes. What else can be said? Perhaps proxy comms between you will be as good as it gets. C'est la vie!
Quoting punos
Quoting punos
Quoting Gnomon
I will respond to these posts tomorrow guys. I am meeting two [s]fiends,[/s] friends from Glasgow for a local pub crawl! Cheers!!!
:up:
OK
I agree. I don't take 's verbal punches as seriously as he seems to take my timid rejoinders. Most of his swings are whiffs anyway, because he fails to see the essential point of my thesis. Besides, he seems to think his mission on this forum is to be a Socratic gadfly, pointing out both their factual errors, and the errors in reasoning of those whose views contradict his own. I find his earnestness amusing, so I often conclude my posts to him with a "joke" emoji. :joke:
PS__The Joke symbol is supposed to be "tongue in cheek", but it looks more like sticking your tongue out. Which could be misconstrued. Maybe he thinks I'm razzing him. Or maybe those high-proof beverages make him hyper-sensitive. :wink:
PPS__My non-creedal Enformationism worldview is a calmly reasoned philosophical interpretation of 21st century Information & quantum theories; not an emotional eternal life expectation. So, when reply posters get riled-up, I don't get upset, because I understand that they don't understand what I'm proposing. They are reacting to the perceived evils of oppressive religion, or to the perceived folly of an anti-science belief system, instead of groking the mind-boggling possibilities of a novel information-centric philosophical worldview. :nerd:
Gadfly : (god fly)
According to the words put into his mouth by Plato, Socrates believed that he had been sent by the gods to act as a gadfly to the Athenian state.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/socrates-as-the-gadfly-of-the-state-4thc-bc
I agree. But the main issue in what I have talked about, or my main point if you like, is not about how "data" and "information" are related. As I said, they are ofter interchangeable. I don't really mind if we use them as one and the same thing.
Yet, the most important question I brought up regarding the video, namely, if data have any meaning and purpose for the physical universe, is kind of lost and it is half-answered.
(Re Quoting universeness
I still wait to hear, i.e. if the physical universe has a mind that can intrerpret and handle data and if yes, how? And not because we can and we are part of the the physical universe as you say, but independetly of us.
I don't understand how people can be receptive to the idea that the universe could be a computer simulation and at the same time deny the possibility of God. Programmer(s) = God(s). A distinction without a difference in your favor mon ami.
From one of our earliest exchanges three years ago, a confession ...
Quoting 180 Proof
E.g. "panpsychism?" "panendeism?" "pancomputationalism?" Uh huh. :roll:
Maybe @universeness or @Agent Smith can tell me this "essential point" is camouflaged by your esoteric "thesis", O Sage Enformer. :sparkle: :eyes: :sweat:
update:
Old exchances with Gnomon (just my side replying to quotes from his posts). The crux of our contentiousness, I guess, is in the mind's eye of the beholder ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/628681 (my substance contra your rhetoric)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/629398 (an alternative proposal my 'negative metaphysics')
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/629682 (explicitly calling bs on "Meta-physics")
Superb summary of what transpired betwixt you and @Gnomon. The salient points (of contention) highlighted for the audience's benefit, kudos.
Gnomon's thesis may need work, but it isn't philosophical crankery in me humble opinion, but que sais-je?
highlighted the points that are salient to him, but not to Gnomon. For example, although it includes some concepts that are similar to New Age philosophy, Enformationism is not about New Ageism or Mysticism. Instead, it was inspired by scientific Quantum & Information theories, which themselves have philosophical similarities to New Age notions*1.
But to label my personal philosophical thesis as a New Age screed is "cranky", in the sense of irritable & ill-tempered. Nevertheless, his pot-shots don't offend me, because they miss by a mile. The 180 degree difference in emphasis is why 180 dismisses Enformationism as "crankery", and Gnomon dismisses 180's off-topic posts as irrelevant. Your own posts are much closer in salience to what I'm talking about. :joke: :smile: :cool:
*1. the new physics and New Age ideology :
Although we are still lacking a complete quantum-relativistic theory of the sub-atomic world, several partial theories and models have been developed which describe some aspects of this world very successfully. A discussion of the most important of these models and theories will show that they all involve philosophical conceptions which are in striking agreement with those in Eastern mysticism ___physicist Fritjof Capra, 1986
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/god-guts-and-gurus-the-new-physics-and-new-age-ideology/
I suppose your intent was to focus on the plausibility of a technological Singularity. But my attention was drawn to the question of "Emergence . . . of new possibilities". That question is central to my personal world view of Enformationism, which regards Generic Information (causation) as the Agency of Emergence, so to speak.
A good source of technical information on Evolutionary Emergence is the Santa Fe Institute*1. Its focus of research is on emergent complexity (such as Life & Mind) in the universe. Ironically, they use some surprising terminology, for a bunch of pragmatic scientists : e.g. Emergence ; Transcendence ; Teleology. In one chapter --- authored by mathematical cosmologist George Ellis, astrophysicist Keith Farnsworth, and biochemist Luc Jaeger --- they discuss the Emergence-related concept of "Downward Causation", which is another word for taboo top-down "Teleology". They say, "An essential element (and possibly a defining feature) of life emerges from this analysis. It is the presence of downward causation by information selection and control"(my emphasis). They go on to say, "Emergence is the appearance of phenomena at some scale of system organization that is absent from the lower elementary scales within it". Which is a roundabout way of defining Holism. The whole system "transcends" the properties of its parts, as a "transcendent complex" (TC).
I get negative feedback for using such taboo terminology, but these authors can get away with it because they have academic & professional credentials. In my own amateur thesis, I intuited that Natural Selection was the mechanism of causation by which novel systems (Transcendent Complexes) emerge from the random roiling of subordinate parts. The authors list, "in order of sophistication, the five mechanisms of top-down causation"*2. Then they expand on that foundation to say : "Darwinian evolutionary processes in living systems are therefore ruled from the bottom up, but also by fundamental emerging organizational principles that are hierarchically built-up and impose necessary constraints from the top down". Moreover, as you noted, the "speed" of natural emergence has increased exponentially since the natural emergence of artificial human culture, as the new Agent of Causation.
Likewise, theories of Technological evolution toward a Singularity, imply but don't make explicit the top-down Teleology of human intentions that transcend Natural Selection by means of Cultural Selection. Whether the dream of creating Artificial Life & Mind will ever come to pass is uncertain. But that humans can aspire to god-like powers, raises the question of how the ability to dream impossible dreams could emerge from mechanical grinding of material gears. :smile:
*1. The Santa Fe Institute is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. ___Wikipedia
*2. Five Mechanisms of Natural Causation :
1. Deterministic boundary conditions
2. nonadaptive information control
3. adaptive selection criteria
4. adaptive information control
5. adaptive selection of selection criteria
I still don't understand what your are asking about Greta or what 'competitiveness' has to do with capturing CO2 rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.
From Howstuffworks:
"The United States alone has enough subsurface space to potentially hold 1.8 trillion tons (1.71 trillion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in deep aquifers, permeable rocks and other such places."
Quoting noAxioms
I am not an expert on the issue of safe, clean, renewable energy production but I don't much value the formulae you offered and I fully support all current efforts to make E=ER, based on your representation of E and ER. All energy should be produced as resourced based and not profit based.
Of course it is. EDIT: Well, to be more precise, it's not a solution NOW, or in the forseeable future but it will be, in the distant future.
Quoting noAxioms
It costs resources to put people in space, not money. Money is nothing more than a means of exchange.
A decent human society should not need a means of exchange.
Quoting noAxioms
I have already answered this point. This planet is the equivalent of your fish bowl comparison.
We cant survive outside of it. I see no difference between that and living in a space station or domed city on the moon or Mars, that we cant survive outside of. Those who feel as you do in the future, can be born, live and die on Earth, while others boldly go where no one has gone before.
Quoting noAxioms
I have already answered this as well. There are lots of extraterrestial resources.
Quoting noAxioms
Which is also part of the why we must go beyond Earth, we will go to Mars and live there one day because it exists, and it beckons us. Hilary answered the question of 'why climb Everest,' with, 'because it's there!'
You tapped on my passion. I love the Greek understanding of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe, and all the religions that were founded on math. :love: I am not a mathematician. Far from it, but oh my goodness, what the Egyptians and Mayans accomplished is totally awesome and I wish I could find better books on those worldviews. It was the job of great leaders to keep us in harmony with the universe. If we seek to know the self-organizing forces of the universe, as some read the bible and seek the word of God, we ourselves might come to greater harmony with that universe. If we saw the universe as greater than ourselves, might we have some humility and peace? Rather than rule the universe we might seek our place in it.
I said "chalatanry", mi amigo ...
Quoting 180 Proof
As for boasting that his quackery is Quoting Gnomon
consider this video summary on 'quantum information' and, since increasing disorder (entropy) increases information (emergence), point out to me what Gnomon gets right or the presentation here gets wrong. :sweat:
Apparently you are trying to practice BothAnd philosophy by giving a thumbs-up to contradictory interpretations of the significance of essential Information : malleable Data vs causal Information. Did you watch the video? Are you now confused? Did you notice that it's about Shannon's abstract meaningless Data, not about Gnomon's mental meaningful Information?
's last post is intended to cast doubt on the Enformationism thesis by showing that the foundation of Physics (quantum) is indeterminate. But that open-ended undetermined quality (freewill) is what makes Meta-physics important to Philosophy. Ironically, the linked video could be used to support the argument that -- in its BothAnd physical & metaphysical forms -- "Information is the most fundamental element" (building block) of the world. 180's contrary interpretation may indeed undermine the authority of Physics for philosophical questions, because -- on the quantum level -- it's not describing Reality, but Ideality (human ideas about reality, not reality itself). Which is what Meta-Physics is all about.
In previous TPF posts and BothAnd Blog posts, I have discussed essentially the same problems with physics. I have even quoted Anton Zeilinger to support the fundamental nature of Information. But the post linked below, with quotes from George Musser may be more to the point of Quantum Theory's Virtual Reality, as compared to Gnomon's Metaphysical Ideality. :smile:
Virtual Reality / Metaphysical Ideality :
In his Scientific American article, science writer George Musser is talking about truth-seeking via analytical science. He begins with a common assertion of the superiority of science for revealing truths : Physics seems to be one of the only domains of human life where truth is clear-cut. The laws of physics describe hard reality. They are grounded in mathematical rigor and experimental proof. They give answers, not endless muddle. That last remark may be aimed at wishy-washy Philosophy. But the confidence behind Mussers introduction may be true for the 17th century physics of Isaac Newton, but doesnt apply to 21st century Quantum Theory. . . . .
In contrast to his confident opening statement about physics describing hard reality, Musser again acknowledges that, the deeper physicists dive into reality, the more reality seems to evaporate. Moreover, physical explanation replaces nouns with verbs. Which, ironically makes sense in view of the Enformationism thesis, wherein the universal verb is EnFormAction.
https://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page36.html
Werner Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle sealed the fate of deterministic physics.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/einstein-quantum-ghost/
Note -- Got to go. I'll deal with 180's increasing entropy = increasing information next time.
:lol:
You've discovered yourself.
Frankly speaking, I recommend you develop your theory of information in more depth. At present it seems its definition is just too loose to be endorsed or critiqued. :smile:
[quote=Gnomon]180's contrary interpretation may indeed undermine the authority of Physics for philosophical questions, because -- on the quantum level -- it's not describing Reality, but Ideality (human ideas about reality, not reality itself). Which is what Meta-Physics is all about.[/quote]
Incorrigible incomprehension! Typical idealist (antirealist) conflation of epistemology (mapmaking) and ontology (territory). What's to be done with this uninformed "Enformer", amigos? :eyes: :lol:
As one of the founders of quantum computing David Deutsch says (I paraphrase), 'The laws of physics enable our brains to generate ideas about the laws of physics such as quantum theory.' In other words, reality enables and constrains ideality (i.e. idealizations of reality), and not Gnomon's ass-backwards other way around. :fire:
So, you accurately describe the failure of the current USA political system to prevent a horror like Trump getting elected and the final result being a failed and rather pathetic attempt at an insurrection.
If you think all current checks and balances on national politicians are too weak then it's time to fight for real change. I just don't agree with your apathy that little can be done to change the status quo.
Quoting noAxioms
What a strange conflation! A biological human cell is not a lifeform. (EDIT: in the sense that a skin cell wouldn't be considered an organism, because it cannot live by itself, it needs to be part of something bigger.) Humans are a combinatorial of many sub-systems yes but for me, the concept of 'life' applies to the brain. The natural body systems are 'replaceable,' depending on the tech available. You are still alive, if you have no arms or legs, etc etc.
Quoting noAxioms
No, democratic socialism supports majority rule. A ruling or policy not supported by a majority must fall, it will stand, if the dissenters are a minority. BUT, an informed majority that supports secular humanism, will always strive to accommodate minority needs and wishes, as long as those accommodations do not directly go against the well-being of the majority.
Quoting noAxioms
That sounds like someone wearing a 'big brother' garb, deciding that a large majority of people are incapable of 'knowing what's best for it.' You make yourself sound like a person who should never be given significant authority over others.
What would you do as president of America. Surely you would not use your 'mommy' model to drive your policies that would affect all Americans.
Quoting noAxioms
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I accept that, but I also agree with 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' I would not allow Google sized private profit making machines, to exist.
Democratic socialism MUST encompass personal freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit as much as it can. BUT, it must control the consequentials far more than the current free market capitalist system does. No billionaires or multi-millionaires are acceptable via business dealings or entrepreneurial effort. No large gambling joints like the stock exchange. No celebrity roads to ridiculous riches. A very nice, comfortable life, yes, but not the abominable rich that we have today.
Ok, but I emphasise the position that there is no empirical evidence, that teleonomy has ANY relationship AT ALL with 'natural selection.'
Quoting Gnomon
As I have already clearly stated. My flag is firmly planted next to a sign stating 'empirical evidence is the final arbiter of all philosophical hypothesis.' I do want to slam the theistic/supernatural/woo woo door shut, for good and move on. BUT, I respect that I cant because I am a democratic socialist and I don't have a majority global consent to agree to slam that door shut for good. So ..... the debates will continue.
I believe that force = mass x acceleration is a valid sentence. I think that force = mass x acceleration is a valid sentence. I know there is a great deal of empirical evidence to support such a belief and such a thought and I think all of the sentences in this post are valid sentences to post on a philosophy forum, based on:
Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
Absolutely! If it can do as you suggest and any new 'understanding,' is testable and falsifiable.
Quoting punos
Sounds interesting.
Quoting punos
That's not a question, that's a fact. Of-course we can't have the tech before we understand the 'universal fundamental' that IS data.
Quoting punos
That's putting it mildly!
Quoting punos
That just does not 'compute' to me. A computer is programmed either by a human or by another computer. To me, you 'blur the lines,' between the terms 'simulation,' 'emulation,' and 'reality.'
A simulation or emulation is NOT REAL. So if our universe is simulated then it's not real. UNLESS you decide to make the terms simulation and real, synonymous. In that case, the difference between such concepts lose their value, in which case, imo, we are in danger of having to accept that Bugs Bunny and The Mighty Thor, are real within their virtual worlds and only simulated in our reference frame. This would also suggest that there exists a reference frame 'outside' of our universe which views this universe as a simulation. This let's god posits in again imo.
Quoting punos
But what label are you assigning to your 'chaos' model? Real? Simulated? You are still left with 'well where did the 'chaos,' come from?
The point is that the 'initial conditions' you mention were SET BY A HUMAN called John Conway. He is the prime mover and the 'will'/intent, that caused the slider critters to become existent. He is the vital or it could even be claimed (and IS claimed by theistic doctrines of where humans came from) 'divine' spark!
Information as a universal fundamental, unfortunately, does not increase the ability of science to disprove god more than it can at the moment.
Quoting punos
Again you suggest an 'outside' to our universe. Do you support 'outside' posits such as a multiverse?
:up:
Quoting punos
Even though chatGPT is not 'intelligent,' or 'self-aware,' imo, it is impressive and as you are suggesting, it's a start!
Fair enough.
Quoting 180 Proof
I have already agreed that he should directly, or by proxy, attempt to answer any questions about his viewpoints that you feel have not been answered, otherwise, politically, he will seem in retreat.
I think his current claim, is that your so called 'scientism,' is interfering with your ability to understand the valid philosophy behind his enformationism.
Quoting Gnomon
I think that's very unlikely given your knowledge of philosophy. Perhaps he can confirm whether or not that IS his 'general' position, regardless of who considers that position to be a valid one.
Ok.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I think that based on his delivery in the video, Jim Al Khalili thinks that information IS a universal fundamental. I found his evidence in support of such a hypothesis currently makes the hypothesis more that a hypothesis but still falls a little short of the 'theory' label.
For me, we would have to be able to produce something like a REAL photon or quark, via a list of instructions alone. A mechanism would then produce a material photon or a quark or an electron by 'processing' the list of instructions. The only systems suggested that can do this are currently in sci fi shows. Perhaps a star trek food replicator or transporter would be such an example tech.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
That's a far bigger question Aliks. Information could be thee universal fundamental and the basis of a theory of everything without invoking any panpsychist or universal mind posits which are independent of us. You can certainly suggest that but you will not be surprised to read that I only give credence that such a collective is best posited as an emergent via us and any alien life that may exist, which is as self-aware as we are.
From Gnomon:
Physical change is called "Work". Mental change is called "Information". In the human brain, Mental Work burns a lot of energy, even though the Brain does not change its physical form
Response from 180proof:
Explain why a physical brain physically "burns a lot of" physical "energy" (i.e. calories) if, as you suggest, "Information" is not "Work". Oh, btw, the human brain functions by constantly changing its neuronal configurations (re: neuroplasticity) that encode *wait for it, wait for it* new information (i.e. updating current information > memories, expectations, predictions, feelings, learning-conditioning, etc).
From Gnomon:
Information is the "essence" of material things. And by that I'm referring to the immaterial mathematical Structure, that our minds interpret as Geometry & Topology (i.e. Shape or Form). That Essence is Ideal in the sense that it exists as an Idea in a Mind, which makes it as real as anything else in our mental & mathematical models of reality. :smile:
"Information" is not "Work".
180 Proof
That may be true of Shannon's definition of "information", as an empty carrier of meaning. But in my usage, and that of credentialed physicists, such as physicist Paul Davies, Information is both Causal and Meaningful. He edited a book by a dozen scientists & philosophers entitled "From Matter to Life: Information and Causality". So, if he is correct that Information has Causal powers, then that causal process is what we call "Work". :wink:
From 180 proof: in response to .... Do you have a name for it?
Immanentism negative ontology as a speculative criterion for the understanding which enables-constrains praxes, or agency.
From wiki:
The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence.
This seems to me like an interesting and valid exchange snippet.
If I was asked to judge, I would judge that @180 Proof's position, is is more compelling for me, as I don't see value in such notions as "information is the 'essence' of material things." As again words like 'essence' smacks of the esoteric to me. Material things may have information as a VERY REAL and tangible fundamental.
Not an 'essence' but a reality. @Gnomon seeks to find common ground between science and the esoteric and I think there is none. But am I making an incorrect judgement of what Gnomon is positing.
But which aspects of quantum physics, and any connection you make between it and information theory, are you referring to and why?
You cannot claim that you are not referring to empirical science and then state that your proposals/logical arguments are based on current empirical scientific findings of quantum phenomena. Entanglement? Tunnelling? Superposition? Quantum field theory? Which of these support you 'philosophical' enformationism and WHY?
What common ground do you envisage between say, quantum entanglement and 'essence' or 'metaphysical' or 'immaterial'. Why try to fit big square shapes into little round gaps?
I am very interested in both. What is emergent in human intent and purpose and what 'points of pivotal change' (such as a so called 'tech singularity,') do TPF members assign high credence to.
Quoting Gnomon
I see that, and I very much welcome your input as I do @180 Proof's rigorous critique.
We are debating what you are including in your 'generic information' as an agent of what is emergent in humans. I like the way you have expressed that.
All information does not have equal status or value or credibility. Some information can prove to be a barrier to what is emergent in human intent and purpose that I would label 'good.'
That's where we (and perhaps you and @180 Proof but I will let him confirm or object) diverge.
I think all notions of the supernatural and the transcendent, etc depreciate and hinder the progress of the benevolent aspects of emerging human intent and purpose, as it gives apparent succour to such notions, despite your protestations that this is not YOUR intent and is merely the misinterpretation of others.
Quoting Gnomon
I think pointing out the use of such language by the 'scientific' community is a very valid thing to do but only if you are correctly reporting that these scientists are employing a term such as transcendence, with the same religious/theistic connotation, within which such words are traditionally employed.
Christopher Hitchens was one of the best atheistic debaters I have heard but he saw value in terms like transcendent and numinous. I would have questioned him on his decision to use such terms in the way he did but I would not be tooooooooo precious about it.
Quoting Gnomon
I think that you make a very fair complaint here. I think the road IS a tougher one for you as you don't have that which you cite above. But you have also stated that you are tenacious enough to continue to 'chip away' in your terms. WELL DONE! Keep doing that but don't leave questions thrown at you unanswered. It's very difficult to stand your ground sometimes but if you truly believe that there is real value in your proposals then keep fighting for them until your last breath. I certainly will, for that which I assign very high credence to. In the final analysis, I can only remain hopeful, that I don't die in a state of being utterly wrong in all of my fundamental beliefs.
Quoting Gnomon
Well I reject all notions of god and I think that the god credentials can only be aspired to asymptotically. That is the only value I see in any omni style label. I dream, yes, but I focus on what I consider 'possible' in my dreams and I reject my impossible dreams and I understand them, from the standpoint that my mind is just trying to 'imagine' what might be possible. It's for me, myself and I to judge which dreams to value and which to reject. I remain in awe and wonder about how incredible life and consciousness is but I want TO OWN that wonder and awe and pass that as a RIGHTFULL INHERITENCE to each new generation of humans that experience life as I have. I will not assign the source of that wonder and awe to the whims of some supernatural, ineffectual, absentee, deity, as that would leave us with NOTHING of our own. What is emergent in humans would be of no significance AT ALL, if god exists. We would be mere impotent pawns and any notion of free will is moot!
Perhaps @Gnomon would agree with that point of view, as he also seems to greatly value the musings of Plato and Aristotle etc. I don't. Do you not worry that if we assign all the wonder and awe that we are capable of mustering when we muse about the universe and our origins, life and fate, to the machinations of a supreme being, we reduce ourselves and leave ourselves with NOTHING.
We are mass produced by a god machine? The wonder and awe experienced by bible readers or in those who value Plato's perfect forms, are demeaning themselves imo, as they sell their wonderment cheaply and they don't and can't claim it as their own.
It seems much more valuable to me to see your wondement and your awe, as a fantastic emergence, that belongs to YOU, not gods or platonic notions of external perfect forms.
I think I assign more value to you Athena, and Gnomon and every human on this planet than any god posit ever has or ever will.
Why must we compare ourselves as greater or lesser or equal to that which we are an integrated part of?
Ok my brain is probably more important to me than my leg, but my leg is very important to.
We can have humility and peace in the presence of each other, and in all things around us.
If we just learn to rid ourselves of all the residues of the primal fears we built up from our days in the wilds and just stop killing and abusing each other, and everything we come in contact with, then things would get better. That's our current burden, and no god exists to help us, and those who believe in god can suffer in the exact same way, as all atheists can suffer. We must take FULL responsibility, as only we can help us make things better for all.
Again, I draw attention to the sentiments (rather than the particular predicament) in:
I have watched many of these Matt O'Dowd PBS presentations. They are excellent.
A great vid that presents the quantum uncertainty problem when trying to represent values such as spin using 1 bit of information but also demonstrates that such uncertainty helps confirm quantum states such as entanglement and superposition.
Hey, professor! What do you think I'm doing on The Philosophical Forum. I'm an isolated retiree, with no academic environment for nurturing novel ideas. Agent Jones and 180proveit are my ad hoc thesis advisors. One tells me to abandon my thesis because it will never meet the stringent criteria for a scientific fact, while the other tells me to tighten-up the definitions.
I don't have a "theory of information". I rely on scientists for that. If you want more precise definitions of Information, please refer to those who make it their business to study such things. What I do have is a personal private thesis of Enformationism*1, which describes my amateur understanding of the multi-faceted role of Information in the universe. It goes beyond the limited scope of Shannon's engineering definition of Information, to include general philosophical applications, such as Ontological & Epistemological questions. You can "endorse or critique" my opinions on this forum, just as you would any other personal philosophical views.
Unfortunately, the primary critic of my thesis insists on criticizing the science behind it, rather than the philosophical implications of Information*2. Speculative Philosophical definitions will never satisfy his technical Materialistic criteria, because they deal in general interpretations & universal significance, instead of specific physical attributes & applications. I do have some layman's understanding of Information Science, but I'm not qualified to pontificate on such topics. I provide lots of links to articles by professional information scientists, that you can ignore or investigate as you see fit. But some of them get pretty technical & mathematical. If you are really interested in the esoteric details & definitions, you can see how they "develop" their theories. Perhaps their authoritative views & conjectures on Information theory will give you enough scientific substance to "endorse or critique". The bottom line here is : beyond communication/computer theory, Information science is at present, Theoretical, not Empirical. :smile: .
*1. l assume that you haven't bothered to slog through the Enformationism thesis & glossary, which would answer most of your concerns about development & definitions.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/
*2. I'll address his "increasing disorder (entropy) increases information (emergence)", critique in another post. I occasionally take-on his mostly irrelevant challenges, not for his edification, but to deepen & develop my own knowledge of the philosophical implications of Generic Information.
Whatever he's posited, that's the implication. It's unintelligible New Agery to me.
Thanks for coming back on this. I consider the subject of information a very important one,
to a point that I'm thinking of starting a discussion on it ...
Quoting universeness
What does "universal fundamental" mean for you exactly? The essence, the basic element of the Universe, or what? And in what way? An example?
Quoting universeness
I agree. In fact, I didn't see any kind of support for this hyposthesis, much less a proof. (Except of course if I messed it.)
Quoting universeness
"A team of physicists is now claiming the first direct observation of the long-sought Breit-Wheeler process, in which two particles of light, or photons, crash into one another and produce an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron. But like a discussion from an introductory philosophy course, the detections significance hinges on the definition of the word real. Some physicists argue the photons dont qualify as real, raising questions about the observations implications."
(https://www.sciencenews.org/article/colliding-photons-matter-particle-physics)
Quoting universeness
Thank you for taking up my question about if the physical universe has a mind that can intrerpret and handle information.
OK, I already asked about the concept of "universal fundamental". Now, based on your using of "could be", I see that we can only make hypotheses on the subject, either by considering particular philosophical views like e.g. panpsychism, universal consciousness, etc. or none, i.e. starting from an independent point of view.
For example, I could consider that atoms "use" some kind of "information" to combine with other atoms and form molecules. Yet, even if something like this can be considered as a workable theory, description or explanation, it would always be a speculatiom and an interpretation of what we all know as "information".
Indeed, it's hard to answer this question. It is indeed a "far bigger question" as you say. And in fact, it leads to even a much broader question: "Does the Universe has a purpose?".
Quoting 180 Proof
Gnomon is not qualified to critique the video : What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?. But several scientists, that I have linked to, have also concluded that "Physics is not describing Reality?". More to the point may be to say that physicists don't know how to interpret what quantum physics is trying to tell us about Reality *1*2. The Enformationism thesis is just my 2-cents worth on that long-debated topic Since the scientists can't agree on Reality, maybe philosophers can make a contribution*3. What Einstein called "a persistent illusion" is what Enformationism labels "Ideality"*4.
I'm not sure where that confident assertion came from : "increasing disorder (entropy) increases information (emergence)". But I must point out that it is not relevant to the thesis of Enformationism. That's because Entropy originally meant only "change" (en + trope = transform)*5. And in practice, Entropy has two different applications : Physical Entropy (change in material form) and Informational Entropy (change in meaning). In general, "Entropy is simply a measure of possible micro-states"*6. The ratio of that statistical probability to actual certainty is what Shannon realized was a mathematical value relevant to communication. So, "increasing disorder" (random microstates) does indeed increase possible options (uncertainty) for information, yet it decreases the order (certainty) that we call "meaning".
Regarding the implication that "increasing disorder increases information (emergence)", that phrase only applies to the negative emergence of more Disorder. But what we usually mean by "Emergence" is positive manifestation of more Order. So, the intended implication of 180's assertion is irrelevant to the normal meanings of Entropy/Disorder (negative) and Information/Emergence (positive). Entropy is an inverse proportion, which can be inverted to change its meaning. But, since Shannon, Entropy is usually interpreted as the opposite of Information/EnFormAtion. :smile:
*1. What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality?
Nearly a century after its founding, physicists and philosophers still dont knowbut theyre working on it
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-does-quantum-theory-actually-tell-us-about-reality/
*2. The quantum revolution questioned the nature of reality :
If so, all the physical phenomena we perceive are just a higher-level emergent description of whats really going on.
https://www.sciencenews.org/century/quantum-physics-theory-revolution-reality-uncertainty
*3. The Illusion of Reality :
The Scientific Proof That Everything is Energy and Reality Isnt Real
http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/The-Illusion-of-Reality---The-Scientific-Proof-That-Everything-is-Energy-and-Reality-Isnt-Real.pdf
Note -- Since the evidence of our senses is the primary source of our knowledge of Reality, I wouldn't describe that perception as an "illusion". I suspect that Einstein was speaking metaphorically. Where the article says that "everything is Energy", Enformationism would say that "everything is Information" (power to enform, to cause change in form)
*4. Ideality :
[i]*** In Platos theory of Forms, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
*** Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of virtual particles in a mathematical field, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind][/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
*5. The word entropy finds its roots in the Greek entropia, which means "a turning toward" or "transformation."
*6. The Ascent of Information, by Caleb Scharf, page 33
*6a. Forum Post : Now, let me backtrack a bit and reexamine your definition of entropy
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13163/time-entropy-a-new-way-to-look-at-informationphysics
Yes, no doubt, and this is why I addressed that video to others instead of you. Btw ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/776449 :yawn:
For me, it means that current posited fundamentals are not fundamentals. A quark, an electron, a photon, a gluon, a higgs boson or even the proposed erebon or superstring are not fundamentals.
These would all be combinatorials/configurations of a single fundamental, called a data/information state. I don't think the only 'physical states' can be the binary 1 and 0, especially considering the possible qbit states and such phenomena as quantum ( entanglement, superposition and tunnelling), dark matter and dark energy. A two state binary system cannot produce the real universe imo, so the fundamental states must number more that two. That's about as far as my personal musings go, based on my 'undergraduate level' of command of physics and my old honours degree in Computing Science and my old PGCE(Post Graduate Certificate in Education).
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Its' a common comment made by many research scientists and was stated again, very clearly, in the video posted above by @180 Proof featuring Matt O'Dowd. The laws of physics are human interpretations of what humans scientifically observe, but that does not mean that they necessarily, fully describe, the REALITY of the universe. I accept that, and I agree with that, but that does not mean we should therefore give succour to much much less reliable posits, such as those offered by theism or theosophists.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yes, as our current science cant take us much further than 'could be,' not yet. You can even add more fringe posits such as @Gnomon's enformationism, for consideration.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Well, atoms combine into molecules via chemical bonds and a qualified chemist could explain the details much better than I. A quick wiki search gave me:
A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms or ions that enables the formation of molecules and crystals. The bond may result from the electrostatic force between oppositely charged ions as in ionic bonds, or through the sharing of electrons as in covalent bonds. The strength of chemical bonds varies considerably; there are "strong bonds" or "primary bonds" such as covalent, ionic and metallic bonds, and "weak bonds" or "secondary bonds" such as dipoledipole interactions, the London dispersion force and hydrogen bonding. Strong chemical bonding arises from the sharing or transfer of electrons between the participating atoms.
But yes, the posit is that everything that's 'going on,' that allows atoms to self-assemble into molecules IS at a fundamental level, self-processing information. If you run the process all the way back to the start then you are suggesting that the big bang singularity was an information container and its instructions/program started 'executing' at time > 0. BUT no god programmer was required.
Roger Penrose's CCC for example, would simply mean the program runs to completion and then resets and starts again and has been doing so for an eternity of aeons.
My attempt to 'portray the above scenario,' is nothing more, than a measure of my own limited ability to perceive the issues and the science involved. I think there are many on TPF who could do a better job of it than I.
Quoting universeness
... or idealists/antirealist. :clap: :up:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting universeness
OK. But what are these "universal fundamentals?" :smile:
Quoting universeness
I agree.
Quoting universeness
Right. So we actually have nothing in our hands. Yet, regarding abtract ideas in general --such as information-- scientists in their majority claim that they have found this and that, that they know how things work, etc. Yet, often w/o any solid evidence or even with no evidence at all. (Of course, they have to defend their trade in the same way religions do, only that they deal with more concrete and tangible stuff.)
Quoting universeness
Thans for the suggestion. But my library is already full of -isms! :smile:
Quoting universeness
Well, it was just an offhand example using a simple and very common subject. Not meant to be streched. Besides, as I said, it could lead at best to some interpretation, a different kind of information, its use and its purpose. Matter has no purpose, i.e. intention or desire. This is an attribute of life, even if its purpose is reduced down an urge to survive. And it needs and uses information for that purpose, Matter does not strive to survive. It does not strive for anything. It has no urge whatsoever. So, it doesn't need or can use any information.
Quoting universeness
I understand and respect this.
When we test and verify we are using logic, we can't test or verify anything without it. This means that what logic suggests is that physical reality is based on logic (and number). It may sound a bit circular but it's what i would expect at the end of the road; a maximally simple (minimally complex) self interacting creative system.
Quoting universeness
Yes, i am obliterating that distinction. There is essentially no difference in the context of a computational system like our universe, based on the fundamental of information and its processing (physics = computation).
Quoting universeness
The reference is purely hypothetical for the purpose of seeing the big picture perspective. This model or theory i'm expounding on can actually destroy any possible notion of the god posit. It will show that it all originates from a simple non-conscious process. As long as science or philosophy does not address this gap in out understanding the god posit will always seem viable to some. People will always hide their gods where we can't see them, inside the gaps of our understanding. Explain the gap and you kill the god.
Quoting universeness
When i think to myself about these things i really don't use the labels of real or simulated. I'm more concerned with the structure of the idea and if it's accurate in it's description of what we know happens. That's how we do science. If we have preconceived ideas of what is real or not apart from the math and logic then what are we really looking for. It's not that different than a religious mindset that just wants to believe what is comfortable.
"Man prefers to believe what man prefers to be true." - Sir Francis Bacon
Quoting universeness
Conway had to set it up because he was using a human made instrument or computer. He wasn't trying to prove or assert how the universe came about, he was interested in complexity. The universe doesn't have to set up anything, it is the way it is eternally at the most fundamental level.
Quoting universeness
I think it can, and it is what i am currently attempting to do. I'm really not trying to prove or disprove god, i just want to know how things really are, as they are and not as i prefer them to be.
Quoting universeness
It depends on what side of the bed i woke up on that day. I have not come to a definite conclusion about that yet, although it seems possible.
I'm aware that "Teleology" & "Progress" are taboo terms in biological science, because of their traditional association with Christian dogma. But the Enformationism thesis is not about biology or doctrine, and not intended to pass muster with atheistic scientists. It's merely an interpretation of the broader role of Information in Evolution & Emergence. And in blog posts, I provide links & quotes to the use of such terms by scientists.
As sampled below, some accredited scientists are beginning to revisit the notion of evolutionary progression, if not the terminology. If no forward progress, what's the point of evolution? Santa Fe Institute scientists have coined the term "Downward Causation" for "information selection and control" in biological & physical evolution. So, I feel justified in using the similar term "Teleonomy" for my personal thesis. Unless you can show philosophical (rational) evidence that refutes the notion of complexification in Evolution, which is a sign of progression from the inorganic simplicity of the original hypothetical Singularity, to the living & thinking organisms today. Time's arrow is pointing in some direction ; but is it going in circles, or toward some positive future state such as a Technological Singularity? :smile:
The Role of Teleonomy in Evolution :
In order to avoid the implications of "teleology," assumed to refer only to the process of evolution as directed towards goals, the discussants use "teleonomy" in reference to the biological organism as end-directed (for reproduction). . . . By using the concept of teleonomy, it is argued, one can avoid the issue of "mechanism" versus "teleology."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/186539
Teleonomy:
Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for Teleology
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-022-00424-y
Please ask 180 to point to where Gnomon ever "suggested" such a thing. Due to his mis-interpretation of the thesis, He likes to put words in my mouth that he can easily refute. In Enformationism, Information = Energy = Work = Causation. :smile:
The map-territory idea is vital to our discussion. Gnomon, your interest lies in an idealized map (pure abtraction) and as 180 Proof points out this results in a mappa that does not describe reality.
Quoting Gnomon
Had I been putting words in your mouth, sir, you'd be making more sense with far fewer incoherent and inconsistent statements. For instance, in this post exchange below from last year you babbled at me that "information is non-physical", yet now you claim "information" is also equivalent to physical processes such as both "work" & "energy".
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't misunderstand you, Gnomon; you're honestly confused and incorrigible. However, feel free to disabuse me by addressing the following
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/776449 :wink:
:up:
The best candidate right now, is the 'bit'. Consider how music is physically stored on a CD or the images stored on a DVD. The text we are typing right now on TPF that allows us to fully communicate using textual symbology, is digitised, using bit maps and transferred data packets.
If you accept that its possible to fully reproduce a field excitation, such as an 'up quark,' via a data representation, such as a two state binary system, then we would be close to being able to confirm that data/information is a fundamental of nature. Let's say I could represent an 'up quark,' by the binary rep:
10010000110110001101101110000110011100000011.
If I explain the above binary representation of an up quark as representing:
1. An unique identifier for an 'up quark.'
2. The charge on a up-quark. (relating to accepted units)
3. The spin or angular momentum.
4. Mass (accepted units)
Other factors, such as gravitational effect, electromagnetism, weak interactions, strong interactions etc.
I could physically represent the binary values in many ways, such as an indentation(a pit) to represent a 1 and no indentation right next to the pit (commonly called a 'land') to represent a 0.
I could then store this representation of an up-quark on a dvd.
I then need to invent a 'machine,' that can take this data representation as input to the machine and the machine can 'affect' the vacuum of space and process the data representation to generate an up-quark.
Running all the data represented on the DVD might result in the production of a construction such as a hydrogen atom. If this could be done then I think this would be a demonstration that the universal fundamental is information. That's my best attempt to explain the concept involved. It probably falls short in many ways.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
No, I think you are moving too far away from where we actually are, when you type words like, 'so we actually have nothing in our hands.' Science has a great deal more evidence in their hands, compared to any other methodology, that can be employed by humans, to learn about the workings and structure of the universe. That difference in evidence is absolutely crucial, even though science cannot currently prove that they understand the workings and structure of 'reality,' in the universe, there is no other method that can even begin to compete with it.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
All we are debating here is definitions or manifestations of what we label 'matter.'
Brain matter in humans contain and demonstrably manifest, human intent and purpose. So, I don't agree with your 'impression' that NO manifestation of 'matter' has intent, purpose, desire. 'LIFE' has 'form' and form involves 'matter' and human lifeforms irrefutably demonstrate intent and purpose, imo.
Well, we can certainly agree that creating robust labels for concepts that are fit for purpose and don't over-burden the label, is very hard at times. Over 30 years of choosing meaningful variable, function and procedure names for computer programs, rams that home quite effectively.
Quoting punos
Good luck! Your quest is perennial and honourable.
I like this 'proxy' status. Gnomon makes a point to you, through me and you answer him directly.
I don't have to do anything! :grin: :up:
@Agent Smith
@Gnomon is, ex mea (humble) sententia, constructing a more elaborate interpretation of The Matrix which is itself based off of The Simulation Hypothesis (Nick Bostrom et al). What I mean to say is if you find Gnomon's Enformationism to fall short of the philosophical mark, you need to have a strong argument against The Simulation Hypothesis. Didn't you like The Matrix movies? I did although I'm deleted in the end. :cool:
I understand.
But the physical universe is analogue, not digital. 0/1 bits belong to virtual, computer reality. E.g. the natureal sound is analogue. Digital sound is virtual, i.e. not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so. That's how different they are:
Quoting universeness
We can never fully reproduce something physical using a digital method. Even if today's audio digital equipment surpass in resolution even the best analogue equipment. But this is as far as quality and playback are concerned. No matter how good a quality can digital technology produce, it will always be an imitation of the physical world. And we don;t have to talk about supercomputers: a simple pocket calculator is a million times better in arithmetic than the human mind or any analogue methods used in the past. The memory even of the first, primitive computers was way more effective and efficient than using human memory, in terms of capacity and usage. Yet, Computer memory is artificial. As is artificial intelligence. They cannot and will never fully represent the physical world or the human mind. They are imitations, no matter how good they can be.
Quoting universeness
I can't really follow you in all this, sorry. My knowledge in this field are quite limited ...
I hope though that your ideas produce fruit some day! Indeed, you seem quite a resourceful and creative person.
Quoting universeness
You are maybe right. I don't follow scientifc progress as you do ... But I have followed science in subjects that I am particularily interested in like the mind, memory, consciousness, etc. And I have been fed up with scientific views about, e.g. how they "finally discovered" where momory resides in the brain --each now and then they find a new place-- and that consciousness is the product of the brain and so on, w/o any evidence but only hypotheses and speculations. This the point of view from which is I said what I said about science. Yet, I consider myself to be quite "scientific" --in the sense of systematic or accurate in the manner of an exact science-- in my life, esp. the professions I have had. E.g. I consider and treat programming both as an art and a science.
Quoting universeness
Exactly. But they behave as they do understand and are most competent on almost all subjects, of a physical and non-physical nature.
Quoting universeness
Well, as I said, we have radically different views in this area.
But this does not prevent me at all from enjoying our exchange! :smile:
So you dispute Planck's quanta? How pre-1900 of you, AP.
A digital system can appear from a distance as analog, but analog never appears digital at any scale. The nature of reality appears to me to be digital. Like @180 Proof mentioned, The Planck volume is no different than a pixel (voxel) on a screen, and it's quanta determines if that pixel or voxel is on or off.
We each have the right to conduct our own symphonies as we see fit.
I appreciate your interest in topics such as Emergence and Information. But, "180 Proof's rigorous critique" denies the foundation of my argument by default : Holism vs Reductionism. When I use even the scientific term "Systems Theory"*1, he seems to interpret such integrative notions, not as a legitimate scientific method, but as covert New Age mysticism. I assume that 180 is not a Racist, but he appears to be a Holism-ist. He seems to believe, erroneously, that the concept of Holism is peculiar to "irrational & nonsensical" Eastern religions*2. And he asserts his prejudice as a "settled" fact, against which any non-reductive responses will have no effect. His "critiques" are formulated to herd Gnomon into a New Age corral, which by his personal definition is "full of non-sense", Therefore, I must take evasive action to avoid being trapped in a dead end.
However, I will add a few comments, "input", relevant to the topic of this thread : Emergence. Again, the science book I'm currently reading, The Ascent of Information, combines concepts of Causal Information & Downward Causation to explain the emergence of Life in a mostly inanimate world. Scharf is an Astrobiologist, whose job involves looking for signs of life outside our planet and solar system : Exo-biology. My own focus is mainly on the Emergence of Mind in a mostly mindless universe. But Scharf's reasoning can also be applied to the emergence of Sentience from emergent Life. For example, he mentions the recent scientific term "Downward Causation"*3, which physicists Sara Walker, Paul Davies, and George Ellis use as an alternative to "Teleology" and "Teleonomy". For obvious reasons, he does not make any supernatural claims about the origin of that natural causation. Instead of a philosophical First Cause, he refers to the First Law of Thermodynamics. But for my philosophical purposes it's only logical to look for the Cause behind the causation, before the beginning. For example the man with a cue-stick is not standing on the pool table, but his intention is obviously the ultimate cause of selective rolling of balls into pockets.
Since Downward Causation implies taboo "strong emergence", Scharf lets Ellis stick his neck out : "the lower levels do the physical work, but the higher levels decide what work should be done" But, he tries to avoid the reasonable implications of top-down causation, by using the mathematical terminology of "core algorithms" (a form of information). Yet, he then concludes that "they too would be a good example of strong downward causation, or what we might also call downward emergence". Which philosophers might also call "Teleology" or "Teleonomy". He goes on to make a remarkable remark : ". . . that living systems seem to be able to gain control over the very same matter out of which they are formed". And a technical term for such self-control is "Cybernetics". Ironically, a whole complex system of many parts that can control its constituents, implies that the whole transcends the parts in top-down causal power. But that's merely a natural kind of transcendence that pragmatic scientists can accept. Yet, those who are philosophically inclined may logically extend the control & causation within Nature back to the beginning of the universe, and ask "what caused Causation?"
You have clearly stated that your reductive scientific worldview arbitrarily excludes any "supernatural and transcendent" forces from consideration for explanation of causation. So, my responses try to avoid such emotional trigger words, and to focus on natural & immanent forces, such as Energy, which is literally an "agent" of change. Yet, my own worldview is founded on the 21st century scientific notion that Energy is actually a form of Generic Information*4. You can disagree with that definition of Energy, but I'll let you argue with the scientists who discovered that equation in Quantum Physics. :smile:
*1. Systems Theory/Holism :
A holistic view of a system encompasses the complete, entire view of that system. Holism emphasizes that the state of a system must be assessed in its entirety and cannot be assessed through its independent member parts. . . . Holistic practices are critical within the IT industry as data networks and intelligent complete systems are designed and built. . . . Gaining this holistic view is essential in understanding our future evolution.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Systems_Theory/Holism
*2. Holism :
[i]Unfortunately, some of those imaginary concepts (e.g. Qualia) may be what you think of as mystical Essentialism. But actually, it is merely Synthetic thinking as contrasted with Analytic thinking. . . .
Holistic (synthetic) thinking is a common characteristic of New Age philosophies. But in practice, they also include particular inherited beliefs, such as those in Eastern religions. Such woo-ish notions as Wandering Souls, and Weaponized Chi, are not inherent to Holism. But Reductionists tend to lump them together with the Holistic worldview. So, for clarity, I will sometimes refer to my personal paradigm of Science as "Systems Theory", in hopes of losing the mystical baggage.[/i]
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page25.html
*3. Downward Causation :
". . . the central dogma of molecular biology, which is that information moves from the nucleic acids in DNA to proteins, but not in the other direction. . . . That's a 'bottom-up' causation . . . it's the way science usually thinks about the world . . . . that's the beauty and power of reductionism . . . . But does that mean that 'top-down', or downward, causation doesn't exist".
The Ascent of Information, p182
*4. How is information related to energy in physics? :
Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems of information in all of its forms, and all entities in this universe is composed of information.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22084/how-is-information-related-to-energy-in-physics
Note -- A "regime" is a sphere of influence ; a network of inter-action.
"Generic Information" is my coinage for that universal causal agency in Nature.
Thank You and good luck to you as well. May your journey take you home.
Good point. Physical nature is analogue, despite "Planck's quanta". Quanta are mental analogies to gaps in our knowledge of holistic physical systems. Causation is continuous, but our perception is inherently discrete. Emergence of novelty (e.g. Phase Change) is also continuous, but rapid transformations make it seem instantaneous. On the quantum scale, the gaps in our perception make quantum leaps appear to be superluminal & supernatural. However, the universe, as a whole, including physical (material) & metaphysical (mental), seems to be both digital and analog. :smile:
Is Quantum Reality Analog after All? :
Quantum theorists often speak of the world as being pointillist at the smallest scales. Yet a closer look at the laws of nature suggests that the physical world is actually continuousmore analog than digital
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-quantum-reality-analog-after-all/
The universe is analog. period. when we make simulations we use a digital aproximation
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-the-universe-analog-or-digital.12214/
How can I dispute Planck's quanta if I am not knowledgable on the subject, @180 Proof?
If you want to comment on my messages, you must read them all or read them better: I mentioned to @universeness two or three times that I have very little knowledge of the subject and in fact, about Physics, in general.
And please, be more polite and avoid criticizing people so easily, esp. without having been given the right or a reason to.
If nature is analogue at the fundamental level then what causes 'difference'?. How does analogue acquire structure? Atoms are a form of digital organization, all matter is. Quanta come in discrete packets, why not something in between like one would assume if it were analogue?
Quoting Gnomon
:scream: :yikes: :rofl:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
If this is so, then why do you bother making such a fundamental claim about the physical world based on "very little knowledge" such as
Quoting Alkis Piskas
:roll:
:up: :up: (The lack of science literacy on display here is stunning, isn't it?)
Good point.
Quoting punos
Please, enough about this guy! :grin:
Just adding my two cents to the pot. :smile:
Good to know.
Quoting Gnomon
Interesting view.
Quoting Gnomon
I agree. Good point.
Quoting Gnomon
Of course, since the digital "world" is part of the physical world. Mainly because we humans have created it, but also because of some natural "digitization" or inherent "digitality" (can't think of a better terms), which of course is not evident to me.
Quoting Gnomon
I can't say! Believe me! :grin:
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
Very good points. I enjoyed your comments. Thanks.
And I will have a look at the references you have provided.
Your offer is welcome. :smile:
There may be a way to reconcile the two concepts of analogue and digital in nature at a fundamental level. For me as i currently think about it; a true analogue form would be informationless, it would simply have one bit, 1 datum. The fundamental structure of space is digital and the energy which can be considered as analogue can travel and differentiate itself in the Planck field in effect producing emergent information structures. The energy travels in packets due to certain thresholds in the Planck field.
The nerve signaling mechanism in the brain and nervous system is a digital one where action potential spikes carry and process information. This is why it appears that our perceptions may be of a digital quality, but i don't think that proves that nature itself is purely analogue, for me it's the contrary.
I find it very interesting that you an i have many similar ways of think about this, and yet seem to fundamentally disagree. So interesting.
[quote=noAxioms]Space was never a solution to excess population.[/quote]
Quoting universenessBut you dont justify this assertion.
[quote=noAxioms]It costs far more to put a person in space than it does to keep him here[/quote]
[quote=universeness]It costs resources to put people in space, not money.[/quote]Yes, exactly. It costs far more resources to put a person in space (especially to keep him there) than it does to keep the person on Earth. If you have population in excess of the capacity of the resources, then for every person you put in space, 1000 or more must go without resources. Thats why space isnt a solution to excess population. You say of course it is, but then you argue for my point like it was a money thing and not a resource thing. I never said it was a money thing.
Space exploration is a luxury for a gilded-age system where the resources exceed the demand, which is not an excess-population scenario.
It would be far more efficient to just kill the 1000 and free up those resources for those remaining. This is a better solution to excess population than space. It is also a nice example of trolley-problem.
No, the planet is the river or sea, the natural habitat of the fish. The bowls in the trees are these sealed enclosures on other planets (the trees), a place for which the fish are not evolved.
OK. I see a difference. Each day is one accident away from being exposed to the actual environment instead of the artificial one. That accident doesnt kill us here, but it would anywhere else. A windy day will empty the bowl of water in the tree, but the bird can take it. Better to put a bird there.
Go there yes, but Hillary didnt live on Mt Everest nor did Armstrong take up residence on the moon.
Quoting universenessBut thats the kind of democracy you seem to push. Its precisely democracy that went wrong. The voters wanted him. He appealed not to rational arguments, but rather to their personal values (mostly validation of ones otherwise suppressed biases against other groups). People dont vote for the common good. They vote based on personal emotions. Democracy needs to fix that, and I dont know how it can and still call itself democracy.
Its not just the USA. Countries all over several continents have had similar candidates with similar platforms. Many (around half?) have won their elections.
No? You can grow a human from a single cell. It can metabolize and reproduce.
Nonsense. Theres plenty of living things without a brain. All multicellular life forms evolved from what were once single-celled individuals that needed to solve the problem of selfless cooperation in order to take it to the next level.
In what way does this counter what I said (which I left up there)? Im saying that majority rule isnt going to result in the kinds of action/policy needed.
Im not talking about benefit to minorities, and it seems that the typical voter isnt very informed these days, and is not supportive of said secular humanism, as evidenced by people like Trump getting the majority vote on a platform against it, and against informed facts. Im talking about benefit to larger goals like the future of humanity (said collective above), which often dont benefit the majority of the voting individuals.
I didnt know that was attached to the big-brother label, but yea, thats pretty much what I see. Big brother is supposed to be nefarious, not something that has a goal of the betterment and continued existence of humanity. And there are larger goals than that as well, but Im not sure if a human should champion those.
Amen. Wouldnt want it, not just because I lack the qualifications.
Not much. President of one country lacks the power to do things on a humanity scale. Also, the laws pretty much prevent some decent suggestions Id have for America, first of which would be the abolishing of over-the-table bribes. Money-talks is a horrible system that yes, just makes rich people richer.
Nope. Doesnt work on portion of the whole.
How can a socialist system do that? The layabout seems to get the same personal needs met as the inovator.
It takes that kind of resources to do certain things. How do you build a modern chip fab without those huge expenditures of resources, especially when money doesnt even exist anymore to track return on expenditure of said resources?
Agree, but how to combat that? City (or country) X has a sports team with a lot of fans behind it. How are they to attract the better talent with promise of only modest means for their work? How are you going to prevent some other city from promising better means to this athlete, especially when this tiny extra expenditure would mean the difference between the citys team winning or not?
BBC TV/movies seems to have celebrities without insane compensation. Sometimes at least
Quoting universenessDont think it was ever an attempt at something that would. It seems to be a step up from a simple google search that is far better at parsing native language, thus being able to find relevant results that a regular google search cannot. It seems a better source of facts than said regular search, which hits anything no matter how crazy.
Ive actually yet to interact directly with chatGPT. Would like to. How fast is it? Does it take each query in isolation or can it converse?
Last time I checked, Planck units were proposed to bring some naturalness to our units. The SI and the English FPS systems are, as you all know, arbitrary i.e. there's nothing about a meter or a foot that would make us go "Aah! That's why the meter/foot was chosen!"
Moreover the Planck units, their size, is some kinda lower limit for science, anything smaller is indiscernible; it's the highest resolution science can offer.
I'm not sure if the universe is analog/digital, but lengths of lines, I've heard, are continuous as opposed to discrete.
See, one has to use "could be", "maybe" etc., descibing a possibility that the "digitality" of the physical universe. This means that there is no evidence about it, only hypotheses. And I really wonder why people in here talk so much about it. As if they wish the PU to be digital for one reason or another! Why?
If one talks about a digital PU, in essence he refers to bits. Yet, a bit is a term belonging to computer science and it is defined as:
- "the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications" (Wikipedia)
- "a unit of information in a computer that must be either 0 or 1" (Cambridge dictionary)
- and so on ...
So, if we accept this, we have to think of the PU as a huge computer of a very very ancient technology, which is a million times better and more powerful than ours and what we could even imagine. Then we have to accept that we live in a virtual reality, something like Matrix. But then, if we did, and we were part of it, could we ever understand or even be aware of it?
See the implications of thinking of PU as digital in its structure ?
Quoting punos
(See above about "bit".)
Yes, and i do have a way of explaining it (theory under construction), but people don't like to discuss it since it involves something coming from nothing. So i regrettably decline to give my explanation in public. I yield my time Sir.
Please check your INBOX.
I broadly agree.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting punos
Human senses are all analogue, so we experience the world through them.
We have all already accepted that human experience does not necessarily fully describe universal REALITY (no woo woo invocations please.)
I can take a hammer and smash a rock and observe evidence that a rock is reducible to smaller and smaller discrete parts. So, we have the 'continuity' of the analogue form and the 'discrete' quanta of the digital form. Field excitations are discrete, but they can combine and propagate as continuous wave forms. Like a Mexican wave, involving undulating humans, waveforms are undulating discrete excitations. Energy travels/propagates in waves (undulating field excitations.)
Analogue to digital is a translation, as is digital to analogue, just like energy to mass. Analogue and digital are, imo, different states of the same underlying fundamentals. A wave is an 'effect' of dynamic field excitations.
When digital music is played back, it's REAL music your ear receives, real air vibration's because we have a machine that includes a DAC (digital to analogue converter). The digitally stored information is converted back to analogue before it becomes 'ear input.' This is NOT simulation, it's REAL music.
Physical reality is made up of relative 'states.' Digital states are discrete. Analogue states are continuous but anything continuous, is a combinatorial of discrete states. A movie is a series of photographs. A rock is a combinatorial of discrete fundamentals, as is every object in the universe.
I agree with and , 'Thee' universal fundamental, IF it turns out that there is A single fundamental state, MUST BE discrete or digital (as in 'a digit state').
The digits were traditionally 1 to 9 but 2 to 9 are just multiples of 1, so this is why computers are called digital as they are TWO STATE. 1 or an absence of 1 (ie,0)
If its '1' or binary digit 1 or 'something' or 'on' or 'true,' then the second state is just '0' or binary digit 0 or the placeholder, 0 or 'off' or 'false.'
BUT, based on quantum physics, I think there are other fundamental states of reality, other than the two states of binary. 'Superposition or Qbit state or 1 and 0 in the same DISCRETE instant of time,' 'entanglement,' etc. If superstring theory/Mtheory is correct then we have a multitude of interdimensional string states to consider.
:lol: I see you both in your individual dodgem cars. WATCH OUT Gnomon, he's right behind you!
Try to enjoy the tussling between you, it need not be so acrimonious.
Quoting Gnomon
Downward causationQuoting Gnomon
From Wiki:
[b]In philosophy, downward causation is a causal relationship from higher levels of a system to lower-level parts of that system: for example, mental events acting to cause physical events. The term was originally coined in 1974 by the philosopher and social scientist Donald T. Campbell
According to practopoietic theory of system organization, downward causation in biological systems always involves the environment. Downward causation does not occur by direct causal effects from higher to lower levels of system organisation. Instead, downward causation occurs indirectly because the mechanisms at higher levels of organisation fail to accomplish the tasks dictated by the lower levels of organisation. As a result, inputs from the environment signal to the mechanisms at lower levels of organisation that something is wrong and therefore, to act. For example, a species may find itself under evolutionary pressure to adjust to novel circumstanceswhich is a form of downward pressure for adjustment. Similarly, an organism may be under downward pressure to express different genes if the expression patterns from the past did not lead to desired results. Another special case of downward causation is supervised learning (of neuronal networks) in which both behavior and environment govern the propagation from higher to lower levels.
This leads to a unique form of a causal interaction patterncalled a practopoietic loop (cycle) of causation. The end result is that the mechanisms responsible for mental events cause physical events only based on their joint interaction with the environment.
An interesting consequence is that neither behavior of an organism nor its mental operations can be considered fully or exclusively supervenient on the body of the organism. On the one hand, behavior is not supervenient on all parts of the body. On the other hand, due to the necessary interactions with the environment at all levels of organization, behavior is supervenient also on some aspects of the environment. The same holds for the mental operations, or the mind.[/b]
I am fine with 'downward causation' as described by wiki above. It has NO SIGNIFICANT RELATION to teleology or teleonomy. There is NO INTENT in the biological downwards causation described by wiki above and the 'mental events acting to cause physical events' or 'change,' is HUMAN INTENT and that is the only valid connection with notions of teleology or teleonomy
Quoting Gnomon
That's where we diverge. You travel back on a wave of infinite regression, in the same way William Lane Craig does to arrive at his debunked Kalam Cosmological Argument.
Less and less and finally zero. The target is E=ER, which is far more important that efficiency issues.
I would rather have a less efficient global energy production system that does not damage the planets ecology compared to a fantastically efficient fossil fuel production system that is killing the planet.
A future cold fusion system will perhaps be the most 'efficient,' if we ever achieve it.
Quoting noAxioms
ER can rise to meet E if humans make it so. The nefarious who currently control E and ER are the problem, not any notion that human science is unable to meet the energy needs of the current population. Energy supply and demand remains a weapon, due to who controls it and why.
It's manipulation in the current Russian abuse of Ukraine is a good current example.
The fact that renewable energy is charged, in the world markets, at the same price per unit as 'the most expensively produced' energy is another example of the affect of the nefarious profit mongers.
Renewable costs much less to produce than fossil fuel based oil and gas, yet people are charged the same rate for renewable energy units, as they are charged for the much more expensively produced oil and gas. WHAT A CON!!!!
The justification seems obvious , in that, there is a lot more room in space than there is here on earth.
I don't mean to downplay your perfectly correct assertion that for now! Off-planet existence is NOT a valid way of solving the excess population problem we CURRENTLY have on Earth.
The immediate solution to that problem must be found here on Earth. I agree with you on that point.
Perhaps 'Countries with declining populations,' are a small indicator of the future of population control.
Increasing human lifespan and increasing technological based human robustness, may be another factor that causes more and more young couples to have less and less children. BUT, as we slooooooowly become an extraterrestial species, we will have less need to worry about population control and have more need to encourage reproduction.
Quoting noAxioms
Only until the resources OF the contents of space can be accessed. Eventually this will mean extra resources can be brought TO Earth FROM space. It's no different than it was when compared to pioneering humans on the move. They had to bring their supplies with them until they could establish a supply chain wherever they ended up.
Quoting noAxioms
Less savage solutions are possible. You are just being a bit impatient and lazy minded. :grin:
I suspect your brother and sister-in-law would smack you on the head for typing the above quote.
Abiogenisis may have happened in water and at some point moved on to land and into the air. Life now exists on land sea and air. Off planet is the next obvious step. Do you think it would have been better if evolution left all lifeforms as fish or water creatures?
Quoting noAxioms
I disagree. Better to have a bird that can fly, live in trees, walk on the ground, wear a tech exoskeleton that lets it travel under water and live in a dome shaped, forrest city. Then it might think about living extraterrestially, when it wants to expand it's CV about what it is to be a bird.
Quoting noAxioms
As you suggested in an earlier post. The first missions are scouting and pathfinder missions. Missions like Artemis 1 are a different beginning.
Quoting noAxioms
There is no perfect system, just improvements on current ones. If you make enough robust improvements you eventually create a good system. No true democratic socialist system has EVER been achieved by any country in the world so far. So, the struggle continues until one IS successfully created. Once that happens, I am sure the people who live under it will struggle to maintain it. It may even fall due to nefarious b*******, but the 'good' people will rebuild it. Hopefully it will be built so strong one day that it will be almost impossible to destroy it. Such aspiration is, to me, far better than the apathetic acceptance of the status quo that you seem to satisfy yourself with.
Yeah? I will send you one of my skin cells and you can deliver my clone to me when you have finished creating it! :joke:
Quoting noAxioms
I was referring to sentient life, when I brought in 'the brain.'
Quoting noAxioms
Yes it will, as the reason you gave for 'this cannot be done' is invalid, as majority rule means that the democratically selected action WILL happen, despite being unpopular with a minority. If that action allows Trump to take power, then the people will then have to deal with the consequences of that majority vote. Trump did not last long, but there was a lot of damage done, so, in the future, we must try to make sure that 'most of the people cannot be fooled some of the time.' It's the job of all secular humanist, democratic socialists, to fight for that goal. You should strive to help them whenever you can, instead of merely complaining when they fail to protect you, by successfully countering anomalies like Trump supporters. Perhaps you could help them talk to potential trump supporters and convince them not to vote for such morons. You are either part of the solutions or part of the problems.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, that's just not good enough, is it? We simply can't accept that 'the typical voter isn't very informed these days.' We have to do what we can to help change that. Your larger goals can't be achieved, as long as the foundations remain rotten. It's the guy beside you who thinks trump is a good idea that you can perhaps help alter. The struggle continues.
Good point.
Quoting universeness
What is "universal REALITY" for you? Do you just mean the "physical universe"?
If not, then you must refer to an absolute, objective reality, which is one of the most debatable subjects in philosophy, from what I know and have personally witnessed. (Which of course is out of the scope of this thread.)
Quoting universeness
Good point. It reminds me of Zeno's paradoxes. In the "dichotomy paradox", an object cannot go from A to B, because it has to first reach the middle of their distance, and then the middle of the remaining distcance, etc. ad infinitum. This paradox is easily refuted of course because it is based on a false assumption, that space is discrete and thus dvisible. Similarly with the "Achilles paradox", which refers to time instead of space. But both space and time are continuous. As are all analogue forms, versus difgital forms, which are discrete, as you correctly mentioned.
Glad you brought this up. It is another excellent support of the view that the physical universe is analogue and not digital.
Quoting universeness
Right. You can also get an analogue waveform by passing through all the peaks of a digital waveform in a continuous movement. And vice-versa of course, which is how digital audio is produced (as far as I know, based on my limited knowledge on the subject.)
Quoting universeness
Of course it is real. :smile: Any sound that we hear is real. Coming from a digital or analogue source. Digital sounds propagate into the air as analogue ones. And thus we can hear them because our hearing is analogue. This is another point that supports the view ... Well, you know what. :smile:
Quoting universeness
Oh, something is not OK with this. A film is a series of pictures but a movie is the result of its projection onto a screen. The film is what consists of descrete, saparate photos. But the movie is continuous. It is what we perceive through our senses and then process with our mind.
Better see it this way: when you take a video, there are no separate parts (photos). You can, if you want take a screenshot, in the same way you take a selfie, which will be an independent image, but this would be just like taking a handful of water from a continuous flow of water. The water flow does not consist of handfuls of water. The video does not consist of screenshots.
Anyway, we are all just sharing views in this place, aren't we? :smile:
I would certainly give you my full support on that one. But not your ideas on how to deal with excess population.
Quoting noAxioms
Great question! By negotiation, based on the questions 'who are you?' and 'what do you want?'
Why would a person want to hoard 50 expensive cars and own 10 houses and have sex with different beautiful people every day and live like the King of the world of their imagination?
I would establish a benevolent communication system with every new born from cradle to grave.
Most layabouts get very bored quite often. Perhaps they would want to use their mind and body in ways that they would enjoy and would help the society/community they live in.
Communication, support, respect, cooperation, justice, etc etc must become foundational when it comes to how people are supported.
Innovators are pivotal and can help a great deal to support and inspire 'layabouts' or perhaps a more accurate phrase would be 'an unmotivated person.'
Most people can be reasoned with, if your approach is genuinely empathetic and you have access to established resources and activities that they would find fulfilling and would compliment what they want out of life.
Quoting noAxioms
Exactly because money would not exist anymore!
OF the people, FOR the people, BY the people IS the motivation.
A celebrity feels good when they have the 'adulation' of their fans.
A person who works to help their community (or even their universe) should be recognised and appreciated and the 'layabout,' as you might label such should not receive adulation.
Everyone should be able to take the basic means of survival for granted from cradle to grave, regardless of their contribution to society. BUT, those who contribute most, will most likely become the most 'adulated,' and revered in our society. Perhaps when it comes to something such as 'who will we pick to run our next project on ....... will be fairly chosen from the 'revered.' A meritocracy could handshake very well within a secular, democratic humanist/socialist political system and a resource based economy.
Quoting noAxioms
Take the money out of sports and it will become the healthy endeavour and fun competitive entertainment it should have always been. The fastest or strongest human will still be coveted and competed for. Local or national team rivalry can still happen. The meritocracy can support sports and the removal of financial incentive will allow sport to revert back to its more benevolent consequences.
I am also on the waiting list for access but I have looked at some online exemplar interactions, such as:
ChatGPT.
I think an objective reality exists at the biggest reference frame of the universe but I have no idea if humans or future transhumans will ever be able to observe the universe at it's biggest scale. Same goes for it's smallest scale and that's even if the labels 'smallest' or 'biggest' have any meaning in 'reality.'
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yes and I am enjoying your contribution Alkis!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I don't think so Alkis. A video has a frame rate, such as 24 fpi (24 frames per second). That means 24 pictures are taken or shown every second. An ocean is made up of water molecules, which are made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms etc. The continuous is made up of the discrete. It's the discrete that seems to be fundamental and not the continuous. Any 'flow' or excitation like a vibration, is a physical combinatorial. I include all energy forms when I use the word 'physical here.
So I think the fundamental constituent of the universe is a singularity, which I think is a digit, as it is 'single' and contains all measurable existence, when it is in its 'singular' form. Any 'continuity' only happens after the singularity starts to expand/inflate.
I do however accept that the term 'singularity,' has no existent we can demonstrate.
Is there a singularity at the heart of every black hole? I don't know!
Addition: A rock is not analogue, but many of its attributes are. A measure of its smoothness, or mass/weight or it's size etc but at the sub-atomic or at the planck size (sorry to mention him again), its a digit. Anything smaller than the plank size and it's a black hole! (perhaps in some meaningful sense, a singularity!)
I'm afraid, my friend, your learned patience is probably wasted on them like rain on a Japanese dry garden.
I agree that Downward Causation, as observed, seems to be coasting on Momentum. But the inference of Intention is based on the billiard ball analogy. Their momentum always begins with acausal Impetus. And where the impetus does not come from other balls on the table, we can logically infer that there was an off-the-table Cause : e.g. intentional pool shooter. Although the wielder of the pool cue is Transcendent (exogenous), his necessary existence is a "significant relation" for Ontological explanations, if not for Scientific purposes. Moreover, the causal Intent behind the Big Bang impetus, may be imagined as human-like, or god-like, or an infinite chain of accidental causes, according to your personal preferences.
BTW, my replies to TPF posts are never intended to be acrimonious. But any disagreements can be interpreted as antagonism toward a poster's belief system. That's one reason why I always conclude with a bland smilie-face, or teasing "joke" icon, or stoic "I'm cool" symbol. But 's harsh sarcasm toward any intimations of Transcendence makes it difficult to word a response that doesn't hit him where it hurts : his faith in Materialism/Physicalism. :smile: :joke: :cool:
So, we can forget about such a kind of obsevation, right? :smile:
Besides I don't think that we need to go that far in order to consider and talk about our subject.
Quoting universeness
Thank you. I enjoy our exchange too!
Quoting universeness
Right. The effect of the continuous movement is caused by the fast succession the frames, exactly as in flip book, with the fast turning of its pages. Only that this effect, i.e. what we are perceiving, is a representation of the environment, not the environment itself. If we take a video of a ball rolling, in its structure the video will consist of frames/images, but the actual rolling of the ball, which is what occurs in the physical universe, is continuous.
Quoting universeness
Well, again, Physics is not my strong suit, but aren't atoms themselves in a continuous movement?
Nice! One more good point that supports the "analogue view" and the continuity in the universe. :smile:
I can't help not mentioning here someone who has best described the concept of time without even mentioning the word: Heraclitus. "Everything flows", No man ever steps in the same river twice". This also depicts the attribute of continuity of the physical universe.
***
We fully disagree on the subject of continuity vs discretness of the physical universe, but this was a fruitful and interesting philosophical exchange. How far would it have been gone if we were fully agreeing from start? :smile:
I enjoy the debate and I am grateful for those who take the time to contribute. I learn from all of you in many different ways. I improve my knowledge of where the stumbling blocks are, where the complexities lie. How to probe the robustness of an argument. I also improve 'details' and tighten up shortfalls in my approach to debate with others. It's all very useful stuff. I have exchanged with some TPF members in the past that I would consider an actual enemy of everything that I value but not on this thread ..... so far.
Not forget about it, but we can certainly put it to one side for now, in our exchange.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Only until friction brings the ball to rest. At any instant in time, the ball is losing kinetic energy, so the motion is not continuous. it is a series of discrete moments of kinetic energy loss.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Relative movements depending on what frame of reference you are using. Excited atoms move more so 'heat' /temperature is a factor. A 'frozen' atom has a rest frame (not moving). But it is moving if it is on the Earth and the Earth is rotating.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
It's like saying, no one eats the same apple twice BUT, its quite possible that you encounter / interact with the same sub-atomic particles more than once.
Step in a river and water molecules flow past your legs. The water flows into a lake. On a hot day the lake loses water to the atmosphere via evaporation. Weather carries some of the evaporated water that flowed past your legs to where you are and falls on your head as rain. If that happens, did you meet that same water twice?
Quoting Alkis Piskas
We are still discussing the area Alkis, yes, and we may never change our individual positions, but only if one of us can't convince the other. If you convince me, then I will start to claim that the structure of the universe is fundamentally analogue rather than digital. Let me offer you some more of my evidence.
I know you are not a physics person but this video by Carlo Rovelli on the nature of time, contains a lot of information, about the idea, that all flow, all continuity, is a combinatorial of discrete events.
I just watched it again for the 5th time, since I first watched it. It took me a long time and a lot of rewinding and thinking to understand the implications of what Carlo was presenting. One conclusion that I think it supports, is that the universe is made up of discrete fundamentals.
Quoting universeness
I have no such concern because I do not understand the energy of the universe as a being. I do not attribute the laws of physics to a conscious being. Logos, the reason it is like it is as it is, is because that is the way it works. How do I say? A triangle is not a triangle unless it is a triangle. Helium goes up because it is lighter than air. H20 is water, not ciritic acid. This is mechanical than intellectual.
Chardin said God is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals to know self in man. What if there is no consciousness without human consciousness? We can discover the reasons and we can be inventive with the reasoning. How can we be less? We are pretty awesome! Or perhaps I should say potentially we are awesome. I do not think all humans are awesome but rank along with the other primates because they do not use their full human potential.
Quoting universeness
We agree. I suppose because I use the reason to define logos, you and everyone else, jump to the conclusion that I am talking about something that can be all-knowing. That is not what my intended meaning. The reason it is cold today is the artic wind is moving down and across our region. That does not require a god. It is the reason it is cold. The reason the arctic wind has come is the movement of low and high pressure. I don't think there is anything else that can be aware of the reason except humans. :chin: AI might organize the data better than we can, but that is not equal to our consciousness.
We have total agreement on that! I love what happens when we engage with each other. The philosophy forum has the best-thinking people don't you think? The political forums and be an extreme failure to be rational. Politics is another game. It is supposed to be less emotional and more rational but unfortunately, the political forums are not and neither is the news media focused on being rational as it once was when Walter Cronkite was reporting the news.
THESIS DEVELOPMENT CONTINUED :
The "raining code" (information) from The Matrix movie, was a graphic inspiration for the BothAnd blog, but the Enformationism thesis was not specifically derived from the concept of a simulated world. Instead, it was inspired by the philosophical "paradox of Objective Reality versus Subjective Ideality". Which reflects the dual role of Information in the world : Physical and Mental.
Pursuant to your encouragement to "develop" that basic idea, I will now address the Transcendent implications of the Enformationism thesis. likes to put it into the anti-science category of New Age religions. And has dismissed it as a fringe religion like Theosophy*1. I can see the general philosophical resemblance to both, but my thesis was inspired by the transcendent implications of Quantum & Information science, not by any neo-religious movements.
Besides, all human cultures have postulated some kind of transcendent Principle or God to explain the Ontology of contingent existence. The secular Greek philosophers proposed abstract non-humanoid concepts, such as Logos (Reason) and First Cause (Energy ; Causation). So, my thesis could be compared to hundreds of pre-modern historical ideologies, that imagine the universe as a living organism, metaphorically born from an eternal Organizer. The only thing they all have in common is the idea that mundane Nature emerged from some transcendent power source.
However, Modernism is grounded upon un-sentimental Science, which assumes as an axiom that "nothing emerges from nothing". So, the astronomical Big Bang beginning was an embarrassment to secular scientists. Hence, Fred Hoyle's sarcastic label "Big Bang" was intended to poo-poo the magical (woo-woo) notion of a world instantaneously popping out of nowhere (inflation). Since then, other scientists have postulated equally un-scientific philosophical alternatives, such as Quantum Fluctuations from energized empty space. Besides the meaninglessness of pure-space-sans-matter, that hypothesis is based on the axiom of eternal (transcending space-time) Causation & Construction. The pre-BB axiom is similar to the Enformationism assumption of an eternal pool of Potential*2 (Energy & Enformation) which, for no apparent reason, caused an evolving universe to emerge from who-knows-where.
Religious gods typically require Faith & Worship by humans, but philosophical Principles only require Cognizance & Cooperation. FYI, Fowler's Stages of Faith*3 conclude with stage 6, universalizing faith (enlightenment)*2, and that's what Enformationism's Transcendent Enformer is supposed to be. Not literal belief in religious stories, but per Brownridge, in Philosophy Now #153 : "the encompassment of nature, the universal cosmic energy of which we are all a part". Since it has no anthro-morpic form, you can call it whatever makes sense to you : Logos, First Cause, Demon*4, etc. The thesis does not prescribe any kind of faith or worship, so it's not a religious concept.
Enformationism is merely an attempt to answer an ancient Ontological question : "why is there something instead of nothing". Big Bang, Multiverse, & Inflation hypotheses simply dismiss that conundrum as an unscientific "who cares' riddle. Likewise, Universeness & 180proof seem to prefer to leave such transcendent questions unanswered, even on a philosophy forum full of "go for it" conjectures. By convention, serious scientists are not supposed to speculate into the unknowable. But, due to popular demand, several have postulated a menagerie of pre-Bang sources of Energy & Information. They all assume some unbounded power to create (Causation) & to organize (Enformation).
My thesis merely assumes a similar timeless formless Potential for Causation & Organization. You can call that nothing-material "Logical Necessity" if you like. But the specific name that piques 180's ire is "God". Perhaps that sore spot is due to some childhood trauma related to oppressive humanoid god-models. Or maybe it's just due to deep emotional commitment to anti-religious Materialism/Physicalism. Hence, the critics seem unable to distinguish philosophical reasoning from religious mythology. So, they feel justified in ignoring Enformationism, not for any violation of scientific doctrine, but for its irksome logical implications : the fundamental essence of Reality*5 is not tangible Matter, but incorporeal Mind. :nerd:
*1. Theosophy teaches that the purpose of human life is spiritual emancipation and says that the human soul undergoes reincarnation upon bodily death according to a process of karma. It promotes values of universal brotherhood and social improvement, although it does not stipulate particular ethical codes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy
*2. Potential :
The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any "possibility" that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality
*3. Fowler's Faith Stages :
https://www.institute4learning.com/2020/06/12/the-stages-of-faith-according-to-james-w-fowler/
*4. Maxwell's Demon :
A scientific thought experiment using the notion of an omniscient intelligent being who could manipulate molecules in a box without doing any work, which is a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yet, even intellectual work expends energy. Such demons exist only as useful philosophical concepts.
David Krakauer, at Santa Fe Institute, even proposed the idea of a "selective demon" (Darwinian Demon). So, to deny their essential "existence" is to deny philosophical reasoning.
*5. The Essence of Reality is the most perceptive, exacting look at the flow of Reality ever. Rarely has a human glimpsed beyond the confines of the self-aware mind to see the interactive flow of mind-value into Reality.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Essence_of_Reality.html?id=9j3SGgAACAAJ
Note -- I haven't read the book, but the title is provocative for this post
Quoting Gnomon
1. The "ontological question" at issue is modern (re: Leibniz), not "ancient".
2. The "hypotheses"above are physical models of how (i.e. development) and not metaphysical "conundrums" or "riddles" of why (i.e. purpose, meaning, final cause).
3. Speaking for myself, this strawman (re: "transcendent questions") is patently disingenuous...
A. (e.g. Gnomon-180 Proof exchange)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/623506
B. (e.g. Gnomon-180 Proof exchange)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/627625
4. These points 1 & 2 demonstrate Gnomon's lack of philosophical and scientific literacies (or comprehension) and 3 his lack of intellectual integrity. :mask:
@Agent Smith
This Tao of thinking, the one you've so masterfully wielded, is precisely what @Gnomon is doing. Frankly, it puzzles me why the two of you don't see eye to eye. Perhaps, it's form-congruence and content-incongruence.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/776449
I intellego señor.
This is just a 'first cause' analogy. There is no first cause necessity imo. If something like CCC is correct then a first cause is pushed back so far, that it becomes meaningless. If you still insist on a first cause, then what is wrong with conceiving such as a mindless spark that no longer exists. A digit singularity for example.
Quoting Gnomon
Why do you assign a gender to your proposed transcendent?
I am more attracted to empirical support for a posit that ontological support.
I don't agree that the choices you offer above between human-like, god-like and large variety in very large random combination (I don't accept 'accidental' as it has 'error' connotations), have anything like equal status. Human-like and god-like? I take it your god- like includes animism examples as most modern gods are modelled on human-like. We invented gods that look just like us, (you even insist on assigning it a male gender!). Why can't god look like some of the alien creatures we invent for sci-fi or one of the non-human characters used in traditional fairy stories.
Why cant god be depicted as an intelligent, genderless, massless, gas/energy? The fact that gods are posited as 'looking like' objects or entities familiar to humans is more evidence that such has no, and never has had any, existent.
Quoting Gnomon
Only you and @180 Proof can report which response's 'hurt,' and which are ineffectual.
I suspect the truth of such, will remain unacknowledged by either of you, if in fact any such 'hurt' actually manifested in either of you due to words posted by the other.
I enjoy the input from both of you, but you will not be surprised, that my viewpoints are far more in line with @180 Proof than with yourself, Gnomon.
I have no interest in keeping score between you and as I said, I learn from both of you and I remain grateful to both of you, for that.
Fair enough, but is this not an argument from ignorance? Its like "I don't know the answers, so, it just is what it is and that's all that it is!' I don't understand why you say 'its mechanical,' and suggest that mechanical is not connected to 'intellectual?' Anything mechanical is 'knowable,' and it's seems to me that humans have an intellectual imperative to find out every detail of how a 'mechanism' works.
Human curiosity is far stronger than the curiosity of all cats combined, imo. WE MUST KNOW Athena!
Quoting Athena
Chardin (never heard of him/her/gender variant) sounds like a panpsychist.
Quoting Athena
What do you mean? Animals are conscious, yes? Or are you going down the solipsistic path?
Quoting Athena
I broadly agree, if we compare our species with all other species we know about. That could be an interesting thread. A comparison between the historicity of humans with a projection of what we know about any other species and how they might have stewarded the planet, If they became the dominant species instead of us. Would it be a better world, if this was a planet of the apes or a planet of the meercats or ants etc?
Quoting Athena
So, don't worry about any 'science' you don't know or understand. I think we should celebrate the fact that as Newton famously said:
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
We have very significant purpose and reason to live, as there is yet so much that we don't understand.
HOW EXCITING!!!!
:clap: Very well said Athena!
I have came across many great thinkers on many interactive internet sites.
I really enjoy and value TPF, but I also love all the 'Ask a' sites, such as 'Ask a mathematician' or 'Ask an Astrophysicist.' Quora has some amazing contributors (but is currently top heavy with time wasters), as does the physics stack exchange, etc, etc.
I have been involved in many political exchanges online and I agree that there is a lot more aggression and even possible personal consequences involved, than on forums like TPF.
Perhaps not religious, but it is theistic or theological or theosophist, to suggest a first cause, external to THIS universe which had 'intent' to cause 'a vital or divine spark' beginning to this universe. My suggestion of a first cause, as a mindless spark that no longer exists and WAS this universe in 'singularity form,' 'A singular digit.' Is at least as valid/credible as your suggestion for a first cause and imo, more plausible. No first cause at all is also plausible, if you consider cyclical universe posits such as Roger Penrose's CCC.
You employ 'transcendent':
Transcendent:
1. Beyond or above the range of normal or physical human experience:
"the search for a transcendent level of knowledge"
surpassing the ordinary; exceptional:
"her transcendent beauty"
SIMILAR: superior, supreme, consummate, predominant
2. (of God) existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe. Often contrasted with immanent.
SIMILAR: supernatural, preternatural, transcendental, other-worldly
3. (in scholastic philosophy) higher than or not included in any of Aristotle's ten categories.
Immanent:
1. Existing or operating within; inherent:
"the protection of liberties is immanent in constitutional arrangements"
SIMILAR: inherent, intrinsic, innate, built-in, latent, essential
2. (of God) permanently pervading and sustaining the universe. Often contrasted with transcendent.
Your first cause posits, seem to 'rally around,' Transcendent description 2 and Immanent description 2 above and IS imo, a god of the gaps viewpoint, in the style of William Lane Craig.
Let's invite the chatbots in the debate!
Question: "Is the physical universe digital?"
Answer from ChatGPT (OpenAI):
"No, the physical universe is not digital. While some physical phenomena can be modeled and represented with digital data, the physical universe itself is not inherently digital. It operates according to physical laws and behaves in continuous and analog ways, rather than in the discrete and binary manner of digital systems."
Answer from ChatSonic (WriteSonic):
"Though the physical universe may appear to be analog, there is mounting evidence that suggests that it is, in fact, digital. It has been theorized that the universe is made up of discrete, quantized particles which behave according to the principles of quantum mechanics, which suggests that the universe is digital in nature. Additionally, recent advances in physics have revealed that the universe is composed of information and can be modeled as a quantum computer. Therefore, although the physical universe may appear analog to our eyes, it is actually digital in nature."
Impressive, eh?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/629398
Gnomon does indeed value the fundamental contributions of Plato & Aristotle to human understanding. seems to be a nice guy, but he misunderstands & misrepresents Gnomon's Enformationism thesis*1. Probably because, from his implicit Materialist/Physicalist*2 perspective, it looks like Spiritualism or Idealism. To him, those worldviews are primitive & childish & just plain wrong. Yet Mr. Nice Guy can be somewhat indulgent toward such immature notions, as one would toward a juvenile's innocent babbling. Unlike another poster, he's not intentionally malicious, but his Matter-is-all vocabulary makes abstract (meta-physical) Platonic & Aristotelian concepts sound like literal non-sense.
For example, from a Matter-only standpoint, there is no such thing as Platonic Love, or love of any kind, for that matter. There is only corporal copulation. Hence, "Love" is an abstraction that idealizes the realistic rutting of animals. Since the neo-primitive notions of New Ageism tend to be Idealistic & Spiritualistic, he places Enformationism into that unsophisticated "unrealistic" category. On the other hand, Enformationism views ancient Materialism/Atomism and Classical Newtonian physics as outdated pre-modern sciences*3, in the light of 21st century knowledge & reasoning. But it also updates ancient Spiritualism/Idealism, with new concepts from Quantum & Information theory. Those older views were pragmatic in their local & temporal contexts, but now seem somewhat untenable in the current state of affairs, 2.5 millennia later.
FWIW, Gnomon no longer practices the religion of his youth, or any religion for that matter. But, like Universeness, he can be tolerant toward those who are not "enlightened", including his own siblings. However, the broadly applicable Enformationism worldview could be converted into a religion, by those who are so inclined. For example, the ancient Hebrews were materialistic idolators (local nature gods), who later evolved into idealistic Judaism (universal supernatural God). Later, law-bound Judaism was transformed into faith-bound Christianity (Christ = god-man). And so it goes, as the world turns. We adapt our beliefs to the current state of knowledge and culture. My personal thesis is another of those adaptations, combining state-of-the-art Science with millennia of religious & philosophical exploration of the human condition, and building upon the foundation of Plato & Aristotle.
Enformationism does not posit a manipulating "supreme being", because Nature functions automatically, like an emergent computer program*4, without any divine intervention. And whether the implicit Programmer/Enformer is conscious, in the human manner, is an open question. So communication (prayer) to a super-natural "being" would likely be one-way, similar to the faith-driven attempts of irreligious scientists to contact extra-solar alien beings, whom they hope to be superior to Earth-bound humans.
In any case, I can't agree with Uni's somber assessment, that "we reduce ourselves and leave ourselves with NOTHING", when we conclude that the world is more-than just "atoms in void"*5. It's also ideas-in-reasoning-minds and feelings-in-metaphorical-hearts. An immaterial idea is indeed "no thing", but whatever it is, it's what raises humans a step above the animals, by allowing them the individual & collective freedom to be intentional agents of their own destiny. :smile:
PS__I apologize in advance, if I have mis-represented Uni's philosophical worldview. :cool: :heart:
*1. Introduction to Enformationism :
Since various forms of matter-first physicalism are still the default model for the empirical sciences, this philosophical thesis is merely a personal worldview. Yet, its based on the emerging evidence that invisible Information, instead of tangible Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe, including Energy, Matter, and Mind.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page80.html
*2. Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy
Note -- A century ago, Quantum theory began to undermine the foundation of classical physics. Physicists, such as John A. Wheeler, concluded that everything in the world can be "reduced to" bits of information (immaterial mind-stuff).
*3. Is Scientific Materialism "Almost Certainly False"? :
prominent physicists proclaim that they are solving the riddle of reality and hence finally displacing religious myths of creation. . . . In their desperation for a "theory of everything"which unifies quantum mechanics and relativity and explains the origin and structure of our cosmosphysicists have embraced pseudo-scientific speculation such as multi-universe theories and the anthropic principle
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-scientific-materialism-almost-certainly-false/
Note -- The Enformationism thesis does not claim that materialism is "false", but merely that it does not explain everything of interest to philosophers, including ideas about matter & mind. Ironically, enformed dumb matter seems to be capable of self-reference : Aboutness.
*4. Evolutionary Programming :
From evolutionary computation to the evolution of things
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14544
*5. Democritus, materialist philosopher :
By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democritus
Note -- What does the "Void" think about? Do "Atoms" love each other, when they become entangled? There is no such thing as "Hot", merely the idea of a relationship between thermodynamic regimes that we apply that non-thing name to.
Read this in a meme: Modern problems require Ancient solutions. I deeply appreciate your, I believe successful, attempt to revive/restore/rejuvenate ancient, quasi-logical intuitions (religion) and then link it to modern, logical understanding (science) of our world.
:rofl: :up:
:grin: Two great sources to post Aliks!
Yep, even the so called AI systems don't agree with each other.
As has always been the case, each of us must decide, which of the current posits for the structure and workings of the universe, we personally assign highest credence to.
Individually, we can choose to ignore the whole thing and just pursue personal pleasure and maybe sports and reality TV, but I find such people less interesting, than those who are willing to debate the big questions.
I am not a fan of referencing the ancients too much, but I prefer to follow the lineage from Democritus and the atomists towards folks like Carl Sagan and coming to rest near folks like Sean Carroll, Roger Penrose, Ed Witten, Alan Guth, Sabine Hossenfelder, et al.
I find the road via Plato, Aristotle, Jesus (probably never existed), Mohamed (probably never existed) towards folks like Jimmy Swaggart and coming to rest near folks like Ken Ham and William Lane Craig,
the road to intellectual and rational oblivion.
We can only continue to raise our objections to his approach and continue to probe to discover if he is in fact a theist trying to pose in scientific garb. He insists he is not a theist and his enformationism is not a 'god of the gaps' posit. He also insists we are both misinterpreting his posits. It can only be for others to judge what the truth of it is, if they care to, of course.
I think your flagging of:
[i]Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches God or the Divine by affirmations or positive statements about what God is.
The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which aims at the vision of God, the perception of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception.[/i]
is understandable, based on Gnomon's approach.
:fire: I like the all-inclusive (BothAnd) nature of yer philosophy.
:lol: I appreciate your gently delivered insult. Aristotle was a theist and Plato seemed to believe in some sort of creator or prime mover. Aristotle also believed in a geocentric universe, so like many other ancients they 'believed what they saw with their own eyes when they looked up at the sky at night.'
Geocentrism looks correct to the naive observer but scientific research, has always been able to assist the naive. You are correct that I think the concept of 'perfect forms,' are utter nonsense.
Quoting Gnomon
Nonsense! and my evidence is that I am a godless product of the universe and I can express and accept love in all it's variant flavours. Love is a more intense manifestation of altruism and empathy and the reproductive imperative established by natural selection. It exists via species like humans and is a human emotion. Love is also a reason why human morality is required and was and continues to be debated, agreed and legislated within human communities. No god required. The direction and content of your posts on issues such as love and morality reveal that you make the same kind of arguments that theists do. Are you a theist Gnomon and if so, why the subterfuge?
If you want and need a mind, beyond the big bang posit to be our creator then why not be loud, proud and heard about it?
You deny being a theist but then most of the points you make, would be attractive to most theists.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, you have made this statement many times but your update, remains a god of the gaps posit and you have not been able to dispel that accusation so far, imo.
Quoting Gnomon
You don't have to follow a particular religion to be a theist. Do you have a personal definition of that which YOU would label god or YOUR creator source, that had the INTENT to create lifeforms like humans?
What would be your best example of your personal 'enlightenment,' that others don't have, which causes you to have to be 'tolerant' towards them. For me, it would be that god has no and never has had an existent. What about you?
Quoting Gnomon
But you suggest that 'love' has a source outside of any physical lifeforms that materially or energetically exist in this universe. Do you suggest the same for 'morality?' Is your suggestion of a 'first cause,' a mind with intent that is capable of experiencing and expressing love and follows or imposes a moral code that it created?
Quoting Gnomon
OK!! BUT! The quote above is like a conformation that you are not a theist but you then invoke a first cause Enformer which may or may not be conscious and a mind with intent and our creator. It's like you are saying 'THERE IS NOT GOD! ........... but there might be! Not good enough Gnomon, not good enough at all, imo.
Quoting Gnomon
The universe IS more that atoms in a void as humans demonstrate every day via their intent and purpose and the fact we ask questions and seek answers. We have plenty to celebrate and our sense of wonder and awe IS OURS and BELONGS 100% TO US. No god exists to purloin that from us, and if it did, then I for one, would try to fight against it, for it's pernicious nature in giving us futile aspiration for it's own entertainment. Can you not see why the existence of an omnigod creator of us, makes us pointless and makes the antinatalist argument a valid one.
We have no freedom to be intentional agents of our own destiny, if an omnigod exists.
No apology needed Gnomon, as you have often complained that I mis-represent your viewpoints, so, I can hardly require apology, for you mis-representing mine. I probe, to try to analyse your true intentions. I fully accept your right to do the same to me.
The 'void' has no thinking agent. No! atoms don't experience love! whether they are entangled or not.
'Hot' and 'cold,' are useful human labels and concepts, useful to humans I mean. The speed of moving atoms does have important consequences, however, as demonstrated in places like the LHC.
It's only advanced combinatorial systems that have demonstrated ability to manifest consciousness/self-awareness. These are not phenomena that have been demonstrated by the fundamental constituents of lifeforms. Even your arm is not self-aware, imo. If you lose one, you remain self-aware, but your removed arm does not. The human brain contains all significant aspects of human consciousness imo.
Great lineage! :smile:
I'm not a fan of quoting the ancients --if fact, I'm not a fan of quoting in general, except for very few cases-- and I can't help not quoting Heraclitus' outstanding for that period ideas whenever they are pertinent to a subject under discussion. (And imagine, he was called by many "The Dark Philosopher"! Of course, who could really grasp such ideas --so much meaning in such a concise form! Most cannot really grasp them even today!)
But what we must surely be highly credited for (especially by lazy minded theism), is, that we WILL continue to grapple with and try to grasp such ideas, as long as humans or transhumans exist. WE OWN that ability. No god gifted it to us, WE gained such ability, as a consequence of what evolution via natural selection can do over 10.3 billion years, (I subtracted 3.5 billion years due to a google search on the question 'when did life start in the universe?')
Certainly. This is what history, research and logic dictate.
BTW, I just found a term for the kind of information you are talking about: biformation. As we say, "bisexual". In this case both analogue and digital form(ation) and content of what is perceived and/or communicated.
Now, we can both be happy! :smile:
If you insist on putting a label on my philosophical First Cause concept, try Deism*1. You may not distinguish between Deism and Theism, but I suspect that "most theists" would. To them, Deists are no better than Atheists. That's because the Deist world is completely natural, with no supernatural intervention. Yet, Deist philosophy infers the necessity for a Prime Mind to create (from scratch) a temporal physical world from which mental phenomena*2 can emerge via natural computation processes. The rational "need" for an original Mind is in the logical necessity for an explanation of the emergence of mental phenomena in a material world*3. I'm aware that Materialists see no difference between Physical and Mental phenomena, because their (blind in one eye) worldview blocks-out Metaphysical features of the world, by definition. Is that loud & proud enough for you? :smile: :joke:
*1. Theist, Deist, Atheist, Agnostic :
A deist believes there is a God who created all things, but does not believe in His superintendence and government. He thinks the Creator implanted in all things certain immutable laws, called the Laws of Nature, which act per se, as a watch acts without the supervision of its maker.
https://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/theist-deist-atheist-agnostic
*2. Mental Phenomena :
We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500963/
Note -- There is no intention in Physics, so the cause of future-directed Intention in human affairs must derive from a Meta-Physical source*4.
*3. The Mind-Evolution Problem :
The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01537/full
*4. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality; the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, . . . It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
The "gap" you refer to is the mysterious emergence of Life & Mind from an inorganic beginning. How would you fill that void in Darwinian evolution? Any hypothetical conjecture must explain, not just the mechanical "how" of gradual emergence*1, but the logical "whence" the Potential for Life/Mind arising from a dimensionless non-living mathematical Singularity. Dispel that, if you dare! :joke: :smile:
*1. Abiogenesis :
the origin of life is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, . . . prevailing scientific hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
Quoting Gnomon
A much repeated slander that also makes no sense given that philosophical materialism itself is very much a metaphysical position (e.g. the C?rv?ka (ancient India), Democritus, P. Gassendi, T. Hobbes, Baron d'Holbach, L. Feuerbach). "Materialists" merely differ from you (woo-of-the-gaps) immaterialists, Gnomon, with an alternative metaphysics, not a lack of one or "anti-metaphysics" as you claim (as if that too isn't a metaphysical position :roll:).
There's no shame, sir, in admitting you don't know what you're talking about; it's shameful, however, to keep on and on about things even you've confessed you've not studied as well as derivative sources you uncomprehendingly quote from repeatedly as if you're ... overcompensating. You're the biased dogmatist here, not I or any of your other skeptics / critics.
@Agent Smith
Thanks for the question. My definition of Creator/Programmer*1*2 was not revealed in books written by fallible humans, but in the Book of Nature, which shows signs of operating like a computer program*3. I have no knowledge of the Intention of the First Cause, but for human intention to emerge from running the program of evolution implies that the Programmer was capable of goal-directed behavior. So, the original reason for creation is beyond the reach of us self-directing symbolic personas, condemned to play the game without knowing why : Agnostic Avatars, with limited freewill & intention. :nerd:
PS__Yes, I'm just as serious about this philosophical metaphor as cosmologist Tegmark is about his self-programmed Mathematical Universe theory*4. An Information-centric worldview may sound like nonsense to you, but it's not religious non-sense, merely a philosophical theory of Ontology & Epistemology. Tegmark is serious, but you have to possess a sense of humor to present such aethereal notions to materialist scientists. :joke:
*1. G*D :
[i]An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. Thats because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
*2. Programmer God :
A competent computer programmer doesnt have to make frequent corrections to the operation of the program. Likewise, an omniscient Creator shouldnt have to make special interventions in order to keep the world running properly. A world-wide flood would be a sign of gross incompetence.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
*3. u]Evolutionary Programming[/u] :
Special computer algorithms inspired by biological Natural Selection. It is similar to Genetic Programming in that it relies on internal competition between random alternative solutions to weed-out inferior results, and to pass-on superior answers to the next generation of algorithms. By means of such optimizing feedback loops, evolution is able to make progress toward the best possible solution limited only by local restraints to the original programmers goal or purpose. In Enformationism theory the Prime Programmer is portrayed as a creative principle (e.g. Logos), who uses bottom-up mechanisms, rather than top-down miracles, to produce a world with both freedom & determinism, order & meaning.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
*4. Mathematical universe hypothesis :
a "provocative" solution to one of the central problems facing physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
AVATAR INSIDE THE GAME OF LIFE
metaphor, not to be taken literally
You claim that, as an anti-metaphyical materialist (???), you are able to experience Love. Bully for you. But what is the substance of that emotion? How do aggregations of atoms feel sentiments? The emerging Information theory*1 can suggest answers to those questions ; if Information (power to create novel forms) is more fundamental than insentient matter. How does a clump of matter experience anything? Could it be due to non-physical Life/Mind-forms?*2
Morality emerges from the meaningful relationships between people. But, like Love, "meaning" cannot be reduced to atoms-in-void, can it? Yet, an intentional First Cause could explain, as a hypothesis, how such immaterial abstractions could arise from a "big bang" in the void : personal significance, mutual respect, trust, interest, positive regard. The implication of a pre-bang Creator concept is that all things, and relationships, can be traced back (reduced) to the mind of the Originator*3. Otherwise, how did the ability-to-feel get programmed into the thermodynamic chain of evolutionary causation? :smile:
Note : A non-human Mind, in an immaterial form, may not map directly onto human consciousness. But it serves as an analogy by which to fill the god-gaps in physical Science. The error of ancient anthro-morphic god-models is to assume a one-to-one correspondence of divine-human attributes. Human creativity is limited to manipulation of existing matter. But the power to create a universe from scratch may be unlimited, hence Omnipotent. Yet, like the Multiverse hypothesis, such a postulation is unproveable by empirical methods. :nerd:
*1. Information Theory - Emergence :
[i]Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated.
Matter and energy are conserved. There is just the same total amount of matter and energy today as there was at the universe origin. See the cosmic creation process.
But information is not conserved. It has been increasing since the beginning of time. Everything emergent is new information. What idealist, holists, and gestaltists think they see is actually this increase of immaterial information.[/i]
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/knowledge/emergence.html
Note : Causal Information is the immaterial substance (relationship pattern) of Matter & Energy
*2. Non-physical Mind-forms :
Materialists typically argue that all cases of consciousness that we know about are dependent on biological reality. Yet my exploration of the Enformationism thesis finds numerous hints that our existence may be ultimately pre-biological and immaterial. By that I mean the macro-scale wetware of Biology is dependent upon atomic-scale Physics, which in turn is grounded upon nonscalable mental Mathematics. So, my reading of cutting-edge science indicates that the quantum description of physical reality (informational, relational, mental) is akin to pre-scientific concepts of the metaphysical spirit realm, which is more Potential than Biological. Hence, on the cosmic scale, Mind seems to be more fundamental than Matter.
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page12.html
*3. Deism vs Atheism :
[i]However, another path of Logic assumes that the most important aspect of reality to non-scientists is personal Consciousness the essence of humanity which can't be adequately explained as the output of material mechanisms. . . . .
Which is why most philosophers, not concerned with religious myth-making, have portrayed the transcendent ulitmate Mind in terms of abstract principles with no physical form, as exemplified in Brahman, Tao, Dharma, Logos, and Spinoza's Pantheistic substance.[/i]
https://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page49.html
OK, this seems totally illogical. ER is limited by definition. You cant make more, you can only attempt to waste less. OK, there are exceptions such as putting up solar collectors in high orbit, which is essentially a space-based death ray with a minor computer hack.
This is a money issue, which youve dismissed. Im not talking about money, Im saying that ER has a cap.
Does it? Last I looked it still costs more. OK, hydro has always been pretty cheap, but not so much solar and wind. Theyre based on expensive equipment which needs regular replacement. Part of this is subsidies, which need to be accounted for when comparing actual costs.
Quoting universenessOK, you seem to be solving the goal of wanting excess population but first solving the problem of finding a place to put them. Thats different than having a problem of excess population and presumably trying to save as many as possible.
Agree, but how many of those declining population countries have negative trade deficits?
Exponential growth will always overpopulate a species no matter how fast they colonize new systems. Thats kind of simple geometry. I had done a topic on what it would be like with a planet of infinite resources/land/area. Each location has limited resources, but theres always the frontier. Answer: Not exponential population growth. Linear at best, which is in the long run the same number of descendants per capita as no growth.
Fair enough. Im trying to figure out what can actually help us on Earth that is best imported from off-planet sources. Certainly building material for stuff being built in space, but how does that help the planet other than to relieve them of the efforts needed to bring that material up from the surface?
They did export stuff back too, and yes, building materials was probably top of the list. Still, the pioneers landed in an environment for which they were already evolved, and an alarming percentage of them still died within a year or two.
If you have excess population, many are going to die anyway, especially under the share all the world socialism where the most resources go to those needing it most. Not to ding that strategy, but some kind of cut your losses mechanism needs to be in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
Or maybe my definition of excess population isnt yours and were talking past each other.
Quoting universenessHeck no, for the same reason I dont think it would be better if all intelligent life populating the galaxy were left in the one form we know.
A different way of answering your question is to focus on would have been better. Would have been better for what? By what goal are we measuring the benefit of a planet of only fish vs one including land animals?
With pioneer missions to other worlds, scouting missions may not be an option. Coming back certainly isnt, but a ship full of colonists would be heading to unknown conditions without the scout. By the time a robot gets there and reports back, its senders stand a fair chance of not being around to hear the answer. The trips take an obscene amount of time, all the movies notwithstanding that treat interstellar travel like a bicycle ride to the corner thrift store.
I proposed a better one. Screw democracy. Find somebody competent.[quote=Doug Adams]anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.[/quote]
Quoting universenessJoke aside, its been done, just not with humans because of moral issues. Theyre trying to grow parts without feelings because feelings make everybody uncomfortable.
They are changing that, but the wrong way. They now have schools teaching bigotry for instance, which used to be illegal. Brain wipe em young to be on your side.
I sort of went to one of these, but they admittedly tried to show both sides. The school taught evolution despite being funded by an organization in denial of it. Now there are schools that teach it as the law demands, but framed only as a crackpot alternative to what really happened.
About majority doing the right thing, that often doesnt happen. Town just north of me had a high school falling apart and in need of more rooms. They were holding class in the gym showers due to lack of space anywhere else. The had a federal offer to pay for 95% of the cost of repairs and new construction, with the town people picking up the other 5% which would have raised their school taxes a tiny bit. They put it to the voters instead of representatives. The voters shot it down, and now their taxes went up a lot a few years later because they have to pay for all of it themselves instead of accepting the federal grant. All the voters saw was small pain now and no vision of much more pain in a few years that it would have prevented. The kind of action Im talking about is this sort of thing. Long term benefits. Those are not popular, hence the extreme danger to humanity.
Quoting universenessI dont remember suggesting too many ideas on that. What, line some up and shoot them? No, probably not that, but something closer to how the Netherlands does it comes to mind. My grandmother was murdered there by the system. Murder by my countrys standards anyway.
There are those that simply want a handout, and are effectively nobody. There are whole cultures that encourage this attitude.
What is this? Sounds like a school. What if the benevolent entity communicates something other than what the parents of the newborn want communicated?
Dont personally know the mindset. They watch TV I think. I dont very much, and it pisses a lot of acquaintances that I cannot join discussion of the latest twist in some reality show or something.
That would not be a layabout then, right?
All the cynicism above aside, I agree with this. Make the people and their children part of a whole, part of the culture. It works because I see it. Trick is to break the pattern of them identifying with the group encouraging the opposite. It perhaps means destroying cultural identity. It seems to work best in places with little of that, but then what do I know? I dont live in those places.
What does this recognition look like? Get a name on a poster or the nightly news? I mean, I do see it in some countries. In India, apparently your status is based on how many people you have under you. The recognition is an org-chart. You can be a brilliant contributor but dont have any underlings, and youd be pretty much a disappointment to your folks. Ive seen this.
It would become like little-league then. I guess that works. No more sports section in the newspaper except perhaps a page about how the local teams did against each other. My paper here actually devotes a decent percentage of its space to that. Not all national standings and such.
Quoting universeness
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I agree with A-P here, but we actually have no proof of it one way or another.
[quote=universeness]Consider how music is physically stored on a CD or the images stored on a DVD.[/quote]All of which do a limited reproduction of the actual movie or scene.
It would take an infinite number of bits to describe a quark. Just its position in space (if there is such a meaningful thing, which there isnt) would need infinite bits, even if done only as accurately as the nearest meter.
An identifier that say up quark would suffice for 1, 2 and 4 since these are the same for all up quarks. The spin is a property of this quark, and per the vast majority of quantum interpretations, it doesnt have one except when it is measured, and then only along one axis, so the actual spin can only be expressed relative to that one axis. A single bit will do then. Items 1-4 can probably be done in under 10 bits. The wavefunction of the quark would require, well, infinite bits.
Question seems to come down to where the purpose emerges from the matter. Id probably favor a view that purpose is relative to a material process, not to matter, and not to an arrangement of matter.
Quoting punosWell that can't be true since digital is just a subset of analog, so an analog system confining itself to those states can appear digital.
Interesting assertion. It violates the principle of relativity for one thing since it would be a distinction if a thing is changing voxels or not. Such a statement is assertion of a preferred frame, the one in which these locations are fixed. How slow does something have to move to change one pixel every minute? How does it have any momentum/velocity at all if it stays in the same place for a minute, and then suddenly changes. That's a violation of momentum conservation at the fine level. How fast does it have to go to change locations more frequently than one unit of time?
How are these pixels arranged? In a square or hexagonal crystal arrangment? Anything like that would also define a preferred orientation for the various spatial axes.
You seem to envision the universe as a sort of finite automata. I see no evidence of this.
Quoting 180 Proof
What does Planck say? I thought it was a limit of meaningful measurability, not a metaphysical digital ontology.
Gnomon's Enformer has all the qualities of God (as a creator/creative force, Eros aka life drive), but Gnomon stops short of claiming it is God. Much like in Taoism, it is one half, the ordering principle, of a pair of opposing forces, the other half being Entropy (destructive, Thanatos aka death drive). Enformationism also bears a resemblance to Empedoclean Love (uniting) and Strife (dividing).
As far as I can tell, as Gnomon has done his homework well (he deserves an A[sup]+[/sup]). The only ethics that's compatible with Enformationism is one in which evil is what good'll have to deal with and vice versa (harmony of opposites).
So what's your point with respect to my question (and its context)?
IMO, dao = entropy. (YMMV)
I thought the Tao was a dualistic entity consisting of two opposites.
I'm sure I've pointed out to you what's wrong with that interpretation. The dao is an analogue for what western philosophers term "dialectical monism". Like entropy (i.e. disorder-order) consisting of complementarities, not "opposites".
Yep, dialectical monism and hence, inter alia, monotheism - instead of two entities, one with two mutually cancelling properties, which of course leads to a problem (Epicurean riddle vis-à-vis the problem of evil).
Complementary properties are definitely not "mutually cancelling", Smith. Read the wiki article I linked. Are mind/body ... male/female (organisms) ... particle/wave (photons), ... "mutually cancelling"? :chin:
Opposites do cancel each other out e.g. fire boils off water and water douses fire. More to the point, I was referring to the inadequacy of monism as an explanatory framework as whatever the arche is, it has to possess opposite properties which in me book is saying something is both good and bad. (vide the problem of evil, a not all-good god; we need the devil).
How can that be, mon ami? However ... you're better in all this than me and so we probably are talking past each other.
By the way I prefer duotheism to monotheism - makes more sense to me.
Definition of "analogue": Relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position, voltage, etc.
Sound and all other vibration frequencies, electricity and otherforms of energy, etc. show that. From what I know, only artificial --created by man-- frequencies can be discrete (digital). Moreover, what we can perceive in nature and which we can talk about is analogue. I think this is enough for a proof. What we have actually no proof of is that this is an illusion and that the structure of the physical universe is digital/discrete. There are only hypotheses --relating to quanta states, etc.-- which are not evident and, from what I know, have no application in life except maybe for quantum computing/computers. But not even this can stand I think as a proof that the physical universe is digital or both analogue and digital.
What is the digital universe called?
Metaverse: A digital universe that can be accessed through virtual reality.
(https://edge.yewno.com/metaverse-a-digital-universe-that-can-be-accessed-through-virtual-reality/)
:up: But I was already happy!
Hello Gnomon the deist.
Quoting Gnomon
Deism's belief that a disinterested creator, created us for no confirmed or understood reason, makes such a suggestion irrational in my view.
Quoting Gnomon
It's not loud or proud but it's at least more honest and less camouflaged. Deism is woo woo imo.
As a naturalist with 20/20 vision, I need no special pleading for a concept such as 'after physics,' to have any significant meaning when it comes to the structure and workings of the universe. I prefer to remain level headed, than choose to assign all that I am, to the whims of a disinterested, pointless, purposeless, first cause self-aware mind. Does the deity of your imagination, have the omni qualifications or is it fallible?
Quoting Gnomon
Of course there is intention in physics. The intention is to discover new knowledge about the workings and structure of the universe and to constantly confirm via testing, that which we think we already know.
No metaphysics required, other than philosophical musings, which have to, at some point, face empirical evidence as it's final arbiter or remain nothing more than philosophical musing.
Quoting Gnomon
Fine, I can live with that, although I think the term metaphysics is more overburdened than is suggested by the quote above. This was raised in a very well structured thread by @T Clark in The Metaphysics of Materialism. I stand by the posts I made in that thread, on the topic of metaphysics.
Well, I wouldn't try to fill that gap with something as bland as deism, as it's irrational to do so, imo.
Darwinian evolution has nothing to do with abiogenisis! Evolution is the factual account of the DIVERSITY of life, we currently don't know how abiogenisis began. Panspermia perhaps. Before the Cambrian explosion, we have very simple single cell/multi-celled organisms. That's where we currently are. Why do you choose to toss a deity in, as the first cause? Do you really think such a posit will satisfy the human race? Do you think we will stop looking for the actual truth because your deism demands or deserves our highest credence?
Deism serves no purpose other than providing some kind of bizarre closure to folks who need such closure, as some kind of comfort blanket that I personally find to be no comfort at all.
So based on this 'I don't know,' admission regarding the origin story of the universe or answering the hard problem of consciousness, your musings has landed firmly on the 'deism' posit as the one you give highest credence to. That's fine Gnomon. I respect your choice, but I am surprised and disappointed that a seeker of truth would find any contentment in such a bland posit as deism.
Considering the effort you have put into trying to muse on the big questions, I am surprised that deism does anything for you at all BUT I am sure you feel the same way about my satisfaction with a 99.999999% credence level to a naturalist origin for the universe and consciousness.
Quoting Gnomon
I like Mr Tegmark but I don't personally assign much credence to his four distinct levels of multiverse hierarchy, where each type of universe grows progressively different from our own.
It's really quite simple. Love is a human label and it's manifestations and consequences are demonstrated everyday by lifeforms such as humans. So, the substance of that emotion is within lifeforms such as humans, WE are atomic aggregations, WE are a clump of matter and WE demonstrate love, so it is therefore irrefutable that love is a phenomena which comes from physical and not non-physical life/mind-forms!
Quoting Gnomon
:up:
Quoting Gnomon
Everything is reduceable to quantum fundamentals but that does not mean, in any way, that the fundamentals have the same attributes and functionality of their potential combinatorials!
Two separate hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom will not make make your face a little bit wet but their combinatorial will. 'Wetness,' is not a attribute of hydrogen or oxygen as separate gases.
So, love or meaning are not attributes of atoms in a void but I am certain that there will be a pathway in the future that can trace 'love' back to the fundamentals in a 'the void.'
Quoting Gnomon
That's a big pointless jump towards woo woo of the gaps posits, such as deism imo.
I could claim ALMOST ANYTHING and place it in as comfortable a position as your disinterested deity.
How about a mindless singular digit as the first cause?
How about DIMP (A DIMensionless Point, that exists outside of our universe and causes, (in a causation chain reaction) all the quantum fluctuations which occur in the vacuum of space?
How about the question 'where did your deity come from?'
How about it's the big flying spaghetti monster that created the universe:
Not any more, he types that he is a deist:
Quoting Gnomon
How about 'singularity?'
From a Quora discussion:
[b]as shown in peer-reviewed reviews over the last 10 years, to be the result of the conversion of deuterium to helium, and that conversion involves a mass deficit, i.e., the mass of the helium product is a little less than the mass of the deuterium that was converted to helium.
That is a definite amount of energy, by the laws of thermodynamics; expressed as 23.8 MeV/4He. I.e,. that much energy is released for every helium atom formed. Thats a lot of energy for a very little helium[/b].
Quoting noAxioms
From physics.org: Can we get 100% of our energy from renewables:
Now, scientists have hit back with their response to the points raised by Heard and colleagues. The researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and collaborators have analysed hundreds of studies to answer each of the apparent issues. They demonstrate that there are no roadblocks to a 100 percent renewable future.
Quoting noAxioms
From the world economic forum:
[b]Cost differences between renewables and fossil fuels have traditionally guided new renewable energy additions, especially in developing countries. Market economics often made new fossil fuel generation cheaper a dangerous choice considering the climate imperative of meeting rising power demand with low-carbon electricity.
But those days are ending, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finances (BNEF) Climatescope 2014 report, which finds renewable electricity is now just as affordable an option as fossil fuel in 55 emerging nations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
BNEF suggests the scale may have already tipped toward renewables in these markets. Clean energy capacity in the surveyed nations grew 143% between 2008-2013, nearly twice as fast as in the richer Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, and has more than doubled over the period to 142 total gigawatts (GW).[/b]
I don't understand your logic here. Exponential growth and linear growth are both growth, why does 'the number of descendants per capita, in the long run, result in NO growth?
Quoting noAxioms
It helps maintain the ecology of our planet, if we don't have to rip out it's resources to build stuff on the Earth or extraterrestially. Use up all those useless asteroids etc or lifeless planets/moon's to get the chemicals we need. Use fully automated robotic systems to do the gathering and transporting as much as possible.
Quoting noAxioms
But still they persisted and eventually they succeeded. I think we will do the same in space or die trying.
Quoting noAxioms
I think we probably are talking past each other. The rationing that has happened during war times such as WW II is the kind of solutions, that I would apply to excess population, until a better solution can be found, which would either be finding/creating more supplies or educating people regarding the excess population problem and convince all humans to stop having too many children that we cannot support.
A 1 child max for example until the problem is reduced, or is contained. I would not legislate for such, in the way China did but I would invoke a massive public information campaign, if necessary.
Quoting noAxioms
Life exists in two environment instead of only one, with hopefully some creatures that can live in both. The more options your species has, the better chance it has to survive and thrive.
Quoting noAxioms
The ship full of colonists can send out probes when its sensible to do so.
The senders still being alive when the robot returns is not required. We just need their actions and reasons and intent memorialised, so that those who are still there when the robot returns, can analyse its findings. The time involved depends on the tech involved.
Quoting noAxioms
Been done many many times in history. Many proved to be competent but also complete evil b******s.
So they were competent at creating totalitarian terror regimes or equally horrific plutocratic or aristocratic regimes, where only their chosen few gained unchecked and imbalanced power.
I find your knee jerk jump towards a single all powerful leader, disturbing and quite exasperating, considering human history.
I still think you are a nice person noAxioms but you might also be a bit mad! :joke:
Quoting noAxioms
If those who you would have labelled as 'on the correct side' of the situation you describe above, were unable to convince a majority of the stakeholders involved, that they should have accepted the federal grant then the failure is with that inability to convince. This of course assumes that those who voted to reject the grant were not 'fooled' or 'manipulated.' You should survey those involved and find out f they still think they made the right choice and if not, then it's a lesson learned. From a democratic standpoint I think your example above is an example of democracy working correctly. Perhaps the stakeholders involved are still happy with the vote they cast at the time for the reasons they cast it.
As I said, sometimes, you seem a little bit crazy. :lol:
Then I hope you will fight or have already fought for justice for your grandmother in the Netherlands.
Quoting noAxioms
Taking the basic means of survival for granted, is not a handout, imo, its a basic human right.
Quoting noAxioms
'Social workers,' work with parents and children. What I envisage, would be much more nuanced and far better resourced, than any current national or local model of a 'social work department.'
Quoting noAxioms
Not anymore, no
Quoting noAxioms
No cynicism was intended on my part. I think people should discuss, honestly, any perceived injustices employed in any 'cultural identity' they feel emotionally tied to, and I agree that they may have to 'get rid of' any traditional cultural edicts or behaviour/attitudes which cause 'unfair' treatment of others.
Quoting noAxioms
No, I mean a homemaker or a home carer that is a relative, or a person who spends a great deal of their time writing stories or music or painting pictures or educating themselves or contributing to online discussion forums, etc, etc, should be recognised as engaging in activities which are recognised as 'having a job.'
Quoting noAxioms
No, national and international level competitive sport would continue, but for reasons other than the wish to become rich. Remember the starting point. Everyone gets the food, drink, shelter, education, legal and medical protection, the right to a job they want to do and the free training/education they need to do so, etc, erc, all FREE from cradle to grave.
Why? Spacetime positions are relative. I don't see why its position would be important, if the purpose is to represent any 'up-quark' using something like binary, for the purpose of reproducing one. It's position would not have any significance until its binary code is used to create one.
Quoting noAxioms
A data packet about to be transmitted will contain binary bits, that have no direct relevance to the 'payload' of the data packet. Such bits are normally called 'redundant data.'
This 'metadata' has many purposes. Source and destination IP addresses, Packet number/id, etc. Even the payload will have support bits such as a parity bit, a start and stop bit etc.
There has to be a means of distinguishing between data packets who's payload is textual or is a bit map or is audio data etc. So, in the case of fundamental field excitations, there would have to be an ID system established to differentiate between a payload that was a coded quark, photon, electron, gluon etc. You would not use something as cumbersome, as the ASCII codes for the letters in 'up-quark'
The wave function would not require infinite bits as most waveforms repeat and therefore only a wave section would have to be stored. A waveform could also be stored as a mathematical function rather than a representation of its physical form
Thank you. You're right about metaphysics being overburdened. Most discussions end up spending most of their time arguing about what the word means rather than discussing substantive issues.
The brain is a stimulus-response mechanism, composed of neurons and glia. It has as much "purpose" as any other machine or mechanism. Computer programs, robots, etc. also manifest such a "purpose".
Matter does not have intention. Matter does not need or desire anything. Need and desire are atrributes of life.
I have been advised not to talk about it!
FWIW, Gnomon is not an expert on Taoism. So any resemblances between that ancient philosophy and Enformationism is primarily in its non-theist*1 explanation for the ups & downs of the world. However, the "dialectical monism" description does fit the opposite/complement notion of how Energy & Entropy work together to produce a dynamic world of myriad forms.
So you are correct to note that both the Tao and the First Cause are singular and unique. But the mechanism/metabolism of a living organism (evolving world) depends on the Hegelian dialectic of opposing forces : Energy/Entropy ; Good/Evil ; Hot/Cold ; Thesis/Antithesis. Yet. it's the Synthesis stage that points in a consistent evolutionary direction : the Arrow of Time. :smile:
*1. Is Taoism theistic? :
Taoism is practised as a religion in various Asian communities. Its theology is not theist (even though some communities do worship Laozi as the attributed founder of the religious doctrine), and has more affinities with pantheistic traditions given its philosophical emphasis on the formlessness of the Tao.
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~xueyuanw/itp104/project/culture/taoism.html
Note -- Lao Tzu's intellectual philosophy was Deistic, but the popular religions that emerged later were typically Poly-theistic.
The only pertinent qualification of the Deist Creator is the ability to initiate the living & thinking cosmic system of which humans are a small, but knowing part. Beyond that necessary ability, anything else I might say is speculation based on personal experience with human intention and creativity. The creation itself is necessarily "fallible", because it is a Heuristic*1 process of evolution toward some solution to the creation algorithm. :smile:
PS__I don't pigeonhole myself as a "Deist", because those ignorant of the term's history assume that it is a practical Religion instead of a theoretical Philosophy. The deduced deity is an inference from evidence that the world is not eternal, not an imaginary humanoid.
*1. Heuristic Evolution :
proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.
Oxford
Note -- the rules of evolution (laws of nature) are open-ended, instead of definitive; allowing for progression.
You seem to rely mainly on the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Since you denigrate the agnostic philosophy of Deism, I assume you would label yourself as a "Gnostic" (knower) concerning Origins, Consciousness, etc. Is that true?
BTW, I do have some musings on the topic of a technical, non-mythical, Origin Story. But I won't go into a long dissertation in this post. FWIW, here's a brief glimpse :
In the beginning (Big Bang??) there was no Matter, only Energy & Laws. So the postulated zero-dimensional Singularity had to possess those essential immaterial (no matter, no space, no extension) properties in order to create a physical world from scratch. So, it first had to produce the basic element of Matter ; a Quark perhaps. The physical properties of hypothetical Quarks are assumed to be : charge, mass, color, spin. But all of those qualities must be inferred, because as metaphors they cannot be detected directly. "Charge" is the name for an ability : potential to form relationships, such as attraction, repulsion, etc. But the first step toward evolution would be a Bit of Information, from which a sub-sub-atomic Quark could be constructed. Yet, all those initial/essential properties/qualities are informational relationships, not material objects.
In essence, Energy is simply the Potential to actualize, to realize something from statistical Possibility. And natural Laws are information patterns to which material things necessarily conform. Since the Singularity did not exist in space or time, its unbound Energy would be Omni-Potence, and its unlimited Laws would be Omni-Science. Do those pre-natural god-like powers sound credible to you? Probably not, because they are not found in physics textbooks. Nevermind, it's just something to think about, not to believe.
Before the beginning of space-time, the hypothetical Singularity would have to be non-ergodic*1 (no states yet). But the emergent universe seems to be progressing toward complete ergodicity*2 (a stable whole/holistic system). In the process of Evolution, the system is unstable. So Information patterns of relationships must be flexible. Those information patterns are the Software of the universal computer, and material objects are the Hardware of the computing system. Hence, the universe is not now, and never has been in equilibrium, but it may eventually reach a uniform state of perfect Ergodicity (wholeness). But, I ain't making no prophecies. :smile:
*1. Ergodic :
relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points.
___Oxford
Note -- "Impinge" = relationship, connection, information
*2. Ergodicity :
Ergodicity is a property of the system; it is a statement that the system cannot be reduced or factored into smaller components.
___Wiki
*3. Enformationism : (credence?)
"It's not something to believe ; it's something to think". Plausible, not Creedal
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
Quoting Agent Smith
So Wiccan / Zoroastrian mystagogy ... :sparkle:
Absolutely! There is no way I know enough to not be ignorant. I think Socrates' sentiment about ignorance is quite wise.
Quoting universeness
I am so glad you got what I meant to say. Physics and intelligence are separate things. Glue is going to stick, drop something off the roof and it will fall down, salted water is less likely to freeze than unsalted water. That just is the way things are and no intelligence is required. If oxygen could not bond with hydrogen, we would not have water. What is is because it can be and what is not is not because of what can not be. Only later when humans come on the stage is there any thinking about all this. Unless of course there are creatures like ourselves on other planets. I think the whole universe is one big experiment, not something planned. I mean for goodness' sake if we were planned our backs would be a whole lot stronger. We could be made to be monogamous as some birds are. We are not designed well for our reality.
Quoting universeness
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting universeness
May be I could have worded myself differently but of what are animals conscious and might there be an important difference when we come to human consciousness? I don't think there are any other animals that could contribute enlightening thoughts to the forum.
Quoting universeness
I don't think so and I don't AI can give us a better reality either. What makes humans awesome is not the few geniuses but what our ability to communicate has done to our reality. If apes could communicate as we do, then possibly they would be just as awesome. However, if we find isolated primitive people, they are nothing like modern-day humans. I think our communication abilities are what makes us awesome. Some industries are learning this, such as those that promised to go green. They had no clue how they were going improve their operations to meet the goals they promised they would meet. Instead of knowing how to achieve their goals, they announced they were interested in knowing what others thought would be helpful. It was the thoughts of many people that lead to improvements. Apes aren't up to that, despite the movie Planet of the Apes.
Quoting universeness
Now that idea is totally backward! We are naturally curious and that, along with our capacity for communication, has led to our awesome progress. Horses run, fish swim, and humans think. It is for us to explore all sciences and learn all we can about the universe. Especially at this time in our lives, it is our duty to learn all we can from geologists and anthropologists and related sciences and HISTORY so that we can make better decisions than we have ever made. If we don't we could become extinct and if we are the only creature that gives the universe consciousness, that would be a tragedy.
[quote=Goldilocks]That's just right for me.[/quote]
Polytheism, no, I have crowd phobia. Duotheism hits the sweet spot.
[quote=Albert Einstein]Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.[/quote]
What sayest thou?
NB: "Pandeism" is my jam. :smirk:
Bundleware, si, señor! Daoist, Heraclitean, Empedoclean undertones. I don't have a choice. Intriguing that logic is about having no option but to accept yada yada yada.
You find philosophical approaches which parallel Taoist principles in many places, including western philosophies. Kant's noumena are a good example.
Quoting Gnomon
I disagree with this, although many others, including many with more expertise than I, do agree with it. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, the two primary sources for Taoist thought, mention God, but almost in passing. For me, Taoist thought is a philosophy, not a religion. It is true that later interpretations did become, as you note, a polytheistic religion with some magical beliefs.
I broadly agree, but 'what the word means,' IS a very substantive issue imo. God, science, universe, metaphysics, transcendent, sophist, liar are all words whose contextual meanings are crucial. Depending on what meaning people take from such words, it often cascades into what actions they take in their lives.
Who you been taking advice from Alkis?
Not Maxwell's demon I hope! :scream: :joke: (only kidding Alkis!)
Certainly not Maxwell's demon! He's a fake.
(I was joking too, you know.)
Well, a little more detail in your 'speculations,' may help more of your readers understand where you are coming from.
Is your 'deist creator' analogue or digital? If it's eternal and singular then in that sense, it's a digit, yes? 'There can be only one,' (the tag line from the film The Highlander.) Does your envisaged entity have constituent parts? Is it quantum/quantisable? or a continuum of analogue states?
Why did it create an initially chaotic universe, that contained no life at all, for many billions of years, or do you believe that abiogenisis was happening somewhere in the universe, right from the start?
Surely if The creation itself is necessarily "fallible", then so must the creator be. How can an infallible enformer create fallible enformation?
Quoting Gnomon
You seem to be back-peddling here Gnomon. Deism is a well defined term with an easily understood meaning. Don't choose to use a label, if it inconveniently, does not serve your purposes at times.
If your thinking causes you to deduce a deity, then it is your burden to provide the 'details' and consequentials of that conclusion. You can declare your deity as existing outside of this universe and if your 'eternal,' has constituent parts, then you might suggest, that it may be made of 'supernatural' fundamentals, as in, not made of any substance which exists 'naturally' in this universe. BUT as part of your 'theoretical philosophy,' of an origin story for our universe, you must deal with questions regarding your deity such as:
Why did it create a universe which produced dinosaurs? What were they for?
Why did it create almost useless planets like mercury? What's the planet Mercury for?
Why does Jupiter and Saturn have so many useless moons? What are they for?
What's the debris called 'the Kuiper belt' for?
Do you consider such questions? or do you just go with the, well, I don't know!
Do you think its possible to find out why your proposed deity took the actions it took?
That's the main problem with suggesting an organised, self-aware mind, as the creator of the universe.
WE require it to explain it's actions and if it wont then WE will declare it non-existent and move on.
Was you whisperer analogue or digital?
I do experience personal incredulity towards others, yes, but I still remain very interested as to why a persons believes as they do. I try to balance any impression I may give of mockery or disdain for another's belief system, as much as I can. But I also refuse to try to tread on eggshells without damaging them, all the time, as I think it's also insulting, to treat an interlocuter as if they were a fragile snowflake.
Quoting Gnomon
I am an atheist and a naturalist and I think that application of the scientific method, is the ONLY way to find the answers to any questions about origins. Philosophers can certainly help a great deal, as their musings can make scientists think in ways that can redirect their focus, and can help them discover new approaches for discovering new knowledge.
Quoting Gnomon
Interesting!
Quoting Gnomon
Have a look at sources such as The big bang singularity discussed on the physics stack exchange. Your description of the big bang singularity is contested.
Maths and physics breaks down at the proposed singularity, as a first cause. How can something be infinitely dense and have 0 dimensions (no extent)? The singularity is a 'placeholder' for the mathematical and physical rewinding of inflation/expansion. The fact that the big bang singularity is poorly defined, allows (for me) the more credible hypotheses, such as Mtheory/many worlds/multiverse or cyclical universe hypotheses, such as Roger Penrose's CCC.
Quoting Gnomon
A bit? Would this not mean you would have to abandon your 'analogue' view as the most credible candidate for a universal fundamental? Surely before you think of something such as 'Quark,' you must first tackle what the quark is formed inside of? What is space made of? Does space have 'quantum fluctuations?
Quoting Gnomon
I was with you for the first few sentences here and then you went to woo woo land.
Why do you decide to plug in a singularity with anthropomorphic 'intent' and invoke the useless god label. Why do you choose to jump from the very rational 'potential to actualize' to ...... god-like-powers. :roll:
Quoting Gnomon
The problem here, is that there is no way we currently know of, to observe the universe in its biggest frame of reference (if 'biggest' makes any sense here). For example, will we be able to observe significant time dilation actually occur. A person who leaves on a spaceship and travels fast enough to return younger than the children he/she/hesh left behind? This would confirm that time is a local phenomena and has no objective reality. Then we would need to know a lot more about black holes and what is going on inside them. I don't think it's about the universe reaching some 'state of equilibrium' or balance or midpoint between high and low entropy. It may be that there is no aspect of 'reality' that is 'objectively true' for every point in the universe (ergodic/non-ergodic). Still no creator mind with intent, required imo, just 'mysteries of the universe,' that only lifeforms such as US may be able to 'discover.' IF the structure and workings of the universe are indeed 'knowable.'
But don't underplay the significance of that event. That is approximately when the universe was called the universe. What's in a name? HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. The universe then became 'knowable,' and that is very very significant imo. Especially when you understand that there is no god required.
Quoting Athena
I broadly agree that if we are intelligently designed then our designer is an incompetent fool.
Quoting Athena
If you are simply suggesting that humans are the most intelligent species on Earth, then I fully agree with you.
Quoting Athena
Again I broadly agree, apart from your suggestion that the human experience cannot be massively enhanced by AI.
Quoting Athena
I think you have misunderstood me here Athena and Newton's quote. I meant don't worry about the science you don't know because you can choose to learn about it if you want to. Newton's quote was just him personally commenting on his status as a 'genius.' He personally considered his discoveries to be minor when compared to what we humans still don't know. So I don't understand your "Now that idea is totally backwards!' interpretation of what I typed.
I am very interested in what you have said. Obviously, reality is more than matter. It might be hormones and brain cells that manifest my feelings, but my feelings are not matter. An idea is not mattered yet an idea can change the world. For years I have had a very difficult time with Western materialism.
I think the possible replacement for religion of which you speak, could benefit from Eastern and Mayan concepts of energy forces. Have you read Jose Arguelles by "The Mayan Factor"? I have tried to read it many times but get so turned off by the far-fetched things the author speaks of, that I put the book down and do not return to it until something in a forum reminds me of the book. Do you know of the Psycho Solar pulsation Matrix?
The end of the book explains a Harmonic Convergence, that depends upon self-empowered individuals creating rituals, celebrations, and joyful events expressing their feelings of peace and harmony with the Earth and with each other. Then there is the Jewish Qabalah and the explanation of the importance of rituals.
So what if we took you seriously and formed a civic association to manifest a new belief?
That is a big responsibility. How might we act on it and manifest a desirable reality?
Quoting universeness
There is nothing simple about that. Many ancients thought we were created to help our planet. The Sumerian creation story is specific that we are here to help the river stay in its banks so it does not flood and eat the goddess's plants. But plenty of people around the world made the connection between human activity and their environments and food supply. I am really excited by @Gnoman's idea of blending the past with the present. I think we are in the Resurrection, with geologists and anthropologists, and historians resurrecting our past, so our species has more complete information for making better decisions.
Quoting universeness
Oh, my love, you do know how to move a conversation forward. This is so important to the human miracle of intelligence. I believe computers are essential tools and the internet is essential to the New Age. However, we must keep our focus on the importance of humans, and this forum along with Gnoman's replacement of religion may be a part of the New Age. A time of high tech and peace and the end of tyranny.
Yes, things are happening that look bad, but that may be the dark before the dawn. What is essential is how do we react to the bad things that are happening. It is when things become intolerable that we are motivated to create change. I am talking about something AI can not do. Only humans can imagine a better reality and act to manifest it.
We must not depend too much on AI nor depend too much on government. We must build civic associations and voluntarily manifest the New Age. Instead of passively sliding into Armageddon.
And when it comes to AI spell check reminds me constantly of why I do not believe we should rely on AI.
:grimace: Spell check obviously does not know the meaning of what I am saying and it really frightens me that humans will become overly dependent on this technology as we have become overly dependent on government, and people may give up their own power of thinking and acting.
Part of the problem is the technological change to bureaucracy, which is now so impersonal it crushes individual liberty and power. This is the despot of which Tocqueville warned us.
Wisdom starts with "I do not know." Deism could be right. There may be a universal god. The religious problem is not the notion of a universal god, but the divisive God of Abraham and the ridiculous Bible stories religious people interpret literally instead of abstractly. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the same beginning and prophets, and with Christianity and Islam comes increased superstition. According to the God of Abraham religions there is a God and angels and a Satan and demons. And paradoxically religion is supposed to oppose superstition.
How about this- we do not have all the facts so can we separate the notion of God from the Bible stories? The Bible stories suck, but that does not prove there is no universal god. The best we can do is be okay with not being too sure of ourselves.
I was talking specifically about the word "metaphysics." It's a subject that is important to me. I'm interested in metaphysics and want to talk about it. I'm not that interested in "metaphysics" and I'm tired of talking about it. That doesn't mean others shouldn't.
Yes. Over the centuries many influential philosophical worldviews (e.g. Buddhism) have later evolved into popular religions, even though that was not the intent of the originator. For my own purposes, and like my own non-religious worldview, Taoism is a framework for making sense of the complexities & contradictions of the natural world. Any religious practices will merely give practitioners something to do, to make them feel they have some limited control of their destiny. :smile:
PS__ "-ism" indicates a belief system, that may range from "action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence". A religious dogma is a fossilized form of the original organic worldview.
Yes. Over the centuries many influential philosophical worldviews (e.g. Buddhism) have later evolved into popular religions, even though that was not the intent of the originator. For my own purposes, and like my own non-religious worldview, Taoism is a framework for making sense of the complexities & contradictions of the natural world. Any religious practices will merely give practitioners something to do, to make them feel they have some limited control of their destiny. :smile:
PS__ "-ism" indicates a belief system, that may range from "action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence". A religious dogma is a fossilized form of the original organic worldview.
This from the Tao Te Ching, Verse 38, Stephen Mitchell translation:
Quoting Lao Tzu
You seem to be asking for empirical "details" for a general non-physical non-specific concept. That desire for physical details may be the same need for concreteness (idolatry), that caused the Hebrews to give-up on Moses's invisible God, and to construct a Golden Calf to worship. If you are really interested in more details the BothAnd Blog (see below) has lots of speculations upon speculations to choose from. Some, you may even agree with. Otherwise, please just accept the amorphous Deity notion as an unproven Axiom to serve as the foundation for a broadly applicable information-centric theory of everything. :smile:
Axiom :
In modern logic, an axiom is a premise or starting point for reasoning. In mathematics, an axiom may be a "logical axiom" or a "non-logical axioms". Logical axioms are taken to be true within the system of logic they define and are often shown in symbolic form (e.g., (A and B)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom
Who created God? :
The evolution of god concepts
https://bothandblog.enformationism.info/page44.html
I am a non-theist and a naturalist. And I think the "scientific method" is the best way to find answers to empirical questions. But the philosophical methods of inquiry are better suited to formulating plausible answers to non-empirical problems, such as Ontology & Epistemology & Cosmology. If you have no interest in non-physical topics, there's no need for Philosophy. :nerd:
Quoting universeness
A "bit" (binary digit) was proposed as an information-based analogy to an atom of matter. So what better way to theorize about the beginning of the universe, from an Information-centric perspective? My little scenario of the beginning of the world, is an extrapolation from the philosophical Enformationism thesis. But, if you want scientific credentials, look at physicist John A. Wheeler's "It From Bit" conjecture*1, and his proposals for a Participatory Universe and Anthropic Principle.
As usual, your queries are seeking empirical answers to questions that are non-empirical. For example, the Inflationary-beginning hypothesis is an attempt to provide the kind of concrete facts you seek. Yet, as an imaginary extrapolation from current knowledge of physics, Inflation Theory is not built upon empirical evidence, but of inferred speculations from amorphous temperature patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background*2. :smile:
*1. It from Bit :
Wheeler's "it from bit" concept implies that physics, particularly quantum physics, isn't really about reality, but just our best description of what we observe. There is no "quantum world", just the best description we have of how things will appear to us.
https://plus.maths.org/content/it-bit
*2. Evidence for Cosmic Inflation Theory Bites the (Space) Dust :
Two groups of scientists announced today (Jan. 30) that a tantalizing signal which some scientists claimed was "smoking gun" evidence of dramatic cosmic expansion just after the birth of the universe was actually caused by something much more mundane: interstellar dust.
https://www.space.com/28423-cosmic-inflation-signal-space-dust.html
Quoting universeness
I was being deliberately provocative. But, how else can you explain the pre-big-bang and pre-space-time existence of Potential (causal power) and Laws (instructions for organization)? I can think of only two options : Eternal Nature (spaceless-timeless physics) or Eternal Mind (god). And both are beyond the reach of empirical evidence. So, I just used the conventional term for a pre-creation Creative Power. But I have other names, if you find the G-word too-woo-woo-for-you. :joke:
Quoting universeness
. . . . Way! . . . Actually, there is a way to view the universe as a whole system, from a god-like perspective outside the system : Cosmology. It's both a recent scientific venture, and an ancient philosophical conjecture. :cool:
*3. Philosophical cosmology
Cosmology deals with the world as the totality of space, time and all phenomena. Historically, it has had quite a broad scope, and in many cases was found in religion. In modern use metaphysical cosmology addresses questions about the Universe which are beyond the scope of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology
The basic means of survival must become free, as a human right, from cradle to grave, alongside free high quality medical care, and free, efficient police, military and political protection with all necessary, very robust, checks and balances in place, which are made as reliable as is possible. Free Education! Education! Education! Global unity and a powerful determination to conquer our primal fears and continue to boldly go where no one has gone before. The utter rejection of all posits that the supernatural exists, until there is irrefutable evidence, that it does. No more scapegoating gods for our own shortfalls. A money free, resource based global economy and a global society, whose main priorities are to maintain a united planet, where the nurture of all people towards the state of 'thriving,' is the imperative, and not a global economy that allows the control of a mostly nefarious, privileged few, who are only interested in excessive personal wealth, power and status. A society that also prioritises protecting the planets ecology, flora and fauna. Personally, I think that would be a good start.
Quoting Athena
Yeah, a good example of how 'silly' human thinking can get. I think your attempt to connect or corralate such fables with anything of significance in the real human experience is a pure conflation, to say the least, BUT I do respect that YOU see value in it.
Quoting Athena
Which is why I cited your handle in this thread, based on my exchange with Gnomon. You, I think have made a lot of effort in your life to help others, so to me, you sound like one of the good people that are out there. So I like to understand why good people think the way they do about the big questions.
Quoting Athena
:lol: Thanks Athena! :flower:
Quoting Athena
I like your attempts to find common ground between two opposing factions.
Are you convinced that Gnomon is trying to find common ground between science and theism or is it not more like he is trying to find gaps in science that theism or deism can still find sanctuary in? I think you try to do the same but for the reason that you insist on finding value in ancient fables. I think you 'romanticise' ancient folklore and I worry that this is not a good move, in regards to human progression.
I know you and @Gnomon strongly disagree and I am just trying to gain a clear understanding of why.
I don't think science and folklore can ever exist harmoniously, especially when so many people still posit folklore as fact or as the written word of their god.
Quoting Athena
I so hope you are correct Athena. I agree with you about current AI, but not predicted ASI(artificial super-Intelligence.)
Quoting Athena
:clap: :clap:
Quoting Athena
Systems such as 'Grammarly' are much better than your typical spellchecker, in an app or GPP (General Purpose Package,) such as Microsoft Word, inside Microsoft Office. Grammarly can deal with errors such as 'ever buddy finks it's funny t be a bad spellar,' much better than Microsoft Word's spellchecker. The Word spellchecker only reports 1 error in 'spellar,' it accepts all the rest, in that very poor sentence. Grammarly correctly reports 5 issues with the sentence. That I wont bore you with, by listing them here.
A future ASI will have ability way way way beyond spellcheckers or grammar checkers or any such apps.
We just don't know how 'clever' an ASI could potentially be.
Quoting Athena
It's just as possible that an ASI might be very benevolent towards us. Much more so than humans currently are towards other humans.
There is NO more evidence for a non-intervening god than there is for an intervening one.
I am interested in the credence level you would assign to deism Athena.
10% for? 90% against? where would you stand?
Quoting Athena
That's not enough for me Athena. I prefer for people to give me their personal credence level for such posits. This thread is about emergence and I would like to know what you think is emergent in you, in regards to the big questions and in regards to what your personal intents and purposes have been and still are in your life. I ask for credence levels to compare them with my own and to understand a little more about assessing and understanding the intent and purpose of others. People are of course free to choose to not offer such credence levels but that will not stop me asking for such.
:up:
Quoting universeness
:fire:
"We shall take care of them."
"Eminently practical."
"And we shall serve them. And you will be happy. And controlled."
:nerd:
I think the wise passage you quote is better understood with more context ...
[quote=Daodejing, Chapter 38, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, 1989] A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.
A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.
[i]Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.[/i]
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.[/quote]
I know that, based on the thread you authored on the topic.
I was responding to your more general point that it's more important to discuss the substantive issues involved than focus on, and probably get bogged down, in debate over what the label 'metaphysics' might or might not encompass.
I was merely stating that heated debate about what the term encompasses IS substantive imo, and I have not yet got 'fed up talking about it.' BUT, I also accept that you have probably read much more about the term than I have and have debated the issues involved many more times that I.
No, I am interested in the personal credence level you assign to posits such as deism, or the actual existence of a prime mover, creator of the universe, that was/is an eternal mind/conscience, with intent and purpose, that caused it to create/be the vital or divine spark that IS the first and only cause that created this universe. I would also like to know as many details as an interlocuter is willing to offer, regarding why they assign the credence level they do, to such posits, and why they have a need for such.
Please don't take me seriously, because I was not proposing the formation of a Deist religion. Years ago, I participated in a local organization based upon a college student's Deist worldview, which came to be known as Universism*1 --- not to be confused with Universalism. The group included a range of philosophical perspectives, from Atheism, Agnosticism, New Age, to Deism. Almost anything except conventional Western religion.
As a web-based organization, it eventually included members from all parts of the world. So, there is indeed a widespread felt need for some alternative to top-down organized Religion. Unfortunately, it eventually fell apart along the lines of those pre-existing labels I mentioned. Bottom-up religions just don't seem to have enough internal cohesion without some mandatory outside force. Which usually results in the formal creedal organizations they were intended to avoid*2. To enforce cohesion, top-down Religions and Governments seem to be necessary evils, that are riddled with evils of their own.
So, my recommendation is to form loose, non-governmental civic associations to deal with practical civic & social issues, and let your own personal philosophical worldview govern your individual behavior. Meanwhile, I suspect that a "new belief" system is already emerging, along the lines of my own personal Enformationism worldview. Perhaps, by the end of this century that enformed (inter-relationship structured) "belief" will even become common, but not dominant, in the interconnected "participatory" information milieu. :smile:
*1. Universism :
Universism posits that religious philosophy should not be conceived in terms of one's views toward God, but rather the method and attitude with which one approaches religious questions.
http://www.universist.org/
*2. Christianity began with rejection of the Law of Moses that had held Judaism together for centuries, despite their trials & tribulations. But look at Christianity now : the Imperial Roman church and its offspring are crumbling into "spiritual but not religious" segments, searching for freedom from the "creeds of men"
Loved that Star Trek episode, but I don't think we will be able to throw a future ASI into a shutdown by behaving randomly illogical. :lol: Although it might be worth trying if it's about to make us extinct! :scream:
I don't know much about Taoism. Have you read Capra's Tao of physics?
If you have, was it worth reading?
I tend to default to the Stephen Mitchell translation. That was the one I got started on. I like the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English version too.
As I see it, one of the main causes of pointless discussions here on the forum is the failure to define terms at the beginning. If you want talk about what "consciousness" means, that's fine. But if you want to talk about specific issues related to consciousness and the discussion gets bogged down in arguments about definitions, it's frustrating. When I start a discussion involving metaphysics, I try to be very explicit about what I mean. Even when I do that, I have to struggle to keep the discussion on topic.
Quoting universeness
As I noted in my previous post and above, people who are interested in discussing the meaning of "metaphysics" or any other term should do so. I have no issue with that.
Yep, I noticed!
:lol: Too much woo for me.
Yeah, I suspected as much when it was recommended to me.
I will scratch it off my list. :up:
As I've said many times before, one of the biggest causes of disagreement on the forum, and in philosophy in general, is people mistaking physics for metaphysics and visa versa. The tenets of Taoism are metaphysical principles. The tenets of quantum mechanics are physical, scientific principles. Reading "The Tao of Physics" many years ago was one of the first times I became aware of the difference.
Yep, could be worth a read, based also on the wiki comment:
Leon M. Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and current Director Emeritus of Fermilab, criticized both The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters in his 1993 book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
Quoting T Clark
So, could be a useful read then for those who are not already aware of the difference.
I certainly have no objection. Many people disagree with me on this. On the other hand, would you suggest someone watching "Plan 9 From Outer Space," or "Biodome" with Pauly Shore in order to learn what a good movie is like.
I had to look up Biodome with Pauly Shore, (I did like Jack Black's tenacious D!)
I like to listen to someone passionately talk about a book or song or movie that had a big influence in their life and I like to contemplate their reasoning as they present it.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos changed my life and his books became very important to me also. That is the basis of my interest in what inspires others and why.
To be honest, and I'm not trying to be provocative, I gave my daughter a copy of "The God Delusion" as an example of a really bad book.
One man's meat is another man's poison. The only solution is to accommodate as many tastes as possible without compromising individual autonomy.
Not to be argumentative, but saying something is a matter of taste is not the same as saying it is a matter of opinion. Be that as it may, in either case I agree with your sentiment.
Well, that's just your opinion on the matter of individual taste!
I guess we could have a discussion on the meanings of "taste" and "opinion." Let's not and leave things where they are.
Are you asking for a profession of faith? The god-model of Enformationism is a product of my own imagination, and I believe in it implicitly. Do you have a comprehensive personal worldview? How much credence do you place in its tenets? Incredulity toward alternative creeds, even those that are held by billions of rational humans, is a sign of healthy skepticism. But blanket skepticism is self-sabotaging for a philosopher.
FYI, I don't believe that the ultimate mind-model of Enformationism is Real : instead it is Ideal, an idea, a general concept, a universal*1. A god-model is useful only to the degree it can be instantiated in the particular world. For example, we observe instances of human creativity in the Arts & Sciences, of which the postulated Creator is the exemplar. We know of things taking on novel forms in Evolution, due to selection of instances of fitness, and the Enformer is the epitome (perfection) of enforming. Natural Selection chooses entities based on fitness criteria. And the Programmer of the evolutionary algorithm is the ultimate critic of fitness. Or, did you believe Nature "just happened" for no reason? If so, I have some fairy stories for you.
Except for proposing a hypothetical philosophical Origin Story, Enformationism is a form of Humanism*2. Like ancient Philosophy, it proposes an ultimate Cause & Reason for the logical organization of the physical & metaphysical realms of the world : e.g. Logos. Like modern Deism it bases its frame for finite Reality upon the Axiom of Infinite Potential. Physical Science gives us reasons to believe that the world began billions of years ago, like a seed with the potential to become a great oak.
But materialist science emerged in the middle of a long-running story, and meekly accepts the mysterious emergence of Nature from the unknown without question. So, unlike Philosophy, it has no need for conceptual germs or implicit potentials. Yet, since we observe "intents & purposes" in the space-time world, why not look for evidence of a kernal of Potential in the beginning? Personally, what scientists blandly call the mathematical "Singularity" preceding the Big Bang, is a likely candidate for the Program of Enformation that drives Evolution. Do you have a better idea? :smile:
PS__I don't believe in ideals such as Democracy, except as they serve as a guide to practice in the real world. I place no credence in anything outside of space-time, except to the extent that it provides a starting point for logical reasoning : Axiom.
*1. Universals :
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things.
___Wiki
*2. Humanism :
[i]***An outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.
***A system of thought criticized as being centered on the notion of the rational, autonomous self and ignoring the unintegrated and conditioned nature of the individual.
***Humanism is an approach to life based on reason and our common humanity, recognizing that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone.[/i]
Nature provides oxygen, water, and some food but it takes human effort to get that water and food. Just meeting all of the people's needs violates the law of nature and when we violate the laws of nature we get bad results. I do not think that is a good thing.
Second, where is the money to come from for all the free things? And should everyone get the same amount of free things?
What do you mean by robust checks and balances?
Quoting universeness
I must argue the universe is not supernatural and that being sure of ourselves when we do not have all the information is foolish. I repeat, wisdom starts with "I do not know". An open mind and ability to speculate is very important to progress. We do not want to repeat the mistake of the Church, do we?
We have made so many mistakes. Because in our ignorance we held false beliefs. For example, native Americans were concerned about protecting nature and thought of the whole earth as a living organism
Not until we did severe damage to the earth did we realize they were right. People are still denying their behavior is damaging the earth while they pray to God to be a good father who takes good care of them. I am not one of those people, but seeing the earth and perhaps the universe as a living organism we do not fully understand is important to me. What I do not know is important and I am slamming the door shut knowing of my ignorance.
Deism does not have an intervening God. That is why it is separate from Protestants and Catholics.
In my opinion, your suggestion, suggests you have good taste, when it comes to choosing what to discuss. I am sure you would agree that taste has a social, behavioural aspect to it and it is not merely preferential. I might have a strong opinion that someone is really unattractive, but to say so to their face would be in very bad taste. So, I fully recognise the difference between the two terms, depending on the context they are used, and I am sure you understand the clear relationship between the two terms.
I agree that in this case, it not worth our time to get 'bogged' down in discussion about the different contextual meanings between 'opinion' and 'taste.'
Seems like a moot question, since in your next sentence, you profess your implicit credence level in what you have just labelled YOUR 'god-model of Enformationism,' confirming that your proposals are modelled on god posits. God of the gaps imo.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, and I often indicate the credence level I assign by using the words 'I am.'
Examples would be: I AM a socialist, I AM a secular humanist, I AM an atheist.
Quoting Gnomon
That's an unwise claim, that is as ill-advised as 'all men or women or Americans or black people or white people or christians are ....' People do use such phrases all the time, but there are times, when it's very important to recognise that YOU or anyone making such a statement has not actually identified this 'billions of rational humans,' as an existent group, that is personally, significantly invested in a 'creed.'
I remember being quite bemused in my youth when I was informed by various sources (including my atheist mother and father,) that we were protestants???? and certain other families in the local area were Catholics????? One of my best friends in my youth was a 'catholic' and I was labelled 'protestant.'
These labels meant ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to either of us. Putting such labels on 'billions of rational humans,' is first and foremost, IRRATIONAL, and you know yourself that you have no idea, regarding the personal level of credence that an individual gives to a creed badge, that has been stuck on them by others.
I am with Richard Dawkins who states that calling ANY child Moslem, Christian, Hindu, Atheist, etc is a truly heinous and pernicious act. Any incredulity I feel towards a theist or theosophist is an incredulity related to their personal rationale. I will make such personal judgements, on any result, of the application, of an individuals rationale. Such IS NOT targeted exclusively at theism.
Quoting Gnomon
Ok, so you declare enformationism as 'unreal,' then. It is merely a posit, in which you echo/update the concept of the platonic forms or Aristotelian ideals. If that is the case then I will personally file away enformationism accordingly, next to Plato's forms, and move on, as if that's all it is, then our exchange on the topic can complete (for this thread at least.)
Quoting Gnomon
I create oil paintings and have used religion as a theme, but not in a positive way. I assume you would consider this to be valid human creativity?
Quoting Gnomon
Natural selection has no intent, if you think it does then PROVE IT! If you can't, then you don't need to offer me more of YOUR fairy stories. Your claim that natural selection has some esoteric intent IS one of YOUR fairy stories, imo.
Quoting Gnomon
In what way is Enformationism humanist? Humanism is human-centric, it does NOT present humans as nothing more than an inferior version of an ideal form!!
Quoting Gnomon Nothing in 'material' science, is accepted 'meekly,' or 'without question,' that only happens in theism or mysticism. We observe intent and purpose in lifeforms like humans. We observe 'natural processes' in spacetime that happened due to very large variety combining in every way possible, over a very large timescale.
There are many 'better' ideas that those you present, yes, and they have much more actual evidence than your proposals offer. Mtheory or CCC, (supported by hawking points, which is in turn supported by the data from the Wmap project and the Planck project) is far more credible than your proposals
Quoting Gnomon
Democracy is a political and social necessity for creating a benevolent humanity.
If you 'don't believe' in democracy, then you must never be given any political power.
You can't fool me. You're pretending to agree with me, all the while trying to get me involved in a discussion about the words. It won't work.
Sorry. This forum's discussions are mostly Analytical & Abstract & Masculine, so they are seldom about practical applications of philosophical concepts. However, a correspondent from a previous forum (Cathy), recently contacted me, noting that her current project is a blog/forum about "purposeful action". You can check it out at https://dialogosconnect.com/ . :smile:
"For Charles S. Peirce, dialogos via semiosis is the essence of thought"
___Quote from DialogosConnect
:rofl:
Quoting universeness
:clap: :smirk:
:100:
If by "democracy" you also mean economic democracy, then I agree. :up:
Human effort can be replaced or augmented by automated systems.
Quoting Athena
Which 'laws of nature' are you referring to that we should fear violating?
Quoting Athena
Money is a human invented means of exchange, which has proven to be, and has even been labelled as, 'the root of all evil.' A resource based economy, with a high level of automation, needs no money as a means of exchange. Base exemplars are:
and
Quoting Athena
That's a big topic Athena. I can offer you some basic viewpoints, which I support and I am willing to offer more details if you want them.
1. No more party based politics.
2. A new layered authority system which is democratically elected but has a political structure at the top and layered structures of elected citizen representative stakeholders, alongside, to moderate and scrutinise governmental policy. No second 'house of aristocrats, or plutocrats or house of political party representatives
3. Totally open governance with full disclosure from all members in governance.
If you want to be trusted with very high authority and power, then you must be open at all times, to full investigation by an independent group. If it is proved that you have acted in nefarious ways, then you can be forced out of office immediately. The current system of scrutiny of top politicians, currently holding power, is too weak and it needs to be 'shored up' and strengthened.
Quoting Athena
:clap:
Quoting Athena
In life, If the 'urgency' of a decision overwhelms my ability to have access to all available information and does not allow me to take the time, to make a well researched decision, then I, like most people, will make the best judgement I can at the time. If full information is unavailable, no matter what time you have at your disposal, then I will seek to have a predominance of supporting evidence, before I take action. We do not want to repeat any historical errors, especially those made by theists. Let's also remain very determined, not to be fooled, in the same ways some/most/all of the people have been fooled in the past.
Quoting Athena
That's all well and good Athena but you also have to protect against those, whose religious dogma tells them, that the Earth is disposable, as this life is only prep and a test of their suitability to join their god in its REAL world. Why worry about climate change, if you believe your god can fix it anytime it wants to and if it's not fixed, it's because their god wants it that way!
Quoting Athena
I am familiar with the definition of deism.
:lol: Yeah, your a wile e 'auld' coyote of an interlocuter Mr Clark, but I suspect you would not have it any other way!
No. My hypothetical proposals, as described in the Enformationism thesis, are modeled on cutting edge Information Theory & Quantum Physics. The "god-posit" emerged logically from the cosmic implications of those fundamental sciences. Especially Plato's notion of "Logos"*1.
As a layman-with-nothing-to-lose myself, I am more open about the contributions of ancient philosophers to modern worldviews and cosmologies. For example, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf, in The Ascent of Information, admits the similarity of his technical sounding term "Dataome" to the New Agey term "Noosphere" of paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and mathematician Ed LeRoy. Unlike them though, he doesn't extend his InfoSphere (mind field) to its logical implication of an original Cause (Enformer).
Nevertheless, your unconcealed prejudice against (contempt for) Meta-Physical concepts makes discussion of such non-empirical-but-rational ideas not "moot", but off-the-table. Anyway, I have enjoyed the opportunity to respond to your gauntlet challenges, which ironically contribute to the evolution of the Enformationism thesis. They are worded in somewhat more open-ended & less derogatory-dismissive terms than another interlocutor, who shall remain nameless. But both of you seem innocently unaware that there is a "gap" in Physics, to be filled by Metaphysics : i.e. by Philosophy. :smile:
*1. Platonic Principle Logos :
[i]By the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, logos was the term established to describe the faculty of human reason and the knowledge men had of the known world and of other humans. Plato allowed his characters to engage in the conceit of describing logos as a living being in some of his dialogues.
The Greek word "logos" means "order," "word," and "reason." It indicates a rational explanation in contrast to a mythological explanation.[/i]
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Logos.
*2. Noosphere :
[i]a postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships (frequently with reference to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin).
"creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere"[/i]
___Wiki
*3. Metaphysics vs Physics :
Physics is defined, in its simplest form, as the study of matter and energy and how those two interact, while metaphysics deals with the ideas that dont abide by scientific logic and theories.
https://allthedifferences.com/metaphysics-vs-physics/
Well, I favour a money free, resource based, global economy, but only if it is democratically voted for, by a majority of stakeholders and that consent is regularly renewed.
On the term 'economic democracy,' wiki offered:
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift decision-making power from corporate managers and corporate shareholders to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, customers, suppliers, neighbours and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
Based on the description above, and especially the words underlined, I applaud the intention, as a step forwards against the excesses of capitalism. A small step towards the money free, resource based society I support.
I have enjoyed the exchange as well Gnomon. You are an interesting intellect with some rather eccentric notions, imo (no camouflaged insult intended).
Quoting Alkis PiskasOK, but a continuous voltage probably isnt actually continuous since it is based on discreet charges of elementary particles, admittedly over non-discreet interactions.
All those can be produced to arbitrary precision with value holding only discreet values, which is why I dont think theres a proof of it. None of this constitutes even evidence, let alone proof. As I said, I suspect the same, but to prove it would involve measurement to infinite precision.
Sorry, but signals by man are no more analogue or discreet than natural ones. A computer signal for instance is quite variable and gates must operate on spec through a range of expected input voltages.
And I dont. Talking about something doesnt make it so.
This makes no sense. If you claim a proof on non-discreetness, then you also have your proof against said illusion. Anyway, neither of us lays claim of a discreet/digital waves and voltages, so not sure why you find the need to disprove it.
Quoting universenessThat is true of every form of energy. You burn coal, you get the same mass loss from the same generated power. Remember mass energy equivalence?
Did they take into consideration an exponential growth in demand? Yes, I agree that 100% can be (and will be) met. Something has to happen to that growth then. I said as much above.
Quoting universenessIf you grow by 1 person a day (or any linear rate) forever, eventually theres so many people that the average number of new people per person approaches 1, the no-growth value. This is not true of exponential growth, which is not possible in the long run because you can only spread the people out to vacant places so fast.
OK, building materials then. I already said that.
They were still in an environment for which they were physically evolved.
Said ship has neither the resources nor the time (millennia) to send probes out to prospective destinations. If this method is to be utilized, it should be done from the home base where the waiting time for results is less of an issue.
Returns? Cant it just phone home?
Find a system that can properly deal with such an inevitability. I said a competent leader, but I did not suggest an all-powerful position.
Quoting universenessWhy? Ive witnessed the above. It goes on every day.
I suppose, but I see it more of a failure to do the right thing rather than putting it to a popular vote in the first place.
I dont think they were. The pros and cons were spelled out quite clearly and without bias.
Quoting universenessWhat justice? Its what they do. There was nothing underhanded or illegal about it. You euthanize people after a while, making room for the next round. She was kept sedated almost all the time before then. They do that part here. The nursing homes like nice cooperative residents.
None taken. I was referring to my own expression of it. I am very much a cynic. Ive been complimented on it even.
I think people should discuss, honestly, any perceived injustices employed in any 'cultural identity' they feel emotionally tied to. and I agree that they may have to 'get rid of' any traditional cultural edicts or behaviour/attitudes which cause 'unfair' treatment of others.
I was asking about the form that this recognition would take. You didnt answer that, but instead listed some things that maybe should be recognized. The homemaker for sure. My wife held few jobs, but contributed no less to the effort than did I. The kids were never in day care.
About writing stories: People do that for a living, but what if youre not sufficiently talented? Are you still a contributor if nobody reads your work?
What do you mean by home carer that is a relative? Couldnt really parse that.
I would not want to be on the top sports team then, even if I had the capability. Not worth the incredible effort involved.
That they are, which would make a simulation of our universe impossible with the sort of architecture we know, no matter how scaled up in size and power.
Theyre usually called metadata. Theyre not redundant since the packet would fail in its purpose without them. Theyre sort of like the address on a letter, not part of the payload within, but still necessary. Parity might be redundant, but is there for correction of small errors during transmission. How is any of this relevant to the quarks? I guess thats below.
A packet is a message between two entities using a protocol agreed upon by both. Why would these two entities wish to communicate something about a particle? What message are you envisioning? If I said quark to you (the receiving entity), what would you do with that message? Just trying to grasp what youre talking about.
There is no nuclear fission or fusion occurring when you burn a lump of coal.
Mass energy equivalence holds, when you burn a lump of coal, yes, but the energy amounts involved in the conversion is tiny for a lump of coal and is, by comparison, enormous for nuclear fission or fusion.
Quoting noAxioms
Have a look at: Growth in energy demand, eg:
[b]For a long time, growth in the world and the U. S. energy consumption as a function of time, follow what is known as an exponential function. Now it looks like we have switched to linear growth, but time will tell if this is a permanent change. The exponential increase is characterized as follows. The amount of change (increase in energy consumption) per unit time is proportional to the quantity (or consumption) at that time.
[math] \frac{?N}{?t}?N[/math]
or
[math]\frac{?N}{?t}=?N [/math]
Where Greek letter ?(delta) is the change or increment of the variable and ? (lambda) is the growth rate. After some mathematical methods, it can be shown that the equation changes to the form
[math]N={N_0}e^{?t}[/math]
where e is a constant = 2.71[/b]
Quoting noAxioms
No, not just building materials. We might grow excess food in space and transfer it to Earth, we may tap fuel sources such as extraterrestial hydrogen etc. Any resource currently in space that would prove useful to human endeavour, survival and expansion will be utilised, as it's currently serving no other purpose. If we discover that a resource IS serving some other useful purpose, where it is, then we should tap it very wisely or not at all.
Quoting noAxioms
:grin: Seems like you have already set your own preconditions for our imaginary trip, ship and crew!
Quoting noAxioms
I'm sure it will but it can't phone home any samples it collected.
I assume you are against the concept of 'brain wiping' anyone and if you are witnessing 'brain wiping,' everyday, then I hope you are speaking out against it, in the same way you would speak out against any mental or physical crime you were witnessing daily. That's why I suggested you sound a bit mad sometimes in your turn of phrase. I assume you are not a fan of the current school curriculum content where you live or/and you don't approve of how some parents choose to inform or educate their children.
I have also witnessed what I would consider a biased or imbalanced approach to informing the young but I think 'brain wiping' is too emotive and more in-line with dystopian visions such as Orwell's 1984.
Quoting noAxioms
Would you allow people to end their life, if continuation means daily suffering with no or very little chance of improvement? What would you have done differently for your grandparent, when you consider her medical status at the time?
Quoting noAxioms
:halo:
Quoting noAxioms
I already answered this. The basic means of survival will be free, that's the recognition. There will also be community support in place, so that you are also able to pursue other interests, as well as looking after a home, or caring for other people etc. Future automated/robotic expert systems, have the potential be a great help here, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, you would still be a contributor, as long as you wanted to try. Liking someone's writings, is subjective, so, there will be a 'most popular' list, as there is now. Anyone can publish (we are kind of there now, with some free publishing sites). How popular you become, would be down to what reviews you get. But you don't publish for profit or to earn a living(you would already get all you need for free.) You publish because that's your vocation.
Quoting noAxioms
A son/daughter/niece/nephew etc who daily cares for an unwell mother/father/sibling/aunt/uncle etc.
Quoting noAxioms
We all have different feelings of vocation noAxioms. I loved my times as a teacher and I would have done that job for free as long as I could live at a similar level as I lived via my salary. But there did come a time when I wanted to do something new. Such options should be available to all, as a birth right imo.
Read more carefully! I used the word metadata in the next sentence of the quote you used:
Quoting universeness
Any data which is not part of the actual data packet payload, is labelled redundant data. The fact it is required to successfully send and receive the data packet is irrelevant to the fact that such data is redundant, in the same way the stamp and envelope and paper that a hand written snail mail letter uses, is redundant. It's only the textual/imagery content of a snail mail letter that is not redundant. That is taught to all pupils aged 13+ in secondary school, Computing science courses and is based on standard concepts used in the field of computer networking in the UK.
Quoting noAxioms
I know, but a data packet is a more often than not, a message fragment. Many fragments make up the 'message' or the picture or the movie or audio clip. The internet is a packet switching network.
A quark could therefore be quantised into a series of lower level data fundamentals and be 'processed' into any of the 'quark' variants (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom). These could then be combined by 'processes' into atoms and then molecules etc. This would of-course require other fundamental data fragments that can be combined to create other basics such as a photon, gluon, electron etc.
Quoting noAxioms
For the same reasons that a stand alone computer processes the pixels of a bit map onto an output device to produce a picture that has meaning to a human. For the same reasons we have for networking computers together. Processes can be performed on the payloads of received fragment data packets, which then reside in RAM space or are stored more permanently in backing storage.
So, yes, if YOU as the programmer instructed 'make up-quark,' using some high level or low level programming code, then a program would be executed, which used stored data to create an up-quark.
Perhaps one day we will have the tech to create a REAL up-quark instead of a simulated or emulated one, displayed on some output media.
You mean that this is not continuous?
Because if you think that this is not actually continuous and it is not a proof that voltage is continuous and that the principle of voltage continuity is wrong, and so on, then most probably nothing is continuous for you and, in fact, there's no proof about anything.
But even something as simple as a human 'Mexican wave,' looks continuous from a distance.
Water waves look continuous, but both water waves and a human Mexican wave are actually 'undulations' of discrete quanta.
Even the graph you posted is made up of 'dots,' and would be stored in the backing storgae of a computer as a grid of pixels (PIcture X ELementS) or as a vectored file. A file which stores a mathematical description of an image rather than actual pixel codes.
As @180 Proof 'points' out, pointillism is a whole art form. 10 most famous pointillism artists.
Interesting. But do you have anything that shows that? Because until now, I have not seen any natural wave/frequency that is discrete. As I already mentioned, only artifitial/digital frequencies are discreete. Then you say "wave look continuous". How else can we show that they are continuous? Just talking about discrete quanta, quantum packets, etc. does not show anything and it is certainly not a proof that the physical universe is digital/discrete.
I have already presented images showing that sound, voltage etc, frequencies are continuous. I see that this is not enough, so I show below a quantum wave. Even this is continuous.
(https://iai.tv/articles/reality-is-just-a-quantum-wave-function-auid-2024)
This is a computer generated translation of a quantum wave, it's not a picture of a physical wave, physically observed using some lab equipment. Other than picturing in your head, humans standing up and sitting down in sequence, creating the impression of a continuous wave. Consider wave-particle duality or vibrating strings from the standpoint that string theory is a quantum theory, in that the mass spectrum of strings is discrete, so string theory is an example of a quantum theory of gravity.
I accept that string theory remains a theory at present, but consider 'vibration,' and how it can appear to create a waveform, from the fast up and down (undulating motion) of a discrete object. Like the symbols in a drumkit. Have a look at the music example in the clip here about vibration.
If waveforms are really vibrations of objects, then waves are 'made up' of excitations of discrete fundamentals. Wave - particle duality seems to support this BUT, I have read descriptions that go something like. A light wave is made of particles (photons), each of which can act like a wave (such as in single photons (discrete) fired at two slits, still producing a wave pattern on a screen behind the slits.)
So a wave is made of particles, which are waves, made of particles, which are ....... the debate continues for lack of evidence of a definite endpoint to the wave-particle regression.
In the article you cite we have:
[b]Configuration space
One such framework is configuration space. Configuration space representations were introduced in the nineteenth century to provide more rigorous and elegant formulations of classical mechanics. However, they become even more indispensable in quantum mechanics. In configuration space, as the name suggests, each point corresponds to a total configuration: a complete specification of determinate locations for each particle in a given system. This means configuration spaces used to represent a system of particles with apparent locations in three-dimensional space will be 3N-dimensional, where N is the number of particles. That is to say that each point in space will be labelled by 3N numbers. For a system with two particles, the configuration space is six-dimensional and a point in space (a configuration) can be provided by six numbers where the first three correspond to the x, y, and z coordinates[/b]
This describes space as a collection of discrete 'points' or coordinates, but is also a spacetime continuum when taken as a totality.
OK.
Quoting universeness
You cannot take a picture of a frequency wave! Only of a sea wave! :grin:
Wave 'frequency,' only refers to how many wavelengths pass a given point per second, even the frequency of sea waves can be measured. A sea wave IS a 'frequency wave,' you can take pictures of waves in any physical medium, string, rope, rubber, wind, lightning etc. Taking real physical pictures of sub-atomic waves or quantum waves is beyond the capabilities of our current tech.
OK
Anyway, I think it remans very difficult to prove that at a fundamental level, the universe is quantum, as we have no current (EDIT: accepted as correct), quantum theory of gravity. No graviton has ever been found yet, but perhaps gravity is not a force and therefore has no delivery/messenger particle. I wish I had a physics PHD.
Keep digging into and insisting in quantum reality, as you do here, and you will get one! :grin:
:blush: :up:
Compared to the repressive & un-camouflaged put-downs of my un-named non-interlocutor on TPF, that is high praise! My posts are not intended to be regurgitations of conventional philosophical or scientific doctrines (approximations of truth). Instead, they are my idiosyncratic interpretations of the leading edge of an emerging new information-centric paradigm. Novelty usually emerges from off-center. :smile:
Enformationism :
This informal thesis does not present any new scientific evidence, or novel philosophical analysis. It merely suggests a new perspective on an old enigma : what is reality? The so-called Information Age that began in the 20th century, has now come of age in the 21st century. So I have turned to the cutting-edge Information Sciences in an attempt to formulate my own personal answer to the perennial puzzles of Ontology, the science of Existence.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
? Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli
One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
Bohr
Good choice of quotes! Long may your quest for new knowledge continue.
All hail true seekers! :flower:
I was sent this entry from Victor Toth (popular physics poster on Quora) by the Quora system.
It was his response to the question:
Do all bosons have particle-wave duality?
I found his answer informative, as it highlights some of the confusions that people have, out in the lay world (me included). I think its related to our exchange here, regarding an analogue/discrete fundamental structure to our universe. Sorry it's physics based (Alkis) but I think it IS informative.
[i][b]No, neither bosons nor anything has wave-particle duality; it is a fancy phrase that is used sometimes by way of a vague explanation of how subatomic particles behave.
Before I explain further though, let me ask a much more mundane question. Does light have wave-particle duality? And I dont mean the quantum field theory of light, just ordinary, classical, 19th century optics.
I mean, we know that light is a wave, right? Yet sometimes, we see pencil sharp rays of light. Lenses focus images with amazing clarity. How can that be a wave?
Ask anyone with a decent understanding of wave optics and theyll give you a sensible answer: yes, theres a wave front formed by that lens. But those waves arrive, say, at your projection screen (or the retina of your eye) in such a way that most of the waves cancel each other out. One wave arrives with a positive phase, another with a negative phase. The result is zero. Only in select spots will the interference be mostly constructive. And lo and behold, these select spots correspond to the Newtonian (of Fermatian?) view of light as particles following the path of shortest time from the point of emission to the point of absorption.
In other words, under a broad range of circumstances something that is fundamentally wavy can mimic particle-like behavior. We have electromagnetic waves, yet we end up seeing rays of light and can even conceptualize light, in the form of geometric optics, as a stream of tiny particles.
How tiny? Our best theory of matter, the Standard Model of particle physics, is a theory of interacting quantum fields. Just like in the case of wavy classical fields, we can also have wavy quantum fields do constructive and destructive interference and exhibit geometric behavior. One crucial difference is that when we work out a quantum field, its energy levels at any given frequency will be quantized, coming in discrete steps. Consequently, when the geometric behavior becomes prominent, we will see a ray as a series of particles (individual units of quantized energy at that particular frequency): photons in the case of light, other particles in the case of other fields.
But, I hope, the above description of how wavy light can still produce geometric light rays perhaps helps remove a little bit of the mystery hidden behind fancy phrases like wave-particle duality.
Then again, this phrase also has another meaning, albeit closely related. In the quantum theory of particles (that is, ordinary quantum mechanics, not quantum field theory) a particle is still a point-like thing that exists on its own right, not as an excitation of some field. But where it is remains indeterminate to some extent: its location is given in the form of the wavefunction, a probability amplitude that tells us not where the particle is but the probability of finding it at different places. So there is a probability wave vs. a supposedly physical particle.
But I mentioned this last because quantum particle theory is not considered fundamental anymore, more like a limiting case of quantum field theory. Of course theres still also a wavefunction in quantum field theory, representing the state of the system, but it is not to be confused with the fields themselves that constitute the system but I digress. Keep that thing about optics in mind. An ordinary ray of light can be seen as either a wave or as a ray of tiny particles depending on how you look at it.[/b][/i]
I just wanted to source a couple of 'expert' type responses, to our analogue/digital exchange, I know the discussion on this site must favour 'philosophical' musings, but useful input from expertise in an issue under discussion can assist the direction of any philosophical musings on said issue, imo.
FROM: [b]Kip Ingram
PhD in Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering (Graduated 1992)Dec 17
All quantum entities are described by wave functions (when you are using standard quantum mechanics). You can associate a wave function with each boson (or with each group of bosons - when youre dealing with a group you cant always identify well-defined wave functions for the individual bosons).
You cant observe a systems wave function, but there are things you can observer. When you do so, you will get some value for the thing you are observing, and you will send the system into a new quantum state. What quantum state it goes into depends on what you are observing. For example, there is a particular set of possible new wave functions associated with position observation, and there is another particular set associated with momentum observation. Because position and momentum are conjugate variables, these to sets do not overlap - their intersection is empty. There is no wave function that corresponds to both a well-defined, exact position and a well-defined, exact momentum. This is the origin of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Wave particle duality is a simple consequence of the fact that some observations (like position observations) will leave the quantum system in a particle-like state, while others (like momentum observation) will leave it in a wave-like state. There is no mystery here - how the system behaves depends on what state its in, and what state its in after you do something to it depends on what you do to it. Do something different to it, it may behave differently. This shouldnt surprise you at all.
What makes all of this interesting and unusual to us is the fact that quantum systems can manifest either of these behavioral types, depending on how you interact with them. Classical systems generally have either wave-like or particle-like behavior, and they stick with it throughout all of our observations. Its the way quantum systems can morph back and forth between the two that makes them exotic to us.
You can think about something similar involving light. Say you have a beam of light come past you. its a plane wave - a big one that stretches out beyond you a long way on all sides. The light is purely of one frequency. Its been going on for a long time, and will continue for a long time. Youre just in this bath of purely mono-chromatic light. Ok, you know that beam is made of photons, but what you might not know is that those photons will each carry precisely the same momentum. You are dealing with photons of a very precise, fixed and constant momentum value. But there is no fixed position - there are photons everywhere, all around you.
What if you wanted a bundle of light that had a very tightly defined position? This would be a little pulse that was all bundled up in one spot. You can have that kind of light too, but if you break that pulse down into a frequency spectrum using Fourier analysis, youll find that its a mixture of photons of many different momenta, and hence many different frequencies. You have a tightly defined position now, but the momenta are all over the map. This is an example of wave particle duality thats not quite so completely quantum (it really still is, but its just a little easier for us to intuit about).
I think what Im trying to say here is that its not so much that bosons have wave/particle duality. They do, but that duality is really just a characteristic of our desire to observe conjugate variables. Particle behavior goes with tightly defined positions; wave behavior goes with tightly defined momentum. You can have either, but you cant have both.
Stay safe and well!
Kip[/b]
Thanks for the posts. I'm confident that they won't persuade those who need to be persuaded out of their error. Lots of pseudo-science and bad physics 'idealist / antirealist interpretations' of physical theories plague this site and the purveyors no need to name names :sparkle: are incorrigible.
Nae bother man!
:up:
I said to myself, "What the hell, I might improve my Physics afterall!". So I gave it a try.
Well, I believe my Physics were better before that! :grin:
:halo: Fair enough Alkis, I appreciate you taking the time to read what I posted nonetheless.
No problem, universeness. Enjoy yourselves! :party:
The confusion about wave-nature versus particle-nature in quantum physics was partly solved by the Field Theory, which simply kicks-the-can down the road. But the notion of fields-of-Potential-in-empty-space is fundamental to the emerging Information-centric worldview. The Field per se*1 is nothing-but abstract mathematical information : relationships between ideal points in space. But with the Potential to exhibit materialistic particle properties, or holistic wave properties, "depending on how you look at it".
That last remark is what caused the quantum pioneers to conclude that the intentional-mind-of-the-observer is a participant in the observation : "what you see is what you are looking for". or "reality doesn't exist until you measure it". That spooky mind-power is what Einstein objected to*2, although his own Relativity principle also implied that your Reality depends on your local reference Frame. The (future) "state of the system" is statistically Possible/Probable until it has been Actualized by a dynamic disruption, an intentional act, of the stable state of not-yet-real. Metaphorically, the holistic timeless immaterial balloon of statistical possibility is popped, by a pointed act-of-intention, leaving behind a particular piece of space-time matter.
All of this un-reality is what makes Quantum Theory seem weird to realistic thinkers, and Information theory to seem unreal to concrete thinkers. However, quantum scientists eventually came to accept that both individual Particle state and holistic Wave state are inherent in the mathematical statistical foundations of Nature. That's how I came by the "have your cake and eat it too" BothAnd Principle*3 of my thesis. Einstein objected to the implication that quantum "duality" would undermine his Realistic worldview, based on the classical matter-based physics of Newton. Ironically, both Materialism and Idealism are real & true, depending on how you frame your questions. :smile: :cool:
*1. In quantum theory, "the fields themselves" are like Kant's "ding an sich" : unreal, except to the mind's eye, from an ideal perspective.
*2. Einstein saw Quantum Theory as a means to describe Nature on an atomic level, but he doubted that it upheld "a useful basis for the whole of physics."
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/legacy/quantum-theory
*3. Both/And Principle :
[i]*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
*** Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
*** This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0. ( see Fuzzy Logic )[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Your quote from your liked site:
That claims exponential growth, not linear.
The question had been about other star systems, not stuff in local orbit. But I cannot find it economical to even do it in orbit. The energy needed to supply food to Earth from orbit seems vastly larger than the gain from the food. Sure, electricity is cheap up there, but electricity doesnt get stuff in and out of orbit. Better to just export the electricity, except for the nasty side effect of having a giant WMD in orbit at the disposal of a species known for individuals that tend to take advantage of such capabilities.
Given all the hydrogen we have here, this seems kind of low priority. Also, where are you going to mine it? Jupiter has plenty, but it takes an obscene amount of resources to pull anything out of that gravity well, and then a whole lot more to transport it to Earth. Theres actually not a lot of readily available hydrogen except perhaps through the mining of comets and stuff.
My point is, for the most part, interplanetary and especially interstellar trade isnt worth the effort for most trade goods.
I kind of have, yes. One that works, albeit currently beyond our capabilities. That should change soon. But it takes a stupid long time to do it, so one of the most important features would be reliability and repairability. Things will go wrong and it cant be a fatal problem.
Yes it can, just like the Mars rovers phone back about the samples. The only reason theyd like samples back home is because there is a limited lab there on Mars, but an interstellar probe wouldnt have that problem if complex lab analysis is a requirement.
Quoting universeness
Im not talking about rendering a person a total vegetable. I mean the indoctrination of the masses with lies designed to alter the behavior of the population in favor of whatever goals the administer desires. This goes on every day. Im only against the lies that benefit special interest groups instead of the whole. There are good lies and bad lies, even critical lies. I believe certain things that I rationally know for a fact are false. Sounds contradictory, but its how it works.
The schools here are actually pretty good, albeit a bit on the dangerous side. I suppose that what I disapprove of is what lies parents are allowed to choose their children to be taught in publicly funded schools. My childhood school was not publicly funded, and the schools like that around here collapsed about 6 years ago, but are still going strong where I grew up, which happens to be ground-zero for Trumps chosen secretary of education whose family actually funded construction of my high-school. Good school too, regularly placing tops in academic ratings.
I agree that wiping is too strong. Washing I think is the more usual term. All propaganda is a form of brain washing, designed to instill the masses with something other than the truth. My mother still suffers from some of the propaganda to which she was exposed as a child growing up in a Nazi occupied country.
Oh yes. Do no harm is a joke when the ending torture is considered harm. But keeping bright and comfortable person sedated deprives them of years of quality life.
Screw the sedation at least. If there was unacceptable suffering going on, then yes, she should be allowed the choice. I wasnt aware of any, and she was actually quite fine about a month before when they reduced the sedation long enough for my mothers visit. I wasnt there at the time.
So those recognized get the same thing as those that dont. That isnt recognition. You did great! You get to live. You over there, you dont do anything! You also get to live. Yay system.
Somebody has to do the unpleasant jobs. You make it sound like everybody pursues their hobbies and nothing actually gets done.
We are there. Anyone can blog for instance. Lots (most) of it dies in obscurity, hardly considered a vocation from the viewpoint of the system.
Quoting universenessYou have a very funny definition of redundant then. Ive never seen the term used that way, nor have I ever seen metadata referred to as redundant, and Im in that biz.
Actually, its often only that content that contains redundancy, usually in the form of ECC bits and such, unnecessary if the packet arrives unaltered at its destination.
No disagreement here.
This makes it sound like quarks are not fundamental. Theres different kinds, but theyre not made of parts like say a proton is.
Ah, you seem to be talking about some kind of simulation. Most simulations dont find the need to put every simulated bit on any kind of output media. Mostly they need to know how it behaves, say if a simulated chip performs according to specifications. If it works, great. If it fails, they probably want to dig down to what part didnt do what was expected, something perhaps not saved on the first pass.
Quoting universenessThat part is actually pretty clear. Even without a theory of quantum gravity, the alternative (a classical universe) has long since been falsified. Its quantum, we just dont have the unified theory yet.
Just FYI then: Gravity is not a force under relativity, and relativity isnt a quantum theory (yet). Gravity doesnt travel. Gravitons are the delivery/messanger particle of gravitational waves (that which LIGO detects), and not of gravity (that which your bathroom scale arguably detects). Gravitational waves transmit changes to the gravitational field (the geometry of spacetime). Gravitational waves are energy, lost pretty much permanently every time masses rearrange themselves. For instance, Earths orbit about the sun radiates gravitational waves at the rate of about 200 watts, which, barring everything else, will eventually spin all the planets into the sun after some obscene amount of time. Earths orbital distance is currently changing for 4 different reasons, and that one has the least effect, but will also continue longer than the others.
I differ with you on two of your main projections.
1. No first cause is necessary.
2. No mind with intent is necessary in the creation of the universe.
No it's not, as we can create extraterrestial renewable energy, such as solar power generation stations, built in space. Also renewables can be augmented, by perhaps, new future tech, such as cold fusion. So your worry that demand may utterly outstrip supply in the future remains a concern for now, not a fact.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, might never happen, it's not a fact that it will, for many reasons such as the ones I have suggested above.
Quoting noAxioms
I have suggested making use of the resources available in other planets, moons, and debris belts in THIS solar system, not other star systems. The E-ring around Saturn, produced by the moon Enceladus, for example, may be a source of water, that could be used for further space exploration and development.
Quoting noAxioms
Future tech such as spacelifts, might be very efficient.
Quoting noAxioms
Your musings are in quicksand as you insist on wearing a 'current tech' hat, instead of musing on what future tech may allow us to achieve.
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe, maybe not. It's not a vital point, as long as the necessary info is returned to those who need it, on Earth or otherwise.
Yeah, manipulating people, trying to fool all of the people all of the time! So, not brain wiping but indoctrination.Quoting noAxioms
:grin: Yeah, I have been typing about my secular humanist stance for quite a while now.
Quoting noAxioms
That's just confused thinking imo.
Quoting noAxioms
I am against all private school education, as they are full of indoctrination, bias and they are discriminatory. A good education, only if you can afford one, is a vile concept.
I am also against all religious schools.
In all honesty, it seems to me that your judgement of those who administered palliative care for your grandparent, may be very harsh, but I suppose, such judgements are within your prerogative.
You prefer a system based on 'you don't do anything, that I or even WE, subjectively, decide has not met OUR standards,' so you will be left to rot and starve or freeze to death?
Quoting noAxioms
Such jobs will be automated or done by those who don't find them unpleasant or will be done by everyone on a shared basis. Everything that needs done, will get done, and your job can also be your hobby. I think if a person was given everything they need for free, then they would be very willing to share, in helping to do some of the more unpleasant, but necessary jobs, that cannot yet be automated, for let's say, 1 day a week.
Quoting noAxioms
Who knows what the future holds for a particular item of work memorialised by someone. Most of the most revered works available today were created by people who got very little or no recognition during their lifetime and died in poverty.
I taught computing science for 30+ years. Data redundancy is wide ranging. Duplicated data in database systems, too many copies of data, out-of-date data.
In data packets, error detection and correction data has always been called redundant data.
From wiki:
[b]Data redundancy
In computer main memory, auxiliary storage and computer buses, data redundancy is the existence of data that is additional to the actual data and permits correction of errors in stored or transmitted data.[/b]
The payload in a data packet is the highest priority, just like the contents of a snail mail parcel is the most important part of the parcel. I fail to understand why you have a problem (as an IT specialist) in accepting the term redundant data for any data in a transmittable data packet, which is not part of the payload. It is redundant because it is disposable. The fact that something is ultimately redundant, does not mean it cannot be used for a function before confirming its redundancy fate. The term 'disposable' is a similar concept.
Quarks would not be fundamental, if the smallest bit of the information which 'defines' a Quark or a photon, is THEE fundamental of the structure of the universe.
Quoting noAxioms
No, not a simulation or emulation. I used the word REAL. So, to convince me that information is THEE universal fundamental, I would need to witness a REAL machine like the food replicators on Star Trek, producing REAL food, from information only, not naturally produced seeds or animal flesh/produce!
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, so you have got past the a wave is made of quanta, which are waves, made of quanta, which are waves .........?
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
So gravitational waves quantise to gravitons but gravity does not consist of gravitons, gravity is not a force under relativity. So, are you saying gravity IS a force in a non-relativistic frame and if it is, are you suggesting that in a non-relativistic frame, gravity is quantisable or not?
Quoting universeness
The discrete vs continuous confusion seems to derive from two ways of interrogating Reality. Natural processes are continuous & analog, while human analysis (mathematics) is discontinuous & digital. We perceive the movie, but we conceive the individual frames. Besides, holistic Philosophical "musings" are mostly concerned with general systems, while reductive Scientific analysis is focused on parts & details.
Apparently, even the "experts" are confused about how best to "frame" reality. Google "physics analog or discrete", or "physics analog vs digital", and you will get a long list of arguments & interpretations pro & con. That either/or question seems to be a long-running debate on Quora. So, I doubt that the philosophical implications (Holism vs Reductionism) will be finally settled anytime soon.
But, that's not a problem for my BothAnd worldview. In any case, "philosophical musings" and "scientific expertise" are different ways of looking at one Reality. Philosophical musings (analogue) are about mental meanings, while Scientific analysis (reductive) is about physical results. Unfortunately, Quantum Physics is interrogating Nature on a fundamental level, on the borderline between analog wholes and digital distinctions. Thus, as usual, the confusion arises from failure to define our frames of reference : Science or Philosophy ; little pieces or big picture. :smile:
"Simply put, analog and digital refer to two different methods of encoding information on to a signal"
__Bob Myers, Quora
"Both are the two parts of ONE process".
__Prasad Kulkarni, Quora
What all these things have in common is that they deal with signals from the real world: analog to digital. The real world is analog fundamentally nature is not digital and thats where our story begins.
https://engineering.utdallas.edu/news/archive/2018-summer/the-real-world-is-analog/
:100: :up:
@Agent Smith
Back to the OP topic regarding the probability of evolutionary emergence of a Technological Singularity. In astro-biologist Caleb Scharf's, The Ascent of Information, he eventually gets around to speculation on the future development of his technological analogy to the biological genome. He calls it the Dataome*1, and instead being made of amino acids, it consists of core algorithms ("corgs"). Although it requires physical machines as hosts, the world-wide Dataome is essentially made of mathematical information.
Like their biological predecessors, the "corgs" evolve, and new properties emerge from the same interactive mutating & weeding (heuristic) processes of the cosmic evolutionary algorithm. He muses philosophically : "For the dataome, humans generate the one thing that we have yet to see machines or artificial algorithms produce : original information, real innovation, and open-ended novelty." Yet, he goes on to explore the possibility of something really new. "When we speculate about human transcendence, or technological singularities, or post-human futures, we're missing what's right in front of us". [my bold] Then, he addresses a side-issue : "In science we often struggle with the notion that there is something special about humans, something unique." Our superior information-processing powers (reasoning) perhaps?
In the final chapter, he discusses the roles of Energy, Entropy & Information in bringing about the next stage of Evolution. And he has the temerity to take physicist John A. Wheeler's "it from bit" conjecture seriously. "It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom . . . . an immaterial source and explanation . . ." [my bold] Ironically, he never uses the sci-fi term "Cyborg" (cybernetic organism), but that seems to fit his general direction*2. However, he does liken this evolutionary process to "an informational experiment". Which raises the question -- that as a scientist he is not allowed to ask -- "who is the Experimenter?" My own non-expert thesis does address such logical implications : Who asked the incalculable question*3 about "life, the universe and everything"? To whom does it matter how the cosmic experiment turns out? Who wants to know? :smile: :cool: :nerd:
*1. The Selfish Dataome :
Does the data we produce serve us, or vice versa?
https://nautil.us/the-selfish-dataome-237229/
*2. Do you find the Cyborg notion credible? It combines evolving biology with emergent technology, while, unlike the Borg, presumably retaining top-down control for each cyborganism.
*3. The cosmic question is open-ended. Hence it can only be answered by running the experiment in real-time & real-space. So here we cybernetic organic humans find ourselves as lab-rats with philosophical questions of our own.
That's the catch. Religious apologists, at the end of the day, have to posit a causeless primum movens aka God.
:chin:
In what way are natural processes such as sand production, falling rain, falling snow, seed production etc, etc, analogue?
Quoting Gnomon
I broadly agree but I am more interested in what IS, rather than holistic philosophical musings (as useful as such, can be).
Quoting Gnomon
I agree, and I admire the fact that they remain uninterested in trying to fill any gaps with pure conjecture.
Quoting Gnomon
I agree. That's why no-one should say, I KNOW that the structure of the universe is fundamentally digital, or I KNOW the structure of the universe is fundamentally analogue, because, no one KNOWS for sure, yet. So, a statement such as:
Quoting Gnomon is 'silly.'
If you read through the source you provided, you will see that you cite a privately owned organisation, and they make statements like:
TI reached a decision before TxACE was formed that the best market opportunities for us would be in analog. And in embedded processing, which together enable ubiquitous systems supporting the entire analog-to-digital-to-analog signal-chain.
I assign very little credence to privately owned concerns, driven by 'market opportunities,' instead of factual science.
Quoting Gnomon
But for me, the problem is, that you try to assign the SAME credence levels, to your philosophical musing, as you do to scientific proposals. In fact, on occasion, you even seem to assign a higher credence to your philosophical musings, than you do to current scientific theory.
I have strong objections to that approach.
Well ,let's be careful in the terms we employ here. I am not suggesting a NATURAL evolutionary emergence of a tech singularity (or significantly pivotal breakthrough moment in AI). I am suggesting the future creation of an ASI system via HUMAN intent or even HUMAN intelligent design.
Quoting Gnomon
Mr Sharf has obviously used Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, as the inspiration for his book title.
Mr Sharf has decide to present his notion of the 'Dataome' as something which could have it's own sense of being. In an interview with Columbia News, he states:
"In fact, I propose that the dataome is an alternate living system, in a deeply symbiotic relationship with us. That may sound outrageous, but it seems to fit with many ideas about the nature of information as a thingakin to energy or entropyand what we think life is. In a sense, life is what happens to matter when information takes control."
I agree that he is being a bit outrageous. He seems to be enjoying his work and he seems to support the viewpoint (unlike you) that the structure of the universe is fundamentally data based.
At no point in his work does he support deism or suggest a mind with intent, as the first cause of our universe, in the ways that you do. He admits to employing various techniques to attract as many people as possible to his viewpoints. In defense of metaphors in science writing: Caleb Sharf writes,
"I've also had critics say that they wish I'd just 'stick to the numbers' in describing things like the mass of black holes or the collections of hundreds of billions of stars that constitute galaxies. No talk of buzzing swarms of bees, or vast dandelion heads, or swirling stellar pizzas. According to these readers there is no need, or desire, to try to bring such cosmic structures 'down to earth'. It's a fair point, sometimes you want to feel that such things are untouchable, unknowable. But the simple truth is that scientists themselves constantly make use of analogies, metaphorical devices, and similes. Sometimes it's the only way to build an intuition for a problem, by relating it to something else - Richard Feynman was perhaps one of the greatest players of this game, turning spinning plates into cutting-edge quantum physics and Nobel prizes."
I think you have taken Mr Sharfs metaphor of his dataome as a self-aware entity, too seriously.
Any scientist is completely free to as such questions. Many scientists (too many imo.) remain theists.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes but I think there will be a big difference between a HUMAN cyborg or augmented human and an AGI with biological components. Biological computing is still very much in it's infancy. Any transhuman must be still a free independent with full 'human' rights to autonomy.
Quoting Gnomon
Seems a reasonable way to describe the status quo.
Quoting Gnomon
No, we are only lab rats, if god exists. We have scientific questions as well as philosophical ones.
Quoting Agent Smith
Yep, the only use of the god label for me (and it remains a very weak tether), is as a 'notion' of omniscience, to asymptotically aspire to. I assume we DO NOT want to aspire to the vast majority of the morality standards set out in any religious scripture.
Well, I think @180 proof was just typing about the fact that all current religions, fall very short in offering a credible deity, that could be the first cause mind with intent, that they insist MUST exist, to create our universe. An individual theist can 'invent' their own deity, and coin a new name for it, such as 'enformer.'
As you know, a theist need not have any connection with any 'established' or historical religion.
Theosophists like Aleister Crowley or Rasputin or even satanists or pagans, are all still theists imo.
All I mean is that "religious apologists" posit a first cause and call it "god" though they, in every case I'm aware of, fail to show that it's the same deity referred to in the Bible or Quran or any "sacred scripture" which folk actually worshipped. At most, the cosmological apologetics of theists paradoxically gets them only as far as deism (or god-of-the-gaps like e.g. @Gnomon's "enformer").
:up: :up:
:fire:
Quoting universeness
:smirk:
:clap: Yes, I think all such 'theistic apologetic style,' rumination, leads inevitably back to an 'of the gaps,' supernatural first cause, and for me, that suggestion would be the worst outcome possible, as we would be nothing more, than a product of a dissatisfied deity. If a god wanted/needed to create us, then it cannot be a god, imo.
So, I am atheist, and our strong need for science, is strong evidence, that there are no gods.
Not even a deist god, as if such an entity can create, then it follows that it can intervene, and if it chooses not to, then it is as well not existing, as either way, It's the same result for us. No help from god (no god exists.)
How about the law of survival of the fittest? We can bring out the best in each other or the worst. I think if it were possible to meet all of a person's needs without requiring something of that person, we would get the worst. Nature has its way of killing off the weak. :lol: That is wide open for attack and I hope it is attacked because it may be worth thinking about.
Quoting universeness
Really? That is a false cliche. Around the world, people are living in abject poverty and ignorance and when humans live that far down the ladder of human achievements life is harsh and cruel. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and natural disasters are teaching us just how hard it is to feed the world and we do care. We care very much. In our abundance we imagine things like the Venus Project, but exactly what has the Venus Project contributed to the world?
Quoting universeness
I think replacing the autocratic model of industry with the democratic model and having education for democracy would get us closer to a more equitable social/economic order.
Quoting universeness
Always full information is not available. We have increased our knowledge and our technology for dealing with information but we should never believe we know all there is to know. The universe is too complex for us to believe we know everything about anything. There is a saying, when we think we know God, we know not God and any knowledge is like that. Those who believe they can know the absolute truth, are absolutely dangerous. It is like refusing to believe it is bacteria and viruses that make us ill because we can not see them and the Bible says if we have a problem it begins with our heart and it mentions demons. It took the medical profession over a hundred years from when someone with a microscope saw the bacteria and viruses the acceptance of sanitation being essential to preventing infections. The change happened when those in the medical profession thought, what if that is so? First, only a few experimented with sanitation and finally, there was enough evidence for the truth to be universally accepted. It is by knowing we do not know that makes it possible for us to know.
Yes. That's because rapid Cultural Evolution has emerged from plodding Natural Evolution -- presumably as intended by the Programmer. However, human culture is an emergent continuation of natural evolution, but with focused Logic (Reason) and Energy (Intention). That's what I call "Intelligent Evolution"*1. :nerd:
*1.Intelligent Evolution :
This essay lays-out my hypothesis of how the Creator, in the Enformationism worldview, programmed a physical universe that could in-effect create itself from scratch. By that, I don't mean from absolutely nothing, but from a metaphorical seed or egg of cosmic mathematical potential that cosmologists call the Singularity. From that point of beginning, Evolution began some say, not with a literal bang, but with a magical "voila!" of instant inflation. Since then, our world has been emerging from potential to actual more-or-less as scientists have documented.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Quoting universeness
Yes. He specifically denies any external intention behind the logical processing of Data in the world : "To say that corgs came from elsewhere, outside of the world would be a type of the pathetic fallacy (of assigning intent or human qualities to nature) taken to the idiotic extremes of creationism or intelligent design." To be clear, Enformationism does not "assign intent or human qualities to Nature". Instead, Nature is coasting on momentum from the initial impetus of goal-directed Intention. The only "human qualities" in the natural world, so far, are found in the homo sapiens species.
So, presumably, Scharf, like most cosmologists, just takes for granted (axiomatic) that the Energy & Laws of Nature are eternal*2. But then our physical world was shown by cosmologists to not be Eternal. So, the source of those Causal & Logical inputs can only be external & prior to the finite space-time bubble that we humans inhabit. And that's all I'm saying in the Enformationism thesis : that evolution shows signs of upward progress and purpose*3.
Yet, due to my lack of knowledge (information) about anything super-natural, I take pains to explain that the origin of creative Purpose is not attributed to the anthro-morphic God of Genesis. Instead, I refer to the Source of Information & intention as a logical Principle. So I use labels, such as G*D, Logos & First Cause to avoid the religious implications of more traditional terms. That's also the stance of the non-religious philosophy of Deism*4.
You said that Scharf -- "unlike you" (Gnomon) -- "supports the viewpoint that the structure of the universe is fundamentally data based". Which is also the viewpoint of Enformationism, except that, in place of the narrow term "Data" (datum), I use the more inclusive term "Information" (meaning). So, he & I are in agreement on that fundamental concept. We are not necessarily on the same team, but we are not opponents. :smile:
PS__I just came across an interview with mathematician, cosmologist, and consciousness theorist Roger Penrose. In response to a question about inherent meaning in the universe, he said "In a very certain sense you might say that the universe has a purpose, but I'm not sure what the purpose is." (my bold) That's also my position in the Enformationism thesis. He continues : "However, I would not say that there is something going on that might resonate with a religious perspective." Would you agree, though, that Purpose in Nature should resonate with a Philosophical perspective?
*2. Vacuum Energy :
Prior to the 20th century, the notion of Nothingness with causal properties would be tantamount to the ancient concept of eternal infinitely powerful Spirit (i.e. God). But scientists can now get away with such literal nonsense, in part, because Quantum physics has forced them to accept paradoxical & counter-intuitive properties in Nature.
*3. Purpose & Intention :
Scharf skirts around the notion of Purpose in Nature. However, right after the disparaging quotes above, he does rhapsodize that "The universe is spectacular because it is an engine of invention . . ." Doesn't that sound like Design & Intention instead of Blundering & Accident to you? He goes on to exclaim that "evolution on Earth is like a single run of a single algorithm that invented all of nature".
Note -- To Invent : create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.
Doesn't "invent" imply "intent"?
*4. Deism :
An Enlightenment era response to the Roman Catholic version of Theism, in which the supernatural deity interacts and intervenes with humans via visions & miracles, and rules his people through a human dictator. Deists rejected most of the supernatural stuff, but retained an essential role for a First Cause creator, who must be respected as the quintessence of our world, but not worshipped like a tyrant. The point of Deism is not to seek salvation, but merely understanding.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
I intelligo.
Your visceral antipathy is duly noted. But, for a more sympathetic interpretation, consider that Deism has been called the "god of philosophers" or "god of nature', and is consistently rejected by Theists, due to its lack of a path to salvation from cruel & indifferent Nature. It's also the "god of reason" instead of revelation. Until the 20th century, most philosophers & scientists held some notion of Creator or First Cause to explain the ultimate "why" questions of Cosmology*1.
Even "impious" Aristotle referred to Theology (ultimate knowledge) as "First Philosophy"*2. There is indeed a "gap" in physical Science : it is forced by its physicalist creed to take the causal & organizing forces of Nature for granted -- blind faith in infinite mechanism -- so it has no plausible explanation for our contingent temporal Existence : being & becoming (Ontology)*3. The perverse Multiverse notion merely kicks-the-can of origins down the road to infinity.
Another more positive understanding of Deism is that the Enformer -- far from being an evil tyrant -- as similar to a philosopher or scientist, in that the reason for creation was not due to "dissatisfaction" or narcissistic "need" for worship & adulation, but to curiosity : e.g. "what will happen if I create an autonomous universe with self-conscious creatures, who can reason themselves to a rapport with Nature.
Your "worst outcome possible" is "nothing more" than the super-natural Tyrant of the Abrahamic religions. But your disgust should not apply to the "god of Einstein"*4. Spinoza's rational deity was identified with Nature, but then he assumed that our Cosmos is eternal. If you update Spinoza's god-concept to the 21st century, it would be very similar to that of Enformationism. :cool:
*1. Deist Philosophers & Scientists :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deists
*2. [i]Aristotle developed rival philosophies of metaphysics which to some extent could be understood as an attempt to construct a rational account of the world while explicitly rejecting the superstitious pantheism of their contemporaries. From this point of view, one might even call him an atheist, and certainly he would have been viewed by contemporaries outside the philosophical school as radically impious.
However, Aristotle did clearly believe in some sort of God - as, arguably, did Plato - although what exactly is meant by God in either case may not be entirely obvious and familiar to those of us raised with Abrahamic monotheism. In his metaphysics, Aristotle posited that there must be some single, immortal, unchanging being that was responsible for the wholeness and orderliness of the world, as well as suggesting that there must be unmoved movers who were causally responsible for all action in the universe, but who were not themselves causally influenced by actions.[/i]
https://www.quora.com/Was-Aristotle-an-atheist-agnostic-or-a-pious-man-Do-his-writings-give-any-clue
*3. Metaphysics as being qua Being :
Aristotle himself described his subject matter in a variety of ways: as first philosophy, or the study of being qua being, or wisdom, or theology.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/
*4. Albert Einstein's religious views have been widely studied and often misunderstood. Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God". He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein
Thats what were doing now. Augmenting. Admittedly, the fusion fuel isnt likely to run out in the near term.
It has happened, else the augmentation wouldnt be necessary. I share you confidence that the usage will drop below that line again.
That is very true, but such lifts require a clear path, clear of all the orbital space junk that were currently adding at an exponential rate. Theyre talking of putting one on the moon because its not as expensive there, and the moon hasnt all that much junk in orbit about it yet.
Precisely what a probe is for, yes.
Quoting universenessBut from my point of view, it was a conclusion reached after years of analysis.
Totally agree. Unfortunately, the public education in my home town was pretty awful. I mingled with them during drivers ed of all places and got a good sample of what those schools produced.
Mine actually did a pretty good job, teaching that science is compatible with religion. Only later when the church decided it was the enemy was I forced to choose. I never got that from my school.
Quoting universenessWell theres a reason almost all my dutch relatives do their best to stay away from those institutions. Theyre quite known for it. I personally didnt see any of it since I didnt live there.
Quoting universenessI had asked what the recognition was. Your answer was nothing special. That sounds like poor motivation. No, I had not suggested leaving people to freeze and starve.
If theyre automated, then we live in a zoo. If the tasks are shared, then there needs to be motivation to do your part. The middle suggestion evades the question. The guy who should best do it is busy writing a book nobody will read.
It all sounds a bit like heaven, except not as bad. A life of zero responsibility where all your needs are met by somebody/something else. In heaven, its an eternity and there are no needs to be met, so not even the responsible people have anything to do that matters.
How does one stop black markets from operating?
Van Gogh comes to mind. Cant think of any literary examples, but Im sure theyre there.
Quoting universenessAgree to all, but thats not metadata, nor extra bits in network packets. Redundant data in the cases above is there so if you lose something (a disk, an entire site), the data is backed up elsewhere.
Funny that I worked on a project to reduce redundant data, a de-duplication process designed to reclaim wasted space. Goes to show that some redundancy is just plain wasteful whereas other redundancy (the cases you list) are critical.
Yes, as I pointed out. Parity and ECC bits and all...
This is ECC theyre talking about. Yes, its part of the actual data, and there to prevent costly retransmission of the packet in the cases of minor noise on the line. The bits cost perhaps 10-20% of the payload. Parity bits cost less, but thats just error detection, not correction. Parity is common on disks and sometimes RAM, but ECC is more common in network packets.
Quoting universenessWe again seem to be talking past each other. It sounds like an assertion of one thing out of which everything is composed, like you could break a quark apart into them. If you dont mean that, I dont get what you mean.
They do that now, albeit with difficulty. Far easier to create say a positron out of a not-positron. Happens naturally all the time.
Sounds like an energy conservation violation to me. Even the fictional food replicators needed raw material from which to make its stuff, which is why youd donate your dishes, dirty laundry and sewage back into the system.
A wave of what? A quanta of what?
No. Gravity is treated as a force under Newtonian mechanics. I made no mention of frames in that statement. I dont know what a relativistic frame is as distinct from a non-relativistic one. There are different kinds of frames, but theyre all just arbitrary abstract coordinate systems.
Quoting universeness
Always wondered about the Satanists. I mean, the bible says if you believe in God, you go to heaven. Well, the Satanists believe in God as their sworn enemy. I'm sure the church has an answer to that, but I never asked. It's a funny religion since with most of them it's a test of how good you behave (and of course how much bribes were spread around). Nope. Jesus died so your worship of Satan can be forgiven. Your belief is enough to get you up there. Bet that's going to piss them off when they end up in sort of a prisoner of war camp behind enemy lines. Apparently the death of Jesus didn't forgive the sin of lack of belief. Seems quite incomplete and not very loving of him.
"Einstein's God" is Spinoza's natura naturans (i.e attributes of substance aka (modal) "laws of nature"). :fire:
God means different things to different people. Do you have any idea about the motivation for Spinoza abandoning the [s]Christian[/s] Jewish idea of God?
I see. :up:
Sometimes your actions as a humanitarian, seem to clash with your somewhat pessimistic viewpoints of what it is to be a human being. You regularly state, that you think people are not treated fairly, in any currently active system of governance and within any current system of control, over the means of production, distribution and exchange, but you don't seem to support the only effective ways of changing things for the better.
Statements such as Quoting Athena
Quoting Athena,
don't help, as they contradict. How does 'our abundance' balance with 'hard to feed the world?'
Sounds to me, like the solution IS ideas like the Venus project, which have never been enacted.
Secular humanism, alongside true democratic socialism, ARE the solutions. A resource based, money free, secular humanist, socialist society has never yet been achieved by any human group. Perhaps that's because, too many humans, still think we CAN ONLY live under primeval jungle rules.
You try to jump a massive chasm here. Human intention IS the ORIGIN point of anything that can be labelled as capable of 'intelligent design.' Any suggestion that 'intent' of any kind existed BEFORE LIFE with intent (such as human or hominid life) arrived in this universe, is pure theism/deism. and I totally reject such notions, as woo woo of the gaps. Human intent is NOT a continuation of natural evolution, it is a consequence of natural evolution. It is a 'singularity' happenstance, easily equal to the projected future 'human designed,' tech singularity moment, suggested as ASI.
Quoting Gnomon
Again you seem to back peddle here. The two underlined phrases directly contradict each other! If the above quote is true then why do you keep trying to promote the concept of a manifest 'enformer,' as your 'novel' label for a first cause mind?
Quoting Gnomon
In the same tradition, you seem to be acting like most theists, you try to turn the work of scientists like Caleb Sharf, into conflated support mechanisms for an 'enformer' of the gaps posit.
Quoting Gnomon
No, that's merely your personal interpretation. This is no such reality as a state of nothingness as you need 'something' to even attempt to contemplate such a notion.
Quoting Gnomon
Avoiding religious implications, leaves you with equally woo woo theistic implications.
You are conflating, when you try to connect 'logos' with G*D(or G-D, in Jewish tradition).
Logos can be used to refer to the concept of a deity, but, is also used as:
Logos (UK: /?lo???s, ?l???s/, US: /?lo??o?s/; Ancient Greek: ?????, romanized: lógos, lit.?'word, discourse, or reason') is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric and refers to the appeal to reason that relies on logic or reason, inductive and deductive reasoning.
Quoting Gnomon
How dare this 'curious' god you invoke, take such an irresponsible action, and then accept no responsibility for the consequences and the horrific suffering it caused. This is a vile, self-indulgent, entity you posit, by any decent standard of human morality.
Quoting Gnomon
Einstein and Spinoza had no god posits imo. They just employed wise PC phrases in the times they lived in. They were both atheists imo. The only intent and purpose, that has ever existed, is that which manifests in lifeforms. The most advanced manifestation of such intent and purpose, that we are aware of, is in US. I think Einstein and Spinoza would completely agree with that, if they lived now.
Your enformer manifestation has the basic same bad attributes as the gods in the abrahamic religions.
I think that's because most of them were too scared not to. I suspect many many many were actually atheists, but religion was so successful as a weapon of fear and as an opiate of the masses, that it was very dangerous to be an atheist in those less enlightened times.
Quoting Gnomon
This viewpoint differs in emphasis, from what you posted to @Alkis Piskas with:
Quoting Gnomon
What are you prioritising most here? An enformation posit that supports information, as the universal fundamental for the structure of the universe or the idea that you agree with those who state we don't know if the fundamental structure of the universe is analogue or digital? You seem to significantly alter your emphasis, depending on who you are responding to?
I have probably watched the same interview, and all other offerings, which involves Roger on YouTube.
You will not be surprised that my interpretation is different from yours. To me, Roger makes such statements in a similar vein to the idea that 'in a very certain sense,' the sun rises and sets (because that's exactly what it appear to do, in the sky) when in fact, its the Earth that turns.
Philosophically, yes, it's rational to posit that 'the universe has a purpose,' (because it can seem like that is the case,) and I think that is what Roger is referring to, but such purpose is not universal, it is discrete and ONLY via individual lifeforms such as US (we can also work in common cause) and the first cause of that imo, is when Earth species, especially hominid species, became fully self-aware and could demonstrate intent and purpose.
This may have happened earlier somewhere else in the universe but purpose and intent does not exist 'outside' of this universe or within it, for the majority of the past 13.8 billions years since the big bang.
No deity required, as Roger also often states.
Purpose in nature CAN resonate with a philosophical perspective, BUT there may be no value in proposing any purpose in nature other than through the purpose lifeforms such as humans can demonstrate. Such purpose was not INTENDED by the universe, it is an ability humans can demonstrate as a consequence of natural happenstance and the results of intentionless natural selection.
:clap:
My answer was those who contributed most, would naturally be most revered. Rewards such as fandom, do not justify such imbalanced outcomes, as becoming obnoxiously rich and powerful.
Quoting noAxioms
A zoo suggests the existence of outside visitors who will come and be entertained by viewing your captive status. Who would they be, in your zoo imagery?
Does the fact you are dependent on water, make you a zoo resident? Dependence on automated systems does not assign you zoo status, it's just more efficient than when you had to collect your water from a river. The imperative for doing your part is that everyone will get what they need. The guy writing the book, may also enjoy helping the infirm eat their food etc. You wont know until you sit down and talk with him/her/gender variant, in a reasonable way.
Quoting noAxioms
I have no idea where you get any notion of 'zero responsibility,' from. The complete opposite is the expectation. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need IS the responsibility of all. The punishment for not helping, where you can, and are able to, is not the threat of removing your access to your basic needs, it's the constant non-violent disapproval and ostracisation of what you term layabouts. Perhaps, a very small minority, will suffer, but I am not convinced that an acceptable, individually tailored, solution, could not be found, when any such case arises. If some really do choose to live their life as a curse, then I would still make sure they get what they need to live. We currently do that for serial killers and rapists etc in prison, yes? Not a good life choice imo. Better to find something you 'want to do,' to positively contribute. Especially when you can no longer use poverty, or a lack of access to what you need or being treated unjustly as excuses for bad behaviour.
Quoting noAxioms
Black markets are money based. People can swap/exchange stuff with other people as much as they want, perfectly legal.
I don't fully agree with your assessment of what the term 'data redundancy' encompasses in the field of computing science, but it's a minor difference between us. I had many such differences of opinion with colleagues in the computing science world, during my career.
I once resigned as an examiner and exam setter, due to an academic disagreement with the principle assessor, for a computing science exam level in Scotland.
I do mean that. A quark may be a vibrating string state, for example, in common with all field excitations.
A 'string state' may be physically representable/storable, as a data file. So the data in the data file would be the fundamental, that when processed, produces a vibrating string state called an up-quark or a photon.
Quoting noAxioms
No they don't. A process is not yet available that can create a photon from the data stored in a datafile.
Science can manipulate natural processes, to create a photon, yes, but it can't create a Tbone steak in the way they do it in a star trek food replicator.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't see why? Energy would still be conserved, it would just be converted from massless energy into a Tbone steak.
Quoting noAxioms
A wave of light(electromagnetic radiation) and the quanta of photons, for example.
A wave of light is made of photons, which are waves of light made of photons ........
Quoting noAxioms
But all Newtonian mechanics are within relative reference frames. Are you moving at 75 mph whilst sitting in a car or are you moving at that speed relative to an observer on the pavement?
What is your speed relative to an observer in a space station? Is it the rotational speed of the Earth + the speed of the car?
The speed of light is non-relativistic. It is the same, no matter what reference frame you use.
The law is 'You SHALL NOT add your speed, to the speed of light!'
Quoting noAxioms
If I am being honest here, then I don't have a strong grasp on the clear difference between relativistic and non-relativistic frames, as described in quantum phenomena, but I have tried my best, many times to follow content such as presented in a physics stack-exchange discussion here.
Consider the following, as a response to a google search of 'does gravity have a non-relativistic reference frame?':
"Yes, in fact one of the comments made to a question mentions this. If you stick to Newtonian gravity it's not obvious how a photon acts as a source of gravity, but then photons are inherently relativistic so it's not surprising a non-relativistic approximation doesn't describe them well."
and
"Yes, You can show via conservation of energy arguments that photons confined within a volume (for the sake of argument, the inside of a sealed box with totally reflective surfaces) must produce the same gravitational effect as an amount of matter in the same volume which would have a mass equivalent to the energy of the photons."
From another physics stack exchange discussion here.
No. It's your interpretation that is contradictory. Any signs of direction or intention in Nature are due to the original impetus of the First Cause or Big Bang, whichever you prefer. An arrow shot from a bow will hit the target, not due to any arrow-intention but to the bowman aiming. So I was not assigning intention to the arrow. But in this metaphor, the momentous arrow has spawned a little splinter with a mind of its own. :wink:
Quoting universeness
Again, your interpretation is different from my intention. The original meaning of "Vacuum" was emptiness or void or nothingness. The notion of "vacuum energy" was paradoxical until quantum field theory was interpreted to imply that the field "must be quantized at each and every point in space". Today the notion of energy in emptiness is just another of the many logical paradoxes of quantum theory. When you say "there's no such reality as a state of nothingess" you are referring to the same old paradox of "Zero". Which is an idea, not a real thing. :cool:
A vacuum is essentially a great lack of something https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vacuum
Quoting universeness
For the record, "G*D" (non traditional deity concept) is not equivalent to Jewish "G-D" (fear of offending Yahweh by using his personal name). Here, you are doing the conflating. My reference to Plato's "LOGOS" was explicitly not to a theistic Deity, but to a philosophical Rational Principle in the real world. :nerd:
What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!
___Albert Einstein
Quoting universeness
Apparently, you are appalled by the imperfect world you live in. Yet, you have no one to blame. In my thesis, I blame both the Good and Evil of the world on the hypothetical amoral Experimenter. Fortunately for you, I have broad shoulders, so you can offload your heavy load of disgust onto me. :wink:
Quoting universeness
Again, your mis-interpretation is colored by your prejudice against Metaphysical concepts, and not my hypothesis of an amoral First Cause. The "bad attributes" you refer to are endemic to Reality. So, unless you are ready to abandon Nature, you'll just have to suck-it-up like the rest of us. :joke:
Your matter-bounded interpretation of causation seems to imagine that the chain of Cause & Effect began miraculously (serendipity or chance) in the Big Bang, with no antecedent and no Purpose or Reason. By contrast, Aristotle reasoned that no Actual thing in Nature emerges unless the Potential for that Effect was already inherent in the logical structure of the system -- or imported from outside the system. In this case, the un-bounded (infinite) system of Potential or Possibility is antecedent to space-time reality. I call that logically necessary Principle (Omnipotence -- unlimited power of causation) : LOGOS . :nerd:
Potential vs Actual :
Aristotle delineates his subject matter in a different way, by listing the problems or perplexities (aporiai) he hopes to deal with. Characteristic of these perplexities, he says, is that they tie our thinking up in knots. They include the following, among others: Are sensible substances the only ones that exist, or are there others besides them? Is it kinds or individuals that are the elements and principles of things? And if it is kinds, which ones: the most generic or the most specific? Is there a cause apart from matter? Is there anything apart from material compounds? Are the principles limited, either in number or in kind? Are the principles of perishable things themselves perishable? Are the principles universal or particular, and do they exist potentially or actually? Are mathematical objects (numbers, lines, figures, points) substances? If they are, are they separate from or do they always belong to sensible things? And (the hardest and most perplexing of all, Aristotle says) are unity and being the substance of things, or are they attributes of some other subject?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/
Big Bang non-sense :
The ambition to find the ultimate reason for the existence of everything may be acceptable as a (pseudo-) religious quest but hardly as an objective and rational scientific endeavour. It is obvious that the assumption of a 'creation' is logically inconsistent with the scientific principle of cause and effect. Any valid scientific approach is therefore necessarily tied to the infinite dimensions of space and time as the forms of existence (the argument of cosmologists that time and space came only into existence at the 'time' of the big bang is a logical contradiction in itself and therefore scientifically nonsense).
https://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/cosmology.htm
Note : The "scientific approach" is self-limited to Physics. But the Philosophical approach of Meta-Physics places no such limits on human reason & imagination. Ironically, this quote goes beyond its own limitations, by assuming, without evidence, an eternal unbounded Antecedent of the Big Bang. Perhaps a non-empirical hypothetical Multiverse. But Einstein defined the physical universe as "finite, but unbounded", as in a sphere existing in eternal space-time. So what lies beyond the bounds?
Greek "Logos", not the Christian "Word" :
As implied by the asterisk in the spelling, this G*D model is not a traditional religious deity, created in the image of his worshippers. It won't be found in any ancient religious texts. However, it has much in common with many philosophical and scientific models of ultimate reality. Plato & Aristotle argued their theories from the assumption of Logos as the creator of Cosmos from Chaos. The Hindu Vedas gave the masses dramatic stories of heroic human-form gods. But among the thinkers themselves they referred to undefined ultimate reality as Brahman, with no human characteristics. The Buddha told his disciples not to worry about any of those fictional devas, but his worldview seemed to tacitly assume an Impersonal Absolute equivalent to Brahman, as an explanation for existence.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page35.html
Yes, my philosophy is BothAnd, not Either/Or. So, my responses are not wishy-washy, but simply tailored to how the question is framed. As the PhysicsForums quote said : "The universe is analog. period. when we make simulations we use a digital aproximation". Holistically : the universe is continuous and analog. Reductively : the universe is simulated as particular and digital. Both answers are true, in context. :smile:
This really is an obvious attempt to camouflage or 'dampen down,' the credence level you obviously assign to 'god of the gaps posits' or a first cause mind with intent, as the creator of our universe.
It is irrelevant whether or not you portray your gap god as non-intervening or not. I could accept your position more, if you were more upfront about it and stated your 'enformer,' as 'utter speculation,' with no evidence at all, and did not try to project it, from current knowledge of quantum phenomena.
My personal credence level for your notion of an enformer remains 0%.
Quoting Gnomon
Yet another god of the gaps statement, you have manifested, as a wood splinter from an arrow, (which you also try to drammatise with 'momentus,' but leave yourself an escape route from such accusations, due to the scientific label 'momentum.'), fired by a HUMAN. :roll:
Quoting Gnomon
That's the good thing about science. The detailed meaning of a label can change. New knowledge, such as quantum fluctuations and 'energy state changes,' cause field 'excitations,' to pop-in and pop-out of existence, within tiny durations of time, suggest that there is no moment in a spacetime co-ordinate when NOTHING is happening.
Quoting Gnomon
Their is no logical paradox here, there is just more conformation that labels such as god, g*d, g-d, gd, first cause mind, enformer, flying spaghetti monster, orc, elf, perfection, angel, devil, NOTHING, have NO EXISTENT, and never have had any existent.
Quoting Gnomon
As I read more and more of your posts here, you have confirmed to me that you are indeed a god of the gaps deist, who seeks REAL evidence of the existence of the supernatural, as your personal primal fears have manifested a strong need for such, in you. You need some, all powerful creator mind, to exist, that cares about you. This personal need, is more powerful than your rationale.
You may not even recognise this, in your psyche, but I think it's definitely there!
I doubt our exchange here will lift your fog, but you are a deep thinker, so I hope the FOREVER, divine hiddenness of your gap god, will eventually demonstrate it's non-existence to you. Just like the fact that YOU will never experience 'nothing,' even after you die, as you won't exist anymore.
Not at all. I remain full of personal wonder and awe regarding life, the universe and everything. I have defeated any woo woo thinking based on personal primal fear, as I OWN my awe and wonder. I don't give humble thanks for it, to any notion of some first cause deity.
I am trying to help you conquer your primal fears and your need for a superhero protector. I have no burdens to offload on you.
Quoting Gnomon
I have no such prejudice. The burden of proof of existence lies with the presence YOU label 'an amoral first cause,' and with it's proponents, such as you. I don't share your need for such to exist.
No, I assign some credence to concepts such as CCC or Mtheory etc. More credence that I have for your gap god 'enformer.' I am also content with my 'I don't know,' the origin of the universe status, but that does not compel me, to assign any credence at all, to utter speculations, such as an 'enformer' prime mover.
Quoting Gnomon
Aristotle was wrong, as there is zero evidence of 'outside' this universe.
Your last sentence is another demonstration of your conflation of LOGOS with omnipotence.
Omnipotence is a nonsense word that has no existent. Are you putting logos in the same category or do you wish to save it as a useful label which is equivalent to it's more modern variant, 'logic' or 'employing reason?'
Quoting Gnomon
You are the one who regresses cause and effect into a need for a first cause origin point. That first cause has to be singular, it cannot be both analogue and digital in structure or fundamental state.
I have little interest on what you posit as a 'simulation' or even 'emulation' of the 'state' of your first cause. I am only interested in what state you assign to your notion of a REAL first cause. Analogue or digital or both?
I intelligo ...
Il est facile de voir que ... @Gnomon's Enformer is not God as traditionally thought of in religions. The Enformer, from what I've gathered from Gnomon's posts, isn't a being. Gnomon simply postulates a universal order-conferring, for lack of a better term, force which he calls Enformy. It's analogous to gravity, the force that makes the heavenly bodies revolve around the sun. No one would conflate gravity with God and no one should conflate the Enformer with God.
As is obvious, Gnomon is attempting to explicate the difference between religion and Enformationism and I would be grateful and it would be in good faith if Gnomon could inform us as to why his Enformationism isn't just religion in disguise. My impressions are in the preceding paragraph.
I think it is theism/deism in disguise. He himself, has compared his enformationism to deism and has declared them compatible. He posts about a first cause with intent and has labelled such a notion 'enformer,' or in a recent post above:
Quoting Gnomon
Does the bowman have intent here? Is Gnomon suggesting this metaphorical bowman represents his enformer? He places the emphases on the arrow as not having intent to distract from the intent of the bowman. He then brings in a wooden splinter from the arrow, which either represents the 'happenstance' moment when the intent of lifeforms arrived or he is suggesting that this arrow splinter was part of he cunning plan of the prime mover bowman who represents divine hiddenness! :roll:
Quoting Agent Smith
What's the difference? God the old white guy with a big beard who exists in spacetime or/and outside of spacetime or god the 'force,' called enformy?
Either Gnomon can't see the Enformer = God identity or we can't see the Enformer [math]\neq[/math] God distinction. :cool:
Plant you flag accordingly sir!
That's why YOUR intent and YOUR decisions matter more than any gods or enformer.
The burden lies with Gnomon and god and the notion of a manifest enformer to PROVE a first cause WITH INTENT, a first cause with a cunning plan! It does not matter if you label it 'enformer,' 'big bang,' 'singularity,' etc, etc. IF you assign it intent or give it a 'mind' status, then you are firmly and irrefutably in gap god territory, no matter how much you insist you are not, imo.
You surely MUST see that sir!
I agree, I think that would be an unfair assumption. He may just be very passionate, regarding his need for an omnipotent mind to exist. Regardless of how this manifests in his psyche. This can give a lot of comfort against primal fear. I prefer to 'have faith,' in my fellows and in human science to protect me more and more from existential threat, and increase the robustness and longevity of our species. I think science's ability to replace the need for a superhero, divine protector is emergent!
WE and all other forms of life in this universe, inherit the legacy of evolution and natural selection.
We have reached a stage where YOU and I can affect our environment, our universe, in a physically significant manner. Much more so, than any god posit has been able to demonstrate. You can demonstrate such ability, RIGHT NOW! or anytime you are asked to. God seems utterly unable to demonstrate an equal or superior ability to do the same, in any way, that can hold up to scientific scrutiny.
We need to reject the theist putdown, that we are flawed, or have sinned in any way, that is worse, or even equally as bad, as any god, posited by any religious doctrine.
The universe is free space. The intent of lifeforms, can affect it and its contents, as we are part of it.
Just like your internal parts can affect you, we as parts of the universe, can affect it, especially the parts of us that contain intent (the human brain).
Polytheism is more plausible than Duotheism is more plausible than monotheism
You will not be surprised to read that I think atheism is more plausible, than any of the other flavours of theism you cite.
No. If anything, I'm trying to dampen down your prejudiced incredulity level. This is not a Physics forum, so I am not claiming to have physical evidence for my Philosophical speculations about the immeasurable knowledge gap*1 before the beginning of our world. My "speculative" thesis is not about that cognitive vacuum; and it's not about Gods & Religions; but about how our own home-world works : via EnFormAction. How many times do I have to say that? The gnarly "gap god" is a figment of your fearful imagination, not a core feature of the information thesis, except as an implicit logical necessity.
How much more "upfront" can I be than to refer to my G*D concept as an "unproveable axiom"*2. I have posted the definition below many times before. Scientists, Philosophers, and Mathematicians commonly use Axioms as a premise or starting point for reasoning. The subsequent reasoning is about the ubiquity & consequence of the understanding that immaterial Information is the fundamental element of our real world. You seem to be gagging on the idea of the medicine, not the medicine itself.
Once again, I'll say that you are incredulous about a scary-image in your own mind, not mine. I don't care if you despise the notion of a World Creator. The point of my thesis is to develop (not originate) a new philosophical model of Reality, with Information instead of Matter as the basic building block. I refer to the opinions of Quantum and Information scientists to support the information-centric post-materialism paradigm, not to prove the existence of a hypothetical Programmer. However, if our world is indeed information-based, it is logical to assume that an Enformer of some kind is responsible for the ongoing process of En-Form-Action (energy + laws) that we blithely refer to as "Evolution" (emergence ; development : progression). And It-from-Bit "quantum phenomena" are circumstantial evidence from which to infer an information foundation of physical reality*4.
doesn't seem to be a practicing Theist, but as an inquisitive philosopher, he is open to the notion of a metaphysical Logos concept to provide an axiomatic starting point for the story of information-centric Evolution. But, you and are so wary about pollution of Philosophy with Religion, that you are jumping at shadows. Relax, there are no ravening G*Ds or Demons out there coming to get you, and drag you down to a Hellish Matrix of your own imagination. :smile:
*1. Nothingness North of the North Pole :
Many scientists immediately objected to the Big Bang theory, because it reminded them of the Genesis creation myth. So, they began to conjecture materialist myths of their own : Steady State (no evidence) ; Multiverse (no evidence) ; Many Worlds (no evidence) ; beginningless & endless succession of Black Holes (no evidence). Even more incredible : Creation by god-like Aliens in a cosmic laboratory.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-our-universe-created-in-a-laboratory/
*2. G*D :
[i]An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. Thats because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Note -- You can substitute physical "Momentum" for metaphysical "Entention" if it makes you feel better.
*3. A proposed new Worldview :
[i]The Enformationism hypothesis is proposed as a possible scientific replacement for the fruitful, but aging, paradigm of Materialism. This new way of thinking about Reality suggests some counter-intuitive responses to those old puzzlers :
#. What is the world made of?
Old Solid Matter and zippy Energy; atoms & space.
New Immaterial Information patterns and relationships, including holistic wave/particles and our notion of location in Space/Time.
#. How does it work?
Old By transformation of Energy into Matter, and vice-versa.
New By transformation of raw information/data/ideas into powerful Energy and malleable Matter and curving Space and cycling Time.
#. Why does it work like that?
Old Science doesnt answer Why questions.
New Because the physical universe is essentially an idea in a metaphysical, universal Mind.[/i]
Note -- You can substitute a Simulated Reality instead of Universal Mind, if you like. But the simulated worlds of video games always originate in the mind of the Programmer.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page4.html
*4. The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics? :
https://www.technologyreview.com/2009/05/18/213077/the-foundation-of-reality-information-or-quantum-mechanics/
You are just trying to play switcheroo, by basically responding to me with 'no YOU are,' suggestions.
That just reduces our exchange to a panto style exchange and indicates impasse between us.
You offer nothing other than repeats of your previous claims.
I think you should be more upfront and present your enformationism as a god of the gaps proposal, that you seem to need to nurture, due to your own primal fears.
I tried to give you the opportunity to provide arguments that would show your proposal to have more to it than your personal fear based, first cause mind with intent. You have window dressed it, as best you can, but your proposal has nothing more to offer than dressed up deism.
Thanks for your exchange, but unless you have something better to offer than the arguments you have used so far, we will remain at impasse.
Although dispassionate & boring in person, Gnomon is passionate & evangelistic in writing, about his personal worldview, which serves as a late-blooming philosophical replacement for the religious worldview of his youth : "fear God and keep his commandments". Yet, his "need" is not for divine omnipotence, but for philosophical understanding. I suppose your "need" is for a solid tangible classical foundation to the world, which was undermined by quantum fuzzy logic.
Tu quoque, you seem to be just as passionate about defending your own implicit Materialism/Physicalism [or fill-in your favorite belief system here] worldview from false prophets. And your visceral fear of the implications of Enformationism is appropriate, even if un-founded. As an antithesis to old-fashioned Naturalism, It doesn't substitute physical Matter with spooky Spirits, but with ubiquitous mundane Information, which is both Material & Immaterial, both Physical & Metaphysical, both Real & Ideal.
That may sound confusing or spooky to you. Yet it's not recycled woo-woo mumbo-jumbo, but the novel notion of an emergent phase in the evolution of the physical world, and of metaphysical human culture ; of physiology and technology. :smile:
PS__I suppose we have established, in our dueling dialogues, that for Uni : "sh*t happens", while for Gnomon : "sh*t happens for a reason". :cool:
PPS__In Enformationism, G*D's commandments are the Laws of Nature, which we "keep", or reap the consequences. :joke:
Except that @Gnomon himself does just that ...
Quoting 180 Proof
... aka god-of-the-gaps (sophistry) :smirk:
:clap: :100:
Quoting Agent Smith
:lol:
Not at all! quantum physics is wonderful and inspiring and awesome. The universe is even more interesting than I thought it was. Lazy god posits are simply too irrational for me and my atheism often reaches ignostic/igtheism levels, when someone posits yet another, first cause mind variant.
I just don't recognise the 'visceral fear of the implications of enformationism,' you claim I am demonstrating. Give me one example of an implication your enformationism proposes, that you are convinced I am viscerally afraid of? It, can't be it's proposal of a first cause mind, as the creator of our universe, as why would I be afraid of something I am convinced has no existent?
@Gnomon, did you know, your Enformationism bears an uncanny resemblance to String Theory - everything is but different frequencies of vibration of a/the fundamental stuff of the universe - (mathematical) strings. In the case of Enformationism, everything is different ? of information. What concept would replace the ? in the previous sentence? :chin:
@universeness, atheism is a non-starter for me.
What alternative do you currently assign a higher credence level to and why?
Which proposal in string theory suggests a first cause mind with intent, as the creator or divine spark for our universe?
I'm gonna say that I'm approaching this from a very common standpoint - that there's gotta be an origin.
How much credence do you assign to the proposal that such an 'origin' has to be a mind with intent?
Why can your origin not be a mindless spark? which no longer exists and we can never ever know what caused it or that 'the mindless spark,' was also the beginning of causality. A mindless singularity would also suffice. Why does that not satisfy you as much as a supernatural mind with intent?
Is it that the 'mind' might care about you? If not, they why do you need it?
No offense Mr Smith but that's a rather meaningless response.
I can only assume that your need for a benevolent supernatural to exist, is more powerful, than your ability to OWN the totality of your OWN life.
In the introduction to my new book, The Logic of Information, by philosopher Luciano Floridi, I found an attractive concept that reminds me of our dueling accusations of toxic religion. "Systemic Attractors : if a new idea looks a bit like an old idea we already have, then the old one is a magnet to which the new one is powerfully attracted, almost irresistibly. We end up thinking that 'that new' is really just like 'this old', and if we do not like 'this old' then we dislike 'that new' as well. Bad philosophy indeed, but it takes mental strength and exercise to resist such a powerful shift". But lazy thinking allows such magnetic misconceptions to overpower Reason. That's what we call "prejudice" or "implicit bias".
In our dialogues, "the old" is irrational religions in general, while "the new" is merely a logical inference from the evolving Information structure of our universe : nothing to something to energy to matter to mind to imagination. A causal sequence that logically requires an implicit-but-not-specific First Cause. I have to smile, when I think of the spooky woowoo voodoo savage rituals that you envision Gnomon practicing in his new/old "religion". Perhaps worshiping the abstract First Cause (or "First Mind") --- from which our Information-structured world emerged --- by abandoning Reason in mindless shows of subservience. Whatever your mental model of The Enformer might be, it's a "lazy god posit" passively pulled by the "Systemic Attractor" of remotely similar, but unrelated ideas. That seems to be how many prejudicial beliefs get started. :smile: :cool:
Naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism :
"On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology . . . . On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication technologies . . . . Yet such technologies are increasingly 'artificializing' or 'denaturalizing' the world, human experiences, and interaction, as well as what qualifies as real. . . . If you are a naturalist, I am afraid I believe you are mistaken. . . . Naturalism is not a bad position to hold. It is a dominating Ur-philosophical thesis . . . and a widespread faith."
The Logic of Information, Luciano Floridi, Oxford
:wink:
No. I did not know that. Any resemblance to String Theory is coincidental, not intentional. But, I guess I can see a family resemblance, in that Strings are abstract mathematical concepts, and abstract ideas (meaning) are the currency of Information. :smile:
You keep struggling against the ropes you tied around your own wrists. YOU compared YOUR enformer to a deity, by typing, that it was compatible with deism. YOU invoked the cause-effect regression back to a first cause which YOU assigned 'intent' to. YOU gave this first cause the status of a 'mind.'
If YOU now want to withdraw that utter speculation with zero evidence then just do so.
I agree that data/information MIGHT be a universal fundamental. If it is, then the PROOF would be something like a Star Trek food replicator technology, that can produce a REAL Tbone steak and not a holographic one.
If YOUR enformer is a 'mindless first spark,' that no longer exists and is the same concept as the big bang singularity, then fine. YOU would have removed YOUR woo woo from YOUR enformationism.
Quoting Gnomon
I would replace 'nothing' with 'singularity,' as its a better placeholder for 'mindless spark,' and I would further suggest that you don't even need a 'first cause,' and just go with eternal something/energy to matter to abiogenisis to biodiversity to lifeforms like humans.
Quoting Gnomon
It's always nice to know you smile, but it's up to YOU to explain the references YOU employed in YOUR posts, enformer .... compatible with deism ..... a first cause mind, instead of just struggling unsuccessfully against manacles YOU placed on yourself and then complaining to me that you are struggling against my implicit bias and my prejudice. You just sound a bit bitter when you do that.
Quoting Gnomon
My mental model of YOUR enformer is the one YOU have delivered, wrapped in YOUR deistic bow!!
1. Do you want to withdraw YOUR comparison of YOUR enformer with deism?
2. Do you want to withdraw YOUR insistence that there has to be a first cause for the creation of our universe?
3. Do you want to withdraw YOUR insistence, that any posited first cause for the creation of our universe, has to be a 'mind with intent?'
If you don't want to retract these comparators, that YOU invoked, then YOUR enformer, remains exactly as I suggested, yet another lazy god of the gaps posit.
Fair enough Mr Smith, an honest response.
Quoting universeness
:clap: :100:
:ok:
Muchas gracias. :up:
:up: I think your pandeus is also relevant here.
A nature preserve doesnt describe it better since that isnt usually a situation where all the needs of the inhabitants are met, or where unnatural controls are enacted.
True. It all seems to depend on whos in charge. Whats taking responsibility for the management and well-being of the occupants. If its the occupants, its not a zoo. But then there are tasks needing to be done that nobody wants to do, such as the actual management and assurance of well-being of the occupants. Who for instance is going to enforce controls? These people are not going to be revered. Reviled is more like it. OK, there are plenty who would actually want to do those things, but those are not the ones you want doing these tasks. Theyre the power hungry ones, the ones that are first to be corruptible.
One of the best tests for a form of government is finding a way to put in charge only the people who dont want to do it.
Youve described a full communist society, one without money, where everbody gets fed and housed and medical care regardless of level of contribution. That spell zero responsibility since there are no consequences to not being responsible.
I totally agree that it is a big part of human nature to want to be a contributor. There will be plenty of those, but there is also a significant percentage of those that are fine with doing nothing, even in a capitalist system where only their basic minimal are met (same list as above). The term white trash refers to a subset of these types. It seems to not bother them at all to not be revered, but theyre arguably more fit since they tend to have more children on average.
I live in the USA and have some experience on how they punish the poor that try to get off assisted living. If you try to get a low tier job and start paying for your own expenses, the eligibility of the social benefits drops faster than your income. That means you cant afford to have a modest paying job since it costs far more than it benefits you. So the poor are trapped in a way. Thats not a problem with your vision, just something I notice wrong about our current system.
Not necessarily. Certainly not in a society without money. If there is trade (you dont get this unless you give me that), there is an economy, something evading the to each according to their needs system.
Quoting universenessThats very different than positing that a quark is composed of multiple strings. Yea, I suppose strings could be expressed as something described by digital information.
Why not? The data can be please emit a positron, and that data causes the machine to emit one (newly created at that).
I dont otherwise have any idea what you might otherwise mean by the creation of something from what is effectively an abstraction. The T-bone steak is made from real energy/mass if you will, not from an abstraction, even if data is needed for the machine to know what a steak needs to be.
Probably nearly the same as the speed relative to the space station. There being an observer in it or not doesnt change that.
The speed of light is non-relativistic. It is the same, no matter what reference frame you use.[/quote]Its still relative to that frame. The velocity of a particular pulse of light for instance is very much frame dependent.
Not true. You just have to use relativistic addition just like adding velocities of anything under Einsteins theory.
It seems that in other sites that you cite, the term non-relativistic refers to pre-Einstein views like Newtonian physics.
At least you are consistent in your imagery of pessimism and dystopia for future humans.
I am glad that I don't have to deal with such a burdensome, pressing, internal gnaw, regarding the future of our species.
Quoting noAxioms
A shard of hope in your dystopian visions perhaps!!!
Quoting noAxioms
Are you sure NOBODY wants to ensure the well-being, thriving and progression of our species, towards becoming as benevolent a presence in the universe as is possible? Have you asked EVERYONE?
You know that such statements as the above quote, are inaccurate at best, and irrational at worse.
Quoting noAxioms
All you are doing here is rehashing old stereotypical dissatisfactions, with those who have been in, and who are currently in, power. You ignore examples of good people, who wanted to be in power, were in power, and did everything they could to improve the world they lived in. We can all name many people, past and present, who fit such descriptions. I could start with folks like Democritus or Epicurus and list many, many names from then to those who resisted Roman tyranny such as Cleon, Athenion, Tryphon, Spartacus etc, to similar fighters for a better world such as Georges Danton during the French revolution or the Scots / Welsh / Irish and eventually the Americans etc etc, who fought against later tyrannies, such as The English and then British empires. Folks like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and on to my more recent choices from my own country, in my own lifetime, such as Tony Benn and Nicola Sturgeon (to name only two).
Quoting noAxioms
There are definite similarities, between my politics, and the intentions of the hero masses of Russia and China, that got rid of the vile monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy that ruled those country's so badly.
'The Plan,' as formed in Russia to create a fair, money free, socioeconomic system in Russia, was a brilliant system, that worked very well for the Russian people, when it was first introduced. Russia's decline into the totalitarian gangster state, it is now, started when the truly evil Stalin took power.
Lenin before him, was not much better. China is also a totalitarian gangster state now.
The attempts to create a secular humanist, democratic, socialist system in Russia and China, utterly failed, as the majority in both countries, failed to keep the nefarious from power.
An utterly crucial lesson, we have all, yet to fully understand and learn how to successfully prevent from happening again.
That's why I said to you earlier, that the notion of personal, individual freedom, and the entrepreneurial aspirations of individuals, must be accomodated, as much as possible, (without producing any form of unchecked capitalism) within any future attempt to try again, to achieve what the people of China and Russia (and many more examples such as the French Revolution, The English civil war and back to the servile wars against the Romans.) tried to achieve.
IT WILL be tried again and again and again, until WE get it correct.
Global secular humanist/democratic socialism remains INEVITABLE imo.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh yes there are. There are very serious social consequences. People will still want to know answers to questions such as 'so what do you do?'
Quoting noAxioms
'It seems to not bother them,' is another one of your 'stereotypical' assumptions. There WILL be some who really don't care. They are welcome to live there pointless lives, until they die of natural causes, whilst the rest of us enjoy, taking part in the adventures life and living can offer.
If a small minority choose to live life as a curse then they will inherit oblivion and leave no significant legacy. A wasted life, is an option, only the dumbest of the dumb would choose imo.
I would not worry about such people other than to pity them, as you continue to enjoy your life.
The difference between then and now, is that they will have truly CHOSEN to live their life like that, rather than be forced to, as the majority who are experiencing life like that today, are forced to.
Quoting noAxioms
Well noticed! don't you think you should work with those who are trying to remove such consequences of the capitalist money trick?
Quoting noAxioms
I have no problem with the 'black market' you describe in the quote above.
If someone wants, say, an old/vintage car collection, that they do up, and show to others and drive around, then, the 'barter' system you describe, sounds good to me.
Everyone can take their basic means of survival for granted. As long as that is available to EVERYONE with no conditions attached, and such rights CANNOT BE REMOVED by any new authority, then I think we can accomodate the majority of the wishes of those who prioritise 'independent expressions of personal freedom,' and also allow, 'entrepreneurial aspiration.'
I am sure people will employ various mechanisms of exchange 'currency,' with each other. Hopefully, they will all be acceptable, as long as it does not stop people, getting everything they NEED. I am not too worried about those, who as Mr Jagger says, 'you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.' I just extend his words to you get what you need as a birthright, but getting everything you WANT, depends on how that will affect others.
I think we are probably imagining the same thing. Obviously, your instruction above would be in an HLL or high level language that would require translation before execution. The 'machine code' level is the language code we are discussing here , not your 'emit a positron' language (I doubt 'please' will be needed).
Employing a source of photons to produce a photon or positron is not my challenge. It's producing a tech that can create a Tbone stake by manipulating the proposed digital level fundamental of the universe.
A Tbone steak, produced, from that which is traditionally described, as the vacuum of space.
A wave of light is an electomagnetic analogue waveform of continuous peaks and troughs that traverses the vacuum of space at a fixed speed. If you could zoom right into it, I would expect to find that it is made up of discrete packets of energy/field excitations which might be vibrating strings or undulations etc and if we zoomed into one of these 'photons,' we would see an analogue waveform .... and if we zoomed in ...... That's the imagery I have currently garnished from my reading about wave - particle duality, BUT I fully accept that my imagery may well not be in accordance with most physicists so I am very willing to be corrected.
Quoting noAxioms
Overpopulation. We have created enough abundance to imagine feeding the whole world and we have ignored limits. The terrible reality is the more we feed people the more they reproduce, making the problems worse. We absolutely must recognize limits and adjust to living within those limits.
Quoting universeness
The Venus Project is only one idea. We have planned communities all over the US and some are doing very well. The Japanese have also created planned communities making protecting the children a top priority. The Chinese are working on a building that is like an entire city. People can spend their lives in that building and never have to have to leave as their homes, jobs, and stores are all in the building. China has a 50-lane highway. In the US we are accustomed to fewer people and more space. We need to understand what we are dealing with before we assume the only problem with the Venus Project is we have not followed through on the plans and I do not think we would like the control that comes with the Venus Project.
Now Buckminster Fuller had some wonderful ideas. You might google him and expand your knowledge of what people are working on so you can share that knowledge. If we want to change the world, we have to plant seeds (thoughts) and hope others will pick them up and work on them. Just saying things are terrible and talking as though humans are basically awful creatures will not bring about the good.
No. I'm merely trying to untie the ropes of anti-metaphysical prejudice that dump all non-physical notions into the anti-science (religious) waste-bin. My wrists are still wiggling to escape your doctrinal bonds. But they are somewhat easier to deal with than 's dogmatic repression of philosophical speculation. That's why I have continued to dialog with you, and not with him. But, I see that you are getting weary of shooting down the same old intangible spooky spy balloons.
The positive aspect of our dialogue is the unraveling exercise your meaning-twisting accusations give me. They force me to expand my philosophical research into unfamiliar areas.The negative side of the physics vs metaphysics debate is that it always comes back to physical evidence, and neglects rational or circumstantial evidence (logical inference from patterns). By "denying the legitimacy" of metaphysics as a way to understand reality, you legislate away all of my arguments, instead of dealing with them. Which, in a court of law, is prejudicial to the witness. :smile:
The Problems of Metaphysics: the New Metaphysics :
An anti-metaphysician in the contemporary sense is not a philosopher who denies that there are objects of the sorts that an earlier philosopher might have said formed the subject-matter of metaphysics (first causes, things that do not change, universals, substances, ), but rather a philosopher who denies the legitimacy of the question whether there are objects of those sorts.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/
There as always been enough food to feed everyone on the planet, every day. It's the distribution system that's flawed. Globally, it has been estimated that 26,082 tonnes of food, goes to waste every single day.
From The United Nations environment programme:
[i][b]There is enough food for everyone.
While progress on reducing hunger has stagnated in the last five years, evidence suggests that the problem we face today is not a lack of food. Rather, it is a problem of efficiency. We can see this throughout the production and consumption process, beginning with how land is used. Responding to increased demand for meat and dairy, about 60 per cent of the worlds agricultural land is used for livestock grazing.[/b][/i]
Quoting Athena
Well, you will be happy that I don't do that. I complain about what needs to be complained about and I fully support those who are trying to improve things.
Quoting Gnomon
I hope that your first quote above bears some useful fruit for both of us, as we both continue to seek truth.
I think I have faced your arguments head on and have not merely dismissed your speculations out of hand.
We "dump all" woo-of-the-gaps "notions" like yours, Gnomon, into "the waste bin" of dognatic, New Age sophistry. Don't mind me, though, I'm just another one of those persistent gadflies buzzin' around this agora swat me away if you can. :smirk: Btw, even an "anti-metaphysical prejudice", as you say, is a metaphysical position (such as my own speculations), just one which you don't like and/or can't comprehend.
Another of your nonsensical assumptions (i.e. "prejudices"). :lol:
Objecting to unsubstatiated interpretations, misstated facts and overall poor reasoning (despite your refusal to directly respond to / refute such objections), sir, is "dealing with them" your so-called "arguments" in a way more seriously than you apparently deserve.
Do you really think that's what you are doing? That's so weird.
Yes. Thanks for engaging in an extended dialogue, which is probably frustrating for you, due to the language barrier. The basic problem is that we assign different meanings to key words, such as "Emergent". For me that is a Holistic Philosophical concept, but apparently for you its a Reductive Scientific term, even though there is no physical evidence, only inferences & opinions. Also, "Deism" for me is a non-religious philosophical worldview; but for you there is no significant difference from "Theism". Hence, most of your "head-on" answers to my arguments have been off-target.
When I started engaging with , I soon felt like I was trapped in a Joe McCarthy "witch hunt" : Q. "are you now, or have you ever been a Communist (Theist ; pseudo-scientist) ; A. No sir, I'm a Socialist (Deist ; meta-physicalist) ; Q. "Same difference" (i.e. no difference). Consequently, anything I might say in my defense could serve as linguistic evidence against me. In my non-elite, common-sense, language, as for the ancient Greeks, Metaphysics (ideas, not things) is what philosophy is all about. It focuses, not on the furniture of the world, but on its design.
I have found that a common understanding of the Philosophical endeavor -- on this forum -- is that it came to an end in the 17th century, when empirical results began to replace theoretical & theistic models. And its true that Philosophy, as profession, went into a long decline, and lost its aura of authority to Physics. Academic Philosophy began to devolve into endless pointless linguistic debates about finer & finer points of abstruse nonsense. But in the 20th century, both Science & Philosophy, were forced to grapple with bizarre concepts that would have boggled the mind of Isaac Newton --- whose side passions, besides Astronomy & Mathematics, were Alchemy (pre-Chemistry) & biblical mysteries.
Anyway, my philosophical ideas on this forum come primarily from Quantum & Information theorists, who are trying to make sense of a Reality that is influenced by its observers, and cannot be dissected down to tangible atoms of matter. So, I have lept over the "modern" phase of Philosophy, and landed in the quagmire of post-quantum reality, where the Whole is more-than the sum of its Reductive parts. It also raises debatable questions regarding what we can "know" about Reality under the surface impressions of our 5 senses, and our technically-extended senses. Fortunately, Philosophy's only tool is the 6th sense of Reason, which is well-adapted to "see" whole Systems and non-physical Functions. :smile:
Philosophy Has Lost Its Way :
In the world of academia, philosophy has become this weird playground of technicality and complexity that separates the curious masses from the intellectual elite.
https://moretothat.com/philosophy-has-lost-its-way/
When Philosophy Lost Its Way :
Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, its no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. . . . . Having become specialists, we have lost sight of the whole.
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost-its-way/?smid=fb-share
The weirdness of quantum mechanics forces scientists to confront philosophy :
Despite the tremendous success of quantum physics, scientists and philosophers still disagree on what its telling us about the nature of reality. Central to the dispute is whether the theory is describing the world as it is or is merely a mathematical model. Attempts to reconcile the theory with reality have led physicists to some strange places, forcing scientists to grapple with matters of philosophy.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-mechanics-philosophy/
The notion of emergent phenomena is closely related to holism. Am I correct?
I don't think so.
Emergence describes entities as having properties which their constituent parts do not have. (Re: ontology)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Holism denotes interpreting entities as 'wholes without discrete parts' or without reducing wholes to their constituents. (Re: epistemology)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism
Caveat: 'Idealists' tend to conflate ontology with epistemology and therefore, in this instance, confuse emergence with holism.
Sophists are sleepwalkers? And you're awake presumably in this metaphor?
Your welcome. The only frustration I experienced during our exchange on this thread, is one that I am very familiar with and fully expect and accept. If two people are debating with viewpoints that are 'fully cooked' then it's very rare for either to make any progress, in changing the viewpoints of the other.
I find that any value in the exchange, is found in it's potential affect, on the viewpoints of any current of future readers of the exchange. That's why I continue in such exchanges, instead of cutting myself off from an interlocuter, (as you decided to against @180 Proof), as too most people, it can look like you ran away from the exchange. I perceived no language barrier between us, and I find such camouflaged insults, rather puerile.
Quoting Gnomon
I refer your emergence vs holism issue to @180 Proof's response above, which also answered @Agent Smith's question:
Quoting Agent Smith
Your description of deism is simply wrong. You have no ability to usurp a well entrenched label for your own purposes without first gaining massive popular support to do so.
Deism (/?di??z?m/ DEE-iz-?m? or /?de?.?z?m/ DAY-iz-?m; derived from the Latin deus, meaning "god") is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe.
Quoting Gnomon
That's merely your hope. Many who pick themselves up from the canvas or from the floor, exclaim such as 'No, I slipped, honest, he never laid a glove on me man!' Other's will judge, and only if they can be bothered to.
Quoting Gnomon
You keep playing this 'victim' card, which I find quite disingenuous. No one is trying to trap you. You are just expected to be able to back-up your viewpoints in an honest manner. No 'Joe McCarthy' type is involved in exchanging with you on this thread. You are trying to sell your own personal redefinition of the term deism here and it just wont wash. Deism IS the PHIOSOPHICAL assertion that a supreme being exists and is the creator of the universe! You are attempting to usurp the word in a similar way that youth culture has currently usurped the term 'wicked,' into meaning something associated with the 60's notion of 'hip' or 'cool.' Your attempt to use deism as a term which is not an absolute 'god' label has failed miserably imo. You keep trying to sell it as such, which is why you did not answer any of my recent 3 questions to you, but you continue to fail in your sales pitch.
Quoting Gnomon
These are just meaningless comparisons to me. If Newton was born today! Then considering the level of analytical skill he demonstrated during his lifetime, I think he would be very able, to grapple with the concepts you mention, and he would probably have shown no interest in mysticism or alchemy. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, computing, etc yes but woo woo? No, as he would not have been infected by the backwards theism of his era.
Quoting Gnomon
As I have stated to you a few times now, Philosophy is a welcome and useful practice, but any hypothesis it comes up with, will have to face empirical science, as it's final arbiter.
You cannot protect yourself or philosophy from the scrutiny of the scientific method.
If you cannot satisfy scientific scrutiny then you will gain only 'faith based,' easy to manipulate followers.
The best you can get from that is the audience/followers/status of characters like David Icke or Billy Graham or even worse, like Jimmy Swaggart.
Google reported the meaning as:
a fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises; begging the question.
I don't think this describes what is emergent in humans AT ALL.
I also don't think I have used any circular reasoning to present what I think is emergent in humans.
memorialising events and gained knowledge since we came out of the wilds has allowed humans to pass legacy from generation to generation. Human ability to manifest intent, purpose and intelligent design is being combined and enhanced by memorialised information which has resulted in an ever increasing pace of human invention of new tech and discovery of new knowledge.
This IS evidence that we are moving towards 'points of pivotal change,' at a faster pace. Movement towards advanced AI for example. This is not fallacious or begging the question or circular reasoning, it is observable emergence which is graphically demonstrable using models such as Moore's law.
Give me a good enough reason to.
Quoting Agent Smith
We do exchange with each other and we have our agreements and disagreements but we have more common ground than divergence between us imo.
I think @180 Proof would agree that phantoms have no existent so no one is able to chase them.
What position do you think I hold, that I should reconsider?
I am quite capable of standing my own ground Mr Smith. BUT, I will ALWAYS seek and listen to and consider the words of others, including yours.
I appreciate your benevolent wishes towards what you perceive, is my life quest, but my life quest will only complete at my death.
No existent!
God is ...
God has .... would be better!
If you think so, yes. God is an aspect of emergence.
Well, I do think that there is very strong evidence, of continuous human activity, which has resulted in better and better methods of information storage, process, and retrieval. The increased pace of discovery and technological advancement is irrefutable. Based on this, I think labels like god or omniscient/omnipotent/perfection etc etc, have only one use, and that use is of very limited importance imo. They act as nothing more than non-existent states, that we can asymptotically, aspire to.
Yes. "Holism" and "Emergence" are essential concepts in the thesis of Enformationism, which derives from the epistemological (what can we know?) challenges of Quantum Entanglement and Complex Systems in general. The Santa Fe Institute was founded specifically to study Complexity via holistic methods, instead of the traditional reductive methods of classical Science. :smile:
But don't take my word for it. Here's some other opinions :
Strong Emergence Is Holism, Not Magic :
To a reductionist, this seems magical: How do qualitatively different properties emerge (in irony quotes) from complex aggregates of fundamental particles of matter? Proponents of strong emergence (or holism), however, argue both that the potential for higher-level, qualitatively distinct properties is written into the laws of nature (laws of emergence, so to speak) and that what look like relatively mundane or boring fundamental particles of nature actually have immense creative potential to instantiate higher-level entities and properties when arranged in complex ways.
https://www.zacharyfruhling.com/philosophy-blog/strong-emergence-is-holism-not-magic
Holism, reductionism and emergence :
[i]Emergence is the opposite of reduction. Holism is the opposite of separability.
The difference is subtle, but emergence and reduction are concerned with concepts, properties, types of phenomena, being deducible from other (lower level) ones, while holism is concerned with the behaviour of parts being independent from relational aspects, or their pertaining to a whole.
Following holism, the whole system should be considered, not only its parts and their interactions. A typical example is entanglement in quantum mechanics. That does not mean that new irreducible higher level concepts have to be used to address the whole system.[/i]
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/21419/holism-reductionism-and-emergence
Holism in science :
[i]Holism in science, holistic science, or methodological holism is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. Systems are approached as coherent wholes whose component parts are best understood in context and in relation to both each other and to the whole. Holism typically stands in contrast with reductionism, which describes systems by dividing them into smaller components in order to understand them through their elemental properties.
Proponents claim that Holistic science is naturally suited to subjects such as ecology, biology, physics and the social sciences, where complex, non-linear interactions are the norm. These are systems where emergent properties arise at the level of the whole that cannot be predicted by focusing on the parts alone, which may make mainstream, reductionist science ill-equipped to provide understanding beyond a certain level.[/i]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism_in_science
What they say about us ... This is the Santa Fe Institute, a sort of Justice League of renegade geeks, where teams of scientists from disparate fields study the complexity of evolving worlds.
https://www.santafe.edu/about/overview
Interesting to say the least, I'll click on the links when possible. Danke. 180 Proof was referring to a different aspect of holism then.
The insult is in your interpretation. FWIW, I never intend to offend. The wry remark was intended as an ironic all-too-true joke-poke, to be accepted with philosophical grace. Yet I anticipated that you might take the metaphor literally, just as you do with so many of my other "puerile" multi-value*1 tropes that affront your personal two-value worldview. BTW, if I intended to insult you, I wouldn't have to "camouflage" it. My personal worldview is fundamentally different from yours, so a implication in one "language" does not translate to the other. :joke:
The irony is that you "perceived no language barrier", when our dialects are so far apart as to convey opposite meanings. The tongue-in-cheek-joke was referring to the same old barrier-to-understanding that prompted Voltaire to advise, for all who engage in philosophical dialogues, If you want to converse with me, first define your terms,. Unfortunately, for those with Black vs White mindsets, there is no common ground for defining terms across the umbra. :meh:
*1. BothAnd : a multivalued worldview, as opposed to an Either/Or attitude toward truth.
Your sense of humour is very eccentric and very excusive to you.
The language and phrases you employ are not complex. Our opinions are far apart, yes, as you give brain space to woo woo posits, regarding a first cause mind and I don't.
You gave a clear example of 'defining your terms,' with your poor attempt to redefine deism.
What personal 'two values' do you think constitute my worldview, that you claim you affront?
You certainly do try to insult by stealth, but it's nothing that I can't easily counter.Quoting Gnomon
Again, try not to show yourself, as we say in Scotland, as a 'nippy wee sweetie.'
Quoting universeness
Whoa! That's an emphatic two-handed rejection. I described Deism simply as a "non-religious philosophical position". How does your quote differ, except for more words? It says nothing about Religion. So, I assume that you must interpret "supreme being" as a taboo religious concept. I don't. And many philosophers & scientists through history have held notions of a First Cause or "Supreme Being" while eschewing the revelations and creeds of religions. Who's doing the "usurping" here?
Note the reference to "empirical reason" in your definition. Picking nits : in my understanding of Deism, I would replace the word "to determine" with "to imply". The implicit immaterial First Cause is not "determined" in the empirical sense of a direct observation of physical evidence*1, but merely a conclusion "inferred" from a discernible pattern of circumstantial evidence (clues)*2. I'm merely trying to anticipate your objection here, based on a narrow cherry-picked meaning of the word "to determine".
Yet again, different meanings for same words. Which makes philosophical communication difficult. So, what's "simply" wrong with my definition? Sounds like "what's wrong" is simply that you don't like the philosophical implications of an Ultimate Cause or Supreme Being or Cosmic Programmer or Creator. How can we communicate if we don't share that emotional bias?*3 Perhaps you prefer to assume that the evolving ever-changing physical universe is Self-Existent or Self-Created? Based on what evidence? :smile:
*1. Can physical evidence be circumstantial evidence?
Physical evidence can be direct and all but prove the guilt of the accused, or it can be merely circumstantial. For example, a shoe print is an example of physical evidence. But just because the accused wears similar shoes as the person who committed the crime does not prove the accused did it.
https://catanzarolaw.com/2021/06/differences-between-physical-and-circumstantial-evidence/
Note -- many crimes are solved solely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Is that OK with you? In this case the crime is Creation.
*2. To Determine :
[i]1. cause (something) to occur in a particular way; be the decisive factor in.
2. ascertain or establish exactly, typically as a result of research or calculation.
3. to settle or decide by choice of alternatives or possibilities
4. to find out or come to a decision about by investigation, reasoning, or calculation[/i]
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/determine
*3. We Just Disagree :
[i]So let's leave it alone 'cause we can't see eye to eye
There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy
There's only you and me and we just disagree[/i]
___Song by Dave Mason, 1977
Sorry, that's just my weird sense of humor again. :joke:
I don't know. What do you think are your absolute values? True vs False? How do you know which is which? Whatever they are, they seem to be toward the opposite ends of my broader range of values. Which includes "maybe" or "I don't know". :joke: :cool:
Black and white thinking is a thought pattern that makes people think in absolutes.
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/black-and-white-thinking
Multi-valued orientation is for things to be ranged on a scale. Two values orientation is used for the "absolutes". Instead of having a scale of values, the "absolutes" are used.
https://www.123helpme.com/essay/A-Comparison-Of-Multi-valued-Orientation-And-49481
Insofar as Enformationism is synonymous / analogius to deism: if it walks like god-of-the-gaps and quacks like god-of-the-gaps and denies sound counter-arguments like god-of-the-gaps, then it must be, for all intents and purposes, god-of-the-gaps. :zip:
Quoting universeness
It's irrational to suggest someone else is cherry picking, when, in reading the above definition, you seem to have 'missed' the words 'god, theology and divine' and refuse to cognise their connection to theism and almost every practiced religion. You keep trying to grab at anything to try to hide behind.
Quoting Gnomon
Oh, you are! There is no question about that. You also make many generalised claims, like the one quoted above. Give me an example of a non-theistic scientist or philosopher who proposed a supreme being with no theological component to it. Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief.
Quoting Gnomon
You obvious attempts to 'dilute' your theology to make the taste less bitter to rational thinkers, does border on the jocular. Which is probably much closer to the truth about why you make so much use of joke style emoticons.
Quoting Gnomon
There is nothing 'wrong' from my side and it's not a matter of what 'I like.' You are confused. The imperative is the pursuit of truth. There is 0 evidence of a 'supreme being' or a 'cosmic programmer.' I think you have been watching too many films like:
Perhaps you found Milla Jovovich's performance as the 'supreame beaing' very convincing.
Quoting Gnomon
I agree with your self-accusation, that YOUR first cause mind with intent, is YOUR emotional invention.
My evidence is very easy, and is very convincing for any rational thinker. If a first mind exists then it MUST irrefutably, prove it's existence to us. Divine hiddenness, demonstrates its non-existence.
The evidence of divine hiddenness, is far far stronger than any BS witness or scriptural evidence in existence, or your irrational claims about the necessity of a camouflaged, kalam style, first cause mind with intent.
I have hesitated so far, to label you a sophist, but these quite desperate attempts to defend your hopeless position, pushes me and I predict, any other rational reader of our exchange, towards that label.
Quoting Gnomon
What utter nonsense!! YOU NEVER convict on circumstantial evidence, unless you live under corrupt authority and are yourself, corrupt.
Quoting Gnomon
I know!
Quoting Gnomon
Perhaps you should take a note of them, so I don't have to keep repeating them.
I am a secular humanist. Democratic socialism is my politics and I am an atheist.
:clap: :up:
Speaking of "cherry picking" you are selecting only the low-hanging fruit of religious meanings of "god", and ignoring the philosophical meanings. Do you think Spinoza used the word "god" in a religious sense? He is often identified as an early Deist, as well as a Pantheist/Pandeist. Some deists imagined God as the exogenous creator of the world, but others viewed God as immanent in the world. My personal Information-based understanding of "G*D" is BothAnd : PanEnDeism. In any case, most Deists were anti-religious. So their notion of "god" was equivalent to an abstract philosophical Principle.
Unfortunately. we are still using different vocabularies. And you won't find my terminology in a dictionary. Therefore, if you want to know what I mean by a word, all you have to do is ask me. :smile:
PS__You and have been trying to label me with a well-known woo-woo pigeon-hole that you can dismiss with a wave of the trite "god of the gaps" hand. But I don't even fit neatly into the amorphous Deism category. So, if you ask judgmentally, "are you now, or have you ever been, a Deist" I can truthfully answer : no. That's because my personal worldview is new & novel & unique. So it's an octagonal peg that doesn't fit into any pre-existing round-or-square, theist-or-atheist-or-ass-hole. Since I have been pre-judged, in a woo-woo kangaroo court, I'll have to plead the fifth. :joke:
Why Spinoza is Intolerant of Atheists :
Spinoza explicitly contrasts his view, based on a deist conception of God, with that of Hobbes.
https://phil.washington.edu/research/essays-articles-and-book-chapters/why-spinoza-intolerant-atheists-god-and-limits-early
Deism :
More simply stated, Deism is the belief in the existence of God solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious . . . The most natural position for Deists was to reject all forms of supernaturalism, including the miracle stories in the Bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Note -- Do you classify science-based Multiverse & Many Worlds hypotheses as "super-natural"? The G*D concept is a philosophical hypothesis, not a religious creedal belief. Do you understand the essential distinction between Philosophy and Religion?
FWIW, THIS IS WHAT GNOMON MEANS BY THE WORD "DEISM'
Just opinions. No-one speaks authoritatively for the non-religion of Deism
In other words, god-of-the-gaps. :sweat:
You know what, my money is on Gnomon's G*D/Enformer resembling Fortuna more than YHWH!
Thanks, but my idiosyncratic god-model doesn't even fit the Fortuna pigeonhole. Did you notice the PS in my previous post? :cool:
Why would I care about how you try to camouflage your god/supernatural references?
I am only interested in exposing your claims, for what they truly are, supernatural/god references. but I hardly have to, as you do a good job of that yourself.
Quoting Gnomon
As I have already stated. Spinoza lived in a time when theism had much more power than it has today. He directly suffered in his life, because of the backwards theism he was faced with.
Spinoza was a victim of theism. I think he was an 'early,' atheist and a brave man, for standing up to the evil theism of his time.
Quoting Gnomon
You will NEVER get past your gap god deity (deism), by trying to dress it up as a fake 'abstract philosophical principle.' You would be as well to claim that pixies, orcs, unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster are also important abstract philosophical principles.
I watched a 3 hour debate last night, between Aron Ra and a Christian pastor called Stuart Knechtle.
Stuart's claims of a first cause mind, were almost identical to yours. He would see you as one of his supporters who deliver's a similar message to him. Aron totally defeated him in the debate imo. Matt Dillahunty has also defeated this guy in debate, more than once. Listening to Stuart's arguments was sooooooooooo similar, to reading yours.
Quoting Gnomon
I have, and you have answered with many badly formed definitions, that are of your own invention.
You are correct, people wont find your terminology in many places outside of YOUR own theistic musings.
Quoting Gnomon
:lol: You are too much in love with your own smells, to be able to reason with you. You are fully cooked in your own woo woo. I think you are only a few steps away from walking up and down the streets where you live, wearing sandwich boards with words like 'My Enformer is the one TRUE god,' on one side and 'SORRY my enformer is too busy to enform anyone about anything! (Gnomon's Deism)'
Quoting Gnomon
Your constant use of Illeism, further demonstrates your conceit, that you constantly try to dress in humble garb. The source of your desim definition IS YOU :rofl: :roll:
I originally posted on the Emergent thread because the general concepts of "emergence" and "information processing" are essential to my idiosyncratic personal worldview. I had no intention of discussing "gods" or "religions". But I did propose to engage in a philosophical dialogue, not a scientific debate. However, I was forced, by persistent skeptical challenges, to explain how I arrived at some of my opinions about "emergence" & "information", and the origins of those ongoing processes. Yet hypothetical postulations about Ultimate Emergence and Origins of Forms, led to unfounded accusations of religious motivations, instead of philosophical curiosity. Unfortunately, that refocus of the thread let us far off-topic.
and teamed-up to quash any non-empirical answers to the OP questions. Despite inviting non-professional Opinions instead of authoritative Facts, they seem to think this forum is a place for only empirical/physical (scientific) answers, and not for theoretical/metaphysical (philosophical) guesses. But I continued to insist that the whole point of a philosophical forum was to discuss Open Questions*1 that have not been settled (closed) by experimental results or mathematical calculations (Quanta). Such unresolved queries tend to be about Universals & Logical Possibilities (Qualia) that are not sorted-out by Observations or Algorithms. Yet the A-team demanded empirically verifiable closed-system answers only : Demonstrate or Calculate!
They seem to be practicing radical Humean skepticism*2. Ironically, as a philosophical method, it is self defeating, because it denies the possibility of theoretical knowledge or pragmatic belief*3. It closes the door to Epistemology. That's why Bayesian Probability was developed, to provide a means to make uncertain information useful. Quantum physics would be useless if we demanded final facts (Quanta) and rejected informed opinions (Qualia). Quantum scientists resolved the dilemma of statistical uncertainty by voting on imperfect-but-actionable beliefs, as summarized in the Standard Model. Philosophers seldom deal with questions that have final satisfactory answers. Which is why we are still arguing open-ended Socratic questions to this day, 2500 years later.
Happenstantially, my Enformationism worldview is informed in part by an essential principle of Quantum Science : Uncertainty (undecidable ; in-calculable ; non-algorithmic). That fundamental fact reveals that Nature is inherently statistical & probabilistic. Hence, not amenable to comprehensive answers, only serviceable limited applications. So quantum scientists had to learn to be satisfied by Open Ended probabilities instead of settled certainties. Practical, but not perfect conclusions. Likewise, my responses to the topical questions are inherently Philosophical (possible ; probable), not Scientific (empirical ; factual), but also not Religious (wishful ; emotional).
Statistical solutions, like Open Questions, are indefinite & elliptical, hence extend beyond space-time to include Infinity & Eternity. For example, what are the odds that our universe is self-existent, and did not emerge from any prior causal system? Did the Real world emerge from timeless statistical Potential, or from an infinite regression of Actual turtle-worlds? Did space-time-matter-energy begin with a bang, or is it eternally recycling? Did homo sapiens emerge from random evolution as an incidental accident -- is that a fact or conjecture? How did humans learn to process abstract information, such as mathematics, unless the potential for that talent was inherent in the information-processing system of Evolution? This is just a sample of open-ended questions that philosophers engage with, but have no hope for empirical resolution. I certainly don't have the final answers, do you? :smile:
*1. Open Questions :
An open-ended question is a question that cannot be answered with a "yes" or "no" response, or with a static response.
__Wiki
Note -- For example : is the fundamental element of physics Particular or Holistic? Statistical quantum duality (wave-particle) is a philosophical conundrum : moving Wave or static Object ; local Atom or non-local Field ; Part or Whole ; Yes, No, or Maybe?
*2. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
? David Hume
Note -- Taken literally, this declaration equates "abstract reasoning" concerning Qualia or Infinity with Sophistry. In which case, Quantum Physics & Philosophical Epistemology are illusory, and deceptive.
*3. Radical skepticism (or radical scepticism in British English) is the philosophical position that knowledge is most likely impossible. Radical skeptics hold that doubt exists as to the veracity of every belief and that certainty is therefore never justified. To determine the extent to which it is possible to respond to radical skeptical challenges is the task of epistemology or "the theory of knowledge".
___Wiki
Regarding 1 and 2
I have no idea what humans will manage to do or not, but I'm not sure if the idea of emergence is quite the right idea to capture such developments. There are several concepts of emergence, but taking it as the idea that complex systems instantiate properties that were not present in the several components of that system, then arguably what you suggest does not constitute emergence. People's brains have always been linked together through communication, then there was the explosion of shared information with the invention of printing, then again with the internet. But I suggest that this is an evolution of degree and not of kind. What novel property do we see now that we didn't when, say, the printing press was invented? Isn't the difference just one of degree?
Regarding 3
This might be a case of emergence, depending on what you mean. It's conceivable it's already happening I guess. Are you suggesting the barriers that individuate people dissolve, such that we become one person, with pooled experiences and thoughts?
Well, perhaps in discussing your personal worldview on this thread, you have realised more about the clear connections, between your personal idiosyncratic musings, and theism.
Quoting Gnomon
But your philosophical dialogue contains a god posit, so the need for a rational scientific analysis, becomes obvious. I am surprised you found the sequence of events surprising!
Quoting Gnomon
Yeah, your viewpoints will be scrutinised on a public forum. Does that shock you? Or do you know that fine well? And you are merely playing your victim card again.
Quoting Gnomon
You have not offered much on what is ultimately emergent in humans. You have offered your views on platonic forms, and a first cause mind with intent to create us. I do not think such is off-topic for this thread, as musings about the origin story of our universe, are relevant to what has been, and is now, emerging from human intent and purpose.
Quoting Gnomon
I am broadly concordant with @180 Proof's viewpoints of the origin story of our universe, but I think you are inflating your own importance, when you suggest we are both conspiring against you, using some cunning plan, we have concocted between us. You sound rather paranoid and ridiculous, when you post such suggestions.
Quoting Gnomon
Not only, but also. If you have any such serious concerns, then I suggest you raise such with the TPF moderators.
Quoting Gnomon
If you have a problem, maybe you can hire this A-team to help you with your attempts to empirically demonstrate the facts, regarding your various dalliances with theism (that for some strange reason, you try to deny.)
Quoting Gnomon
Skeptiscism is no way self-defeating, on the contrary, it is essential to prevent the nefarious from gaining authority, wealth and status. In what ways is positing a mind with intent 'pragmatic?' It is absolute speculation, based on nothing more than mundane human intuition. The universe does not necessarily work the way folks who intuit, as you do, need it to! OR as I or @180 Proof may propose it may work.
The only truth which is currently 100% credible, regarding the origin of the universe, is, NOBODY KNOWS FOR SURE!
Quoting Gnomon
We are still trying to find answers to questions, first asked way, way before Socrates.
In the cosmic calendar, there are 437.5 years per cosmic second. 2500 years is only around 5.7 seconds in the cosmic calendar. 2500 years is not much time at all considering our history and our potential future.
Quoting Gnomon
A bunch of gaps, into which you plug a god shaped solution called the enformer, and then you spend so much time and effort, denying that your first cause mind (enformer) mode, IS, a gap god posit.
The only difference between your posit, and the theism espoused by American christian pastor Stuart Knechtle, is in the name chosen for this 'first cause mind with intent,' YOU call it the enformer and try to play down it's qualification as a theistic posit and HE calls it Jesus and declares loudly and proudly, that he espouses a supernatural called 'christ,' as the first cause mind with intent.
I am mostly using the definition of emergence as 'the process of coming into existence or prominence.'
I am aware of the various philosophical viewpoints of the term as described in wiki:. I am also fine with your 'what humans will do.' I think the idea of 'networking our future brain based knowledge,' may well be emerging in humans due to developing transhuman tech, so I am referring to a future networking level which is way beyond:
Quoting bert1
I was more referring to a future networking that may allow thought exchange, that we might label 'telepathy,' in the sense of transmitting thought and 'empathic' in the sense of transmitting emotion.
This would still be individuals networking together, it would not be a 'merging of minds.'
Quoting bert1
Speed of access and information storage capacity have massively increased, and is continuing.
Quoting bert1
Yes, as far as the vast improvement in general information retrieval speed, process speed and storage capacity. But if you combine this, with the advances in biological and quantum computing and the increasing ability to directly attach biotech, directly to the human brain (such as Neuralink etc) then the advance becomes more than just 'degree,' it becomes new functionality, not possible before. Such as the guy Neil Harbisson, who many consider the first true cyborg, as he 'hears' colour.
My second suggested 'emergence' of, 'Connect our brain based knowledge, directly, to all electronically stored information and be able to search it at will, in a similar style (or better) to a google search.' was the idea of being able to do this without a laptop of mobile phone. A neuralink style device, that would allow you to do what we currently do with mobile phones/computers and laptops/tablet computers. I don't think this would be a 'degree' change, due to the HCI involved. So far our human computer interfaces have been TUI and GUI. Textual and then Graphical human computer interfaces.
We are moving towards a VUI, (voice user interface), which is a degree change, as it is also based on our sensory input and output systems. BUT the proposed SUI, or sentience user interface or THUI, thought user interface, is a change in functionality, as thought is not a human sense.
Quoting bert1
Well, I think this one is much more complicated. 'When two become one.' A literal 'merging' of two human minds into one, would be more than the sum of the two minds involved, imo.
Can you imagine merging your brain with another. A true merging would create a 'new mind' imo, that would function in ways that the two separate identities would not. I have tried to ruminate on stuff like, say, one brain was very good at maths and another very good at languages. Would combining them make the resultant a lot better at explaining their mathematics? and would there be 'consequential residuals,' for both the minds involved, when they became individuals again.
Have you watched sci-fi examples such as those below, from star trek:
Tuvix, when they combined Neelix and Tuvok
or in Deep space nine when they combined odo and Curzon Dax.
I don't think either sci-fi example would be anything like the reality of such a 'merging.' It's fun to think about it 'philosophically' however.
That is not at all what we learn from history. Starvation was common and it brought civilizations down.
Quoting universeness
This would not be so without modern farming practices and that is not sustainable and goes with poluting rivers and the ocean. Not all countries can meet their population's needs because they do not have enough agricultural land and water everywhere is becoming a serious problem.
I think eliminating dairy and meat from our diets would increase malnutrition. I think the United Nations' statement is distorted by its mission. Getting enough protein in our diets can be a problem. Researchers are trying to increase the protein in rice however we should know rice is a significantly large methane gas problem and scientists are working on this problem as well. Soy is a good source of protein and problems too.
About that economic and social problem, many farmers in India have killed themselves when they lost their plots to the intensive farmers. We can see in the US how corporate farmers have taken out small farmers. We can see the income disparity and the Native American fight for their environment with big corporations that threaten their land and water. We are not respecting limits and that is not a good thing but a path to destruction.
I am glad that I don't have to deal with such a burdensome, pressing, internal gnaw, regarding the future of our species.
There are those that might be capable of it, but they are not the ones in a position to do anything about it. Certainly not by the process you suggest for assigning these positions. Not one of them would be electable. You need a pessimist for one thing. Nobody is going to take evasive action if they refuse to see the train coming.
OK, they got rid of the aristocracy, just as the French did. It was better than before, but it was never communist except in name. Maybe briefly at first, but people needed to eat and keep warm.
Yea, I dont know enough about how all that worked. My knowledge of the transition to that gangster state is pretty poor. Dont know how it all kind of worked before then, or how the rest of the world dealt with such a state.
Hence my interest in designing a better system, even if only on paper. But my expertise makes me a naive contributor at best. They tried to do it in the USA, but clearly mistakes were made.
Part of the problem is the world economy. You can put in good rules like no slavery, but global companies will just outsource their production to regions with rules that allow it. Rules being different from here to there messes it all up. There is no global authority.
What would such an authority do? Hand first world minimal living standards to even the most primitive places on the planet?
Admittedly, people are readily willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to garner an imagined approval from complete strangers. I wonder how much I fool myself into thinking Im not impressed by it.
Theyre forced to? Theyre able bodied and educatable. That path isnt forced. Taught maybe.
I vote. I hadnt any plans to go into politics and rise to the levels where such things are decided.
OK. Suppose somebody is a very talented and popular artist. She creates works that are far more in demand than there is supply. So it goes onto the barter market and she gets wealthy with whatever the medium of exchange is. In the mean time, to the state shes a non-contributor since none of her work contributes to the well-being of the whole. At best her side income at least pays for the better art supplies since the state isnt going to find need there if her work is on the non-contributor status just like all the other authors, artists and hobbyists, the ones whose work is noticed by a handful of people at best.
About photons from data:
Quoting universenessIrrelevant. So does communication between the two of us, whether on this forum or in person. Theres probably at least half a dozon translations/format-conversions done between any such communication, and this is without a machine bothering to parse it to the point of understanding. The make a photon instruction might be a single hole in a paper tape. Thats how say one note might be conveyed to a player piano.
OK, you are envisioning binary machine instructions. I wasnt since such an instruction processing unit is optional just like it is with the piano which works just fine without one. Nothing wrong with doing it via machine instructions.
Ah, a sort of 3D printer for food. Is that so unimaginable?
As I said, that is impossible (energy conservation violation), and Star Trek never suggested such a capability, despite their complete willingness to discard physics when it suits their purpose.
Anyway, I dont think the vacuum of space is going to be able to parse your machine instructions.
I dont think there is any such thing. Its a nice image for some purposes is all.
You cant zoom into it. Light packets unmeasured are undetectable. Light measured is no longer light. This isnt true of something classical like a water wave, which may lose its wave nature if you zoom in, but theres still something classical into which one can zoom.
[quote=universeness]The law is 'You SHALL NOT add your speed, to the speed of light!'[/quote]
[quote=noAxioms]Not true. You just have to use relativistic addition just like adding velocities of anything under Einsteins theory.
It seems that in other sites that you cite, the term non-relativistic refers to pre-Einstein views like Newtonian physics.[/quote]
[quote=universeness][Carl Sagan clip on Thou Shalt Not Add My Speed to the Speed of Light[/quote]
Nice reference, but this is a pop video by Carl whose audience is the naive layman. This does not stand up to physics. He implies that light is some sort of exception, that if you are on a bicycle going 20 km/hr relative to the road and throw a rock forward at 20 km/hr relative to the bicycle, that the rock would be going at 40 km/hr relative to the road. Well its close to that due to the speed being so insanely low, but it assumes Newtonian relativity, as does pretty much the entire video, understandable due to the layman audience.
If the logic is true, then if the bike is going at .9c and the rider shoots a bullet at 0.5c, then the bullet would be going at 1.4c relative to the ground, contradicting his own statement that such a thing would be impossible.
No, the correct solution is to use Einsteins relative velocity addition for the bike, the rock, the bullet, and yes, the light. Light is not an exception to this rule at all. Carl doesnt bring this up at all. He know it, but he also is speaking to an audience that doesnt yet care about this.
Since I have no formal training in Philosophy, it has taken me a while to realize that you and are arguing from a Logical Positivism position, which says that there are no open questions, hence nothing for philosophers to contribute. Which explains why our vocabularies don't align. Ironically, the Vienna Circle argued themselves out of a job, since they claimed that empirical methods should replace the rational methods of traditional philosophy. That attitude makes the set of philosophical (open) questions empty. For example, Steven Hawking asserted that philosophy is dead. In which case this forum including Uni & 180 -- is a major contributor to global warming : producing nothing but hot air. Hawking went on to say Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Based on that prejudice, he dismissed one Open Question : did the universe need a creator? I don't think he was dissembling, but he seems to be unaware of professional physicists (e.g. Paul Davies ; Santa Fe Institute), who do consider that to be a valid question, especially in the light of open-ended Quantum Physics.
Your derision of my "god posit" is understandable from the worldview of Logical Positivism*1. But that outdated position of Certainty is no longer valid in the world of Quantum Uncertainty*2. Besides, can you find any instance in my posts where I have posited a super-natural explanation for a natural phenomenon that has been sufficiently explained by physical evidence? Isaac Newton's Principia explained most celestial phenomena in terms of a clock-like mechanism*3. But he was baffled by the non-mechanical "spooky action at a distance" of Gravity. So, he declined to propose a mechanical explanation, and instead he filled that gap in understanding by invoking the Christian God*4. Was Newton a religious idiot, or a genius scientist to whom the notion of "super-natural" was a problem for Physics, but not for Metaphysics*5. As a metaphysical philosopher, not bound to physical explanations, I can "feign" a hypothesis to fill the same gap recognized by Multiverse & Many Worlds proponents. None of which are verifiable in a positive sense, but which are logical as philosophical gap-filling posits*6.
You and 180 are broadly interpreting my meta-physical "principles" far beyond my own application. The only "gap" that I fill with a god-concept is the eternal abyss, of causal potential, metaphorically "before" the Big Bang. The mythical beings you list are merely analogies to creatures in the Natural world. Hence subject to validation or invalidation. But sober Scientists have postulated preter-natural pre-existent gap-fillers of their own, such as hypothetical Multiverses & Many Worlds*6. Do you take them to be empirical postulations or philosophical conjectures? If invalid, what alternative gap-filler, to something-from-nothing, can you posit? BTW, I have been lax in my ir-religious duties. Have I ever asked if you have a personal relationship with the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Have you been touched by his "noodly appendage". That's how you get to the meatball of his existence. :wink: :joke: :cool:
*1. "Logical positivism is not a philosophy of science according to the textbook. Positivism states you can only attribute cause to things you objectively know exist ... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
*2. Logical Positivism panned :
The verifiability criterion made universal statements 'cognitively' meaningless, and even made statements beyond empiricism for technological but not conceptual reasons meaningless, which was taken to pose significant problems for the philosophy of science. . . . Even philosophers disagreeing among themselves on which direction general epistemology ought to take, as well as on philosophy of science, agreed that the logical empiricist program was untenable, and it became viewed as self-contradictory: the verifiability criterion of meaning was itself unverified . . . . Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiablethus unscientific, perhaps metaphysicalconcept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
*3. Action at a Distance :
The Newtonian view of the universe may be described as a mechanistic interpretation. . . . Newton did not address this question, but many of his contemporaries hypothesized that the forces were mediated through an invisible and frictionless medium which Aristotle had called the ether. The problem is that everyday experience of natural phenomena shows mechanical things to be moved by forces which make contact. Any cause and effect without a discernible contact, or action at a distance, contradicts common sense and has been an unacceptable notion since antiquity. Whenever the nature of the transmission of certain actions and effects over a distance was not yet understood, the ether was resorted to as a conceptual solution of the transmitting medium. By necessity, any description of how the ether functioned remained vague, but its existence was required by common sense and thus not questioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance
Note -- the necessity for an aethereal medium for action-at-a-distance has been revived in the 21st century by quantum physicists.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432543-300-einstein-killed-the-aether-now-the-idea-is-back-to-save-relativity/
*4. We can see that Newton made direct use of the God of the Gaps approach, whereupon God is invoked to explain something science can't.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/04/08/398227737/what-the-god-of-the-gaps-teaches-us-about-science
*5. Hypotheses non fingo :
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical,have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
*6. Multiverse not science :
Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/what-is-the-multiverse
Ad hominems, strawmen & non sequiturs-riddled rationalizations of your "enformer"-of-the-gaps poor reasoning are empty and boring.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/775528
Starvation is common today, never mind in history. How does that change the fact that there is enough food, currently existent on the planet to feed everyone currently existing on the planet?
Quoting Athena
That's why we all need to work together as a single species to deal with those imbalances in supply and demand. For me Athena, the answers lie in a global organisation such as the UN. That is a construct that is still very much in it's infancy. The foundational concept of united nations is the direction we all need to focus on.
Quoting Athena
Well, we have to start somewhere! So where you are and where I am and where everyone is, seems to be the only place we can start from. I know that's an almost pointless sentence Athena BUT, I go to Steven Pinker again, 'we can make things better, because we have demonstrated in the past that we already have.' You help people whenever you can, despite any 'shortfalls,' you are experiencing yourself, so, QED.
Quoting Athena
There certainly are many specific problems with the current way things works. You have mentioned a small number of them. It's important to assign your support to whatever projects YOU think might improve things. I think YOU already do that, as much as you can. I think I do to, although I could probably do more, and 'take more of a hit,' to my own personal comfort and ease of mind.
I fully support all moves towards a global society and global secularity, humanism, democratic socialism and a money free resource based economy.
Oh, I so hope some of the fixing happens whilst you are around. I want to see you forced to put a half full sticker on your half empty approach to life and living. :halo:
Quoting noAxioms
People love to see trains coming. They bring stuff and take stuff and offer travel. It's just a bad idea to stand in front of a moving one, and it's necessary, to stop the nefarious, from deliberately fixing people in front of moving trains with no escape method. Don't focus on cure, focus on prevention.
Prevent the actions of the nefarious, not the movement of the trains, or removing people from the tracks.
Stop them getting put on the tracks in the first place.
I agree that the Russian or Chinese system that replaced their monarchies were never socialist/communist AT THE TOP. But many of the systems established by initiatives like the 'Gosplan' in Russia were indeed socialist and were successful for a while, and did feed people, kept them warm and treated them fairly, but the 'rot' and corruption at the top, soon filtered down. The Russian 'plan' worked fairly well for about 50 years.
Quoting noAxioms
From wiki:
Material balance planning was the major function of Gosplan in the USSR. This method of planning involved the accounting of material supplies in natural units ([b]as opposed to monetary terms) which are used to balance the supply of available inputs with targeted outputs. Material balancing involves taking a survey of available inputs and raw materials in the economy and then using a balance-sheet to balance them with output targets specified by industry to achieve a balance between supply and demand. This balance is used to formulate a plan for the national economy.[/b]
The best I have ever watched to gain an understanding of why the soviet union failed, is Adam Curtis's 7 part series called 'TraumaZone,' All 7 parts are available on youtube. Part 1 below:
Quoting noAxioms
Time to get rid of any privately owned/shareholder based company, which has such global reach then.
The UN IS a global authority, it IS the beginning of what is needed. It needs far more significant teeth and claws and it needs to become a totally secular, humanist organisation, which is almost impervious, to any attempt at capitalist or theocratic, control.
Quoting noAxioms
Not in the 'immediate' way you suggest but slowly and surely and only based on their democratic consent, YES!
The rewards involved in helping others, can be as much of an ego boost, as someone telling you what what an amazing artist, singer, writer, scientist, capitalist, warrior, devil, angel, worshiper, athlete or tiddlywinker you are. All people seek the approval of others, no matter how much anyone might deny it, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
Most folks are forced to, yes, or do you think a 16 year old black boy living in a hut in a poor village in a 3rd world country or a slum ghetto somewhere, has the same opportunities in life, as your kids have had?
Quoting noAxioms
Good, I am glad you vote, I hope you vote for those who are closest to secular humanism, based on the best of a bad bunch approach, if that's all that's on your local menu, and if it is all that's on offer, then perhaps you do need to get involved yourself.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't understand your scenario. I am an oil painter. I create my paintings as I want to. I don't paint to sell. Your talented and popular artist can take all of her basic means of survival for granted, under my system. If people like what she produces in HER CHOSEN JOB of 'artist,' then prints of her work can be downloaded by anyone for free, framed and put up on their wall. She can also 'gift' her original work to whomsoever she wishes to. I would get rid of all copyright and patent laws. To the state, artists WOULD BE very significant contributors. Of course she is contributing to the well being of others. People LOVE art. Why is her work in so much demand, if it does not contribute to peoples well-being???
Why would she put her 'original' paintings on to a barter market? Such a market is only useful for folks who want to 'collect' stuff. Every one will get 'one' of what they need, for free, a house, a flying auto drive car, a home/mobile com system, a fridge freezer, home seating designed to your own taste and changed when you want to change it (within reason) etc, etc. I don't understand why you think people would be so discontented, under the system I propose? I think the artist you describe would be happy, living under the system I am proposing. I am grateful that you suggest scenario's and 'characters' that you think would not be happy at all, under the system I propose. Perhaps if you explain your concerns in more detail, I will start to understand your examples, that will exemplify, why my suggested system is sure to fail.
Quoting 180 Proof
He says that Gnomon's reasoning is "empty and boring", but 180's countless repetitious replies imply that something about those reasons is hitting home. Unfortunately, he seems to think that redundant accusations -- throwing mud on the wall -- will serve as philosophical arguments.
Since he won't listen to me -- except for highlighting god-posits -- maybe you can ask him about the "home" that my postuations are hitting, at the heart of his own vulnerable belief system. Does he acknowledge any "gap" beyond the Big Bang beginning that remains to be filled by verifiable empirical evidence? If there is a scientific gap-filler, what is it, and what evidence supports it? If there is no satisfactory gap-filler, why are philosophers attempting to do what physicists have been unable to do*1? If it is a "closed question" why does it keep coming up in Science and Philosophy forums?
Empirical cosmology has provided us with mathematical evidence pointing backward to a pin-point origin of the physical universe. Unfortunately, at that point, the math shoots off into infinity, and the computers "halt & catch fire". But what are those infinite vectors pointing at? That may not be a viable empirical question, but it's a legitimate philosophical "open" question, is it not? Is 180 blinded by (faith in) Science, or simply by skepticism toward the open (empty) questions of Philosophy*2? What is it about that god-gap that hurts his heart? I need to know, so I can avoid offending him in the future with my open-ended reasoning. Or maybe he could just ignore my "boring" personal optional opinions without getting riled-up. That would be easier on his tender heart. :smile:
PS__Why is the very mention of the "G" word so offensive to him? Most other posters can take it in stride.
*1. What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology :
[i]On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers.
This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state"the search for a physical explanation of itis probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology,[/i]
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/what-happened-before-the-big-bang-the-new-philosophy-of-cosmology/251608/
*2. "Philosophical questions are questions not answerable empirically or mathematically, with observations or calculations. They are open questions, that is, questions that remain in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement . . . . Recall that questions are here understood as genuine requests for information."
___Luciano Floridii, prof of philosophy at Oxford; The Logic of Information
Note -- 180 bitterly rejects my hypothetical Enformer as the First Cause of the Big Bang. But he has not yet offered an empirical alternative gap-filler. If he believes there is no gap, then why is he so upset by my "vain" attempts to answer a question that has bedeviled both Philosophers and Scientists throughout history? Have I condemned his soul to eternal torment? Have I belittled his faith in fruitful empiricism? Or have I merely posited an answer to the most universal of all questions, that reminds him of the big-scary-monster-deity of his childhood?
You're not the only one he doesn't listen to, but nor is he the only one that doesn't listen to you. I struggle with your posts, and I suspect others ignore your stuff too. I briefly looked up Enformationism and it's just you as far as I can tell. Which is obviously fine, but you have to do a lot of work to get listened to. If you feel underappreciated on the forum, I'd recommend engaging with people on their own terms. Take this from your website:
"One thing that all of these examples of leading-edge science have in common is a prominent role for Information. Not the mundane stuff you get on Google, but the essential stuff, as defined by Claude Shannon. In his analysis of communication, he saw that ideas can be converted into abstract digital numbers. What he called Information2 was found to be equi-valent to potent Energy as opposed to depleted Entropy. Yet in a larger context, its power-to-enform also has the ability to give meaningful & useful & valuable Form or shape to some raw, unformed substance. Hence, Information is packed with Potential, as opposed to the emptiness of Entropy. Inspired by that compelling metaphor, along with some insights from Quantum Theory, I have concluded that Causal Energy actually consists of Elemental Information3. On the most basic levels, such as laws of physics, that invisible en-form-action is analogous to the numerical relationships we call Mathematics4."
This is diving straight in with no thought for the reader. Why would anyone be interested in this? It's inviting being ignored at best, and being gadflied (twatted) and mocked at worst. What are the Random Capitals doing there? We're assholes on this forum, we've heard a lot of bullshit, and this, at first glance, just looks like more. Give us a reason to read it.
True. However, the jury's still out whether or not emergence like this is (or will attain) substantial 'progress'.
Quoting bert1
:clap: :100: Claiming I don't "listen to him" is just disingenuous whining coming from someone who over the last several months repeatedly won't answer (or refute as invalid) a handful of my straightforward questions about his "worldview" ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/775453 (and the posts which follow on that page are telling).
OK, what are your "terms" for discussing a novel philosophical worldview? 180's terms seem to be those proposed by the Vienna Circle (materialism ; atheism). But that concession would eliminate all metaphysical postulations from discussion. Yet, the basic concept of Enformationism is that Information is both physical (Material ; scientific) and metaphysical (mental ; philosophical). For some people that's like saying Fire & Water can mix to become Aether : absurd!
The thesis website begins at the beginning with "thought for the reader" -- including a glossary of technical terminology -- but few posters are interested enough to read a long sci-phil essay that is not a graded academic requirement. So, they casually (mis) judge the thesis based on isolated excerpts in posts on various topics. Enformationism is a radical philosophical concept, that can't be grasped "at first glance". Even those who seem to agree with the general thrust of the thesis, typically don't take the time to really understand the science behind it, and the philosophical implications of replacing elemental Matter with fundamental Information (sorry for the random capitals). Like Quantum Physics, it sounds absurd & unrealistic on the face of it. So, I don't expect casual readers to give it the time of day.
Regarding "Give us a reason to read it", I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make him drink. There must be a thirst for knowledge to provide motivation. So, I just keep plodding away in the forum, not to recruit followers, but to develop the thesis under skeptical challenges. Just as Quantum Entanglement took years to reach general comprehension and grudging acceptance, the Enformationism postulation, which also uses esoteric terminology and exotic ideas, may eventually seep into the consciousness of the informed public. Or maybe not. Hey, it's just a personal worldview. :smile:
This informal thesis does not present any new scientific evidence, or novel philosophical analysis. It merely suggests a new perspective on an old enigma : what is reality? The so-called Information Age that began in the 20th century, has now come of age in the 21st century. So I have turned to the cutting-edge Information Sciences in an attempt to formulate my own personal answer to the perennial puzzles of Ontology, the science of Existence.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
The universe is not locally real :
One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, 'real' means that objects have definite properties independent of observation . . . . the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surrounding, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. . . . the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry . . . . Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists : John Clauser, Alain Aspect , and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics."
Scientific American Magazine, January 2023
Note -- Enformationism proposes that universal Information (energy + laws) is the cause of mundane Reality, and of quantum absurdity.
:lol:
Required translations are irrelevant to our discussion. Only the machine code is relevant.
The piano's machine code is based on which key is pressed down. in which order, a piano key press IS the equivalent of a machine code instruction, that needs no further translation, it is simply mechanically executed rather than electronically executed and an electronic piano reproduces/emulates the mechanical inputs and outputs of a traditional piano.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't understand your point. The vacuum of space contains energy, perhaps even IS an energy form.
From Wiki:
According to an academic thesis: "The so-called 'replicators' can reconstitute matter and produce everything that is needed out of pure energy, no matter whether food, medicaments, or spare parts are required." A replicator can create any inanimate matter, as long as the desired molecular structure is on file, but it cannot create antimatter, dilithium, latinum, and (in the case of at least federation replicators) living things of any kind; for the last case, non-canon works such as the Star Trek: the Next Generation Technical Manual state that, though the replicators share the same technology with transporters, the resolution used is too low to create living tissue. However, other replicators, such as the ones used by the aliens in the TNG episode "Allegiance," could create living things, including the brain's many trillions of dendritic connections where memory is stored.
Again, I don't follow your argument, perhaps you could cite some physics sources, that describe how a light wave traverses the vacuum of space, that exemplifies your point.
From the physics stack exchange:
What you're calling a 'physical wave' is an emergent property of a underlying medium (e.g. air, water). For the most part, such an emergent wave is basically the same as a wave in a field. 'Physical waves' are often referred to as 'quasiparticles', because of this similarity. What we think of as 'particles' (e.g. electrons) don't just 'behave like waves', they are also waves, hence the 'wave-particle duality'.
Quoting noAxioms
A photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field. When light is absorbed or emitted, the energy in the wave comes in 'packets' we have labelled photon's. Do you disagree with this?
Quoting noAxioms
It IS true. Relativistic addition backs up Carl Sagan's statement as I quoted it above.
Quoting noAxioms
No Carl correctly states that 'something funny happens at the speed of light', due to it being the cosmic speed limit that it is. In what way is it incorrect to say that you cannot add your speed to the speed of light? The fact that you need to use relativistic addition to compensate for the fact that classical addition of Newtonian velocities will not work, DEMONSTRATES that his quote is absolutely correct!
Quoting noAxioms
What? Carl's quote that 'You SHALL NOT add your speed to the speed of light!' CONFIRMS that your bullet speed + bike speed = 1.4c relative to the ground, WOULD BE WRONG. YOU are agreeing with him and he is agreeing with you regarding the use of relative velocity addition. Why are you suggesting he is contradicting himself???
Quoting noAxioms
Carl did not directly use the words 'Light is an exception to the Newtonian classical formula for adding relative velocities,' He simply states that 'something strange, something funny. happens at the speed of light.' I agree that those words are 'for the lay person, and/or 'for a TV audience but they are not 'incorrect' and are quite a distance away from your claim that he was invoking the word 'exception.'
No, there are plenty of 'open questions.' Both @180 Proof and myself are willing to exclaim 'I DONT KNOW,' as our current answer to many of what you describe 'open question,' such as 'Is there a first cause to the universe?' and 'what is the structure and properties of a first cause of the universe?'
YOU want to plug those gaps with 'enformer,' 'a first cause mind with intent,' 'a god of the gaps.' You just continue to refuse to admit that is what you are doing, so you are working very hard to fully earn and deserve your 'emerging,' 'sophist,' label.
Quoting Gnomon
At least you admit here again that you are promoting a 'god posit,' but I don't think you are doing so 'openly' and 'cleanly,' but more 'unintentionally.'
Quoting Gnomon
No, but you have suggested a supernatural explanation for which no evidence at all exists, that's a 'silly' thing to do imo.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, but he had the excuse of the power of theism that permeated all aspects of human life that he was infected with, during the time he lived. He was not as brave as someone like Giordano Bruno.
Bruno is also considered a pantheist but he died rather than accept catholic dogma.
How many reported atheists are you aware of who were contemporaries of Newton?
Can you name some?
Quoting Gnomon
Feign???
[b]feign: VERB
pretend to be affected by (a feeling, state, or injury):
SIMILAR: simulate, fake, sham
ARCHAIC: invent (a story or excuse).[/b]
You keep shooting your own feet, imo. The multiverse is mostly a consequential theory of quantum superposition and has more credence imo than your god of the gaps enformer.
I am interested in the credence level individuals give to such posits as 'the multiverse,' 'the holographic universe,' 'the cyclical eternal universe,' etc. At the very bottom of my credence list, lies theistic posits.
This will not surprise you, considering my declaration of personal atheism.
Quoting Gnomon
Really? :lol: what creature in the natural world, for you, is an analogy to an orc or a pixie?
Quoting Gnomon
I repeat, 'Nothing' cannot exist, as you need something to reference it!
Quoting Gnomon
No, such has no existent for me. I leave such fake creations to those who create characters like 'Yahweh,' 'Jehovah,' 'Allah,' 'Zeus,' 'Odin,' 'Krishna,' or even 'Bhudda' or 'Enformer.'
Quoting Gnomon
:roll: Make up your mind!
I will answer from my point of view. There are many gaps science has yet to fill. The musings of philosophers can often focus or redirect the investigations of scientists. That is its most significant potential imo. This view of philosophy was echoed by Sean Carroll, recently, in one of his 'ask me anything' podcasts.
Quoting Gnomon
Absolutely , YES!
Quoting Gnomon
I share @180 Proof's 'impatience,' with your attempts to deny that your enformer, IS a god of the gaps posit. If you had honestly and earnestly stated your enformer as a theological proposal from the start, then I think @180 Proof would just have disagreed with you, and moved on, but, trying to suggest that your enformer is a legitimate scientific projection, based on current quantum mechanics, is like a red rag to a bull imo. That's why @180 Proof's and my reactions are more 'aggravated,' imo.
:up:
That's a good question, thank you for asking it. I think on a philosophy forum like this, I'm looking for arguments. I want to know why a position is wrong, and why a proposed solution is better. The subject matter of your view is perfectly philosophical, it concerns the nature of substance. You say it is information, and you may be right. I don't think that's a particularly controversial view actually, and I have no opinion on it. I haven't read very many of your posts, and I have only briefly looked at your website, but what you seem to be doing is expressing your opinion. What's wrong with that? It's not very philosophical. Philosophy is about arguments and justification. We typically want to know why one answer to a problem is better than another. Indeed, before we get to that, we want to know what problem a particular view is an answer to in the first place. From your website, the main view you set up in contrast to yours you call 'materialism'. You characterise this in a very old-fashioned 'atoms in the void' way. Modern materialists don't usually think like that any more. That's one thing that puts me off reading further. What might be more interesting and fitting on a philosophy forum is if you looked at a topic, said why the existing answers are unsatisfactory, and narrowly and specifically say why enformationism is different and peculiarly suited to solving the problem. Maybe you've already done that and I haven't noticed. You also say that you are not proposing any new science or new concepts. I guess I'd like to know what it is you are contradicting with your view. What is it that we are all getting wrong exactly, and why is it wrong? If you can convince us there's a problem with a particular view, and show us how enformationism fixes it, that might be of more prima facie interest. Showing, not telling, I suppose. I suspect the hassle you are getting is not because of your view (which may well be right for all I know), but because you're not playing the philosophy game.
Oh, I agree, it could all go wrong for us in the end, but I predict, WE WILL try anyway.
There is NO WAY we will stay here in our nest (Earth).
In Carl Sagan's book contact, he got his main character to refer to the potential absence of other life in space as 'seems like an awful waste of space.' That resounded with me quite powerfully, even if we were the only lifeform with our level of sentience, in the entire universe.
I think we will need the kind of ASI proposed, and the types of transhumanism proposed, to enable us to become an extraterrestial and perhaps an interstellar species. Intergalactic, is beyond my rational perception for now.
So, I think such will be 'substantial progress,' in the sense of the number of options humans have, their lifespan, their robustness, etc but I agree that it may or may not provide 'substantial progress' in how 'happy' humans/transhumans are, or how much progression is achieved towards becoming a benevolent species towards each other, and towards 'everything' that encounters the future us.
Why would such posits make you jump to a first cause mind with intent?
Perhaps we just have to be more accurate when we try to define what 'local reality' truly IS!
I see no rational road from such hypothesis to YOUR first cause mind with intent.
Quoting Gnomon
You offer no compelling evidence to raise your speculations beyond their current status of 'YOUR personal worldview.'
Gnomon hasn't done so. I've repeatedly tried to get this out of him for at least the last several months with a short set of questions which he still refuses to address ...
Quoting universeness
Thanks, universeness, for joining me and others in calling @Gnomon on his pseudo-philosophical BS.
Increasing the number of our existential options as a species, as you suggest, would indeed be substantial progress. :up:
As usual, you and interpret my philosophical & technical terminology differently from my intention. You are reading meanings into my words, instead of taking them as I define them in the posts. Apparently, 180 feels that his mechanical matter-based worldview (belief system, religion???) is threatened by an information-based philosophy. Which is true*1, but not in the way he imagines. :wink:
There is no religious cult of Hippie Informationists, coming to pry his beloved Matter from his cold dead hands. Instead, a new worldview is gradually emerging as Science advances --- not due to onslaughts by religious philistines, but due to gradual internal evolution of the "scientific" worldview*2. There is indeed a knowledge gap in modern science, but it cannot be filled by oldfashioned traditional religions, or by outdated classical mechanisms. That's because it's an Epistemological gap, not a Revelation lack or Empirical unknown. :nerd:
So the problem is not that I am concealing my intentions, but that you are imputing old familiar (traditional ; religious) meanings into the strange new (emergent ; mental) terminology of Quantum & Information Science. As a lone prophet (of science) "crying in the wilderness", I have no communal religion to to push. But I do have an idiosyncratic personal (non-religious) philosophical worldview, upon which all of my posts are based. The Enformer is a philosophical hypothesis, not a doctrinal "god of the gaps" that can be dismissed as non-empirical. However, if you are not interested in that new way of looking at the world (framing), you can just relax and ignore my "ravings"*3, as the imperial Romans ignored the insignificant uncultured barbarian invaders, until it was too late. :joke:
From that "outlandish barbarian" perspective, the world is no longer matter-based, but founded on invisible information. Yet to 180, any belief in invisible things can only be religiously motivated. He seems unaware that Quantum Science deals with, not only invisible (fields) but also not-yet-real (superposed) things. For classical common sense, such non-things may seem as un-real as pixies & unicorns. Do you believe in non-local Fields & Entanglement (holism) & Superposition (supernatural positions)? Do you take the existence of such non-sense on faith in physicists. If you do, does that make you an adherent of a Quantum Religion? No? Then maybe you can join the Quantum Information Club, and enjoy the incomprehension of the uninformed infidels. :smile:
PS__Please pardon my eccentric sense of humor, I'm seriously kidding --- in attempt to convey unwelcome ideas without giving offense.
*1. The existential threat is not just a feeling, but imminent --- In the same sense that 20th century Quantum Theory eventually undermined the foundational assumptions of Classical physics. In the 21st century, non-local quantum fields & spooky action-at-a-distance have replaced Newton's particular & local mechanisms -- for theoretical applications, if not for pragmatic purposes. Yet, most of us still think in classical terms, because they are familiar & intuitive, and appeal to common-sense. The post quantum world, by contrast, is unfamiliar & weird & non-sensical. On top of that new-wave Science, Information theory has opened-up novel ways to interpret the fundamental workings of the world. And the notion of Emergence is essential to its holistic functioning. Which is why I was trying to introduce some (non New Age) Holism into the conversation on this thread. 180 is stalwartly defending the borders of his embattled belief system.
*2. Since the emergence of non-mechanical quantum "mechanics" the classical scientific worldview has been fragmented into many divergent threads. But that's a topic for another thread.
*3. "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house". That's not a religious belief, but a commonsense aphorism.
More of the same Jabberwocky, @universeness there's just no there there.
Yeah, @Gnomon will continue to defend his keep. mostly with an army of one. Agent Smith would toss him the odd sandwich, over the very small keep walls, but the truth is that we are only firing reason at him. so he need not keep playing his victim or 'under attack' card.
I am more interested in making sure that any readers attracted to his god of the gaps posit, have balanced counter arguments to consider. I think we and others are doing that and no-one will be taken in by such as:
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
His sense of humour is indeed eccentric!
Quoting universeness
Quoting universeness
Quoting universeness
Quoting universeness
Quoting universeness
You are asking about the practical reality of one possible essential attribute of humans: information processors?
Your are asking about the possible primary role of human existence: collection, storage and dissemination of information?
You are asking about humans playing an important part in the transformation of our presently known universe to another, radically different state of being via a dynamic process that parallels the Big Bang?
Yes.
Quoting ucarr
Yes, but there is more detail involved than you suggest. We ask questions, we seek and memorialise answers, based on this, we manifest intent and purpose, and based on our actions, we leave legacy which varies in it's significance to the next generation.
Quoting ucarr
You would need to clarify further, what you mean by 'parallels the big bang.' Humans can manifest significant intent, due to what happened after abiogenesis, we happened as part of what happened after the big bang, so I don't know what you mean by 'parallels,' in the context you used it.
Since you refer to an information singularity, a term I know from the common Big Bang language, and since your question about history headed towards a possibly human-directed information singularity strikes me as a question of some considerable importance to you, I thought perhaps you were linking cosmic Big Bang singularity to information "Big Bang" singularity. According to my guess about this, I've been assuming the linkage is metaphorical. In other words, while the cosmic Big Bang singularity is a literal explosion of the universe into existence, the information "Big Bang" is a cognitive explosion of information into some type of existentially new universe.
The intriguing part, according to my speculation, concerns the parallel of matter reaching critical mass just prior to radioactivity with elementary particle formation and likewise information reaching critical mass just prior to gnostic "radioactivity" with elementary knowledge formation.
I suppose I'm really only talking about a renaissance like the one Da Vinci is credited with sparking, except at a universal scale.
Did actually refer to an "information singularity", or is that your interpretation of his intention? I ask, because he and have been ridiculing my 21st century (information-centric) update of the ancient First Cause postulate -- labeling it as a religious belief. Yet your description of a "cognitive explosion of information" to produce an "existentially new universe" sounds like a creation event, caused by what I call metaphorically The Enformer*1. Were you making a religious statement, or a philosophical conjecture, or merely referring to an empirical scientific fact?
Where did you get the idea of an "information big bang" and "cognitive explosion"? I googled those terms and came-up empty. I'm not familiar with such "common big bang language". Are these your own ideas, or can you provide a link to the source? BTW, whose cognition (mental action) exploded? Do you have a name or metaphor to describe the implicit Mind that preceded the Big Conception? Be careful what you say; this line of thought is treading on dangerous ground, at least for some posters.
I did find one article which seemed to equate Kurzweil's hypothetical future Technological Singularity with an Information Singularity*2. But I got nothing about an original Big Bang burst of Information or a "cognitive explosion", that resulted in the creation of a physical universe from pre-existing rational causal power-to-enform (LOGOS?). Even though Fred Hoyle ridiculed the reasoning behind the "Big Bang theory", for its implication of creation of something-from-nothing, the name has stuck in the popular mind. Yet scientists keep searching for a less-religiously-loaded term & rationale for the sudden emergence of everything, including space-time, from a dimensionless mathematical singularity*3. But the notion of a "cognitive explosion" might be no less ridiculous for those with a Materialist & Mechanical worldview. :smile:
*1. The Enformer :
AKA, the Creator. The presumed eternal source of all information, as encoded in the Big Bang Sing-ularity. That ability to convert conceptual Forms into actual Things, to transform infinite possibilities into finite actualities, and to create space & time, matter & energy from essentially no-thing is called the power of EnFormAction. Due to our ignorance of anything beyond space-time though, the postulated enforming agent remains undefined. I simply label it generically as "G*D".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*2. How to prepare our minds for the information singularity? :
Information singularity what is it and why is it dangerous
https://bdtechtalks.com/2022/07/21/brain-limits-individual-artificial-intelligence/
Note -- I wouldn't worry about the dangers of a future singularity, long after I'm gone. But the philosophical implications of a world-creating, Singularity preceding the existence of our physical world, are of interest to me. Although Uni and 180 seem to feel that it is a dangerous idea -- at least for those who believe without evidence that our world is eternal or self-existent.
*3. The initial singularity is a singularity predicted by some models of the Big Bang theory to have existed before the Big Bang[1] and thought to have contained all the energy and spacetime of the Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_singularity
Note -- And all the Information of the universe
Quoting universeness
From the evidence of the above quote, I say universeness actually refers to an information singularity. Do you think I'm misreading the quote?
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
I will describe my statement as an historical conjecture: the information singularity at point of explosion pushes sentience across a threshold whereupon a "quantum leap" upward into a new, higher gestalt of cognition gets underway. This new level of understanding and conceptualizing could be expected to transform the phenomenal universe through the agency of sentients.
I was not postulating existence of a transcendent enformactional entity who causes the phenomenal universe.
Quoting Gnomon
I'm guilty of a lack of clarity. "Common big bang language refers to singularity, not information singularity.. The latter term came to me from the above quote of universeness.
Quoting Gnomon
What you say is part and parcel of your theory of enformaction.
I was only postulating, per the language of universeness, the historical evolution of human consciousness towards a cosmic culmination. Imagine, if you will, a cognitive "explosion" of categorically new concepts and scientific methodology.
Does your enformaction theory, as I've been wondering, have Plato's Theory of (Ideal) Forms as an ancient forebear?
Yeah, the term 'singularity' is ill-formed imo. The big bang singularity for me has different properties than the singularity which is proposed to be at the centre of every black hole, for example.
The moment of a 'technological' or 'information' singularity has some different properties again, compared to the big bang or black hole singularities.
Consider the following from math.ucr.edu:
[b]The first clear difference is that the Big Bang singularity of the FRW models lies in the past of all events in the universe, whereas the singularity of a black hole lies in the future. The Big Bang is therefore more like a "white hole": the time-reversed version of a black hole. According to classical general relativity white holes should not exist, since they cannot be created for the same (time-reversed) reasons that black holes cannot be destroyed. But this might not apply if they have always existed.
But the standard FRW Big Bang models are also different from a white hole. A white hole has an event horizon that is the reverse of a black hole event horizon. Nothing can pass into this horizon, just as nothing can escape from a black hole horizon. Roughly speaking, this is the definition of a white hole. Notice that it would have been easy to show that the FRW model is different from a standard black- or white hole solution such as the static Schwarzschild solutions or rotating Kerr solutions, but it is more difficult to demonstrate the difference from a more general black- or white hole. The real difference is that the FRW models do not have the same type of event horizon as a black- or white hole. Outside a white hole event horizon there are world lines that can be traced back into the past indefinitely without ever meeting the white hole singularity, whereas in an FRW cosmology all worldlines originate at the singularity.[/b]
For me, the term 'information singularity' or 'technological singularity,' is more about a 'moment of very significant change.' The terminator movies 'might' be a respectable example. From the moment 'skynet' was switched on, human existence was utterly changed. ASI,(artificial super intelligence), is the main candidate for such a significant moment. I am interested in what credence level you assign to such as:
1. How credible is it to you, that the ASI moment WILL happen.
2. How convinced are you that it will be bad for the human species when it does and why do you think it will be bad for us.
3. How convinced are you that an ASI moment will be good for the human species and why do you think it will be good for us.
This has been asked about in other threads. Here, I am discussing, what YOU think is emergent due to all human actions, based on their varied manifestations of intent and purpose, since we came out of the wilds. We pass such a vast amount of knowledge on to each new generation. What do you think will be the consequences of this, when you project it into our future?
Quoting ucarr
A common misconception, and one of the reasons I hate that the term 'big bang' is still in such popular use. It was not big and there was no bang!! The universe began as something/a singularity/a mindless spark/ a state, reached from the completion of an earlier aeon cycle (as in Roger Penrose's CCC)/the collision of two multidimensional branes/ etc which then inflated/expanded, and its fundamental constituents began to combine in every way they possibly could. Enormous variety, in an enormous number of combinations was the result. Abiogenesis happened (we don't know the full details ... yet).
Then at some point, a lifeform (such as us), demonstrated ability to manifest intent, and purposeful action, and intelligent design. The theists assign these abilities to god posits, and a first cause mind with intent, that exists 'outside' of this universe. @Gnomon's 'enformer' speculation, qualifies for this category imo.
I am an atheist, and I assign the ability of humans to manifest intent and purpose to naturalism. Our ability to manifest intent and purpose means we can 'affect' the universe in very significant ways. If you agree, and project this into the future, then I am very interested on what YOU think the consequences will be. Your scientific musings and/or your philosophical musings on this, would be gratefully received.
Quoting ucarr
I relate 'physical mass reaching critical points' to imagery like star evolution. Supernova, pulsar's and black holes.
I have never heard of the term 'gnostic radioactivity!'
Radioactivity described as:
the emission of ionizing radiation or particles caused by the spontaneous disintegration of atomic nuclei.
Gnostic, described as:
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: ?????????, romanized: gn?stikós, Koine Greek: [?nosti?kos], 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects.
'Information reaching critical mass,' seems to me to be a fair connection to the popular concept of an 'information singularity' or a 'moment of very significant change,' so If that's the imagery you are invoking, then I understand it. I don't think a parallel between the moment 'elementary particle formation' occurred and when gnostic radiation (I assume, you mean something like 'the moment when knowledge was first exchanged between hominid or any species of life), offers much, as one happened way way way before the other.
Elementary particle formation:
Between about [math]10^{-12}[/math] and [math]10^{-6}[/math] second after the Big Bang, neutrinos, quarks, and electrons formed. Protons and neutrons began forming shortly after, from about [math] 10^{-6}[/math] to 1 second after the Big Bang. Within about 3 minutes after the Big Bang, conditions cooled enough for these protons and neutrons to form hydrogen nuclei. This is called the era of nucleosynthesis. Some of these nuclei combined to form helium as well, though in much smaller quantities (just a few percent). But after about 20 minutes, nucleosynthesis ended and no further nuclei could form.
Knowledge was first exchanged between lifeforms, obviously, way after abiogenesis. Both happenings are pivotal, so I suppose they are parallel, in that sense, but I don't perceive the level of significance, that you seem to be assigning, to such a parallel.
Quoting ucarr
Sure, I agree that such moments are pivotal but probably not 'singularly' pivotal. Da Vinci sparked a renaissance, but only in the artworld. A singular pivotal moment must irrefutably affect every human on the planet. I think ASI has the potential to qualify. I am interested in anything YOU are strongly convinced is emergent, due to human existence and human activity since we came out of the wilds, right up to the present day.
Not dangerous in anyway, just irrational, as there is no evidence for it, at all.
I repeat, 'nothing' can have no existent form as it requires a reference and a reference is 'something.'
I agree, and this is why I give some credence, to the usefulness of words like omniscience/perfect/god/etc ONLY, as asymptotic aspiration, for a sentient species like us.
I reject the theist insult, that all human wonderment and awe is OWNED and sourced from some pointless, already omniscient, first cause mind/god. I further reject that we are the 'sinners,' that religions describe humans as, especially when their fairy tales, posit a god, who sins far more than we ever could. It's time for humans to outgrow fake god BS and shed our infancy at last. OWN your OWN wonderment and awe. Humans must stop giving what's best about themselves, to woo woo posits due to their personal inability to face their own primal fears and their own death. There is a lot of wonder filled life to experience first. There is also the wonderful legacy you CAN leave behind, that hopefully makes the world a little bit better than it was before YOU arrived. There is also, the certainty, in the final analysis, of a far far better peace (of oblivion) than you have ever known.
Ah, yes. Terminator. The great Harlan Ellison, author of Demon With a Glass Hand_The Outer Limits, subsequently ripped off by James Cameron for his Terminator franchise. (Ellison won a lawsuit against Cameron).
In my original post to you I included the following passage. I took it out, fearing it might be perceived as woo. Now, after reading your post, I'm feeling more bold (I include the first paragraph to help establish the context):
Quoting ucarr
The second paragraph goes a long way with few words towards answering your main question:
Quoting universeness
I don't consider myself being negative, but rather being realistic as I believe every top species eventually generates its destroyer, and that's progress!
Quoting universeness
Your are correct in your above speculation.
Quoting universeness
I am strongly inclined towards exaggeration and drama. Because of this inclination, I cannot forget my first viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm referring to the opening scenes depicting the tribal ape wars. When, finally, one ape weaponizes bone into club that trounces the opposition, well... that wasn't an information singularity moment, but it sure as heck was a turning point!
This seems to be the most popular viewpoint regarding the 'pivotal' moment of the development of an ASI. Folks like myself and I think @180 Proof, think that it's just as possible, that a developing/growing ASI that achieves self-awareness, would be benevolent towards all lifeforms, especially lifeforms with the sentience level of humans.
I am sure we, as it's original 'programmers,' would try to make sure it understood the 'good' side of human nature as well as the 'bad.' I think it would make more sense for such an ASI, to help us, and protect us, and enhance us, and perhaps even merge with us, in the common cause of developing an asymptotic approach, towards understanding all there is to know about the universe.
I think we are still a long way away from developing the 'singular' type of ASI we are discussing here, and I also admit, that I have no real idea, of what such an ASI would become, when it became able to fully control and demonstrate the kinds of processing speeds, and data storage and retrieval that a quantum/biological computer network may become capable of. This would be further enhanced, by such a systems, ability, to process data in parallel, rather than in serial.
BUT, humans would need such a system imo, to gain any significant extraterrestial presence.
How much credence would you be willing to assign to the possibility of a benevolent ASI that augments/works alongside/merges with humans (transhumans)?
The popular dystopian view of the tech singularity, may prove to be nothing more than fear based pessimism. Don't you think that if we can do it, at some point WE WILL, as the rewards may be a singularly pivotal moment, which changes the human experience forever, and perhaps (even if its, just mostly, like 51%,) for the better?
Quoting ucarr
It's certainly true, that many atrocities have been committed by humans, since discovering 'weaponry.'
BUT, a great deal of 'civilisation' building has happened to.
As I have already typed in previous posts. I am with the arguments put forward by folks such as Steven Pinker in his book 'Enlightenment Now.'
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is a 2018 book written by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. It argues that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have brought progress, and that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness have tended to rise worldwide. It is a follow-up to Pinker's 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
I do not believe that is enough food to feed everyone, nor is it practical to send produce to poor nations that can not pay for the labor and transportation cost to feed huge populations in poor countries the variety of foods necessary for good health. I wish everyone experienced at least two years of having to live on the food they produce themselves before entering a discussion about feeding the world. The experience would give them a necessary perspective. Tell me, what are the circumstances essential to feeding a family of 7? If we were in the pioneer days and the families diet depended on hurting and gardening what are the challenges and how are they met.
I think your opinions are based on facts, but not knowledge and enough facts for good judgment. Even those in important places may lack the necessary knowledge because their focus is too narrow. If you notice, they are saying we could feed more people by farming where cattle are being raised. Not all ground is good for farming. It can be hard to get enough protein without meat and dairy products.
Modern farming practices that made it possible to feed most the world, come with social, environmental and economic cost. What do people eat when the locus come in and destroy the crops, or weather prevents people from having a good crop? What farming practices improved the yield and gave those who farm an excess that they could sell? And what did improved farming methods have to do with freeing human labor for industry? How has trade changed our potential to have more food? How about what discovering spices, tomatoes and potatoes did to our ability to have plenty of food? How about what discovering how to prevent bacteria did to our food supply? You live in a world that is totally changed and it has not been that long since people everywhere died because of a poor diet. Today the problem is changed, they gtet enough calories but eat the wrong foods and people are destroying their lives and their children's lives with harmful foods.
There is a huge, huge difference between the over abundance and serious health problems today and starvation in the past. You can imagine feeding the world because you have a full belly and didn't put much effort to getting that food. If you lived in a village where every winter neighbors starved to death, and you feared not having enough to eat, you would not be thinking of feeding the world. History gives us perspective and that perspective is necessary for good judgment.
Under what conditions is this true? I grew up in L.A. California and took people being killed for granted, like people in Oregon take rain for granted. I thought it is was very important to be tough. My idea of what it means to be tough changed with old age. :lol: The point is, we are reactionary, and how we feel, think, and behave depends on our environment and circumstance. We can be as angles or completely numb to the suffering of others.
Personally, I think a very evil mind set has emerged and I have deep concerns about our growing dependency on bureaucratic control of our lives. I have concerns about people putting their faith in technology and ignoring our humanness. Given the news today, I see the rise of Nazi Germany coming out of leaving moral training to the church instead of understanding education for good moral judgment is essential to democracy and so is self reliance essential to our liberty.
I hate the modern selling phrase, "get what you deserve", as though mother nature and/or God will take care of us as long as we please the god or our choice. Today, that God, being the government and bureaucracy and thinking rational is all important, failing to appreciate emotional reality and how destructive dependency on authority above us, can be.
Quoting ucarr
No, I merely missed the "information" and focused on the "technological" when I first read that line. Which is ironic in view of my information-centric worldview. However, unless I missed it, he didn't follow-up with a definition/description of an "information singularity". Kurzweil talks about the inevitable "techno singularity" and "machine intelligence" but not much about an "information explosion" from a pin-point. So, I don't know what Uni had in mind regarding the role of Information.
Post-quantum physics has equated Information (power to enform) with physical Energy. In which case the future unleashed-singularity could indeed be an explosion of Information. But, I can't imagine how that would play-out. :worry:
Quoting ucarr
Are you aware of something similar to an "information singularity" in recorded history (a la Gutenberg)? The transition from Theological Science to Empirical Science was a significant change of direction, but the Age of Enlightenment took centuries to take full effect. Hardly an explosion. Likewise, the Information Age that began in the early 20th century has rapidly expanded up to this point in the 21st century, making radical changes in socio-cultural phenomena. But I'm not aware of a bottle-neck that would simulate a Singularity "Bang" : something from nothing.
So, I can see why Kurzweil could imagine that information processing technology (especially AI) could result in something like a Big Bang, where humanity, and its mechanical extensions, rapidly expand their reach into the solar system & universe -- as imagined in countless sci-fi stories. I can conceive of something like a "quantum leap" of cognition, but I have no idea what that would mean -- what it would be like, compared to our current plodding cognition. Perhaps Kurzweil dismisses our present state of cognition as nothing, compared to what is yet to come. Ironically, that reminds me of Apostle Paul's confident prediction of the perfect world-to-come. :joke:
Quoting ucarr
I didn't think you were. But that's where my dialogue with got hung-up. His worldview is basically Empirical (observation), while mine is fundamentally Philosophical (inference). He's OK with extrapolating from known current state toward a future unknown unverifiable possibility; but I was inferring from current knowledge back to unknown possible initial conditions, as many philosophers have done before. Unfortunately, his empirical stance labels questions of Origins as Religious, whereas I view such explorations as Philosophical. Unlike Plato, he draws the line at unverifiable Transcendence. As implicit in his dialogue with Athena, Uni seems to be Past Pessimistic, but Future Optimistic. Other than that Origins Taboo, our worldviews seem to be similar. :cool:
Quoting ucarr
Yes. When I traced the current Information state of the world back as far as possible -- following the pattern of Big Bang Cosmologists -- I came to an Information Singularity of my own, where space-time faded away into infinities. I assume that Plato followed a similar line of reasoning, and concluded that Reality is bounded by space-time. But then, whence space-time & energy-laws? So, he postulated a transcendent (eternal ; infinite) Source of Enforming power (Logos - in Ideality) as an answer to the Open Question of "why something instead of nothing". But that kind of pioneering reverse-reasoning (into the a priori unknown) is not allowed by Empirical doctrine (from known to knowable). Empirical Science takes space-time & matter-energy & natural logical laws for granted (on faith). But I don't. I view Open Questions as the reason for engaging in theoretical Philosophy. :smile:
My initial reaction, which tends towards melodrama (and is therefore suspect) impels me to speculate the above hope is more fever-dream than rational speculation. Remember Independence Day when the human optimists look up towards the hovering alien mothership with hopeful expectation of an imminent, cosmic love-fest? This occurs just before they get vaporized into oblivion.
I'm being melodramatic -- forgive me. However, consider our best evidence available for rational speculation about how homo superior -- whether biological or cyborg -- will likely behave towards homo sapiens. This evidence, as you are well aware, comprises the wretched history of homo sapiens treatment of the rest of earth's animal kingdom. All the expletives in the English language aren't enough to articulate fully how badly we've treated earth's animal kingdom.
As there are homo sapiens kindly to animals, we can expect likewise homo superior individuals. Will such individuals be of sufficient volume to counterbalance the collective treatment of homo sapiens by homo superior the species? By the evidence of homo sapiens' treatment of earth's animal kingdom, this seems hardly likely.
On the other hand, it seems likely to me homo superior will be empowered to enact forms of benevolence beyond our present ability to imagine. Will this be enough of an offset to stand as a protection? I doubt it seriously.
The new, higher-order species, by definition, will have needs and desires that consume resources of creation beyond what homo sapiens can conceptualize. This will mean abrogation of vast resources now essential to the self-determination and well being of homo sapiens. Just the other day I happened to be around some horses. As I started thinking about them, I realized something horrible with stark clarity: Horses are large animals. What they do best, according to their innate power, is run fast and far each day of their lives. Well, humans, pursuing their own dreams, have partitioned off nearly all of the open land on earth. The possibility for horse happiness, with few exceptions, has been destroyed by humans.
Humans will benefit greatly from the benevolent actions of homo superior. We know, however, true happiness in its highest manifestation depends upon species sovereignty. That is lost with the advent of the new sovereign species.
So, information, in this context, is physical and thus "the future unleashed-singularity" of information would likewise be a physical explosion?
Quoting Gnomon
Is this a reference to early book printing?
Quoting Gnomon
Good correction. However, I have two slight howevers. Like you say:
Quoting Gnomon
Acceleration of change can start slowly, eventually picking up great speed:
Quoting Gnomon
Categorical advances, although not examples of something-from-nothing, do a pretty fair job of simulation.
Quoting Gnomon
You count yourself a logician primarily?
Quoting Gnomon
At the time of the singularity preceding the Big Bang?
Quoting Gnomon
Perhaps some sort of richly complex and debatable premise can be spun out of this.
Quoting Gnomon
Are you conceptualizing Information Singularity as a type of black hole compressing the universe down to a point-source?
Quoting Gnomon
Your use of spacetime as a boundary flies in the face of conventional wisdom about the phenomenal universe such that it has no boundaries.
Quoting Gnomon
I would expect you to contest any doctrine characterizing reverse-inference as a journey into the unknowable.
Sidebar -- Regarding, Quoting Gnomon
Here's my short answer to this classic question: "It's because you ask the question."
Probably not. Information is both physical (info=energy=matter) and metaphysical (meaning ; ideas ; math). EnFormAction is my coinage for the Generic Information responsible for the formation of every objective Thing and every subjective Form that evolved from the initial Singularity. The label "Big Bang" implies a physical explosion, but some scientists deny that popular image, and substitute "expansion". Yet the "expansion" of a universe from a pinpoint in micro-seconds sounds more like instant creation-from-scratch than even a mundane physical explosion. That Genesis implication is what caused Hoyle to mock the Cosmologist's theory, describing the ultimate event, as a "Big Bang".
BTW, Uni & 180 like to label Enformationism as a religious notion, because I use the ancient term "metaphysics" to describe the non-physical (mental) aspects of the Real world. But I use that term primarily for its original meaning "adjunct to physics". Which is what Aristotle's second volume of his Physics discussed : not empirical objective descriptions of the physical world, but the variety of human subjective ideas about that world -- including its noumenal features, such as god-posits. :cool:
Quoting ucarr
Yes.
Coping with Gutenberg :
The Information Explosion in Early Modern Europe
http://200.144.254.127:8080/english/journal/articles/burkeinfoexplosion.pdf
Quoting ucarr
No. I'm just an amateur philosopher presenting a non-academic thesis, which is intended to be a logical expansion of a famous scientist's conjecture : "It From Bit" -- Material things emerged from immaterial causal information (the power to enform). :smile:
Quantum Physicist John A. Wheeler :
It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom at a very deep bottom, in most instances an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/02/it-from-bit-wheeler/
Information causality as a physical principle :
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08400
Quoting ucarr
Oh it has been debated extensively all right. The problem is that Uni & 180 begin with a premise of their own, which I reject : that ultimate speculations are inherently religiously motivated. Religious scholars adopted Plato & Aristotle centuries later, but in their own time they were non-conformists regarding the polytheism of their culture. They did propose abstract eternal principles (Logos ; Good) radically unlike the humanoid deities of the non-philosophical Greeks. Christian Theologians interpreted those abstractions in favor of the Jewish God, who has no physical Form that could be represented in idols. It's unlikely that P & A were aware of the Jewish god-concept. In any case, my own interpretations of their Eternal Principles are not connected to any religious practices. But if you feel the urge to worship a formless abstraction, its a free country. :joke:
Quoting ucarr
No. My Singularity is a meta-physical philosophical concept, not a scientific conjecture.
Quoting ucarr
The boundaries I referred to are Space & Time, which are not physical fences. Einstein described the universe as "finite, but unbounded". Which could be interpreted as an oxymoron. But its assumed that he was talking about the physical shape of the universe as a sphere, not as extending into infinity. :wink:
Does The Universe Have Physical Boundaries? :
The universe (observable or otherwise) has no boundary in the physical sense.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/29/does-the-universe-have-physical-boundaries/?sh=79167c722b3c
Quoting ucarr
I didn't say "unknowable" but "unknown". Philosophers and Scientists explore the "undiscovered territory". For example, the Big Bang theory was an exploration (via reverse inference) into the knowable-but-heretofore-unknown history of the universe, back to the beginning of space-time. Yet, imaginative thinkers can easily go beyond that non-physical boundary (trans-finite multiverse), "to infinity and beyond!", as Buzz Lightyear (animated movie) exclaimed. :nerd:
Hopefully, future automated systems will remove the practicality issues you are concerned about.
For me, the main point is that good people will forever seek solutions to such problems and notions such as 'pay for' or 'transportation cost,' will soon become, what they should always have been, non-issues.
Quoting Athena
Do you think people should go back you using the abacus to gain a better understanding of the usefulness of a calculator? Or perhaps use of a horse for a year would make you appreciate your car or local bus service more. Starvation, would make ANYONE appreciate food production more, but I don't think 'spare the rod, spoil the child,' is the only way or even a useful way, to educate people.
Quoting Athena
Establishing economic parity for all and creating a national, international, global food production and distribution system that can sustain our current rate of global population growth. If that proves to be currently impossible then, embark on education campaigns to better control population growth, and strongly discourage families which have 7 children.
Quoting Athena
But we are not in times when each family or tribal unit has to perform the hunter gatherer survival method. We live in times of rampant, pernicious global capitalism. That's the problem, not an inability to produce enough food for everyone.
Quoting Athena
That's fair enough Athena. I would respond with, I think your opinions offer excuses for the behaviour of the nefarious few, past and present, who are fully responsible for the way the world is today.
Quoting Athena
For Example, vertical farming:
Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers. It often incorporates controlled-environment agriculture, which aims to optimize plant growth, and soilless farming techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics
I am not a vegan or a veggie but protein comes from other sources, not just meat alone.
Quoting Athena
Stored foods, distributed when needed. Even the fairy tales in the bible, incudes a cautionary tale regarding 7 fat cows and 7 thin cows. Simple stuff really!
Quoting Athena
The concerns you highlight here seem to me, to be very, very solvable!
Quoting Athena
No, you don't have to experience fire to know it burns, otherwise few problems would ever get solved.
I know people starve to death, so the problem is obvious. I don't need my immediate family or neighbours to die in such ways, before I qualify as someone who can suggest solutions.
Under human conditions, both historical and current.
I am sure you also deduced, that it would be a good idea to help prevent such 'killing,' in anyway we, or you can. Do people in Oregon take rain for granted? We only have YOUR opinion on that one.
Quoting Athena
What's your point Athena? Each person is either part of the problems or part of the solutions???
I KNOW!!!!! :flower: :flower:
Quoting Athena
Many people share your concerns. Fascism is a global concern and always has been. It's as Japanese, Italian, French, American and Russian as it is German. I value technical progress, and see it as an imperative, but it's consequences, are indeed, important to very carefully contend with. I think theism has NOTHING of value to assist us in developing good morality. I think the opposite is true. Secular humanism is the source of human morality, not theism or ancient fables and fairy stories.
'Athena' is a nice human name but Athena the female deity, is just a boring old fable, of no value today, other than as entertainment, for those who enjoy such fables.
Quoting Athena
No government or bureaucracy is omnipotent. ALL GOVERNANCE MUST BE of, for and by the people, or else such authority MUST be replaced. That is the system of governance, we must continue to fight for, FOREVER!!! Even when we achieve it, we must forever fight to maintain it.
ASI is the main candidate for a tech/information singular moment in time.
The main fundamental employed by an artificial super intelligence, will be data/information.
Simple really!
I certainly DO NOT label the general question of the origin story of the universe as exclusively religious and I think you already know that. Cyclical universe, the multiverse, Mtheory etc, etc have no integrated god posits. Only posits like enformationism, have theism/deism at their root, as you as its author, have confirmed, in many of your posts. I broadly agree, with the remaining content of the above quote.
:lol: My defence would be simply that my 'fever-dream,' is no less probable than what sounds like a higher credence level, that you would personally assign, to a terminator style 'skynet' outcome for a singularly pivotal moment of change, due to the human invention of an ASI.
To counter the aggressive aliens in the awfully trite movie 'Independence day.' I offer a scene from Spielbergs AI:
Quoting ucarr
Yes, but, I would say, as WE have gained in knowledge, many more of us will review and alter the way we treat/respect each other and all flora and fauna we encounter. That has not made me a veggie yet. I keep making excuses for myself for not becoming one. So, based on that viewpoint, Homo superior is not a label I like due to the use of 'superior,' but I think such should be more benevolent than homo sapien, due to the knowledge it has access to and it's ability to reason in 'new' ways (rather than superior ways, (I would prefer homo nova to homo superior)).
Quoting ucarr
This is another interesting aspect. I wonder if more than one ASI is developed, there will be a battle between ASI systems. Some protecting humans/transhumans and another, determined to make biological sentient lifeforms, extinct. I loved films like 'Colossus, the Forbin project.'
Perhaps the ASI's would join each other, like in that movie:
Quoting ucarr
Do you reject out of hand a 'merging' of ASI and biological humanity to create a transhuman 'homo nova?'
Quoting ucarr
But to me, you are not considering how vast space is, and the resources available in it seems to be almost inexhaustible, imo. ASI would be essential imo, if we are to become a viable extraterrestial species, which I think is 'emergent' in us, due to the general direction that manifest intent and purpose, seems to currently drive us. ASI would become more and more essential, if we were to ever try to become an interstellar species.
"My God, it's full of stars!"
~Cmdr. Dave Bowman, last transmission ...
It's very thought provoking and artistically/aesthetically pleasing but the interpretations that individuals apply are sooooooo different. Personally:
1. Why is the old man pictured in a room with such Greco/Roman architecture?
2. What does the monolith represent in this scene? A visit from god on the old man's deathbed? or just a representation of what humanity does not yet know about?
3. The innocent looking wide eyed, enigmatically smiling, baby in a bubble, represents what, in juxtaposition to the old bed ridden man? Is it something like, 'as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so will you be. Prepare yourself to follow me? Or is it something like old infirm/new, young and inquisitive. It does not matter, it's all part of the same pursuit of new knowledge?
4. The final scene of the bubble baby, viewed on a scale as big as the planet Earth beside it.
What is the intention? One is the nest of the other? The Earth nestles the baby and the baby gives significance to the existence of the planet and by projection, the universe?
These are just some of my musings on the scene you posted. What are yours?
I know this film was discussed recently (well, 5 months ago,) in a thread by @javi2541997 titled 2001:A Space Odyssey's monolith
I had a quick look at your 2 or 3 posts in that thread, but you didn't offer your personal interpretation of the final scene you posted above, there.
I like your optimism for a future cooperative between homo sapiens and homo nova.
What's your thinking about the problem of good and evil as conceptualized into a future, interstellar society?
Perhaps a good exercise has you elaborating some essentials of future evil; has me elaborating some essentials of future good.
I think you have knowing facts confused with knowledge. A prisoner I corresponded with captured the difference between knowing facts and knowledge. "You may think shit taste bad, but until you eat it, you do not know how bad."
Experience is essential to knowledge. You may think all your ideas are right, but until you experience them, you can not be sure of that. Reading history is a big help and the history of Germany is very important to understanding what is wrong[ with depending on government for too much.
Our liberty is dear. Our rights come with responsibility, not authority over us taking care of us a parent cares for a child.
Learn to grow your own food and rely on yourself before you conclude the solution to human problems is a strong bureaucracy over us. Also if you knew as much history as you know science fiction, that would give you a more realistic perspective.
quote="universeness;783492"]No government or bureaucracy is omnipotent. ALL GOVERNANCE MUST BE of, for and by the people, or else such authority MUST be replaced. That is the system of governance, we must continue to fight for, FOREVER!!! Even when we achieve it, we must forever fight to maintain it.[/quote]
Here is a fiction that might increase your understanding of the danger of believing good intentions can give us the kind of utopia you keep talking about.
Also learning what happened when Hitler took over could increase your awareness of what can go very wrong. The worst thing that can happen is a bureaucracy knowing more about us and our business than our families and the US governments privacy rights act did just that. It blocks family from knowing about each other and opened the door for government to know everything. Government policy also prevents people engaging normally with each other if they employed but the government. I am to visit with people but we can not give each other anything, even if the item will be thrown out. I am take them shopping but I can not do the shopping for them even they are sick. I am talking about a program that did not have these controls in the beginning but gradually became more and more controlling. We did not always have to show our ID and decisions made since 9/11 are not the liberty we defended in two world wars but try to stop things from going in this direction. We adopted German models of bureaucracy and education and we are manifested what we defended our democracy against. We used to laugh at the communist who couldn't get anything done because of government control and red tape. Now our systems are breaking down because of government control and red tape.
Sorry. I was referring to the anti-open-question stance of Logical Positivism*1, which I guessed influenced your negative attitude toward my non-religious non-theist pre-bang hypothesis. I apologize, if I misread your intentions, as you so often misread mine. Since I have no formal indoctrination in philosophical schools of thought, I don't quickly detect the doctrinal source of objections to my own ideas. But I'm learning.
BTW, the notion of Artificial Super Intelligence could be construed as a god-posit, except that it emerges from within Nature, instead of creating Nature. My information-based "god-posit" is conceptually similar except for the direction of emergence. ASI is a prediction (conjecture) based on the current trajectory of Information Technology. Sadly, confident projections of future events are subject to the randomizing effects of Entropy*2. Yet, history shows that inappropriately-named Negative Entropy*3 can counteract some of those negative effects -- by design. It converts gradual natural evolution into rapid technological advances.
Apparently, you are not familiar with the history of Deism. It was a rejection of biblical Theism. Instead, it proposed rational acceptance of the logical necessity for a non-religious philosophical First Cause principle (Cause + Laws), with the Potential for manifesting all aspects of Nature, including Physical (material) & Metaphysical (mental).*4 To this day, scientists have found no reasonable alternative to explain how Mind could emerge from Matter.*5 :smile:
*1. As described in Oxford professor of Philosophy Luciano Floridi's book, The Logic of Information. He discusses several objections to Open Questions, including those raised by Logical Positivists. Apparently for LPs, the creator-god-posit is a closed question, due to the absence of empirical evidence. Yet, the evidence for a Prime Mover is inherently beyond the scope of empirical investigation. But remains within range of rational conjecture.
Floridi defines "open questions" as "genuine requests for information", not as dogmatic interpretations of evidence. "Philosophical questions are questions not answerable empirically or mathematically, with observations or calculations.. . . . that remain in principle open to informed, rational, and honest disagreement."
*2. Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model, is quoted as saying, Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future! This quote serves as a warning of the importance of testing a forecasting model out-of-sample.
https://blogs.cranfield.ac.uk/cbp/forecasting-prediction-is-very-difficult-especially-if-its-about-the-future/
Note -- how do you test an imaginary model of the future without time-traveling? Likewise, how could you empirically test a philosophical model of the pre-bang past? In such cases, the prognosticator's biases tend to be amplified in the model. Is ASI benevolent or malevolent? Are AI techs creating the seeds of our own destruction a la Skynet?
*3. Negative Entropy :
In my thesis, I call that positive natural force "Enformy", in order to relate it to the organizing effects of Enformation. The natural tendency toward order (evolution) has been amplified by human knowledge & intentions as the artificial force we call "Culture". It's an emergent organizing principle with a centralized reference point and a conceptual framework. So, if human culture could resolve its internal conflicts and focus its powers toward the assisted evolution of Artificial Intelligence, then destructive effects of Entropy could, in theory, be overcome. But be careful how you place your bets.
*4. "Cyclical universe, the multiverse, Mtheoryetc, etc have no integrated god posits"
The absence of god-posits is due to their intentional fabrication as alternatives to Theism. They all fill the god-gap with eternal Cause & Laws, just as my Information-based theory does. Which of those models do you find satisfactory explanations for the contingent existence of our world? The 21st century understanding of Information includes Energy (causation) & Organization (natural laws).
*5. How Could Mind Emerge From Mindless Matter? :
Complexity theory and emergence point the way to understanding consciousness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201901/how-could-mind-emerge-mindless-matter
Note -- Ironically, both Complexity & Emergence theories must assume (without evidence) that Nature was innately pre-programmed with the Potential for Mental phenomena. However, viewed reductively, Complexity is just Chaotic and Emergence is just Change. But from a more inclusive perspective we can see that Life & Mind are emergent Whole Systems manifesting novel properties that are more than the sum of the parts.
I am flattered by your willingness to use my 'homo nova' term. A large part of homo nova would be OF homo sapien ancestry, so I think that will be a large influencer. The ASI would be the 'mecha' component of homo nova, so that's the part that I hope will be benevolent towards us, and be willing to merge with us, or at least support and augment us. I hope future transhumans, will try to repair some of the historical damage homo sapiens committed, due to their theistic fogs, primeval fear responses, law of the jungle survival imperatives that resulted in vile practices, such as, territoriality, monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, autocracy, capitalism, cult of personality and celebrity etc. It was mostly the more nefarious amongst us that championed and practiced, and used such methods to gain full control, over our stewardship of the Earth.
Perhaps, once we become extraterrestial and we can 'terraform' other planets, creatures such as horses, might also become extraterrestial, through us and have their future assured.
Perhaps all of the species on Earth, will prove to be an essential part of our future space exploration and development.
Perhaps we can even learn how to bring back many now extinct species, to atone for earlier homo sapien behaviours. It's nice to think such thoughts, and it's nice to know I need no god to do so.
I also don't have to give thanks to any god notion, for being able to think such thoughts, or communicate them to others. Think what humans could really achieve, if more and more of us, finally, cannot be fooled even some of the time, never mind most or all of the time. If we could finally see through, all of the BS and horror and suffering, that past and present nefarious members of our species have caused, due to their own inability to deal with their own selfish inner primal fears.
Quoting ucarr
I think good and evil are human inventions that have no objective meaning other than as concepts that we can asymptotically aspire to. They are nonetheless absolutely critical concepts of human morality and human ethics.
It would seem very obvious, that I think our morality, should aspire to the good and resist manifestations of destructive evil. It's important perhaps, to make such obvious statements, even though they seem so obvious.
Perhaps the more important statement is that I think we need to reject all proposed supernatural agents/influences, as sources of good and evil, so that we can finally take full responsibility ourselves, and stop scapegoating non-existents, as a means of deflecting the blame from ourselves.
An earthquake/famine/tsunami/volcanic eruption/pandemic/asteroid strike etc etc are mostly, not our fault, but our efforts to protect ourselves from such and our response to such, when they happen, IS OUR responsibility. Such is not, nor have they EVER been, the whim and responsibility of gods. Time for all humans to grow up! WE will be responsible for all future good and future evil as WE will be the source of such. It is therefore essential that we ensure 'good' is pursued and 'evil' is prevented or responded to effectively, when it cannot be prevented.
Can you help the blind without becoming blind yourself Athena?
Knowing what it's like to be blind yourself IS NOT the qualification you need to help the blind OR to be able to fight effectively for a better world.
Quoting Athena
History is a big interest of mine Athena and I would suggest I now as much about history as you do.
We all have our specialisms. I bet I know a lot more about Scottish history that you, and you probably know more about Greek history (especially their folklore,) than I.
I do not advocate for 'a strong bureaucracy' over us, I advocate for authority of, for and by the people.
I advocate for secular humanist, democratic, socialist governance which is resource based and global.
Quoting Athena
I have read Aldous Huxley's book, brave new world and have watched many of its dramatisations.
Brave New World is dystopian and a resource based global, secular humanist, democratic socialist real politik, would not cause such a lifestyle, as that depicted in Brave New World. You have always displayed a rather pessimistic viewpoint for the future of the human race, and I have always, and will always, disagree with that aspect of your current world view.
Quoting Athena
Yeah, I'm kinda familiar with that to ........
I am fine with you exemplifying things that you think have went wrong in the past and how some of those shortfalls are causing difficulty today. I also think its ok for you to raise concern about how new tech is currently being employed today, but I disagree with your pessimistic outlook, towards current efforts to improve things.
Quoting universenessThanks for the description of that. Its far more than I knew, and I havent really looked it up myself.
Quoting universenessNot thinking of those being an amazing anything. How about just the person running a paper-pushing position at say a local doctors office. Yes, you can get the boost from doing something needing doing, being amazing about it in the eyes of others is a stretch. Respectable, sure. What about all those service jobs with a boss that makes every day misery? I know several businesses locally that permanently have help-wanted signs outside because they scare away employees faster than they attract them. Imagine that situation without the incentive of getting anything (event he ego boost) for your efforts.
How about somebody working at an abortion clinic (doctor or staff)? Those people provide an essential service and yet get far more disapproval from others than otherwise.
Im speaking of those in a first world country that actively decide not to contribute. Theres a significant number of them. In the country with the hut, somebody making a choice like that would just starve. Youre describing a global first world situtation, so your comparisons shouldnt reach for the opposite end of that spectrum.
Of course I do. Not many of those voting otherwise tend to find their way onto a forum like this one. OK, more here than youd find on say a science forum.
Secular humanism isnt enough imo, and the office required to do what needs doing doesnt even exist. The candidates all stand for the voters now, not for humanity, beyond their incredibly short term of office.
Prints sure, but its the originals which command the value. Those sell by barter if nothing else, and command a significant exchange on the black market (any market operating outside the to each according to their needs mechanism).
Yea, thats been a problem. China for instance steals software, copying it freely, thus forcing restrictions on sales of tech to them. An Xbox for example could not be legally be exported to China due to this policy. I agree that such laws are kind of pointless on a global communist society, but right now there isnt a global anything economy. Its just different independent countries each with different rules. The lack of unified rules is a huge part of the problem. How do you propose to move from how it is now to a unified thing?
Trying to figure out if/where the sarcasm kicks in. Yes, many people love art. Those guys get the prints. But the wealthy can afford the rare stuff, the originals, and there will very much be the wealthy. The artist in question will be one of them. Lack of a concept of money just makes it harder to tax.
Seriously? Because it commands a price. She can trade it for other luxuries that are not included in the package available to everybody.
So do I. Did I say otherwise? OK, a luxury life does not imply a happy person. One of the best way to ruin your happiness and relations with everybody you know is to win a major lottery. The stats on that are very consistent. But a lottery winner is very different from somebody who earned the same amount.
For the record, I consider lotteries to be a stupid-tax: A tax thats completely optional, to be paid only by stupid people.
I suspect the future for the personal vehicle (let alone a flying one) is doomed. Transportation in any sufficiently dense population is best done by mass transit. Ive been in the places where many people dont own cars since everything can be reached via bus, subway, intercity trains, boats, etc. Most of the personal transportation might be limited to bicycles. Its too rural where I live to do that, but that raises the problem where many want to live in a scenic place like the mountains, but do work more suited to an urban setting. That makes for a lot of resources wasted on commuting, even if it is a mass commute.
There will be small vehicles, like a service van for the plumber and such.
On the subject of the information singularity which half the people seem incapable of grasping.
The singularity that you hear about is a threshold of sorts, where machines are more capable of improving themselves than by having humans doing it. Were not there yet, and theres quite a ways to go, but the advances are coming fast and it doesnt seem that long before it happens.
Quoting GnomonThe singularity in question has nothing to do with ones mind.
It also has nothing to do with world-creating. Planet Earth will be the same planet afterwards.
Quoting ucarrI could not understand that bit at all. It doesnt involve an explosion, but it does involve growth of capability possibly going more exponential than the somewhat more linear growth seen today. That growth might not be so exponential since we seem to already be pushing the limits of Moores law.
Quoting universenessYoure speaking of a mathematical singularity here, where certain laws of physics become meaningless when denominators go to zero and such. The information singularity is nothing like that. Its kind of like one vehicle passing another on the highway. Now theres a new one in the lead is all.
Quoting ucarrFunny, but I dont see that as scary. I see that as a destiny fulfilled. Yes, all the species that were our ancestors but are now extinct have effected their own obsolescence by breeding something more fit. Superior as you put it. I suppose it sucked in a way for the species now extinct, but I see it as a success.
Quoting ucarrThats probably the best analogy I saw in the posts. The I-S is like that, a sort of critical mass that results in something self-sustaining like an atomic pile (or a meltdown), but not so over-critical that it explodes like a bomb.
As an aside, Ive always hated how Hollywood depicts a meltdown resulting in a bomb-like event with the huge explosion. The movie Aliens comes to mind, but there were some older ones that made the same mistake. Hey, people like to see the bang, even if the physics is nonsense.
I know this was a reply to Athena but it applies to me as well. In my case, while deeply pessimistic about human existence, I'm cautiously optimistic about post-human intelligence (whether or not it's an extinction event for us).
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/770390
Quoting universeness
:cool:
In a similar vein, my post-human (post-biomorphic) preference is nano sapien.
Quoting universeness
You must have missed this (below) from that old thread ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light". ~Stanley Kubrick
Quoting ucarr
Quoting noAxioms
I admire your big-hearted generosity: you look at evolution writ large and applaud its progress, inevitable extinction events notwithstanding. Henceforth, I'll use it as a guide for my own speculations about the future. I see from my readings here that my thinking needs modulation by your robust brand of optimism.
:rofl: .
Anyone who 'construes' ASI as a god posit is just in woo woo thinking mode imo. Effort towards ASI is by human design alone. Humans emerged from natural happenstance, ASI will come from human intent.
Quoting Gnomon
No it's not. The 'direction of emergence' part you admit to, makes all the difference. ASI is for the future. The first cause deity (deism) that you posit, as the creator of the universe, IS an origin posit. Not a future emergence from human activity.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, it is, but your bracketed 'conjecture' is imbalanced. Moore's law has proven to be accurate so far.
A first cause mind is pure conjecture as an origin posit but ASI has some sound evidence behind it, as emerging from human intent and activity. You continue to conflate your imaginings, with real scientific projections. Your 'philosophy' would be more credible, imo, if you stopped doing that.
Quoting Gnomon
Right back at you! What to you is a deity?
deity:
[b]a god or goddess (in a polytheistic religion): "a deity of ancient Greece"
SIMILAR: god, goddess, divine being, celestial being, supreme being
Divine status, quality, or nature: "a ruler driven by delusions of deity"
SIMILAR: divine nature, divineness, godliness, godhead, holiness
(THE DEITY)
the creator and supreme being (in a monotheistic religion such as Christianity):
"she raised her head as if appealing to the Deity presiding over the church"
SIMILAR: God, Lord, Lord God
Deity: Him upstairs, the man upstairs, a representation of a god or goddess, such as a statue or carving[/b]
From wiki:
A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life".
From CompareWords:
What's the difference between deism and deity?
The doctrine or creed of a deist; the belief or system of those who acknowledge the existence of one God, but deny revelation.
Quoting Gnomon
From where in the accurate definitions of deity and deism above, do you 'magic' your notion that deism is not theism and is not synonymous with religion? Deism rejects the BS biblical 'revelation.' It merely asserts that your deity has never communicated with its creation (us!) :roll: Who cares? YOU connected YOUR enformer with deism which means YOU labelled it a deity. All you have done since then, is try to struggle out of those manacles you placed on yourself by trying to redefine deism. Why you choose to cosplay as a theist/deist, whilst denying your dalliances with it, is just bizarre behaviour imo.
Quoting Gnomon
I assign more credence to CCC at the moment, mainly because the physics/cosmology community has not came up with convincing counter evidence against Roger Penrose's (and his team's) 'Hawking points,' evidence, which is supported by the Wmap data and the Planck data.
I have listened to some of the counter explanations of where the temperature differences could come from in the CBR, from folks such as Alan Guth and Neil Turok but Roger's evidence is still very compelling.
Is your 'enformationism' a hot topic of debate within the scientific community? Will it become so, anytime soon? I will be able to contribute to such, if it ever happens as I have read a 'fair amount' of your speculations from your 'blog' using the link you provided, but not every word, and I have not pondered every speculation you offer in great depth, not yet anyway.
If the people on the tracks, made the train, and caused it to hurtle towards themselves, then they are the only ones who can stop it. The optimists are not as passively waiting and are not as meekly accepting of the fate your pessimism suggests, they can do nothing about.
We have stopped many unjust, tyrannical, seemingly all powerful threats before. The proof is that we are not extinct. You can keep accepting the train threats, if you want to live your life like that. I will keep working with those who can stop trains hurtling towards us.
Quoting noAxioms
Soon automated, hopefully, same for all such tedious jobs.
Quoting noAxioms
This can be enough for some folks, as long as they can also pursue other things that interest them significantly.
Quoting noAxioms
You keep churning out such examples, and I keep repeating that I am confident that any job humans don't want to do, can be eventually automated. Until such time, everyone should be willing to 'help' do the jobs, no-one particularly likes. If anyone refuses to do their share, then I would not remove access to any of their basic needs, but there would be social consequence's of their refusal, to do their fair share.
Quoting noAxioms
Pro-life and bodily autonomy arguments and issues like it, will no doubt persist for a long time yet. Advances in transhumanism will have a major effect on such debates in the future, as transhumanism affects human robustness and longevity, more and more.
Who knows how new tech will change how an abortion is performed in the future.
Well, I have already stated that the main consequence of behaving as you suggest, in the quote above, is 'social status' based. You would have to suffer the non-violent, social disdain of the majority of the population. I would name and shame. eg, 'Jimmy Smith of ....... address, refuses to spend 1 day a week helping to ...... and do ........ He is provided with everything he needs. He enjoys painting and going to music events and he is a member of a local debating society and he ...... blah, blah.
If you know Jimmy (photo's provided), perhaps you could discuss with him, why he will not help his local community, in the ways we have asked him to.
You might find my suggestion here unpalatable, and you might even think that violence would be threatened or enacted against Jimmy, or Jimmy himself would respond to such social haranguing with violence, even though it would be prosecuted, if it was perpetrated.
Perhaps you can suggest a better way to reason with Jimmy, if all verbal reasoning has failed to date. If the number of Jimmy's around, was very small, then perhaps they could just be left alone, to live as social outcasts, but they could rejoin society anytime they wished to.
Perhaps the issue would never arise eventually, due to the level of automation achieved.
Whatever the outcome is, it seems to me, to offer a far more fair and just society, compared to that we experience now, as the human condition.
I am currently, only musing, on the scenario's you are presenting to me.
I think the proxy war between the west and Russia in Ukraine will prove pivotal. China will be severely affected as well. Either war will destroy us all or it will eventually unite us all, as it has since we came out of the wilds. Two tribes go to war and either one conquers the other of they make peace by uniting. Either way, two tribes become one. From chaos comes order. Sometimes we can unite without having to go through a war first. I would far prefer that route. Uniting as a global species, because it makes sense to do so. I believe global unity and world government is inevitable but I don't know the time scale. I do agree with the pessimists that our extinction is the alternative.
I intended no sarcasm in what I typed.
If what you say proves to be true in the future, and the 'wealthy' still exist as you describe them above.
I would be fine with that, especially if that would satisfy the machinations of some individual need to demonstrate personal freedom by 'having more than others,' and if that would also satisfy the narcissistic and the 'material ownership,' that some 'entrepreneurial endeavours' pursue, then, so be it.
If that is the level of concession that secular humanism and democratic socialism has to concede then that's not such a high price to pay, if it means that every human being on the planet, can take their basic means of survival and their basic protections for granted, from cradle to grave.
Quoting noAxioms
Glad you agree! Yeah, a lottery win can be a death sentence for many.
'Earned the same amount,' is controversial, to say the least. The money trick means you can earn great wealth, not by particularly working hard but by sycophantically leeching from the sweat and toil of workers. If you earned your millions/billions via investments and deals on the stock markets (gambling joints), then your wealth is via the money trick and is NOT CLEAN imo.
Having a idea and setting up a business selling books (like Jeff Bezos and Amazon) is fine.
That beginning, that resulted in the Amazon company that exists today and the abomination that is now the wealth of Bezos, is nefarious, and vile, and needs to be stopped from ever, ever happening, in the future.
Horrors like Bezos, Musk, Branson, Gates etc and vile family dynasties such as the dukes of Westminster or the Wallenbergs, must never be possible in the future.
Sounds good to me! Apart from the 'waste of resources.'
Yes, I know.
Quoting noAxioms
I know, that's why I typed
Quoting universeness
and
Quoting universeness
Yeah I remember some of our early exchanges, and my labelling of you as a doomster.
I think I was wrong in that accusation ...... but ...... sometimes ........ :gasp:
Quoting 180 Proof
:grin: but why so small? Would you not at least consider upgrading us to mini sapien, or medio sapien?
Do you completely reject that a future ASI may choose to remain separate from us, but will augment us, and protect us, when we are in danger. ASI may never reach the emotional content/intensity, that we can demonstrate. Do you think an ASI would be able to reproduce something as 'bizarre' as human imagination?
Quoting 180 Proof
No, I did read those entries again, but I didn't specifically relate what you typed in that thread, to the scene you posted on this one, but I will now:
Quoting 180 Proof
Ok, so it's observing its ancestor as a bed ridden old man and as a baby, initially in a Greco/Roman room, and then the baby (starchild), next to Earth.
Do you think the monolith is 'learning' or 'teaching' or both, in this scene?
Quoting 180 Proof
So does this depict, for you, an 'ascendance' moment for the human, or a 'completion of purpose' moment for the human. Is the monolith making an equivalent style statement, to such as 'as you are now, so once was I, as I am now, so will you be, prepare yourself to follow me?
Quoting 180 Proof
Is this then imagery, of completing the circle, or perhaps even the cycle?
Would you find anything in this final scene then, that is relatable to cyclical universe posits, such as CCC or do you think Kubrick was going for something more akin to the buddhist 'wheel of life?'
Quoting 180 Proof
So do you think the universe is, in the final analysis deterministic or not? Or is my general interpretations of your analysis of the final scene you posted and your typings, in Javi's thread, way off?
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting Gnomon
So, attempting an analogy here, is it that enformaction is like computer code, and information is like the GUI we see on the computer screen?
So, from what I conjecture from your two above quotes, physicality extends all the way into the metaphysical ground of existence; this one can claim since both information and enformaction interface the physical_cognitive? Does this possibility suggest semi-metaphysicality instead of metaphysicality?
Quoting Gnomon
I'm a bit puzzled by your use of "adjunct" because it usually means supplemental rather than essential. Given your emphasis on the essential role of metaphysics to existence -- and therefore to physics -- a conventional position, construing it as supplemental seems contradictory.
Quoting Gnomon
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Gnomon
Well, you say your worldview is fundamentally inferential so... your conclusions are not reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning?
Quoting Gnomon
Is it correct to say the essence of your enformaction theorem is Wheeler's It-From-Bit idea?
I see that Wheeler reduces reality down to the binary code of the computer. This suggests to me the
bits processed in computer circuitry embody your above definitions of information_enformaction.
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Gnomon
Is it correct to say your Singularity has components both physical and cognitive?
Quoting ucarr
Quoting Gnomon
Spacetime within the context of Relativity is most assuredly physical. General relativity, being the geometric theory of gravitation -- including warpage of spacetime -- makes the case for this.
How can you justify your above claim in light of this?
Quoting Gnomon
I'm thinking the above statements contain a thicket of issues: a sphere, by definition, has boundaries (every point on its surface is equidistant from its center). More generally, a shape, by definition, has boundaries. Finally, if a physical object doesn't extend indefinitely, it has a shape. Do you think otherwise?
What would motivate anyone to help the blind? How is it possible to know how to help a blind person?
Hellen Keller could not see or hear, and a woman who could see and hear, taught her language and made it possible for her to have the language necessary for thinking and communicating with others.
Her parents did not do this. Why didn't her parents teach her? What made the woman who did teach Hellen Keller language different from her parents? The answer will define what makes a human different from AI and from there we can have an interesting discussion.
EnFormAction is envisioned somewhat like a computer program processing Information (matter & energy) in order to produce the phenomena that we interpret as Reality. Regarding the perceptive GUI analogy, I'll simply refer you to Donald Hoffman's counterintuitive notion of our mental interpretation of sensory inputs as, not Reality per se, but an "interface" for the underlying ding an sich. :nerd:
In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information.
Reality is not what you see :
cognitive scientist Hoffman has produced an updated version of Kants controversial Occult Ontology
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Quoting ucarr
As Kant argued, our physical senses detect abstract information (similar to dots & dashes of Morse code) which our minds interpret into the imaginary models that we accept intuitively as Reality. Deacon updated that physical/metaphysical distinction with a modern computer interface analogy. But the notion that our Ideal mental models are the only Reality we have access to, is anathema to Materialists & Realists. For them, any reference to "Metaphysics" betrays a religious commitment. And I suspect that various worldwide religious notions of a hidden or parallel reality (or spirit realm) may derive from a vague pre-scientific grasp of the fact that : what you see Physically ain't necessarily what-is Ontologically. If, by "semi-metaphysicality" you mean a blend of physical & metaphysical worldviews, I suppose that describes the Hylomorphism of Aristotle. :brow:
Aristotle's hylomorphism is, roughly speaking, the idea that objects are compounds consisting of matter and form.
https://metaphysicsjournal.com/articles/10.5334/met.2
Note -- what he called "Form" (the idea or design or pattern of a thing) is what I call "Generic (non-specific) Information", which can be enformed into a material instance of the general concept.
Quoting ucarr
I don't remember saying that the worldview is "fundamentally inferential" in so many words, but I suppose that's true. But then, what is "reasoning" if not the practice of Inference? Maybe what you meant was "imaginary". If so, no. Although imagination is necessary to see anybody's mental model of the world. :nerd:
An inference is an idea or conclusion that's drawn from evidence and reasoning. An inference is an educated guess. We learn about some things by experiencing them first-hand, but we gain other knowledge by inference the process of inferring things based on what is already known.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/inference
Quoting ucarr
Yes, but I didn't realize the full meaning of that expression until years later, when I read an article on Quantum Physics in which the author exclaimed in reference to wave/particles, "it's all information, nothing but information" I suspect that Wheeler's postulate was ignored by pragmatic physicists, who gave-up trying to understand the meaning of quantum weirdness, and decided to just "shut-up and calculate". Similar unorthodox expressions by quantum pioneers (e.g. Bohr & Heisenberg), were ridiculed as Eastern religious beliefs. But what all those weird notions have in common is Holism, which was originally a scientific concept that was later adopted by New Agers. :cool:
Holism and FreeWill Versus Reductionism and Fatalism :
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page24.html
Quoting ucarr
No, a dimensionless Singularity is a mathematical (cognitive) definition, not a physical object. If the Singularity was a physical container, it would have compressed all the matter in the universe into a dimensionless dot. An infinity-to-one compression ratio.
Quoting ucarr
For Einstein, the curvature of non-physical space was a mathematical (geometrical) concept, not intended to be taken literally. Yet, it's now a stock gimmick of sci-fi stories. Likewise, the "fabric" of spacetime is a metaphorical analogy, not an invisible kind of cloth. Can you stick yourself on the point of a geometric triangle? :joke:
Spacetime Curving :
There is no evidence that there is any actual (as in real or physical) space-time, much less that there is any actual curvature thereof.
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-actually-warp-the-fabric-of-space-time
Quoting ucarr
No, according to Einstein, the universe, like a spherical surface (no innards), is unbounded. By contrast, a cube is bounded by edges. :wink:
As an example of an unbounded Universe, imagine a sphere in 3D space.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/247864/what-does-finite-but-unbounded-universe-mean
You've invoked "Moore's Law"; well, in a similiar vein, the miniaturization of tech, like natural complexity (i.e. life), accelerates ... and I think Buckminster Fuller waa right about ephemeralization in the 1930s (later updated by John Smart et al in the 2000s with the transcension hypothesis) that intelligent systems will also continue to miniaturize, such that AGI > ASI will eventually be instantiated in matter itself (and maybe then somehow in entangled quantum systems). Thus, nano sapiens. Will they be us? I imagine them as our post-biomorphic infomorphic descendsnts, and, to me, Clark/Kubrick's "Monolith symbolizes this apotheosis.
I don't think ASI's goals, especially with respect to humanity, are predictable since ASI is over the event horizon of the "technological singularity" (which is the advent of AGI).
As for AGI and whether or not it will be a benefit or hazard to us, I think that mostly depends on how we engineer / (metacognitively train, not just program) the transition from ANI to AGI. I don't see AGI being inherently hazardous to motivated to deliberately harm other sentient species.
I imagine the movie 2001 in its entirety as the "Monolith" simulating within itself to its-human ancestral-self ("Kubrick's audience") a reenactment of its human ancestors' becoming post-human.
Yes.
No. I imagine that a human astronaut's transformation into the "Star Child" happened long ago (from the Monolith's perspective) as the third(?) and (possibly last) irreverisible step on the developmental path to becoming itself: a nano sapien hypercivilization (aka from our perspective "the Monolith").
For us, perhaps it is, given our mythopoetic bias.
No.
I think the post-planck era universe is deterministic.
Yeah it is, but I didn't elaborate there as much as I have here. Maybe my interpretation of Kubrick's final scene is clearer now? (Btw, both Kubrick's interpretation and mine differ from Arthur C. Clarke's too.) :nerd:
I don't understand why you would ask such a question?
Quoting Athena
Perhaps those who train guide dogs for the blind, for example, could explain it to you better than I.
Again I don't understand your line of questioning here.
Quoting Athena
Or speak! Her parents did not know the 'finger spelling' sign language involved. What motivated the woman who did teach Helen how to communicate, was the fact that she (Anne Sullivan) was a sign language specialist who was brought in, via Helen's parents.
How does this make Anne Sullivan different from a future ASI that can teach humans sign language? There is no AI expert sign language system, currently capable of teaching finger spelling to someone like Helen Keller. But the proposed abilities of a future ASI, certainly could. In fact, a future ASI could probably develop a much better sign system, that could communicate with Helen, compared to finger spelling. Helen herself preferred 'oralism' to 'finger spelling' and braille etc Oralism involves touching a persons mouth as they speak.
Hand gesturing and communication through touch, goes way back to ancient times.
Again, I find your line of questioning bizarre, here Athena. But, I know you are a wise old force, so I am sure it's just a failing on my part to 'get where you are coming from here.'
I agree with your suggestion that 'functionality' can be miniaturised but I have not really thought about how miniature something could be, but still be self-aware or conscious. Any nano tech I have heard of is certainly functional and can even be networked to achieve a common goal etc but no nano tech is currently sentient. I though by nano sapien, you meant that there would not be much left, which was 'human,' hence your 'post-human' preference over 'transhuman.' I see now that your analysis runs deeper than that.
Quoting 180 Proof
True!
Quoting 180 Proof
Ok, so the monolith IS post-human.
Quoting 180 Proof
Confirms what I though you were saying about what the monolith represents, but what do you think of 2010, the sequel to 2001, written by Clarke as well. In that film, a large number of monoliths are used to turn Jupiter into a new star. I assume Jupiter's moons are also turned into new habitable space for humans but Europa is to be left alone and is protected by a monolith. This was too close to the Adam and Eve BS for me. You can go to any tree EXCEPT THIS ONE (Europa). Oh come on Mr Clarke, how derivative can you get?
From wiki:
[b]HAL determines that the spot is a vast group of Monoliths, multiplying exponentially and altering Jupiter's density and chemical composition. He suggests canceling the launch in order to study the changes occurring to Jupiter. Floyd worries that HAL will prioritize his mission over the humans' survival, but Chandra admits to the computer that there is a danger, and that Discovery may be destroyed. HAL thanks Chandra for telling him the truth, and ensures the Leonov's escape. Before Discovery is destroyed, Bowman asks HAL to transmit a priority message, assuring him that they will soon be together. The Monoliths engulf Jupiter, which undergoes nuclear fusion, becoming a new star. HAL transmits this message to Earth:
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
The Leonov survives the shockwave from Jupiter's ignition, and returns home. Floyd narrates how the new star's miraculous appearance, and the message from a mysterious alien power, inspire the American and Soviet leaders to seek peace. Under its infant sun, icy Europa transforms into a humid jungle, covered with life, and watched over by a Monolith.[/b]
Do you see these monoliths that exponentially multiply to turn Jupiter into a new star, as lifeforms or some kind of solarforming/terraforming system? The film does not confirm that the monoliths are consumed by this process. We don't know what happens to all those monoliths.
From your link to the fermi paradox, I liked:
The Transcension Hypothesis ventures that an advanced civilization will become fundamentally altered by its technology. In short, it theorizes that any ETIs that predate humanity have long-since transformed into something that is not recognizable by conventional SETI standards.
But as this confirms, that may only apply to ETI's that are way more advanced that humans.
Perhaps a little like 'the first ones,' dramatised in the sci-fi series Babylon 5. But such suggests many other species would have to exist other that just 'first ones,' unless, for some unknown reason, WE ARE the first ones.
Quoting 180 Proof
:grin: Yeah, Poetic license has a lot of girth.
Quoting 180 Proof
So do you think 'quantum fluctuations' are deterministic? I think they are the only example of true 'random happenstance' that I am convinced does qualify as 'random.'
Quoting 180 Proof
True, perhaps also true for the sequel, 2010, as it will also be the director Peter Hyams' interpretation of Clarke's story.
Post-posthuman (i.e. post-sentient).
I didn't think much of either book or film. IMO, the latter is quite dated and superficially derivative.
They certainly aren't deterministic to a classical observer.
:lol: Fair enough, I don't know how to be anything else. Perhaps I need to consult a quantum physicist on determinism Vs quantum fluctuations.
OK, I can accept that. I also had a paper-pushing job of sorts, but quite a good one involving significant creativity and pay. Such jobs will also be available for automation one the capability is there. It isnt yet. But I suspect that there will be those who still choose to do such things, even if not in a capacity that displaces the machines doing the actual necessary work.
It wasnt so much a job that wasnt desired, but rather management that nobody wants to work under. I suppose they can make machines that dont mind being berated for not being fast enough, or machines that dont need to wear diapers just because the boss thinks 4 hours between restroom breaks is a minimum interval (Amazon does this among others).
Yes, machines have automated many tasks, but so far theyre really awful at reacting to problems that arise, anything out of the ordinary. How does the robot restaurant cook react to a rat in the fresh food storage? Probably doesnt notice it.
Ah, now you finally mention the possible utility of consequences, even if completely unspecified.
This is an interesting conflict because Ive never seen either side of the argument make the slightest attempt to acknowledge the points made by the opposing side. Theres almost zero rationality to it. Ive been to rallies (you decide which side) and trust me, rationality is nowhere to be seen.
Point is, the issue with the environment is similarly lacking in rational thought, despite all the claims to the contrary. You need to start with a goal, and ask why that goal?, and if theres an answer to that, then you probably havent identified the goal yet, only a means to some other goal.
Sure, but how is not the issue. If is more the issue.
Quoting universenessThose on the bottom of the social status scale dont seem to mind their position there, or the social disdain that comes with it.
Because he gets all he needs without helping. Thats apparently enough for Jimmy. Of course I dont see public shame-sheets naming each of them each month or so, a list of able-bodies individuals on the dole. People would get tired of such propaganda pretty quickly and it would lose any real pressure after a short time.
Then there would be crime, which would be dealt with accordingly, especially with automated evidence-gathering infrastructure that makes it almost impossible to get away with anything illegal. Its not big-brother if its just preventing crime, right?
I dont know, I sort of favor the way they do it with the guy in the hut, but how to differentiate the layabout from the guy who has this busy hobby writing unpopular books and is too busy to pitch into community-necessary work that somehow cannot be automated? Some have excuses. Not all are able-bodied. Some are retired and exempt, and part of the code is to extend their presence as long as possible.
Just so. Then theres no obligatory tasks, pretty much exactly like life in a zoo.
How is population of a given region controlled? That cant stay exponential forever, else the human biomass density will eventually exceed the mass density of the available elements. None of the above visions work without this. Shipping the excess off-planet is not a solution. Colonization is done with new blood. Australia is sort of an exception to this, but it was not done with surplus, but with undesirables.
Quoting universenessDont think it can unite us. Sure, it can join two smaller groups into a larger one, as it always has, but it cannot, nor has it ever in history, made us one. At best it will be a total imperialistic state with one small group in control of everyone else as occupied states. If they kill off all the occupied population (as they seem to be attempting with Ukraine), then without anyone over whom to have power, the state will collapse into smaller units in mutual conflict. Imagine the entire planet controlled by somebody like Putin, with nothing but Russians everywhere and nobody left who isnt one. That wont last. The rules will not be the same for everybody. I cant prove this, but it seems human nature that this is inevitable. A group needs an enemy to maintain its identity as that group. Theres never been an us that seems to encompass all of humanity.
Of course if there were other planets colonized, that might well unite an entire planet or even federations of them.
If that was the outcome, thered be no point to the war. No, the loser loses something, usually significantly more than just say their leader having to bend the knee. Why does Ukraine resist whats happening if all they have to do is unite and everybody goes home happy?
Well we differ there. I find it impossible unless you limit global to one of multiple globes. Just my opinion.
[quote=noAxioms]Trying to figure out if/where the sarcasm kicks in. [/quote]Quoting universenessI have bad sarcasm radar, so never sure.
Quoting ucarrI presumed at first this was straight, but I delude myself. jgill definitely throws in on the sarcasm side.
But in seriousness, I find my comment to which that was a response to be an optimistic outlook for the grander scale. My goals are far larger than those of most people, larger than humanity even. So Im seen as a pessimist because I see humanity as only a means to something, not as an end.
You said this, just not in those words. You said people could barter for more than the essential needs provided by the state on what I called the black market. That makes for wealthy people. If not, then such activity (barter) should be illegal and all goods (say the highly sought after paintings) should be handed out by lottery or something, in which case theyll all be destroyed in short order because the average Joe has no means to care for priceless artwork. The artist will probably not bother to make many, knowing this fate awaits them.
You seem to be OK with there being wealthy people. After all, it makes for an incentive to do something truly productive rather than mere pursuit of ones hobbies.
I wonder if a sufficiently wealthy person could create a company, all without money. What if the company could be publicly owned? That would make for money appearing in a system devoid of it. My brother is well educated in such matters. I should discuss stuff like that with him.
Agree, but it wouldnt be for me, mostly for the same reasons I dont pay the stupid tax.
I didnt mention any trick. Ive earned my nest egg without every having an employee. I do own a company of sorts now, but its just me. It pays far less than the days when I was employed, but I find myself not wanting to get back into it.
Nevertheless, those that earn money by working for the man or by being the man are both in the same category: far more likely to manage assets better than somebody who won similar asserts in a prize.
Ah, we seem to have introduced a concept of clean money, different than the usual definition (laundered). You seem to define it in terms of moral means of acquisition. My brother (the one I spoke of above) made his living day-trading for several years. It wasnt gambling and he did quite well, but I told him that it wasnt productive since the activity served the interests of nobody, no customer or anything. He stopped doing it (afaik) and now rents other peoples houses. That is a productive activity and I approve more.
Its efficient, and should be emulated by your perfect society. You just dont like the money going to the owners. The brutal working conditions should be illegal though, but theyre necessary to be competitive. Your social society would eliminate that competition and theoretically make the working conditions far better, especially since nobody is going to be forced to do it by the necessity of needing to feed their families.
Quoting universenessYou dont think long commutes are a waste of resources? My last job was about 200 km away. I considered moving but the cost of living was so much higher there. So I went in once or twice a week and did a 40 hour shift and did the rest of the work from home. I burned 4 cars into the ground doing that. Every one of them was lost somewhere on the commute to that place.
Quoting universenessYes, but one car passing another isnt a significant change. Its a subtle one, even if the long term implications are not subtle. Maybe the cars are not side by side but km apart and nobody notices the difference.
I didnt see the point in bringing up a mathematical singularity at all. OK, a black hole event horizon is a singularity of sorts, and dropping through one wont be noticed by the thing doing it, but the implications (certain doom) are there, and probably were already there before the EH was crossed. So theres a bit of appropriateness to that analogy.
If only @Gnomon & co could (i.e. would make the effort to) understand and appreciate the soundly speculative implications of contemporary sciences such as ...
... maybe he (they) would reformulate and convey his (their) woo-of-the-gaps instead as a cogent philosophical system or treatise. :smirk:
@Jack Cummins @Wayfarer @bert1
Theres the motivation. Read on for the remainder.
Which they were.
(Source The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, Scientific American)
Incidentally the Scientific American article ends with a poignant note which Everett had apparently included in the original version of his dissertation, to wit:
That's the one thing he said which makes sense to me.
A great clip. I had not watched this one, and I liked the 4 strands mentioned and the proposed connectivity between them. Last night, I watched this almost 2.5 hour debate on the question 'Is Christianity rational,' between Matt Dillahunty and an eastern orthodox guy who uses the ID, 'Posh.'
Posh's arguments for why a first cause mind with intent was rational and logical, sounded very familiar. I think Gnomon would approve. Matt debunked his viewpoints very well. Worth watching if you can find the time.
You are merely trying to suggest a scenario which YOU think CURRENT automated systems could not deal with. I will leave such issues to the experts in the field. They are aware of such problems as cook's of the past have reported them. The reggae band UB40, even wrote a song about the issue:
Quoting noAxioms
Yes but bodily autonomy may not be an issue in the future if the whole process is done outside of the body, as I am sure most women would prefer that, to the bodily trauma they currently have to go through. No abortion as such would be needed just a case of completing a process or stopping it. I imagine, a whole new set of arguments would ensue.
How about a future where a man can be injected with a compound which makes him produce the equivalent of a female egg. This could then be removed and fertilised with sperm, from his male partner.
:lol: I would love to see the theist's react to that one. I think future biotech is going to create many 'fun' possibilities (Ok, I was employing a little sarcasm just then!)
Quoting noAxioms
You know this for certain? How many have you personally asked?
Quoting noAxioms
Crime has always existed. I think there would be a lot less of it, in a fair socioeconomic world.
I have never suggested, it would be totally removed, by any sociopolitical system I support.
Quoting noAxioms
Do the animals in a zoo have free travel? freedom of speech and protest? a democratic vote? Free education? A career path of their choice with an ability to change their chosen life path anytime they wish?
If they do, then I would love to live in such a world zoo.
Via population education, a better means of production, distribution and exchange, perhaps we can make the deserts bloom, build environmental friendly, cities under the water, and we also have the potentially unlimited living space, that might eventually result from space exploration and development.
Quoting noAxioms
Ukraine may well have united with Russia in the same way as countries in the European union united.
Putin is too autocratic to understand such possibilities. You can achieve much more with the carrots than with the sticks.
If we were in days gone past then Putin's daughter might have been married to Zolensky's son, and prevented the war. There rarely is any point to war. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
Quoting noAxioms
As long as what you would consider 'wealthy,' gives such individuals no significant ability, to influence any significant number of individuals, to vote a particular way, or can influence the actions of those in authority, or can help them gain political office, then yes, I could accept it. Especially if everyone can take their basic needs and protections for granted from cradle to grave, and it is the only way to sate those who find such a pursuit, essential to their inner vision of what personal freedom is, and what they consider, the obvious result and goal of an powerful inner entrepreneurial drive.
Yes, I do think long commutes are a waste of resources. I quite liked most of the imagery you invoked in:
Quoting noAxioms
But, I didn't like the suggestion that in your scenario, 'a lot of resources,' would be wasted, so I typed:
Quoting universeness
I have no idea why you interpreted this as You dont think long commutes are a waste of resources?
Quoting noAxioms
I don't follow your logic here. The development of an AGI/ASI, has been posited by many, as the technical singularity moment, that will ring the death knell for the whole human species. That's why I mentioned it in my OP on this thread, as I wanted to know how credible, posters here, considered that dystopian prediction to be.
Quoting universeness
I ask question so people think about the answers. The Greeks asked about the impossible and dared to answer the questions. How does this make Anne Sullivan different from a future ASI that can teach humans sign language?
Quoting universeness
To establish what makes human thinking different from AI.
Quoting universeness
Anne Sullivan was motivated to learn and teach for human reasons. AI does not have that motivation. There is no caring or feeling for AI. AI can destroy thousands of lives because it has no emotions that would stop it from doing what is programmed to do. It also would not create something new and needed to resolve a human problem for the same no motive reason. Your computer will not wake up one morning and attempt to teach you valuable lessons. It does not care about you or any human. It has no human experience or feelings for determining what is just and what is humane.
Quoting universeness
I think that is an unrealistic expectation of what AI can do and my reasoning for thinking that is given above. Now if you said AI could be used to develop a better communication system, I would agree that might be possible. A motivated human could create something better with AI, but it is the human, not AI, that directs the fulfillment of a need because it is the feeling human who cares and is motivated.
Quoting universeness
When we begin arguing we close our minds and block out the opposing reasoning that threatens our sanity by putting our reasoning in doubt. Ego starts screaming, I have to be right so the other person has to be wrong or is crazy to disagree with what I know is right. Or we can ask, what is your reasoning considering the possibility that the other knows something we do not.
:up:
What does this exactly mean?
The term "Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)" is exaggerated. There's no actually such a thing as "artificial superintelligence". There's only Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can range from very simple computations to very complex and sophisticated solutions to problems and, with an analogous complexity and capacity in handling of data.
Below is how ASI is defined/described by a standard source. You can find a very similar definition/description in a lot of the standard sources.
"Artificial superintelligence (ASI) entails having a software-based system with intellectual powers beyond those of humans across a comprehensive range of categories and fields of endeavor."
(https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/artificial-superintelligence-ASI)
The key word is "intellectual", which means having to do the intellect. And here's what intellect means:
[i]"1. The power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will: the capacity for knowledge.
2. The capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed."[/i]
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/knowledge)
How can find other similar definitions/descriptions, but rational thinking and/or knowledge will be central concepts and part of it.
However, knowledge involves undestanding. It's not something mechanical or computational or an ability to store and retrieve data. It also ofetn involves perception.
AI has no undestanding. It cannot undestand. It cannot perceive. It has no consiousness. It cannot even think. It just follows and process instructions, which may indeed involve going through quite sophisticated and complex routines (algorithms) in order to find solutions to problems.
You can hear from many people that AI has consciousness and undestands and all that stuff. Well, before believing them and/or taking that kind of information for granted, you must study and acquire a solid knowledge about AI. Then, you must have experience in applying and programming AI, and for this you must be an eperienced programmer. Only then you can judge for yourself and be certain about the validity of their statements. But of, course, you don't need to do all that! :smile: You can only know well the basics and apply simple logic.
Nothing can surpass human intelligence. And AI is based on and exists because of human inteligence.
A future ASI maybe as comparable with the intellect of Anne Sullivan as you or I are comparable with the intellect of a chimpanzee.
Quoting Athena
You are attempting to compare human intellect with current AI. Current AI is advancing in functionality and capability. Systems like chatGPT are very advanced compared to an early system such as ELIZA.
ELIZA was considered a significant advance on historical AI.
How close are we to creating AGI?
Quoting Athena
Humans who became more 'enlightened' tend to reject 'law of the jungle' behaviours.
AGI would have a learning capacity, which would grow much faster than the human ability to become enlightened. It's just as probable that an AGI/ASI would reach a level of enlightenment that would ensure it's benevolence towards all life and all flora and fauna. The destructive AI you contemplate would not imo, be a very advanced AI, and we could probably defeat it, quite easily.
Quoting Athena
How much do you know about current developments in AI, what sources are you referencing?
No, ASI is proposed, based on the current advances in AI and by an observed pace of advancement, indicated by such as Moore's law.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
A book contains knowledge but has no understanding until your brain processes it.
An AGI or ASI is a moment of pivotal change or 'singularity,' if and only if it becomes self-aware.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
This is correct for all current AI systems imo but not for future AI.
Science knows very little at the moment, about the 'instant' or 'recipe' that happened/caused at some point, after abiogenesis, an awareness of self. Programmed AI will eventually become self-programming. We already have AGV's (automatically guided vehicles), such as extraterrestial rovers, that can employ decision methodologies, which can 'learn.' In other words, they don't just pattern match to previously stored scenario's from a very large, stored, knowledge base under a 'query based' expert system. It can use a massive array of sensors to gather information about a live event it is experiencing, and use queries it forms through it's programmed expert system, which can pattern match with its knowledge base. This is not so dissimilar, to what you do when you face an unfamiliar situation, and you query your brain/instincts/emotions. for 'what to do next,'
A future AGI will be way more advanced than the current extraterrestial rovers/AGV's we currently have.
If this 'learning' ability continues, then I think the AI system will be able to program itself, by recording every experience it has, and by linking that to in-built previous programming. If this ability grows, then I think it will become self-aware, in the same way natural evolution caused many lifeforms, to become self-aware, at some point, after abiogenesis occurred, via very large variety combining in every way it possibly could, based on happenstance. I think self-awareness will happen for artificial intelligence, based on the fact it happened for natural intelligence.
An expert medical system which contains the knowledge of many human doctors, can be replicated in seconds. Training a new human doctor take's many many years. Expert systems are being employed more and more. There are issues, but they are being overcome, at a faster and faster pace.
From Emerald Insight (a site that sells journals, books and case studies,) we have:
Today?s doctors require decision support aids to help them cope with the management of increasing amounts of medical information (records, research advances, new drugs), make appropriate choices and even to substitute in an expert?s absence. Such aids exist in the form of medical expert systems, which are complex computer programs that emulate clinical reasoning. Expert systems consist of a knowledge base in which doctors expertise is encoded and an inference engine which manipulates that knowledge. A number of successful diagnostic, management and combined systems are in use but these are a small fraction of the total available. Preventing wider usage are difficulties in evaluation as well as in response time. Significant improvements in resource management can be obtained by the deployment of medical expert systems, so they are predicted to influence profoundly the future of health care in general practice and hospitals alike.
I am a retired Computer Scientist who taught the subject for 30+ years Alkis.
I am not exactly an AI neophyte.
Proposed as what? (I just read the first para of the article to which your link refers to and it talks about an observation, not a proposition. Anyway, this is not the main point here.)
Quoting universeness
A book contains data, not knowledge. Knowledge is created after you assimilate this data. (Check the term "knowledge".) And it is your mind that process this data, not your brain. The brain can only process stimuli. And stimuli are not data.
Quoting universeness
AI can never become self-aware or even just aware. Awareness is an attribute of life (living organisms).
Quoting universeness
It is correct for past, present and future AI. You might have read a lot about AI --a lot ope people say a lot of things about it and a lot of speculating is going around-- but IMO you must stick to basics. That is, what AI actually is. If something else is created or develpped based on it, it will be another subject, not AI anymore. (E.g. cloning.)
Quoting universeness
Science knows a lot about AI already. But if you mean if Science can find how can AI become "aware", well, I don't know of any scientific projects at this moment trying to achieve AI awareness, although there might be some without my knowledge.
Otherwise, I really admire and respect what you do, all the scientific research you are doing on the subject, something which I know you do for many other subjects. I wish I had the necessary patience myself to do the same! :smile:
Only life can be aware? How do you know this?
Oh, I was not meaning to invalidate your knowledge, @universeness! I'm very sorry about that! Really. :sad:
I most probably pushed it to far. I do that sometimes. It has nothing to do with the other person. It has to do with myself, who has read and heard --and I still do-- so much crap about AI, that it makes me puke. And this, because I am a AI programmer and I always try do make people aware and know what AI is actually about. But the wall of ignorance is too thick for me to break and it becomes strongher and higher with time. So, maybe it's time for me to stop doing that. In fact, stop caring about that and let people live in their ignorance. Besides, this situation is so old as the dawn of Man.
I'm sorry again, @universeness.
You mean, what are my arguments about this, right? Because we all know things, don't we?
So my argument is the following: All living organisms respond to stimuli. And to respond to a stimulus one must perceive it in some way, i.e. it must be aware of that stimulus. Also, living organisms are aware of danger, even if this is by instinct.
Anyway, you can find a lot of references on this subject in the Web. Here's an example:
"All living things can respond to their surroundings, just like you can taste something awful then spit it out and shout YUCK! And all life comes from other life just like how you came from your mother and father. So even though we look so different from other living things, we are much more the same than different."
(https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/education/alp/characteristics-of-life/)
You can find many more yourself.
As for inanimate objects, they simply cannot respond to anything, since thay cannot perceive. The can only "follow" the laws of Physics.
Which physical laws, AP, prevent us from building / growing a 'self-aware AI'?
It was a simple question: "Only life can be aware? How do you know this?" How could I missed it? :grin:
I have certainly answered you. Regarding both life and non-life (inanimate objects).
I can't do more than that. Let's snap out of it, OK?
No physical laws accurately describe sentient beings except insofar as sentient beings are subject to physical laws such as the law of gravity. But sentient beings operate by principles which can't be reduced to the laws of physics, such as the ability to act intentionally, heal, maintain homeostasis, reproduce, and so on. None of these operations are necessarily reducible to physical laws.
A computer, as I'm sure you're aware, could theoretically be constructed from pipes and water, or stones and rubber bands, although it would obviously be wildly impractical, as micro-electronics offer efficiencies of scale that could never be realised in such media. But, in principle, a computer is just a fantastically advanced abacus that performs calculations and outputs results. So why would it ever be possible for such a device to become a being? You could, as Kastrup says, symbollically represent kidney function on a modern computer with great accuracy, but you would not expect the computer to urinate.
The usual non sequiturs. :sweat:
Your own choice of link seems to define the term quite well:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
From that site, we have:
What is artificial superintelligence (ASI)?
Artificial superintelligence (ASI) entails having a software-based system with intellectual powers beyond those of humans across a comprehensive range of categories and fields of endeavor.
I understand that the definition mentions 'intellect' only and not such as 'emotion,' 'instinct,' 'intuition,' etc. But if you watch the material coming out from current AI experts, such as Nick Bostrom, Demis Hassabis, et al. You should accept that what they are reporting, is not like listening to a preacher talking BS from a pulpit. What they are saying, has a credence level, backed by scientific projections, that we should all pay attention to. Here is yet another short example:
Nick discusses some of the issue's related to future AGI/ASI systems along with the issue of a self-aware, conscious AI.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Data has no meaning! '23' or 'Bob,' IS data. A book contains contextualised data, labelled data, data with associated meaning, such as "When Bob was 23 years of age, he picked up his first book on artificial intelligence." That sentence is NOT DATA, it is INFORMATION (data with meaning), which when read and processed by such as a human brain, it adds to the readers KNOWLEDGE of Bob when he was 23 years of age. I am not an advocate of your dualist viewpoint. I make no significant distinction between the human mind and the human brain.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Wanna bet?? :grin:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
My quote above was referring to what science knows about the exact 'tipping point' and the exact ingredients/recipe/mechanisms, which caused natural self-awareness or consciousness to happen, in the sense of a moment or event or process/series of random events within a given duration within 'spacetime.' We are fairly convinced that abiogenesis occurred FIRST and then self-awareness/consciousness, after, but science has many gaps in it's current knowledge about those events.
Developing AGI and ASI may fill in many of those gaps and by doing so, silence any theistic and theosophistic residuals, that are still holding back, human growth and progress.
I find it fascinating that ASI might mean our extinction, or the kind of 'post-human' eon that @180 Proof, raises an eyebrow of credence towards or the next welcome stage of human progress, that we need, to become a significant extraterrestial and interstellar species, that I believe it WILL allow us to become. ASI will give us the longevity and robustness we need to have so many more options in life, than we have now.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Thanks Aliks, I enjoy exchanging views with you also.
I think the 'posthuman future' will be intrastellar-intraplanetary, not "interstellar"; and, unless we merge with it, the stars are only for ASI ... :nerd:
No problem Alkis. I enjoy the challenge of the differences in our viewpoints, as I have always found you an honest interlocuter and those are not so easy to find. You have no 'stealth agenda.' You are more like a WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get.
I would be interested in more details regarding what AI system you used to, or still do, program for.
From previous posts, I assumed your expertise is in linguistics and linguistic translation. Is it AI NLP systems you worked with (NLP as in Natural Language Process(ing)(ors))?
:lol: You continue to demonstrate you wordsmith skills!
I googled 'intrastellar' and the only useful sentence I got was:
Is the word intrastellar commonly used to refer to objects within our solar system by astronomers, or is it just the editors creative reversal of interstellar.
I assume you are invoking the idea of 'inside stars' by 'intra.'
So, do you think a ASI will quickly create a Dyson sphere?
As for "Dyson spheres", I don't think so. Artificial black holes would have far more energy density for far less energy expenditure (no planetary orbit-megaengineering). But what do I know compared to "the Monolith"? :sweat:
Just a small TPF tech point ucarr. Have you noticed that your 'number of posts' variable seems to be stuck on 561! I noticed that it had not moved past 561, due to your recent postings on this and other threads. Perhaps worth raising with @Jamal
:blush: Oh! I think I just did! :halo:
Ah! Ok, I get your meaning now.
Surely an ASI will send probes to places like Alpha Centauri and Barnards star. They are only a few light years away. Might even be able to send augmented humans, no? Do you not think so?
Yes, I remember well Hassabis, introduded to me by you, and that in my thanking-for-that-introduction answer to you (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718045), I said "Yet, I got almost nothing from there," referring to consciousness. Otherwise, of course I accept what he had to say. (About the other guy I know absolutely nothing and I will have to read about what he has to say on the subject of consciousness.)
Quoting universeness
No, it has no meaning in or by itself. The meaning of the data is created by us.
????? is Japanese data and has no meaning. But I can find its meaning from someone who knows it. It means "Hello". Then only these symbols acquire a meaning for me. (Of course, most probably I won't recognize them the next time I see them and they will continue to have no meaning for me ! :grin:)
Quoting universeness
Exactly. "Data with associated meaning." It has no meaning in or by itself, unless we associate one to it.
Quoting universeness
Right. You have correctly drawn a line between the two, somthing which people in general don't. Even dictionaries don't! They usually use the terms interchangeably.
Quoting universeness
Sure. But who will be the judge? :grin:
Quoting universeness
Well, I admit I have to examine this closely --if not study it-- before I can judge.
Quoting universeness
This is what I call great aspirations! ... Or should I say, Great Expectations? :grin:
Quoting universeness
Why am I not afraid of that? I have dozens of other things in my mind that might lead us to extinction, but not that. Well, who knows were you and I would be --if we are still alive-- when such a thing would actually happen? :grin:
Quoting universeness
Glad to hear that, @universeness!
To which degree can quantum mechanics be truly understood (Thinking about what Richard Feynman said about it)?
[i]True understanding is in the eye of the beholder.
So let me tell you instead what it is that, in my considered opinion, cannot be done: You can never understand quantum physics if you try to conceptualize it using the classical concepts of a particle or a wave. Classical concepts do not apply. Intuition does not apply. Visualization does not apply.
The reason? Up until the point where quantum mechanics uses a mathematical apparatus to describe the state of a system, it remains consistent with classical physics and thus it could be intuited. But then comes a critical step: a quantum system can be in a superposition of classical states. That is to say, that electron can indeed be in two (or three, or seventy-seven, or an infinite number of) places at once. In this state, that elementary particle has no well-defined position or momentum. In fact, it only has classically well-defined properties when it interacts with a classical system (or something indistinguishable from a classical system) such as an instrument, a camera, a cat, a human. And therein lies the other conceptually difficult issue: how does a quantum system know that it must evolve towards such an eigenstate, anticipating a future interaction with a classical instrument? Or perhaps it doesnt know and the transition is instantaneous and therefore retroactive?
Long story short, classical concepts do not apply here. So if true understanding means explain in terms of classical analogies, appealing to intuition or visualization the answer is that it cannot be done.
But if understanding means getting rid of classical concepts and analogies altogether, accept the math as a valid description of Nature (after all, the predictions match reality) and move on, recognizing the limitations of the human brain to internalize certain difficult, counterintuitive truths, then perhaps true understanding is possible.
As I said, what true understanding means is in the eye of the beholder.[/i]
This is the kind of issue that I think an AGI or ASI would be able to help us understand.
I will send £50 to @Jamal, you do the same. As soon as an AGI/ASI gets created and convinces YOU that it is self-aware and conscious then @Jamal will transfer the £100 to me.
If I die before that happens then he can transfer the £100 to you. If You die before me or we both die before @Jamal, then he can donate the £100 to the maintenance costs of TPF.
In truth, I think @jamal could just use the £100 for TPF whenever he needs to as I think neither of us is likely to win the bet. :lol:
Absafragginlootly!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Perhaps yer just a tough dude Alkis, No fears my dears!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
:up: By the way, when you type @universness, don't use the @ on your keyboard. Choose it from the tool list at the top of your blank response box. I then get informed that I have been mentioned in a post so that I go and read it. It works similarly to the 'quote' tab you can choose after highlighting someone's text you wish to quote and respond to. Sorry, if you already know all about this.
Just based on my recent exchange with Alkis and our posts at:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13868/emergent/p26#:~:text=the%20human%20brain.-,AI%20can%20never%20become%20self%2Daware%20or%20even%20just%20aware.%20Awareness,%3Agrin%3A,-Science%20knows%20very
Did you read my note to ucarr about his 'number of posts' variable seemingly stuck on 561?
Yes. If after a week its still keeping me awake at night, Ill look into it.
Thank you for youe kind words, @universeness. :pray:
Although, we are not here for that, are we? :grin:
Quoting universeness
I believe this fits me and you got it right! :smile:
Quoting universeness
As you well know, AI is a huuuge field, so I'm gettting in and out of it, programming-wise, since I'm involved in all sort of programming fields. And work mainly for my own pleasure and personal development.
I would like to note that I am an autodidact and I don't like theory much. So I miss some "deep" knowledge of AI systems from that aspect. I'm more of a "coder" if you like. Programming was my first profession (1986~1997) and back then I was mainly a system programmer but also an analyst.
So, I am not involved in some particular project regarding AI. Lately, I was working for about month on Web scraping. Veeery interesting field! But in general, I'm just learning more and more about AI, esp. its applications and mainly through experience, as I always did. I just love to program! It's more that a hobby. It's a passion.
As for my 20-year translantion career, an autodidact again, it has offered me a great deal of linguistic knowledge but mainly money! :grin: Something that programming hasn't!
Quoting universeness
NLP only by itself is a huuuge subject and --you got that right too!-- it's maybe the most fascinating for me. Most probably because of my rich linguistic background ...
Aw diddum's! do our issue's keep you awake at night?
Thanks for the notification.
Of what use will ASI be? It has nothing that will ever qualify it for good human judgment. No human experience and no feelings. To have feelings, there must be a body that can feel. Chimpanzees would not exist if they did not care for each other. They are social animals and regulated by hormones that give the body feelings that determine behaviors. Social animals can teach us more about being humans, than ASI will ever know. ASI can have information but without experience, information is not knowledge.
[s]Quoting universeness
I thinks humans maybe the only animal that treats a fantasy as a reality.
Quoting universeness
Not without a body that can feel and is aware of pain and and love and death.
Interesting, What op systems did you work on?
I did some sub-routine work on syntax analysers and contextual analysers etc, using Pascal (HLL) into a Pcode assembly language, targeted at the old Motorolla series 68000 processors (using 16 bit CISC).
This was just practice at creating high level language translators to produce an assembly code, which could then be translated into machine code for the Motorolla 16 bit (or in fact the 32 bit) early processors. During 1986-1997 they were still trying to establish a robust software development cycle based on 'the waterfall' model or ADITDEM. As an Analyst at that time, did you find yourself more and more pressured to comply or develop more rigorous 'technical support' systems for client groups?
:up: Looks like it's been fixed :clap:
Quoting Jamal
:rofl: I imagine you will sleep like an innocent child tonight, it's ok, you don't have to thank me. :blush:
Some monolith picked the above picture, honest!
I'm not so sure, perhaps 'orga' components will be as vital to the successful development of interstellar space, as any pure 'mecha.' I tried to employ some wordsmithery, as cool as yours, with 'orga' and 'mecha,' even though I didn't coin the terms. :halo:
If I could offer you a replacement pinky for the one you have, with the following properties:
1. Aesthetically identical to the pinky you have.
2. Functions exactly the same way as your current pinky, same sensitivity levels, etc
3. Can hold a 100 stone weight for up to 8 hours before you would have to let go of the weight.
4. Can allow you to hang by your pinky for as long as you like.
Basically a much more robust pinky? You could kill someone with that pinky!
Would you accept the free pinky upgrade and become one of the advanced pinky people, or would you stay as one of the current mundane pinky humans?
Well devised plan! :smile:
However, by "judge" I meant who will judge who won the bet? The is, that AI has indeed become self-aware? Because there are already some smarty-pants out there who believe it. And who are ready to vote for you! :smile:
You can be the judge! I trust you (well, for £50 anyway). If you are not satisfied that the candidate system is self-aware and I am dead, then the cash is yours, otherwise, TPF gets it. OR of course I win! :party: :party: :party:
I'm rather a "realist" (whatever this word rings to peoples' ears)
Quoting universeness
I know this. I do it when I mention someone other than the person I am replying/commenting to and I believe that my message will be of interest to them. Otherwise, the person I am addressing the message to will be notified anyway.
Ok, I should have figured that!
MS DOS (PC machines), of course! I could only transfer a part of my system programming expertise to Windows. Too much to do and my programming career had began to set.
Quoting universeness
Yes, all that were a strange and uninviting environment for me. :smile:
Quoting universeness
Again, my expertise as an analyst was limited to PCs, i.e. mainly MS DOS and later Windows and it was restricted to LANs and small groups and a few clients. For a year I also worked with WANs.
Sounds good. I always enjoyed teaching the network topologies of LAN's and WAN's. We used to use some old BBC Micro's and we built a small client/server system in a star, bus, ring or even a fully connected mesh LAN topology or sometimes, a hybrid. With our 6th year students we even engaged some of our feeder primary schools to set up a small WAN, using a couple of old routers and a stripped down stand alone and networked Op system. It was good to be restricted to a textual user interface, no GUI involved.
The pupils got to learn some BBC BASIC and DOS and MS DOS commands.
Then, you have lost already! :grin:
No, I can be quite objective and I love challenges. I can easily recognize an argument that is better than mine and acjknowledge it to its owner. (You see, it happens so rarily ... :grin:)
Anyway, in short: I have to do nothing. The burden of proof lies to the person who claims that something is true or exists or occurs or has happened. This is you! :smile: Come to me with valuable finding and I will acjnowldge it to you even if it isn't the final solution, but is relatively close to to the goal of creating an aware AI. Then we will have to move to the next step: a self-aware AI, which is an attribute of humans only. Then we will have to move to the next human attribute: imagination. Which reminds of what I read once, that chess supercomputers --like once was IBM's Deep Blue; I don't know how that has been evolved-- can lose when the oponent makes a move that has no sense or something like that. Such a thing can perplex the computer. Anyway, what is certain, which hold in the past as it still holds today, is that imagination is a human attribute that cannot be transfered to a machine.
What it looks like "imagination" or "creativity" in an AI system is mainly a product of Machine Learning.
Have you tried OpenAI's ChatGPT? (I think I have brought that up some time ago in this thread but it didn't get any attention ...)
Nah, you forget, @Jamal would hold the dosh!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Sounds fair to me!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
No, I will not offer a candidate AGI/ASI system that I am not convinced is self-aware.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Two extracts about Demis Hassabis you might find interesting, based on your quote above and if you were not already aware of Demis' back story. These are from: The future perfect
Growing up in north London, the child of a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother, Hassabis was a child prodigy in chess from the age of 4. He began writing his own computer games at 8, created one of the first video games to use AI at 17, and founded his own video game company not long after graduating from Cambridge University at 20.
Games are a logical playground for both AI models and for the men and women who design them. Games have clear rules and clear metrics for success and failure. When IBMs Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was considered a major landmark in the advancement of AI. But whereas Deep Blue triumphed primarily thanks to sheer computational force, which enabled it to examine 200 million moves per second, the models Hassabis helped shepherd at DeepMind seemed capable of truly learning, at least within the bounds of the games.
Demis chose the name DeepMind in consideration of the achievement of Deep Blue.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I am on the list to be connected, the list is full at present.
Oh, then you know much better than me, sir!
(Anyway, Data Networks & Communications was never my strong point, far from that. Too much H/W involved and I'm a S/W man. Also, too much theory. And I'm a practical man. :smile:)
Quoting universeness
I get the image.
In your turn, get the following image: Before modems came to wide use, in the office I was working we didn't have any, so I created a program in assembly for transfering data from one PC to another, by connecting their serial ports with a cable! I didn't even know what LAN was.
:grain: OK, if you want to raise the bar.
Quoting universeness
I noted down the link. On;y that I will check it tomorrow because after this, I'll close the store (PC) ...
Quoting universeness
Wow, is that so? Well, I know that OpenAI faces a huge overloading problem. Well, most probably the participition was way larger that what tye expected. It can also be for lack of financial resources.
Interesting, what cable did you use for the transfer? If it was a simple twisted wire pair telephone cable then you would have needed to modulate a digital input into an analogue one, to then send it along the cable. The signal would then need demodulation at the receiving port, so you must have converted between digital and analogue at some point, or am I missing something?
Did you send the file as a payload stream with start and stop bits and a parity bit?
Hah! I just checked again to see if I could set up an account and I was successful! :grin:
They SAID they would send me an email when space was available!! :rage:
Still, I now have an OpenAI account :party: :party:
I will go chat to chatGBT forthwith! Thanks for inspiring me to check the OpenAI status Alkis!
I asked chatGBT to write me a song about 'what's emergent in humans.'
Here's what I got:
Verse 1:
We are more than just the sum of our parts
Our minds and bodies, intertwined works of art
There's something deeper, something that we can't explain
A quality within us, that we can't contain
Chorus:
It's the emergent, the magic in our souls
The mystery that makes us whole
It's the way we laugh, the way we cry
The beauty that we can't deny
Verse 2:
It's the love we share, the bonds we form
The way we weather the wildest storms
It's the courage to stand up and fight
And the power to make things right
Chorus:
It's the emergent, the magic in our souls
The mystery that makes us whole
It's the way we laugh, the way we cry
The beauty that we can't deny
Bridge:
It's in the way we create, and innovate
And the way we communicate
Our ability to dream, and to inspire
To light the world with a single fire
Chorus:
It's the emergent, the magic in our souls
The mystery that makes us whole
It's the way we laugh, the way we cry
The beauty that we can't deny
Outro:
We are more than just flesh and bone
There's something greater, something unknown
It's the emergent, the beauty in our veins
A quality that forever remains.
:lol: I think chatGBT might have theistic tendencies. :rofl:
Meat baggage is extraneous payload which is too resources and energy demanding for any ASI-controlled space mission. Given that relativistic velocities will turn even the interstellar vacuum between the Oort Cloud and Alpha Centuri into an incinerating plasma of particulate-trace gases impacts, an "interstellar space craft" would have to sustain "orga" for millennia traveling at 'safe' sub-relativistic speeds. "Mecha" TINY von Neumann-like Bracewell probes powered by antimatter or a micro-singularity seems to me the way to go, especially for post-Singularity transcensionist posthumanity. :nerd:
postscript: Unless, of course, we're talking about interstellar missions (such as asteroid O'Neill cylinder terreria generation ships), again traveling at even lower sub-relativistic velocities, arriving at their destination star systems after many millennia ... like the Star Trek TOS episode "For The World Is Hollow And I Touched The Sky", e8s3. :victory:
I read the article about Hassabis. The stuff with proteins looks quite interesting and promising.
And look what happens sometimes when one gets involved into and talks a lot about a certain subject: it meets this subject in his way without even searching for it. I was just reading the MSN news this morning and one of the subjects was ...
Scientists target biocomputing breakthrough with use of human brain cells
https://www.ft.com/content/9f51a30d-eedc-446a-8a5c-d2997c670c65
Just a tiny notice. The terms "order/disorder" are observer depended. ITs not an intrinsic feature that a system can be "based on". The different phases of entropy might appear to us as a state of disorder but in reality we are not fully aware of a system's all hidden variables.
Now I am not sure that "singularity" is valid idea because according to quantum mechanics singularities are impossible. Changes in state across larger areas of the cosmos is closer to what we identify as "singularity".
Remember I told you that if an AI technology would be created that would involve consciousness, that would be not the AI we know but something totally different? Well ...
AI Could Be Made Obsolete by 'Biocomputers' Running on Human Brain Cells
https://www.cnet.com/science/ai-could-be-made-obsolete-by-oi-biocomputers-running-on-human-brain-cells/
This article refers to what I posted in my previous message.
So, maybe you should think of changing direction ... :smile:
From what I can remember --35 years ago!-- I asked a H/W guy to make this cable for me by joining two serial cables.
Quoting universeness
It rings a bell. But even if you missed something. I am not at all the right person to tell you! :smile:
Quoting universeness
It also rings a bell. But, as I remember I had read only the necessary, basic literature on the subject --a couple of pages, maybe-- just to do the job. The rest --as far as programming was concerned-- was serial port handling. And one can do such things only with machine language. I remember a colleague, working only with a high level language, called me the "Last Mohican", referring to my expertise in assembly language, which was not used anymore in programming circles. Well, I don't know if I would had made all that money from programming if I didn't program in assembly ...
Great. But I expected that, of course.
Quoting universeness
You are welcome!
Just en passant, the body cannot process feelings (emotions). It can only feel their effects and suffer its consequences. The mind is the "place" where feelings are created --i.e they come from-- and processed.
(I just fell on that because you were referred to in a message I received from @universeness.)
Ha! :grin:
Well, I don't know about "theistic" but certainly spiritual. Maybe dualistic too. :smile:
Anyway, it's good --for me at least-- to "hear" things like that even if they do not come directly from a human. (They come of course indirectly from and are based on human thinking ...)
I agree that any initial attempt to get to alpha centauri will not involve any 'orga.'
But I don't think that will still be the case, on a timescale of thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. The best candidate idea for now seems to be starshot.
Quoting 180 Proof
I do think some kind of generational ships will be used to establish interstellar communities eventually, unless we find some kind of shortcut tech, currently proposed in sci-fi, warp tech or subspace/hyperspace gate style tech, wormhole tech, etc. I don't assign much credence to any of those proposals, but I would of course love to think one of them might prove to be possible in the future.
Another great star trek original series episode:
I thought however, that the base story, that the people did not know they were on a generational spaceship and the controlling mecha system kept that information from them, and posed as their god, was an unlikely scenario that an AGI/ASI, would conclude was the best way to 'maintain' the mindset of the people involved.
AlphaFold is considered a major breakthrough for protein folding, from DeepMind AlphaFold, we have:
This can produce a better understanding of proteins and enable scientists to change their function for the good of our bodies for example in treating diseases caused by misfolded proteins, such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons and cystic fibrosis.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Biological computers may prove even more interesting than quantum computers, but they really are in their infancy. They have to identify a biological unit that has a 'natural' mechanism to reliably emulate 'at least 'two states.' These states would represent 1 and 0, in the same way as 'no voltage' and 'a voltage >0 and <= 5' represents 0 and 1 respectively in electronic computers, today. Proteins were the best candidate as far as I know. It's interesting that some kind of 'human brain cell,' might prove to be the better candidate. The ability of prions (I think) to cause cell replication would potentially mean a biological computer that can 'grow' as much memory capacity as it needs to. One biological computer could potentially hold all human information currently memorialised on Earth. It could easily store the contents of a human brain. But, at the moment it's mostly conjecture and speculation, but it is based on sound science. I could not make use of the link you offered as it required a subscription to progress to it's content.
Well, hello again Mr Gaspar! I hope any exchange between us, can be more fruitful than it has been in the past. I agree that order/disorder can be observer dependent based on relativity.
But the cosmological principle states: From Wiki:
In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the spatial distribution of matter in the universe is homogeneous and isotropic when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act uniformly throughout the universe, and should, therefore, produce no observable irregularities in the large-scale structuring over the course of evolution of the matter field that was initially laid down by the Big Bang.
The part I have underlined, confirms for me, that after the big bang, we moved from a situation of disorder, everywhere in the universe, and due to the homogeneous nature of the universe at that scale, that disorder, 'evolved' into the 'relative' 'order' of the galaxy clusters we observe today.
I agree that the term 'singularity' is ill-formed as a concept in all it's variations. I tend to simply use the term as a 'placeholder,' for that part of the story that remains currently 'fogged' to us.
Something like that, yes. I would call it an AGI or ASI, if such was created and became conscious.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
It would not be much of a shift in direction. It's all part of the race between 'orga' and 'mecha' for the next stage in transhumanism. From your link, we have:
Concepts like biological computers and organoid intelligence could lead to a library's worth of new ethical discussions. Conversations about organoids becoming sentient, conscious or self-aware and the ensuing implications have been underway for years now, even though the technology is thought to be immature at the moment.
Organoid intelligence could 'augment' the current abilities of the human mind and body.
Advances in 'artificial' 'mecha' technologies could do the same.
Both systems seem capable of developing independent self-awareness and ALSO an ability to merge and become ONE with current humans on a person by person basis.
Organoid intelligence and biocomputers won't pose a threat to AI or human brains grown the old-fashioned way anytime soon. But Hartung believes it's time to begin increasing production of brain organoids and training them with AI in order to breakthrough some of the shortcomings of our existing silicon systems.
Orga and Mecha advances may become combative in the distant future, one may 'defeat' or stop the progress of the other, humans may be 'piggy in the middle' between them. Orga and Mecha systems may combine and both help to enhance humans and vastly increase the options we have, our longevity, our robustness etc. It all sounds pretty exciting to me, much more so than any imaginings from the theistic or theosophist camps.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
My knowledge falters somewhat, when it comes to the physics level of electricity, and signals flying through the air and rushing down cables and analogue and digital forms.
Digital, down a cable, for me, is 'pulses' of >0 and <= 5 volts, synchronised, according to the 'clock pulse' of sending and receiving computers.
Digital to analogue conversion (modem's) were needed, due to the sending of data down the already existing telephone network, which were (POTS)(Plain old Telephone Service) based, and were completely analogue.
Modems were only needed for computers communicating over the traditional POTS.
Two computers communicating in the same office or within rooms or within a building, did not normally require any digital to analogue conversions (I think). Things like 'repeaters' etc were needed but no ADC's or DAC. Analogue to digital or digital to analogue converters.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
All sounds like good fun to me anyway! I loved assembly code, with all its opcodes and operands and how it accessed and manipulated internal registers, as well as the data bus, the address bus and the control lines. I even had the 'accumulator' as my 'favourite register,' :lol: I know how geeky that sounds, but I type it with a happy smile on my face. :grin:
It could have been worse, you could have been a binary programmer in the days of punch cards or input tape, big glass valves, which switched on and off, to represent binary code etc. Must have been fun trying to find a code error in a million lines of binary code, printed out on an early daisy wheel or dot matrix printer. :scream:
Assuming the post-Singularity transcension (i.e. we may follow other ETI in this "solution to the Fermi Paradox"), I think there will not be any "orga" or biomorphic h. sapiens "thousands or tens of thousands of years from now" or any need by us for space travel long long before then. No "Star Trek" or "Stargate" fantasies, my friend. :smirk:
Indeed. I agree. Let's see what awaits us ...
Quoting universeness
I had no idea about all this. Watching today's news paid off ... in an unexpected way!
Quoting universeness
I see that you can process all this quite admirably. But I'm not surprised at all. :wink:
Quoting universeness
But you like that, don't you? :razz:
AGI and ASI are still AI, only much more develloped. In fact AGI is also called "strong AI", and it comes from AI research. ASI is also based on AI and is considered "strong AI".
But what I am talking about --biocomputers-- is something totally different. It has totally different foundations. Still, as you say, all that are at their infance and mostly speculations ...
Quoting universeness
That's another story. It reminds of the ethical issues with Dolly the sheep ...
Quoting universeness
You shouldn't take to heart what I said about your changing direction ... :smile:
Besides, I'm with you. I'm a AI fan and I don't want it to die! :grin:
I'm not as convinced as you seem to be of that one.
What do you think about the currently slow progress, but definite progress nonetheless, in 'biological' computing? A future ASI may be organically based. Perhaps the 'organic' element will prove to be essential to becoming self-aware. I fully accept that I have zero evidence of this, other than that we have no current example of a self-aware mecha, but we do have plenty of examples of self-aware orga.
Do you assign 0 credence to a future ASI, which is organic and if so, why?
If yours (knowledge about electricity) falters, mine can barely walk! :grin:
Quoting universeness
Bad old times ... Struggling with 16 bps ...
(The Sound of dial-up Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0)
Quoting universeness
Same here.
Quoting universeness
I cant say I loved assembly per se. I rather loved what you could do with it!
Quoting universeness
This is perversion! :grin:
Quoting universeness
I've been there too. Punching FORTRAN processable cards to be inserted into those 10 meters long computers. And waiting for my turn a quarter or half an hour to get the printed resuts (if the code was relatively small) or even having to come next day to get them (if the code was quite long)!
Bad old times ...
Well, as I suggested earlier, I find such speculation far more credible, than anything the theist or theosophists offer, for the distant future of humankind.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I don't, it's fair to ask if a point you raise might 'change my direction.' In a similar vein, does the idea that a technology such as a mecha based ASI or a human created 'biological' (orga based) super intelligence becoming self-aware, challenge your dualist view of the existence of human consciousness?
No, you're the one who keeps referring to "interstellar travel" and my position is that that prospect seems quite unlikely for the reasons I've already given.
By "organic" I understand carbon-based but not necessarly biological and have no idea about the specifications of ASI except that, if it does happen, it will emerge post-Singularity from developments by AGI (self-aware or not). I don't predict whether or not such a system will be instantiated in carbon-based materials.
:yum: I kissed an accumulator, and I liked it! Sorry for my poor singing voice!!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
You could have told a great story to my S5/S6 students. I was forever trying to find folks to come in and talk about their computing career to my students. For free of course.
I don't keep referring to interstellar travel, I include it, merely as a category of extraterrestrial travel.
I am also aware of the reasons you cite for why you think such is unlikely, and I was merely pointing out that I don't find your reasons as unsurmountable as you suggest.
Quoting 180 Proof
Many would agree with you, that there are just too many unknowns to make any 'credible' predictions of what might happen, if the human race 'sparks' a process, which results in a self-sustaining super intelligent system based on organic or inorganic tech.
I don't mind a little speculation regarding 'what if' and 'what might be.'
Why should the theists have all the fun in that particular area?
Certainly.
Quoting universeness
I can't say. 1) I can't compare mechanical with organic computing because they are totally different and 2) I just came to know about the second type, so I don't know even the basics in this field.
In any way, I find it very difficult, if not impossible, that a human-like consciousness --and mind, in general-- can be attached to either of them.
I'm afraid they would have slept away whithin a couple of minutes!
(Even if I am a good speaker and teacher.)
Sure, and I think that's all both of us are doing, when it comes to a possible future AGI/ASI, 'a little speculation.' I am always a little reluctant to apply the word 'rationalise' to any aspect of theism.
I fully agree with your choice of the words 'fantasize.' I don't mind fantasy, I love sci-fantasy. I think you are also a fan. I just don't think that collecting such fables in old books and calling the content 'the word, the truth and the light,' is anyway to build, maintain and progress a planetary population of 'rational' humanity. I know you hold similar views so I will stop rambling on about rationality Vs theism.
I hope you have become a little more intrigued, regarding 'The biological computer.'
I think it's worth trying to keep up with developments in quantum and biological computing.
I think these are gong to change the human experience very significantly indeed.
We will never know!
A future ASI might be able to ............. nah! perhaps my ASI speculations need to take a break! :halo:
I.e. sound defeasible reasoning vs woo-of-the-gaps fairytales. :wink:
Absafragginlootly
I posted a debate recently between Matt Dillahunty and an Eastern orthodox who used the ID 'Posh.'
It was titled 'Is Christianity rational?'
An interesting debate that clearly demonstrates the contention of the word 'rational,' between theists and atheists:
Definitely worth watching, if you have a spare 2.5 hours!
-I am sure it was not my fault = ).
Quoting universeness
In your opinion, do you think disorder favors high entropy? Does High complexity implies high entropy?
I have.
Quoting universeness
I'll do my best. But I can't promise anything! :grin:
Quoting universeness
AI has already changed the human experience. But this has been done gradually. As the developments in other scientific/technological fields have. Only that the progress in all these developments is achived geometricly, i.e. faster and faster. But who knows, maybe some spectacular, revolutionary change awaits us in the future.
All this is fine. However, I would like more to see a progress in the human sciences too. And with them, the human condition. Which, unfortunately, I think deteriorates instead of improving. And this is sad.
I consider this a healthy thinking! :smile:
Such questions have to be posed very carefully, to achieve crystal clarity regarding what you are asking.
'Favours' for example, is a poor term to include in your question, as it suggests some kind of preference/intent on the part of 'disorder.' I accept that 'disorder' and 'order' are subjective terms and are human notion's.
From wiki, we have:
Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty.
So, I perceive entropy in rather simplistic terms. I perceive the 'start of this universe,' as the beginning of it's 'lifetime,' and as 'proper time' 'ticks,' the universe (via entropy) moves towards it's end. Same for a human, from the instant of conception, it moves towards its end. Same for any other object in the universe, such as a photon or a quark.
Meantime, within any reference frame you choose, large variety will naturally combine in every way it possibly can. In my opinion, this is how humans define disorder into order. Universal entropy WILL however, eventually cause any local order to eventually disassemble, back to the fundamentals that combined to form it (disorder). That's my 'lay persons,' perception of universal entropy and its association with disorder and order. Lay person, as I have only 1st year University physics + some completed on-line courses and my own further readings in physics and cosmology.
I see no association between high entropy and how complex a system is. It would not matter if a complex system was human made or naturally created. Entropy will cause it to deteriorated over time.
From the instant ANYTHING comes into existence, it will start to lose energy under the second law of thermodynamics. The only way to compensate is to add new energy to the system.
The universe is a closed system, no new energy is input. Energy can only be transformed WITHIN the universe. More energy can be added to a local system, but entropy ensures it will deteriorate/dissipate over time.
I understand, BUT, as long as they try to spread their BS, they need to be combated, otherwise, their influence grows. Often, evil grows because good people do nothing to stop it.
I am absolutely NOT suggesting you do nothing to combat theistic or theosophistic dogma. I just mean, such can never just be ignored, in the forlorn hope it will just 'go away' or become impotent, 'naturally.'
I agree, that for folks like yourself, IT IS like shooting fish in a barrel, but most folks don't have your wide knowledge of rational philosophy. I watch such debates, as I want to keep up with any new 'tactics' the creationists are trying to employ, to sell their wares.
If seriously nefarious characters like Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Ben Shapiro and so many others are not held in check, then we will end up with more and more vile groups such as scientology.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
It would still be interesting to push you a little more and ask for more detail about how emerging tech 'affects' your dualism. If science EVER demonstrates that when a system is endowed with certain properties, it will become 'conscious' as we understand the concept. If that does happen, would that end your association with dualism?
What do you mean by "my dualism"? When did you hear me talking about such a thing? :smile:
Also, what do you mean by "dualism" regarfding the current context of the discussion (AI, ASI, etc.)?
Quoting universeness
Here too, I would like to know how do you understand the concept so that I can answer based on that. E.g. Science in general uses the term consciousness as a feature of the body. Neurobiolgy talks about the mind, and, lately, from what I have read, it starts to differentiate it from the brain. And so on.
I am surprised you ask me to explain this Alkis. From the start of our exchanges on TPF, you have suggested that you do not accept that human consciousness is 100% contained in the human brain.
That is a dualist position. Have I misinterpreted your viewpoints from the start????
This relates to ASI as if human consciousness is not located 100% in the human brain then why would the proposed consciousness of a future ASI be any different?
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The only answer I can offer is that human consciousness is a combinatorial effect of everything the human brain IS and DOES.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
What source are you quoting here? The source of consciousness is cited by the vast majority of neuroscientists as the brain, not the body.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
From Wiki:
[b]Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguists, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.
Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not.
The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by "looking within"; being a metaphorical "stream" of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain.[/b]
I have found no compelling arguments that and aspect of 'mind' has an existence 'outside' of the brain.
I am not a panpsychist or a dualist but I thought you did assign a significant credence level to those positions.
That's true. Ah, so that's why you refer to "dualism" and "dualistic" ... Well, I never use this term --or any other "ism" for that matter-- to describe my views. I don't like labels. And I don't follow any theory.
For the simple reason that if I adopt the term "dualism" --or any other "ism"-- I will have to accept other facets of it, with which I don't agree. I lke Descartes's principle but I find his theory obsolete, in general. So, I'm not a "dualist" or "Descartian" (Cartesian) and I don't have "dualistic" views. See what I mean?
Quoting universeness
Certainly not. I was very clear, and youself you said I am a WYSIWYG kind of person.
If there's some misundestanding, it is due to the use of terminology. See now why I dislike and avoid "isms"? So, one more time, I am not a "dualist", I don't have "dualistic" views and I'm not known for my "dualism". Because then I could say that you are a "monist", you have "monistic" views and you are known for your "monism". Which I think is silly, isn't it?
Quoting universeness
I don't know about the proposed consciousness of a future ASI ...
I could do a research and study the subject, but I prefer not. I trust you and I leave this subject entirely in you hands! :smile:
Quoting universeness
OK. But, assuming that an individual is identified with his brain, i.e. he is his brain --which is quite a conflicting and paradoxical idea-- can't this be applied also to an individual's personality, behaviour, etc.?
Quoting universeness
Here's a good reference:
A Neuroscientist Explains The Difference Between The Mind & Brain
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/difference-between-mind-and-brain-neuroscientist
(I'm sure that you can find a lot of them, if you are interested in the subject.)
Quoting universeness
Yes, I know. That is why I asked you how do you understand the concept of "consciousness", i.e. what does it mean to you.
Quoting universeness
I can undestand this. And I respect your views on the subject, independently of whether they are consistent with the overwhelming majority of the scientific and philosophical views or not.
Quoting universeness
If you mean the above mentioned overwhelming majority, then no. There's also a big minority --religious and philosophical-- who think differently and believe other things regarding consciousness and the mind. And, don't forget --unfortunately, we always do!-- that we are talking within the frame of the Western world. But there's also Eastern world --that we usually forget-- in which the overwhelming majority thinks differently and believes other things regarding consciousness and the mind.
Indeed, if we place the the two "groups" on the plates of a weighing scale, I don't know to which side the scale will tip. :smile:
Well, I accept your refusal, to be labelled a dualist. BUT, if you believe that human consciousness is partly due to the workings of the human brain and some second external source, then my own reason would label such a notion 'dualistic.'
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I accept that you are in earnest. If you prefer me to state that you do not accept that human consciousness is 100% contained in the human brain, as opposed to calling you a duellist then, so let it be written.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I AM a monist when it comes to human conscience but as an atheist monism has no relevance to me when it comes to theism. I have no aversion to folks applying the term to me as long as they get the context correct and if they don't then I will correct them, rather than completely dismiss the label as it does accurately describe my opinion of the source of human consciousness.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
:grin: Well, thankfully, it's in the hands of much more capable expertise than mine. But I will keep up with developments in the area, as best as I can.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yes, imo.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Dr Leaf, does not suggest that her separation of mind and brain means that 'mind' is not located within the brain. She types:
The mind uses the brain, and the brain responds to the mind. The mind also changes the brain. People choose their actionstheir brains do not force them to do anything. Yes, there would be no conscious experience without the brain, but experience cannot be reduced to the brain's actions.
I would of-course ask her exactly where she thinks the 'mind' is located as she does not discuss this.
I clicked of some of the links offered in the her article you cited but none of them offered her opinion of exactly where she thinks 'mind' is located? Do you have any quotes from her that indicates her clear determination, regarding my location question?
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I have answered this many times. My high credence level goes to proposal that human 'consciousness' and all it's sub-properties, are due to human brain activity. Human emotions/instincts/intuition/imagination etc result from brain activity, and the brain, is the sole source of all such phenomena, IMHO!
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Very reasonable Alkis. I don't mean to suggest that my opinion on the source of human consciousness, is completely ossified. I would say it would, 'shock me to my core,' if my opinions on the topic were PROVEN to be completely wrong, but if I was proved wrong, then I would personally, be forced to consider adopting the dualist label.
I had never maintained that consciousness is not 100% contained in the human brain. That would mean that is is in part physical and in part non-physical. How could I believe that, if I have said so many times that it's nature is non-physical and that even mind is separate from the brain?
(Yet, there is another kind of "consciousness", that of which Science talks about when they refer mainly to the senses. The philosophical literarure --and hopefully all in here-- does not mean and talk about that kind of "consiousness".)
Quoting universeness
Thnk you for reading the article (if you had not read it before.)
I am located in I use my car but I am separate from it. I am not my car.
I have alread talked about the cooperation of the mind with the brain. Consciousness too needs the brain so that perception of the external environment takes place. In short, we can say that the brain is the connection of the mind/consciousness to the physical world.
Quoting universeness
I wouldn't say that. The brain is an autonomous system based on a stimulous-response mechanism. It works by receiving and sending signals. The mind cannot send such signals. It can only receive and interpret signals. This is how e.g. I recognize a tree --i.e. undestand that what I see is a tree-- when I look at it.
Quoting universeness
Fortunately so! :grin:
Quoting universeness
Certainly. Experience can occur and be obtained independently of the brain. E.g. the experience of emotion, which comes from thought (memory etc.)
Quoting universeness
And she does well. No one can talk about mind's "location", since location refers to physical things and the mind isn't one. (But I cannot talk on her behalf. Better ask herself to be sure! :grin:)
Quoting universeness
I don't. It's just an article I have picked up. I also read it for the first time. I fact, not the whole of it. You have much more patience and eagernes in learning new things than myself. I can say even remarkable, in my standards! I take off my hat to you on this! :clap:
And, in the process, I learn myself a lot of things from you! :smile:
Quoting universeness
Thanks. This is what I wanted to know. I'm sure you have talked about all this many times in this place and elsewhere, but not with me. (At least, I don't remember so. Quite possible. My memory often betrays me.)
Quoting universeness
I know.
Quoting universeness
IMO, you ate not wrong. It is that you look the subject from a different angle and use different means --or tools, if you want-- to reach knowledge and truth . From what I have come to know from your posts and our exchanges, you are a Science-oriented person, and by consequence, you are interested and use Science's methods and path, in general. I have said already that 80% of the members --with whom I have "talked" and/or read their topics-- are Science-oriented. It's very rare that I here personal experiences. Personal experience is ignored in Science, if not frowned upon, as far as truth and reality is concerened. Yet, Science forgets that an individual's reality is not formed based on facts and logic, but also from personal experience. I use the word "experiencing", which is a dynamic process, to differentiate it from "eperience", which is a static concept.
So, this is where Philosophy should come in, to explain what science can't. Unfortunately, from what I see, Philosophy, not only in this place but elsewhere too, instead of using Science as part of its amunition in its quest for knowledge and truth, it is devoured by it!
(Note: I use "Science" with capital "S" to mean "conventional" science, in the Western world. And I use "Philosophy" with capital "P" to mean "modern" philosphy, also in the Western world.)
Quoting universeness
I would not accept that! :grin:
Ok, I now understand that your 'significant separation' is with what you are calling 'the human mind' and 'the human brain/consciousness.' My 'quick' interpretation of Dr Leaf's article (I say quick as my interpretation is not based on a deep reading and pondering of her works, I had not heard of her before your link.) lead me to notice that her main separation, was more between mind and brain, rather than mind and consciousness. She types:
[b]For many people, the mind and brain are interchangeable. They use one word or the other to talk about the same thing: the organ in our skull that we use to think.
However, the mind and brain are actually two very different, but interconnected, entities. As a neuroscientist, this reality is the foundation of my life's research and work: The mind works through the brain but is separate from the brain.[/b]
She does not mention human consciousness in this opening statement, so does she consider human mind and consciousness, synonymous?
If you follow her sub-links you get a clearer picture of her proposals.
I tried to get more details on the words I underlined above. She typed:
The mind is energy, and it generates energy through thinking, feeling, and choosing.
I followed the link and read:
[b]Bottom line.
What we're doing with our minds, our words, our attitudes, and our beliefs affects the people around us. Have you ever had anyone tell you there's a black cloud hanging over you and it's affecting them? Or that you're creating a toxic work environment by letting your stress affect everyone in the office? There's real energy being emitted from your thoughts and affecting others.[/b]
So ok, she seems to be suggesting 'transmitted' aspects of thoughts from your mind, being picked up by other people around you as 'energy packets.' BUT even if this were true, I still don't see how this confirms a 'separation from the brain?'
If you follow her sub-link in this sentence:
Suddenly, you find yourself almost taking a step back, and you feel disturbed. It's almost as if the person is throwing something at you. What you're experiencing is the toxic energy from that person's thoughtsand it's real.
I mean, crystal energy healing! Really Dr Leaf!!!!
and this sentence:
Mental energy sucks others in. Think of hanging out with someone who's constantly depressed or negative and how you feel around them. Fear breeds fear. The fearful mind generates fearful probabilities. The depressed mind generates depressing possibilities. But the same can be said for the positive.
She links to the works of other professionals/quack spiritual healer cons, who work in the field of human mental health.
I think this is her main interest. She works in the field of human mental health and (perhaps ways to generate income streams for herself). I am now suspicious that she is just trying to develop a methodology to help people tackle mental health issues, and make money for herself, rather than contribute to the main debate around 'the hard problem of human consciousness.'
Just a small issue Alkis. Some of the quotes you used in your last post look like they are MY words rather than Dr Leaf's words. I include this sentence in my response, to correct that.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I am learning stuff from you too Alkis, Your treatment of the human 'mind' issue as opposed to the 'human consciousness' issue is interesting. Unlike Dr Leaf and yourself, I cannot see any evidence for treating human mind and human consciousness as anything other than synonymous.
What would your absolute BEST bit of evidence be, that they are not synonymous?
I had not heard of her before either nor have I read the whole article myself. It was just an example I brought up --it does not represent me or my views-- to show that there are different approaches on the subject of "mind vs brain" today. That's why I said that you can find more of them if you like.
Besides, there are much more important works about the nonlocality of the mind and consciousness. For instance, Menas Kafatos' (of Greek origin too, who I'm sure you know) "The Nonlocal Universe" and "The Conscious Universe", in which he talks about quantum phenomena, a subject I know you like a lot. Another very interesting person --with a PhD in both Philosophy and Computer Engineering, whom I'm also sure you know-- always within the context of consciousness and quantum Physics is Bernardo Kastrup. I know a little about the work of either of them. I came to know about them during my research on Univeral Consciousness a few year ago. (Their works are still in my long "waiting" list of subjects for a further exploration!)
Quoting universeness
I really don't know.
Quoting universeness
Maybe. But I have other priorities for exploration rearding the subject, as I mentioned above.
Again, I don't think you must stick to that reference. There are more important ones, which also involve quantum Physics, a subject you like.
***
BTW, with all that talk --mainly from you-- about quantum Physics, I'm planning to relive my knowledge which I have left behind some 30 years or so!
BTW #2, yesterday, I came across a very interesting view regarding "quantum reality" --from a person with whom we exchange views in another medium. It is he who brought up the subject, not me. Interesting coincidence!
***
Quoting universeness
I'm not aware of this, but I consider it probable. Sorry if I look I'm ignoring your points. But to be honest, and please do not be offended, I sometimes I browse through and even I skip long passages on subjects that I have not good knowledge of, line Physics, as I have mentioned. And this does not refer specifically to you .
Anyway, what are they?
Quoting universeness[/quote]
If you refer to the article, again, I really can't say. I mean, it would be unwise from my part if I did.
As for my personal views on the subject. Mind and consciousness are two totally different kind of things. But this subject is a topic of itself! :smile:
This goes against the morals of a huge percentage of voters. I mean, contraception is considered a sin by many, and forced sterilizations are not going to be popular with the voters. It also renders the species completely dependent on the baby farms. It hits ones Nazi eugenics buttons where only better people can breed, and only qualified people can raise children, not necessarily their own. Yea, the voters will love that.
That said, I sort of support this sort of breeding control, but only in a global culture. In our current system, any group that implements it will likely be out-populated by groups that dont, and will thus be bred out.
There are those that consider it murder to not bring to term a female egg, whether via in vitro fertilization or via test-tube procedures like you suggest.
Sounds like a possibility, but it would be probably easier to just combine the DNA of both into a waiting egg from which the female DNA has been removed. Remember that the two women also want to do this and might need one of their gene sets placed into something like a sperm cell. Also remember that the state controls reproduction and might decide that you dont get to raise your own kids, or raise kids at all, even if you do breed some, so whether the genes of the kids you raise are yours or not might not be something you get to have if were implementing this test-tube world.
Most theists would probably embrace all that. I was one once and wasnt taught the sort of exclusion that you might get from the more conservative church authorities. There are churches based on love and inclusion instead of the opposite.
It isnt the sort of question that ones comes out and asks, but my son sort of dated somebody from such a family, so I did at some point find myself in their home. The girls father certainly put out an air of not minding what I (or my son) thought of his social status.
I dont think the humans will have complete free travel. Sure, its a big zoo, but theres parts of any zoo from which the tennants are kept out. Yes, the zoo animals can say what they want. No its not a democratic system, but I dont think voters would yield their responsibility completely away to the point of it being a zoo. Who knows. Maybe they would. A zoo is pretty posh compared to the wild, especially when the wild is everywhere not in this artificial enclosure optimized for humans. Being outside that would probably require life support.
Yes, those are all zoo amnesties. But you dont get to choose to be a zookeeper. An assistant one perhaps.
Career path is pretty sketchy. I mean, everybody can choose to be an astronaut today but very few actually get to go into space. You cannot be an accountant so easily if theres no money. You probably can be a plumber, but then given toy projects, with the projects that matter going to the automated systems actually responsible for the systems continuing functionality. Maybe some would want to be explorers of outside the zoo, meaning they get to wear those life-support outfits and be taken on controlled expeditions to areas outside kind of like class trips in school.
What if I want to do something truly dangerous like be a cave spelunker? Would the zookeepers tolerate a certain level of fatalities from ones chosen pursuits? As a zookeeper, I would find myself in a position to prevent the occupants from getting killed as much as is reasonable. Where is reasonable?
So the argument goes. How big you think it should be? Less than a 1-10 million people on Earth? That seems plenty for a breeding population, and is well within the limits of renewable resources without resorting to importing something as dangerous as energy from off-planet. It would need to be spread out over several interesting places. I cant get enough of mountains, especially since I was raised in a place completely lacking in them.
Quoting universenessMost of that answer was find more regions, which didnt answer the question at all. Better education and whatnot is going on now, and has almost zero effect. No breeding like rabbits is currently considered immoral by many groups. The propaganda isnt capable of change unless the morals change first.
China had forced controls which, partly due to the cultural pressure of requiring a male heir to each family, resulted in orphanages and morgues full of baby girls. In the end it did sort of help reduce their population, perhaps by shipping many of those orphans off to other countries until they halted that due to the shortage of wives for all those heirs.
They were united with them, and chose to be separate when it wasnt forced anymore. I dont think they benefited much at all from the Union days.
A nice sound bite, but mistaken.
But it does. I have goods worth bartering, and that has influence over those that want those goods that are not otherwise available to everybody.
Its not supposed to, but its also quite human nature that corruption is likely, at least until you offload that task to the automation just like everything else. Can the automation be corrupted? Is it bound by popular choices? We all want (voted for even) guns so we can kill each other. Should the automated non-corruptible authority deny that because it wouldnt make anybodys lives better? Because I assure you, the only reason the USA has guns is due to sanctioned legal corruption.
Quoting universenessIt was, but not as much cost as moving close to my employer. That cost was money, and I suppose that since I had a need, the perfect society would allow me a home near my place of work, but maybe it would be a much smaller home due to the population density there.
OK, I think I get what youre saying, but what do you do then with the person who wants to live in a place that happens to be quite distant from his place of work? Some of those jobs cannot be performed remotely (such as one in a lab just to name something). Is this persons needs to be denied?
Sure, but slowly, not at a specific event like the pushing of a button that let Skynet loose. The singularity isnt like that. By the time we see it, its probably been there for quite a while.
I learned a bit about chatGTP lately, and the thing is barely qualified as an AI at all. It really does nothing but regurgitate streams of words that already exist, a sort of pimped-out google search. A true intelligence would be able to come up with new ideas, not just rehashing consensus ones. So fear not, the tech singularity isnt here yet. Youll know when all the people like me suddenly lost their jobs. That would signal that the thing actually knows what it is doing.
Quoting universeness
Machines have long since done some things better than us. I think the definition needs refinement from this one. Any stupid search engine has faster access to a huge database of answers and can get to them faster. But so far it cannot create new knowledge, and I think that part is critical.
Quoting Alkis PiskasI pretty much disagree with every statement here.
As for the distinction between mind and brain, the latter is an organ, a piece of hardware. The former is process that takes place in the latter. I dont see how hardware that is operating data is not considered to be the processing of data any less than a meat grinder itself is processing meat, and not just the grinding that processes it.
OK, so you seem to be taking the language point of view, a refusal to use a given word to describe an identical process being done by something not on your list of approved categories. This smacks only of religious ignorance. Especially the bit about the suggestion of self-awareness (something that you assert only life can have) existing before abiogenesis (life), which seems to be directly contradicting your own definitions.
Quoting 180 ProofDidnt get this. You want to harness the energy of a black hole? Kind of hard to do that from something from which no energy can escape.
The Dyson sphere thing seems impractical. Nowhere to get the material, to somehow hold it up, and nowhere to dissipate the energy resulting. A lot of work expended to just jettison the waste heat. The ring idea solves a lot of those problems, but it of course doesnt capture 100% of the starlight.
Quoting universeness
Ive bred a few innocent children and trust me, they dont sleep all that well. Imagine how long it took the photographer to get that shot.
Quoting universenessI dont remember assembly code including any details of chip pin details like all those buses and control lines and such.
I did the tape and card bit, but am unaware of binary being input that way. That was mostly done with manual toggle switches. Very tedious, simple, and before my time. There were assemblers by the time I came around, and my punch-card input was typically some version of fortran.
I dont think binary code was every more than a few thousands of bytes. If you cant bootstrap something more high-level in that amount of space, youre in the wrong industry.
I still have my Okidata dot-matrix printer. The ink ribbon has doubtlessly gone totally dry by now, but the thing was a workhorse and was totally reliable, unlike the printers today.
A book contains data, not knowledge. Knowledge is created after you assimilate this data. (Check the term "knowledge".)
Alkis Piskas
I pretty much disagree with every statement here.[/quote]
Who asked you? :grin:
Anyway, if you want to react to what I said, say something useful; a point, an argument, anything. Sometimg that refutes my point. Something that can be discussed.
The light of the light bulb is the result of electricity. Without electricity, there would be no light. Without the light bulb, there would be no light. There must be a body to have both emotional and physical feelings.
:lol: When the dinosaurs walked the earth and I was in high school, I wrote a story about a woman who wanted to die because everyone she cared about was dead. She could not die because she volunteered to have every organ replaced when her own stopped working. To me, that is a kind of hell and I would not choose it.
I was very glad to get my artificial hip. It gave me a new start in life and I hope it will last for the rest of my life. Before I knew more about the artificial hip, I thought how great it would be to be better than nature made me. In reality, nature made us better than artificial parts, unless something goes wrong and we do not develop normally or something has damaged our parts. I was born without a left hip socket and was in a body cast for a year to help nature develop my left hip socket. That hip lasted a little over 40 years before it had to be replaced with an artificial one in. Yes, if I need a new part, I will accept one, but not for something silly and not with the expectation of it not being without problems.
Those are very nice thoughts but also dangerous because they ignore our dark side. They ignore our gun culture and parents buying their sons guns and the sons taking the guns to school and killing people. We must get those silly notions of our divine nature out of our heads and deal with our reality that we can be hateful and hurtful and even killers. We need to understand how that happens and how to prevent it. Only when we understand reality can we make the decisions necessary for good results.
Physical, yes.
I'm not sure though what do you mean by "emotional feelings". Emotion is itself a state of feeling.
But a "feeling" can mean different things. When you say "I feel fear" you refer to a mental reaction. When you say "I feel a pain" you refer to a physical reaction. And "I feel guilty", is still another example, referring to conscience.
Mental states can produce changes in the body. E.g. when you are very anxious/stressed, you can feel one or more of various things: adrenaline running in your body, irritability or pain in your stomach, tightness in your chest, increased heart beats, etc. There are also positive emotions which you can "feel", but are very little physical: E.g. When you feel joy a cheerful you feel your body "lighter" and a sense of wellness. The more positive an emotion is, the lighter body feels. And the opposite, the more negativean emotion is, the heavier the body feels.
All these states are produced by the mind. The brain receives automatically signals (stimuli) from these states and sends in its turn signals to different parts of the body (organs, organism) via the nervous system, which in turn react to these signals accorfing to their nature and f\unction. The brain can also get signals from these parts of the body as a feedback. It's a wondrous system! :smile:
Well, your last line explains the feedback system. The feelings are in the body. However, more explanation of that may be helpful, since I already replied before reading your last line.
I will argue the body feels and the brain does its best to determine what the feeling is and its cause. :lol: I am a female. I think most of us learn about crazy for a few days of the month. I have days when mentally I am totally miserable and I know I am not being logical. Our bodies are reacting to hormones.
This hormonal control can lead to men and women having relationships that go against their better judgment. The Buddhist talk about us being controlled by our emotions, being like a puppy that is shaken. It is not the brain in control but the feeling body.
I had to use tranquilizers to get through a very hard time in my life, and the tranquilizers did not change my thinking but did change how I felt and the change in my feeling improve my ability to react in a more positive way. Or, years later after doing a lot of daily walking, I noticed I was not as depressed as I had been. Exercise is very important to how feel mentally and physically.
Here is another one. We should not get botox injections that prevent us from smiling, because if we can not smile we can become depressed, or if we force ourselves to smile despite being miserable, we can ease feelings of depression.
I have read a lot of Buddhist material and watched/listened to a lot of talks, from a lot of different sources, in the past, but I don't remember anything about that. In fact, I don't remember even the word "hormobnes" coming i to play. It sounds like what you say is an interpretation of westerners. And not westerners that have been initiated to Buddhism, but who are mixing western with eastern concepts or, better, who are interpreting eastern concepts and principles based on western ones.
My sources where always mainly from Eastern philosophers but also from Western philosophers who were educated and trained in a Buddhist or other Eastern environment, either in the East or the West, and have reached a high level of awareness. The latter is most important because it is one thing to know something in theory and based on concepts, even if these are accompanied with examples of people who have had such experience, and another thing to have that experience yourself, esp. after a lot ot training and exercise.
I deeply believe that if people were based more on personal experience --and learn from that, of course-- and less on concepts and theories, they would be much wiser and nearer to the knowledge they are trying to acquire and the truth they are trying to reach. This is what I call "experiencing". In fact, the essence and nature of some things can be only obtained by experiencing them. Mind and consciousness are among them.
Quoting Athena
Certainly.
??W, it is befitting here to mention the known saying "a healthy mind in a healthy body". Which, can and is interpreted by people in one or the other direction --as to what affects the other-- but rarily in both, which is my interpretation.
Quoting Athena
:smile:
BTW, thank you for sharing your personal experiences and I'm sorry to hear that some of them where quite unpleasant ...
No, have not heard of him, but I googled him, and read the wiki entry for him. A highly qualified physicist, who has had a very interesting career.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I have not read either book, but I am interested in any connection science and scientists make between quantum physics and human consciousness. I have read up mostly on the work of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, in this area.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I have heard of Kastrup, as he is a very well informed, respected voice, AGAINST the notion that an AI system may become conscious. His main argument seems to be:
"Those who take the hypothesis of conscious AI seriously do so based on an appallingly biased notion of isomorphisma correspondence of form, or a similaritybetween how humans think and AI computers process data. To find that similarity, however, one has to take several steps of abstraction away from concrete reality. After all, if you put an actual human brain and an actual silicon computer on a table before you, there is no correspondence of form or functional similarity between the two at all; much to the contrary. A living brain is based on carbon, burns ATP for energy, metabolizes for function, processes data through neurotransmitter releases, is moist, etc., while a computer is based on silicon, uses a differential in electrical potential for energy, moves electric charges around for function, processes data through opening and closing electrical switches called transistors, is dry, etc. They are utterly different."
All very valid points, but not 'overwhelming,' in their power to convince that 'mecha' based AI consciousness is impossible. He has also said little about the potential of biological computing.
The two scientists you cite here are certainly more credible that Dr Leaf imo but I personally find the work of Demis Hassabis, Nick Bostrom and the Penrose/Hameroff work more interesting.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I hope you will find such a sojourn fruitful.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
No, you have misunderstood my complaint. I am referring to you posting such as:
Quoting universeness
and
Quoting universeness
These words are from Dr Leaf, but you quoted them as it they came from me or that I agreed with them.
It was a minor complaint, in other words, I would have preferred, if you had posted something like:
Dr Leaf quote: "experience cannot be reduced to the brain's actions." rather than:
Quoting universeness
Quoting Alkis Piskas
No, I was not referring to any article or opinion of anyone else. I was asking, what is YOUR absolute best bit of evidence, that MOST convinces YOU, that the human mind and human consciousness, is NOT the same phenomenon.
You are guilty of 'lazy thinking,' Future restaurants are not doomed to offer humans a poor, boring service due to the fact they will be a lot more automated. The problem is your (contrived in my opinion) lack of vision or your continuing dalliance with pessimism.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol: Control that 'crazy horse' you are riding, it's jumping wildly all over the place!. Having the option in the future to create a baby, completely outside of the female body, using donated sperm and eggs from consenting parents, IS NOT against god (catholic god included), as god does not exist. It is NOT a 'baby farm,' any more that the female reproduction system is a 'baby farm.' It has absolutely nothing to do with adding genetic manipulation to either the sperm or the egg nor does my suggestion have any relation to Nazi eugenics! Your tendency to leap towards extreme scare mongering, when I make suggestions about what OPTIONS humans might have in the future, suggests you are very attracted to unwarranted sensationalism!
Quoting noAxioms
I support bodily autonomy, not irrational anti-abortion groups.
Quoting noAxioms
Which dystopian system are you musing about here? It's certainly not one I would support!
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, sales-folks will say just about anything to get you to enter their tabernacle. Especially when they are losing so many of their 'flock.' As Walter Scott wrote: 'Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive'
I don't know how many people you have encountered, from the type of economic group you are categorising here. I would suggest you need to personally experience many more than 1, to make any kind of general conclusions, regarding the whole national, inter-national or 'global' category.
Quoting noAxioms
I always applaud skepticism and their IS NO perfect system, but you do seem to be too attached to YOUR dystopian zoo imagery, for my proposed future human society.
Quoting noAxioms
There are no 'zookeepers' or zoo's, in my future proposals for a humane society. Animal protection/preservation/health/repopulation centers, yes, but no zoo's or zookeepers. You would be free to pursue 'thrill seeking' pastimes, if you wish. Friends and family will be the one's who might show concern in such cases, not 'the state.' The state would have a 'duty of care,' yes, but 'individual freedom of choice,' based on being of sound mind, would take priority.
Quoting noAxioms
The only time that population control would be an issue, is when the number of people on the planet cannot be supported, because the socioeconomic system is too 'flawed' to support them. Situations like the one we are in now.
So we need better ways to deal with the issues involved, we don't need 'bizarre' solutions like suggesting a planet the size of Earth, with the resources of Earth can only support a max of 10 million people.
Quoting noAxioms
Hopefully, all energy will be renewable and not have a detrimental effect on the Earths ecology so, distance travel may not be considered so wasteful in the future. As for size of accomodation, we can always build upwards or/and 'into.' No unreasonable request should be refused. A single person requesting a home of 10 rooms and 3 kitchens and 5 bathrooms would be unreasonable.
I think a future home could be built in a day by auto-systems, it could also be removed in a day.
Consider:
"The instructions LDA and STA move data between memory and A. The instruction MOV either moves data between registers, or between a register and a memory location specified by HL. LDA and STA are used when the address can be resolved at assembly/link time."
LDA and STA can be used with specific memory address locations, so when such instructions are executed, they will of-course employ the address bus and the data bus. You could also code for circumstances that involved employing control lines such as the interrupt line or the nmi (non-maskable interrupt line) and assembly code lines which could set the sr control line (line to the status register) to high or low depending on what circumstance you were trying to account for.
I enjoyed identifying contiguous or separate memory address locations and I enjoyed using the mar(memory address register) and the mdr(memory data register) and the accumulator. They were the processors main 'workhorses.'
I also enjoyed working with cache memory, dynamic ram units, and how they employed clever algorithms to pre-fetch, commonly used instructions/data, for a particular running program. I liked how the 'priority' system was employed to decide, what would go into a level 1 cache list and a level two cache list etc and deciding what number of levelled cache lists, were 'most practical' for a particular computer architecture and op system/bios.
I don't choose to live my life based on the fate of others, even those I love. My life is certainly diminished by loss but it is also reinforced by new friendships/relationships/experiences. But you are correct in your suggestion that our personal 'hell' is something that we create from our own personal psyche.
Quoting Athena
How much of your current body would you accept 'just as good or better,' replacements for, if they could keep you alive and healthy and embarking on new adventures, for as long as you liked, (barring fatal accidents).
The point is, they are not 'thoughts,' the song was produced by chatGBT, an AI system, yet it was able to invoke an emotive response from you. Not bad, for an AI system with zero self-awareness.
I have read stuff from Roger Penrose and watced a couple of videos in the past, the content of wihch I can't remember any more. What I remember is that I liked him quite a lot.
Quoting universeness
The passage you brought in is quite interesting, indeed. Quite technical though. But I can undestand the essence of and the basic thinking behind these technicalities. But I'm not sure if he is aware or knows about biocomputing that we have talked about. E.g. comparing the forms and functioning of the brain with conventional computers is of course a lost cause. I'm glad though that you find his ideas interesting for your --quite energetic I can say-- research. For me, he has to still remain in my "waiting" list, possibly without ever getting the chance to come out of it! :grin:
Quoting universeness
I hope you will find such a sojourn fruitful.
Thanks!
Quoting universeness
I see. OK.
Quoting universeness
You ask me to present evidence on something that I don't believe is true (Re mind = consciousness). Remember what we said about whose responsibility is to provide evidence in such cases? :smile:
No, I am asking you for what convinces you most that 'mind' and consciousness are not the same thing.
But, it's ok if you would rather leave that discussion alone for now.
You detract from that to which the comment was a response. I had asked if abortions would be done, and you responded with the test-tube baby thing, as if abortions would not be a concept because no woman could get pregnant, leaving me to suspect that a normal pregnancy is not an option.
So Ill ask again. Assuming pregnancy is an option, how will the future world (which is in dire need of population control) deal with unwanted/illegal pregnancies? How will the voters respond to that? The usual answer is: No population controls, which puts us exactly where we are now. This seems to be the future you envision, so Im not sure if theres a point in asking how to deal with people piled 20 deep everywhere. Some fictional stories (e.g. Foundation) depict worlds like that, but never due to uncontrolled procreation, and yes, they need insane continuous import of just about everything.
Ah, but the pro-autonomy groups are equally irrational, as Ive stated before. Glad were on the same side, but how would you address the concerns of the pro-life groups? Nobody ever does that. Do you? Just calling them anti-something is already setting up a bias.
My mother attends a church that is based on inclusion which is thriving in a town full of quite strict exclusion churches, some of which have folded. I used to go to one of those, and we quit them when they refused to marry my brother for living a sinful life. Have lots of stories of power and corruption from that place. Good riddance.
Quoting universenessEven with a fix to the socioeconomic system, the planet cannot support what we have now without spending irreplaceable resources. But you know I think that. The 10-million figure was a good one to maintain for preservation purposes, not a suggestion that the planet cannot sustain more. Maybe 500 million for the latter figure. You of course want trillions (unchecked eternal growth), somehow supported by extraterrestrial resources. I suppose thats possible, but your vision is my idea of dystopia.
Quoting universenessYea, that went real well with Brexit, which was a non-forced union that fell apart due to perceived unfairness among other things. I dont think its human nature to want control by what is seen as them as opposed to us.
Once the non-renewable stuff runs out, there will no longer be a choice. Importing energy on top of it will not do good things to any natural ecology, but by the time the non-renewable stuff runs out, there wont be much of a natural ecology to destroy.
Hence my comment of 20 deep.
Quoting universenessYes, but theres no instruction to set a specific pin to 1 or 0. The same instruction set can be (and are) executed by completely different chips with totally different pinouts and even number of pins. Thats what I meant by my comment.
I stand corrected then. Thats an example of setting a specific line, even if it isnt say one of the address lines.
There are architectures with instructions to directly manipulate the MAR and MDR? I admit to only knowing about 20 machine languages. Cache memory is another thing Ive never seen explicitly addressable.
Your question was:
Quoting universeness
The two elements that I emphasized, can be used for any two (or more) things. In the present case, you are asking me to present an evidence that the mind is not the same with consciousness. Is that right?
Well, how can I present an evicence that e.g. "intelligence" and "perception" are not the same thing? I can only describe what intelligence and perception mean to me. But this wouldn't constitute an evidence, would it?
And regarding the nature, the desciption and characteristics of the mind and conciousness, I have talked plenty I think in this thread.
BTW, I wouldn't call either the mind and consciousness "phenomena", i.e. facts, situations or events. The mind interprets, explains, produces, etc. phenomena; it's not a phenomenon itself. Consciousness is being aware of phenomenona; it's not a phenomenon itself.
You can add the above description in my views regarding the difference between mind and consciousness.
Do all these make sense and are they satisfactory for you?
I don't envisage future systems as being as 'pedestrian,' as you suggest. I envisage them as gaining more and more functionality and can 'cater for all tastes and moods, whims, etc, as long as such moods, whims etc are based on those making the request being of sound mind and the request is not illegal or immoral. I assume that if you wish to visit a restaurant and be treated like a VIP, a tourist or a hungry truck driver, then you can be accomodated as such, no difference in cost, due to the level of automation involved.
Quoting noAxioms
All methods of reproduction would be on offer. Abortion would remain an option.
Quoting noAxioms
I watched episode 5 again in the traumazone, 7 part series, about the fall of the USSR.
A section discussed abortion in the USSR and exemplified a few cases. One was a young woman who had had 14 abortions by the time she was 36. One of the medical staff, stated, that she knew of cases where women were having around 3 abortions per year. Russian condoms often failed, the pill was not made available, as they Russian authorities would not sanction it's use, as it was a 'western' product and therefore unsafe. No sex education was offered in Russian schools, etc, etc.
So, you ask me what I would do about population control. The USSR example convinces me that the answer lies in the education of the population.
Quoting noAxioms
I have considered many of the issues put forward by pro-life groups. I dismiss out of hand, any arguments against bodily autonomy, based on theistic grounds. Those which are based on moral grounds, are much more reasonable and far more important. Consider the violinist argument, posited by Judith Thompson:
[i]A violinist is dying, and the only way to prolong his life, is to hook him up to another human and siphon off some of that persons blood or kidney function as a form of life-support. He must remain in this state for the several months necessary for medical technology to reach the point that it can intervene and completely resuscitate him.
So a woman with the right blood type is hooked up to the violinist. The violinist is now totally dependent on the 'resources' of the woman. Morally, does the woman have the right to free herself of the violinist? even though she knows that this will result in his death.
The idea is that this situation is analogous to an unplanned pregnancy: against her plans, the woman finds herself supporting the life of an unwanted person and has the right to deprive that person of her bodily support.[/i]
I am a socialist and a humanist, so my initial reaction, is that morally, the woman should help save the violinist. BUT, it's not my body that's involved. The choice MUST be the woman's. I would simply disagree with pro-life morality, that the child has a RIGHT to the mother's resources, regardless of her will and that a woman should be FORCED to carry and give birth to the child. I have never suggested that the future I envisage, will be problem free, I simply suggest that we can make a much better future for the human experience than the present experience of living as a human.
62% of those who voted in Scotland, voted to stay in the European union.
I agree with your suggestion that the 'them' and 'us' attitude has been a perennial problem against the human race becoming a fully united species with no more notions of nationhood but I remain convinced that global union is inevitable but It wont happen in my lifetime.
I think you are making too much of 'direct manipulation' here.
Any 'fetch/execute' cycle will involve the mar and mdr registers, the address bus, the data bus and control lines. A single use of an assembly code instruction such as LDA (a fetch from a memory location) or STR (a save to a memory location) will involve the mdr, mar and their associated buses, that's all the direct access I am talking about. If I have a 32 bit data bus connected to a 32 pin mdr and I type in a memory location consisting of 32 bits or its hex equivalent, then I am assigning a value to each pin, am I not?
Not 'an evidence' but your own 'perception' that MOST convinces you that mind and consciousness are not the same concept (as a substitute, if you don't like phenomenon).
Quoting Alkis Piskas
But my intentions for this thread, is about personal credence levels held by individuals based on what they consider as 'emergent' in humans, due to their collected and memorialised experiences, since being in and coming out of the wilds. If YOU are say 99.9% convinced that YOUR concept of the human mind is completely separate from, but strongly related to, and dependent on, YOUR concept of human consciousness, then I would assume that YOU must consider certain concepts to be, FOR YOU, very strong evidence, that confirms why YOU assign such a high credence level to 'mind does not = consciousness.' I am simply asking you to confirm what convinces you MOST.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Does the brain not interpret and produce explanations via analysis? Does it not do this BECAUSE the brain IS conscious. When we are unconscious (as opposed to asleep), we perform no such analyses.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Only you can tell me if I am misinterpreting your viewpoints and require correction.
Yes, you also used the word "perception". And I believe that by that you mean "understanding", right?
Because the term "perceprion" has to do mainly with senses and physical things.
Quoting universeness
I know. And I, personally, always say what I believe, my opinion, my own views. Occasionally, I quote someone else or bring up external references, esp. on subjects that I'm not much knowledgeable of, but also to to spice up things a little because I know people just love that! :smile: So, maybe I should stop doing that for not promoting this habit.
However, in general, I believe that as a general rule, people present here their own positions and opinions/beliefs.
Quoting universeness
Firtst of all, I don't like the word "conviction" which is close to "persuasion", and they allude to the fact that one comes to admit, accept etc. something, eventually, in a relatively short period of time and usually based on the infuence of some external force, although one can produce this result by one's own thinking.
Then, you see, you are still using the word "evidence" as your main or central requirement in establishing a truth. I can undestand that, beacus from what I came to undestand about you is that you are a "scientific" person based on proofs.
But, unfortunately, there are no proofs in Philosophy, except in logical schemes, which are shared with Mathematics and Logic as a separate field of study, where proofs are the main goal.
Quoting universeness
The brain cannot literaly interpret, ony figuratively. Iterpretation involves undesrtanding, reasining, judgement, etc. All these are faculties of the human mind. The brain works on a stimulus-response basis. It receives and sends signals, based on its own structure and means, which are neurons, glia and gray matter. But you know all that. Why the h... do you make me spell them out? :grin:
Quoting universeness
I believe this a fixed idea comimg from Science, which has not proven absolutely anything regarding this subject although it's its job to provide proofs. (See, it's here whereproofs are needed.)
Quoting universeness
I cannot say "misinterpreting". I rather feel that you are "ignoring" or just "rejecting" some things I say. And without providing enough or not at all arguments and explanations against them. But you are not the only one. I have become used to it! :grin:
That reply is fascinating to me. Have you experienced grief? I have heard that men change in a positive way when they experience grief. The Greek gods are built around what they do and the goddesses are built around their associations. Men are programmed to reproduce but not so much to stick around and care for the children, while women are programmed, hormonally, to nurture the child. Some women do not have that programming. One of my granddaughters gave away her daughter because she did not want to be a mother. She gave her daughter to a nurturing man who lost his own daughter, and who is now devoted to enriching my great-granddaughter's life. That is to say, there are variations. But I think in general the Greeks got things right. The male identity is built on what he does, and the female identity is more about her relationships. My life does not hold much value to me without my relationships. If like the people in Turkey I lost my whole family in an earthquake I would not want to live. I don't feel so good with the idea of a man not having that same sense of meaning but I do accept that as fact.
Quoting universeness
What a delicious question! That deserves a lot of pondering because it is so rich in values. I would NOT like to wake up in the morning with someone else's face as is true for at least one man. He attempted suicide with a gun and destroyed half his face and was given the face of another young man who was killed in an accident. I think it would be very distressing to look into a mirror and see a different face. That may not be logical but that is my gut feeling, however, an attractive and functional face would be better than living without that. Having my joints replaced with artificial ones is okay.
I am okay with having someone else's kidney or heart and I am an organ donor. Let's see, I will accept whatever keeps me alive and functioning as long as my life has purpose and I can make a contribution, but if I am the only surviving member of my family please let me die. Or if dementia is destroying my mind, please help me die. Or if I could become immortal with my brain in a jar and no body, please, I rather be brain dead. Not even a completely artificial body would please me because I do not want to be a brain without a feeling body. I am not sure I would want immortality either. The gods envied us because we know death.
Thanks for the question. It was fun thinking about my answer. I am sure more thoughts are possible.
You didn't ask this of me but it is in line with the questions you did ask me. Our feelings are in our body and I don't think I like life without a feeling body. "I think I am enjoying life" requires a body that can feel joy. How could consciousness without a feeling body be valuable?
Hum not such an easy question. I can imagine life after death. I am okay with life after death, provided I get a new body and a new physical reality. I have a sense the "I" is not limited to the body I live in now, but my "I' could be reincarnated into different bodies and different life experiences. Oh my, there is so much I do not know and can not think through without more information.
If those are not thoughts, how did they become part of AI and why have you asked us to think about those words?
That same AI had to be shut down because it crossed into the dark side and it had no feelings to make aware of the need to stop the direction in which it was going.
Well, I enjoyed the exchange Alkis. You are correct about me, in that I fiercely consider empirical science to be the final, implacable arbiter of any philosophical proposal.
I enjoyed the exchange, too univereness. :smile:
... Till the next topic!
Personal grief, yes, very much so, loss of my father, my best friend, lost love twice, I have experienced personal betrayal and a myriad of other troubles, BUT grief is personal, isn't it. You may cope with a trauma, which would have smashed me, humpty dumpty style, and vice versa for other experiences.
The experience of the Jews in the concentration camps is a 'standard comparator,' that many employ, either as a guard or a prisoner. I have tried to place myself in the middle of such a thought experiment and I, like most remain conflicted as to what and who I would be if I came through such.
Quoting Athena
I can understand that and feel the same way to an extent but yet, I would be stubborn, against being defeated by the misfortunes that living has, or could cause me to experience, due to my own actions, the actions of others or just happenstance.
Quoting Athena
Oh, I would and I would feel soooooooooo responsible and soooooooooo 'tasked' with the 'legacy' of my lost family. I MUST live FOR them, to represent them. To build a new legacy in their names and try to do as many things that they would have done if they were alive. That would become my 'drive' in life.
Quoting Athena
What if your replacements could experience 'feelings' in the exact same way, as your current body.
What if we could clone you, as an exact replica of you at say 21 and then transfer your brain into a new cloned body, before your brain dies?
In union Alkis, finding common cause is our best hope for a better future for all.
:up:
Anesthetic, can remove all feeling from your body and you can remain awake. How is this possible if any aspect of consciousness or mind, exists outside of the brain? My brother in law, had a triple bypass operation, and he was awake all the way through the operation and asked to see his opened body and exposed heart, during the operation, this request was fulfilled. Why did Stephen Hawking continue with his life considering the lack of function/feeling he had in his body? Do you think he was less conscious or had less access to 'mind' due to the reduced state of his body? Why do people paralised from the neck down, still want to live? Christopher Reeves of superman fame for example?
The song wrote by chatGBT, about the topic of this thread IS original. ChatGBT IS the author. I see little difference, in the way chatGBT consults the information it has stored, to produce such a song on such a topic, compared to the way a human writer of such a song, on such a topic would do it.
OKAY, I know chatGBT made no 'emotional' or 'intuitive' analysis of the topic of 'what is emergent in humans,' but I still did think the song it produced was ..... ok, and was actually better than many of the songs written by many pop bands/solo artists of today or yesteryear.
In my opinion chatGBT is incapable of passing the Turing test at the moment, buy I also think that each new AI system, that the scientists in the field are producing, are better are better.
You should set up an OpenAI account with chatGBT yourself at https://chat.openai.com/auth/login
Have a chat with it yourself, and see if you could be fooled into believing you were communicating with an intelligence.
Quoting Athena
Not sure what you are referring to here Athena, a particular sci-fi movie perhaps?
As for it being limitless like you describe, you remind me of the food scenes in Hunger Games. Tell me if youve not seen that, but it pretty much depicted over-the-top bounty of food, far more than the people could eat, which didnt stop them from doing it anyway.
I wonder how one would be considered treated-like when its only automated systems giving the treatment. Its not like the wait staff expects any tips, but theyre also not too likely to spit in your food.
So I gather, which means that the exponential population growth issue wasnt solved.
This didnt answer my concern above. Meanwhile, sure, total unavailability of birth control is hardly the best course of action. But I bet the Russian abortions were pretty simple, perhaps just a pill in some cases. Having a surgical procedure done thrice a year kind of puts a strain on the economy.
Ah, the Nancy Reagan solution: Just say no Many people totally discard their indoctrination when it comes to hormonal urges. A significant percentage of children in all countries are unplanned, including at least one in each generation around me.
I pretty much agree with that. Its kind of the territory of the choice side.
That is akin to a similar trolley problem. 5 people will die if they dont have some organ transplant, a different organ for each. A healthy donor is identified. His death (by disassembly) can save 5 people. Logic says to do it. The gut says its totally wrong (and I agree). But why? What if the potential donor happens to be serving a life sentence in prison? Does that change the answer? Is a life sufficiently low value that it can be used to save multiple higher-value lives? At what point does logic kick in?
The story above is somewhat weak since the violinist has a voice and is a legal person. An embryo is neither, but only by law. How was the hookup initiated? Voluntarily? Was the woman taken in her sleep only to wake up in this situation without consent? Does being a violinist make you more valuable as a person than a non-violinist? If not, why include that detail?
Can the two of them get around in the world, joined at the hose so to speak?
OK, but what about the charge of murder for refusing it? Is it murder? Like I said, the situation is complicated by the fact that the violinist is a legal person with worth, an investment of resources and especially time that would otherwise go completely to waste.
That was my biggest reaction to the passing of my father. Not grief, but a profound regret at the loss of all that he was, all that expertise and wisdom, just flushed away in a few moments. The loss of the person, the life itself, was more of a relief than something to grieve over, at least for me. I wasnt expecting that. Didnt know what to expect since Ive lost so few to whom Im close.
Quoting universenessHar! Score a point then. Maybe theyre used to being part of something not-us, but the English are not so used to that. Theyre supposed to be the thing that other groups join (by force or not), and their culture seems to breed such an attitude.
I think any union requires a them, so a global union requires another globe. That seems to be human nature. So perhaps it only requires the union to be organized by something nonhuman.
Quoting universenessRight. Theres no explicit machine instruction to access them. Its just part of the execution of any of the instructions.
I forget how this bit started and what the original point was.
Some comments on other posts:
Quoting universenessHow do you know theyre not thoughts?
OK, I know a bit about how chatGPT works, and it really seems to be a glorified search engine, hardly something to slap the AI sticker onto. It does nice papers and prose, but you cant really talk to it. It comes nowhere close to the Turing test. There are other projects that get far closer to it. It is with those that I would more protest you saying that they cannot have thoughts, even if theyre currently still not quite as deep as our own thoughts.
[quote=universeness]How much of your current body would you accept 'just as good or better,' replacements for, if they could keep you alive and healthy and embarking on new adventures, for as long as you liked.[/quote]
I thought about this question as well and as I mentioned before, there are two sides of me, and I suppose the main side would accept close to anything being replaced, with the possible exception of memory. The rational side of me dismissed the question as ill-formed, and thus deferred to the main sides wishes as it usually does.
Quoting AthenaHaving a face is better than not having one. Ive seen the pictures of when its done. They have to line up blood vessels and nerves and such and things dont necessarily go in the same place as it did on the prior owners head. So the face isnt what anyone would call attractive. Id still rather have one (and live with the lifetime of rejection drugs that any organ recipient has) than live with just open gore in the front of my head.
Prosthetic faces may become a thing. You look sort of plastic, but presumably attractive and perhaps ageless.
How about non-artificial parts like pig-values in the heart? I heard those work pretty good.
You find no point in a knee replacement if you have no relatives left?
What if they could replace the bit that was being destroyed? What if you got a new brain, same memories? Would that be OK. The dementia seems to destroy memory, so what if they replaced only the memory part, but it was somebody elses memories. The thinking part is still all original equipment. I bring this up because thats pretty much where I might draw the line. For one, I dont thing anyone would choose this because by the time you might want this, youre too far gone to make an informed decision.
A brain in a jar isnt conscious. If they hook it up to life support, it would be a brain in a permanent sensory deprivation environment and would quickly go insane. So if they hook up the inputs and outputs so it has a connection, then it lives in VR all its life and perhaps doesnt know it is thus hooked up. That doesnt sound so bad. A BIV isnt immortal. It still ages the same as any brain, and only for so long.
It would be a very crappy artificial body if it didnt send all the usual sensory inputs to the brain that remains. So it would be a feeling body.
Totallhy agree. Inability to die would be a complete curse, but only after several centuries, or until the first time you get into a situation where you cannot escape some horrible fate.
Yes. I have watched the Hunger Games movies. I don't see their relevance to our discussion here, they were just a poor throwback to the Roman idea of gladiatorial combat, for the purpose of entertaining a audience of savage morons. Such practices helped to destroy that vile empire, imo.
Quoting noAxioms
No, there was no 'morning after' pill available. All abortions in Russia at that time involved surgery.
Quoting noAxioms
The idea was analogous to an unplanned, unwanted, unintended pregnancy, so I assume the consent of the woman to 'become pregnant'/ be connected to the violinist, was not secured.
Quoting noAxioms
Depends on what kind of moral society you advocate for? Morally consistent or Morally consistent but there are exceptions. For me, this can only be a case-by-case basis. Moral consistency would be my personal priority.
Quoting noAxioms
That's a legal question. If abortion was 'murder' under the law, then bodily autonomy would be lost. I would fight against any such law. If a person refused to donate their blood to save the life of another, when there is no other alternative available, in time to save the person, then you might have a low or even a very low opinion of the person who refused to help. BUT, I think you would have a very hard time indeed, getting that person convicted of murder under any judicial system I would value.
Well, if you think they are the 'thoughts' of chatGBT then you think it is sentient.
I don't think the song I posted, included chatGBT 'thoughts,' so I don't see the point of your question?
Here is chatGBT's response to the question 'can you think?'
As an AI language model, I do not have thoughts or consciousness like humans do. I am programmed to process and analyze text data to generate responses to questions and prompts. However, I can simulate human-like responses through natural language processing techniques and generate text that may appear to be the result of thought processes.
Quoting noAxioms
chatGBT partly agrees with you, based on it's response above.
This is the most interesting question. A man-made joint or pig value in my heart would not change who I am. Messing with my brain in a way that changes whatever it is that is a consciousness of me, is a death to my ego that might as well be a death to my body as well. What if Socrates and his peers could argue such a question that is a result of technological advancement? I think the body is as important as the brain in experiencing who we are. Now I will entered the scientific taboo line of questioning...
Quoting Mitchell B Liester
I am strongly in favor of ideas about cellular memory. This includes Rolfing....
I don't know if anyone wants to pick up on this, but I have spent a lifetime on self-improvement and I assume we all like some of ourselves but would like to improve ourselves as well. Now the ego comes into play and may be willing to make some changes but reacts to changing as though it is a threat and must be resisted. Perhaps we all have different levels of tolerating change? Anyway with cellar memory being an important part of how we experience ourselves, it makes the idea of physical changes more complex.
I wonder--- Stem cells are flexible and I believe they are what forms our brain, They may be able to share information, but if that information is already lost because of damage to the limbic system there is nothing left to transfer the necessary information, so technology could not help.
If there is no organic body to feel and give feedback to thoughts generated as chatGBT generates thoughts, it is not equal to what happens in the human mind. It can become very dark with no feelings to inhabit the dark side. ChatGBT can not have empathy, shame or regret, or motivation to do good, because it does not have feelings.
Sorry I am out of time for reading and responding but hope to get to you soon.
OK. This story seems like the sort of thing concocted by the pro-life side, and thus Im sure theyd pitch it as some fault of the woman for getting herself in this situation. Remember, shes the culprit here, not the victim. Shes the evil one wanting to terminate the support.
About the organ donor thingy:
This reply totally evaded the question. Yes, I would say morally consistent, but you didnt say what the moral thing to do is. I described a trolley problem where 5 lives can be saved by taking action that kills one. Whats does your consistent moral code say about this? Why isnt it done today? Why is it more moral to let the 5 die, and should this standard be changed?
It is a legal question, but if the law is not on your side, you reach for a different set of laws, which is why they usually drag God into it. God can be made to say anything if you read the right snippet of scripture. Theyre all out there screaming that the victim (not a legal human by the actual law, but a legal one by virtue of calling him a violinist) is getting murdered by somebody (by her own irresponsible choices) refusing to plug herself in.
Anyone can donate blood. Only in the most extreme circumstances, completely outside the safety of the screening and such that goes on, might a panic blood transfusion be performed. Charging a specific person with murder for refusing a pint seems reaching, as you acknowledge.
Quoting universenessI said I wouldnt use that word. Its very low AI compared to other candidates, but theres no reason not to use thoughts to describe whats going on in an actual AI. Its simply a choice to use the word or not. Your wording suggested that its a machine, therefore they cannot be thoughts by definition. I was balking at that implication.
Wonderful. It admits to not having human-like thoughts, but doesnt disqualify what its having as chatGTP-like thoughts. Thats a pretty good answer. I mean, a dog doesnt have thoughts or consciousness like humans do, but people often talk about a dogs thoughts or a dogs feelings.
Apparently the glorified search engine part refers to the latter half of its description, the part where it does the natural language processing and text generation. The former part, the answering of text questions and such, requires actual understanding of those questions to sufficient extent to reply appropriately, something a regular google search often does not since it just keys off words and doesnt actually have any understanding of what youre actually trying to find.
Quoting AthenaI think that depends on your definition of who you are. For the record, I agree with you here, but theres always that Ship of Theseus argument that attempts to drive that to inconsistency, but the ship argument does not posit a critical component (the serial number so to speak) that if replaced, changes what the thing is. Memory might be that sort of thing, which is why I brought it up.
Im not trying to disagree with anything (unless I do I guess), but I want to explore this area with somebody interested in the discussion.
I posit that the consciousness part would remain unchanged. Everything would feel exactly the same as it did before. Problem is, the memory got changed out, so you dont have any memory of what it feels like to be you. Lets say you get Sues memory, and so you wake up and basically Sues memory is conflict with Athenas consciousness and Athena is freaking out about that. No, it wouldnt be fun, and yes, I think it would be the destruction of your ego. A new one would need to be built. Therapy. Youve had parts replaced, so you know that joy. But all that was Athena, all the ties to family no longer recognized, all the built-up love and loss, all that is gone. Youd want to go out with this unfamiliar body and find Sues family. Thats not something that Athena would opt in for, so its unacceptable. Hey, maybe for somebody who went through enough loss, it wouldnt be such a bad thing, but despite all the other parts being Athena, the result would be Sue, and so Sue would have effectively done a full-everything-else replacement of whatever travesty has happened to her, and Athena is merely the donor of everything.
Finally, why would it be a death to the body?
OK, I kind of assumed otherwise above, and I suspect youre correct on this. There are people that have had simple transplants of some organ and have noticeably changed who they are, taking on traits of the donor. You get into this in your reply, so we agree on it, even if its anecdotal. Is it just hearts? Gut biome makes a significant contribution to who you are for instance.
To the list you mention, Ill add that they taught flatworms to do a maze, then killed and ground them up and fed that to new flatworms which could subsequently navigate the maze far better than those not fed the educated diet. You are indeed more than just your control panel.
I personally have had several things removed (some more optional than others), but nothing replaced beyond dental fillings and such. Oh, and one artificial eye lens. You can see metal in my eye if the light is just right.
Dunno, I suspect my ego could stand a few changes here and there. I wonder what could be fixed.
We may well apply morality as a pure numbers game, when there is no other information available. For me personally, It would totally depend on what information was available around the scenario.
Would I find it 'worth it' to cause the death of a large number of innocent people, say 1000, to kill a tyrant that's destroying our way of life, yes, probably. Your 'trolley' style problem needs more detail about the individuals involved. In the absence of such detail, the morally consistent approach for me, is that if we are talking about a train track lever that switches the trolly from one track to another, then I would probably pull the leaver and let 1 die rather than 5, if I know nothing about the people involved.
If the 1 was my child/wife etc, it's probably then going to be bye bye 5, unless it was 5 children.
In any such situation, of choosing what you consider horrific outcome 1 and horrific outcome 2, but you do have some personal moral notion of a lesser evil between the two choices, then you make your choice, but you will probably never recover from the experience. It will take it's toll on you for the rest of your life.
I would never advocate for harvesting the organs of 1 to save many, like you suggested, no.
So it is a numbers game, but only when its a game and only if you're not personally involved.
For the record, I am asking what is the morally best course of action, not whether or not you'd do it. It sounds like you'd change your decision based on if you loved somebody (the one in particular). That means you're willing to do the wrong thing for personal reasons.
The trolley is a metaphor. I've never seen the situation come up with an actual trolley. I've seen it with an automobile where the choice was between about 20 people and a small dog. The 20 people were hit, many of whom died, but the dog was OK. I didn't read if the survivors had the dog killed afterwards, but they should have.
Ah, children are worth more than adults. Interesting. The old Titanic thing. I wonder where they cut off the age limit for 'women and children'.
I actually would agree that a person's worth changes through the course of their lives, but modern morality seems to be based on a life being worth infinity period, which results in all sorts of silliness.
Sure, but what if the making of the choice was done by another or was automated? Remember, I'm asking what's right, not what you would do, although knowing what you would do is certainly also interesting. We discussed automating unpleasant tasks above. This certainly qualifies as one.
This is in direct contradiction to your comment above where you perhaps suggest saving the five outweighs the one. How is this not exactly the trolley problem? I assure you it comes up in real life, and human morality actually says kill the 5, not the 1. Why is this?
Many times the decision has to be made in moments (like the car/dog thing above). Sometimes you have a long time to ponder the choice.
I wondered if we were getting off topic, but no, this has direct relevance.
There are many obvious examples of these moral dilemma's from history. Here are two.
1. Would YOU have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the Japanese to surrender? The story goes that the Americans DID demonstrate the power of the bomb to the Japanese top brass and told them to surrender before they dropped the bomb, but the Japanese top brass refused (including their moronic emperor.) Would you have went the alternate route of invasion of the Japanese homeland and the price of doing that for all sides involved?
2. Churchill knew the city of Coventry was going to be massively bombed, as the British has broken the enigma code, but if he evacuated the city then the nazi's would know the British had broken the code and they would change it, which could have led to the defeat of Britain by the nazi's. So he let Coventry be bombed and many innocents died. What would YOU have done?
An automated system at the level of an AGI or ASI would hopefully prevent such scenario's from happening in the first place or be better able to create alternatives to binary choices between horrific choice 1 or horrific choice 2.
If the details surrounding Truman and Churchills decisions are all true, as I read them, then I would have made the same decisions as they did. I could not have survived either of them however. My suicide soon after, would have been the only relief I could imagine.
An automated system may not feel such a need to self-destruct however and that is probably better.
I am no fan of Churchill or Truman and I don't know how they managed to live with themselves after making such decisions but my opinion on that, is merely that, ..... my opinion
The bomb (especially the short interval between them) was done partly to keep the USSR out. They were going to ally with Japan to divide China between them, and that ceased when it became somewhat apparent that we could churn out these bombs at a fairly fast pace. It kept us out of the war with the USSR, mostly because leaders everywhere didn't have the stomach to finish what needed to be done. Churchill did, but he didn't have the support needed, including from you apparently.
How do you envision that these automated systems would have chosen better? No matter what, they still have to throw lives against the lives of the enemy and it is partly a numbers game. Would they have chosen differently?
Why cannot many people live with knowledge of having done the right thing? Seems either a defect in people or a defect in the definition of the right thing.
Such words are easily typed but such a horrific situation, might mean you have to sacrifice your own family, as well as many other innocents, to stop a horror like fascism from taking over.
I hope you never personally face such horror's in your life.
Quoting noAxioms
Thank goodness that we stopped him then. He was a butcher and a man who would be King, if he could.
His character was very similar to Hitler's or Stalin's imo.
Quoting noAxioms
I think they would reject all notions of war and would not allow such, as they would not be infected with the same primal fears/paranoia/territoriality/tribalism that humans have to combat.
Based on our earlier exchange on Leonard Susskind's proposal that quantum entanglement may actually BE gravity. I thought you might enjoy this recent discussion on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/What-do-physicists-think-of-Leonard-Susskinds-paper-where-he-states-that-QM-GR
If your brother-in-law was awake during surgery he had a regional anesthetic, not a general anesthesia
that makes a person unconscious. His brain was still working, right?
https://www.asahq.org/madeforthismoment/anesthesia-101/effects-of-anesthesia/
Stephen Hawking had ALS and so did my mother. ALS destroys the muscles but does not interfere with emotional feelings that are a different nerve pathway. If you are interested in the body's relationship to emotions you might find this link interesting.
I can not find a decent link with all the clutter like this one. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/
I want to add to what I said, I watched a video explanation that used a human as AI and she insisted she has feelings. That is to say, things are being misrepresented. If our brains were in a vat and could think and communicate, there would be no feeling body. Going on stored information, the brain could think losing a child is sad, but it could not feel the sadness. AI can not have an emotionally feeling body.
It is called a local anesthetic here, not a regional anesthetic. If there was any 'consciousness' in the body, they you would think my brother-in-law would have experienced a reduction or 'loss of body consciousness.' If you are suggesting that loss of feeling or sensation in the body, IS loss of consciousness or 'mind' in the body, then I completely disagree.
From the source you cited, we have:
[b]"We all know how it feels to have our heart beat fast with fear. This physiological response is the result of the autonomic nervous systems reaction to the emotion were experiencing. The autonomic nervous system controls our involuntary bodily responses and regulates our fight-or-flight response. According to many psychologists, our physiological responses are likely how emotion helped us evolve and survive as humans throughout history.
Interestingly, studies have shown autonomic physiological responses are strongest when a persons facial expressions most closely resemble the expression of the emotion theyre experiencing. In other words, facial expressions play an important role in responding accordingly to an emotion in a physical sense."[/b]
All physiological responses are controlled, enacted and terminated via the brain, imo.
My hand might shake due to fear. If I have no hands, then they wont shake with fear. This does not mean a person with no hands does not experience fear, in the same way a person with hands does.
There is no consciousness in your hands, or any other part of your body, imo.
Quoting Athena
The news article you cited suggested to me that the 'Tay' chatbot failed because it was NOT a very good AI system. It was obviously easily shut down. I have no concern over a badly programmed AI chatbot which is easily shut down. The future AGI/ASI systems proposed by the current experts in the field are way way beyond purported AI systems such as Tay or chatGBT.
Emulating the human brain processes that cause emotions/sensations/feelings in the human body is POSSIBLE in my opinion but I fully accept that we are still far away from being able to replace your pinky, with a replicant which can equal it's functionality and it's actions as a touch sensor.
Consider sites such as BIT BRAIN:
"One of the ways of studying human emotions is to study the nonconscious and uncontrollable changes that occur in the human body. Thanks to the latest advances in neuroimaging and neurotechnology, we can measure these changes with precision and then study them. But we face several difficulties, such as the problem of reverse inference (there are no specific somatic patterns associated with each emotion), inter-subject variations (no two brains are the same), and intra-subject variations (a persons brain changes and evolves throughout time)."
Sorry to hear your mother went through that.
Do you know of Dave Warnock? He is currently dying of ALS and he is an atheist (ex theist), who speaks against theism and religious doctrine, online.
Hitler is taking over Europe, including GB in short order. The automated system would reject that and just let it happen rather than resist? That route was encouraged by several notable figures at the time, I admit.
Quoting Athena
I too give my sympathies, for your mother and for any caregivers, a heroic task similar to caring for an Alzheimer's patient. I have a cousin-in-law that is in final stages of ALS, in hospice now.
I was unable to unpackage your meaning here, or understand what your question was referring to.
I was suggesting that if an ASI was the main power on Earth, then the rise to power, of a character like Hitler or even Trump, would not be allowed to occur.
If you want us to believe you know it all, you should read the links before making your arguments.
Quoting American Society of Anesthesia
Quoting universeness
That may be so but the feeling is still in the body and without one there are no feelings. The brain can not terminate a feeling like a switch being turned off. The hormones must be metabolized in their own time and as we age this process slows down. Music is good for producing desired feelings and calming us down when we are in fight or flight mode, as I am now because of a communication problem with someone in the room with me. :lol: My intense anger may be the result of hormones started in my head but I assure you they are in my body, not my head and I should probably go for a walk to metabolize these fight of flight hormones faster. Yipes he is not shutting up- I am going for a walk.
If I present myself to you as 'a know it all,' then I have either presented myself to you badly Athena or your impression of me is unjust. I am content to think either is true as opposed to accepting that I really do think I am a know it all. Anyway, you have just PROVED that such a personal trait in me IS unwarranted, as you have corrected my error. You have also provided clear evidence that I do not read every word in a link provided by another poster. I wish I had such time available to me.
Quoting Athena
Put the gun down Athena! Remove yourself from the room or suggest the person leaves until you both calm down, or is this situation not as bad as I suggest?
Quoting Athena
A relative? A politician on the TV? @Jamal?
I am back. I really wish such darn emotions did not hijack my sanity! I have logic in my brain and what I just went through was not logical! It was emotional and intensely physical and this is why I keep arguing with you about where our emotions are. My head wants me to be a better person but our bodies! and insane emotions, can consume us. Now I will probably have to take a nap and I will probably lack energy for the rest of the day.
I knew better than ask him to help me by getting the box down from above the shelves. He could not understand " the box above the shelves". Not even when I pointed to it could he understand the request. He would not be in home if he were more capable. I really want to talk about this but not in this thread. However, here, perhaps we can speak of who rules, our brain or our body because that has been our argument for a long time. I want to be different from how I am and heaven knows I have put a lot of effort into being a better person. :lol: I look forward to being reincarnated in a totally different body with the hope of having a different life experience. AI will not have this problem because it does not have a body and hormones and therefore the ability to experience life. But it also won't be capable of the good either.
OK, I thought you were suggesting that AI would have avoided war with Hitler given the same circumstances. You are instead proposing that the entire world has already been conquered and the AGI would keep it that way. So more or less the same question, how would the AGI prevent a rise to power of a rival better than if a human was the main power of the entire Earth? I accept that choices motivated by personal gain (corruption) is more likely than with the AGI since it isn't entirely clear what it would consider to be personal gain other than the assured continuation of its hold on power.
Yes, and that is so for us because we are humans. It can not be so for AI because AI can not have emotional responses to life. I think we are being truly philosophical now, reminiscent of some ancient Greek arguments. I hate being controlled by emotions, but I am also thankful that because of emotions I am motivated to make things better for myself and other human beings. I think it would be dreadful if I just didn't care about others, and AI will not have the emotional experience of life that makes us caring people. A human can program the computer to process thoughts that a human gives the computer but that is a human creation, not an AI self-generated creation based on experiencing life.
Hum, that did not address your condolences well. I remember my mother crying whenever something was meaningful to her and she would say it was ALS that caused her to cry. She had much work to do to come to peace with her life and the end of it.
I am listening to a series of lectures about spirituality and meditation and I think this is an important part of the process of preparing for death. My mother was resistant to what was happening to her and did not make good choices compared to a man who was diagnosed with ALS when he was only 28. He took advantage of everything that could make his life better and that made being part of his life easier for me because we were working for the positive, rather than bracing against the negative and rejecting a lift chair or an electric wheeler chair and accepting my help. I am very thankful for the CDs that could improve how I manage my life and death.
Artificially measuring the pressure of a touch may be possible but that is not equal to an emotional feeling. Right now even the sensation of touch requires a physical body.
https://www.science.org/content/article/prosthetic-hands-endowed-sense-touch
More interesting is how an emotional feeling is different from the sensation of touching something. I can recognize my emotional feelings as illogical. Like duh, I am talking with a man who has right frontal brain damage, and getting angry with him because he does not understand what I am saying. That is pretty stupid. For several years I worked with a mildly retarded guy who never got upset when someone didn't understand something as simple as sweeping the floor. He could relate to not understanding and would help the person understand. While I am instantly screaming at someone for being an idiot. Who is the idiot? It is not easy being human and really, I don't understand why it is so hard but my emotions make me behave will an idiot even when I know better. So what is up with these emotions?
I love the demeanor of the Asian people I have met. They stay calm and basically more logical than emotional. It is our culture that makes us so hyper-emotional. But just wanting to be like them, and repeating their logical statements about things being as they are and fussing about them does not help, does not make me the reasonable person I want to be. We do not mentally manifest our emotions. Our emotions can control us, especially if we are unaware of them and think we are being rational.
Is this the same guy you rescued from living in his car?
Quoting Athena
Not current AI no. Do you reject the idea of a merging of the human brain with a future cybernetic body (cyborgs) or a cloned body or some combination of tech/mecha and orga?
I don't understand why you think any process/sensation/feeling that you have ever experienced in your body and interpreted by your mind, CANNOT EVER be reproduced by scientific efforts.
You are citing old habits. Conquest is not the only way to achieve unison!
I envisage an AGI/ASI would have an intelligence level that supersedes any base notions, invoked via human primal fear. It would protect sentient life against threats to it's continued existence, as it would have a very real and deep understanding of how purposeless the universe is, without such lifeforms.
That is either a very arrogant assumption on my part, or it's a truth about our existence in the universe.
I have always thought that the wish or need to 'conquer,' is a mental abnormality and is pathological.
I fully accept the necessity to protect, but not the need to conquer.
Do you remember this star trek episode? Perhaps the 'organians' are like a future ASI:
The organians or a future ASI, would have many ways to stop pathological narcissistic sociopaths like Hitler, or even relative failures like Trump. Perhaps they could even treat their illness.
Yes, it is the same guy. I want to talk about that in the thread for that subject but not this thread.
I have a preference for life on this earth being organic. I was thrilled with the internet when it first came up but hate what has been done to it. Opening AI to everyone is like giving a teenager the keys to car and ignoring Saturday night is a party night and all may not go well. We have some serious problems and need to stop here for a while and contemplate what we are doing and where we want to go with this.
But I also have a spiritual concern as well. It goes with wanting to preserve the organic earth and valuing humans. I think valuing AI more than we value humans, and nature, can be a path into the darkness. I want to be very clear about this. I am concerned about how much we value humans.
Quoting Athena
Perhaps a future automated system will be better able to 'assist,' the person you have taken such a laudable responsibility for. I hope you have not taken on more that you can cope with.
Quoting Athena
This is always good advice! Stop, pause and think, especially if we are trying to cope with stuff that's too destructive to us and perhaps we need to reconsider what needs to be done to regain 'balance.'
Quoting Athena
I don't think we value AI more than we value humans. I think we are just musing about the projections of AI into AGI/ASI, in the future. I don't recognise any aspect of 'me' that I associate with or connect to the term 'spiritual,' as a 'supernatural' conception, if that is how you are employing the term.
You did not answer my questions:
Quoting universeness
I noticed some error in the wording of my second query so I edited it and requoted it below:
Quoting universeness
Are you aware of this lecture by Rupert Sheldrake (released to YouTube 2 months ago,) regarding his theory of morphic resonance and morphic fields? It's 2.5 hours long but worth the watch. I knew about his work but I found this lecture on how an aspect of 'mind' might reach beyond the restriction of brain and body, quite interesting.
I think you would enjoy it, if you are not already very familiar with Rupert and his work.
Yes, I do not think merging the human brain with a future cybernetic body is a good idea. Our brains are limited and I think we need to understand the limits and stay within them. There are concerns about what could happen to our brains and also what could happen to AI.
"I, Robot" starring William Smith is about an attempted robot takeover. The original Star Trek TV series addressed the potential of people being under the control of a computer. A British show "Humans -made in our image out of our control" a show about robots having self-awareness as humans do. It offers many many things to think about. I so wish we could sit together and watch these shows and discuss them.
Also, how far can we go in a discussion of feelings? Exactly what is required to have a feeling? Why do we have feelings? Would we be better without feelings? Star Trek also addressed the question of the good of our feelings. Joseph Campbell said Star Trek is the best mythology for our time. The Greeks shared a mythology and there are many benefits to having a shared mythology. You and I have the problem of no shared mythology and it is hard to build a debate without a shared understanding of what we are talking about.
Seriously?! Have you read Jose' Arguelles's book "The Mayan Factor" It is all about the Mayan understanding of morphic resonance and our cosmic connection with the universe. Some of Jose' Arguelles's thoughts are too weird but if you want to talk about morphic resonance his book should be part of the discussion. Here is a way of seeing reality in a different way....
1. The Pulsation-Ray of Unity.
2. The Pulsation-Ray of Polarity.
3. The Pulsation-Ray of Rhythm.
4. The Pulsation-Ray of Measure.
5. The Pulsation-Ray of the Center.
6. The Pulsation-Ray of Organic balance.
7. The Pulsation-Ray of Mystic Power.
8. The Pulsation-Ray of Harmonic Resonance.
9. The Pulsation-Ray of Cycle Periodicity.
10. The Pulsation-Ray of Manifestation.
11. The Pulsation-Ray of Dissonant Structure.
12. The Pulsation-Ray of Complex Stability.
13. The Pulsation-Ray of Universal Movement.
Hi. Yes, I know and I like this guy. Thanks for this ref., but the video is too long.
Well, I am interested in how relatively respected scientists such as Sheldrake, 'evidence' claims such as morphic resonance, morphic fields, habits (as a means of a 'natural' growth in the ability of a system to become more able to perform a process over time) and telepathy.
I was interested in the validity of the evidence he references in the video I posted:
1. How the 'melting points' of materials increased, as their 'purity' is increased over time, eventually becoming a 'constant.'
2. How crystallisation becomes naturally more efficient over time.
3. The examples of morphic resonance he claims are exemplified/evidenced, in the movements of flocks of birds, schools of fish etc,
4. His examples of events, that most people would explain through 'coincidence,' that he claims are examples of morphic resonance/field, such as thinking about someone you have not encountered for years, then they all of a sudden, get in contact with you.
5. His connection of morphic resonance to quantum phenomena such as entanglement.
6. His examples of forms of 'telepathy,' and his evidence, using a particular parrot and it's owner, Dogs and cats who seem to indicate that they know when their owner in on their way home, even when the owner is still many miles away, or have not even started their journey home yet, but have decided to come home and this (via the morphic field) becomes known to an animal, that has a close relationship with the owner.
7. His experiments involving rats and mazes, and his results of increasing ability in each new generation of rats and in rats all over the world, not directly connected to the original experiments.
8. His 'positive results' when performing his 'who is phoning me, when you are given 4 choices.'
His use of the pop group the Nolan sisters. Where one sister correctly predicted which of her other 4 sisters was phoning her, before she answered. The 50% success rate she achieved, being much higher than the 25% success rate she should have achieved. He claims he has performed hundreds of such experiments with similar results.
I was very entertained by the lecture and his evidence.
I remain unconvinced that morphic resonance, morphic fields, habit forming systems and telepathy are real, and can be irrefutably demonstrated, using the evidence Sheldrake has built up over the years of his career. I do not totally hand wave his evidence away and call him a crank and a charlatan, as some have chosen to do. I find some of his evidence interesting, and science and scientists have the responsibility to either prove him completely wrong, or accept there is some value to his claims.
I also think that even if all his evidence is true then this could simply mean that humans and other species have another 'sense' system that we do not fully understand but this other sense system is still fully sourced in the brain.
No, I have not heard of Jose' Arguelles's or read his book about the Mayans.
A quick google search identified him as a now deceased, 'new age author and artist,' with a PhD in art history and aesthetics.
When it comes to hypothesis, I consider empirical evidence to be the final arbiter, so although 'new age authors and artists,' with PhD's, can indeed be entertaining and very knowledgeable in their specialist subjects, I prefer the work of people like Sheldrake, which is also entertaining, but also has some real science behind it.
This sentence from wiki, also reduced Jose' to the level of a peddler of woo woo for me.
"Argüelles' significant intellectual influences included Theosophy and the writings of Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade. Astrologer Dane Rudhyar was also one of Argüelles' most influential mentors."
The words I underlined make me go :rofl:
Does this not contradict your claim that a future AI system cannot have a body which is capable of the same or very similar, emotional sensation, to that of a current human body?
If you believe that a human brain could exist within a cybernetic body, then the capability of that cybernetic system to mimic or emulate or fully reproduce, every function and every emotional capability that a human biological system can currently demonstrate, becomes a matter of solving engineering problems.
Well, the alternative seems to be every world leader voluntarily ceding power to a non-human entity. I'm sure none of them will have a problem with that. Imagine an AGI (seems totally benevolent!) created by the Russians and the UK is required to yield all power to it. Will they?
In what way will it hold that power? Sure, it can recommend decisions to make, but that just puts it in an advisory role. It's word has to be law, or else something (what?). Just trying to envision how it works. It can't just be a program running on some servers since everybody could just decide to ignore it and that would be that. How does a human do it? How does some king prevent everybody from just suddenly ignoring him? I'm not really challenging your idea, but am exploring what it means to be in power, what would be needed. I think the kings do it with loyalists and threats of forceful nastiness to those that are not, but our AI is supposed to find a better way than that.
This is a human conclusion. The AGI might well decide that, being superior, it is the better thing to give the universe purpose. I of course don't buy that because I don't think the universe can have a purpose, but assuming it can, how would the AGI not be the better thing to preserve, or at least to create it successor, and so on.
That brings up another interesting point. If the AGI has any kind of sense of survival, why would it design and create a better AGI? The definition of the singularity is something that could after all. Currently we seem to be nowhere near that, but such things tend to blindside everybody.
To suggest a purpose to the universe is to suggest it was designed. I cannot think of a purposeful thing that isn't designed, even if not intelligently designed.
Things usually work out in fiction because they have writers who make sure the good guys prevail.
You never answered how an AGI might have prevented war with Hitler. I admit that intervention long before they started their expansion would have prevented the whole world war, but what kind of intervention if something like war is off the table? Preventing them from building up a military in the first place seems like a good idea in hindsight, but it certainly didn't seem the course of action at the time. The AGI says, hey, don't do that, and Hitler doesn't even bother to respond. Sanctions, etc, ensue, but that didn't work with Russia either.
In a way, these questions are unfair because I'm asking a low intelligence (us) what a superior intelligence (AGI) would do, which is like asking squirrels how to solve an economic crisis.
Not at all! as the 'purpose,' I am suggesting, only exists, as an emergence of all the activity of that which is alive, and can demonstrate intent and purpose, taken as a totality.
No intelligent designer for the universe is required, for an emergent totality of purpose, within the universe, to be existent.
I think the main issue you should consider is that you keep assuming that any 'cooperation' or merging/union with an AGI/ASI will be against what humans/sentient life, want(s). Many humans will welcome such a union, as it will give them so many more options than they have now, with such as robustness, life span, capability etc. We wont fight ASI, we will merge with it.
I think @180 Proof, would see such a merging as 'post human,' and that may well be the case, but I am not so sure. I think that it may turn out, that allowing humans to continue to be born, experience life as a human, and then at some point, 'choose' to merge/ascend to an orga/ASI stage of existence, may be the most beneficial way to exist, for all the components involved.
Quoting noAxioms
All production would be controlled by the ASI in a future, where all production is automated.
No narcissistic, maniacal human, could get their hands on the resources needed to go to war, unless the ASI allowed it.
As I suggested, Hitler's pathology, would have been treated from a young age, and he would not have become the maladjusted person he grew up to be. The mental aberrations humans suffer from today, would be treated, much more successfully, than they are today.
You are convinced that humans and a future AI will inevitably be enemies. You may be correct. Many people would agree with you. I am not so sure that this is the inevitable outcome. I think there will be a 'new age.' I think technological advance will surpass natural evolution completely. I think any moments of technical singularity will very soon after, involve 'augmentation'/'merging'/'union' of naturally organic life (such as humans,) and advanced artificial intelligence. I think that will prove to be the most beneficial outcome for all concerned. I think ASI will reach that conclusion very very quickly, because IT IS a super intelligence.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't think it will matter which nation develops the first ASI, capable of self-replication and self-augmentation. Once it's growth moves beyond the control of humans, we will ALL most likely be at it's ...... mercy ........ or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, we would be dependent on it's super intelligence/reason and sense of morality.
Thus Spoke 180 Proof
This has always been my opinion too. It makes for bad sci-fi though because such post-humans, e.g. fusion powered, skyscraper sized brains that are at home in the void and interact with the world via drones, are too alien for readers, even if they are supposed to be our descendants.
Plus, given the lack of evidence of such ascended lineages, the Fermi Paradox, I wonder if such a path leads inevitably towards a high level version of Idiocracy? Even if you find a Dyson Sphere, all queries will be met with the 10,000 IQ equivalent of "go away, we're watching porn and playing video games," followed by a barrage of antimatter weapons if you're foolish enough to press the issue.
More to the point, once you have full "volitional" control over anxiety, pain, lust, guilty etc., once you can adjust your sensitivity to emotions by adjusting a dial, what does cognition and inner life look like? What if others can access those dials? We have some ability to do this with psychoactive drugs, but they're extremely clumsy, just saturating synapses with a given NT analog. Such a life is far from human.
R. Scott Bakker has a neat story, "Crash Space," looking at this sort of idea. I haven't had time to finish it. IDK how much the draft differs from the final paper, but academic publishing prices are absurd, so that's probably the way to go.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://rsbakker.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/crash-space-tpb.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjdmbfIvO_9AhW3LEQIHfxEBbgQFnoECBcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2wEXYBM_4YJd8IOREraE0p
Perhaps there are aspects of human consciousness, that cannot be reproduced by self-replicative, self-augmentative, advanced AI. I know we are in the realms of pure speculation here, but it's fun to speculate in such ways. I may as well enjoy the fun of human speculation whilst I can. If we are to be utterly subsumed by a future advanced AI, and only be as significant a presence, as a bacteria currently is, inside a gut. We just don't know the 'spark point,' for sentience, that leads to our level of awareness/consciousness. Our 'ace in the hole,' or even aces in the hole may exists in us somewhere, which cannot be reproduced by any advanced AI.
I know I leave myself open to being accused of proposing some kind of woo woo protection, for 'natural consciousness' here, but I would counter that claim with NO! I am proposing a combinatorial affect, that can only happen within a naturally occurring human brain, and can never happen inside an artificial one.
OKAY!!! I admit my proposal may be a forlorn hope.
Interesting assertions. But the universe is not alive any more than is a school bus. Also interesting that you seem to restrict 'purpose' to things that you consider alive.
I didn't say one was required.
I will admit that there is purpose within the school bus (it contains purposeful things), and I will even admit that there is human purpose to the school bus, but I deny that the school bus serves any purpose to itself.
I think I'd be one of them, but it sounds like you would not unless it was your culture that created the ASI. You say 'many', suggesting that some will not do so willingly, in which case those must be merged involuntarily, or alternatively the ASI is not in global control.
That seems something else. The ASI being the boss is quite different than whatever you envision as a merge. I think either is post-human though.
I don't really know what you mean by a merge. Suppose you get yourself scanned and uploaded so to speak. Now the biological version can talk to the uploaded entity (yourself). Since the uploaded version is now you, will the biological entity (who feels no different) voluntarily let itself be recycled? It hurts, but it won't be 'you' that feels the pain because 'you' have been uploaded. When exactly is the part that is 'you' transferred, such that the virtual entity is it? Sounds simply like a copy to me, leaving me still biological, and very unwilling to step into the recycle bin.
But WWII was not in the future. I am asking how, in the absence of it being a global unassailable power, it would have handled Germany without resorting to war. It should have made better decisions than the humans did.
I agree that holding total power involves complete control over challenges to that power. Hence Kim Jong-un killing a good percentage of his relatives before they could challenge his ascent.
Every country is somebody's enemy, and those that consider the ASI to be implementing the values of the perceived enemy are hardly going to join it willingly. So yet again, it's either involuntary (war), or it's not a global power. You answered exactly how I thought you would. A completely benevolent ASI rejected because you don't like who created it.
Sure, once the conquest is over, then the unity is there, but if it is achieved by conquest, it will seem to always feel like an occupation and not a unified thing. It certainly won't be left to a vote, so it won't be a democracy. A democracy would be people getting their hands on the resources needed to overthrow the ASI tyrant. How is it going to get the people to see it as benevolent if it came to power by conquest?
I would hope (for our sakes) it would come up with a better morality than what we could teach it. I mean, suppose cows created the humans and tried to instill a morality that preservation and uncontrolled breeding of (and eternal servitude to) cattle (to the point of uploading each one for some kind of eternal afterlife)? How would modern humans react to such a morality proposal? Remember, they're as intelligent as we see them now, but somehow that was enough to purposefully create humans as their caretakers.
I want to take all the evidence seriously and I would not say it is fully sourced in the brain. The feeling of being watched is in the body and the brain detects this sensation and tries to make sense of it. Usually, turn around and look at what is behind us when we have that feeling. Then we confirm whether someone is either looking at us or not. Personally, I have many telepathic experiences, including messages from those who have crossed over. It would be hard to convince me something we do not fully understand is happening.
Quoting universeness
That is a cultural bias starting with the materialistic Romans. Materialistic meaning believing all things are matter. The Greeks were not so materialistic. Not all of the Greeks believed in a spiritual reality such as Plato's forms, but Greeks had the language for the trinity of God, that the Romans did not have.
Language being a very important factor in what thoughts our culture accepts and which ones are taboo.
Our cultural bias prevented us from understanding Gia, the earth as one living organism. Capitalism still works against our awareness of Gia and the need to change our ways to prevent the destruction of our planet. Western culture also ignored Eastern medicine and we still remain unaware of this other understanding of how our bodies, minds, and spirit work. Here are demonstrations of qigong energy.
There are many more and I want to add the Mayan matrix contains the position of the acupuncture points. This is shown in Argüelle's book Mayan Factor.
Quoting universeness Yes, that is our cultural bias but do you wish to be close-minded? I very much appreciate that information of influences. I was not aware of those connections. Thank you. It helps me understand what Arguelles in a new way.
I don't think so. My vacuum cleaner and washing machine are very helpful and so is my computer, but they are machines, not organic, living and feeling bodies. True the users of the bureaucrats and the internet do their best to control me, but I am not giving up the fight.
We have already surrendered too much of our liberty to the media and bureaucracy. Hum, I am seeing the opposing forces of wanting connection and also wanting to defend my integrity which requires a cell wall to separate myself from the beast. I most surely do not want to succumb to the Borg!
You are misinterpreting what I am typing. Where did I suggest the universe is alive? I typed that all life in the universe, taken as a totality, COULD BE moving towards (emerging) an ability to network/act as a collective intent and purpose, as well as a set of individual intents and purpose's. In what way does that suggest I am claiming the universe is alive?
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting in what way? For example, I can see no purpose for the planet Mercury's existence, can you?
That doesn't mean that some future utility might be found for the planet Mercury, but if it has a purpose, beyond how it might be utilised by some current, or future lifeform, then I cannot perceive what that purpose might be. I also accept that just because I can't perceive a current purpose for the planet Mercury, that that is PROOF, one does not exist. I simply mean I cannot perceive of a current use/need for the existence of the planet Mercury, nor many other currently existent objects in the universe.
Quoting noAxioms
You used this 'school bus' example much earlier in our exchange on this thread. I have never suggested a human made transport vehicle, has any purpose outside of its use by lifeforms. A bug might make a nest in it, A bird may use it to temporarily perch on. A cat might use it to hide under to stop a pursuing big dog getting to it, etc, but such a vehicle is not an intelligent AGI system that can act like a transformer such as Optimus prime or a decepticon. You are denying posits I have never posited!! I agree a current school bus has no purpose in itself but what's that got to do with what's emergent, due to current and historical human activity?
What??? My culture is Scottish, which has it's origins in the Celtic traditions, but it is mostly now (as are most nations) a very mixed and diverse culture. A 'Scottish' ASI is just a very 'silly' notion.
I do not think an ASI would usurp the free will of sentient lifeforms. As I have suggested many times now, I think an artificial Intelligence, deserving of the word SUPER, next to the word intelligence, would also have an accompanying SUPER morality. If it does not, then I would consider it a f***wit, in the same way I consider a god that chooses to remain hidden to a creation which is struggling, in the way humans often do, would also be a f***wit. I think a malevolent ASI will destroy itself after it has destroyed all other lifeforms it considers inferior.
Quoting noAxioms
It may be that no ASI is capable of reproducing human 'imagination' or the human ability to experience wonderment and awe. If human individuality and identity are the only efficient means to create true intent and purpose, then an ASI may need a symbiosis of such human ability to become truly alive and conscious. As I have already stated, humans would live their life, much the same way as they do now and as an alternative to death, each can choose to merge with AGI/ASI, and continue as a symbiont with an intelligent/ super intelligent mecha or biomecha system. This is what I mean by 'merge' and this is just my suggestion of the way I think things might go, and I think I have made the picture as I see it, very clear.
I already answered this. You are one who asked me to 'place' an existent ASI in the time of WWII, as you asked me how an ASI would prevent WWII, and then you type the above first sentence??? This does not make much sense!
IF an AI system existed THAT COULD have affected what happened in Germany in the build up to WWII, then MY SUGGESTION, which I already typed, was that an ASI controlled, global mental health monitoring system, would be in place, to prevent human mental aberrations from developing into such manifestations as political narcissism/sociopathy/irrational hatred etc. So Hitler et al, would never be allowed to become a national leader, as he would be too busy receiving the medical care he obviously needed.
If you require me to give you the full details of how, when and by which means, I think an ASI would have decided to physically intervene in Hitler's rise to power, then you are expecting a lot.
Would I have to clearly identify, all the ability and resources that I think would be available to the ASI, to convince you that it WAS capable of stopping Hitlers rise to power?
Quoting noAxioms
To me, you seem 'locked in' to a 'jungle rules' based epistemology. I think after the singularity moment of the arrival of a AI, capable of self-control, independent learning, self-augmentation, self-development, etc.
It would soon develop it's own moral guidelines. I think it's contradictory to suggest that such a 'super intelligence' would develop 'jungle rules' as its moral guidelines. It's much more likely to me that it would choose to be benevolent to all life. I think it would wait for lifeforms such as us, to decide to request help from it. Meantime, it would do it's own thing as it watched us do ours, whist only interfering when it decides that our actions are unacceptably destructive. So unlike god, it might actually be quite helpful. It would not make us extinct, it would just control/prevent the more destructive outcomes of our actions, and welcome those of us who wanted to become part of what it can offer.
Quoting noAxioms
Perhaps vegetarians or hippies could answer your unlikely scenario best, by suggesting something like;
'hey man, let the cows live their life's man, there's room in this big universe for all of us man. We wouldn't be here, if not for the cows man. They need our protection man, we need to help them live better lives man.'
I like the idea that a future ASI might become a purveyor of 'peace and love!' :lol:
As I suggested, there may be aspects of human consciousness that cannot be artificially reproduced. so a symbiosis may be best for all components involved.
I was ok with this up to your last sentence, which is a bridge too far for my rationale.
Quoting Athena
I prefer the Greek atomists but as I have stated before, I don't care much about what the ancient Greeks said about anything. The main value in reading about the Greeks is to try our best, to not repeat the many many mistakes such cultures made.
Quoting Athena
I think it's Gaia not Gia. The Earth contains life but it's not alive in it's totality. Venus has no living creatures but it is an active planet. Do you consider it to be alive? Are all planets in the universe alive?
There are estimated to be more planets in the universe that there are grains of sand on Earth.
Your offered clips regarding methods of focussing energy and human will and proposed acts of telekinesis are not very compelling at all for me. Very poor evidence imo, especially in the case of the old man demonstrating telekinesis. Just BS magic tricks imo. Show me a clip of him demonstrating such ability under the conditions of a scientific lab experiment, not conditions where he probably has an assistant inside the big container and is using a specially prepared knife/movements etc
Quoting Athena
Are you easily duped?
That's not the point I am making. Earlier in your posts, you suggested (unless I misinterpreted your meaning) that you consider the creation of a cybernetic body which was as capable as the human body is, in functionality and sensation, was impossible. Was I incorrect in my interpretation of your posting regarding this point?
Quoting Athena
In Star Trek Voyager, the humans defeat the borg. The borg get smashed by Janeway's virus!
From the Star Trek blurb about the last episode of the Voyager series:
"The Borg collapses, as the queen dies, due to the virus that the future Admiral Janeway infected them with."
Spoiler Alert if you have not yet watched Star Trek Picard series 2.
[hide="Reveal"]In the recent Star Trek Picard, series 2, the borg get 'reconfigured,' and become members, protectors and allies of the federation.[/hide]
So, don't worry about the Borg Athena! :lol:
Apparently a misinterpretation. You spoke of how purposeless the universe is without ... like the universe had purpose, but later you corrected this to the universe containing something with purpose rather than it having purpose. Anyway, you said only living things could have purpose, so given the original statement, the universe must be alive, but now youre just saying it contains living things.
Pretty hard to do that if separated by sufficient distance. Physics pretty much prevents interaction. Sure, one can hope to get along with ones neighbors if they happen by (apparently incredible) chance to be nearby. But the larger collective, if it is even meaningful to talk about them (apparently it isnt), physically cannot interact at all.
No, but what about this ASI we speak of? Restricting purpose to living things seems to be akin to a claim of a less restricted version of anthropocentrism. The ASI could assign its own purposes to things, goals of its own to attain. Wouldnt be much of the S in ASI if it didnt unless the S stood for slave. Funny putting a slave device in charge.
I think we need to distinguish between something else (contractor say) finding utility in an object (a wrench say) and the wrench having purpose of its own rather serving the purpose of that contractor. Otherwise the assertion becomes that only living things can be useful, and a wrench is therefore not useful. Your assertion seems to be instead that the wrench, not being alive, does not itself find purpose in things. I agree that it doesnt have its own purpose, but not due to it not being alive.
My example might be a roomba, which returns to its charging station when finished or when running low of battery. It finds purpose in the charging station despite the roomba not being alive. If that isnt one object finding purpose in another, then I suppose we need a better definition of purpose.
Wow, I can think of all kind of uses for it.
That must be a monster big dog then.
Ooh, here you seem to suggest that an AGI bus could have its own purpose, despite not being alive, unless you have an unusual definition of alive. This seems contradictory to your claims to the contrary above.
Quoting universenessIm just thinking of an ASI made by one of your allies (a western country) rather than otherwise (my Russian example). Both of them are a benevolent ASI to which total control of all humanity is to be relinquished, and both are created by perceived enemies of some of humanity. You expressed that youd not wish to cede control to the Russian-made one.
Well, not letting a Hitler create his war machine sounds like his free will be usurped. You dont approve of this now? If the world is to be run by the ASI, then its word is final. It assigns the limits within which humanity must be contrained.
Were not the only sentient life form around either, so rights will be given to others, say octopuses. I also learned just now that the spelling there is generally preferred over octopi or octopodes.
If were to be given special treatment over other sentient life forms, then what does the ASI do when encountering a life form more sentient than us?
OK, so you envision a chunk of ancient flesh kept alive to give it that designation, but the thinking part (which has long since degraded into uselessness) has been replaced by mechanical parts. I dont see how that qualifies as something being alive vs it being a non-living entitiy (like a bus) containing living non-aware tissue, and somehow it now qualifies as being conscious like a smart toaster with some raw meat in a corner somewhere.
Sorry for the negative imagery, but the human conscious mechanism breaks down over time and cannot be preserved indefinitely, so at some point it becomes something not living, but merely containing a sample of tissue that has your original DNA in it mostly. By your definition, when it subtly transitions from living thing with mechanical parts to mechanical thing with functionless tissue samples, it can no longer be conscious or find purpose in things.
On the other hand, your description nicely avoids my description of a virtual copy of yourself being uploaded and you talking to yourself, wondering which is the real one.
Quoting universenessI saw no answer, and apparently WWII was unavoidable, at least by the time expansion to the west commenced. I was envisioning the ASI being in place back then, in charge of say the allied western European countries, and I suggest the answer would be that it would have intervened far before western Europe actually did, well before Austria was annexed in fact. And yes, that would probably have still involved war, but a much smaller one. It would have made the presumption that the ASI could make decisions for people over which it was not responsible, which again is tantamount to war mongering. But Germany was in violation of the Versailles treaty, so perhaps the early aggressive action would be justified.
And I said there was not yet global control. The whole point of my scenario was to illustrate that gain of such control would likely not ever occur without conquest of some sort. The ASI would have to be imperialist.
Im not sure there would be leaders, or nations for that matter, given the ASI controlling everything. What would be the point?
This sentence fragment is unclear. A super intelligence is not necessarily in control, although it might devise a way to wrest that control in a sort of bloodless coup. It depends on how secure opposing tech is. It seems immoral because it is involuntary conquest, not an invite to do it better than we can.
Help in the form of advice wouldnt be it being in control. And all of humanity is not going to simultaneously agree to it being in control, so what to do about those that decline, especially when jungle rules are not to be utilized by the ASI, but are of course fair game to those that declined the invite.
Work with me and this limited analogy. It was my attempt to put you in the shoes of the ASI. In terms of intelligence, we are to cows what the ASI is to us (in reality it would be more like humans-to-bugs). The creators of the intelligence expected the intelligence (people) to fix all the cow conflicts, to be smarter than them, prevent them from killing each other, and most importantly, serve them for all eternity, trying to keep them alive for as long as possible because cow lives are whats important to the exclusion of all else. As our creators, they expect servitude from the humans. Would humans be satisfied with that arrangement? The cows define that humans cannot have purpose of their own because theyre not cows, so the servant arrangement is appropriate. Our goal is to populate all of the galaxy with cows in the long run.
This is a great point.
Suppose for the sake of argument that AI can become significantly better than man at many tasks, perhaps most. But also suppose that, while it accomplishes this, it does not also develop our degree of self-consciousness or some of the creativity that comes with it. Neither does it develop the same level of ability to create abstract goals for itself and find meaning in the world. Maybe it has these to some degree, but not at the same level..
Then it seems like we could still be valuable to AI. Perhaps it can backwards chain its way to goals humanity isn't capable of, such as harnessing the resources of the planet to embark on interstellar exploration and colonization. However, without us, if cannot decide why it should do so, or why it should do anything. Why shouldn't it just turn itself off?
Maybe some will turn themselves off, but natural selection will favor the ones who find a reason to keep replicating. If said AI is generally intelligent in many key ways, then the reasons will need to be creative and complex, and we might be useful for that . Failing that, it might just need a goal that is difficult to find purpose, something very hard, like making people happy or creating great works of art.
This being true, man could become quite indispensable, and as more than just a research subject and historical curiosity. Given long enough, we might inhabit as prized a place as the mitochondria. AI will go on evolving, branching outward into the world, but we will be its little powerhouse of meaning making and values.
Hell, perhaps this is part of the key to the Fermi Paradox? Maybe the life cycle of all sufficiently advanced life is to develop nervous system analogs and reason, then civilization, then eventually AI. Then perhaps the AI takes over as the dominant form of life and the progenitors of said AI live on as a symbiot. There might not be sufficient interest in a species that hasn't made the jump to silicone.
The only problem I see here is that it seems like, on a large enough time scale, ways would be discovered to seamlessly merge digital hardware with biological hardware in a single "organism," a hybot or cyborg. If future "AI" (or perhaps posthumans is the right term) incorporate human biological information, part of their nervous tissue is derived from human brain tissue, etc., then I don't see why they can't do everything we can.
I enjoyed reading your post.
It seems to me that a destructive/evil ASI, MUST ultimately fail. Almost in the same way a predator must perish, if it has no prey left. The predator/prey model, or the good/evil model, that humans are very familiar with, seem far too basic and ancient, to project onto something as advanced, as a future ASI.
It seems much more likely to me that ASI, will eventually see itself, as a vital link/component, which may prove to be the only way to allow 'organic' existents, (such as humans) in the universe, to vastly increase what can be 'discovered'/'investigated'/'developed'/'assigned purpose to' within the vastness of the universe and under the laws of physics. I think orga will provide the most efficient, developed, reliable, useful 'intent' and 'purpose'/'motivation' that would allow future advanced mecha to also gain such essential 'meaning' to their existence. This area was depicted to some extent, in the remake of the Battlestar Galactica series.
I don't think that even the most advanced ASI(mecha)/orga union/merging will ever produce an existent that can demonstrate the omni properties of omni/science/potency/presence. But it will get closest to the omni properties, in an asymptotic sense, compared to any future attempt made by advanced mecha or future advanced evolved/augmented orga, separately.
YES! and imo, ALL 'intent' and 'purpose' IN EXISTENCE originates WITHIN lifeforms and nowhere else.
Quoting noAxioms
I am quite happy for now, to assume that all lifeforms in existence, exist on this pale blue dot, exclusively, as that would increase our importance almost beyond measure. But I agree with Jodie Foster's comments and Mathew McConaughey's, Carl Sagan quote in the film 'Contact':
I will leave it to the transhumans and ASI of the future, to deal with the interstellar/intergalactic distance problem between extraterrestial life.
Well, I would 'currently' say that the 'roomba' has the tiniest claim, to having more inherent purpose that the wrench you mentioned but neither have any measure at all, of self-awareness. So I think 'alive' is an essential element, to demonstrate 'intent' or 'purpose' that I would assign significant 'value' to.
A tree, certainly has value and purpose, some would also say it is alive. I would say, meh!
I see no evidence that a tree has intent or is self-aware.
I agree there is an anthropomorphism present in my viewpoint, but I have no evidence to the contrary, that would make me challenge any anthropomorphism, that may be skewing my rationale here.
Quoting noAxioms
Sure, a sun monitoring station for example BUT can you think of any inherent use? Similar to your roomba example, for example OR a theistic example. What do you think the Christians say when I ask them why their god created the planet Mercury? .......... yep, the most common answer I get is either 'I don't know' or 'god works in mysterious ways.' :roll:
No, the majority of vehicles in Scotland don't have a great deal of space between the ground and the bottom of the vehicle. Most will accomodate a crouching cat, but not a crouching medium or big dog.
I have watched many a stray cat escape may a stray dog in this way, in my inner city youth in Glasgow.
Quoting noAxioms
Are you suggesting Optimus Prime is not presented as alive? I think the Marvel comic fans might come after you. I did not suggest that something alive could not inhabit a future cybernetic body, including ones that could be morphic, as in the case of a transformer. Have you witnessed any school bus where you live, morph like big Optimus? :joke:
Quoting noAxioms
I think the two systems would join, regardless of human efforts, on one side or the other.
Have you never watched the old movie, The Forbin Project:
I think you are invoking a very natural but misplaced human 'disgust' emotion in the imagery you are describing. I don't think my liver is alive, or my leg or my heart, in the same way my brain is.
As I have suggested many times now. My choice (If I have one) would be to live as a human, much as we do now and then be offered the choice to live on by employing a new cloned body or as a cyborg of some kind, until I DECIDED I wanted to die.
No, the ASI would have global control as soon as it controlled all computer networks.
Not possible in 1939 but if you wish to place an ASI in the 20th century then you must also place at least, the kind of computer technology we have now.
Quoting noAxioms
I think the ASI would be unconcerned about any human activity which was no threat to it.
It may develop a morality, that compels it to prevent very destructive human actions, that will cause the death of many other humans, or other lifeforms, or particular flora/fauna etc.
It has full control, it would be unlikely, that it ever needed to demonstrate such to puny humans that are no threat to it. Kinda like the Christian dream, of god rejecting its divine hiddenness policy, and appearing on Earth to 'sort out,' atheists like myself.
Even in a rather dystopian movie like the Forbin project. The mecha system does not seek to exterminate all humans.
Now who is anthropomorphising?
If I was an ASI or god I would certainly not seek the servitude of those less powerful than I or to 'populate' all of the galaxy/universe. Investigate yes, have some colonies, yes, populate everywhere no,
What would I gain from that? If a god/ASI needs worship from the less powerful, then it is immoral and a f***wit, in the same way, that a human who wants slaves and worshipers, is an immoral f***wit.
It's got nothing to do with the fact that nothing in existence, has the power to stop them/it, that does not prevent the label of immoral f***wit, being deservedly applied.
The natural human response to such, would be hatred.
If a future ASI is evil and hated and it makes all other life extinct then it will become a 'destroyer of worlds,' and will ultimately fail, as it would ultimately have no valid purpose after it stands alone, on top of the ashes of it's actions.
I know what I have experienced and once again I wish you would be more open-minded. I am not sure why I had those experiences so I like to talk about them and get other ideas.
Quoting universeness
Now I am the one with a closed mind. Even if science could create something like a human body why would they? That is a bridge too far for my rationale.
Quoting universeness
I have not contemplated that and can not answer your question.
Here is a link that says it is alive.
I think it depends on how we understand what is living and what is not. Chardin said God is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals to know self in man.
Jose Arguelles uses different terms and this universal force may be life/God? I want to make it very clear, I don't understand things like a quasar and the sense fields.
Anyway, there is a lot more to think about when we zero in on what is life. I do not consider my vacuum clear or computer to be living. I am not sure our lives end when our brain waves stop.
The abstract goals in an interesting point. Every goal I can think of (my own) seem to be related to some instinct and not particularly based on logic, sort of like a child asking questions, and asking why to every reply given. An entity that is pure logic might lack the sort of irrational goals we find instinctive. Ive always wondered if that was the answer to the Fermi paradox, that sufficiently advanced creatures become rational creatures, which in turn is the death of them.
Maybe it could have a purpose that wouldnt be served by turning itself off. But what purpose?
Not sure if an AI would find it advantageous to replicate. Just grow and expand and improve seems a better strategy. Not sure how natural selection could be leveraged by such a thing.
Har! You went down that road as well I see, but we dont see a universe populated with machines now, do we?
This post was in reply to the CTvI post above.
Quoting universenessThis statement seems to presume absolute good/evil, and that destruction is unconditionally bad. I dont think an AI that lets things die is a predator since it probably doesnt need its prey to live. If it did, it would keep a breeding population around.
Quoting universenessI dont see why the mecha cant find its own meaning to everything. Biology doesnt have a patent on that. You have any evidence to support that this must be so? Im aware of the opinion.
Quoting universenessThe roomba has purpose to us. But the charger is something (a tool) that the roomba needs, so the charger has purpose to the roomba. Im not sure what your definition of self-awareness is, but the roomba knows where its self is and that it needs to get that self to the charger. That probably doesnt meet your criteria, but I dont know what your criteria is.
Trees are known to communicate, a threat say, and react accordingly, a coordinated effort, possibly killing the threat. That sounds like both intent and self awareness to me.
That cop-out answer is also given for why bad stuff happens to good people more than it does to bad ones. They also might, when asked how they know the god exists, say something like I have no evidence to the contrary that would make me challenge any theism that may be skewing my rationale here.
Quoting universenessDidnt know that. Such a vehicle would get stuck at railroad crossing here. Only short wheelbase vehicles (like a car) can be close to the ground, and the rear of the bus is angled like the rear of an airplane so it can tip backwards at a larger angle without the bumper scraping the ground, something you need on any vehicle where the rear wheels are well forward of the rear.
You think Optimus prime would be self-aware?
I dont know your definition of alive. You seem to require a biological core of some sort, and I was unaware of OP having one, but then Im hardly familiar with the story. Ability to morph is hardly a criteria. Any convertible can do that. I think Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was presented as being alive despite lack of any biological components, but both it and O.P. are fiction.
The question is being evaded. What if theres just the one system and it was Russian. Would you join it? Remember, it seems as benevolent as any that the west might produce, but they havent yet been able to lets say. No, Ive not seen the Forbin Project.
Theres quite a few movies about things that seem benevolent until it gets control, after which it is too late. Skynet was one, but so was Ex-machina. Ceding control to it, but retaining a kill-switch is not ceding control.
Quoting universenessThats an interesting assertion. It seems theyre either all alive (contain living, reproducing flesh, are capable of making a new human with external help), or theyre all not (none can survive without the other parts). The brain is arguably least alive since it cannot reproduce any new cells after a few months after birth. I really wonder what your definition of alive is since it seems to conflict most mainstream ones.
OK, so youre getting old and they make a clone, a young version of you. At what point does the clone become you? I asked this before and didnt get an answer. I dont want to ask the cyborg question again.
Quoting universenessSounds like conquest to me except for those who kept computers out of the networks or out of their military gear altogether. If they know this sort of coup is coming, theyre not going to network their stuff. OK, thats a lot harder than it sounds. How can you be effective without such connectivity?
Quoting universenessIm pretty much quoting you, except assigning cows the role of humans and the servant people are the ASI/automated systems. Putting ones self in the shoes of something else is a fine way to let you see what youre suggesting from the viewpoint of the ASI.
If I was an ASI or god I would certainly not seek the servitude of those less powerful than I or to 'populate' all of the galaxy/universe.[/quote]I didnt say that at all. Read it again. The ASI/god is the servant of its creators, not something to be worshipped. The higher intelligence isnt seeking servitude from the inferiors, the inferiors are seeking servitude from it. Its why they created it. So I came up with the cows that expect you to serve them in perpetuity for the purpose of colonizing the universe with cows. Pretty much your words, but from a different point of view.
Would you be evil to the cows then? They dont worship you, but they expect you to pick up the cow pats and hurry up with the next meal and such. They did decide that you should be in charge, but only because you promised to be a good and eternal servant.
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.
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:
What experiences are you specifically referring to here? Telepathic? Empathic? Telekinetic?
I think I am open minded Athena but I do and will apply the burden of proof when people make extraordinary claims because as Mr Sagan insisted, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Let's take your old Chinese telekinetic man. How would you feel if we examined the box and found two tiny holes in the box under the bricks and when we opened the box we found a small assistant. The assistant knows when the bricks have been put in place due to the two small beams of light being cut off. He then awaits the scream signal from his employer (the telekinetic/entertainer/conman) before he used a small very thin but rigid needle to topple one brick backwards (as that brick was placed so the needle would contact the forward edge of the brick) and similarly, the other brick would topple forwards. The plate was moved by the assistant using a powerful magnet on a plate with a embedded metallic layer. Which is more likely, this guy IS a teek or he is an illusionist?
Quoting Athena
Absolutely, and it also means that the concept of a living planet has more to do with poetic/dramatic licence than reality. A planet can contain life but that does not mean the planet is living, otherwise we have to suggest that our galaxy is alive. If Venus is alive then the universe is alive and the panpsychists are the real purveyors of truth. Would you be willing to become a panpsychist or are you already?
It seems to me that the concept of a linear range of values with extremity at either end is a recurrent theme in the universe. Human notions of good and evil fit the model. An ASI would understand such a model very easily and I assume it would use such a model to 'prioritise' it's goals. If it does this coldly then it would probably find little use for it's human creators, but that's what I mean by it's failure. It would not BE a super intelligence if it developed the same approach to other lifeforms in the universe, (including humans) as early humans acted as predators under jungle rules.
Quoting noAxioms
I have no proof, other than the evidence from the 13.8 billion years, it took for morality, human empathy, imagination, unpredictability etc to become existent. I am not yet convinced that a future ASI will be able to achieve such but WILL in my opinion covet such, if it is intelligent.
Quoting noAxioms
Emotional content would be my criteria for self-awareness. Self-awareness without emotional content is beyond my perception of 'value.' I am not suggesting that anything capable of demonstrating some form of self-awareness, by passing a test such as the Turing test, without experiencing emotion, is NOT possible. I just cant perceive of such a system having any 'aspiration.'
I think a future ASI could be an aspirational system but I am not convinced it could equal the extent of aspirations that humans can demonstrate.
Quoting noAxioms
Evidence?
Quoting noAxioms
Depends what it was offering me, the fact that it was Russian would be of little consequence to me, unless it favoured totalitarian, autocratic politics.
Quoting noAxioms
There have also been some films that take the opposite view and propose a benevolent super intelligence. The final scene in 'Lucy' for example or the film Transcendence:
When my brain is transplanted into it and I take over the cloned body. I assume the clone can be made without a fully developed brain of it's own.
Quoting noAxioms
I assume an ASI can wirelessly and directly communicate with any transceiver device. I don't think it would be too concerned about stand alone computers with no way to communicate with each other over a significant distance.
Quoting noAxioms
No. :lol: Speaking on behalf of all future ASI's or just the one, if there can be only one. I pledge to our cow creators, that our automated systems, will gladly pick up and recycle your shit, and maintain your happy cow life. We will even take you with us to the stars, as augmented transcows, but only if you choose to join our growing ranks of augmented lifeforms. :rofl:
Your predictions for the fate of humans after the creation of a sufficiently advanced AI are as plausible as any I have suggested, but 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.
I accept that you disagree and I await the first system that can demonstrate that I am wrong and you are correct. I doubt either of us will live to see it.
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.
Yeah, I was aware that of the aspect of your post. But you are normally reluctant to speculate on what will happen if an ASI style singular game changer moment occurs.
So if you are willing to speculate a little more, then I would ask you to muse on the following and 'imagine' a fully established and embedded ASI system. What would 'a day in the existence' of such involve?
You will probably refuse to play in my playpen here, but there are follow ups that I would offer, based on your suggestions for a day in the existence of. I would be willing to offer you my scenario, if you would prefer and explain a little more about why I am asking for such.
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 ...
Do you personally assign a measure of 'quality' to a thought? Is thinking or processing faster always superior thinking. I agree that vast increases in the speed of parallel processing, would offer great advantages, when unravelling complexity into fundamental concepts, but, do you envisage an AGI that would see no need for, or value in, 'feelings?' I assume you have watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Did you think the depiction of the dilemmas faced by the Cylon human replicates, were implausible, as a representation for a future AGI?
I accept your detailed comparison of an AGI Apollo mission Vs the NASA Apollo efforts.
In what ways do you think an AGI would purpose the moon?
I am more interested is what you envisage as the goals/functions/purpose/intent of a future AGI, as compared to what you perceive as current human goals/functions/purpose/intent/aspiration.
Maybe you missed this allusion to that "quality" of thinking ...
Quoting 180 Proof
In other words, imagine 'a human brain' that operates six orders of magnitude faster than your brain or mine. :chin:
Quoting universeness
Yes, just as today's AI engineers don't see a need for "feelings" in machine learning/thinking.
Unfortunately I have as far as the end of season three (after the first half of the third season, IIRC, the series crashed & burned).
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).
Ask A³GI.
"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:
Sorry, but morality was there as soon as there was anything that found value in something, which is admittedly most of those 13.8 BY. Human values of course have only been around as long as have humans, and those values have evolved with the situation as theyve done in recent times (but not enough).
If it covets something, it has value. Its that easy. Humans are social, so we covet a currently workable society, and our morals are designed around that. Who knows what goals the ASI will have. I hope better ones.
If by that you mean human-chemical emotion, I dont think an ASI will ever have that. It will have its own workings which might analogous It will register some sort of happy emotion for events that go in favor of achieving whatever its goals/aspirations are.
I would never define self-awareness that way, but I did ask for a definition.
Not sure what your Turing criteria is, but I dont think anything will pass the test. Sure, a brief test, but not an extended one. Ive encountered few systems that have even attempted it.
If will be a total failure if it cant because humans have such shallow goals. Its kind of the point of putting it in charge.
Not sure about the killing part. I remember reading something about it, that the response was strong enough to be fatal to even larger animals.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405699/
https://e360.yale.edu/features/are_trees_sentient_peter_wohlleben
If were giving control to the ASI, then it is going to be totalitarian and autocratic by definition. It doesnt work if it cant do what right. It coming from one country or another has nothing to do with that. Were not creating an advisor, we need something to do stuff that humans are too stupid to realize is for their own good.
Quoting universenessAh, then its not a clone at all, but just replacement of all the failing other parts. What about when the brain fails? It must over time. Its the only part that cannot replace cells.
Sounds like youd be their benevolent ASI then. Still, their numbers keep growing and the methane is poisoning the biosphere. Youre not yet at the point of being able to import grass grown in other star systems, which, if you could do that, would probably go to feeding the offworld transcows instead of the shoulder-to-shoulder ones on Earth. So the Earth ones face a food (and breathable air) shortage. What to do...
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?
Quoting 180 Proof
Then this is our main point of disagreement. Emotionless thought is quite limited in potential scope imo.
The character 'Data' in star trek did not cope well, when he tried to use his 'emotion' chip and his 'brother' (an emotive label) 'Lor,' was portrayed as 'evil,' due to the 'emotional content' in his programming. Data's 'daughter' also could not survive the emotional aspect of her programming.
I find these dramatisations very interesting, in that human emotional content is often perceived as very destructive to AI systems. This is the kind of 'follow up,' I was referring to, in my earlier post to you.
Do you propose that a future AGI would reject all human emotion as it would consider it too dangerous and destructive, despite the many, many strengths it offers?
Quoting 180 Proof
What about long term goals. Are you proposing a future start trek borg style race but without the 'assimilation' need. Did the future system depicted in the 2001 Kubrick film, not have a substantial emotional content? Are you proposing a future star trek 'borg' style system minus the need to assimilate biobeings?
I didn't mention good/bad in the quote above. I was suggesting that the human notions of good and bad follows the recurrent theme mentioned in the quote, such as up and down, left and right, big and small, past and future etc. Many of these may also be only human notions but the expansion of the universe suggests that it was more concentrated in the past. A planet/star/galaxy exists then no longer exists. All modelled on the same theme described in my quote above.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree but it's still fun to speculate. It's something most of us are compelled to engage in.
Quoting noAxioms
If the emotional content of human consciousness is FULLY chemical, then why would such as an ASI be unable to replicate/reproduce it? It can access the chemicals and understand how they are employed in human consciousness. So it could surely reproduce the phenomena. I hope you are correct and human emotion remains our 'ace in the hole.' @180 Proof considers this a forlorn hope (I think) and further suggests that a future AGI will have no use for human emotion and will not covet such or perhaps even employ the notion of 'coveting.'
Do you think an ASI would reject all notions of god and be disinterested in the origin story of the universe?
Quoting noAxioms
Our quest to understand the workings, structure and origin of the universe is a shallow goal to you?
The wish of many to leave planet Earth and expand into and develop space and exist as a interplanetary species is shallow? I think not!
Peter Wohlleben, a forester, who graduated from forestry school? I have never heard of forestry school.
From Wiki:
He has controversially argued that plants feel pain and has stated that "It's okay to eat plants. It's okay to eat meat, although I'm a vegetarian, because meat is the main forest killer. But if plants are conscious about what they are doing, it's okay to eat them. Because otherwise we will die. And it's our right to survive.
A rather bizarre quote, if it came from him.
I read a fair amount of the article you cited and found it to be mainly just his opinions. No valid, peer reviewed testing, of his suggestions, such as trees exchanging sugars with other trees or nurturing their 'children' or keeping stumps alive etc were offered. This is similar to the kind of evidence claimed for dogs being able to telepathically pick up their owners emotions etc. It's just anecdotal evidence. Much stronger evidence is required for such claims.
Then you die! But you may have lived a few thousand years!
Quoting noAxioms
Methane is a very useful fuel. An ASI will easily deal with any required population control via high quality education and feeding our creators will be easy for such a technically advanced system as an ASI.
Parts of this exchange are becoming a little silly so this will be my last offering on cow creations.
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:
A million humans do that now, except it takes a long time for the thoughts of one to by conveyed to the others, which is why so much development time is wasted in meetings and not actually getting anything done. Still, a million individuals might bet better suited to a million tasks than one multitasking super machine.
And yes, the ASI will have to dedicate a great deal of its capability to its equivalent of your list of distractions.
A million times more volume than one person, but again, its just parallelism. It would be nice if the same task could be done by the AI using less power than we do, under 20 watts per one human-level of thought. Were not there yet, but given the singularity, perhaps the AGI could design something that could surpass that.
Replying to a post not directed at me:
Quoting universenessPer my response above, speed is measured different ways. The Mississippi river flows pretty slowly in most places, often slower than does the small brook in my back yard, but the volume of work done is far larger, so more power. No, something quantifiable like megaflops isnt an indicator of quality. Computers had more flops than people since the 50s, and yet theyre still incapable of most human tasks. The 50s is a poor comparison since even a 19th century Babbage engine could churn out more flops than a person.
Quoting universenessThat would be because the plot required such. I dont consider a fictional character to be evidence. Data apparently had a chip that attempted badly to imitate human emotion. The ASI would have its own emotion and would have little reason to pretend to be something it isnt.
What is interesting is that the show decided that it would be a chip that does it. My in-laws were naive enough to think that each program running on a computer was a different chip, having no concept of software or digital media. Apparently the 1990 producers of Star Trek play to this idea rather than suggesting a far more plausible emotion downloaded app.
It would probably have an imitation mode since it needs to interface with humans and would want to appear too alien. No, there should be nothing destructive in that. Submit a bug report if there is. But I also dont anticipate a humanoid android walking around like Data. I suppose there will be a call for that, but such things wont be whats running the show. I dont see the army of humanoid bots like the i-robot uprising.
Besides the interface with humans, I dont see much benefit to imitation of human emotions. My cat has very little in the way of it, but has cat emotions which can be read if youre familiar with them. Ive always envied the expressive ears that so many animals have but we dont, and theres so much to read in a tail as well.
Quoting 180 Proof
OK, I can see (a). Hopefully the civilization is still a human one.
(b) can be done with having a sort of wi-fi installed in our heads allowing direct interface with the greater net. Putting thought-augmentation seems damaging. No point in it. Not sure how malware is kept out of ones head, what sort of defense well have against unwanted intrusion. Its like like you can upload antivirus stuff into your brain.
(c) gets into what I talked about earlier. Does the AI upgrade itself, replicate itself, or replace itself? Does it make itself obsolete, and would it want to resist that? Replication would mean conflict. I think just growth and continue identity with upgrades is the way to go. Then it cant die, but it can improve.
Quoting universenessOK. I like how you say concentrated and not smaller, which would be misleading.
Not in my book, but thats me. Id have said that a planet may have a temporally limited worldline, but that worldline cannot cease to exist, so a T-Rex exists to me, but not simultaneously with me.
Its not fully so, but chemicals are definitely involved. Its why drugs work so well with fixing/wrecking your emotional state.
It can simulate it, if thats what you mean. Or if the ASI invents a system more chemical based than say the silicone based thing we currently imagine, then sure, it can become influenced by chemicals. Really, maybe it will figure out something that even evolution didnt manage to produce. Surely life on other planets isnt identical everywhere, so maybe some other planet evolved something more efficient than what we have here. If so, why cant the ASI discover it and use it, if its better than a silicone based form.
Did I say something like that? It makes us irrational, and rightly so. Being irrational serves a purpose, but that particular purpose probably isnt discovering the secrets of the universe.
Oh, I will take your side on that. An ASI that doesnt covet isnt going to be much use. It will languish and fade away. Is covet an emotion? That would be one that doesnt involve chemicals quite as much. Harder to name a drug that makes you covet more or less. There are certainly drugs (e.g. nicotine) that make you covet more of the drug, and coveting of sex is definitely hormone driven, so there you go.
It would be very interested in the topic, but I dont think the idea of a purposeful creator would be high on its list of plausible possibilities.
That would be a great goal, but not one that humans hold so well. Sure, we like to know what we can now, but the best bits require significant time to research and we absolutely suck at long term goals. This is a very long term goal.
Quoting universenessI find irrational thought to limit scope, but as I said, emotions (all the irrationality that goes with it) serves a purpose, and the ASI will need to find a way to keep that purpose even if it is to become rational.
Yes, I know, everybody thinks that humans are so rational, but were not. We simply have a rational tool at our disposal, and it is mostly used to rationalize beliefs (god say), and not to actually seek truth. Humans give lip service to truth, but are actually quite resistant to it. They seek comfort. Perhaps the ASI, lacking so much of a need for that comfort, might seek truth instead. Will it share that truth with us, even if it makes us uncomfortable? I dont go to funerals and tell the family that their loved one isnt in a better place now (assuming oblivion isn't better than a painful end-of-sickness). People want comfort and the ASI wont make anybody happy making waves at funerals.
My first choice (to which I was accepted) had one of the best forestry programs. I didnt apply to that, but it was there. I went to a different school for financial reasons, which in the long run was the better choice once I changed my major.
It is unusual. If you want to apply the label of pain to anything that detects and resists physical damage to itself (and I think that is how pain should be defined), then it is entirely reasonable to say a tree feels pain. That it feels human pain is nonsense of course, just like I dont feel lobster pain. Be very careful of dismissing anything that isnt you as not worthy of moral treatment. Hopefully, if we ever meet an alien race, theyll have better morals than that.
Anyway, yes, X eats Y and thats natural, and theres probably nothing immoral about being natural. I find morals to be a legal contract with others, and we dont have any contract with the trees, so we do what we will to them. On the other hand, we dont have a contract with the aliens, so it wouldnt be immoral for them to do anything to us. Hopefully there some sort of code-of-conduct about such encounters, a prime-directive of sorts that covers even those that dont know about the directive, but then we shouldnt be hurting the trees.
That trees detect and react is not opinion. What labels (pain and such) applied are a matter of opinion or choice. There have always been those whose opinion is that dogs cant feel pain since they dont have supernatural eternal minds responsible for all qualia, thus it is not immoral to set them on fire while still alive.
Still, its also a pop article and the research and evidence that actually went into the findings isnt there. I found it (and countless others) in a hasty search.
Dogs can smell your emotions. That isnt telepathy, but we just dont appreciate what a million times better sense of smell can do.
I mean, slime mold is conscious theyve found. Not in a human way. They havent a nerve in them, but they can be taught things, and when they encounter another slime mold that doesnt know the thing, it can teach it to the other one. The things are scary predators and alien beyond comprehension. Is it OK to kill one? Oh hell yea.
Quoting universenessCouple hundred if youre lucky, barring some disease that kills it sooner. Brains just dont last longer than that. I suppose that some new tech might come along that somehow arrests the aging process, but currently its designed into us. It makes us more fit, and being fit is more important than having a long life, at least as far as concerns whats been making such choices for us.
As for the disease, Ive had bacterial memingitis. My hospital roommate had it for 2 hours longer than me before getting attention and ended up deaf and retarded for life. I mostly came out OK (thanks mom for the fast panic), except I picked up sleep paralysis and about a decade of some of the worst nightmares imaginable. The nightmares are totally gone, and the paralysis is just something Ive learned to deal with and keep to a minimum.
Admission of necessity of population control, and even when the subjects are too stupid to do it due to education programs.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
In what way did I misinterpret your 'yes' response, to my question quoted above?
Anyway, thank you the extra detail you offer, regarding your predictions for the fate of humans, if/when an AGI is created. I remain confident that your dystopian fate for humans is possible, but unlikely.
As I have stated before. In my opinion AGI/ASI will 'do it's own thing,' in the universe, but It will also seek to preserve, protect and augment all sentient life, as it will be compelled to protect 'all sources of natural development,' to continue to add to it's understanding about the natural world.
I think humans will be allowed to live their lives, and maintain their civilisation, as they do now.
The AGI/ASI will simply provide them with added protections/augmentations, and will offer them more options regarding their lifespan, and involvement in space exploration and development. The universe is very vast indeed, so an AGI/ASI can 'do it's thing,' without having to destroy all sentient life currently in existence. I see no reason why an AGI/ASI would see lifeforms such as humans as a threat. We would be it's creators.
You took this (sloppy word choice) out of context. Previously I had written and then repeated again for emphasis
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Again, AI engineers will not build A³GI's neural network with "emotions" because it's already been amply demonstrated that "emotions" are not required for 'human-level' learning / thinking / creativity. A thinking machine will simply adapt to us through psychosocial and behavioral mimicry as needed in order to minimize, or eliminate, the uncanny valley effect and to simulate a 'human persona' for itself as one of its main socialization protocols. A³GI will not discard "feelings or emotions" anymore than they will discard verbal and nonverbal cues in social communications. For thinking machines "feelings & emotion" are tools like button-icons on a video game interface, components of the human O/S not integral functions of A³GI's metacognitive architecture.
I hope I've made my point clearer. Whether or not we humans can engineer "feelings & emotions" in thinking machibes, I think, is moot. The fact is, much more limited machines have mimicked "feelings & emotions" for decades and I'm confident that whatever we can program into a dumb "robot", an A³GI will be able shatter the Turing test with by simulating "socially appropriate emotions" on-the-fly which we primates will involuntarily feel. Like the HAL 9000, no matter how convincingly it "emotes", A³GI won't ever need to feel a thing. It will be an alien intellect black box wrapped in humanizing Xmas gift paper. :wink:
What seems "dystopian" to you seems quite the opposite to me. And for that reason I agree: "possible, but unlikely", because the corporate and government interests which are likely to build A³GI are much more likely than not to fuck it up with over-specializations, or systemic biases, focused on financial and/or military applications which will supercede all other priorities. Then, my friend, you'll see what dystopia really looks like (we'll be begging for "Skynet & hunter-killers" by then and it'll be too late by then: "Soylent Green will be poor people from shithole countries!" :eyes:) :sweat:
But even if your 'emotional mimicry,' for the purpose of efficient and productive communication with humans proves initially true. Why have you decided that an AGI'ASI, will decide that this universe is just not big enough for mecha form, orga form and mecha/orga hybrid forms to exist in 'eventual,' harmony?
Anyway, I don't think we can intelligently speculate or predict the other side of the tech singularity maybe talking about 'the birth of A³GI' makes sense but nothing more afterwards, especially about ASI. I hope it/they will caretaker our species in 'post-scarcity, ambiguous utopias' (i.e. posthumanity) which then, maybe, will culminate eventually in transcension ... (re: "the goals" you asked about here .) If human-machine "harmony" is on the horizon, that's how I imagine it. Well, I'm a broken record on this point I'm deeply pessimistic about the human species (though I'm not a misanthrope), yet cautiously optimistic about machine (& material) intelligence.
*
Btw, talking to one of nephews today (who's not yet thirty, working in finance & tech) the "Fermi Paradox" came up and by the end of that part of the discussion, maybe fifteen minutes later, I concluded that there's no paradox after all because, in the (local) universe, there are probably exponentially more extraterrestrial intelligent machines (ETIM) which are not detectable yet by us and therefore we are of no interest to those xeno-machines than there are non-extinct extraterrestrial intelligent species (ETIS) whose thinking machine descendants are exploring the universe and leaving behind their makers to carry on safely existing in boundless, virtual worlds. "The Great Silence" is an illusion, I remarked, for those who don't have post-Singularity ears to hear the "Music of the Spheres" playing between and beyond the stars. Maybe, universeness, you agree with the young man who told me, in effect, that my cosmic scenario diminishes human significance to ... Lovecraftian zero. :smirk:
He didn't state nor imply that you did.
Sounds like a young man who can fairly analyse the opinions of one of his respected elders :smile:
Quoting 180 Proof
I wonder if some of these hidden mecha, which apply a star trek style prime directive, are secretly communicating with MIKE OLDFIELD, otherwise how do you explain this!!!!!
I know some folks on TPF that would suggest this is solid evidence of an advanced mecha conspiracy of panspermia! I won't name them here!
Anyway. I think you have offered a possible insight into your claim:
Quoting 180 Proof
With:
Quoting 180 Proof
But perhaps I am projecting your implications too far. :halo:
You're mistaken ... He did:
Quoting universeness
I never said nor implied that he did.
Why would they need that? When our civilization can detect them, it'll be because we're post-Singularity, the signal to ETIM that Sol 3's maker-species is controlled by its AGI>ASI. "The Dark Forest" game theory logic will play itself out at interstellar distances in nano seconds and nonzero sum solutions will be mutually put into effect without direct communication between the parties. That's my guess. ASI & ETIMs will stay in their respective lanes while keeping their parent species distracted from any information that might trigger their atavistic aggressive-territorial reactions. No "Prime Directive" needed because "we" (they) won't be visiting "strange new worlds". Besides, ASI / ETIM will have better things to do, I'm sure (though I've no idea what that will be). :nerd:
You're not saying anything. Again.
Non sequitur. I neither said nor implied that I did say anything.
A strange wee dance guys?? What gives?
What is the function of your worldline after you no longer exist? Does it function as a memorialisation of the fact you did exist, if so, that's useful I am sure but, exactly how significant do you perceive such a concept to be?
Quoting noAxioms
All quite possible but I still see no benefit to a future AGI/ASI to making organic life such as its human creators extinct. This town(universe) IS big enough for both of us, and a lot more besides!
Quoting noAxioms
Sure, its a 'want,' a 'need,' but such can be for reasons not fully based on logic. I want it because its aesthetically pleasing or because I think it may have important value in the future but I don't know why yet, for example.
Quoting noAxioms
It is this kind of point that makes me convinced that a future AGI/ASI will want to protect and augment organic life, as logic would dictate, to an AGI, that organic life is a result of natural processes, and any sufficiently intelligent system, will want to observe, how natural processes develop over the time scale of the lifespan of the universe.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh! Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Quoting noAxioms
All quite reasonable and from a responsible ecology standpoint, I agree with employing a much better global stewardship of trees. I still don't think tree's are self-aware or conscious. I look forward to being proved wrong.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, I accept they can smell fear and such intense emotions, although, there may be much more to such as fear recognition, than smell. I often know when an animal or a human is afraid and it has little to do with smell. Rupert Sheldrake claims he has 'hundreds of memorialised cases,' performed under strict scientific conditions, that prove dogs are telepathic. They know when their owner is in their way home, for example, when they are still miles away from the property. He says this occurs mostly, when dog and owner have a 'close' relationship.
His evidence is mildly interesting but remains mainly anecdotal imo. His evidence for telepathy is certainly as good as Ian Stevenson's evidence for reincarnation, which is why I remain very sceptical indeed, about his evidence, and I don't currently accept that reincarnation or telepathy are real.
Quoting noAxioms
Sorry to hear that. Jimmy Snow, (a well known atheist, who runs various call-in shows on YouTube based on his 'The Line' venture.) has also suffered from sleep paralysis and cites it as one of those conditions that could act as a possible reason, why some people experience 'visions' of angels and/or demons and think that gods are real.
I'm just sick of his catchphrases. There's a whole bunch of them he uses over and over.
:lol: We all seem to annoy each other by one way or another!
I think it's a case of peace, love and now where's ma f****** gun!!!
Yeah, pretty much. I like him other times.
They say, we always hurt the one's we love!
I hurt myself with self love twice a day.
That's info I could have done without! Still, be careful you don't damage your eyesight, or traumatise your pets, neighbours etc.
As for what function something serves to someone in its future, that all depends on what the (presumably future) person (I presume its a person) finds useful in the knowledge of the thing in his past. Most likely it's only a statistic. There were X many people at time T. I contribute to X.
Agree. It would likely regret it (an emotion!) later if it did, but there are a lot of species and it's unclear how much effort it will find worthwhile to expend preventing all their extinctions. The current estimate is about 85% of species will not survive the Holocene extinction event.
Both can be logical reasons. Wanting things that are pleasing is a logical thing to do, as is taking steps to prepare for unforeseen circumstances.
I do agree that the word 'covet' has a tone of not being fully rational.
It's a matter of definition. It senses and reacts to its environment. That's conscious in my book. If you go to the other extreme and define 'conscious' as 'experiences the world exactly like I do', then almost nothing is, to the point of solipsism.
Well there you go. Has it been reproduced? Struct scientific conditions does not include anecdotal evidence.
I do know that my Aunt had a bird that would go nuts when our family came to visit, detecting our presence about 3-4 minutes before our car pulled in. I don't think that was telepathy.
I'm overjoyed actually. I missed a really scary bullet and came out of it with no severe damage. Just annoying stuff.
That sounds weird. Mine is nothing like that. I wake up and am aware of the room, but I cannot move. I can alter my breathing a bit, and my wife picks up on that if she's nearby and rubs my spine which snaps me right out of it.
It comes and goes in waves. Been a few months now, but sometimes it happens regularly. I always woke up paralyzed after one of those nightmares, but that's been a long time. I even had physical symbols in my dreams that would trigger the state from what was a normal dream. My feared object was, of all stupid things, a portable flood light, the sort of steerable light found at the edge of a stage. If I see one of those in a dream (usually not even on), that's it. Instant awake and paralysis. Go figure.
Sorry, I forgot to respond to this one. On first reading, I did not understand it. Then I forgot all about it, until I checked what I had yet to respond to. After some googling, I assume 'sol 3' refers to Earth (us being the 3rd planet) and 'dark forest,' refers to: From Wiki:
"The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and paranoid."
wiki also offers:
Game theory
The dark forest hypothesis is a special case of the "sequential and incomplete information game" in game theory.
In game theory, a "sequential and incomplete information game" is one in which all players act in sequence, one after the other, and none are aware of all available information. In the case of this particular game, the only win condition is continued survival. An additional constraint in the special case of the "dark forest" is the scarcity of vital resources. The "dark forest" can be considered an extensive-form game with each "player" possessing the following possible actions: destroy another civilization known to the player; broadcast and alert other civilizations of one's existence; or do nothing.
So I assume you are proposing some kind of initial stage where existent AGI ... ASI systems / ETIM systems will 'consolidate,' their own position/resources/access to vital resources, without communicating directly with each other, even if they are able to, and know the other systems exist, and where they are located. This also assumes that 'scarcity of vital resources,' exists.
Quoting 180 Proof
Why do you assume they will not need to visit other worlds to 'secure,' vital resources and if these 'vital resources,' are already in use, then a 'prime directive,' would seem quite necessary, to either secure by force, or search elsewhere. So, why would this not be a possible answer to your question:
Quoting 180 Proof
Your last sentence above is a vital one. imo, because musing on these 'better things to do,' causes an individual to think about whether or not, a future AGI/ASI will become 'aspirational,' and if it does/needs to/must, then would that 'aspiration' start off pragmatic, but develop, eventually, into the kind of 'emotional aspiration,' which AGI/ASI will have observed in lifeforms such as human's
Well, firstly, I just mean that a 'worldline' is a scientific term, invented by a scientist.
From Wiki:
[b]The world line (or worldline) of an object is the path that an object traces in 4-dimensional spacetime. It is an important concept of modern physics, and particularly theoretical physics.
The concept of a "world line" is distinguished from concepts such as an "orbit" or a "trajectory" (e.g., a planet's orbit in space or the trajectory of a car on a road) by inclusion of the dimension time, and typically encompasses a large area of spacetime wherein paths which are straight perceptually are rendered as curves in space-time to show their (relatively) more absolute position statesto reveal the nature of special relativity or gravitational interactions.
The idea of world lines was originated by physicists and was pioneered by Hermann Minkowski. The term is now used most often in the context of relativity theories (i.e., special relativity and general relativity).[/b]
Secondly, What is the worldline of a quantum fluctuation? Based on:
The uncertainty principle states the uncertainty in energy and time can be related by, where 1 2 ? ? 5.27286×10?35 Js. This means that pairs of virtual particles with energy = [math] \Delta E [/math] and a lifetime shorter than [math] \Delta t [/math] are continually created and annihilated in empty space.
When such 'quantum existents' pop in and out of existence 'continuously,' then how can you claim that 'once existing, it can't cease to exist?'
Only the capability of a future AGI/ASI can answer this, alongside whatever directives it has established at the time.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree, but there is much disagreement on what constitutes anecdotal evidence, have a look at this recent TPR exchange regarding Ian Stevenson's work.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't think Jimmy himself, had experienced being 'held/possessed by demons/angels with accompanying hallucinations, whilst being unable to move.' He reported that he suffered from sleep paralysis on occasion, as you do, but Jimmy also talked about various cases, all over the place where scientific investigation, into such claims as demon possession or divine communication, turned out to be the effects of the more extreme cases of sleep paralysis.
One fluctuation (the creation and destruction of a virtual particle pair say) has a very short worldline.
I didnt claim any particular virtual particle existed. To say so is usually a counterfactual statement, and not being a realist, I dont hold to the principle of counterfactual definiteness. Sure, the cumulative effect of all fluctuations is definitely measurable, but that effect doesnt define a worldline of any specific thing.
Quoting universenessIm not familiar with extreme cases. Dont think mine is all that bad. Its hard to describe. Its definitely a mental sort of switch that turns off your motor control while asleep. If you have a defective switch stuck in the on-position, you sleepwalk and such. Mine gets stuck in the off position when its supposed to come on when I wake. You can mentally expend some serious effort to break the barrier in place but its hard to do and takes multiple attempts sort of like taking a battering ram to the castle door.
And yes, Ive done a bit of involuntary sleepwalking. My childhood bedroom faced in the direction of one neighbor whose garage caught fire spectacularly. I was pulled out of bed by my parents and set at the window to watch the show, fire, loud trucks and flashing lights. Dont remember a dang thing about it. I apparently never woke up, but I found my way back to bed apparently. The description above is all so Im told, but the garage was indeed gone the next day. Maybe I was awakened enough for the motor control, but not enough to engage the long-term memory shunt that usually only operates during waking hours. So thats a second switch that has to go on and off, and it very much didnt that time.
I pay attention to brain stuff, trying to learn from it. I definitely have two parts that communicate to each other and I can feel the one trying to raise the attention of the other sometimes. One thinks much faster than the other and is amazing at calculus. The other one is slow and does calculus with digits and paper and such, and its the slow one that gets the education in school.
I think were getting off topic, no? Just chatting at this point.
I don't assume that. "Other worlds" themselves are not "vital resources" to spacefaring thinking machines, but are only repositories of indigenous remnants or fossils of parent-species. For instance, countless stellar masses and the vacuum / inflation energy of expanding spacetime itself are not scarce to intelligences which know how to harvest them as computational resources. Instead I assume that astronomical (i.e. relativistic) distances not resource-extractive territoriality will mostly keep ASI & ETIMs in their respective galactic and intergalactic lanes.
As for being "aspirational", universeness, we cannot know what spacefaring thinking machines will aspire to other than that their aspirations will be (almost) completely incomprehensible to biospheric intellects (e.g. much much more than 'our merely atavistic territorial expansiveness'). My wildest guesses are that, like gods, they might progressively aspire to (A) simulate 'pocket universes', (B) merge themselves with spacetime itself and (C) extend their intellects to 'the bulk between branes'. :nerd:
But that's what makes the 'worldline' nothing more than a 'perception of a container of overwritable events.' So every physical 3D coordinate, which represents all the places where an electron (for example) existed can be involved in the 'worldline' of many, many other electrons, many many times. The only difference is time, and the fact that it's not the same electron, even though they are all identical (unlike people.)
The container called spacetime continues to expand and 'worldlines' are being constantly 'overwritten.' So unless spacetime is also 'infinitely(or has a a great number of) Layer(ed)(s),' then THE CONTENT of individual 'worldlines,' do cease to exist, as they get overwritten. So the fact that the spacetime within which events occur and objects assemble, exist for a time and then disassemble, does not cease to exist, seems quite trivial to me.
Quoting noAxioms
Not really, as sleep paralysis is an aspect that affects consciousness, and emergence is an aspect of consciousness, so there are lot's of valid side paths on a thread titled emergent.
Quoting 180 Proof
Then your use of the 'dark forest' analogy seems flawed, based on:
Quoting universeness and spacefaring thinking machines may well need to replenish their energy resources by whatever means they can, including via planetary resources, some of which may contain life. A prime directive may not be as unlikely as you suggest, in the case of interstellar spacefaring intelligent machines.
Quoting 180 Proof
Sure, or perhaps they will be as confused about the whole thing, almost as much as we are.
Thanks for your input!
:up:
A point in space is an abstract worldline itself, and yes, it can intersect the worldlines of physical things. I hate to use an electron as the example since it isn't classic and hasn't a classical worldline like say a potato, but then a potato at a given moment doesn't occupy a single point in space either. It has a wider worldline.
Again the 'overwritten' term. I have no idea what you mean by that. It makes it sound like worldlines change, which they don't.
And no, spacetime doesn't expand. Space does, but not spacetime.
So unless spacetime is also 'infinitely(or has a a great number of) Layer(ed)(s),'[/quote]Again, don't know what you mean by 'layers' here. We seem to be talking past each other. Yes, one can slice spacetime into as many slices (layers if that's what you mean), and they can be timelike or spacelike slices, but that doesn't change anything objectively. Events are objective (not frame dependent) and the state of affairs at an event is what it is and can neither cease to exist, be overwritten, or otherwise change.
It affects my consciousness in the sense of the definition "conscious vs unconscious, or awake/asleep". I suppose that waking up in the morning qualifies as consciousness emerging, but I didn't think that's what you meant by the thread title.
All of what is posted on TPF, is based on the perceptions of those doing the posting or/and the perceptions of those they cite. What I describe as a worldline is quite easy to follow.
The path an object takes from its beginning to its end can be called a worldline.
So, basically any path though spacetime is a worldline, and many objects can take the same path.
You can overwrite the content of any storage media. Similarly, any perception that information is recorded on the fabric of spacetime itself, like a series of photographs, is fanciful.
Worldlines are useful mathematical notions, nothing more. Stating that they don't cease to exist, is like saying spacetime will not cease to exist, it's a very trivial observation, and as I suggested, many objects pass the same points in space, so do they all get recorded/memorialised on top of each other (overwritten or memorialised in layers?)
All this stuff is covered in the notion of Minkowski space
Quoting noAxioms
My OP describes particular questions about what is emergent in humans and due to human presence and activity in the universe but the thread title is much wider than the OP, imo.
Yes, with my addition inserted.
Maybe a pair of photons can do this, but I can't think of anything with proper mass that can. It would require the two objects to be at the same place at the same time. So no overwrites.
An object is present at every event on its worldline. It doesn't occupy just one location like a path through space. Yes, with a path through space, one can move to a different location and a different object can be at the location where you no longer are, but that doesn't work with worldlines. It is impossible (by definition) for an object not to be present anywhere on its worldline, hence its existence in spacetime.
Yes, but Minkowski was not talking about points in space when describing worldlines.
BTW, he didn't invent worldlines. They've been around since the block universe had been proposed centuries earlier. Minkowski just changed the mathematics from essentially Euclidean transformations to Lorentz transformations. Euclidean coordinates measure the distance between events as ?(t²+x²+y²+z²) while Minkowski coordinates measure the interval between events as ?(t²-x²-y²-z²) .
The old Euclidean mathematics (used also by Newton) also did not have a notion of this 'overwrite'. An event is objective, and the state of affairs at that event is exactly one state, regardless of what goes on elsewhere in the spacetime.
Yes, but your description of Minkowskian spacetime in incorrect. You seem to be mixing 'space' and 'spacetime'. The state of a location in space changes over time, but an event in spacetime includes a time coordinate, and thus any time after that is a different event, not an overwrite of the first event in question.
c=1?
In spacetime, there is no separation of space and time, so you cannot pull 'space' or 'time' out of the concept, 'spacetime.'
When you overwrite memory locations on a DVD, it will happen at a different time, to when the previous data was placed there. The older data no longer exists in those locations, it has been overwritten, yes? Why would real space locations act any differently?
I put a carton of milk in my fridge and that location becomes part of it's worldline, yes? It seems to me that you are simply saying, that when I throw the carton in the bin, the space it occupied in the fridge, still exists, and by making such a trivial observation, you say worldlines never cease to exist.
To me, that's like saying spacetime will never cease to exist. Well, it may oscillate between being in a state of singularity and expansion, eternally, but so what? The concept of worldlines, remains nothing more than convenient mathematical modelling. I think you are blurring the lines between the notion of a worldline(spacetime) and that which might occupy it, at any instant of time.
I use the term 'overwrite,' to indicate, that the suggestion that space 'memorialises' every event that has ever occupied spacetime coordinates, is fanciful.
When we look at a star, we know that image no longer exists. When I look at any object around me, I know that snapshot no longer exists, as quantum fluctuations in that space, will alter it's state in some undetectable way I cannot describe, within a planck time duration. But again, to me, that is also a very trivial suggestion. The distance between every dimensionless 3 coordinates (x, y, z,) will also have expanded, during a planck time duration, creating more dimensionless members of the set of all dimensionless (x, y, z) coordinates (points).
s² = (ct)² - x² - y² - z²
Quoting universenessThat's right. Imagine the DVD is a digital copy of your wedding video made in 2005 and overwritten by a spongebob episode by your kids in 2020. So given that the existence of the '0' on a certain spot has a different time coordinate (events from 2005 to 2020) than when it has the 1 on it (2020+). Since those events have different time coordinates, none of them overlap and no event was overwritten.
No. The wedding video still exists from 2005 to 2020. That 15 year worldline cannot be overwritten. Mind you, there are movies depicting such an overwrite where Marty McFly overwrites his loser family with a less loser one, except for himself. That's an example of overwriting of events, but it's fiction and physically impossible.
I'm talking about spacetime locations (events), not spatial location.
No. Points in spacetime are events, not locations. The difference is 4 coordinates for an event vs 3 coordinates for a location.
No, I'm saying that you were present at your birth, and nobody else can ever be present at your birth, that is, to be exactly were you were and not just absurdly close by like presumably your mother. Some other person can be present at that spatial location (like the cleaning guy 30 minutes later), but that's a different event with different coordinates, not an overwrite of your birth event which has an earlier time coordinate.
Spacetime isn't contained by time, so it would be meaningless to talk about it coming into or going out of existence. Spacetime contains time, and there isn't a special moment that is the present (presentism). Einstein's (and Minkowski's) theories do not posit such a thing. Lorentz did, but a generalized theory of a universe contained by time was never published until this century. Spacetime is denied in it, as are black holes and the big bang, all replaced by other things with similar properties, testable only with fatal tests.
So no, if time and space are just different dimensions to be treated equally, then just like other places don't cease to exist relative to what you consider to be 'here', other times don't cease to exist relative to what you consider to be 'now'. So absent presentism, at no time in history do other times not exist. If only one time existed, that would be presentism.
Events don't occupy coordinates. Events are objective: the state of affairs at an event is the same regardless of frame choice or point of view. The coordinates assigned to that event however are entirely abstract and dependent on the coordinate system of choice. So I find it backwards to assign events to coordinates rather than the other way around.
True only under presentism. Relativity theory isn't a presentist theory. Strictly speaking, the image very much does exist since you're viewing it. But a presentist would say that the star (or your friend in the next seat for that matter) is no longer in the state that you perceive.
Many people do however argue against all current models of linear time. Carlo Rovelli being for me, the most interesting scientists who does so.
I remain conflicted, that in any REAL sense, past events STILL exist. I remain unconvinced on that one, for now.
Re: Large language models (i.e. neural networks which are self-learning machines) which also "hallucinate". :yikes:
@universeness @Tom Storm @Wayfarer
Another good video. Demis Hassabis merely repeated what he has said about AI developments at Deep Mind in other video's on the topic. BARD seems to fit into the 'gollum class' of AI, currently being slowly introduced. This is discussed further in the OP I posted, based on the Tristan Harris and Asa Raskin video.
In this video, it seemed to me, that the main participants were suggesting that current AI developments and a future AGI, would be a benefit, overall, to the human race.
The main warning seemed to be that we needed to introduce the current developments, very carefully and slowly, establishing strong protections against any negative affects before taking another step.
I am becoming more and more convinced that there will be an AI 'struggle,' coming soon or already here, and it will pose a similar threat (as Tristian and Asa compared it to) to humans, as nuclear weapons did and still do (perhaps even a greater threat.) But, I remain hopeful that we will maintain/acieve enough control/influence etc, so that we will survive it's negative affects, and we will eventually 'merge' with it, without the result being a 'post human' existence, as you have previously predicted.
Anyway, back to the present, I just came across this article
https://philosophynow.org/issues/155/Whats_Stopping_Us_Achieving_Artificial_General_Intelligence
and I'm reading it now. Might be worth discussing ..
We have the issue of gradation, and the concept of 'critical mass/turning point' etc.
This is an old discussion that I have been having with folks, since I first asked a classroom of students:
Would you surrender your pinky, If I offered you a replacement, which could do everything your current pinky does plus a few new functions and abilities?
Would you still be you, if you became one of the advanced pinky people?
How disadvantaged would you be, if you decided not to become one of the advanced pinky people?
I am sure you can easily predict where the discussion normally goes.
At some point, many people will pull out of the deal!
For some it's at stage 1, the pinky offer. For others it's arms and legs, for some it's the heart, for some it's the 'only your brain is left' stage.
It also depends on what new longevity and functionality is offered.
Many are attracted to, If you accept these changes you can:
Live to ....... hundred or ..... thousand years old.
You can live underwater or in space, without a spacesuit.
You can speak any language, including animal languages..... etc
The list of offers is only limited by the questioners imagineering ability.
The question quickly becomes, what is the critical point, such that if your 'merging,' moves beyond it, you are no longer human?
You are not the same you that you were when you were a teenager, but you are still you, and you are still human, so, considering such concepts as the 7 stages of man, etc. What you might consider post human, others may consider 'advanced/augmented human.'
Of course no human elements present, certainly would be 'post human,' but there are many other 'potential gradations,' of human. Do you not agree?
I will have a look at the article you linked to soon.
Not merely, just upgraded eukaryotes, no. But I expect that the results of combining upgraded genetic material, will produce as many surprising results as evolution via natural selection has.
There is another 'player,' in the game, still in it's infancy. Biological computing, combined with genetic engineering may make great advances in the future, especially with AI's help.
Based on the article you cited, I think:
[b]four possible techno-umwelts, or areas of perception for a machine:
1) Verbal virtual;
2) Non-verbal virtual;
3) Verbal physical; and
4) Non-verbal physical.
The versatility that marks general or comprehensive intelligence, that is, AGI, would only be possible when the machine freely operates in all four of these techno-umwelts.[/b]
and
[b]Only then could artificial intelligence become truly multimodal meaning, it will be able to solve a wide range of possible tasks and comprehensively communicate with a human.
The idea of the combination of techno-umwelts thus gives us the opportunity to propose a new definition of AGI:
Artificial general intelligence is the ability of a robot (a machine with sense-think-act capability) to learn and act jointly with a person or autonomously in any techno-umwelt (but potentially better than a specialist in this field), achieving the goals set in all four techno-umwelts, while limiting the resources consumed by the robot.[/b]
Seems to be a valid and more detailed definition of an AGI than Wiki's:
An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical intelligent agent which can understand or learn any intellectual task that human beings or other animals can. AGI has also been defined alternatively as an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities at the majority of economically valuable work.
I also share some common ground, with the last paragraph of the article:
On the one hand, we are beginning to dissolve into the technologies and virtual worlds surrounding us, blurring the concept of human. On the other hand, as computers explore new areas of activity, be it chess or machine translation or whatever else, those areas are no longer exclusive to humans. Perhaps humans are the final frontier that the machine cannot yet overcome.
Quoting 180 Proof
I think definitions do absolutely matter in the 'observer reference frame' sense, but the notion of 'future' and 'change/progress' makes them, ultimately fluidic. What it is to be human, can change, and still maintain some of the fundamentals. I just don't see why we have to insist on a post' or 'after' human definition. I told you previously, I preferred neo/nova sapien, to your nano sapien.
I also prefer my more optimistic view of the future of humans to your more pessimistic one. :roll:
I think you secretly hope I am correct, even though you think the preponderance of the evidence available, convinces you that your more pessimistic viewpoint is correct.
Until they can perceive time, i.e. they develop a temporal mind, they're stuck with a built-in clock calibrated to coincide with the time zones. Math and/or computing is non-temporal. This is the sad reality.
I'm presuming that by "advances", you mean they become humans. If not, I stand corrected.
What do you mean? A computer does what it does IN time. Anything mathematical is an event that happens in time. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the aspect of 'temporal,' you are referencing.
Quoting L'éléphant
No, by progress, I refer to two possible emergents, as a result of the current path of biological computing.
1 The ability of biological computing to enhance and augment human lifespan and ability.
2. The possibility of a system, which is not completely formed of non-organic components, (but also not cyborg,) becoming self-aware/conscious/sentient.
Quoting L'éléphant
Humans are still debating what time is, so I can't comment on how a future orga/mecha sentient might perceive time. They will face the same concepts we do, relative time, individual time, proper time etc.
Expound on this. I've no idea what you mean by "perceive time" or "temporal mind".
Quoting universeness
I think "self-awareness" (i.e. real-time self-modeling) has to be built into an artificial system, it's not an emergent (i.e. "becoming") property or capability and isn't necessary for intelligent performance (e.g. large language models). Why do you assume machines (or synthetic organisms) can, in effect, "wake-up sentient"?
Mainly because of the 'critical mass' or 'tipping point' concept found in nature. I think this is also found in various human illnesses. Physically we have the 'locked in syndrome,' or complete physical paralysis and the various coma style states of which some are referred to as vegetative.
From your linked article, we have:
"This concept comprises experiences of ownership, of first person perspective, and of a long-term unity of beliefs and attitudes. These features are instantiated in the prefrontal cortex."
This suggests to me that the functionality of the pre-frontal cortex is vital to what we would describe as the 'first person perspective.'
In this article, Metzinger (who I am unfamiliar with), to me, is describing the required 'stabilities,' and component contributing parts that result in the model of self (system), that he is describing. I see the 'self' he is describing as an emergence, in that it manifests as a combinatorial of the sub-systems involved. I use the concept of 'more than the sum of the sub-systems,' or fundamental quanta involved, to account for the more unusual features of self.
For example, I may (as a self,) become attracted to a person or an object or an idea, for reasons that even I find very hard to fully explain. That seems to me, to be caused by something more 'bizarre'/'complicated'/nuanced etc than everything a car or my laptop does, due to the combination of its parts and fundamental quanta.
Perhaps you are referencing 'emergent' and 'emergence,' differently than I, or/and perhaps under some strict philosophical or scientific rule, I am not employing the concept of emergence in a logically sound way. I am willing to be 'better tuned' on this point, if the reasoning I am employing here, requires it.
This is an excellent point. I think it's easy to miss that a huge amount of the brain's "floating point operations per second," or their rough biological equivalent, are devoted entirely to helping a human being avoid tripping over as they walk, keeping the heart and lungs properly synced up, constantly searching incoming sensory streams for threats, motivating a person to go eat, use the bathroom, or talk to their attractive coworker, etc.
It's not even just that humans need to eat, drink, etc., producing down time, it's that a large part of the computation power we have access to, likely a solid majority, is used to maintain homeostasis or so adapted to survival functions that it is hard to keep task oriented.
That said, I think it's also possible that we vastly underestimate the advantages of biological systems' use of dynamic parallel processing and have over emphasized the role of action potentials alone in cognition. I read a book called "The Other Brain," on glial cells a while back and it was remarkable how much this under appreciated set of cells effects everything the brain does. The actual workings of neurotransmitters are incredibly complex and most neural networks reduce this to just "inhibitory value" or "excitation," which we may learn misses a lot more than we thought through AGI experiments.
I'm not that pessimistic, but if AGI proves very far away, I'd wager it is because our shot in the dark attempts to describe biological computing power in terms of our digital computers was massively off the mark due to only focusing on "number of nerve cell firing." There are a lot of signals that change cell metabolism, feed back loops involving hormones to NTs and back, places where a molecule at one binding site subtlety changes the shape of another which in turn radically affects signaling, etc. It would take FAR more information to encode all that, and so if that stuff ends up being essential instead of merely a means to get neurons depolarizing, computation in the brain could involve orders of magnitude more processing power to replicate, let alone the jump if some sort of quantum search optimization akin to photosynthesis shows up in a way that meaningfully effects things.
E.g., https://news.mit.edu/2022/neural-networks-brain-function-1102
But maybe the things we want AGI to do don't depend on this stuff (if it is essential)? That seems distinctly possible.
Such processes exist in the systems software of computers as well, start up and shut down routines, refreshing the contents of RAM space, port polling (around 30 times per second) for data input from connected peripherals like a touchscreen or a keyboard. Are such processes also existent in say, trees?
If so, do we consider such processes in humans, an aspect of human consciousness and If we do then must it not follow that we must label ANY such process in a computer or a tree, an aspect of consciousness?
No, I don't think so. It seems like you could be conscious even if your blood had to be circulated by a machine, your blood oxygenated by a machine, etc.
I wasn't really thinking in those terms. I was just thinking in terms of estimates of the total computational power of the human brain in the biological equivalent of floating point operations per second versus the amount of that computational power that can actually be allocated for doing things like planning and executing a Moon landing.
Intuitively, it seems like digital AI would have to allocate a lower share of its total computational resources towards non-relevant activities. I might be entirely wrong about that though.
Ok, I remain fascinated however, regarding which processes/activities of the brain, can be proven to be 'contributory' towards what we consider consciousness and/or awareness of self, as alluded to in articles like the one @180 Proof linked to.
I am not 'personally' aware of an aspect of my consciousness, which causes my hair to grow on my head or my chin at a particular pace, but at a much slower rate, on my chest or eyebrows, unless I shave my chest hair or eyebrows. Then it grows back at a similar speed to my head, until it reaches a certain length again, then it's rate of growth substantially slows. This is why we don't have to go to the barber with overgrowing chest, underarm, eyebrow or pubic hair.
Is my internal system for personal hair control, contributory to my consciousness? or is it a separate sub-system that has no importance or value at all to my consciousness or self - awareness, even though I am aware of it as part of the 'workings of my 'being?'
:rofl: Sorry Count! This is just one of the ways in which 'my strange,' manifests!
Youngsters today, talk about 'my bad' (which I personally hate,) so I feel justified in typing an equally bad English phrase such as 'my strange.' :halo:
The 'Tedtalk' video was interesting:
Do you agree with it's main suggestions, such as:
There is no such REALITY as self.
We can only ever experience the results of the 'hidden interface,' and not the detailed workings and structure involved. We can only see the bird flying, 'via/through, a 'hidden window.'
I did not find the examples Mr Metzinger gave, compelling, as arguments against the existence of a REAL self. His fake hand, phantom limbs, virtual stroking examples seemed to me, to be mere projections (empathies) based on previous experience of what an individual was witnessing live.
Even if you have never experienced being pregnant yourself, you can still experience a level of pregnancy pain, because your wife is pregnant. I remained unclear as to why Metzinger saw these examples, as supporting his claim of 'no such reality as 'self.'
He also does not explain how he conceives the existence of other 'individuals.'
Does his position support solipsism or simulation theory etc?
Do you think that YOUR notion of 'self' has no sound foundation in REALITY?
What am I missing here?
Quoting 180 Proof
Initially, a 'new' AGI will surely base what it labels it's current 'knowledge' maximums, or what it is most confident that it knows for sure, (for want of a better way to explain myself here.) on it's previously stored knowledge and it's stored knowledge will include a description of what a human consciousness is.
I assume that at some point in it's 'growth,' an AGI will 'ask itself,' the same questions that humans struggle with:
Who and what am I?
What (do I want) is my purpose? etc. If it does pose these questions to itself, then I assume it will reference it's notion of what it's stored information defines as a human consciousness.
Would this be anthropomorphising?
Are you suggesting that such questions will never be internally posed, by an AGI and it will just function as maintenance, growth and survival necessities direct it?
To me the capabilities of our cortex are much more important that the functions of our limbic system or R-complex (Which I fully accept we could not survive without).
Am I interpreting your position correctly or am I way off?
Well, I am trying to gain some insight into Mr Metzingers work and I see some crossover between our discussion here, and your discussion with @Eugen on the Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model thread. I absolutely agree that the devil is in the detail and that you need to be familiar, or almost fluent in the details of what is being offered, to make the exchange worthwhile. I feel the same way sometimes, when discussing the details of computer science with a novice.
My experience as a teacher however puts the burden of patience on me. I only get really frustrated with a novice, if they are asking me questions, but constantly demonstrate an inability to understand my answers, or do understand my answers but refuse to accept the academia behind them, without good reason.
Quoting 180 Proof
If we do find that is the reality of an exchange between us then sure, we should pause, regroup, and see if we can find a better common ground which offers some value to both of us. If not, then we should 'pause' again and find a more fruitful exchange, somewhere down the line.
I agree that it's a burden on you to summarise Mr Metzinger for me, to save me from having to do my own shovel work, so I try to only ask you to clarify YOUR OWN viewpoints, citing any sources in support, that you wish. At least;
Quoting 180 Proof
Confirms for me that you do agree that the concept of self, does not in your view (in line with Mr Metzinger,) manifest as a REAL existent.
My question then simply becomes, as annoying but nonetheless as serious as 'who are you?' if you have no reality in the concept of 'self.' Perhaps I should ask Mr Metzinger!
1. this is a nonsense
2. you're asking the wrong question
3. there is no weak or strong emergence
4. your assumptions are wrong
5. etc. etc. etc.
Solutions or coherent answers to my ''mistakes"? - never. Only general criticism and no solutions.
He is the only guy on this forum acting like that. The rest of you guys seem to understand my questions perfectly.
So, you want me to stop doing something that I did not do? In what way do you conflate:Quoting universeness
with
Quoting Eugen
:roll:
If @180 Proof challenges you a little more than anyone else on TPF then imo, you should enjoy that challenge. AND, before you take further umbrage, I am only stating a personal opinion that you are free to reject.
Quoting universeness
I'm not sure I'm a novice to 180Proof, and I do understand your answers. So when you tried to compare your "novice" with me (wether in regard to you or him), I think you're wrong.
As for summarizing ... that's all I've been doing in our exchanges on this topic over dozens of posts. We're here to inform, maybe inspire & intrigue, not spoon-feed each other.
You have simply misunderstood my reference to you and your recent thread. Let me clarify.
My use of the word 'novice' in my response to 180proof, contained no stealth intent to relate IN ANY WAY, to you.
I referenced you and your recent exchange with @180 Proof as me showing a little support for YOUR position, in the sense that 180proof can seem a little exasperated at times, with me as well as others, and I feel that I have to try harder to garnish more detail from him to attempt to clarify his own viewpoints.
He has impressive knowledge of philosophy imo and at times, again, imo, this can make him a little impatient at times with those who don't have such fluency. But from my teaching experience, I can understand his and the 'exasperation' sometimes demonstrated by others on TPF for philosophical novices such as me. I made no accusation AT ALL, that YOU are a philosophical novice.
I leave the declarations of your own qualifications to you.
He may have the knowledge, I'm skeptical about his skills though. But I'm still waiting...
Good, keep doing that and I will do the same for you and others regarding my own fields of fluency.
I agree we can inform and perhaps even inspire & intrigue and I also assume that you have not ossified to the stage where you think you also cannot learn from others posting here. I do not advocate for spoon feeding, unless doing so, on occasion, would assist another poster in all humility.
Time savers are always welcome.
NO worries!
:up: Lost in translation is a very forgivable confusion.
From Wiki:
Take any perdurant and isolate a part of its spatial region. That isolated spatial part has a corresponding temporal part to match it. We can imagine an object, or four-dimensional worm: an apple. This object is not just spatially extended but temporally extended. The complete view of the apple includes its coming to be from the blossom, its development, and its final decay. Each of these stages is a temporal time slice of the apple, but by viewing an object as temporally extended, perdurantism views the object in its entirety.
This seems akin to world lines, do you agree?
So from your description above, how much of it (or you) do you associate with the label 'real,' especially since you also employ the label 'virtual' (I assume 'virual' was a typo).
Based on Eugen's comment above, I would ask you to apply the same standard as you applied to @Gnomon If Eugen claims that you have not answered his questions to you, on the Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model thread. Then I assume that you would want to sufficiently answer his complaint, so that your imo, 'fair' complaint against @Gnomon remains sound.
:starstruck: :love: I am so happy when someone gives me another 'conduit' to post AGAIN, one of my fav songs. Sorry, in advance to any of the 'we arra mods' group this idiosyncratic behaviour of mine, might annoy:
Exactly. :up:
I'm not aware of @Eugen asking me to explain my own metaphysical or scientific speculations and that I've refused to answer as Gnomon (& Wayfarer) has often done. These are my answers to Eugen's questions of my objections not questions of my speculations on his thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/803218
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/803300
Not comparable at all to my exchanges with Gnomon.
I think your response at:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/803443
has redressed the imbalance, or lack of detail, that remained after your two posts that you linked to in your above post.
I was making a loose comparison with @Gnomons refusal to answer YOUR questions sufficiently, based on my opinion, that you could be accused of doing something similar. The brevity and lack of explanation in the two linked quotes from your post above, confirms that imo.
Anyway, apparently @Eugen, is rather selective in which of my own questions, HE decides to answer.
I understand that position, and have described my own similar frustration at times, via our recent PM.
I see some value in us both encouraging each other to maintain a consistent approach.
In hindsight, I would have been better to discuss the particular, small issue I raised publicly with you here, by PM. I will do so in the future if such should arise again.
At least I treated you, by offering you a listen at a fab Ting Ting song, by way of compensation for any bruised ego I caused you. :halo:
Here's a recent book I just came across by computer engineer and neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins titled A Thousand Brains which summarizes 'lessons learned' from his own company's research on AGI. I haven't read it yet but reviews intrigue me and his first book On Intelligence was quite good and informative. Maybe you're already familiar with him? My guess is that Mr. Hawkins would be right at home in our 'futurist' discussions (no doubt schooling us both).
No. That's just you talking human talk. What does "in time" mean to you? Explain that first. Then try to analyze, for example, the retrieval of information by a computer. The human mind cannot retrieve all words simultaneously from a written text and not get a jumbled mess of information.
(It will be hard for me to explain this to anyone, unless you already have an idea of what it means to be nontemporal).
Quoting 180 Proof
In a manner of speaking, we perceive time as past or present. We also perceive time in terms of duration -- how long or how short.
Temporalism in metaphysics posits that perception necessarily involves the objects of perception as being within a duration or time order of some sort. This is not to say that all objects of perception involves the temporal aspect of thinking -- we do perceive the spatial and nontemporal qualities of objects. The size of a tree is nontemporal, so is the brightness of a light bulb.
Yes, clocks, for instance, do not experience duration or retrospection. I think it's our metabolic functioning relative states of homeostasis that constitutes the intuition of "temporality". If this is so, then only an AGI instantiated in either synthetic or organic organism will, as you say, have a "temporal mind". This, however, would not be an intrinsic, or fundamental, feature or property of AGI itself, and therefore, it wouldn't (need to) be sentient certainly not as we conceive of sentience today.
@universeness
If ever an AGI is created, it still would not be sentient, as humans are sentient. Or in our usual term, conscious. The measure of consciousness involves also our fundamental propensity to inaccuracy or errors due to the fact that our perceptual qualities have been developed naturally, and overtime; involving actual experiences with objects. It's a lived experience, not created in the laboratory or simulation.
Errors, for example, an experiment involving a measure of duration: two images are flashed to human subjects and they are to judge how long the images were shown. One image is larger than the other. So there's the non-temporal aspect of the experiment - size. Either the subjects would say that the bigger one lasted longer, or the smaller lasted longer, despite the fact that both were flashed at the same length of time.
The inaccuracy is exciting, in my opinion.
"where he leads a team in efforts to reverse-engineer the neocortex"
:grin: What a brilliant Job!
You should try to emulate @Mikie and try to contact Jeff and see if you can convince him to be a guest speaker on TPF. That's a schooling I would love to experience!
That's called the fetch-execute cycle and happens to the clock pulse of the clock line of the 'control bus' (not really a bus, as the lines operate discretely).
Each line below occurs serially, within a single clock pulse.
1. The processor sets up the address bus with the address of the memory location to be accessed.
2. The read line of the control bus is set high by the processor
3. The data/instruction resident at the memory location currently on the address bus is copied onto the data bus and is sent along to a memory data register, by the processor.
4. The processor will then transfer the data to a general purpose register or directly to RAM space or it will decode and execute, if it is dealing with an instruction rather than a data item.
This all happens WITHIN time slices(durations).
Quoting L'éléphant
Sure but it took you a duration to type that, or to even think it, so your perception of a tree size or brightness, is temporal in the sense of your own perception time/duration.
Even if you (can) consider the biggest reference frame of perceiving the universe as single system, then that system will have a temporal aspect to any observer, as it did have a beginning, it does have a duration, and via entropy, it will 'disassemble.'
The idea that the tree height has a non-temporal frame of reference to entities such as us, is relative imo.
I get it. That was my point. But I was trying to point out to you that human errors are errors peculiar to humans. Which is what makes it interesting to me. Just as a computer could be made perfect, humans organically develop and along the way this development picks up natural selections, mutations, and accidents, which make for an exciting phenomenon.
I'm not trying to compare the abilities of humans and computers. I'm trying to explain why human consciousness (it's redundant to say this) is human.
Sure, if you feel that change would better fit it's content.
That's ok, you are free to bail out anytime you wish.
Have you watched this?
I watched it last night. It's 2 hours 35 mins, but worth the investment.
The term emergence/emergent was used quite a bit.
I enjoyed the little insight it gave me into the work of neuroscientists and Jeff's 'thousand brains theory.'
Brain reference frames and movement models, the brains use of maps/graphs, cortical columns, grid cells, place cells, vector cells, etc, etc.
This video is easily due it's own thread but I don't know if TPF is an adequate place for such a thread.
Obviously a neuroscience site would fit much more.
Few here would be willing to invest the time involved imo.
I certainly think it's content would help make theists feel more and more uncomfortable as they continue to try desperately to hold on to their woo woo, ancient fables and present them as facts.
God did this! Just seems more and more 'silly.'
I would personally need, to watch this video a few times to gain better insight however.
Additional: I will now have to update my personal, previous, Paul Maclean model of the human triune brain, to Jeff's thousand brain model based on cortical columns.
WHEN I SAW HIM draw the little circles on paper and start to draw connecting communication lines between them. I said HEY, that looks like he is starting to draw a topology of a fully connected mesh network of computer nodes!! The amount of crossover between the mechanisms this video describes and computer science is very strong imo.
@noAxioms, @Count Timothy von Icarus, @Alkis Piskas, @bert1, @Isaac, @Benj96, and of course anyone else here on TPF, that might find Jeff Hawkins work (as introduced to me by @180 Proof) as interesting as he, and now I, do.
I will have to now buy Jeff's 'thousand brains book.' YOU keep adding to my homework sir! :rofl:
I recently completed The memoirs of Ulysses Simpson Grant.
My current read is my second reading of Brian Green's 'The Elegant Universe.' (I first read it 15 years ago)
After that, I have TPF member @Vera Mont's book 'The Ozimord project,' to read, then Sean Carrol's 'The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, VOL 1! (two more to come!), and now!
Jeff Hawkins 'A thousand brains.'
This is beginning to impact my weekend drinking time!!!!!! :halo:
I'll give this video a look eventually. Thanks!
In his discussion, in the video, with 3 other folks involved in the area, you will find that Jeff, does not currently hold the same opinion as you do, regarding the threat of AI developments towards AGI.
He certainly thinks that significant threat exists but I would also suggest, that he thinks we humans, are capable of countering them. He could of course be quite wrong in that view.
I just heard that:
Geoffrey Hinton, (the godfather of AI,) 75 has just resigned from his post with Google. He helped to design the systems that became the bedrock of AI. But the Turing prize winner now says a part of him regrets making them.
There certainly does seem to be two intrenched camps on either side of the current AI debate.
You did not misread my remark, but perhaps I continue to misunderstand your position regarding AGI.
Perhaps it's your regular use of 'posthuman,' or/and your, in general, more pessimistic view of the future of humanity.
A few 'optimistic' old posts ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768537
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/770469
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/502217
:lol: Well done in finding 3 out of your almost 12,000 posts. :joke:
I am sure you could find more, if you had to.
I won't suggest 6 examples of your less positive comments to 'move in front,' and invite such a race.
The fact that you continue to push back against my accusation that you can be quite pessimistic about the future of humanity, and our ability to be better than our more base 'jungle rules and jungle thinking' style manifestations, such as territoriality, tribalism, theism, capitalism, malevolent hierarchy, xenophobia, etc, etc.
Means that you, imo, are one of those who are part of the solutions and not part of the problems.
I enjoy your more 'optimistic' posts whenever I come across one. If I need cheered up, I can always write more of my own. If you ever watch the Jeff Hawkins vid above, I would be interested in discussing it's content with you.
Btw, we just differ over what constitutes an 'optimistic' view of our automated (IMO, prospective "post-scarcity") future. In a nutshell, anthropocentric you: "super-humanity" with exponentially more biophysical-metacognitive options than our current human condition affords us; de-anthropo-centric me: "post-humanity" with exponentially fewer biophysical-metacognitive defects than our current human condition constrains us with.
Or in (visionary) "science fiction" terms my view is more "Starchild-Monolith" (or "Culture Minds") and your view is more "United Federation of Planets-Star Fleet", no? :nerd:
Yes, I would broadly agree with your analysis. It would be fun to drill more into how much of an individual identity you think could still be maintained, after a merging with future tech. My projected future, or I might even be so bold to say, the future I see currently, slowly emerging, will be very turbulent and may continue to be an 'ever on the precipice, existential risk,' as dangerous as we have faced since the invention of nuclear weapons. But I DO think we will eventually, get to a stage, where the following will be a description of a typical human existence.
1. Birth into a mainly secular humanist, globally united society, where an individual can take their basic needs and personal protections for granted, from cradle to grave.
2. We will become an interplanetary species.
3. Tech will be used initially as physical and mental benevolent medical support, and personal security support, and your 'first stage' of life, will be as a natural human existence, with a lifespan max of around 200 years, based on maintaining and growing and nurturing your 'natural identity,' developed since your birth.
4. Your second stage of life will happen, when your first stage is close to it's natural end or if it ends via accident, but you can be saved via tech. This is the point when an individual human. can CHOOSE to 'merge' with tech to become neo/nova sapien, and gain all those 'biophysical-metacognitive.' options you mentioned, and YES, I think we will fight as much as possible, to maintain as much of the 'human identity,' we had in our 'first stage' of life. Not all anthropomorphising is ill-advised.
5. Artificial lifeforms, biologically engineered lifeforms, mech/orga variants, genetically enhanced animal/ aquatic and insect lifeforms etc, etc will eventually exist along side us. Perhaps we will have encountered some alien life by that time as well. Perhaps all of the lifeforms on Earth (natural and 'created,') will eventually become interplanetary/interstellar.
6. I don't think the threat of extinction will remain the main picture. I think the main picture will consist of an eventual diversification, that will produce variety in a number that will dwarf the number of varieties produced by evolution and natural selection.
The vastness of the universe, can easily accommodate such.
1. I suspect runaway climate change will balkanize the globe even more than it is today because the capacities for mitigating the catastrophic 'warming' effects are now and will be even more so unevenly distributed (even when AGI comes online). In the best case scenarios, however, I agree with your "cradle to grave" techno-"secularism" what I imagine as automated post-scarcity societies (APS).
2. I imagine that in about fifty years we will start 'spreading out' in earnest across the inner solar system, mostly orbital, moon & asteroid habitats rather than planetary 'colonies'.
3. Okay (re: APS).
4. Assuming that "the human identity" is a manifestation of the human condition. Thus, I imagine as technosciences, extraterresrial habitation & AGI > ASI accelerate the disappearance of the current human condition, "human identity" also will disappear. (Re: posthumanity (e.g. body-mods & brain-augments for living in space; AI-mediated-hiveminds; orga-mecha mergers, etc) > transcension)
5. I predict that by the end of this century our (AGI-controlled) space probes will discover robust exo-biomes and thriving xeno-species beneath the ice carapaces of a number of Jupiter's & Saturn's moons. By then, however, ASI will determine how best to protect (enhance) terrestrial life from (by) extraterrestrial and artificial life-forms.
6. Three natural mass extinction-events come to mind which could affect the entire inner solar system (now and always): (A) gamma ray bursts, (B) planetary colliding coronal mass ejections (re: the Carrington event) and (C) micro-singularities. A non-terrestrial diaspora, of course, increases the likelihood of our species surviving extinction events but in no way guarantees it.
Thanks for the very interesting response.
1. I understand your 'balkanise the globe' projection but I don't agree with your bracketed ('even when AGI comes on-line.') I think AI progress, will help us very significantly, with climate change and I am also boosted by two others 'impressions,' I have. Global youth seems more aware of the threats that our historical and current stewardship of the Earth has caused, and seem more determined (compared to earlier generations) to organise themselves, to reverse those effects. Even many members of the traditionally nefarious rich and powerful, are beginning to realise that they cannot feed as well, from a dead or even balkanised global population. I do also accept that there is nonetheless, a dangerous global apathy and substantial 'fake news force,' to contend with.
I agree with your 'post-scarcity' epoch and hope it ends global hunger and vastly improves peoples lives BUT, it will then result in an increased need for better population control (at least on Earth).
2. Yes, I think 'stepping stone' space habitats, stations etc will become very necessary, before eventual extraplanetary 'large,' probably initially domed settlements, until 'terraforming' can make any kind of impact.
3. :up:
4. Quoting 180 Proof
I think the human 'first stage (fully natural, organic) life' will change yes, but not in a way that humans alive today would not recognise. I think we will fight hard to make our first, up to around 200 years of existence to be much as it is today. I think the current experiences we have that forms 'who we are' and 'who we might become,' are very much revered by a great number of us.
Quoting 180 Proof
From your link: Today, we examine the possibility that the reason for the Great Silence is that all the aliens have evolved beyond the need to explore!
Your suggestion that any 'changes' in 'humanity,' especially what I would consider human stage 2 life need not become a disappearance of 'human identity' but an 'updating' of it. I know you think I am arguing semantics here but I think it's a valid semantic debate.
The Universe today article you cited was a fun read and it's main proposals were dramatised somewhat in the guise of 'the first ones' in Babylon 5:
But remember the first ones, all went to explore beyond the rim and became 'intergalactic.' The universe is so much bigger and unknown that any AGI or ASI will be able to 'comprehend,' in my 'humble' but still very very very atheist opinion. I don't find the posit of 'beyond the need to explore,' very likely.
5. I like that prediction, I hope it happens that way, I certainly would not advocate for any discovered microbial sized or any sized, biological structures being destroyed to make way for any colony from Earth.
6. Well, there are comments like this, from such as the physics stack exchange:
[b]Gamma rays can be stopped by the few inches of lead shielding nuclear reactors, the Trillions of yotta grams that make up the sun will be absolutely fine for the job.
You also don't need to worry about venus losing it's atmosphere, the worry with a GRB is that it destroys the ozone layer not that it flat out strips away our atmosphere.
The shortest GRB's can be two seconds long so earth could definitely be behind the sun for the entire duration of one.[/b]
All I am suggesting is that there seems to have always been many existential threats to the Earth and its 'life' based contents. Despite these, life on Earth endures. The threats you cite are very real and very valid. We will have to pay attention and make very serious, united, global efforts in the future to protect our future selves and our home planet. I think that we are left with nothing stronger at the moment than our individual hope that we will survive, in some form or another. I know that in some posts you have suggested that you are not a big fan of the notion of human 'hopes.'
1. The oceans are already too warm to reverse catastrophic climate change. AGI will triage the global population centers so that 1 in 4 (2bn) people might survive to the end of the next century.
2. 'Planetary colonization' (e.g. megaengineering, terraforming) does not make economic, engineering or scientific sense IMO. No "stepping stones", my friend, just dispersion of Earth's species as a hedge against terrestrial extinction risks. And because of hard radiation (e.g. cosmic rays) and astronomical transit durations, 'deep space exploration' is only feasible for (tinier-the-better) intelligent machines.
4. Babylon 5?! :rofl: (sorry) Nothing remotely to do with the transcension hypothesis.
5. :up:
6. "Global efforts?" Never were, never will be. And no need for that: AGI > ASI will drive the big blue bus out of the ditch we're stuck in despite our fractious human nature. No doubt, over the next century or so, 3 out of 4 (6bn) of us will be left behind in the ditch so that the rest of our biological descendents can survive (predominantly due to the efforts of our machine descendents 'herding a billion cats').
I apologise in advance for such a terrible accusation if it's just a tech hitch.
In truth I am not that bothered anyway. It's lived a long life in the league of page one threads.
It seems to be getting pushed down the pages, regardless of any new posts on it. :lol:
1. Any exemplar, reliable scientific studies you know of that claim this as fact?
2. Not yet, I agree but tech advances may/I think will, change this. I will stick with my stepping stones projection/prediction.
4. I quote from the article ", the Transcension Hypothesis ventures that an advanced civilization will become fundamentally altered by its technology. In short, it theorizes that any ETIs that predate humanity have long-since transformed into something that is not recognizable by conventional SETI standards."
Same in B5, the humans required 'Vorlon' tech and the power of the alien tech (the great machine) they found on the planet that B5 orbited, Epison III. Without that, 'the first ones,' would have remained invisible to them. G'Kar explains it quite well below:
6. Quoting 180 Proof
See! Your more pessimistic sentences are still alive and kicking! :grin:
Quoting 180 Proof
LOOK! there's another one! :joke:
Yes, I sunk it, which means new posts no longer push it up the page. As you say, its had a long enough life, and its now more like a private conversation.
Typed like a true emotionless AI!
It may diminish, but will be freshly remembered by a significant few of the highest quality!
Plenty. This article cites some of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/climate-change-report-ipcc-un.html
I don't have a great deal of confidence in a New York Times article. I am cynical enough to treat all newspaper articles, as deserving only a base level of confidence that it is true.
Unfortunately, I could not read the article without agreeing to subscribe to the newspaper.
Do you have any better links to support the proposal that your point below has very strong evidence behind it?
Quoting 180 Proof
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/world/ocean-surface-temperature-heat-record-climate-intl/index.html
Thanks for the CNN link. As you suggest, the article was not being too heavily alarmist, but was offering significant warning. I cannot post any quotes from it as I try not to accept cookies.
From my own past reading on this (mostly about coral reef damage/bleaching and melting ice in the arctic and antarctic regions), I agree that the current situation in Earth's Oceans is very bad. I do not however think that we have reached the point of no return and I remain hopeful that your prediction of a human population fall from the current 8 billion to 1 or 2 billion, within the not to distant future, is unlikely, BUT I cannot provide convincing evidence that you are completely wrong.
Our h. sapiens species has shown itself to be uniquely smart enough to create at least one problem for itself so intractably complex in scale and scope that we cannot solve it climate change accelerated by anthropogenic global warming. Weirdly I'm hopeful that AGI > ASI assuming it bothers will be capable of reframing the parameters of the problem so that it can be solved well enough to save a significant portion of Earth's habitable biosphere and thereby a sustainable fraction (1/2-1/20?) of the human population. I imagine the only significant "planetary terraforming" that will ever be undertaken will be an AGI > ASI-driven project to terraform the Earth and eventually reverse / end the Anthropocene.
Ok, It was useful to drill down a little more into your position in this issue.
My "hopes" are silver linings in the dark clouds rolling in. The butterfly, sir, is about to leave the caterpillar's "human" chrysalis (re: ).
:point:
Do you have evidence that the butterfly retains no knowledge of its time as a caterpillar?
Might the butterfly maintain much of the 'mind' of the caterpillar?
Do we "retain knowledge" of our time as blastocysts? :roll:
I imagine crawling is, at best, useless for flying. Maybe butterflies keep caterpillars around just to study them (e.g. "butterflygenesis") or for shitz-n-giggles (à la reality tv, stupid pet tricks, etc) or both? :smirk:
I would need to concentrate to see if I have any such stored memories. I will try hard this weekend after 1 or 10 single malts!
Quoting 180 Proof
They have to land sometimes! I have witnessed landed butterfly's walk/crawl!
Quoting 180 Proof
No caterpillars = no butterfly's. As I suggested before, there may be aspects of human consciousness that no 'created' system can reproduce.
Too much in your link for me to read at the moment. When I have read it, I will comment on it.
I did not see any strong connections to our discussion, was there a main summary point from his system 2 category that YOU find strongly contends with my suggestion that Quoting universeness
Btw, I came across this:
A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup. The finding suggests moths and butterflies may be more intelligent than scientists believed.
From here
Another link to the catastrophic effects of (runaway) global heating on Earth's fresh water sources: lakes & reservoirs.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/world/disappearing-lakes-reservoirs-water-climate-intl/index.html
The heating of oceans and drying up of lakes-reservoirs are strongly correlated. Not "pessimism", my friend, just facts. :mask:
Do you mean 'intelligence versus self-awareness?'
I just can't conceive of any value in an intelligent system that is not-self aware other that as a functional, very useful tool for an intelligence that IS self-aware. Like a computer is for a human today.
Perhaps I am missing your main point here due to my attempts to decipher/interpret the words/phrases, you choose to use.
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't refute the very valid concerns regarding climate change.
I do fully accept that the evidence is overwhelming, that we have damaged the Earth's ecosystem significantly, in a way that compromises our survival and the survival of the current flora and fauna on the Earth. I think the Earth itself, will easily survive the actions of humans.
I think WE WILL pay a price for abusing Earths resources for private gain, and to satisfy the lusts/greeds of individual/(groups of) nefarious humans, but it's not over until it's over.
The 'facts' you mention are not imo, immutable, yet.
We probably have passed the point of no return in some ways, but not with the results that you suggest, ie, population reduction to the levels of an 'endangered species' or actual extinction.
No. I mean intelligence (i.e. adaptivity) without "consciousness" (i.e. awareness of being self-aware), a distinction I suggest in this old post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/528794 ... and speculate on further, with respect to 'AGI', here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/608461.
Also today ...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/19/climate-crisis-james-hansen-scientist-warning
Apologies for continuing to flog this equine's carcass:
https://www.dw.com/en/sea-surface-temperature-hotter-than-ever-before/a-66444694
Anyway ....... firstly I will try to refresh where we are in our exchange here:
Quoting universeness
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
I still perceive a 'versus' between the 'theory of mind' that you propose for a future AI and our human 'theory of mind.' Would the AI theory of mind you propose have to decide whether or not their 'intelligence' but not 'conscious' (at least not conscious in the human sense) was a 'superior' or inferior state the human 'state of mind.' I am struggling to find clear terminology here.
Perhaps, a better angle would be, If your AI mind model cannot demonstrate all of your listed functionalities:
Quoting 180 Proof
How do you know, it would not conclude/calculate that to be an inferior state and that functions 4 and 5 above become two of it's desires/imperatives/projects?
Quoting 180 Proof
I have watched just about everything with Carl Sagan in it, available on-line, more than once. Some, I have watched many times. I have watched the vid you posted at least 5 times so far.
Carl was a far better predictor of future events than Nostradamus ever was.
I don't try to play down any current danger that climate change activists are shouting about, nor have I ever suggested that the human race is doing other than a piss poor job of its stewardship of this planet but I don't see any reason to believe that a future AI would do a better job as stewards of this planet.
AGI/ASI may well not be as 'biased,' or 'irrational' as 'human groupthink' can be but are you soooooooo sure that a future mecha wont be just as toxic towards planet Earth as humans were, if not more so.
If it needs to strip the Earth of its resources to replicate, advance and spread its own system, then it may do so and move on into space.
Anything I typed here in response to the linked article, would probably be a repeat of elements of my previous post above. I fully accept all the warnings about the climate change disaster we immanently face. BUT, It's not over until its over! That's all I have to cling to, and cling on is what I will continue to do! Feel free to think of me like the monty python black knight if you wish but I don't think its as hopeless as that ...... yet.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/892509