From: Tennessee Leeuwenburg (tennessee@tennessee.id.au)
Date: Tue Oct 11 2005 - 18:06:39 MDT
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Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly wrote:
| On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 05:32:07 +0000, H C <lphege@hotmail.com> wrote:
|
|
|> As far as computer intelligence goes, it appears to me you are
|> drastically underestimating the impact. (Yes, the rabbit hole
|> goes much much deeper, in fact- its something of black hole, or
|> ... *cough* Singularity... hehe).
|
|
|
| Well let's not get into a fight over who can be most awed by the
| incomprehensibility of the Singularity. There's no winner to that
| conversation; it descends instantly into madness. For instance,
| we can readily assume that over the next decade or two we will
| invent The Orgasm Button (prototypes, for women only alas, are
| already in use) and generally otherwise intimately control our own
| pleasure and pain responses. Therefore the question "what will
| posthumans do with these amazing powers" can only reasonably be
| answered "why, whatever they program themselves to do." There's
| no sense to it.
The male version, of course, may be operated using a hand crank.
I was just struck by a relationship between the ideas about reward and
motivation, and Heidegger's idea of "thrown-ness". Now, while I think
that Heidegger is a big booby-head, some of his sentences are very
thought-provoking. In one of his more lucid moments, he talks about
how Dasein (read human minds) is thrown into the world. We can't
simply change our state of being in the world through a simple force
of will -- we need to learn about what affects us, how it does so,
learn the rules by which our brains operate. Of course, us mere humans
only ever learn some rough approximations of our own behaviour /
mental function rules.
The suggestion of most Singularists is that a sufficiently advanced
intelligence *would* understand its own mind, and *would* be able to
modify its state of being in the world, without having to learn its
own behavioural rules.
I am yet to be convinced that all possible super-intelligences will
also have the property of being able to change their mental states in
this way. I don't *think* it's clear from the literature, but not
having read every book ever written, I don't know what I don't know.
What are people's opinion about the relationship of
"superintelligence" and being "thrown into the world"?
Cheers,
- -T
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