From: M.>h (m.transhumanist@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Dec 11 2009 - 00:11:46 MST
Am 07.12.2009 um 21:09 schrieb Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com>:
> "M.>h" wrote:
> > ... sorry, but i do not get the whole problem.
>
> You understand that I can't define something which doesn't exist.
> When I say qualia or self awareness or that little person inside
> your mind that observes the world through your senses, most people
> know what I mean.
>
> Let me put it this way. Consider the AI program that observed
> everything you did for the last several years until it became so
> good at predicting your behavior that none of your friends or
> relatives could distinguish it from you in a Turing test
> environment. Unfortunately the building containing the only copy of
> the program is on fire. It is just you and the computer in a room
> rapidly filling with smoke. There is just enough time either for you
> to get out, allowing the only copy to be destroyed, or for you to
> upload a copy of the program to a remote site over the internet with
> your last dying breath. Which do you do?
... from a rational point i would
a) think that copy and me are the same
b) assume that saving the copy is a better long-term strategy
... however i would nonetheless feel strange because if dying i would
(probably) recognise it as my *own* death, because i will (probably)
not perceive what the copy does but what i do. a distructive upload
would not have these divergences, or?
cheers,
miriam
>
> If you got out, then you must believe in this nonexistent thing.
> Otherwise you would logically conclude that by preserving your
> memories in a form that can be backed up, that you become immortal.
> Furthermore, you have the opportunity to enhance your intelligence
> and your environment by running on more powerful computers and
> embodied in better robots in the future. Why would you ever allow
> one copy to be destroyed now and the only other copy in a few decades?
>
> Sorry for my ambiguous use of the word "you".
>
>
> -- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
>
>
> From: "M.>h" <m.transhumanist@gmail.com>
> To: "sl4@sl4.org" <sl4@sl4.org>
> Sent: Mon, December 7, 2009 1:58:00 AM
> Subject: Re: Copying nonsense (was Re: [sl4] Uploading (was : goals
> of AI))
>
> ... sorry, but i do not get the whole problem. even if a clone of me
> would walk up to me right here and now, having sufficiently enough
> of my memories and claiming to have my 'identity', i would not care
> if this 'double' would not use my resources (e.g. credit card) and
> bureaucrats would leave me alone!
>
> cheers,
>
> miriam
>
>
>
> Am 06.12.2009 um 22:12 schrieb Thomas Buckner <tcbevolver@yahoo.com>:
>
>>
>>
>> From: Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com>
>> To: sl4@sl4.org
>> Sent: Sun, December 6, 2009 2:44:53 PM
>> Subject: Re: Copying nonsense (was Re: [sl4] Uploading (was : goals
>> of AI))
>>
>> Rewot Fetterkey wrote:
>> > Can you clarify that? How, exactly, is consciousness nonexistent?
>>
>> By consciousness, I mean that which makes you different from a
>> philosophical zombie as described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
>> But by definition, a zombie is not distinguishable from you at all.
>> I really don't know how much more clear the logic could be.
>>
>> The problem arises because all animals, including those that have
>> no concept of death, have evolved a fear of those things that can
>> kill them. Humans do have such a concept, which we associate with a
>> lack of conscious experience. So we all desperately want to
>> preserve this thing that does not exist. We can't help it. We are
>> programmed that way.
>>
>> One way to deal with this conflict is to argue that the zombie
>> argument is wrong and create ever more convoluted arguments to
>> refute it. My preferred approach is as follows:
>>
>> 1. I believe that I have conscious experience. (I am programmed to).
>> 2. I know that conscious experience does not exist.. (Logic
>> irrefutably says so).
>> 3. I realize that 1 and 2 are inconsistent. I leave it at that.
>>
>>
>> -- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
>>
>> I'm with Daniel Dennet on this: the P-zombie is (to paraphrase an
>> earlier poster) 2+2 = 5. Purely hypothetical, a character in a
>> gendankenexperiment, The Man Who Wasn't There. In practice, any
>> creature with a human brain that could say "Ouch, that hurt" has an
>> internal process isomorphic to what we experience as consciousness.
>> Please see my post of a few hours ago on the Edge talk. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html
>> Consciousness in the human brain is a global pattern of activation
>> and we now have methods of scanning and can say whether that
>> pattern appears or not. This scanning has been applied to comatose/
>> vegetative patients. From Dr. Dehaene's talk:
>>
>> "Let me just give you a very basic idea about the test. We
>> stimulate the patient with five tones. The first four tones are
>> identical, but the fifth can be different. So you hear something
>> like dit-dit-dit-dit-tat. When you do this, a very banal
>> observation, dating back 25 years, is that the brain reacts to the
>> different tone at the end. That reaction, which is called mismatch
>> negativity, is completely automatic. You get it even in coma, in
>> sleep, or when you do not attend to the stimulus. It's a non-
>> conscious response.
>> Following it, however, there is also, typically, a later brain
>> response called the P3. This is exactly the large-scale global
>> response that we found in our previous experiments, that must be
>> specifically associated with consciousness.
>> (snip)
>> The P3 response (a marker is absent in coma patients. It is also
>> gone in most vegetative state patients — but it remains present in
>> most minimally conscious patients. It is always present in locked
>> -in patients and in any other conscious subject."
>>
>> Consciousness, according to Dr. Dehaene's findings, is how the
>> human brain gets around certain limitations of being an analog
>> computer. If you've read Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts you'll know that
>> his approach to AGI would not necessarily call for the AGI to be
>> conscious in the sense we understand. I recall he said "I'm not
>> looking for the AGI to be a new drinking buddy, at least not at
>> first" or words close to that. Paramount, to him, is that the AGI
>> be Friendly, and not damage us intentionally or otherwise. While
>> the human brain is a kind of analog computer, and much research is
>> now afoot to emulate it on digital computers, our minds are not
>> exactly computer programs. They are certainly not fungible programs
>> running on a general computing machine, but rather embedded in the
>> structure. The mind is not fungible unless the neural structure is
>> made fungible, which may or may not ever be possible.
>> To sum up, there's no real-world way a zombie could react as if
>> conscious, using human brain architecture, without being conscious.
>> Unless you believe in magic. And the subject of zombies, even if
>> such could exist, probably doesn't really apply to the problems of
>> building an AGI.
>>
>> Tom Buckner
>>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:05 MDT