Building a mind from scratch sounds much easier.
I disagree—I would argue that, in principle, simulating/emulating a mind would be much easier than building a mind from scratch. My main justification is that simulating a brain is much more straightforward than building one from scratch. They are both undoubtedly extremely difficult tasks, but we are much closer to being able to accomplish the simulation. As a rough measure of this, you can try to look at where current companies and researchers are placing their bets on the problem. For example, brain simulation is a field which is already maturing rapidly (IBM’s project being a keynote example), whereas the state of the art of “mind design from scratch”, as it were, is still essentially speculative. Some groups like Goertzel’s team and others are looking at it, but no big company is taking on the task.
I am a grad student in physics in Wisconsin, I’m 26. I had another LW account for a while and participated some, but found the forum really frustrating. I strongly disagree with many of the aspects I encountered then, such as (but in no particular order) style of discussion, closed mindedness or willingness to nitpick, difficulty to convey opinion, sense of establishment set of correct opinions, poor writing styles, overly analytical discussion, ineffective karma system, and so on. Then again, it also appeared to me a place of unusually high quality discussion on the internet. Nevertheless I still reserve the right to be extremely critical, but maybe it’s time to start looking at some of the stuff again.
I just got a hernia surgery yesterday and I’m currently on painkillers. I’m taking two philosophy courses now but when I’m done, I’ll be done with classes, so I’m very happy about that. I’m not sure if I see myself staying in my specific field of physics, long term. After I graduate, I want to move to a very big city. I think of humor as being very important in my major relationships, perhaps the single most important thing for me for having fun with others. I definitely lean towards the absurd end of the spectrum, I love satire and I hate the sense of people taking themselves so seriously. I really believe in a sense of justice and I am dismayed by people who behave as assholes. I have a tendency to perceive and act in a formalistic way, writing very formally, and so on, perhaps through the personality of my dad who raised me. I am a big fan of literature and philosophy and the art of writing, but my mind and memory tend to be very visually oriented so that I don’t tend to remember a lot of word-for-word type details, but I remember images really well. As a theoretical physicist, I am extremely interested in mathematics but my aptitude in pure mathematics, while appreciable, is not academically competitive. Last but not least, I am finding it very difficult to meet women and make long lasting relationships (or even short relationships) with the opposite sex, and it is increasingly bothering me as I start to get older and find more biological urgency in the situation.