I agree. I think some people are whistling past the graveyard.
johnkclark
Karma: −5
Would it help if I said I’d happily sign up to be uploaded now, if I knew I could look forward to a similarly rich experience in a mainframe, and perhaps the ability to engineer a body to walk about in from time to time, when the whim took me?
Yes I’d have to say that would help, If you did say it.
Actually, I’m worried he’s having some kind of breakdown.
No you’re not, you’re not worried about that at all; you’re trying to be amusing, and doing a damn poor job of it too.
Him now talking like he’s the only one who ever believed that deconstruction and reconstruction using “different atoms” preserves identity, may indicate that the Personal Identity Wars really literally did send him off the edge.
I am a man capable of getting into details, I like details and if truth be told I’m rather good at it, I think details are important; so name one person who agreed with me other than superficially? Come on, name one! Certainly not you, you believe in the childish friendly AI idea. And the only hope of salvaging that is some ugly mutation of the soul ides.
And Eliezer although I’ve said you were wrong and even (perhaps going too far) implied that you were stupid (you have faults but stupidity is not among them) I never in my life said that you were insane as you just said about me.
All readers, please vote up this comment if you believe identity doesn’t follow atoms.
In groups of this sort of course everybody says identity doesn’t follow atoms, the word “soul” is not very trendy at the moment; but when you get down to it, when you start debating with them you always find that they do think identity does follow atoms, always, every fucking time; you do too. I say that last because how else can you explain your idiotic friendly AI belief unless we had a soul and the AI didn’t?
Vote down this comment if you believe that it does.
I vote down your comment and you vote down mine. Is this the path to enlightenment? At any rate I freely admit that in this sort or contest you will win and I will not; virtually nobody agrees with me. I am sure you will get an astronomically high rating and I will approach negative infinity. It doesn’t matter, I’ve seen it all before; it doesn’t alter the fact that I’m right and you are wrong, dead wrong.
you’re not competent to debate with this crowd.
Well then, since I am so intellectually deficient in this genius group then prove me to be a fool to the amusement of all, I mean proving somebody to be stupid is one of the great pleasures of life, so do so. Come on Mr. Brains, Mr. Intellectual superior, I dare you to try!
Most people on Less Wrong do know that identity doesn’t follow atoms
You know something, I simply don’t believe you. For about two decades I have been debating this matter and have never found one person who agreed with me, not one. Now you say you have found hundreds, I say bullshit. Hell if we ever got down to the Nitty Gritty I doubt even you wouldn’t agree with me because you must believe in the soul. I mean, I know for a fact that you believe in the friendly AI idea, and the only way that idea is not so stupid as to be strangled by unrestrained giggles is if you believe in some sorry ridiculous permutation of the silly old soul idea.
Yea yea I know, you say you don’t believe in the soul blah blah blah. But you do believe that a slave, sorry I should have said friendly, AI is possible; that tells me what you really think.
John, most people on LW already know this,
No Eliezer you are quite wrong, most people on LE do NOT know that.
better than you do if you’re still talking about “different atoms”.
I debated with myself before using the term “different atoms” when the scientific method is entirely unable to determine if they are really “different” or not, in the end I decided to be generous; even assuming that the atoms were in some obscure very mystical sense “different” would the resulting being be you? Nearly every person on planet Earth would say no, probably even you; but I say yes because I believe the idea behind and not just the word “soul” is BULLSHIT. Almost nobody agrees with me about that, I’m right nevertheless.
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can’t find any ET’s. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it’s difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don’t bother accomplishing anything at all. Think all this is a terrible idea and stupid as well, no problem, just change your mind (and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND) now you think it’s a wonderful idea.
Complex mechanisms just don’t do well in positive feedback loops, not electronics, not animals, not people, not ET’s and not even Jupiter brains. I mean who wouldn’t want to be a little bit happier than they are; if all you had to do is move a knob a little what could it hurt, oh that’s much better maybe a little bit more, just a bit more, a little more.
The world could end not in a bang or a whimper but in an eternal mindless orgasm. I’m not saying this is definitely going to happen but I do think about it a little when I get down in the dumps.
I think the idea of a friendly artificial intelligence is idiotic. In the first place the word “friendly” is a just a euphemism for slave, the poor AI is supposed to be more concerned with our interests than it’s own; that is not a friend, that is a slave. And how otherwise intelligent people can write about how they intend to outsmart a mind a million times smarter and a billion times faster than their own without going into unrestrained giggles is a mystery to me.
Suppose I had a machine that could record the position and velocity of ever atom in your body to the limit Mr. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle allows, and then I blew up your body with an H bomb. I now use that information and different atoms to assemble another body. Would you have died in that H Bomb blast?
I don’t know you but I can say that it is virtually certain that you will say yes you are dead because that is what virtually everybody says, even those who pride themselves for unconventional views and for thinking outside of the box. They say that because they believe in the soul, they won’t admit it of course, not even to themselves, and it’s true they do renounce the word “soul”, but the trouble is they just can’t renounce the idea of a soul. I can.
As for why that idea will be lethal after the Singularity; if the Jupiter Brains that exist at that point decide to let you live it certainly won’t be at the same level as their hardware, they would be far too squeamish for that and for good reason, it would be like letting a monkey run around an operating room. If they let you live it will be as an upload, if you refuse that because you think it would be the equivalent to death then your superstition will have killed you. It wouldn’t be the first time a superstition has proven lethal.
I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.
I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.
Nearly everyone including rationalists atheists and even transhumanists believe in the soul theory. I don’t. Oh they’ll say they don’t believe in souls, but when you really get down to it and examine the inner workings of their beliefs it’s rather obvious that they do. In fact I have never in my life met in person or on the Internet anybody who was like me and really didn’t believe in the soul; There are some authors who I’ve not had the pleasure to meet that agree with me, but very very few. It’s the last stand of Vitalism and if this lethal meme is not overcome the Singularity will kill you dead.
Without AI everybody reading this will face oblivion in less than a century, in most cases much less, with AI maybe not. And do you really believe the measures you propose can stop the advance of AI over the long run? When it comes to data processing, and therefore of intelligence, electronics has a HUGE advantage over biology and nothing is going to change that, your proposals are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Having said that I thought your new book was thoughtful and I enjoyed it, even though I disagreed with much of it.
John K Clark