“A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—” On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics.” The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!” --- The Primitive Expounder in 1847
summerstay
I find David Chalmers’s explanation of what is meant by “qualia” and “subjective experience” and “something its like to be” the easiest to understand. For example, read the first chapter of The Conscious Mind.
The Knowledge Argument above refers to the fictional story of Mary the color scientist. She was raised in a black and white environment and never saw color. But she read textbooks on color theory (printed in black and white, of course.) The question is, when she finally experiences the color blue, how is that different from the previous knowledge she had about what the color blue would be like? That different extra aspect to the actual experience is what we refer to as qualia, and how such an experience can be caused by physical processes is (in Chalmers’s terminology that has now been widely adopted) the Hard Problem.
Have you ever heard of musical frission? Sometimes you hear a piece of music resolve, and it feels right, and that rightness makes you feel pleasure, sometimes described as a chill running down your spine. You can get the same emotion from learning a new idea that overturns a lot of what you knew and inspires a manic rush of ideas. Or if you’ve been in a room full of people listening to a speaker seriously talk about a deeply personal experience, the room gets totally quiet and you realize that everyone in the room is feeling the same things as you at the same time. These are the kinds of experiences people describe as feeling the spirit. It’s an intense feeling that something is true, and good, and important.
Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself… we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves...
There is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.
-- Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines 1863
I’m guessing you mean Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon. More a horror book than a rational extrapolation of future human evolution. For a great early attempt at this kind of thing, take a look at Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, published in 1930.
I don’t expect that humans, on meeting aliens, would try to impose our ethical standards on them. We generally wouldn’t see their minds as enough like ours to see their pain as real pain. The reason I think this is that very few people think we should protect all antelopes from lions, or all dolphins from sharks. So the babyeater dillemma seems unrealistic to me.
Maybe the antelope was a bad example because they aren’t intelligent enough or conscious in the right way to deserve our protection. So let’s limit the discussion to dolphins. There are people who believe that humans killing dolphins is murder, that dolphins are as intelligent as people, just in a different way. Whether or not you agree with them, my point is that even these people don’t advocate changing how the dolphins live their lives, only that we as humans shouldn’t harm them. I imagine our position with aliens would be similar: for humans to do them harm is morally wrong for humans, but they have their own way of being and we should leave them to find their own way.
Dolphins do in fact engage in infanticide, among other behaviors we would consider evil if done by a human. But no one suggests we should be policing them to keep this from happening.
Summa Theologica is a good example of what happens when you have an excellent deductive system (Aquinas was great at syllogisms) and flawed axioms (a literal interpretation of the Bible).
This kind of attitude is common among my friends who are more technical, but it can really damage communications with most people. “You’re an idiot” doesn’t just communicate “you’re wrong” it says that you lack the ability to think at all, so all of your conclusions, whether related to this subject at all, are worthless. A good friend might take that in the way you intend, but there’s no reason anyone else should. What is being called a Dark Art is something that Hermione would use; something that shows that you care about the other person’s feelings, that you want to avoid causing pain where you can. It’s a kindness. Sure, most of us can handle rough sports like intellectual boxing when we know what we’re getting into, but most people aren’t expecting to be sparring in a conversation.
No effect from practice? How would the necessary mental structures get built for the mapping from the desired sound to the finger motions for playing the violin? Are you saying this is all innate? What about language learning? Anyone can write like Shakespeare in any language without practice? Sorry, I couldn’t believe it even if such an AI told me that.
One book that takes a very mechanical approach to story plot is Dramatica Theory (free, online, see link below). If I were to try to write a program to write fiction, I’d start with this and see what I could automate.
http://www.dramatica.com/theory/theory_book/dtb.html
cultureulterior is talking about plots to overthrow governments.
Fawlty Towers is a good example of the understated and deadpan nature of British comedy.
I’m kidding, by the way. Anyone who has seen it would know that it has a lot of broad slapstick humor.
When we exert willpower or mental effort, it uses up glucose from the blood in the brain. One way you could explain the exhaustion that comes from using magic is that it requires mental effort to the point of creating dangerously low levels of blood sugar in the brain.
I was thinking the same thing. The things he thinks should be obvious by now (such as the quirrel/voldemort connection) ought to be made explicit in an appropriate point-of-view so we can puzzle over the things that he wants the reader to be puzzling over.
Oh, it’s not so bad a quote. If we define sanity around here as being more Bayesian (that’s the waterline we’re trying to raise, right?) then defining insanity as refusal to update when more data comes would make sense.
There are very few people who would have understood in the 18th century, but Leibniz would have understood in the 17th. He underestimated the difficulty in creating an AI, like everyone did before the 1970s, but he was explicitly trying to do it.
Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is playing god here?
Craig Venter: Oh… we’re not playing.
I think he’s saying that there are only two ways to live consistent with the world as it is, and they are identical except that the second includes the sense of awe or wonder. It’s a miracle (a wonder, unexplained) that anything exists at all. Religion that believes only some things are miracles is not either of the ways he supports.