The Evolution of Human Consciousness and the Idea of the Technological Singularity

[Blowtus]

More difficult for me to comment as I am no chess grand master and am unfamiliar with their strategy... but your last paragraph seems to cover it. We just haven't programmed them well enough, which I imagine is because we don't understand the logic of the strategy well enough. The grand masters can use it, but can they spell it out effectively? It seems not. Like riding a bike, compared to knowing which neurons to fire to move which muscle groups at what time

The whole discussion of 'context free' seems irrelevant to any understanding of intelligence - brute number crunching may give a semblance of intelligence at times, but without effective and adaptive heuristics then it's only ever a semblance, imho...
Does Dreyfus supply an argument for the claim that programs can never become more precise and capable than a human?

 

[Einherjar86]

Unfortunately I'm still working my way through his book. He may provide a solid argument towards its conclusion, but as of right now I've yet to come across one.

I appreciate your comments and thoughts man, I'll post more when I reach the next stage or step in Dreyfus's argument. Most of the stuff he's saying now seems pretty rudimentary (I'm not yet halfway through the book).

 

[Blowtus]

Cool It's something I find pretty interesting, as I do think there are some massive choices and effects to come...

 

[Dak]

I think the root of the problem is that since Humans are organic and potentially have a soul, or whatever you want to call the inner thinking, unique part of your psychy, we process stuff in an organic way (for lack of a better way to explain it), which will be difficult to cross over into something that totally functions on 1s and 0s.

 

[Einherjar86]

That is a potential argument, although Dreyfus makes a point (at least so far) to never use the words "soul" or "emotion" or anything like that.

I recently read another interesting book called Neuropath that basically breaks the human brain down to nothing more than a computer, and argues that everything we feel (such as emotions, urges, etc.) are not "human" at all, but merely inherent evolutionary traits; biological programming, if you will. So therefore, the brain itself is nothing more than a computer.

In order to counter this, an argument needs to be made that human brains actually do work in a fundamentally different way than computers. I hope that Dreyfus provides such an argument in his book, but until then all I have to offer is that human experiences are what distinguish us from computers. I know that Blowtus suggested that a computer can easily be programmed with perceived "experiences;" but I think the fact that human beings can actually recognize that they experienced an event in a given moment of time sets them apart. An event is not programmed into them; they witness it.

However, a counter-argument to this might be that the witnessing of an event is no more than a programming of sorts. Perhaps when a piece of information is programmed into a computer, the computer perceives it as its own "experience."

 

[Blowtus]

I think the root of the problem is that since Humans are organic and potentially have a soul, or whatever you want to call the inner thinking, unique part of your psychy, we process stuff in an organic way (for lack of a better way to explain it), which will be difficult to cross over into something that totally functions on 1s and 0s.

My computers hard drive is different to yours, yeah?


Einherjer - re the experience of events, I agree that at present we are fundamentally different to computers, though I do think we could one day give them the eyes, ears, and experiences you speak of. Even without such 'human-esque' experience, I think they can exhibit advanced intelligence - if not now then some day.

 

[razoredge]

I think Laural and Hardy could easily blow a computers mind.

The deal is, the geneticly fit human functions for 60+ years on food and water, our fuel. A computer is nothing but a man-made piece of electrical garbage that has a high maintenence, finicky life span of less than 10 years.

A computer cant fuck me, it cant play the blues, and cant go for walks in the woods.

The computer is no match for man. I can throw a computer into a fire and not feel a thing, I can touch 110 or 220 voltage to its man-made little circuts and fry its brain and not feel a thing. I could not do any of this to most people and not feel a thing. The computer is nothing more than mankinds most recent slave, a tool... anything man-made can be destroyed faster than it is built... so sadly techies need to face the facts that their technology is highly vulnerable to failure and not all that imnpressive in the grand scheme of things.