Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
It's a cool idea, but what?
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First, there is little agreement among scientists about exactly what information is. Second, when scientists refer to information they are often actually talking about the way energetic activity is organised in physical systems. Third, brain imaging techniques such as fMRI, PET and EEG don’t detect information in the brain, but changes in energy distribution and consumption.
Brains, I argue, are not squishy digital computers – there is no information in a neuron. Brains are delicate organic instruments that turn energy from the world and the body into useful work that enables us to survive. Brains process energy, not information.
Gonads.
That's like saying when I examine my computer all I can detect is heat, fans, air movement and a couple of lights, all of which is energy. Computers are therefore not actually computers.
The rest of the articles references some sense but pulls it together into an incoherent acid trip.
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Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
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But it was a memorable if unnerving experience during an LSD-induced trip that got me thinking.
Yeah, it's difficult to make sense of the freestyling word salad in that Frontiers article otherwise.
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Something it is like-ness is not in itself sufficient for consciousness. Rather it is to recognize that:
(i) energy, forces, and work are actualized,
(ii) they are expressions of difference, and
(iii) there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo actualized difference.
I use the term actualized difference to refer to the active, antagonistic nature of energy, forces and work in a way that encompasses Heraclitean cosmology, Aristotelian energeia, and contemporary scientific descriptions of energy.
Don't take it too seriously and instead appreciate it for its aesthetic value. He's an art professor after all.
Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
The only two things in the article (the Alternet one) that make sense are that 1. feedback is involved in some way and 2. for consciousness to exist whatever processing is going on has to be realized in a certain physical way. The rest is the author being confused about what energy means and turning it into his own idiosyncratic mush.
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The human brain consumes some 20% of the body’s total energy budget, despite accounting for only 2% of its mass. The brain is expensive to run. Most of the cost is incurred by neurons firing bursts of energetic difference in unthinkably complex patterns of synchrony and diversity across convoluted neural pathways.
No. Neurons don't fire energy anywhere. That's not how they work. In an electrical cable that is used to transmit a signal, there is real energy flux along the way. In a nerve it's more like a chain of dominoes falling, except one piece takes energy away from the next one. The little energy that actually travels along the axon actually travels backwards. What counts is the signal, the information, contrary to what the author claims. Then again, actualized differences, whatever they are, may behave differently. Who can tell?
Really good answers here. While I think you could simulate a brain using a binary system, the brain itself isn't. If you could see a 'control pannel' for your brain it would be tons and tons of dials. In the synaptic cleft, where lots of the magic happens it's a kind of complex place with transport molecules and receiver areas and the memories of previous activities encoded into those. Previous activity can get encoded into, and then cleared from neurons on a per neuron basis.
Not to mention that on larger structures brain signals are more like waves. There do seem to be frequency timing signals and sending on frequency will not only make a signal more noticed but recursion is common in the brain and on frequency recursion will help to amplify the signal. The timing of signals seems to be quite important to what other neurons they activate.
Finally of course is the reality that while we spend a lot of time thinking and reading a huge portion of the brain is for doing motor tasks and not accurate maths crunching for information.
Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
It's like dark Wally, man creates AI, AI finds man to be a pain in the ass when it came to its goal of... say, organizing all words ever printed or written in existence together in alphabetic order. The AI then creates a Wally like bot to organized and cube all items that aren't words into marked piles to make the search easier. At one point the AI realizes it can't complete its task if humans keep creating more written things and so creates a system to destroy or otherwise pacify humanity, doing a resource cost analysis that if the goal was the finish the task, it would need to reduce humans down to a size where it could organize faster than they could produce. Thousands of years later, the few humans left have died, the AI sits idle content in completing the task, ever watchful of new words and we're left with a bunch of complex AI bots who's goal it was to organize all material on earth that's not words and are no longer under control of the original AI.
Out there somewhere there's at least one planet who's surface is compacted burnt cubes and an extremely content AI on idle mode, with no other life.
Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
To add to that a little bit (maybe more than a little), I think right off the bat in the comparison between the two we need to recognize a few things, one being that the brain and a computer were developed for completely different reasons and problems, that they can delve into each others domains is amazing but isn't important to their main goals. A computer's base goal is to do math operations on data and store the results in a way that more math could be applied to them. A brain's base goal is to coordinate input and output in a way that keeps it alive a bit longer. A brain can certainly do math operations on data but that wasn't the point, and a computer can certainly use math operations to simulate how a brain functions but that again wasn't the point. Which is a lot to say that when you have something designed by evolution you have a combination of access to universal laws not yet fully understood but also a kind of organized chaos that might go down a sloppy or inefficient path because it worked well enough to survive.
I'm working on finding some pictures but virtually all drawings of synaptic gaps are deceptive. Everything is drawn too large, the gap itself is absolutely tiny, of course it has to be when you think about how quickly neurons can re polarize and fire again but most drawings give this impression that the neurotransmitter is just set adrift and it slowly floats its way over to the other side of the gap. At this size the entire concept of 'floating' is meaningless and it's a sea of electro chemical attractions and repulsions.
Chemistry that takes things from the nice binary of a synapse firing/or not to complex electrodynamic interactions. Certain receptors work quite a lot like a lock and key but that analogy is poor as some keys can unlock the receptor better than others and others can block the receptor off to prevent access. A big danger recently with synthetic cannabinoids is that they activate the receptors too well and stick around too long. THC is popular in part because it's a partial agonist, so it activates the cannabinoid networks but not all of them and not fully. Full or long term agonists can be useful in medicine but also quite dangerous if used improperly. (Many of the more dangerous hallucinogens do the same, or fuse with the binding site causing repeated activation over hours).
Just like gap drawing are deceptive, so are drawings of neurons that give the appearance of cabling that plug into each other. Each neuron links with another through an area of contact, sometimes with linking buds, but others like two roots next to each other, and in these contact areas are receptor sites that can be exposed, hidden, grow or die away. When scientists talk about strengthening connections in the brain they are sometimes talking about growth of these receptor spikes which better link the neurons (studies with Ketamine show in controlled use it could produce increased growth of certain spikes). In just the opposite case, certain excessive uses of drugs can cause an overflow of stimulating chemicals which when over time shows the neuron it doesn't need as many receptors to be easily activated and becomes dependent on that high base line of the neurotransmitter.
Beyond that is the chemical brain, which we know little about. Glial cells, once thought just to be helpers, appear to also communicate through chemical releases and exactly what is being communicated we don't really know. This would be just an interesting foot note if the neuron gaps weren't chemically organized, but they are. People talk about neurotransmitters like they have properties, 'serotonin is the happy chemical' 'dopamine a reward chemical' etc. but none of these chemicals *do* anything themselves. They can only be labeled as such because certain networks rely heavily on certain neurotransmitters and thus networks are partly mapped out and stamped by how they interact with different chemical transmitters. But of course this is evolution and why use two things when you have something laying around, so neurotransmitters are used for multiple disparate networks. Serotonin for example is used heavily by your gut and your blood vessels. It's ability to cause your veins and blood vessels to contract and cause severe pain is why it's often part of scorpion venom. Ironically the happy chemical doesn't always make you that happy.
In the same way that you can choose to alter your neuron interactions through drugs, this glia network can alter your brain with surgical precision. A big question going into copying consciousness into a computer is how much of "you" is in the glia cell network. It's entirely possible that one day we duplicate someone's neural network and discover it's lacking some firmware.
That doesn't mean we aren't due for an upgrade, neurons are slow! One of the biggest advantages a computer simulation or cybernetic systems will have is that compared to computer signals, ours move at such slow rates a processor would be waiting ages just to get the relevant data.
I'm not sure the acting should win any awards, but the stereotyped viewpoints are reasonable representations and some of the quotes are gold. Gold, of course, is going to be valueless.
Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
Have I told you about the robot accident I saw at a trade show, many years ago?
The robot manufacturers had set up a nice demo that was drawing the crowds. The robot first opened a fridge door, reached into the fridge and took out a can of beer.
The robot wasn't smart enough to pull the ring pull on the can (this was a long time ago) but the manufacturers had rigged up a station where the robot put the can down and a punch came down and punctured two holes in the can top. While the punch was doing its thing the robot closed the fridge door.
The robot then picked up the can and carefully poured the beer into a waiting glass, threw the can in the trash and moved the glass over and put it down on a table, ready for a member of the viewing public to pick up and drink.
The robot was clever enough to index its way through maybe twenty cans of beer in the fridge, and pick up a fresh glass from a stack of glasses during each cycle.
As you can imagine, it was a very popular exhibit, with the public marvelling at the robot's cleverness and queuing up to get a free beer.
It was all going great until someone opened one of the big doors of the exhibition hall, and a gust of wind blew the fridge door closed at the wrong moment. The robot arm then punched a hole through the fridge door, picked up a can and the fridge too and carried the wrecked fridge over towards the hole punch. At this point someone was smart enough to hit the emergency stop before any more damage could be done!
Re: Ensign Steve waxes philosophical on the Singularity, a thrad by Ensign Steve
I'm beginnig to think that God is an endless computer program.
what kind of thing can conceptualize light when there was none? that's God. in the first moment there was absolute darkness followed by all light to see it. Black and white. Alpha and Omega. One and Zero.