Do you sometimes feel you NEED to believe in something else out there in spite of being an atheist intellectually? (Christ, heaven)
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That's it, absolutely. It's like asking whether I feel the need to believe that there is an advanced civilization on Mars - someone we can talk to and advise with our problems - use a bit of advanced technology to help - just so we know we are not alone.
Put like that, it could sound like a real need we all have (if only Deep Down inside) or there is something wrong with us if we don't. But in fact there is no shred of evidence there is any such thing so the generality of us don't fret about it.
It's like that with the 'Something Out There' aka 'God'.
Yes, this is right. Humans are very needy, and have a very needy psychology. Have you heard of Transhumanism? A lot of people I've heard call themselves that, actually Hope and Yearn that the future will solve our problems. Like downloading minds into immortal computer data-bases, etc.
Yes, this is right. Humans are very needy, and have a very needy psychology. Have you heard of Transhumanism? A lot of people I've heard call themselves that, actually Hope and Yearn that the future will solve our problems. Like downloading minds into immortal computer data-bases, etc.
I had this rather nightmarish idea about uploading minds into computer data-bases.
How would we tell the difference between something that looks and acts like us and experiences the world around it...and something that looks and acts like us and does not experience the world around it?
What if sentience can only be formed of certain materials...like organic materials? What if we don't actually upload ourselves into computerized databases...but instead just make programs that act like ourselves?
What if it gains popularity and everybody slips out of their bodies into computerized databases...and the entire human species loses its sentience, but appears to act just like it always did. I can imagine one person left...living in a society of machines that act almost exactly like her old friends, and she has absolutely no idea the entire human species except her has turned itself into empty automatons
Yes, this is right. Humans are very needy, and have a very needy psychology. Have you heard of Transhumanism? A lot of people I've heard call themselves that, actually Hope and Yearn that the future will solve our problems. Like downloading minds into immortal computer data-bases, etc.
Transhumanism is a vague longing, just as I have a more defined longing for more secrets and mysteries to be answered, though, with atheism came the rationalist mindset that rather took the 'glass half full' attitude of being so delighted that so much was being discovered and answered. And of course, the immediate mission is to have a more irreligious global mindset where we find ways to sort our problems and don't keep on with the same ones.
In this kind of thinking, a hope for an afterlife is an idle mental indulgence, and wanting or needing a god to exist is really not there, in any way that I can feel.
What if it gains popularity and everybody slips out of their bodies into computerized databases...and the entire human species loses its sentience, but appears to act just like it always did.
How can the human race be acting "just like it always did" if they no longer have bodies?
What if sentience can only be formed of certain materials...like organic materials? What if we don't actually upload ourselves into computerized databases...but instead just make programs that act like ourselves?
The bigger question for me is that our sentience doesn't do well with sensory deprivation; it needs sensory input of a particular kind. We are optimized to operate with a particular kind of body. Perhaps the mind is more adaptable than we think, but if my awareness simply materialized in a computer with crude or zero ability to experience the world, I'd find it claustrophobic and probably go mad in a hurry. I would not want to spend my life interacting with text messages, essentially.
This is something that happens to me from time to time. Even though I "know" that atheism is probably the most intellectually honest position, I find that it does not always relieve anxiety and bring peace and happiness to the mind.
Can anyone else relate to this? If so, how have you reconciled this contradiction? Let's hear about your journey.
I'll be honest with you, I have found the exact opposite.
Although I have essentially always been an atheist, I spent the majority of my life 'sitting on the fence' - never wanting to commit fully to using the word 'atheist' until I was 100% sure.
I spent a long of time doing what a lot of people do, asking the big questions about life and 'what's it all about'?
When I finally ruled god out it was like a heavy weight being lifted or clouds parting to reveal a clear day. I don't know whether I'd say it brings happiness but it did bring a certain amount of peace. You stop trying to find blame for everything bad that happens. You realise that all of it is 'just life'. Much of it has no rhyme or reason. Much of it is just forces of nature and circumstance. Nobody to blame and nothing to get tied up in knots about - just acceptance that this is what life is.
The bigger question for me is that our sentience doesn't do well with sensory deprivation; it needs sensory input of a particular kind. We are optimized to operate with a particular kind of body. Perhaps the mind is more adaptable than we think, but if my awareness simply materialized in a computer with crude or zero ability to experience the world, I'd find it claustrophobic and probably go mad in a hurry. I would not want to spend my life interacting with text messages, essentially.
I agree with what you say...given what we currently know. However, I can certainly appreciate the essence of transhumanist fervor given that the ultimate objective is to transcend all that we currently "know", or can even currently envision/imagine. If your brain is attached/tailored to a synthetic/customized body that optimizes your own predilections--hell, could be amazing. What are the engineering limitations, though--that is what I have long suspected Kurzweil and the like to be underestimating when they issue their grandiose proclamations. The brain as an organ is still nowhere close to being understood--yet the Singularity can be forecasted for, eh, 2030? Yes, Moore's Law and the exponential increase in processing power and all that...maybe the brain (and lots of other things) are thus that close to being unraveled by AI. But then, what about the dangers inherent in developing AI that's capable of in turn developing the AI needed for this and other projects? Ultimately, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel confident saying that most AI researchers don't either, on the grand scale. This (transhumanism) is the one prospect that does ultimately have me "hopeful" (word isn't even close to being appropriate for the task here, especially given that overall I remain incredibly cynical, but...) for future developments.
The engineering innovations would seem to have to entail the creation of a "body" that fits the brain well enough to "trick" said brain into sentience while occupying a foreign space. The imaginable forms are many; function is the issue. Maybe Kurzweil and his ilk have this covered. Maybe they don't. Maybe they think they do and they don't. I don't have the technical wherewithal to speak to these topics, at all. I've long suspected though that the brain's actual physical attributes were being minimized when people would talk about "mapping consciousness into a computer" or whatever...as if that would be sufficient to "upload" our "self" into some other "immortal:" entity. ****, define all of your terms, please. No one even knows what entails consciousness. And I mean no one, on this planet, knows that at this very moment. Therefore I will continue to maintain that it's the height of presumptuousness to make any sort of prognostication about the imminence of the Singularity. Hear me, Ray?
Last edited by Matt Marcinkiewicz; 08-02-2014 at 11:49 PM..
I agree with what you say...given what we currently know. However, I can certainly appreciate the essence of transhumanist fervor given that the ultimate objective is to transcend all that we currently "know", or can even currently envision/imagine. If your brain is attached/tailored to a synthetic/customized body that optimizes your own predilections--hell, could be amazing. What are the engineering limitations, though--that is what I have long suspected Kurzweil and the like to be underestimating when they issue their grandiose proclamations. The brain as an organ is still nowhere close to being understood--yet the Singularity can be forecasted for, eh, 2030? Yes, Moore's Law and the exponential increase in processing power and all that...maybe the brain (and lots of other things) are thus that close to being unraveled by AI. But then, what about the dangers inherent in developing AI that's capable of in turn developing the AI needed for this and other projects? Ultimately, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel confident saying that most AI researchers don't either, on the grand scale. This (transhumanism) is the one prospect that does ultimately have me "hopeful" (word isn't even close to being appropriate for the task here, especially given that overall I remain incredibly cynical, but...) for future developments.
The engineering innovations would seem to have to entail the creation of a "body" that fits the brain well enough to "trick" said brain into sentience while occupying a foreign space. The imaginable forms are many; function is the issue. Maybe Kurzweil and his ilk have this covered. Maybe they don't. Maybe they think they do and they don't. I don't have the technical wherewithal to speak to these topics, at all. I've long suspected though that the brain's actual physical attributes were being minimized when people would talk about "mapping consciousness into a computer" or whatever...as if that would be sufficient to "upload" our "self" into some other "immortal:" entity. ****, define all of your terms, please. No one even knows what entails consciousness. And I mean no one, on this planet, knows that at this very moment. Therefore I will continue to maintain that it's the height of presumptuousness to make any sort of prognostication about the imminence of the Singularity. Hear me, Ray?
I am not an AI specialist but I am a software developer with an interest in AI and I would say you've hit the nail pretty squarely on the head.
There have been very interesting strides in understanding how the brain works in the past few years. There is an open source library written in the Python programming language that does a respectable job of simulating the human prefrontal cortex. We know what each cellular layer of that part of the brain is responsible for, how the basic feedback mechanisms work, and the interesting thing is that the software model has actually been useful in figuring out how the brain works because when it produces results at variance with an actual brain, it can be fiddled with until the outputs / responses match what is known from studying the actual brain.
One thing that has hampered progress in AI until now is that we have made the fundamental mistake of assuming that the human brain is a glorified digital (or perhaps analog) computer. It is not organized along those lines at all. And what should have tipped us off to that is that although the brain's "clock speed" is a tiny fraction of that of our best computers, our best computers have utterly failed to mimic its most rudimentary capabilities such as determining on the fly what physical movements must obtain in order to catch a ball being thrown at it. Somehow the brain does that perfectly with a bit of practice, whereas even clumsily approximating that feat would require the combined resources of our best supercomputer.
The secret appears to be that the brain is mostly a pattern-matching engine. The best AI work I have seen of late approaches it from this angle, with much better success.
All that said, we have a LONG way to go and we still don't know how learned patterns are stored, retrieved, and made integrated use of in the brain. Likely any computer successfully dedicated to either simulating or reproducing consciousness would be built very differently from current machines, even if we understood how to replicate or transfer the information out of a living brain. And it begs the question, if we could transfer it from a living brain to a computer, why not from one living brain to another? That form of biological immortality would probably involve growing fresh "blanks" to move into, they would likely be far better than non-biological media.
Here's the simple way to look at it: our best computers still experience the Blue Screen of Death, kernel panics, and various mystery lockups, and that's just running conventional software. I don't see such an environment as a refuge from mortality anytime soon. Heck, I can't even get my DVR to function correctly with a wired Internet connection!
There are things on the horizon like biological computing and quantum computing that could move us forward rapidly, but I can't see us being within less than a hundred years of Kurzweil's vision. Kurzweil's fundamental error is equating the availability of a given quantity of computing POWER with adequate knowledge of how to HARNESS and DIRECT that power, with sufficient reliability, and with an adequate understanding of the problem domain itself. The truth is that the computing power we have is, metaphorically speaking, all dressed up with nowhere to go when it comes to hosting human consciousness.
Given that consciousness / self awareness is probably an emergent property of a particular psycho-biological system, my guess is also that it will be difficult if not inherently impossible to corral it and send it down a wire to be reassembled elsewhere. It would be like scanning the sum total of human knowledge and transferring its morality someplace else. Morality has no meaning apart from society as currently expressed, and self awareness has no meaning apart from one's being as currently expressed. It is not a "thing" or particular pattern of inconvenienced electrons, like an email, that can be usefully copied.
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