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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
let's say we are robots. i talk about this in some degree in my last blog, how the forces of physics conspire to form our bodies and consciousnesses.
unfortunately i do not possess a soul noble enough to adequately understand our models of the neuron. i understand that we are very different from modern computers, but it could be that modern computers are comically primitive compared to us. we've been shaped with less engineering direction and de-bugging than say an iphone, but it's been over an incomprehensible amount of time. blah blah blah, you guys know evolution.
so then, let's talk about my cute stupid dog. she is a machine designed for absorbing nutrients, maintaining homeostasis, procreating, and depositing waste. even does the doggy butt wipe on the grass/carpet. her visual perception arises from processing data from individual photoreceptors, which when firing and considered en masse allow for things like edge detection and horizontal/vertical movement detection and color and all this wild shit. it's not perfect - she has been observed in the relative wild of our backyard to confuse deer poop with dog food - but the basic concept is good enough to have lasted tens of thousands of years. self-replicating computers, what the FUCK, nature. unbelievable.
locomotion, self-repair, temperature control, cross-platform communication, onboard navigation, memory banks, can process variable fuel sources (even tomatoes?!), basic weaponry, 0% apr financing
so, yeah, fuck yeah we're computers. we can google things in our heads. we can do limited arithmetic and logical operations. our consciousness is like the admiral/president-elect of some huge terrestrial mecha. earth is our spaceship. our thought processes are like committees and subcommittees, pacs and superpacs and congresses and senates all petitioning at once in your mental government for your attention.
- "hi! the Committee for Large-Scale Reproduction has decided that we will go talk to that prospective mating partner."
- "wait sir hold on a second, the Institute for Group Selection says that that's your favorite sibling's love interest and that there is a huge opportunity cost if we fight over this particular mate."
- "the right hand's representative labor union wants to pass a law forbidding us from punching holes in windows after losing in computer games. also they want to cosponsor a bill with the National Sexual Satisfaction Library to make the left hand take masturbation duties sometimes, because it gets old."
sometimes the machinations of our fictional mental government decide things without our knowledge. makes sense - i doubt obama is aware of everything going on in his government. for the most part, our brain cells are the upper class, literally, in our bodies. yeah, some neurons have to spend their lives controlling your anus sphincters, but at least it's in the comfort of your head. they're not the actual cells touching the gloop.
a shaky visual approximation via a few milliseconds' worth of light of a sight "i" encountered while on a roadtrip
wow that took a long time. now to the actual point i wanted to make. if we are machines, then in the perspective of the universe, we are a bunch of nanomachines. generations of human life can be seen as little nanobots making new baby nanobots with basic physical homo sapiens template, filling them with data from previous expeditions, and them sending them off on their own in search of more data. the original ones die off. some of us are the anal sphincters of this nanobot society, some are the brains, some are genitals. but most of it is needed.
over time, what data we have collected has more and more become "common" human memory. first via our senses, like through observation learning and conditioning. then language and art and print. books and punchcards and 8inch floppies. photos. hard drives and flash drives and the internet. these are all in some sense external memory storage devices - this information exists outside of our heads. and all the while, our brains have been more or less the same basic model. there are some differences, like how ancient greeks were mostly colorblind, but overall we can process lots of stuff on same incredibly energy efficient hardware platform.
a ship of theseus problem arises as we begin to accrue more and more information - same data, different brains processing it all. wikipedia is the compendium of the best human thoughts, and its existence allows for many brains to think the same things. one day maybe everything we do will be streamed and saved and pass-on-able, terabytes of information from each human life.
if we are to believe memory shapes personality, as our species' memory develops so too will its distinct individual personality. like skin cells, generations of us perform our functions and then die off. individual computing units working together to document the nature of the universe. starting from the earliest hunter/gatherers figuring out how to feed themselves and teaching their kids. like the first group of mankind to manipulate fire and pass it on.
humanity right now is like a child with the maturity of my dog, sometimes eating poo and sometimes spreading it in inappropriate places. we have an autoimmune disorder where masses of our cells attack other masses, and our waste deposits poison/clog our literal bloodstreams, the lakes and rivers whose water courses through our veins. our decision making parts in the executive function areas suffers from PTSD and stupidity, especially in the part of our nervous system called the 112th congress. maybe one day we'll be housetrained and self-sufficient without being totally vile. as our species consciousness is a sum of each individual's own, we need to encourage and nurture traits in others that we'd like to see be represented as humanity ages.
we can see being a member on teamliquid.net as being a member in one of the neuronal networks responsible for processing specific forms of play. we process the shit out of sc2 and mining rates and micro and macro. as cognition is the result of a endless feedback loops, we each all have our other functions in daily life and other networks we belong to, some more fiercely than the others. but here we handle how to handle blows to your ego, how to be clutch, how to overcome another opponent given equal starting conditions. we can improve our reaction time, better our grasp of strategy, practice eye-hand coordination. we are cells performing maintenance and stress tests.
like each single human, one day our species will die off. by then i hope we can ship all our knowledge in a compatible format to another alien race consciousness to process, thus continuing the universe's investigation of itself.
 
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I don't know what to say. I'm just really interessted in these thoughts.
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On August 08 2012 07:30 intrigue wrote:
like each single human, one day our species will die off. by then i hope we can ship all our knowledge in a compatible format to another alien race consciousness to process, thus continuing the universe's investigation of itself.
and we will name that ark Flash
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What a dark, cold way of approaching humanity. Shame you didn't mention emotions once, being the opposite of logic (something you seem to be trying to apply without a real logicial structure).
Can i ask you what your main goal in life is?
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Love the writing but couldn't disagree more with the content.
Sure, there might be some similarities in how human consciousness arises from individual building blocks and how our "common consciousness" works or might work in the future.
But it's easy to forget that our (and our pets') consciousness was formed by evolution. More specifically natural selection. If the neurons of an individual couldn't work together it didn't have a future.
If there's no selective pressure there's no incentive towards real species-level coordination. And if there is humans are more likely to just die out than to be the one specimen who happened to survive the challanges of the grim reaper euphemistically called evolution.
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Canada6688 Posts
i am one of those who believe all species form a super organism. while humans, etc, are not as specialized or structured as insect societies, the very concept of continued survival of the species over the individual defines this, very much as the little parts of the human body try to keep the whole being alive.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
On August 08 2012 08:04 supervizor wrote:
What a dark, cold way of approaching humanity. Shame you didn't mention emotions once, being the opposite of logic (something you seem to be trying to apply without a real logicial structure).
Can i ask you what your main goal in life is?
oh erm i'm actually a really happy person and i wanna make beautiful things for a living! =)
i don't mention emotions much because that's what i do in the rest of my posts...
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On August 08 2012 08:04 supervizor wrote:
What a dark, cold way of approaching humanity. Shame you didn't mention emotions once, being the opposite of logic (something you seem to be trying to apply without a real logicial structure).
Can i ask you what your main goal in life is?
I think thinking like this is the only way to AVOID approaching things in a dark and cold way...
Really, this sort of realization is the precondition of ethical thought.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
On August 08 2012 08:14 hypercube wrote:
Love the writing but couldn't disagree more with the content.
Sure, there might be some similarities in how human consciousness arises from individual building blocks and how our "common consciousness" works or might work in the future.
But it's easy to forget that our (and our pets') consciousness was formed by evolution. More specifically natural selection. If the neurons of an individual couldn't work together it didn't have a future.
If there's no selective pressure there's no incentive towards real species-level coordination. And if there is humans are more likely to just die out than to be the one specimen who happened to survive the challanges of the grim reaper euphemistically called evolution.
the internet leads towards species-level coordination, look at the phenomenon of wikis or internet bandwagons. or great ideas. we also have governments or companies or whatever organizations that someday won't be led by idiots. as long as people are dying and having asymmetrical # of offspring, isn't there always some form of selective pressure?
if we mess up the planet enough we're going to have to all work closer together to survive man-caused natural disasters and nuclear apocalypses.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
hoped to soften that sentence lol
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On August 08 2012 13:04 intrigue wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2012 08:14 hypercube wrote:
Love the writing but couldn't disagree more with the content.
Sure, there might be some similarities in how human consciousness arises from individual building blocks and how our "common consciousness" works or might work in the future.
But it's easy to forget that our (and our pets') consciousness was formed by evolution. More specifically natural selection. If the neurons of an individual couldn't work together it didn't have a future.
If there's no selective pressure there's no incentive towards real species-level coordination. And if there is humans are more likely to just die out than to be the one specimen who happened to survive the challanges of the grim reaper euphemistically called evolution. the internet leads towards species-level coordination, look at the phenomenon of wikis or internet bandwagons. or great ideas. we also have governments or companies or whatever organizations that someday won't be led by idiots. as long as people are dying and having asymmetrical # of offspring, isn't there always some form of selective pressure? if we mess up the planet enough we're going to have to all work closer together to survive man-caused natural disasters and nuclear apocalypses.
That might be true but it's a very different process than neurons coordinating to control an organism. Neurons coordinate well because the configurations that didn't died out. Which was the vast majority.
The problem is that it's not the dumb neurons that died out creating an organism that could then function properly. It's the organism itself that perished but because there was many of these organisms some managed to survive even at such complex levels as humans. In the modern world there's really only one collection of humans. There's no evolution through natural selection. There's only extinction or survival.
If humanity will survive it is precisely because the collection of sentient beings is different from a collection of dumb neurons. That's why our odds as a species is probably higher than that of a random hominid's who was trying to come to terms with all the different desires and voices going on in her head.
But on the whole I'm pessimistic. Having billions of humans who can each change the course of history is as much a curse as a blessing. Sir Martin Rees has been making this point for years. We'll reach a point in history when millions of people will have the power to destroy humanity, or at least have a shot at it. I can't really see a flaw in his argument.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
i don't think what we're saying is really different. using your analogy if we look at individual humans capable of destroying humanity (oil barons, military leaders, charming sociopath leaders) and equate them to faulty neurons, our meta-organism also dies.
i'm also considering this on an absurd timescale where humanity will eventually run into challenges. it could be resistance to a virus or better suitability for a 95% water planet or better radiation damage repair mechanisms.
the similarity between a human being and a neuron seems insulting but on a larger timeframe i don't think it's that far off. an action potential can be likened to, say, a vote for some presidential candidate. ions crossing membranes is the flow of material through a human digestive system. they're clearly not perfect comparisons but i find them very interesting.
if you think about all the research in every university lab taking place right now on this planet, this planet is performing parallel processing like the human brain. from the perspective of a completely alien race we may appear to possess a spherical green and blue and white torso. we have telescopes and people who man them and people who make scientific press releases and the media that alerts the rest of us.
lawyers are like dna polymerase that prevent transcription errors. prisons are like waste vacuoles.
i have a cool scifi idea where we start exporting our consciousnesses into machines and in turn machines start reprogramming our brains to clean out outdated vestigial instincts. then they upload their data banks back into our biological platforms. after all, we're incredibly efficient. things like empathy and solidarity and all the wonderful human qualities will remain and we'll excise the shitty ones!
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On August 09 2012 02:14 intrigue wrote:
i don't think what we're saying is really different. using your analogy if we look at individual humans capable of destroying humanity (oil barons, military leaders, charming sociopath leaders) and equate them to faulty neurons, our meta-organism also dies.
Add disgruntled scientists or grad students, programmers or lower level military personel. MAD worked because at any time there were only 2 people who could make it a reality. What if 10 million people had the same option? Would you trust every single one of them to act rationally?
i have a cool scifi idea where we start exporting our consciousnesses into machines and in turn machines start reprogramming our brains to clean out outdated vestigial instincts. then they upload their data banks back into our biological platforms. after all, we're incredibly efficient. things like empathy and solidarity and all the wonderful human qualities will remain and we'll excise the shitty ones!
Yeah, I don't think people would support that.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
of course not. i'm really pessimistic about the present and next few hundreds to thousands of years too. i think huge swaths of humanity will be wiped out in that time frame. but if we make it out of those millenia and preserve a history of humanity now perhaps our descendants can learn from it.
found a really cool quote from rees
I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead--for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.
fun stuff to wonder about, huh 
i think we're super lucky to be alive at this particular point in human history. what comforts and indulgences! a little earlier and a little later and we might have had terrible lives.
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Have you read Calculating God or the WWW trilogy by Robert J Sawyer. The guy has a lot of very interesting ideas on game theory and conciousness. If this sort of stuff interests you read those books. They're fascinating and actually really entertaining at the same time. He disguises all this psychology theory with just plain good writing.
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some very deep and interesting metaphysical/physics/engineering/artificial intelligence/neuroscience related musings. will read when i have more time
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I was just at a conference with Robert Sawyer, he seemed like an interesting enough dude although I haven't read his books
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Q3dJd.jpg)
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