= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MatthewB comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (725)
There are several that I've wondered about:
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.
Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes's theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)
Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.
Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they're taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.
I've noticed that some of the Pacific Island countries don't have much in the way of sexual taboos, and they tend to teach their kids things like:
or
Japan is also a country that has few sexual taboos (when compared to western Christian society). They still have their taboos and strangeness surrounding sex, but it is not something that is considered sinful or dirty
I am really interested in that last suggestion, and it sounds like one of the areas I want to explore when I get to grad school (and beyond). At Eliezer's talk at the first Singularity Summit (and other talks I have heard him give) he speaks of a possible mind space. I would like to explore that mind space further outside of the human mind.
As John McCarthy proposed in one of his books. It might be the case that even a thermostat is a type of a mind. I have been exploring how current computers are a type of evolving mind with people as the genetic agents. we take things in computers that work for us, and combine those with other things, to get an evolutionary development of an intelligent agent.
I know that it is nothing special, and others have gone down that path as well, but I'd like to look into how we can create these types of minds biologically. Is it possible to create an alien mind in a human brain? Your 4th suggestion seems to explore this space. I like that (I should up vote it as a result)