shokwave comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 March 2013 10:45AM

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Comment author: shokwave 05 March 2013 09:17:16AM 16 points [-]

On consciousness:

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"

He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts

Comment author: MugaSofer 06 March 2013 09:53:32AM 6 points [-]

It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors

If it treats everything it sees as a cosmic-ray, it's a pretty terrible cosmic-ray sensor.

Comment author: Endovior 06 March 2013 08:54:58PM 3 points [-]

Not necessarily. Cosmic rays are just electromagnetic energy on particular (high) frequencies. So if it interprets everything along those lines, it's just seeing everything purely in terms of the EM spectrum... in other words 'normal, uninteresting background case, free of cosmic rays'. So things that don't trigger high enough to be cosmic rays, like itself, parse as meaningless random fluctuations... presumably, if it was 'intelligent', it would think that it existed for no reason, as a matter of random chance, like any other case of background radiation below the threshold of cosmic rays, without losing any ability to perceive or understand cosmic rays.

Comment author: MugaSofer 24 March 2013 05:49:57PM 0 points [-]

Scanning itself and saying "nope, nothing to see here", that's one thing. Scanning itself and saying "well, this is basically cosmic rays, only at a lower frequency ..." is closer to what the quote describes.

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