"Singularity or Bust" full documentary

Torello

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/11/singularity-or-bust-.html

I've never heard of this before, and have only watched 7 minutes so far, but I'd imagine many people here would be interested in this video.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/11/singularity-or-bust-.html

I've never heard of this before, and have only watched 7 minutes so far, but I'd imagine many people here would be interested in this video.

Argument from incredulity? Really?

No, not really. I don't feel I have confuted Goertzel because I cannot believe his position. See below.

It's a genuine philosophical position, and one with a long tradition in the reductionist philosophy of mind.

Yeah, but that doesn't make it any less silly.

If you don't believe that a coin (or to use the more typical example, a thermostat) can have epsilon consciousness, then where do you draw the line? What does a conscious system have to have that, if you were to take it away the system would suddenly become inert and without a subjective experience of existence?

Well, I cannot describe exactly what a system must be configured to say that it is conscious, but I can certainly draw a line on having a cognitive system (that is, a system for perceiving, elaborating and storing information). Mind you, that is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.
If you take away the brain out of a human, it becomes a thing, like a rock or a thermostat.

Positing that all things - all! - are conscious to varying degrees dependent on their informational complexity and structural pattern is an attempt to dissolve the mysterious question of what grants us awareness in the first place.

If you conflate consciousness with informational complexity, then you can do away with the term and just call it complexity. It doesn't make consciousness any less mysterious, it just sweeps the problem of what differentiate a human from a coin under the rug.

Well, I cannot describe exactly what a system must be configured to say that it is conscious, but I can certainly draw a line on having a cognitive system (that is, a system for perceiving, elaborating and storing information).

A thermostat has these properties. So does a coin or rock too, if you look at it from the perspective of having vibrational modes, electric potentials & eddy currents, stored potential and spatial configuration with respect to, say, a gravitational field. It's a bit more of a stretch than a thermostat (as we tend to mentally a... (read more)