The ancients considered everything to be the work of spirits. The medievals considered the cosmos to be a kingdom. Early moderns likened the universe to a machine. Every age has its dominant metaphors. All of them are oversimplifications of a more complex truth.
Suppose you had an identical twin with identical genes and, until very recently, an identical history. From the perspective of anyone else, you're similar enough to be interchangeable with each other. But from your perspective, the twin would be a different person.
The brain is you, full stop. It isn't running a computer program; its hardware and software are inseparable and developed together over the course of your life. In other words, the hardware/software distinction doesn't apply to brains.
To call something an "uploaded brain" is to make two claims. First, that it is a (stable) mind. Second, that it is in some important sense equivalent to a particular meat brain (e.g., that its output is the same as the meat brain, or that its experiences are the same as the meat brain's). The sorts of methods you're talking about to stabilize the mind help with the first claim, but not with the second.
I've always struggled to make sense of the idea of brain uploading because it seems to rely on some sort of dualism. As a materialist...
What if there would never be someone I trusted who could tell me I was Good Enough, that things were in some sense Okay?
The internalized feeling that you're not okay is a huge part of what motivates you to become better. If you lost it, you would be much more likely to become complacent and stagnate. Both inner peace and relentless drive are profoundly valuable, but they are mutually exclusive.
I certainly agree that brains are complicated.
I think part of the difference is that I'm considering the uploading process; it seems to me that you're skipping past it, which amounts to assuming it works perfectly.
Consider the upload of Bob the volunteer. The idea that software = Bob is based on the idea that Bob's connectome of roughly 100 trillion synapses is accurately captured by the upload process. It seems fairly obvious to me that this process will not capture every single synapse with no errors (at least in early versions). It wil...
Surely both (1) and (2) are true, each to a certain extent.
Are the random thermal fluctuations pushing me around somehow better than the equally random measurement errors pushing my soft-copy around?
It depends. We know from experience how meat brains change over time. We have no idea how software brains change over time; it surely depends on the details of the technology used. The changes might be comparable, but they might be bizarre. The longer you run the program, the more extreme the changes are likely to be.
I can't rule it out either. Nor can I rule it in. It's conceivable, but there are enough issues that I'm highly skeptical.
Let's try again. Chaotic systems usually don't do exactly what you want them to, and they almost never do the right thing 1000 times in a row. If you model a system using ordinary modeling techniques, chaos theory can tell you whether the system is going to be finicky and unreliable (in a specific way). This saves you the trouble of actually building a system that won't work reliably. Basically, it marks off certain areas of solution space as not viable.
Also, there's Lavarand. It turns out that lava lamps are chaotic.
Any physical system has a finite amount of mass and energy that limit its possible behaviors. If you take the log of (one variable of) the system, its full range of behaviors will use fewer numbers, but that's all that will happen. For example, the wind is usually between 0.001 m/s (quite still) and 100 m/s (unprecedented hurricane). If you take the base-10 log, it's usually between -3 and 2. A change of 2 can mean a change from .001 to .1 m/s (quite still to barely noticeable breeze) or a change from 1 m/s to 100 m/s (modest breeze...
Consider - A typical human brain has ~100 trillion synapses. Any attempt to map it would have some error rate. Is it still "you" if the error rate is .1%? 1%? 10%? Do positive vs. negative errors make a difference (i.e. missing connections vs. spurious connections)?
Is this a way to get new and exciting psychiatric disorders?
I don't know the answers, or even how we'd try to figure out the answers, but I don't want to spend eternity as this guy.
an exponential decrease in measurement error will only buy you a linear increase in how long that simulation is good for.
True, and in the real world attempts to measure with extreme precision eventually hit limits imposed by quantum mechanics. Quantum systems are unpredictable in a way that has nothing to do with chaos theory, but that cashes out to injecting tiny amounts of randomness in basically every physical system. In a chaotic system those tiny perturbations would eventually have macroscopic effects, even in the absence of any other sources of error.
The seminal result for chaos theory came from weather modeling. An atmospheric model was migrated to a more powerful computer, but it didn't give the same results as it had on the old computer. It turned out that, in the process of migration, the initial condition data had been rounded to the eighth decimal place. The tiny errors compounded into larger errors, and over the course of an in-model month the predictions completely diverged. An error in the eighth decimal place is roughly comparable to the flap of a butterfly's wing, whi...
I don't want to live in a world where there's only the final survivors of selection processes who shrug indifferently when asked why we don't revive all the beings who were killed in the process which created the final survivors.
If you could revive all the victims of the selection process that brought us to the current state, all the crusaders and monarchists and vikings and Maoists and so, so many illiterate peasant farmers (on much too little land because you've got hundreds of generations of them at once, mostly with ideas that make Putin look like Soni...
Almost everyone believes one and only one of the following statements:
Logically, these statements have nothing to do with each other. Either, neither, or both could be correct (I suspect neither). They are, in the words of the post, questionable assumptions.
See also Beyond the Peak – Ecosophia and Germany's economy strugg...
Actually ideal:
Now you're getting it. The world can't be fixed. It can't even be survived. But it can be a nice place to live.
The worst people in the world, the Stalins and the Osama bin Ladens, try to be heroes but they're as flawed as anyone else. If they start to succeed those flaws can manifest in horrifying ways. They often destroy imperfect but necessary things in attempts to build perfect things that can't exist, like true Communism or functional political Islam. Humility and temperance are called heavenly virtues for a reason.
That even though I decided that my morality would never demand that I be a hero... there nonetheless just isn't a coherent, enduring shape that fits my soul that doesn't make that the thing I ultimately want for myself.
Reading that, I'm not sure whether you're grieving because you've given up on that belief or because it's true. I hope the former. The desire to be a hero is dangerous - a hero needs villains. As Nietzsche said, he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't do...
I think you're onto something. I think, for this purpose, "child" means anyone who doesn't know enough about the topic to have any realistic chance at successful innovation. A talented 16 year old might successfully innovate in a field like music or cooking, having had enough time to learn the basics. When I was that age kids occasionally came up with useful new ideas in computer programming, but modern coding seems much more sophisticated. In a very developed field, one might not be ready to innovate until several years into gradua...
A child who's educated in a Salafi school has two choices - become a Salafi or become a failed Salafi. One of those is clearly better than the other. Salafis, like almost every adult, know how to navigate their environment semi-successfully and the first job of education is to pass on that knowledge. It would better if the kid could be given a better education, but the kid won't have much control over that (and wouldn't have the understanding to choose well). Kids are ignorant and powerless; that's not a function of any particular politic...
I think there are more limits than that because plausibility matters. The set of positions Ibram X Kendi could plausibly take is very different from the positions available to Donald Trump. Too big a reach and you'll look insincere, opportunistic, or weak. It's easy to alienate your social coalition and much harder to gain acceptance in a new one.
You seem to be steering in the direction of postmodernism, which starts with the realization that there are many internally consistent yet mutually exclusive ways of modeling the world. Humility won't solve that problem, but neither will a questioning mindset.
Every intellectual dead-end was once the product of a questioning mind. Questioning is much more likely to iterate toward a dead end than to generate useful results. This isn't to say that it's never useful (it obviously can be), but it rarely succeeds and is only the optimal ...
In 14 centuries of Islamic history from Spain to Indonesia, with limited travel and much regional variation for most of it, there will be many opportunities to find examples that match our own culture's Current Thing. Some Muslims are hypocrites; some Westerners look for homosexual subtext where none was intended. Many Muslim empires have risen in vigor and fallen in decadence. Still, the orthodox position is clear - homosexuality is both sinful and illegal. I've seen a Jew eat pork and laugh it off; it would be a mistake to make po...
Trying to replace enemy leadership with more congenial leadership never works. You reliably get a corrupt puppet government and an insurgency. The only exception is after a comprehensive defeat of the enemy (i.e. post-WWII Germany and Japan), which begs the question (in the sense that this tactic would allow us to win only in cases where we've already won).
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the food supply in the Middle East and North Africa used to come from Russia and Ukraine (link). Actions targeted at increasing food security in the region won't solve the political issues, but probably would turn down the temperature of the region. It would also help with the immigration crisis in Europe. It's not an easy or quick solution (growing food takes time, and the scale of the problem is staggering), but it's hard to see how peace would come without food.
Sun Tzu says that the keys to victory lie in knowing yourself and your enemy. When I got to #4, it became obvious that you know very little about Islam. There are no LGBTQ+ safe spaces in Islam. A relevant wikipedia page says "Homosexual acts were forbidden (haram) in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and therefore were subject to punishment. The types of punishment prescribed for non-heterosexual activities include flogging, stoning, and the death penalty, depending on the particular situation and the school of thought." The major ...
Me - Ph.D. in solid state materials chemistry. Been out of the game for a while. Less understanding of physics than some other commenters but have a different perspective that might be useful.
My first thought is that they have a minority phase; the samples are likely ~99% LK99 and ~1% unknown phase with weird properties. You can see it in the video; part of the specimen is levitating but a corner of it isn't.
The second thing I would do is try to make a bunch of variants with slightly different compositions to identify the minority ...
Strongly upvoted. A few comments:
I think of a human being as a process, rather than a stable entity. We begin as embryos, grow up, get old, and die. Each step of the process follows inevitably from the steps before. The way I see it, there's no way an unchanging upload could possibly be human. An upload that evolves even less so, given the environment it's evolving in.
On a more practical level, the question of whether a software entity is identical to a person depends on your relationship to that person. Let's take Elize...
A lot of the nonprofit boards that I've seen use a "consent agenda" to manage the meeting. The way it works is:
It doesn't do much for governance directly, but fewer time-wasting consent votes can make room for more discussion of issues that matter.
In the US, parties still aren't recognized by the Constitution. Every election is a choice between all of the people who qualify for the ballot for each office. Several groups of like-minded politicians quickly emerged, and over time these became our major parties.
It's not uncommon for an American candidate to run as an independent (i.e. not affiliated with a party), although they hardly ever win.
To the extent that I understand what you're saying, you seem to be arguing for curiosity as a means of developing a detailed, mechanistic ("gears-level" in your term) model of reality. I totally support this, especially for the smart kids. I'm just trying to balance it out with some realism and humility. I've known too many people who know that their own area of expertise is incredibly complicated but assume that everything they don't understand is much simpler. In my experience, a lot of projects fail because a problem that was assumed to be simple turned out not to be.
I get your point, and I totally agree that answering a child's questions can help the kid connect the dots while maintaining the kid's curiosity. As a pedagogical tool, questions are great.
Having said that, most people's knowledge of most everything outside their specialties is shallow and brittle. The plastic in my toothbrush is probably the subject of more than 10 Ph.D. dissertations, and the forming processes of another 20. This computer I'm typing on is probably north of 10,000. I personally know a fair amount about how t...
Being honest, for nearly all people nearly all of the time questioning firmly established ideas is a waste of time at best. If you show a child, say, the periodic table (common versions of which have hundreds of facts), the probability that the child's questioning will lead to a significant new discovery are less that 1 in a billion* and the probability that they will lead to a useless distraction approach 100%. There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world, and it takes intelligent people many years to understand them well e...
I think a better way to look at it is that frequentist reasoning is appropriate in certain situations and Bayesian reasoning is appropriate in other situations. Very roughly, frequentist reasoning works well for descriptive statistics and Bayesian reasoning works well for inferential statistics. I believe that Bayesian reasoning is appropriate to use in certain kinds of cases with a probability of (1-delta), where 1 represents the probability of something that has been rationally proven to my satisfaction and delta represents the (hopefully small) probability that I am deluded.
Wars are an especially nasty type of crisis because there's an enemy. That enemy will probably attempt to use your software for its own ends. In the case of your refugee heatmap idea, given that the Russians are already massacring civilians, that might look like a Russian artillery commander using it to deliberately target refugees. Alternately, they might target incoming buses to prevent the refugees from getting out of the Ukrainian military's way and make the Ukrainians spend essential resources on feeding and protecting them.
I spent about 20 years in academic and industrial research, and my firm belief is that almost nobody spends nearly enough time in the library. There have been hundreds of thousands of scientists before you; it is overwhelmingly likely that your hot new idea has been tried before. The hard part is finding it; science is made up of thousands of tiny communities that rarely talk to each other and use divergent terminology. But if you do the digging, you may find a paper from Egypt in 1983 that describes exactly why your project isn't working (real example). Finding that paper two weeks into the project is much better than finding it five years later.
The US has at least 16 intelligence agencies, but we still went into Iraq.
Oddly, it's probably easier for Putin to get credible information about Ukraine's military than about his own. Fewer people have an interest in lying to him about Ukraine.
Richard Hanania's Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is worth reading on this general topic, although it's mostly about the Iraq war.
He doesn't use these words (that I recall, and I'm only partway through), but the behavior of states is less like rationality and more like autism. What I mean is that states act on internal motivations that are only very weakly coupled to the objective strategic reality.
Putin probably didn't have access to reliable information about the capabilities of his military vs. Ukraine's military. &n...
Re aliens - Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we're interested in?
Re machine learning - The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we're even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it's an open question.
I'd like to add two pieces of evidence in favor of the weak unlearnability hypothesis:
(1) Humpback whales have songs that can go on for days. Despite decades of study, we don't really understand what they're saying.
(2) The output of machine learning algorithms (e.g. Google's Deep Dream) can be exceedingly counterintuitive to humans.
Whales are our distant cousins and humans created machine learning. We might reasonably suppose that actual aliens, with several billion years of completely independent evolution, might be much harder to understand.
We actually do pretty much the opposite of that in the U.S. Student loans have a Federal guarantee, so the incentive is to sign people up for as much education as possible. If they succeed, great. If they fail, they'll be paying off the loans until they die at which time Uncle Sam will pay the balance. With compounding interest, the ones who fail are the most profitable.
Normal humans have a fairly limited set of true desires, the sort of things we see on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Food, safety, sex, belonging, esteem, etc. If you've become so committed to your moral goals that they override your innate desires, you are (for lack of a better word) a saint. But for most people, morality is a proxy goal that we pursue as a strategy to reach our true goals. Most people act a culturally specified version of morality to gain esteem and all that goes with it (jobs, mates, friends, etc).
Your true desires... (read more)