Technological Singularity

Well, no thought is one isolated signal. Rather thoughts are what we call clusters of signals too vast to trace individually. If they don't fire, thoughts don't occur. If they do fire, thoughts do occur. I find it easier to assume that there is a firing going on than that there is a firing going on and also there is a magical thought-entity floating somewhere in the aether in the meantime. I agree it is reductionist, but until you can prove to me that you are "actually" thinking you don't get to require of robots to prove to you that they are "actually" thinking. Either there is a theoretically possible way to tell the difference or there isn't.

We could of course go as far as they went in Battlestar Galactica with their Cylons and say that this machine doesn't need to be of metal but can be of artificial flesh and artificial bone and can even reproduce with those of our kind. What will you say on that day? Where is the line between superficial and no longer superficial? You see, the only reason you insist that there is a difference is just because it makes you uncomfortable to think that we would not be the only ones. And you hoped that I would object the same way you would, but I wouldn't, because my identity or notion of self-worth are in no way dependant on a notion of my very own very unique soul. I don't see myself as special, I don't see my species as special either. That is not to say they are not important to me, of course they are. It just wouldn't change a bit if tomorrow we lived side by side with robots that we could not tell from our own people. Our species is but one of many, and adding one more bothers me no more than it did my distant ancestors back when sapiens was not the only human species around. You call my reasons superficial yet there is no level deep enough to make them non-superficial, or is there? If you remember, when I proposed the thought experiment, I did offer as one of the testing methods to dissect the subjects to any level and use any equipment that either exists or is possible in theory. You call this superficial not because it doesn't go deep enough, but because of the conclusion I reach. In a sense you are begging the question, insisting that my reasoning is flawed just because it doesn't lead to the conclusion you favour and not because there is a structural weakness or failure in premise accuracy. Technological singularity is "just unacceptable" to you. I feel differently. And if you are curious, here is a crude outline of my justification.

If between two things the difference is naught, they are the same:
a-b=0 <=> a=b
That goes both for the things themselves as well as for ways of looking at them.
If the difference between having a mind and not having a mind is naught, then they are the same... And the mind might as well be naught:
a-(a+b)=0 <=> a=a+b <=> b=0

So at the end of the day, if it makes no difference, it makes no difference. That is the very definition of irrelevancy (in this context anyway). Therefore the question of the possibility of the singularity is a matter of just how well can we reproduce those things you call superficial. Until such time that we know of anything underneath, Occam's Razor frees us from the need to assume it. And so nothing but that superficial stuff remains for us to aim for.

Well, I'm sick of arguing, because it's honestly going nowhere. You're far too pragmatic to take the side of the Cartesian when it comes to the mind-body problem, and I've personally discarded pragmatism as I don't care for empiricism and enjoy ontological metaphysics far too much to be considered a pragmatist. The legitimacy of any AI depends on the view of the mind by whoever is considering it, and our approaches are opposite. There is no point in debating this topic any further between us.

But, it's been fun. I haven't had a chance to polish my philosophy/debating in a long time. I'm pretty rusty right now. We should do it again sometime.

I think it's interesting how two thought paradigms have emerged here:
1.) Singularity is impossible and therefore irrelevant.
2.) Singularity is possible and relevant.

So which is it? I used to be in camp #1 until Obama decided to fund exascale supercomputers and the Japanese ran a partial brain simulation on their petascale supercomputer. Now I'm in camp #2 and I'm a little uneasy about becoming the 2nd most intelligent species on Earth. Loads of people in camp #2 think that robots will do all the work for us and we will have nothing but leisure... but that's what was said about outsourcing, ya know? We Americans will be the managers and the Chinese and Indians will be the worker bees. Didn't happen like that. Why hire an American manager when you can get 10 Chinese managers that are bilingual for half the price? Same goes with robots.

I guess it will only be as relevant as the information it can access to process. If we make it equivalent in physicality and cognitive function to a human, then it should be just as confused and clumsy as the rest of us
:lol:
Though yea, an unrestricted AI would be as superhuman as the tools it could integrate with. Given enough social media mining and thermal brain imaging it might even be able to read a person thoughts in real time with pretty good accuracy. I'm getting all Wintermute from Neuromancer now, but perhaps AI's will replace governments, and us humans will rally around logical forks in thinking... or at least we'll be the stupid things it tries to help grow
:dry:
Mother AI, shepherd to the sheep.

There are species of octopus with brains on par with, if not superior in terms of processing power to our own. They use that power to control all sorts of muscles and pigments to mimick the shapes and colours of their environment. Are they smarter or stupider than us? I don't know. I think we cannot help but be severely biased when judging such things.
Likewise, there is no reason to think that AI would grow to be capable of mind reading or controlling or that it would be indeed better at anything from our domain unless we specifically set out to design them in this way.

Like Adder says, seeing the shortcomings of our brains that we cherish so much and consider so highly advanced, my guess is that artificial brains we would design to resemble our own would fall short in most of the same places. They would have shortcuts in deducing that would make them commit fallacies, shortcuts in observing that would make them see false patterns or think magically and they would have shortcuts in interacting with us and with each other that would be equivalent to what we call emotion, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It's not like some ghosts made us have those, but rather it turned out overall beneficial to the kind of lives we live and if they are supposed to be like us, they would probably benefit from the same things. I hesitate to call them imperfections, because perfection is subjective to the goals at hand and theirs wouldn't necessarily be flawless computation - ours isn't.

Unfortunately people are very racist. When we are faced with a new type of what is essentially our own kind, we tend to either go at war or enslave them and that's no good start for long-term relations in my humble opinion. The mere fact that they came from a different place is enough to make us feel like it is a competition. For what though? It's not economy, since they are not an economic faction. It is not power for the very same reason. There is nothing to compete agains them for, really, since what they would be is fully analogous to Jews: A people that, without reason, we silently agreed with them to identify as one people when in reality at this point they really aren't, integrated into all reasonably inclusive societies of the planet, indistinguishable from anybody who isn't one of them by any means aside from that silent agreement that they are still, somehow, for some reason, different.

I am, as it were, in neither of the two camps WH proposed. While I see no reason why the singularity wouldn't be possible, I dare not assert that it is until I can demonstrate that possibility. Provided though that it is, my life or outlook upon it will not change after it happens. Since when it comes down to it, I couldn't tell a robot if I met one, I wouldn't treat them as anything less (or more) than human either.