I have long been perplexed at the obsession with so many AI folks with vision processing.
I mean: yeah, it's important to human intelligence, and some aspects of human cognition are related to human visual perception
But, it's not obvious to me why so many folks think vision is so critical to AI, whereas other aspects of human body function are not.
For instance, the yogic tradition and related Eastern ideas would suggest that *breathing* and *kinesthesia* are the critical aspects of mind. Together with touch, kinesthesia is what lets a mind establish a sense of self, and of the relation between self and world.
In that sense kinesthesia and touch are vastly more fundamental to mind than vision. It seems to me that a mind without vision could still be a basically humanlike mind. Yet, a mind without touch and kinesthesia could not, it would seem, because it would lack a humanlike sense of its own self as a complex dynamic system embedded in a world.
Why then is there constant talk about vision processing and so little talk about kinesthetic and tactile processing?
Personally I don't think one needs to get into any of this sensorimotor stuff too deeply to make a thinking machine. But, if you ARE going to argue that sensorimotor aspects are critcial to humanlike AI because they're critical to human intelligence, why harp on vision to the exclusion of other things that seem clearly far more fundamental??
Is the reason just that AI researchers spend all day staring at screens and ignoring their physical bodies and surroundings?? ;-)
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
anton webern
this mini-biography of composer Webern, from Rhapsody.com, is just too good ... such perfect dry humor w/ so much of the human condition in it...
"Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge," said Igor Stravinski of Anton Webern. A member of the Second Viennese School, Webern's diamonds appear mostly in geometric twelve-tone technique and serialism, a compositional technique based on the manipulation of a set of musical elements, stemming from twelve-tone technique.
Born in Vienna in 1883, he was a dedicated pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, and, in one of his early tonal works, produced 1908's Passacaglia. He left tonality altogether with his songs of 1908-'09, though, and his instrumental pieces between1909-'14 were very short due to technical limitations on thematic development. The songs of 1910-'25 show a reintroduction of traditional formal patterns which prelude his late-career serialism. On September 15, 1945, during the occupation of Austria, he was accidentally shot and killed by an American Army soldier while smoking a cigar after curfew.
- Nate Cavalieri
"Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge," said Igor Stravinski of Anton Webern. A member of the Second Viennese School, Webern's diamonds appear mostly in geometric twelve-tone technique and serialism, a compositional technique based on the manipulation of a set of musical elements, stemming from twelve-tone technique.
Born in Vienna in 1883, he was a dedicated pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, and, in one of his early tonal works, produced 1908's Passacaglia. He left tonality altogether with his songs of 1908-'09, though, and his instrumental pieces between1909-'14 were very short due to technical limitations on thematic development. The songs of 1910-'25 show a reintroduction of traditional formal patterns which prelude his late-career serialism. On September 15, 1945, during the occupation of Austria, he was accidentally shot and killed by an American Army soldier while smoking a cigar after curfew.
- Nate Cavalieri
arguments with thoughtless anti-transhumanists...
Some excerpts I've pasted for future reference from a very silly dialogue at
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23400750&postID=9133136415007870265&page=1
that I uselessly got involved in... basically someone wrote an annoying blog post stating that transhumanists are fuckups because they're gripped by fear of death. A number of us transhumanists replied, to the great irritation of themselves and their followers.
*****
Hi,
I am one of the transhumanists mentioned in this post, and I wrote an article on open-source robotics for the first issue of H+. I'm an AI researcher aimed at creating human-level AI: see novamente.net, goertzel.org, opencog.org, singinst.org.
In your post you say What I don't like about transhumanists is the fact that they simply refuse to understand certain arguments of their opponents - like the idea, best advanced by Bernard Williams, about boredom not with the things of the world but with oneself, or, as Roger Scruton puts, the soul grows tired of inhabiting the body.
What I don't like is this sort of glib generalization about large groups of people. Transhumanism is not a cult any more than, say, democratism or spiritualism is a cult. There is a lot of diversity.
My father has sometimes expressed the attitude you cite: he's said he wouldn't want to live forever because life can be kind of a pain, and from his view, the finitude of human life gives it some of its meaning. That's fine for him, though it saddens me, and I hope he changes his attitude.
I have also explored Zen fairly deeply, and enjoyed its approach that experiencing the present moment is what is important, rather than focusing on thoughts of the past or future. From this perspective, whether I live forever or become transhuman or whatever is basically irrelevant: what's relevant is the depth of the Now I'm experiencing. The me who wakes up tomorrow morning will be a different guy anyway.
Having said all that, though, I remain a dedicated transhumanist, both in my attitudes and my actions.
It's not about the technology: in fact I too get a bit worn-out with quasi-fetishistic blurbs and glossy photos of shiny gadgets, though I appreciate their importance for marketing new ideas to the uninitiated.
It's about mind and experience: about the embracing of Becoming as well as Being ... about the feeling of becoming something more than I am now, something more than I can even conceive now. While doing my best to embrace each Now along the way.
No doubt many others will run out of curiosity and ambition, and choose death. That's OK. As for me, I'm not a quitter.
And it's also about suffering. Yes, as the Buddha said, "all existence is suffering" -- but Buddhists also do practical work to reduce suffering. Transhumanist technology can drastically reduce suffering among humans and other sentient beings.
I watched my grandfather die a few months ago, at age 92. Even if he would have chosen to die given the option not to, it's obvious he wouldn't have chosen to die in the manner he did. Dying in the midst of disease and dementia is part of the human condition, and it's a part that I feel an ethical duty to help us transcend, by enabling possibilities for living that are generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.
He also would have liked to transfer more of the understanding he'd gained during his life to me and his other family and friends. Transhumanist technology will enable this eventually.
So it's not just about living forever as a human, and it's not just about the possibility of transitioning to something far beyond humanity -- though both of these possibilities interest me intensely. It's also about drastically reducing the level of suffering of those who choose to remain generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.
Most likely some nonzero level of suffering is intrinsic to the condition of any generally-human-type being -- but I strongly suspect this level of suffering is far lower than what many of us currently experience ... even those of us with the good fortune to be living in the middle or upper classes in developed parts of the world.
The only intellectually and ethically respectable argument I have heard against the transhumanist perspective is that the development of transhumanist technologies could lead to grave dangers, perhaps even to the extinction of the human species.
I think this is a possibility that needs to be taken very seriously, and am pleased that organizations such as the Lifeboat Foundation and the Singularity Institute (both of which I'm involved with) exist precisely to understand these issues more fully.
However, my strong intuition is that the human race is facing a lot worse dangers than technologies that improve the mind and body. I'm a lot more worried about chemical and biological weapons, runaway nanotech, or good old fashioned nukes. In my view we will be far more able to wisely handle the risks of these other technologies we've developed, if we can improve the fundamental basis of our thought and judgment processes -- which means improving the human mind and body.
Susan B, in her comment, wrote
People think they want it, but really they don't. The fear is of old age and suffering, not death per se.
Give me a break, please! I am 41 years old and have been thinking hard about these topics for most of my life (while, yes, also conducting a normal life, with a successful career, 3 kids, a lot of travel, and various assorted other accomplishments and hobbies). I have read plenty of relevant literature and philosophy and theology and am aware of the various perspectives out there. I am not driven by naivete, and I am not driven by fear. I am driven above all by curiosity and a desire for more and more interesting, pleasurable, growth-inducing experiences. I'm not afraid of death, I just prefer it not to happen ... and I'm not afraid of remaining a legacy-human, but I would prefer a more interesting future if possible (and amazingly, it does seem this may be possible).
It is unfortunate (but typically human) for people to lampoon and summarily dismiss perspectives they have not thought-through carefully and do not deeply understand.
***********
Someone nicknamed Brit wrote:
I'm all for re-thinking concepts of the self, Guilio, I just don't see a replica as giving me immortality. I don't give a hoot if everybody, including the replica, thinks it's me.
Here's another thought experiment for you. (Assume for the purposes of the thought experiment that the science is all bona fide and you have complete confidence that the doctors can do what they say that can do, and that you like the idea of being rich).
You get an offer from a scientist: when you go to sleep tonight we’re going to kill you in a painless manner. But don't worry, we've backed up all your memories and personality onto a microchip. Eight hours after you die, we'll remove your body, upload the data into a new brain in an identical body and put it in your bed. The new brain will think it was you, and will think it just went to sleep - we'll erase the memory of this whole conversation. For doing this, we'll put £1million in your bank account every year from now on.
Do you accept?
Brit: not surprisingly, I would make the same choice as Giulio in the situation you mention.
This really comes down to philosophy of mind. So far as I can tell, "I" consists of a certain system of dynamic patterns, that happen at this time to be associated with a particular physical system (my body).
If my body were replaced by another physically-nearly-identical one, then the same system of dynamic patterns constituting "me" would be there.
Note that many of the cells in my body are dying and being replaced every minute.
Do you believe that your "I" is some sort of extraphysical soul that is attached to your current, particular body, and wouldn't reattach itself to the new body in your thought-experiment?
Or, do you believe that your "I" is somehow immanent in the small percentage of cells in your body (e.g. most neurons) that don't get turned over through natural biological processes?
What philosophy of mind does your attitude derive from? Or is your attitude more of a non-theoretical, instinctual bias/reaction?
****
(in reply to a comment by Max More, someone named Mildred wrote)
Max, let's face it; you will not be alive in 5250. I'm sorry you can't deal with that, but it's the reality.
Mildred: if it happens that Max and I don't live to 5250, we can certainly "deal with that." Not only in the sense that dealing with being dead is easy ... but also in the sense that we are both people who enjoy our lives in the here-and-now very much: so if either of us found out we were to die soon (in 5 minutes or 50 or 5000 years or whatever) we'd have no major regrets except not having more of life to enjoy.
However, I find your narrowmindedness and hubris somewhat absurd. How can you propose to know what's going to happen? Your way of thinking seems to be the same as the one that led people, 150 years ago, to say a man would never walk on the moon.
Not to mention: even in the 1960s when Ted Nelson suggested the Xanadu project, nearly all the pundits (let alone the common person) bloviated confidently that nothing like the Internet could ever exist. Yet, here you are, polluting it with your overconfidently pessimistic yabblings....
The mainstream media is now reporting that within decades biologists will be able to regenerate a Neanderthal from old DNA. I'm sure quite recently a lot of folks would have called that impossible too.
I regret the combination of genetics, upbringing and chance that has caused you to grow into a person with such a lack of imagination and vision. Too bad for you, my friend....
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23400750&postID=9133136415007870265&page=1
that I uselessly got involved in... basically someone wrote an annoying blog post stating that transhumanists are fuckups because they're gripped by fear of death. A number of us transhumanists replied, to the great irritation of themselves and their followers.
*****
Hi,
I am one of the transhumanists mentioned in this post, and I wrote an article on open-source robotics for the first issue of H+. I'm an AI researcher aimed at creating human-level AI: see novamente.net, goertzel.org, opencog.org, singinst.org.
In your post you say What I don't like about transhumanists is the fact that they simply refuse to understand certain arguments of their opponents - like the idea, best advanced by Bernard Williams, about boredom not with the things of the world but with oneself, or, as Roger Scruton puts, the soul grows tired of inhabiting the body.
What I don't like is this sort of glib generalization about large groups of people. Transhumanism is not a cult any more than, say, democratism or spiritualism is a cult. There is a lot of diversity.
My father has sometimes expressed the attitude you cite: he's said he wouldn't want to live forever because life can be kind of a pain, and from his view, the finitude of human life gives it some of its meaning. That's fine for him, though it saddens me, and I hope he changes his attitude.
I have also explored Zen fairly deeply, and enjoyed its approach that experiencing the present moment is what is important, rather than focusing on thoughts of the past or future. From this perspective, whether I live forever or become transhuman or whatever is basically irrelevant: what's relevant is the depth of the Now I'm experiencing. The me who wakes up tomorrow morning will be a different guy anyway.
Having said all that, though, I remain a dedicated transhumanist, both in my attitudes and my actions.
It's not about the technology: in fact I too get a bit worn-out with quasi-fetishistic blurbs and glossy photos of shiny gadgets, though I appreciate their importance for marketing new ideas to the uninitiated.
It's about mind and experience: about the embracing of Becoming as well as Being ... about the feeling of becoming something more than I am now, something more than I can even conceive now. While doing my best to embrace each Now along the way.
No doubt many others will run out of curiosity and ambition, and choose death. That's OK. As for me, I'm not a quitter.
And it's also about suffering. Yes, as the Buddha said, "all existence is suffering" -- but Buddhists also do practical work to reduce suffering. Transhumanist technology can drastically reduce suffering among humans and other sentient beings.
I watched my grandfather die a few months ago, at age 92. Even if he would have chosen to die given the option not to, it's obvious he wouldn't have chosen to die in the manner he did. Dying in the midst of disease and dementia is part of the human condition, and it's a part that I feel an ethical duty to help us transcend, by enabling possibilities for living that are generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.
He also would have liked to transfer more of the understanding he'd gained during his life to me and his other family and friends. Transhumanist technology will enable this eventually.
So it's not just about living forever as a human, and it's not just about the possibility of transitioning to something far beyond humanity -- though both of these possibilities interest me intensely. It's also about drastically reducing the level of suffering of those who choose to remain generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.
Most likely some nonzero level of suffering is intrinsic to the condition of any generally-human-type being -- but I strongly suspect this level of suffering is far lower than what many of us currently experience ... even those of us with the good fortune to be living in the middle or upper classes in developed parts of the world.
The only intellectually and ethically respectable argument I have heard against the transhumanist perspective is that the development of transhumanist technologies could lead to grave dangers, perhaps even to the extinction of the human species.
I think this is a possibility that needs to be taken very seriously, and am pleased that organizations such as the Lifeboat Foundation and the Singularity Institute (both of which I'm involved with) exist precisely to understand these issues more fully.
However, my strong intuition is that the human race is facing a lot worse dangers than technologies that improve the mind and body. I'm a lot more worried about chemical and biological weapons, runaway nanotech, or good old fashioned nukes. In my view we will be far more able to wisely handle the risks of these other technologies we've developed, if we can improve the fundamental basis of our thought and judgment processes -- which means improving the human mind and body.
Susan B, in her comment, wrote
People think they want it, but really they don't. The fear is of old age and suffering, not death per se.
Give me a break, please! I am 41 years old and have been thinking hard about these topics for most of my life (while, yes, also conducting a normal life, with a successful career, 3 kids, a lot of travel, and various assorted other accomplishments and hobbies). I have read plenty of relevant literature and philosophy and theology and am aware of the various perspectives out there. I am not driven by naivete, and I am not driven by fear. I am driven above all by curiosity and a desire for more and more interesting, pleasurable, growth-inducing experiences. I'm not afraid of death, I just prefer it not to happen ... and I'm not afraid of remaining a legacy-human, but I would prefer a more interesting future if possible (and amazingly, it does seem this may be possible).
It is unfortunate (but typically human) for people to lampoon and summarily dismiss perspectives they have not thought-through carefully and do not deeply understand.
***********
Someone nicknamed Brit wrote:
I'm all for re-thinking concepts of the self, Guilio, I just don't see a replica as giving me immortality. I don't give a hoot if everybody, including the replica, thinks it's me.
Here's another thought experiment for you. (Assume for the purposes of the thought experiment that the science is all bona fide and you have complete confidence that the doctors can do what they say that can do, and that you like the idea of being rich).
You get an offer from a scientist: when you go to sleep tonight we’re going to kill you in a painless manner. But don't worry, we've backed up all your memories and personality onto a microchip. Eight hours after you die, we'll remove your body, upload the data into a new brain in an identical body and put it in your bed. The new brain will think it was you, and will think it just went to sleep - we'll erase the memory of this whole conversation. For doing this, we'll put £1million in your bank account every year from now on.
Do you accept?
Brit: not surprisingly, I would make the same choice as Giulio in the situation you mention.
This really comes down to philosophy of mind. So far as I can tell, "I" consists of a certain system of dynamic patterns, that happen at this time to be associated with a particular physical system (my body).
If my body were replaced by another physically-nearly-identical one, then the same system of dynamic patterns constituting "me" would be there.
Note that many of the cells in my body are dying and being replaced every minute.
Do you believe that your "I" is some sort of extraphysical soul that is attached to your current, particular body, and wouldn't reattach itself to the new body in your thought-experiment?
Or, do you believe that your "I" is somehow immanent in the small percentage of cells in your body (e.g. most neurons) that don't get turned over through natural biological processes?
What philosophy of mind does your attitude derive from? Or is your attitude more of a non-theoretical, instinctual bias/reaction?
****
(in reply to a comment by Max More, someone named Mildred wrote)
Max, let's face it; you will not be alive in 5250. I'm sorry you can't deal with that, but it's the reality.
Mildred: if it happens that Max and I don't live to 5250, we can certainly "deal with that." Not only in the sense that dealing with being dead is easy ... but also in the sense that we are both people who enjoy our lives in the here-and-now very much: so if either of us found out we were to die soon (in 5 minutes or 50 or 5000 years or whatever) we'd have no major regrets except not having more of life to enjoy.
However, I find your narrowmindedness and hubris somewhat absurd. How can you propose to know what's going to happen? Your way of thinking seems to be the same as the one that led people, 150 years ago, to say a man would never walk on the moon.
Not to mention: even in the 1960s when Ted Nelson suggested the Xanadu project, nearly all the pundits (let alone the common person) bloviated confidently that nothing like the Internet could ever exist. Yet, here you are, polluting it with your overconfidently pessimistic yabblings....
The mainstream media is now reporting that within decades biologists will be able to regenerate a Neanderthal from old DNA. I'm sure quite recently a lot of folks would have called that impossible too.
I regret the combination of genetics, upbringing and chance that has caused you to grow into a person with such a lack of imagination and vision. Too bad for you, my friend....
Monday, December 1, 2008
email about possible importance of differences btw empirically equivalent theories
> If two theories give identical predictions under all circumstances
> about how the real world behaves, then they are not two separate
> theories, they are merely rewordings of the same theory. And choosing
> between them is arbitrary; you may prefer one to the other because
> human minds can visualise it more easily, or it's easier to calculate,
> or you have an aethetic preference for it.
>
> --
> Philip Hunt,
However, the two theories may still have very different consequences
**within the minds of the community of scientists** ...
Even though T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent in their predictions,
T1 might have a tendency to lead a certain community of scientists
in better directions, in terms of creating new theories later on
However, empirically validating this property of T1 is another question ...
which leads one to the topic of "scientific theories about the sociological
consequences of scientific theories" ;-)
ben g
> about how the real world behaves, then they are not two separate
> theories, they are merely rewordings of the same theory. And choosing
> between them is arbitrary; you may prefer one to the other because
> human minds can visualise it more easily, or it's easier to calculate,
> or you have an aethetic preference for it.
>
> --
> Philip Hunt,
However, the two theories may still have very different consequences
**within the minds of the community of scientists** ...
Even though T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent in their predictions,
T1 might have a tendency to lead a certain community of scientists
in better directions, in terms of creating new theories later on
However, empirically validating this property of T1 is another question ...
which leads one to the topic of "scientific theories about the sociological
consequences of scientific theories" ;-)
ben g
Saturday, November 29, 2008
greed post singularity?
> The question of whether to allow drugs and/or wireheading is not really interesting. The fact is that cultures that prohibit overriding the evolved motivational systems that keep us alive have more children, thus explaining current attitudes.
>
> We should similar attitudes among reproducing AIs capable of reprogramming themselves to live in simulated worlds with magic genies, or that just directly increment their utility registers. They will succumb to the AIs that aren't happy all the time because they hunger for computing resources.
>
> -- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
Matt,
I'm very skeptical of assuming that post-Singularity society will be dominated by a competition for resources.
This view of organismic evolution has been rightly questioned by Stephen Jay Gould, A. Lima de Faria and many others ... most of these folks don't doubt that competition-based selection exists, but they argue that
a) selection is mostly not about competition for the same resources, but rather about the creation of complementary niches
b) self-organizing dynamics acting complementarily to, and orthogonally to, the dynamics of differential reproduction also have a huge impact
In short, the "nature, red in tooth and claw" vision of organismic evolution is in itself an idealized oversimplification which approximates reality better in some cases and worse in others ... and, it may approximate post-Singularity society even worse...
Even if one posits that "the surviving post-singularity minds will be the ones that want to survive", that doesn't tell you anything about reproduction or the drive thereof, or the drive of agents to accumulate more and more resources.
How do you know some kind of "post-singularity steward" won't get put into place, with the specific job of preventing greedy agents from accumulating more and more resources -- but NOT asking for anything in return ... and not trying to accumulate excessive resources for itself ... and proceeding in this manner because **that's how it was programmed**
I believe this is closely related to what a previous version of Eliezer Yudkowsky called the Sysop Scenario...
ben g
>
> We should similar attitudes among reproducing AIs capable of reprogramming themselves to live in simulated worlds with magic genies, or that just directly increment their utility registers. They will succumb to the AIs that aren't happy all the time because they hunger for computing resources.
>
> -- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
Matt,
I'm very skeptical of assuming that post-Singularity society will be dominated by a competition for resources.
This view of organismic evolution has been rightly questioned by Stephen Jay Gould, A. Lima de Faria and many others ... most of these folks don't doubt that competition-based selection exists, but they argue that
a) selection is mostly not about competition for the same resources, but rather about the creation of complementary niches
b) self-organizing dynamics acting complementarily to, and orthogonally to, the dynamics of differential reproduction also have a huge impact
In short, the "nature, red in tooth and claw" vision of organismic evolution is in itself an idealized oversimplification which approximates reality better in some cases and worse in others ... and, it may approximate post-Singularity society even worse...
Even if one posits that "the surviving post-singularity minds will be the ones that want to survive", that doesn't tell you anything about reproduction or the drive thereof, or the drive of agents to accumulate more and more resources.
How do you know some kind of "post-singularity steward" won't get put into place, with the specific job of preventing greedy agents from accumulating more and more resources -- but NOT asking for anything in return ... and not trying to accumulate excessive resources for itself ... and proceeding in this manner because **that's how it was programmed**
I believe this is closely related to what a previous version of Eliezer Yudkowsky called the Sysop Scenario...
ben g
on wiring stuff into AGI systems
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Abram Demski wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> If I were running an AI company I might not be down-to-earth enough to
> admit the necessity of so much preprogrammed bias... I'd want the
> thing to learn about physics on its own :).
>
> --Abram
Actually, if you were running an AI **company**, you might feel huge commercial pressure to hard-wire as much behavior as possible into your AI system, so as to enable it to achieve commercially valuable functionality as quickly as possible
The same might hold if you were running a grant-funded AI project within academia: getting your grant renewed would depend on your system's functionality at the end of a 1-3 year period, and the quickest way to get impressive observable functionality is to hard-wire a bunch of stuff
;-)
Of course, as a mathematician, I feel the pull toward pure learning systems that have a minimal set of innate biases and built-in structures.
And yet, as a scientist, I observe the human brain and see that this is **not** what it is. The brain has *so much* special-purpose built-in structure, and its general intelligence is a fairly small layer built atop a bunch of special-purpose built-in structure.
Logically, it would seem the computational resource requirements for creating a "pure learning system" would be far greater than for creating a system with a conceptual architecture more like the brain. So then, which approach is going to get to the end-goal earlier along the Moore's Law curve?
ben
>
> Ben,
>
> If I were running an AI company I might not be down-to-earth enough to
> admit the necessity of so much preprogrammed bias... I'd want the
> thing to learn about physics on its own :).
>
> --Abram
Actually, if you were running an AI **company**, you might feel huge commercial pressure to hard-wire as much behavior as possible into your AI system, so as to enable it to achieve commercially valuable functionality as quickly as possible
The same might hold if you were running a grant-funded AI project within academia: getting your grant renewed would depend on your system's functionality at the end of a 1-3 year period, and the quickest way to get impressive observable functionality is to hard-wire a bunch of stuff
;-)
Of course, as a mathematician, I feel the pull toward pure learning systems that have a minimal set of innate biases and built-in structures.
And yet, as a scientist, I observe the human brain and see that this is **not** what it is. The brain has *so much* special-purpose built-in structure, and its general intelligence is a fairly small layer built atop a bunch of special-purpose built-in structure.
Logically, it would seem the computational resource requirements for creating a "pure learning system" would be far greater than for creating a system with a conceptual architecture more like the brain. So then, which approach is going to get to the end-goal earlier along the Moore's Law curve?
ben
Friday, November 28, 2008
email dialogue on entheogens and singularity
> also because set & setting continue to change. Even when the setting
> is clinically identical, the subject has a prior experience with which
> to anticipate experience.
Yes, but shamanic uses of psychedelics try to minimize this variation
via making the setting really intense and using psychological force to
influence set (mindset).
For instance, the "Union of the Vegetable" church in Brazil allows
ayahuasca use only in the midst of highly structured, highly intense
rituals involving music, dancing, preaching and so forth. In this context,
it's presumably hard *not* to experience the ayahuasca roughly the
same way as the other folks around you...
> I'm curious - what do you think would be a more "right" use of
> psychedelics ...or other mind-altering substances?
There are many "right" uses, of course...
But what's bizarre is that in modern culture psychedelics are mostly
relegated to the category of "party drugs" to take in rock concerts and
dance clubs and such ... which is not bad, but misses most of the
potential they have for leading to interesting mind-states...
> Can/should we allow the individual freedom to alter brain chemistry
> enough to literally leave the "normal" world for another? Consider
> how this answer applies to the use of neural-integrated hardware to
> directly access electronic/digital "other" worlds.
that's an easy one: yes ;-)
I would add that I found psychedelics more interesting before the
possibility of Singularity in my lifetime became palpable. Psychedelics
offer a greater variety of inner experience than most people can achieve
without years or decades of effective meditation ... but, even with the
help of these drugs, there are going to be strict limits to what the human
mind can experience ... whereas various transhuman technologies promise
the possibility of actually extending the human mind in much more dramatic
ways...
In short, although psychedelics offer way more than our culture generally
recognizes [visionaries like Huxley, Leary, McKenna, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, etc.
being exceptions ;-) ] ... the Singularity will offer way more, if we conduct
it properly
It does seem plausible that use of psychedelics can provide some modest
insight into post-Singularity realities, in that it allows exploration of a wider
space of mind-states than we experience in ordinary waking life. But I wouldn't
assume the space of mind-states accessible using psychedelics comes close
to touching the full variety of post-singularity mind-states, of course....
Psychedelics push us to see beyond some of the implicit assumptions we
make in conducting our everyday mental lives. For instance this book asks
"Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion"
http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Journal-Consciousness-Controversies-Humanities/dp/0907845231
and anyone who has taken a lot of psychedelics will know the answer is YES,
without needing to look at the neuroscience and psychology data (though perhaps
with answer in the latter). However, once these assumptions are dropped
(e.g. the assumption of the objective reality of the constructed subjective visual
world) ... then what? An awful lot of possibilities present themselves, and human
minds can only scratch the surface....
In fact, many psychedelic mind-states explicitly point at these limitations: for instance,
the aliens one talks to on DMT (read Terrence McKenna or Google "machine elf")
explicitly present themselves to the mind as lower-dimensional projections of
some higher-dimensional reality inaccessible within the constraints of legacy
human consciousness...
> is clinically identical, the subject has a prior experience with which
> to anticipate experience.
Yes, but shamanic uses of psychedelics try to minimize this variation
via making the setting really intense and using psychological force to
influence set (mindset).
For instance, the "Union of the Vegetable" church in Brazil allows
ayahuasca use only in the midst of highly structured, highly intense
rituals involving music, dancing, preaching and so forth. In this context,
it's presumably hard *not* to experience the ayahuasca roughly the
same way as the other folks around you...
> I'm curious - what do you think would be a more "right" use of
> psychedelics ...or other mind-altering substances?
There are many "right" uses, of course...
But what's bizarre is that in modern culture psychedelics are mostly
relegated to the category of "party drugs" to take in rock concerts and
dance clubs and such ... which is not bad, but misses most of the
potential they have for leading to interesting mind-states...
> Can/should we allow the individual freedom to alter brain chemistry
> enough to literally leave the "normal" world for another? Consider
> how this answer applies to the use of neural-integrated hardware to
> directly access electronic/digital "other" worlds.
that's an easy one: yes ;-)
I would add that I found psychedelics more interesting before the
possibility of Singularity in my lifetime became palpable. Psychedelics
offer a greater variety of inner experience than most people can achieve
without years or decades of effective meditation ... but, even with the
help of these drugs, there are going to be strict limits to what the human
mind can experience ... whereas various transhuman technologies promise
the possibility of actually extending the human mind in much more dramatic
ways...
In short, although psychedelics offer way more than our culture generally
recognizes [visionaries like Huxley, Leary, McKenna, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, etc.
being exceptions ;-) ] ... the Singularity will offer way more, if we conduct
it properly
It does seem plausible that use of psychedelics can provide some modest
insight into post-Singularity realities, in that it allows exploration of a wider
space of mind-states than we experience in ordinary waking life. But I wouldn't
assume the space of mind-states accessible using psychedelics comes close
to touching the full variety of post-singularity mind-states, of course....
Psychedelics push us to see beyond some of the implicit assumptions we
make in conducting our everyday mental lives. For instance this book asks
"Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion"
http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Journal-Consciousness-Controversies-Humanities/dp/0907845231
and anyone who has taken a lot of psychedelics will know the answer is YES,
without needing to look at the neuroscience and psychology data (though perhaps
with answer in the latter). However, once these assumptions are dropped
(e.g. the assumption of the objective reality of the constructed subjective visual
world) ... then what? An awful lot of possibilities present themselves, and human
minds can only scratch the surface....
In fact, many psychedelic mind-states explicitly point at these limitations: for instance,
the aliens one talks to on DMT (read Terrence McKenna or Google "machine elf")
explicitly present themselves to the mind as lower-dimensional projections of
some higher-dimensional reality inaccessible within the constraints of legacy
human consciousness...
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