“The Machine is Us”

1. On December 5th, 2007 at 3:20 pm Ariel Says:

   Jani, I don’t think the video — very nicely done — went as far as you are implying in your comment on it. It said that we need to do some rethinking, as indeed we always should. We know there is already a great deal of information (and misinformation) creation and sharing, and no doubt there will be more and more varied ways of doing that. And we also know that all this sharing helps to create communities the world over and sometimes to mobilize large groups of people for action.

   Explain, however, how it will radically alter humanity itself. Please be specific!

   It took me a long time to get around to reading the Iliad, which I finally did a couple of years ago. I found a translation that is highly regarded. Now, this work was written 2500, maybe 3000 years ago. Yet as I read Agamemnon making his blustery speeches or saw Achilles justifying his inaction, I was profoundly struck by the recognition of these men and their behaviours. We have learned a huge amount about ourselves and about the universe we inhabit since the Trojan war, but in so many ways our behaviour is unaltered. Even with so many new memes, our genes still haven’t budged, and many of our desires are the same as they ever were: love, admiration, power, money, control, and more.

   I think there has been and still is great human progress and the potential for much more. Which is why I think you should flesh out your assertion. In your copious free time, of course!

2. On December 5th, 2007 at 3:54 pm Jani Myriam Says:

   Hi Ariel! Probably the best thing on the blog I’ve written on this would be here:

   http://www.slashgeek.com/?p=41

   Are you familiar at all with this line of thinking? (e.g., Kurzweil’s Singularity, Dyson’s Machines of Creation, and other trans-humanist and post-humanist writers?)

   What I perceived in the video was the notion that by training Google and similar systems to understand the relationships between data (thereby creating the widely touted semantic web) we are creating the foundation for a greater-than-human intelligence that is developing more rapidly than most people believe thanks to Moore’s law and the extension of Moore’s law to information technologies generally. Cool stuff, a bit far out there, but the logic all seems sound to me if you buy the underlying assumptions which, frankly, I kind of do although I’m skeptical enough to assume they should be watered down a bit. :-)

   Jani

3. On December 8th, 2007 at 2:25 am Ariel Says:

   I liked the blog entry you linked to. I don’t think I had read that far back in your blog. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Kurzweil et al., so I just have your entry and the video to go on — for now.

   I still don’t see the video reaching as far as you do. Could be that I’m not bringing enough knowledge to my viewing of it. Could also be that you are seeing it in the context of your own knowledge.

   One thought on the idea of transferring the mind into something non-biological. Maybe there’s a different way to think of it, but what catches me there is that “mind” simply means “brain at work.” To say that “mind” is something that can be transfered anywhere is to reify a concept. That’s dualism! I can see teaching a very advanced computer to “be” me, but it will only be a copy of me. It would not be me. If you take my consciousness out of me, that simply means I’m dead. Consciousness-as-entity is another reification.

   However, if anyone figures it out, I would go for the Natalie Portman model as well. :) And I might have to get some first-hand knowledge of the background here.

4. On December 8th, 2007 at 1:01 pm Jani Myriam Says:

   I agree that the video doesn’t reach as far as I implied. I think that the post/trans-human undertone I seemed to detect is really there, and may even have been intentional, but it was definitely magnified greatly by having been interpreted through lenses ground by my own experience as you point out.

   I think of consciousness and mind as an epiphenomena of our body’s, primarily our brain’s, biological functioning. This is in a way a dualism but since in this scenario the material clearly precedes the noumenal I’m not sure how to read it against a classical definition of dualism. If only I had the time these days! :-)

   I’m not sure the idea that one can “copy” one’s consciousness should naturally inherit the negative connotation we often associate with copies compared to originals so I’d probably prefer some other or new language that could get across the notion of duplicating consciousness without such baggage. It may be the copying and reintegrating consciousness (and other types of meta-processing we can’t or haven’t imagined) and involving different substrates will result in some lesser sense of being but actually I seriously doubt it since the trajectory of evolution argues against this, at least in my view. What we have now in terms of intelligence and technology I tend to see in evolutionary terms as at the forefront of a general trend toward increasing complexity that can be viewed as beginning with early cosmology, proceeding through the emergence of terrestrial chemistry and biology, and ending up where we are now, at least on our planet. What comes next is a big question but it looks like the answer may be around the corner as well as the concomitant risk of some sort of catastrophe that may often go hand in hand when transitions like these burst onto the scene.

   Since most of our body naturally recycles at a cellular level over the course of our lives there’s already some sense in which we aren’t materially who we were in the past so perhaps if we imagine that our body will be replaced at the cellular level as part of a transition from biology to some new techno-biology this will make the whole experience easier to swallow and integrate without losing a sense of having a continuous identity along the way. Fun stuff to think about in any case! :-)

   Jani