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On Mon, 17 Mar 2025, Ed Cryer wrote:
> x wrote:
>> On 3/16/25 14:21, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>> oldernow wrote:
>>>> On 2025-03-16, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> The internet cuts peoples' heads off on a regular basis,
>>>>>> leaving people running around spewing liberal nonsense
>>>>>> between screams of "HITLER!" and "FASCIST!"....
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, I have a head to cut off. From your posts, I gather
>>>>> that you don't. Maybe that's got its benefits. Your
>>>>> lonely isolation in your ivory tower safeguards you from
>>>>> the natural shocks that flesh is heir unto.
>>>>
>>>> Indeed is identification with the idea of a free-willed
>>>> being lonely isolation!
>>>>
>>>
>>> You seem to me to be fighting for a widely held philosophical idea; that
>>> mind is on its own, uncaused, unattached and free as the wind swell.
>>> OK, so I won't take you up on that. As John Milton put it "the mind is its
>>> own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven".
>>>
>>> But that seems to be the end of your campaign. A battle in the realm of
>>> metaphysics; a battle to establish the autonomy of mind.
>>> Me, I love battling. But I'd never battle to be alone. I fight for my
>>> rights; my convictions; my political goals. They keep me in the world,
>>> attached to other people.
>>>
>>> I won't fight for empiricism, I won't fight for idealism, I won't fight to
>>> grind myself into a corner. Philosophy is interesting, but it's a hobby,
>>> not an ideology.
>>>
>>> Ed
>>
>> If you had the power to mind upload someone's neural engrams to
>> computer, and you purposefully denied it.
>>
>> Would you be murdering someone?
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>>>
>>
>
> I doubt your uploading hypothesis would work with the human brain. Or at
> least not adequately enough to be able to reconstitute the brain and persona
> whence the backup came.
> I've often replaced hard drives; clone it, take out the old and put in the
> new; it works perfectly.
> But that functional view of mind would need testing and testing and testing
> with a living brain before I'd even consider it feasible. Would consciousness
> be restored? Would personality be restored? Are these just emergent
> properties of neuronal bit-settings and weightings?
> This seems to be the question at the heart of recent scares over AI; the dawn
> of consciousness in a silicon brain. The recent sudden appearance of bots
> driven by a new algorithm has fired this old chestnut; especially their
> ability to mimic human communication and language.
>
> Ed
>
The techno-religion of transhumanism loves to talk about uploading as a
form of immortality. The only thing it does have going for it, in my
opinion, is that in _theory_ it should be possible to test this
empirically.
It would, however, rely on a behaviourist theory of consciousness, but if
we're fine with that, technology might at some point in the far off future
be able to test uploading destructively, and perhaps, non-destructively.
Another techo-religion aspect is the equating of AI with god. I am very
uncomfortable with some transhumanists. Some of them seem almost religious
in their belief in technology. I think whereas traditional religious
people like to play with concepts outside of time and space,
transhumanists, draw out the time axis way too much and assume science
will just continue to progress exponentially. This can cross over into
religion.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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