Information Won't Make Us Immortal
erco
Posts: 20,254
An interesting read on why pressing the save button won't save us. : http://motherboard.vice.com/read/information-is-not-the-new-soul
Riccardo Manzotti is a Professor in Psychology at the Institute of Human, Language and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan, holds a PhD in robotics, is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness, and is the webmaster of consciousness.it. He has previously asked if pixels are driving out reality, and with Andrew Smart examined Elon Musk's assertion that we are probably living in simulation.
Riccardo Manzotti is a Professor in Psychology at the Institute of Human, Language and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan, holds a PhD in robotics, is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness, and is the webmaster of consciousness.it. He has previously asked if pixels are driving out reality, and with Andrew Smart examined Elon Musk's assertion that we are probably living in simulation.
Comments
If you want to know the most you can about me, then the most you can ever know is limited by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. You would have to know the quantum state of me.
But Quantum Mechanics tells us that cloning is not possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
So I conclude I cannot be made immortal (with or without a consciousness or soul (whatever that is)), in the sense of copying my information to other hardware.
But even, philosophically, what if I could be cloned. Up loaded to some other hardware? What of that "soul"/"consciousness" thing? When you set fire to my hand I feel pain. There is some essence of me, that is yet to be described in any mathematical or physical model, that feels pain. What if I set fire to my clones hand? He may scream and shout like me. A brain scan might show all the same neural activity. But how can I be sure it is actually feeling pain like me?
And what about that simulation idea? Well, who is the observer of that simulation? Yeah, that's me. Presumably I am outside of the simulation. Or at least nobody has suggested a way my awareness can be simulated to my satisfaction. So it makes no difference if there is a simulation out there of "reality".
Meanwhile, thermodynamics says that entropy always increases. We are all doomed to chaos no matter what.
Sorry, no immortality there.
But yes, pixels are driving out reality. But that is a different issue.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to do differently if we're living in a simulation? Buddhists have talked about emptiness for a while now (e.g. Heart Sutra), but that's a bit different.
I think the whole computer AI thing is a side show.
I might suggest that we humans are building some kind of intelligent thing that we do not understand. With ourselves as components.
Consider: By all accounts your brain is made up of billions of brain cells. Connected to each other in trillions of different ways. Not one of those cells knows or cares who you are. But working together they are you. You are the result of all those dumb cells connected together.
So, by analogy, I might speculate that all us humans, connected to each other via the internet, are creating an intelligent thing. Each one of us is a "dumb" cell in the overall thing.
Like us humans that never think about the well being of our brain cells so much, that "super thing" does not know or care about individual humans much.
Emptiness...
You are one.
I am zero.
Without me, you are nothing.
Yep, that's called "culture". That's what made us able to end up in this technological civilization, filled with stuff which none of us can make. But human culture can. Even something as "simple" as a stainless steel table knife is very difficult to make from scratch without a lot of people involved. Take away the knowledge about how to create stainless steel and it's orders of magnitude more difficult - the setup which made it possible to stumble over the discovery needed the industrial revolution well behind it.
Or look at ants and what that collective organism can do.
Never mind the table knife. Last night I was watching a video of the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry. There was a chip fab plant holding a party for people from the 500 suppliers the plant depends on. Each of which in turn depends on hundreds of suppliers....
It's amazing the complex web of millions of people everything we take for granted today depends on.
"culture" is also the term biologists use for that bunch of cells they grow in a Petri dish!
I was hinting at something more. What if we individual humans are as insignificant as the neurons in your head? What if the interconnections we now have between us are like the synapses joining those neurons together? What if the resulting intelligence of all that is as far above us as we are to our brain cells?
The human race, as a whole, as an intelligence that no human could ever glimpse.
You mean like, the whole galaxy is a huge brain? Or perhaps the whole universe is a brain-brain?
Hmm... If we accept that the universe as we know it is only 13 billion years old. And the speed of light is so slow. Then perhaps there is a limit to this idea.
We might just be "cells" in the first planet sized brain.
Of course the mathematicians know more than we can "see, touch and investigate". They can prove truths well beyond that day to day stuff.
Theory's like String or "M" (Matrix), theory, have mathematicians baffled for a complete answer.
It is wonderful how exacting this creation actually is.
Make the best of your reality, whatever it might be.
Or was it that fumes from that fluid I was using to clean flux off of PCB's yesterday?
The idea behind AI might be: it is cheaper than to educate. But AI consumes nothing but energy, so this is bad for business. I personally see no chance since I know, that every neuron creates about 1000 synapses AND (not logical and) even a single synapse can have two connections, where the runtime of the signal from one to the other connection determines functionality.
But we are in a time, where zero has a high potential and even a blank playes an important role: insert a blank in the right place and everything changes: the ideal president
In maths we start with some simple assumptions. The "axioms". We then combine and tweak with those deriving all kinds if interesting facts and formulae. Like Pythagora's Theorem, the Quadratic Formula, Calculus, .....
However, change you basic assumptions, those axioms, and the following manipulation will lead you to very different results. For example, Euclidian geometry assumes a kind of flat and straight space to work in. In which parallel lines never meet, the angles of a triangle add up to 360 degrees and so on. Change that assumption of "flatness" and a "non-eclidian" geometry allows parallel lines to meet and the sum of the angles of a triangle not to be 360 degrees.
Another example. Under our normal assumptions the sum of all the integers, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ..., is infinity. Change the assumptions a bit and the infinite sum comes to -1/12.
So it seems Maths can be used to prove almost anything if you start from the right axioms.
That is why we need Physics, to keep the mathematicians on the ground!
As far as I understand this is the case with string theory. It can arrive at almost any model of "reality" depending on a bunch of assumptions you can plug into it. There is no particular reason to select one solution over the billions of others. String theory has no predictive power.
This man is supposedly the father of String Theory, he had brought the five different ways of looking at it, down to a single conclusion.
We know four different dimensions or degree's of freedom: Time, Space(x,y,z), String Theory adds six more dimensions, plus one more for M Theory. For a grand total of (11) Eleven.
Yet Physicist's that believe in these extra dimensions, think that they all reside on a membrane, a flat plane. Very confusing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten
Luckily we can get a lot done in robotics and such without such extreme mathematical effort
I'm not with you on the flat Earth argument. We don't need to climb trees or fall into pits to convince ourselves the world is not flat. Simply measure the angle of the suns rays to the ground at different latitudes. This was done many hundreds of years ago and a pretty accurate estimate of the diameter of the Earth was made then.
It's often said that we cannot visualize more than three dimensions. However Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek suggested we do that all the time. We can imagine multiple dimensions as we do the pixels on computer monitor. For each one we have the usual dimensions of space, x and y. Also for each one we have three colour components R,G,B. The images can move with time t. So we already visualize 6 dimensions. Or 7 if we extend that to the three dimensional world we live in. x, y, z, r, g, b, t.
LOL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory
Imagine you have to steel balls. If the run a pathway with same speed and opposite direction, the eventually will collide. And be reflected. But if the balls are identical, you can not discriminate if they are reflected or just passed through each other. That means: dimension is nothing "real", something that exists on his on, but something that "reflects" the behavior of entities.
An electron has no diameter, because whenever two electrons are collided they behave like deflected by electrostatic charge. While Protons can hit each others and be disintegrated. So if you shoot one electron from one side and a second from the opposite you will alway detect an ariving electron, but you will never know it the electron comes from the other side or if your electron collided and was reflected. Thats the true origin of altenate facts. You do not know, what is true, but that doesn't matter.
Isn't that one of the reasons why we have built atom smashers like Fermilab and Cerne, to prove / dis-prove such exotic idea's. If it can't be proven in a lab, it's just theory.
Is that like "alternative facts", two words that had made the news lately. Alternative facts are not facts, quoting a news moderator recently.
Thank you for the explanation, this will take a couple of re-read's. I had to go outside in my 3D backyard and clear my head.
On the way back I evaluated my garage door again.
This morning it was a three dimensional breakfast.
Chip please don't read on..
If it's only twice a week: scrambled eggs(2), sausage patties(2), fried potatoes(what ever is left), buttered toast(2).
My father always said, he can assimilate a breakfast like that. You couldn't take away his fried potatoes.
Is that four dimensions?
I hope I don't pay for it someday.
I was very disappointed with breakfast in my hotel in San Jose. Only time I have been to the USA. Same one dimensional tasteless "healthy" Smile you get in Scandinavia.
If you want the 3 dimensional breakfast: bacon, eggs, beans, black pudding, toast, you need to be in England for the "Full English Breakfast" or Ireland for the "Full Irish Breakfast". Same thing really.
Say you arrange a lot of radius 1 circles on the 2D plane in a square grid. All touching each other. Then you see there are these empty spaces on the diagonals of four adjacent circles. Those empty spaces are too small to put one of your circles into.
One can do this in 3D. In this case piling a bunch of radius 1 spheres in a cubic lattice. Again there are these spaces between 8 adjacent spheres. Those empty spaces are bigger but still not big enough to fit one of your spheres into.
We can continue this sphere stacking in 4D, 5D etc...
But here comes the magic part. When you get to 8 dimensions those gaps between all the adjacent "spheres" are exactly big enough to fit one of your spheres into!