At $1 / synapse / year you can be listed as the benefactor of a synapse!! Cool!! Since there are approx 10^14 synapses (or something like that), that should be plenty of money.
Hell it could be $1 / synapse / century.
So if My_Estate sponsors synapse _S, then I pay $1 for the maintenance and upkeep of synapse _S for a 100 years. That is 1 cent per year.With 100 trillion synapses, that is 100 trillion per century, or 1 trillion per year. Which comes to an average of $200 per person on the planet (with 5 billion people on the planet). So some people and governments would sponsor more synapses than other people and governments obviously.
But if we all came together like this, we could very well fund this, at 1 trillion per year (100 trillion per century) paying 1 cent per year per synapse (1 dollar per century per synapse). Small price to pay to create a new form of consciousness, and perhaps a new era of prosperity for humankind in my opinion.
This is a great story. I first recall when I first knew I was being misled by a teacher. I was in 9th grade earth science, and she had shown a documentary on the early history of the universe which had made reference to string theory. String theory posits perhaps 11 dimensions in some versions from what I gather. The teacher thought this was ridiculous and said something to the class to the effect of, well I can't even imagine having a fourth dimension, can you? Student Parrots: No! Teacher: Well then, of course string theory can't be right!
Now I was 14, and it would still be a few years before I first would read 'A Brief History of Time' and so I knew nothing of string theory, but, I somehow knew, on some basic instinctual level that I was being misled in that moment, that just because the teacher could not "imagine" higher dimensions did not in and of itself mean that there could not possibly be higher dimensions in theory. Looking back, that was the start of a distrust in me with regards to the academic "establishment" which has continued in varying degrees to this very day. It is one of those epistemological moments of clarity: once one realizes it is possible to be misled by a teacher, which one naturally is conditioned to trust, then really who else could possibly mislead one? What sources can after all be trusted? Once one realizes the inherent fallibility of everyone, including one's teachers, then things just are not quite the same ever again, there is a certain loss of innocence there which can never be gotten back.
I think that makes total sense, in terms of longevity not being broadly inherited. Why would it be? Once an organism has lived long enough to be able to reproduce and no longer is able to reproduce, there is no evolutionary purpose for that organism to stick around. Genetic drift could account for some people having more longevity than others, but I see no selective advantage for it, from the point of view of the gene. Thus it makes sense that not too many people would be genetically pre-disposed towards longevity.
Personally, I don't mind the James Dean ethos: "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse behind!" :-)
This question is actually puzzling biologists. I think they found that the longer a granny lives, the better her grandchildren fare (and the more she might have). However, a similar relation was NOT found for granddads, so it is apparently still a mistery why men grow so old (last I read, there might be more info by now).
My maternal grandfather has certainly gotten an evolutionary advantage from living a long life. He's had nine children that I know of, including some younger than me.
Grandfathers can continue to father children til they pass away, and we're not actually programmed to die, we're just not optimised for immorbidity. These two things are enough to explain grandfathers. Oh, and grandmothers as caregivers are unique to humans, or at least the menopause is, which is an adaptation for this care giving strategy. I'm not familiar with any other mammalian species with it.
A possible reason for longevity being heritable is the society they are living in prospers due to their experience and extra labor. Remember it wasn't long ago that grandparents looked after children in villages in some societies.
Technically, there's no reason that organisms should reach a point where they're "no longer able to reproduce"; I think it's merely a random choice of our most basic biology that we grow "old" and then die from various diseases and systems failures, rather than simply surviving until there are so many [generations] of us around at once that some individuals can no longer find food. This is the way that asexual species, like bacteria, function.
You'd think it would actually be in the best interest of any given organism to have as long a reproductive lifetime as possible, and therefore fitness would increase along with longevity, as long as that longevity remained virile/fertile.
Then again...
If the old did instead survive to compete with the young, evolution would start to fail as a process—you'd have too many non-adapted organisms reproducing with one another, and so what adaptation there was would happen much more slowly.
Today, sexual species that have "dropped back down" into being asexual, reproducing by cloning or the like (which have the same evolutionary disadvantage as a non-aging species would have, but more so) can survive and prosper. However, far enough back in the genetic soup, when sexual species first diverged from asexual ones, there was probably a fierce competition where being a sexual species was only a little better (it requires more resources, after all), and so aging provided an immediate advantage in terms of setting an equilibrium point for species size, so as to not strain resources.
(This may very well be taught in an intro Bio class, but I love discovering things on my own in the form of meditative writing. It's a fact completely untaught in schools today that knowledge lies at your fingertips that you're completely unaware of, not from a book or a website or another person, but from your own mind, and that you can access it without having to have anyone guide you to it. Philosophy is neglected as a means to pursue ordinary, practical knowledge, but it's really just a super-set of science: there's still a hypothesis, experimentation, observations and a conclusion, it's just that the "experimentation" doesn't require a physical world. In the case above, obviously, it would be better to have an actual scientific study, but the very fact that you can derive a preliminary intuition of a topic without anyone telling you what to think, or giving you a demonstration one way or the other, is revelation enough for most people in the world today.)
> Technically, there's no reason that organisms should reach a point where they're "no longer able to reproduce";
Women who stopped having children and instead invested in their grandchildren had more decendents than women who didn't stop having their own children.
It's not a random choice. You're optimised for the spreading of your genes and if you spend resources on maintaining your body in perfect health and your competitor lets his body run down while spending those resources on progeny he wins on average.
The old surviving to compete with the young would not make evolution fail. There are limited resources and competition for them so the ill adapted die, there's nothing in there that stops the old living on forever, and if organisms can't breed together they generally don't copulate (adaptation). Great^8 granddad might want to get it on with g^8 daughter, but she'll be uninterested because her adaptations will not see him as sexual, any more than we'd see a chimp.
There is actually only one major family that are asexual the rotifers. Given that sex appears wasteful of energy, the fact that there is only one example of a lineage successful in geological time with asexuality is pretty strong evidence it's a good idea.
For more, better, more clearly expressed, read Richard Dawkins.
Under no circumstances read anything by Steven Jay Gould to learn biology.
you can derive a preliminary intuition of a topic without anyone telling you what to think, or giving you a demonstration one way or the other, is [a] revelation enough
Indeed. However I studies philosophy when I was 14 and I suspect it may be due to this early "training" that I am incline to think stuff through on my own and get a logical understanding of things. I have been pleasantly surprised often by so many things I have come up with on my own to only find out that many other people with proper objective undertakings have arrived at the same conclusions, or things I thought were knew and insights to only find out others are studying it indepth.
I think people do not try and think stuff through on their own perhaps because they have not been giving this "early training". There is a danger with thinking stuff on your own and that is the fact that one may come up with whatever story, which is perhaps another reason why laymen may disincline to endeavour in such activity, however if they were introduced with some philosophy and emphasised the objectivity of their undertaking our place perhaps would be filled with much better adapted individuals. For such reason I propose philosophy be introduced in the curriculum at grade 9, rather than religion as they teach here in Britain.
Once an organism has lived long enough to be able to reproduce and no longer is able to reproduce, there is no evolutionary purpose for that organism to stick around
The theory of evolution speaks of adaptation to the environment so that one may survive. Whether they want to survive only so that they may pass on their genes is only a hypothesis which sounds rather convincing, but there is hardly any evidence for it. There is no reason to assume that we only live so that we may reproduce, although reproduction is an important part of our existence.
In terms of a long-term solution to the DNS cache poisoning issue it seems deep packet inspection could be the only way to go. The work-around was to extend the encryption involved with DNS but that only makes it harder, but not impossible for DNS hacks to take place. Only if deep packet inspection happens would DNS hacks truly become a thing of the past, since if my ISP is inspecting all the packets, and it's stored IP for say cnn.com gets re-routed to a hacker's IP, an inspection of the packets coming across could flag a problem to the ISP. I am not an expert in this area but I just recall from reading a 'Wired' article on this issue that the only really good solution here is in fact deep packet inspection. So outlawing it would be a hacker's wet dream, and by hacker I mean "cracker" or "black hat" people obviously.
(1) No part of the DNS is currently any hacker's wet dream. Why bother spoofing at all? You don't need to bust out the batmobile to get into most people's accounts.
(2) The technique that "extended" DNS' security is the same technique that protects plenty of other core Internet protocols, so if it doesn't work at least in the medium term, we're all doomed.
(3) The issue isn't whether DNS is breakable --- it always has been --- it' s how easy it is. The problem is about cost, not about raw capability. If you can't pull the attack off drive-by, it doesn't make a difference in 2009.
(4) Anybody who tries to sell you on a DPI solution to DNS security is scamming you. You'd need a globally deployed network of DPI boxes, all synchronized, to make a dent in the problem.
One can only hope that as the reductionist principles upon which our consciousness operates are made apparent by projects like these, that the masses will finally begin to be disabused of the ever-persistent and pernicious god delusion which has impeded human progress and welfare since the dawn of recorded history.
So let's see, you set out to build a human brain and emulate consciousness, yet in the process you reaffirm to everyone that it takes a phenomenal level of supercomputing power, complexity and intelligent, purpose-guided scientists to create something that can operate on its own.
I may be mistaken, but tell me again how intelligently designing and creating an autonomous entity furthers the atheist world-view (which I am guessing you agree with, given your careful choice of phrasing ala god delusion)? If I was one of the masses -- who are evidently far less enlightened than yourself -- I would argue that this project demonstrates that an intelligent being is clearly involved in the production of a conscious entity.
Philosophical dualism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)) is a mistake at the core of most religions. Making a human brain would contribute much to destroying the concept of the mind as something separate from the brain, rather than the mind as something the brain does.
I would not call it a mistake, yet. Just another philosophical position (which I do not agree with, but that's not the point).
Apropos dualism: Did you thought about how artificial intelligence might end the dualism in economic theory: I.e. that one has to account for labour and capital as completely separate factors of production? (I am ignoring land etc here for the sake of simplicity.)
This is not about ID vs. evolution. It is about whether the brain can be reduced to a purely physical system or if there is something nun-physical about it, i.e. a 'soul'. Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one. I'm not saying we are there now, but there is certainly progress.
I'm not sure that it will settle anything. Even if you built a brain that functioned identically to a human brain, one can never prove that the brain is experiencing/creating consciousness. It could always be argued that the brain is just mimicking function but lacks subjective awareness. Since we have no way of measuring consciousness even in a human brain, how will be prove that a man-made brain is conscious.
I did not say it was about ID vs. Evolution, either, but the original post clearly indicates a world-view that claims a lack of a designer. As I already noted, there would be an obvious logical dilemma between how the results of this experiment were achieved (if it ever came to fruition), and his world-view.
Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one.
You state this as if replicating a human brain would be like buying a new Lego set and following the instructions. I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?
The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.
You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?
The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.
I don't think that's clear at all. I might agree with your first point, that we don't understand the internal mechanisms very well, but in some cases it's a lot easier to model a system than to understand how it functions. This is particularly true of emergent behavior, which pretty much anyone in the field acknowledges the brain is largely driven by.
Even in fields as concrete as physics, there are plenty of emergent results which can be verified to arise from the small-scale behaviors that we can observe, whereas a full "understanding" of how that emergence happens is beyond our grasp.
Regardless of the question of sleep, the lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer. Perhaps the answer is unknown in the universe.
If you believe otherwise, where did the intelligent being who knows this information come from?
lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer
However, in your same vein of logic, the incapability to prove the existence of a designer does not invalidate the existence of a designer in the equation.
This same flimsy logic is applied within scientific naturalism, where we assume that because the existence of a designer is not capable of being proven, that the only way we can conclude something "coming about" is by inferring from only what is empirically given.
Surely you would not try to argue with me that because a child is not present (and thus logically unprovable to exist) that the existence of a sand castle on the beach could only be explained by the waves and functions of the ocean.
Obviously in that example we have external information to invalidate our faulty logic (i.e. seeing prior children build sand-castles), but it serves to highlight the absurdity that comes about when trying to infer from what is only empirically given. Now take that simple sand castle example and apply it to the insane complexity of trying to explain the creation of the universe. Not to mention remove the external information that enables us to validate/invalidate our claims.
I hope you can see why I choose to merge my intuition for recognizing intelligent design with empirical science.
There are many people on HN capable of making pattern-recognizing neural nets. Neural nets are loosely (very) modeled on human neurons.
To create a neural net, a framework is created that sets up layers of neurons and sets their weightings (often randomly). The framework runs the net against batches of data, measures the level of success, and changes the weightings. Eventually this process produces a "brain" that can, for example, recognize letters.
The framework's creator can't explain how the generated neural net functions because no one designed it. To someone not familiar with the process, the neural net would trigger their intuition for recognizing intelligent design.
OK, and so what does that conclusion have to do anything?
You just went in a big circle to tell me that my intuition about the neural network was correct -- that there was a designer (the framework's creator) outside of the neural network who set the boundaries and then let that unique neural network run its course.
It doesn't matter if we know how the neural network works (and so forth), because this argument becomes logically invalid the moment you inject a designer (The framework's creator) into an argument to prove the lack of one.
Edit: Even if your comment was trying to show how an intuition for recognizing design can be "fooled", it still fails out because the intuition was correct.
There was an intelligent designer for the framework, sure, but not for the intelligence in the neural net. That was just the product of a feedback loop organized by simple rules. Mistaking order (like a fractal, for instance) for intelligent design is one item I was addressing.
>> I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?
>> The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime
The other item I was addressing with the example is your implication that we can't create something until we understand every aspect of it.
And finally, adding an intelligent designer can't do more than push the argument back a step and leave you saying "who created him?"
Probably won't change many minds, but it does prove there's no "magic" in the recipe, and proves that god(s) are not necessary for the creation of life. It challenges the assumption that some magic chunk of soul-cloth is required to make consciousness work.
That said, surely there will be those that argue that conscious machines have no rights because they are missing their chunk of soul-cloth.
I've never understood this argument. If an INTELLIGENT being produced the conscious entity, who or what was responsible for creating this intelligent being?
And no, you can't side step this question. You can't say "well, it's god" because that's special pleading. I just don't understand how people can assume that evidence of complexity requires a designer, but never seem to have a problem inventing said designer out of thin-air as a magically preexisting entity.
What's more likely: that a natural process of change followed by selection essentially navigated through an infinite search space of possible configurations, some of which would create things like intelligent life, or that there was, magically, a pre-existent eternal intelligent being that decided to create other intelligent beings?
The people who propose a designer simply haven't learned how to think properly. It's as simply as that. They don't understand logic even though they pretend to.
Playing Devil's Advocate: if these simulations are truly modeled after humans, why are you so sure that they won't buy into many of the same religious ideas and reaffirm what many humans naturally think and do? Would a simulation like this even be aware that it was not just another person?
It seems like the answer to this question MUST be that the simulation cannot tell the difference between itself and a normal human. Otherwise, your argument is moot, because the religious folk will simply be able to point at this thing and say "clearly this thing is different from us -- it even knows that it's different, so obviously this is not the way our 'souls' work."
I think what Allocator2008 is getting at is that creating artificial life would show that there is nothing mystical or non-physical about consciousness. This would partly poke a hole in the argument for existence of God that the creation of life and/or consciousness has never been witnessed.
To have the artificial brain not be aware it is not a regular person, or to have the brain buy into religious ideas, would actually make the point (that the artificial brain is just like a human's, and thus consciousness is not mystical or non-physical) stronger.
I think what Allocator2008 is getting at is that creating artificial life would show that there is nothing mystical or non-physical about consciousness. This would partly poke a hole in the argument for existence of God that the creation of life and/or consciousness has never been witnessed.
Fear not. Even if the thing achieves consciousness, writes poetry, falls in love, critiques literature, etc., people will still claim that it's just faking it. "Neat trick, but it still doesn't have a soul, so it can't be conscious!"
If I had to guess, I'd say that it would take a fresh generation, growing up with this sort of thing all around it, to accept (en masse) that the computers had whatever that special "something" is that we have.
Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise - what happens when a computer, aided and guided by nobody in particular, does something illegal? Creates a piece of art and wants copyright protection? Who do you sue when a computer sets up its own Pirate Bay? Do you let it get its own bank account? What about when it figures out how to beat the stock market by hacking e-mail accounts of executives and returning trades based on insider information to clueless traders that just follow its black-box suggestions - is that insider trading if the system wasn't explicitly told to do that and no human ever sees the information? And so on...our legal system is neither equipped for this stuff, nor agile enough to adapt to it in a timely fashion, and these issues will remain unresolved far past the point of no return.
> Fear not. Even if the thing achieves consciousness, writes poetry, falls in love, critiques literature, etc., people will still claim that it's just faking it. "Neat trick, but it still doesn't have a soul, so it can't be conscious!"
Good point. Academics seem to have accepted that consciousness isn't magic for a while now, so building an artificial brain might not be so convincing for the rest of the world.
> Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise...
Yeah. I wouldn't even know where to start with figuring out some of those questions. I'm sure someone has written about this already, so if anyone knows who and where this has been written about I'd be interested in reading about it.
Precisely what makes you think that a group of people who dismiss a concept as simple and transparent as natural selection will accept a collection of--probably significantly more complex--"reductionist principles upon which our consciousness operates"?
Similarly (and in opposition to many of the opinions in the other responses), if faced with artificial consciousnesses, why do you expect them not to ascribe to them the same "soul" substance that they allow themselves (ultimately, anyway--early resistance is likely to be universal)? After all, it is immediately evident that people can perform an action that creates an entity with an independent consciousness; if humanity develops another such creation method, how would that contradict their theology?
Why clone Neanderthals? It would be like winning the war in 'Starship Troopers', then cloning the bugs because it was so much fun fighting them the first time, we just had to have another go at it. That is just stupid. Our ancestors beat these guys 25,000 years ago. I say let the victory stand. There will plenty of other struggles to be had no doubt, maybe even the insects of 'Starship Troopers'! :-)
When I visited the Unix room at Bell Labs in 1993, there was a picture of Dan Quayle before a blackboard with the famous misspelling. Below the the picture was the text "My heroe -- Ken Thompson".
I got the reference, I just don't find 'references' funny. I don't see it's a joke (or otherwise interesting) for a commenter to remind us, that like the parent commenter, former Vice President Dan Quayle also mispelled "potato" in 1992.
Try MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
I've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent
I think to the best of my knowledge that in teleporatation when one grabs the quantum information from the original location one destroys the physical content from the original location, then transmits the information to the second location, and rebuilds the original physical content. In other words the original physical content is destroyed in the act of analyzing the content. So there is not a danger of leaving a "copy of oneself" at the original location. Necessarily to measure quantum spin and so on, the original physical material is destroyed, or more precisely, is re-arranged into indecipherable form.
One question. If you know the exact location of all the particles as you do this, and you "teleport" them, but at the same time create a copy in the old location with the same quantum information, aren't you back to the same problem?
Had not thought about that. I suppose once one has all the quantum information one needs, one could "splice the signal" into an arbitrary amount of copies. Unless there was some entanglement going on. That is, if Origin Point and Destination Point where put into some kind of EPR entangled state to preclude both points having a "copy" at the same time.
Regarding the tetraneutron issue: I would be interested if they could repeat the experiment which supposedly detected this. My guess is that this was a statistical anomaly. It is highly unlikely 4 neutrons could arrive more or less at the same time at the same place in the detector, but the alternative, that something is wrong with the Pauli exclusion principle, may be even more unlikely. Accordingly I would seriously bet if they did the exact same experiment again (shooting beryllium atoms at a carbon target) that they would not detect any "tetra-neutrons".
With things like this, I always remember something Sherlock Holmes said in 'A Study in Scarlett' I think it was though not quite sure where it was exactly - "Once one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the case."
Here, it strikes me that though the anomaly seen was very improbable, the alternative idea that the Pauli exclusion principle and hence the standard model is wrong in some way is tantamount to impossible. It is far easier for me to believe what they saw was just a fluke, than to think there is an issue with the Pauli exclusion principle. Of course, if they can repeat the experiment, that is something else again, and I suppose then further inquiry would be warranted.
Have a "sponsor a synapse" program.
At $1 / synapse / year you can be listed as the benefactor of a synapse!! Cool!! Since there are approx 10^14 synapses (or something like that), that should be plenty of money.
Hell it could be $1 / synapse / century.
So if My_Estate sponsors synapse _S, then I pay $1 for the maintenance and upkeep of synapse _S for a 100 years. That is 1 cent per year.With 100 trillion synapses, that is 100 trillion per century, or 1 trillion per year. Which comes to an average of $200 per person on the planet (with 5 billion people on the planet). So some people and governments would sponsor more synapses than other people and governments obviously.
But if we all came together like this, we could very well fund this, at 1 trillion per year (100 trillion per century) paying 1 cent per year per synapse (1 dollar per century per synapse). Small price to pay to create a new form of consciousness, and perhaps a new era of prosperity for humankind in my opinion.