Click through for full sized version, and for the red button caption.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

This cartoon reminds me of one of the objections I often hear to mind uploading, that even if the uploaded mind was identical to the original, there would be a break in continuity between them.  I’ve never quite understood why that break in continuity would be any worse than the one that occurs with a nap, or any other period of non-consciousness.

It’s interesting how strongly some young children resist falling asleep, occasionally not allowing themselves to succumb until they’re exhausted.  It’s made me wonder if there isn’t some primal fear of the end of the current consciousness.  Of course, it’s probably just a fear of missing out on whatever’s going on after they go to bed.

This may well be the best explanation of particle colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider, I’ve seen in a long time.

Click through for full sized version, and for the Feynman diagram in the red button caption.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Of course, none of it might be fundamental.  It might be structure, patterns, mathematics, whatever, all the way down.  Even when we can’t go down any further, there will always be doubt that maybe, perhaps, there is something more fundamental farther down than we can observe.

Click through for full sized version.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

STRICT REDUCTIONIST:
Anyway, apologies are an evolutionary survival mechanism and therefore just an illusion.

Click through for full sized version, and to see the red-button caption.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

I often wish I could draw comics.  You can say a lot in a brief and humorous cartoon.

I think one of the dangers we always have to be on guard against is the trap of thinking that we know best, that we’ve finally figured it all out, that everyone who thinks differently than we are idiots who simply must give up their misguided ways and think like we do.  It’s an alluring trap, that we probably have all fallen into at one time or another.  It is, to some degree, human nature.

The most typical example is religious fundamentalists and extremists.  Right now, Islamic extremists are the most glaring and violent of these examples.  But there are plenty of people in other religions and cultures who share similar impulses, a desire to impose their values on others, although usually not to a violent degree.

But history has pretty conclusively shown that you don’t need religion to be blinded by ideology.  Eugenics is a pretty clear example of people who told themselves that they were being rational, that they had science on their side, and then imposed their will on others, with often horrific results.  Others include the worst aspects of the French Revolution and Communism.

People who refer to themselves as rationalists and freethinkers are not immune to the allure of this trap.  As a nonbeliever, I often find myself squirming when confronted by those whose metaphysical conclusions I share, but whose unbridled contempt toward those who disagree with us, I often find not very freethinking oriented.  And as a skeptic, I try to remember that anyone can be fooled, everyone has blind spots, including the sharpest scientific skeptics.

No matter how certain we are of our beliefs or positions, we have to remember that history is filled with people who thought differently, but who were equally certain.  Most of them were wrong, to varying degrees.  No matter how careful, how scientific or rational we think we are being, we are also probably wrong about a lot more than we’d be comfortable discovering.

Many of our errors will likely be obvious to future generations.  We can only hope that they’re less severe than the mistakes from previous generations.  But one category of people that history often judges the harshest, are those who never pause to consider their own fallibility.

None of this is to say that we don’t know a lot more today than we once did about a great many things.  Human knowledge does progress.  The trick it to remember that it will continue progressing in the future.

Click through for full sized version and the red button caption.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

This SMBC reminds me of a concept that I’ve been debating on ways to express, but a brief comment here seems like the opportunity to do so.  We’ve had a lot of discussions about exactly when we might start to consider an AI (artificial intelligence) a fellow being.  This is a philosophical question with no right or wrong answer.

One of the things that’s become apparent to me over time, is that there are two answers to it.  The first is the emotional one, which this strip satirizes.  We come pre-wired to see things as fellow conscious beings.  Many see this anthropomorphizing tendency as the basis for beliefs in ghosts, spirits, demons, gods, and other supernatural entities.  We often intuitively extend it to things like storms, cars, and existing computer systems.  In experiments, people have been reluctant to destroy cute robots after they had played with them for a while, obviously intuitively feeling that they were conscious entities.

I recently listened to an interview with the director of the new Ex Machina, the new AI movie, who stated that he knew he wouldn’t have a problem convincing audiences that the AI in the movie was sentient.  He knew that emotionally, they’d be predisposed to accepting it as such, at least within make believe framework of the movie.  (Having actress Alicia Vikander‘s lovely face on the AI probably helped tremendously.)

Of course, intellectually we know that things like storms, cars, and cute robots aren’t conscious systems.  Even though we feel at times emotionally that they are, we don’t intellectually give ourselves permission to regard them as such.  (At least most of us in the modern developed world don’t.)  I think this intellectual threshold where we give permission is the second answer.  And, as before, it remains a philosophical threshold.

The other thing this strip brilliantly points out, is that we have to be careful of being too guarded with that intellectual permission, too skeptical.  It’s the same intellectual skepticism that once allowed people to consider animals as not being conscious, and to then feel okay with mistreating them.

I think we’re still a long way from having a sentient conscious machine, but as we get closer, we have to be on guard against setting the standard too high.  We don’t want to find ourselves making statements like the one in the last caption.

I loved this SMBC.  It echoes something I’ve observed before, that some physicists have disdain for philosophy, while often engaging in it themselves.

Hovertext: “Philosophy is dumb, unless it comes out of the mouth of a physicist.”

Click through for full sized version and red button caption.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

I’ve discussed the question before on this blog on whether the universe is mathematics, mathematics is the universe, or some weird combination.  Personally, I’ve gradually become more convinced that the foundations of mathematics and logic are empirical, that they are our most fundamental theories about how the universe works.  This isn’t completely intuitive because we are born with some logic and quantity cognitive pre-wiring, giving the illusion, perhaps, that it comes from somewhere else.

One consequence of seeing math and logic as theories, is that they are subject to revision, something many will find intolerable.  Still, arguably quantum physics led to revision in logic.

I love this SMBC on the Chinese room thought experiment.

Click through for full sized version and the red caption button.

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

My regular readers know I’m not a big fan of the Chinese room thought experiment.  I think it only confirms whatever intuitions you already have.  If you think intelligence can’t come from the processing of symbolic information, then it seems to self evidently confirm that intuition.  If you think intelligence can come from that, then you intuitively conclude that the entire Chinese room is intelligent.

But my main beef with this thought experiment is that it’s ridiculous, and Weiner does a good job pointing that out.  In the real world, a person in a Chinese room, as described, would need to be in a room the size of a warehouse and, depending on the question, might take days, months, or years to provide a response.  It becomes more plausible if you actually put the person in there with a computer, but then the intuitive aspects start to disappear.

This is pretty good, and it will exercise your mind for a minute.

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The distinction between mathematical notation and its underlying reality is a crucial one.  The first is an invention of humans, the second is universal.  In fact, I’ve increasingly become convinced that the second actually is the universe, and mathematics is just us recognizing reality’s fundamental patterns, and devising mechanisms to describe and to model, to extrapolate, to make predictions, based on those patterns.

Of course, many of those predictions have no correlation in observed reality, at least none that has been observed yet.  Many mathematicians take delight in pointing out how useless many of their endeavors are.  Yet, despite this, many mathematical structures initially thought to be purely abstract do eventually end up being useful to model some aspect of nature.  The ones that don’t could be thought of as either untested or falsified scientific theories.

Another way to describe what I’m saying is that mathematics is the universe.  This is similar to but the reverse of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which posits that the universe is a part of mathematics.  Both of these ideas see an equivalence between underlying mathematical realities and the universe, but with opposite ideas of which is the more primal reality.

Which one is true?  Like all metaphysical conundrums, I can’t see any way to know for sure.  But my personal judgment is that mathematics being the universe is simpler.  The universe being a subset of mathematics requires us to assume a trans-universe reality that we can’t observe, an assumption mathematics being the universe doesn’t require.

Of course, depending on exactly what we mean by “mathematics”, even if there is no trans-universe reality, the universe could still be thought of as a part of mathematics, but only in the same sense that it is a subset of all scientific theories, including both true and false ones.

Unless I’m missing something?

Click through for full sized version and red button caption.

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Of course, the upshot is that if you view humans as organic machines, it opens the door to something like robot heaven eventually working for us.  We might someday build heaven.  Indeed, if it should turn out that there is a heaven waiting for us, it might well work similarly to robot heaven.

This is just too close to some of our recent discussions for me not to call attention to it.  As usual, Weiner knocks it out of the park.

(Click through for hovertext and red button caption.)

via: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This seems relevant to some of our discussion on the previous post.

via smbc-comics.com (Click though for hovertext and red button caption.)

The last caption may be in reference to these developments:

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

A better question might be, if a robot has conflicting programming, what will it do?  That seems to be where most human moral dilemmas arise, when our instincts are in conflict.

Today’s SMBC highlights something about humanity that is often overlooked, something that any extraterrestrial intelligence that builds a civilization would have to have.

Click through for hover-text and red button caption.
Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – The Mammal Conspiracy

We often talk about the intelligence of dolphins, whales, cephalopods, elephants, and other species.  But something all of these species lack is an ability to alter and control their environment, at least in any detailed fashion, a capability that is at the heart of building a civilization.  When you think about the evolutionary steps that were necessary for humans to have the dexterity that we do, it starts to look like we were the benefactors of a very lucky sequence of events.

First, there needed to be a three dimensional environment like the interlocking tree branches that made the primate body plan adaptive.  Second, the primate line needed to evolve an intelligent line (the great apes).  Third, there needed to be a change in environment that led to some of those apes coming down from the trees to tall grasslands where walking upright was adaptive, freeing their hands for work other than locomotion or hanging.

Only then do we have the stage set for human intelligence to evolve.  Of course, it’s completely conceivable for alternate factors to lead to the evolution of those capabilities.  But the fact that, despite a number of relatively intelligent species in the animal kingdom, it’s only happened once on Earth should give us pause before concluding that it’s at all common for a civilization building species to evolve.

Intelligence and dexterity aren’t the only factors by the way.  Mastery of fire as a tool also seems crucial, something that seems to rule out water dwelling species like cephalopods, who if they lived longer, might have a decent chance at manipulating their environment.

Fermi’s paradox is the question which asks, if extraterrestrial civilizations are common, why weren’t we colonized long ago?  The rarity of the combination of intelligence and dexterity might give a pretty grounded answer to that question, and that’s before we even consider the likelihood of other evolutionary milestones, such as sexual reproduction or multi-cellular life.

So, when thinking about the evolution of human intelligence, be grateful for the existence of jungles and grasslands.  Without them, we might not be here, at least not with enough intelligence to discuss our evolution.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (click through for red button caption)

These days, I usually share these on Twitter, but this one seemed more relevant for this venue.

Despite using Twitter to share interesting articles and sites, I’ve never found it to be a great platform for actually sharing complex thoughts or having long conversations.  I’m too much of a pontificator to stay within the 280 character limit (or whatever it is these days).  On the few occasions that I’ve attempted it, the short pity exchanges that sometimes followed left me unsatisfied.

Blogging may be old fashioned at this point, but it still seems the best way on the internet to have thoughtful discussions.

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Click through for full sized version and the red button caption.)

My own take on this is that what separates humans from machines is our survival instinct.  We intensely desire to survive, and procreate.  Machines, by and large, don’t.  At least they won’t unless we design them to.  If we ever did, we would effective be creating a race of slaves.  But it’s much more productive to create tools whose desires are to do what we design them to do, than design survival machines and then force them to do what we want them to.

Many people may say that the difference is more about sentience.  But sentience, the ability to feel, is simply how our biological programming manifests itself in our affective awareness.  A machine may have a type of sentience, but one calibrated for its designed purposes, rather than the ones evolution produces calibrated for gene preservation.

I do like that the strip uses the term “humanness” rather than “consciousness”, although both terms are inescapably tangled up with morality, particularly in what makes a particular system a subject of moral concern.

It’s interesting to ponder that what separates us from non-human animals may be what we have, or will have, in common with artificial intelligence, but what separates us from machines is what we have in common with other animals.  Humans may be the intersection between the age of organic life and the age of machine life.

Of course, eventually machine engineering and bioengineering may merge into one field.  In that sense, maybe it’s more accurate to describe modern humans as the link between evolved and engineered life.

Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic is pretty good, and related to our recent discussions. Click through for the original to see the hovertext and Red Button bonus caption How would you have responded to Zorkrang's initial question? (Assuming you weren't more concerned about being naked and experimented on by an extraterrestrial.)

Zach Weinersmith is a man after my own heart when it comes to consciousness, as today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows. As the consciousness is in the eye of the beholder and hierarchy of definitions guy, I feel this comic. It also resonates with Jacy Reese Anthis' conscious semanticism outlook. Click through for the original … Continue reading SMBC: Consciousness: a definition thing →