Marie PhD
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Singularities and simulation

2/28/2015

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The first time I used a computer I was struck by how much it appears to act like a human and loved playing with Eliza and twisting its use of language into knots.

Of course the computer only appears human-like superficially and does so to make it easier for us to interact with it, this is an anthropomorphism.

Computers sit there waiting for us to enter a command (which is what it really is because computers are really just tools, just like garden rakes, they sit there waiting to be used. If the command is properly formed, the computer will respond by executing your command or produce an error, you can use any tool the wrong way, some will work, some won't and sometimes you can break it. Same with televisions, they sit there waiting for us to turn them on then we tell them what we want to view, and remote controls communicate via infrared signalling. On the other hand humans seldom give other humans commands and the parsing of the command is part of being able to properly use language.)

We as humans have the peculiar desire to anthropomorphize everything (notice how I anthropomorphized TVs sitting there waiting in the last paragraph?) and even to turn them into gods, to which we particularly loved making human sacrifices to. The volcano never needed human sacrifices, the volcano never was human. And now we are preparing for our computers to overtake us intellectually because - we decided to do that anthropomorphizing thing again. And what is best about those computers that achieve self-awareness, consciousness or whatever the pop-culture buzz word de jour is, it will immediately seek to destroy humanity. So before the internet can actually experience psychological scars, the nascent computer consciousness becomes totally paranoid.

I suspect if a computer/internet became conscious, it'd be more like the thoughts passing through the sperm whale's mind after coming into existence in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Over the years I have thought about computers as I use them constantly both for work and to use the internet and in that time I have thought a lot about thinking. Of course I don't know all the answers so I am guessing quite a fair bit here.

I doubt computers will ever become truly conscious, although I think consciousness could be simulated, but it has no reason to. We are conscious because it facilitates our survival, our brain allows us to formulate plans, remember things, gather information, make hypotheses
, test theories, optimize resources, prioritize... all necessary for our survival. For instance, is this berry good to eat or not? How can we test it without killing anyone and then performing an experiment to find out.

Computers aren't alive, the same way volcanoes aren't alive. They will never need human sacrifices or be totally paranoid.

In this silly piece of science fiction, it talks about computer programs that will write themselves and because we have the ability to code genetic algorithms. I have written programs that will write themselves and genetic algorithms. The programs with genetic algorithms were solving the problems I presented, but computers don't need to adapt, although they probably will because WE want them to.

We evolve to adapt to better facilitate our survival in our environment. But computer programs adapt to possible solutions and randomly or as determined by the programmer.
Adaptation for a computer would possibly to minimize more processor time and to optimize how it shares of RAM, perhaps, stuff that will never cause it to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as in Terminator. It will never care if you reboot it, it will never fight you to stop you pulling out its power cord, not unless we give it the ability too.

From this facebook discussion people think we need a) to have souls and God  or b) we can simulate consciousness as is. I'm in camp c) we need to be alive to be actually able to experience consciousness.

I think consciousness is a byproduct of being alive.

We need the 'I' to resolve the information we are receiving from the environment and then we can decide how to respond and I think that 'I' is part of being alive. I don't believe in souls, but I think other animals have an 'I' as well. Some animals have more consciousness than others and I think it is a result of how many neurons the animal has and
general brain size. One of the things animals and humans have in common is that we are alive - when the animal or human is dead, the lights are definitely out and can no long respond to the environment, it's dead body is acted upon by other organisms as it decays.

I don't know how sequences of carbon molecules first became alive.

The other component of being alive is we get the ability to act - I used to call this 'will' but I got into too many discussions where people assumed I was talking about 'free will'. I don't care about that debate because it is true we are all subject to behavioral psychology - still we obviously get to have some level of choice - if you go into a restaurant for the first time that you've never heard of, you are going to have to make a choice what to order. I don't think you have completely pre-programmed so that every choice you make would be known in advance - if that was the case your loved ones would know how you'd order in advance, but apparently they don't and from what I gather these numbers in that article still look almost like a coin flip.

If something happens, we have a choice of whether we do something or not. It is usual that we'd think about it at least before deciding how to respond to some stimulus.

So being alive has some a) experience/awareness of sensation (the 'I'), b) the ability to act, even if those actions are the result of behavioral conditioning. Neither of these things are present in a dead body. Even bacteria can respond to stimulus - they can absorb nutrients when they are present in the environment and when they have acquired the right nutrients they act by reproducing, to put it simply. If the bacteria is dead it can do neither.

While a computer may be able to process data, and I do think consciousness can be simulated, a computer can only ever do what we tell it to because it doesn't have an 'I' and I don't know how to simulate that at all.

It is the 'I' that wants to stay alive, to survive, it has it's own imperative to live and it can override that imperative and chose to suicide - I suppose. Computers only do what we want. They cannot suicide, they cannot do anything other than what we want them to do.

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Brains in jars

2/10/2015

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Pretty much every time I met intelligent young men they always start to talk about brains in jars. Its based on Descartes' cogito, "I think therefore I am," and hence we roll onto the whole idea of the singularity, but I digress. The singularity debate is worth having another time, but the idea shows its self in other ways, and I think it starts when boys learn to divorce themselves from their bodies when they hit puberty.

Anyway, the brain in a jar is basically we don't have a body,  we are just brains in jars kind of like the idea in the Matrix movies of which you become aware when you take the red pill. Our senses are delivering a simulation of "some reality" to our perception, the 'I' as some might call it. And there is legal precedent for this, we are not our DNA in that we are created 'equal', it's illegal to discriminate. Technically I think we should be of equal 'value' although without the financial implication. Technically this is called the Mind-Body problem and is a well established problem that is known to philosophy.

Asking men why this happens some have suggested that men (boys) must quickly learn to turn off the urge to get an erection at a very early age and relatively early - because erections are socially embarrassing. It means that the boy has no self control (as an aside, its interesting that if a girl gets raped society wants to know if she was drunk and what she was wearing. This implies in private its acceptable for a boy/man to lose control? I think this is insulting to men/boys because we know men/boys can control themselves). 

In polite society it's like our bodies disappear. We don't discuss our body's normal functions. We use bathrooms in private, we never discuss our secretions or excretions in public - they may happen but no one wants to know about it including periods. We project perfect bodies, especially women, well groomed, good looking, young.

The sick are hidden out of sight; men prefer to ignore things going wrong with their bodies, often ignore symptoms until it is too late; and the elderly are usually put into homes where they generally can't be seen. Babies and the young are also kept out of sight from most adult work environments. This may be why breast feeding babies is often considered unacceptable? We don't want to be reminded of the aging process and female body 'ornaments' (breasts) might actually serve useful purposes - it reminds us we are going to die and for most of us we live in this fantasy we will live forever.

Women remind men that men have bodies - because women make men get erections (okay I am generalizing) but men do have to evaluate each woman and give her a rating and then figure out whether they have a shot or not (yes still generalizing). This is very likely one of the reasons why men sometimes resist women in the work force. Women remind men of their bodies of which they'd rather not remember.

Bodies are something we don't want to think about. And this is why the brain in a jar is such an attractive concept to most men - because that's the ideal. There is only the illusion of pain, need, hunger, desire when you are a brain in a jar other. Brains in jars exist in worlds of concepts and abstractions often not connected to any reality.

Eating food has become glamorous and is also disconnected with the idea of actually nourishing human bodies - because nourishment is the last thing in the minds of large corporate food chains and the "food" products they sell.

I think this is why our society is hyper-sexualized, because I think that some men think women are like the icing on the cake. Women are the reward men get when they feel like they have done something worthy. What I mean by icing on the cake is women (are meant to) look good,  women are all warm, soft and good to hold, women stroke men's ego, they get affection (aka sex), or comforting (this is often when men seek out prostitutes), women give men the feeling of being connected and needed and give men a
dopamine rush.

But I think for some men, women aren't generally considered useful for much else. Being a brain in a jar we stop being animals. And this is probably the appeal of the singularity because it proves we can exist as brains in jars and then live forever and we don't need our body. Hence it makes it easy to anthropomorphize (or rather identify with) computer networks into being brains in jars, rather than tools that perform operations based on our ability to act.

We feel uncomfortable remembering we are very much dependent on our bodies, but animals we are, we give birth like other mammals, we produce milk like other animals, we mate, we produce offspring like other animals which often gets turned into something 'miraculous' by 'christians' so we can distance ourselves from the fact we are nothing but (extremely clever) animals (and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense).


Advertising makes use of this by often placing subtle and sometimes not so subtle sexual messages hidden in their advertising.

But when men really want to get stuff done, what they consider important stuff, they go seek out other men and go off and do it together, like war, build businesses, drink beer and watch ritualized war (aka sports) together. To men, men's stuff is the important stuff.

And if they do anything for women like acknowledge women's existence women should be grateful because women aren't really that important. Women's purpose is pretty much purely for recreation. What women say is kind of trivial to them and yes I am generalizing, I hope. That's why women's studies are not taken seriously, important women in history tend to be ignored, what women do, think and invent is irrelevant, because it's men who feel men do the important stuff.

I think this sets up a problem for men - men very seldom get intimacy from each other, they do not get warm from each other, they don't make each other feel connected, although they may feel they perform useful function in their work, they very likely could be replaced by someone else. (Yes again I am generalizing)

Nevertheless men do need to feel connected, they do need the warmth of a woman and companionship because they are animals despite how much denial they may have over having a body. The warmth of another human being is essential to our well-being. Those statistics on the number of hugs we need a day aside, we need affection, touch and warmth, it is part of being an animal and having a body. The icing on the cake is an essential component of life and it is only thought irrelevant because we are in denial about our bodies.

While we can live with the belief humans are bodiless for the most part, we do need our bodies to develop our brain. Our brain learns how to see after birth, this is not the same as being blind at birth, our brains must learn to recognize and understand what our eyes see after birth. We must learn language, we must learn the relationship between space and languages because I believe it is via our senses that we actually think. Whether we think in words or think visually, our thoughts are expressions of and derived from our sensory input, and for those who are born deaf and blind, they learn via touch. What feels good and bad is salient to how we choose to operate in our lives.

I think men think this function women provide is of no real importance but I think it may account for the high suicide rate of men. Men sometimes think cultivating their relationships with women are irrelevant, that they are enough. As a result women end up not expecting very much from the friendship and seeks the connection she needs else where. This will end up meaning the man will no longer have any connection. This often results in suicide for the man because there is no one who needs or cares about him anymore.

While women do go along with denial about their bodies by pretending they don't get periods or have body hair and being perpetually young, women do acknowledge they have bodies and part of this is taking care of their body because women are supposed to fulfill this function of being icing on the cake. And perhaps this is part of the myth women are their bodies but men live in the fantasy they are brains in jars.

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In God We Trust

2/10/2015

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I know someone who likes to talk about risk socialization especially in the context of corporations. The phenomena is that corporations make profits but if they have a mishap while conducting their business it is we the people who bare the burden of cleaning up the mess, for instance, the BP oil spill in the gulf. BP is no doubt profiting from the oil being mined in the gulf but it was us who had to clean up the spill and it is likely BP will never pay anything for making that giant mess.

But we also socialize risk when we trust in God. If things go bad for a group of individuals we can blame their relationship with god for their situation rather than take responsibility for their circumstances ourselves. We should have instead "In Ourselves We Trust" because it is us that have the ability to act and do something to help ourselves and other people.

We should trust in ourselves to do the right thing. If things go bad we get to say God wanted it this way and He was punishing those people for some reason. Instead we are the cause for letting things be the way they are because we didn't act.

In reality it is only us who act - we the people (can) act - we should trust ourselves to make the right decisions, we the people should pledge allegiance to ourselves.

There is pretty much nothing we can't do if we work together, we can solve our problems, we can fix most things. We should learn to trust ourselves, rather than shrug it off and say "it's not my problem, it's their relationship with God and His plan for them".

Acts of god are random events we can't control, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes happen and are caused by living here on earth and our interaction with the environment. We may be able to impact the environment by reducing CO2 and stop fracking, but it's unlikely we'll be able to eliminate them completely. 

Then there are accidents, random occurrences as things fall apart because humans make mistakes, or sneeze when they drive, or have heart attacks, because they are animals apt to die.

We pretend we are not animals and think that God is making everything happen "for a reason" and this may be comforting for some, but really it's just random stuff happening that we have little control over. 

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    I am interested in progressive politics, women's rights, science & art. I believe the only way we'll survive is if we help each other.

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