Loligo Blog

There are many easy-to-guess advantages to moving consciousness to a machine platform. If/when "we" as a society become machine-based beings:

• We will be able to move from one body to another with the same ease we biology-based beings now change vehicles.

• We will be able to live and work in the vacuum of space without having to take along a very-hard-to-maintain bubble of pressurized air.

• We will be able to travel on a beam of electro-magnetic energy to far-away worlds where spare bodies have been shipped.
  • And those faraway worlds will not need to have a biosphere, or have bubbles of biosphere constructed/cultivated.
  • In like fashion, we will be able to move to and from orbits and Lagrange points where bodies have been previously placed.
  
  
• Our sustenance will not be limited to carbohydrates that require a biosphere in which to grow. Most sources will be harvestable directly from light, heat, and kinetics, which all exist in the vacuum of space.
  
  

While this is not by any means a complete list, there are likely to be many less obvious advantages, too. This one for example:

We will be able to have multiple independent bodies, each with its own short-term situational memories, working off of a single set of long-term experiential memories that have been accumulated over time.

Consider multiple bodies working in a manufacturing environment, each working off of a single experienced individual's learning and acquired expertise in manufacturing processes. Each maintaining its own short-term memories which will form and decay quickly to respond to the fine-grained details of its immediate individual situation

It may even be possible that the single individual's long-term experiential memory may be able to continue to gain learning from each body's short-term situational connections as they form and decay in response to their own current situations.

-djr

The Catholic (i.e., "Universal") church used to teach its children that the sun orbited the earth, long after everybody knew the truth. The truth would have sent the whole intricate house of cards that was the Church belief system crashing down upon itself.

Today, they are teaching children that DNA is a self-replicating molecule, even though everybody knows the truth. Their reasons for averting their eyes (and their children's eyes) from the truth are identical. Church people, whether they call themselves the Universal Church or the University, have not changed. They are first and foremost about self, and anything that threatens that must be defended against.

Even if the enemy at the gate is truth.






disclaimer: I don't know the explanation, or if I.D. covers it, only that the current dogma no longer does.

Recently read:

"Recent observations have thoroughly established that order in groups of small particles, easily visible under a low-power microscope, can be caused spontaneously by Brownian-like movement of smaller spheres that in turn is caused by random molecular motion." — from: a paper by Frank Lambert at Entropysite.

. . . . . . .
References:

• Adams, M.; Dogic, Z.; Keller, S.L.; Fraden, S. Nature 1998, 393, 349-352 and references therein.
• Laird, B. B. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 1388-1390.
• Dinsmore, A. E.; Wong, D. T.; Nelson, P.; Yodh, A. G. Phys. Rev. Letters 1998, 80, 409-412.
• Frenkel, D. Phys. World 1993, 6, 24-25.
• See: Learning Is Ubiquitous

*(will expand later)

Anybody who has ever come across stacked rocks while walking in the wilderness knows how easy it is to recognize consciousness when we experience it.

Why is something that's so easy to recognize, so hard to objectively describe?

Can we write an algorithm capable of recognizing consciousness as reliably as people do when we see those stacked rocks? Would writing such an algorithm help move us any closer to understanding, or at least defining consciousness?

Those who hold out the possibility of Machine Consciousness* ask: What if it is not the gene that is selfish, but the information stored within it?


*Also known as: strong AI





Resources

• The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism

Imagine a universe in which it is impossible for one man to take the credit for another man's contributions (work, ideas, actions).

For some this would be heaven, for others, it would be hell; . . . the exact same place.

The abyss of mediocrity looks into the eyes of the optimist and declares: "mediocrity always wins."

The optimist, realizing the truth of the assertion, stares back into the abyss and says: "that's an excellent record."

The optimist cracks a little smile. Mediocrity shrugs.