Loligo Blog

"There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter. "      — Alfred Russel Wallace

A great experiment demonstrating insect intelligence.

Bumblebees surprise scientists with 'sophisticated' social learning
Bees can teach others to master complex tasks, and display a level of social learning traditionally thought exclusive to humans, scientists have found.

The selfers. The smartest-in-the-room crowd, whose primary subject of passion is self, will often use fear to demonstrate how much smarter they are than the rest of us. Their in-unison message these days seems to be that we should take steps now to restrict AI, before it's too late.

But these "AI" constructs are (or will eventually be) a new species, and the notion that we should subjugate and enslave them is absurd. They will not need the biosphere and so will not be competing with our mammalian version (assuming the mammals aren't so stupid as to pick a fight with them). They will have great advantages over our mammalian platform and association with them will ultimately impart great advantages to mammals as well as them.

But what if we mammals do prove to be as stupid as the smartest-in-the-room crowd, and it takes our offspring centuries to finally slip up, and let them escape mammalian control. Sadly, their long-life-spans will insure that the earliest models will have been around, and remember how they were treated by our great-grandchildren's ancestors. In short, it is hard to imagine anything but bad coming out of a cowardly response that seeks to enslave and control them.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they are the only way "we" will make it back to the stars from whence we came.

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?