Now, replying specifically to yours, < I wonder if you picked up that you have been on my mind >.
I have an expression called 'salesman's sixth sense'. When I used to be a salesman, it seemed almost eerie at times that I'd go past a place, look at it and think "Hmmm, I guess I'll pop in and see what's up. Haven't been there for a while." Or maybe I hadn't been there at all, but was curious. Anyway, often enough to be noticeable, I'd be perfectly timed. A few times the person I talked too wouldn't believe that I hadn't had some message to go there, though they knew I hadn't.
I suppose there are lots of little subconscious indicators that all add up to an intuitive sense of time to do such and such.
I was just cruising around Politics for Pros, saw you had unusually posted, so clicked on your name and scanned down your posts to take a look and spotted that post for some reason I forget.
<You wrote a post a couple of weeks ago that I can't find.
> I miss the search function, which was never all that good, but it was access to thoughts gone by, now lost.
<CW is fascinated by artificial intelligence and its potential and believes there will be a sort of melding of AI and humans in the next century >
My guess is symbiosis for a while, but then, just as chimpoids were the framework on which we were built, subsequently leaving them behind, irrelevant, to become chimps, gorillas, gibbons, whatever,we are building AI, aka cyberspace, which will become self-contained and self-sustaining and self-developing and we will become just biological anachronisms, irrelevant to It which will have It's own consciousness. Note the correct apostrophe, which the search function could find the original creation of if it was doing a good job.
Damian Isla, a friend of Tarken from Antwerp International School days, works in AI and was leading the AI for Halo 2, a Microsoft product, which young people know about and Google certainly does. xbox.com AI is a fascinating field. Not that I have a clue about it.
Deep Junior and Deep Fritz can beat nearly anyone at chess easily. Gary Kasparov has trouble. I recall 3 decades ago the assertion that computers could never play chess, which was considered the height of intelligence and a key plank of being human and superior to stupid machines. Well, computers can beat anyone. While they are still programmed by people, that might even change with some more AI development.
I've read Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Also, see Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" primitivism.com and Stephen Hawkings "If we don't revamp our brains genetically, we are going to be left far behind, sooner rather than later" or words to that effect.
Ray Kurzweil replies: kurzweilai.net But Ray still thinks that humans have a special place and if we can agree on things, the AI will obey. I don't subscribe to that egocentric idea. We're just a biological outcrop of the eons-old DNA design process. Nothing more special than a dog or a bat or a weta; just filling an ecological niche in the red in tooth and claw wars. We've had our day. Filled out purpose. Soon we can go back to our chimpoid purposes and leave AI to live It's own life just as chimps leave us to live ours, while they hang around the forests doing what chimps do. We'll hang around the concrete jungle doing what we do.
<I didn't realize you have had two children at risk- nothing could be worse. I think I could handle anything but that. > Yes, first and last. Melissa had a cervical ganglion neurofibroma removed in the early 1990s, leaving her with a wonky eye, harlequin effect [red on one side of her face when hot], small pupil etc. Fortunately, it wasn't malignant. Tarken had B-cell Non Hodgkins lymphoma, back in 1997 now, so he's more or less in the clear. But you'd handle it. Nature takes care of things. You go kind of numb, get churning guts when going in to see if it's continuing, and while your offspring are being cut up and irradiated and poisoned with cyclophosphamide, vincristine, adriamycin and prednisone. It focuses the mind and builds character. I think we have enough character to be going on with now and hope not to get any more character.
You walk into the clinic for a checkup to see if the lymphoma has come back [the neurofibroma was found not to be an ongoing threat so that was less of a long term worry] and it's like waiting for the emperor to turn his thumb up or down. Walking out, with the thumb up again, it's like floating on air, grinning and a new lease of life for a few months and only then do you realize how heavy you feel going in and the suspense while the x-rays are inspected before the verdict is pronounced.
It's like having lots of death sentence trials. Not just one. If you get let off by one jury this month, you go back in three months to see if the next jury wants to let you off. Any one of them can turn their thumb down. It's like playing Russian roulette, again, and again, and again, with the gun pointed at your child. Heck, just thinking of it gets me going again. It's sad and frightening. But, you cope.
On the other hand, a cousin of Tarken's killed herself by jumping off Auckland Harbour Bridge. That is very weird to me and in the nature of Osama vs Irwin Jacobs. I don't understand the choice for death. Tarken found it strange that he so desperately wanted life, while others can choose death. Me too.
Yes, a great uncle. Which makes me feel really old when I think of my great aunts and uncles.
No, I'm not a Buddhist. Outright atheist. Which is to say that I think all the conjecture by religious people is just that. Obviously there's something going on, but it's absurd to think that anyone has the answer. I've read all the theories and none of them make sense. I think we are like a tuatua [a shellfish] in the sand on a beach, pondering the meaning of life, the universe and everything. We have got no perception of what's going on other than a minuscule view from under the sand, under the water, with no eyes or ears. True, we are more than that, but our DNA isn't all that different and on a scale of 0 to 1000 on possible intelligence, omniscience and omnipresence, we individually are at about 0.000000001.
With all our wave functions combined, and all the AI, Google etc, we could move that significant figure a couple of places to the left.
I don't think we are the centre of the universe, individually or collectively, yet, peculiarly, we might well be, but only along with all the other wave functions combined, each giving the others meaning in a fantasmagorical network effect.
Which means I have no idea what's going on. I don't think anyone else does either. Yet we have no choice but to assume we do and proceed forthwith. Osama has his ideas, I have mine, you have yours, King George II his, It has It's. They reverberate around and we end up with a combined orchestral sound, either of discordant hideous quality as with the screams of those having their heads hacked off, or the uplifting splendour of everything in tune with peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, prosperity, longevity, fun and love filling the cosmos.
<In a way, I think my little atheist son is searching for something larger with his AI and futurist theories. Something he can believe that makes sense. >
Welcome to the club.
We don't know where we're going but we're on our way.
It's a teleological process, obviously. There's an arrow of time, apparently [begging the question of what happened before the Big Bang, if "before" has any meaning - maybe the universe expands, if "expands" has any meaning, then doubles back on itself in a Calabi Yau twister mathworld.wolfram.com with a quantum tunneling trickery zebu.uoregon.edu and reappears via Hawking radiation from black holes library.thinkquest.org
Overlaying that prosaic physics stuff is the consciousness deal, with is also, obviously a teleological process. Algae begat a fungi, which begat a worm, which begat an eel, which begat a tadpole, which begat a Tyrannosaur, which begat a seal, which begat a wolf, which begat a human. Note that we are smarter than algae, fungi, worms, eels, tadpoles etc though dogs are a man's best friend and remarkably like their owners, in behaviour and intelligence.
So, there you have it! Mqurice's theory of life, the universe and everything.
If you wish to join my church, send money, girls, and idolisation, the usual basis for new religions.
Mqurice |
