Comments on Futurisms: Simulation and the Singularity

@Brian Boyd: This is a good point, and something C...

2009-10-05T00:37:39.396-04:00

@Brian Boyd: This is a good point, and something Chalmers did touch on in his talk. I also heard a lot of other people discussing this one, and talked about it at some length with another conferencegoer (the British cabin builder I mentioned in a previous post). My thought is basically the same as what you say: there's no sensible way to discern copies from originals if you makes a molecularly identical copy of someone. This is one of those points where you have to look at the premises of the question and instead of saying, how are we going to deal with this problem?, say, the ethical intractability of this problem is just one more reason we shouldn't allow this scenario to occur in the first place.

@taoist: I quite agree with you that brain augmentation is much more feasible than strong AI. It still suffers from some of the same general problems, though, in which we are required to understand the brain as a computer system when it very well might not be.

The difficulties present in the various paths to A...

2009-10-04T09:00:15.579-04:00

The difficulties present in the various paths to AI are one of the larger reasons why I believe augmenting our brains is much more likely to happen first. Every time we've tried to study a system to try and learn more about building AIs (for example, chess) we've ended up learning much more about the system, and how to create a specialized decision process for that system - but still nothing about AIs in general. At some point we will understand ourselves enough to be able to construct a consciousness, but that time is a long way off.

Very interesting that they're trying to find a way...

2009-10-03T17:33:51.035-04:00

Very interesting that they're trying to find a way to be 'reconstructed' if the Singularity occurs after they die. Perhaps they ought to consult some Christian philosophers who have wrestled mightily with the problem of identity in the context of the Resurrection of the dead, such as Peter van Inwagen. For the problem, of course, is that if the super-AIs (be they God or the Architect of the Matrix) can reconstruct *one* of you and it's supposed to be you, what happens if they reconstruct *two*, or twenty, of 'you'? There would be no criteria by which to say that one instead of the rest if actually you.
Then again, unlike Christians, perhaps Singularitarians would be quite happy with the prospect of potentially infinitely many copies of their present self running around in the distant future ..