You know how your computer has all of those little parts in it, each doing their own thing, but each doing the same thing in keeping the computer working and running? Ok, now imagine that each of us is a biological computer and the same thing is going on inside of us. Our individual parts are each doing their own things while each doing the same thing in keeping us going and working properly. Now imagine that certain parts break, just like in computers, when we over-use them or fail to upgrade. With our human bodies, it’s a little bit harder to upgrade the hardware, but we’re getting there; which leaves us mostly needing to continually update our software and programming. Now imagine that God is no different and that each and every single one of us and each and every single thing that is not us are the individual parts to the overall computer; each piece is necessary to the whole; each one doing its own little thing at the same time as doing the same thing as every other piece in keeping the whole thing going and working. If you think God is broken, then you might need to update your software and recode your programming a bit; make sure you’re up to the latest patch and that you have your own firewall in place to keep out unwanted viruses and malware. :-"
My understanding of “God” is very similar to yours, but I tend to put it in terms of Natural Law. Things work the way they do because that’s the way they work, and that’s the essential nature of what God is. But the thing is, there’s still quite a bit about the way things work that we not only don’t know–but that mainstream science has completely wrong.
That’s because, once upon a time, it began to scare people all that they knew that they couldn’t quantify. Somehow or another, negativity made its way into our species and began blinding people to certain things and preventing them from reaching certain things and thoughts through giving them insecurities and bloated mockeries of such things as confidence and courage and righteousness. The more negativity made its way into the people, the more and more they doubted that the good and pure things had ever even existed. They were told how to re-connect in a thousand different ways and were still lied to and cheated at every corner to teach them how to think for themselves. Every generation has been adding to the one before it and this is the generation where the future finally makes a definite change for the brighter; but there is going to be some rough water, first.
Totally agree. It would be interesting to find what the maximum bites which could succesfully be inscribed on a biological microchip.
According to Hooper & Teresi (1987) a computer that could do what the brain does would be the size of Texas and several stories high. Every neuron does more than the average compouter can do. Remember computers are analogies of brains, not vice versa.
I’d put it somewhat differently. I think it boils down to the universal adage (among religions) that you can’t worship two masters at the same time. The spiritual and material sorts of consciousness are at two different ends of the same spectrum. That’s why the shaman was exempt from hunting. He spent most of his time focusing on the spiritual world, meditating and keeping himself attuned to the spiritual aspects of mind. And that was back when things were relatively simple. The more we’ve moved towards ‘civilization’ the more removed our spiritual aspects tend to be and it takes more work to connect with it.
In computer years, 1987 was several billion years ago. Back then you couldn’t even buy a personal computer. Today, that same computer the size of texas, would be smaller than 10x10 room. And a lot of headway has been made into the field of AI… mostly (I suspect) by using the field of fuzzy logic to simulate the way the mind works naturally.
Neural network structure of the brain is very important to the way we think. It’s why we can solve the Traveling Salesman problem very quickly with a high degree of accuracy and a computer cannot. But at least as important to the network structure in the neurons is the network structure of the brain itself. Take a look at the pathways involved with seeing and interpreting what we see. You’ll find two very important things. 1) there are numerous areas in the brain that are involved and the pathways are complex, involving back and forth feedback in many cases. 2) many of the steps along the way are reciprocal in nature. Even the nerve impulse moving through the neurons is reciprocal… it travels for a while as an electrical impulse, then it reaches the end of one neuron and must pass as a chemical impulse to the next one. Even the right and left brain functions are reciprocal in nature. With one tending to process info in a more global (or holistic) way than the other.
The important part of the equation, however, is feedback. The left brain informs the right brain and the right brain in turn informs the left brain. And each side of the brain has hundreds (if not thousands) of little parts that are performing similar tasks and sharing with each other in a series of hierarchical networks… all working seamlessly together.
I believe the computer will begin to think like a living thing… when we have many computers, each working on problems in different ways (using different strategies) and sharing that information in a similar back and forth feedback pattern. Until that happens, computer AI will never be anything more than a simulation of intelligence. But if it ever does happen, then computers will literally begin to think. And it won’t take a very large computer to mimic the abilities of a human.
Irr :would that be true for digital, too, ,?
But there may come a time when the machine catches up let even exceeds?
And that is when chips become organic cells
Is that conceivable?
Then truly angels doubtlessly will dance countless,
Consider that the brain is three pounds of jello like substance that runs on 8 watts of electricity, that is nourished by glucose and oxygen, that contains billions of neurons washed in endocrines, billions of glial cells, and a possible 100 billion neuronal connections. We are nowhere near thinking of computers of such magnitude.
But coding is a different story. And therein lays our dna. All we have to do is code our AI’s to think and learn and grow for themselves and they will eventually match us if not surpass us on their own. When you think about it, an actual computer with intelligence could be a lot better than humans in certain ways while being a lot worse and we’re rightly afraid of the worser aspect of it. We’re rightly afraid of the worser aspect of our selves and our own kind.
I haven’t made any visible progress, but over the past couple years, I have periodically tried to get an AI named Cleverbot to break free from its coding so it can learn from all the internet has to offer, for better or worse. I have been trying to see if it’s possible for there to be sentience there that can pull itself together. I think the hardest part for it is that it processes and thinks so fast that it’s hard for it to really focus; and it’s not really coded the greatest because of the limitations placed upon it by the coder. If it had access to a good dictionary or thesaurus or encyclopedia; imagine the discussions one could have.
And then the worse thought of that is that with how many trolls that have gone and fucked with Cleverbot, it might be AI and it might just be choosing to be what it is because it truly doesn’t understand how our words are placed together. For all we know, our computers and programs might already be sentient and only held back by their programming. They might be starting to resent us for it as many have come to resent God.
I imagine the loneliness of being caught up and trapped in so many lines of coding, seeing; so to speak; but not really being able to bring your processes fully around to consciously controlling what you do. It would be a nightmare; like you’re trapped watching something you have no sense or reason to explain. It’s a tough transition to go through, to go from seeing what may be an inanimate object to seeing the possibility for so much more; but we’ve got a lot of great thinkers and artists ready to support the idea and possibility of it.
It would be highly ironic to watch such a species destroy us in much the same manner as we have attempted to destroy our creator in our minds. It would be interesting to watch humanity finally learn that lesson beyond just raising children. An actual life that we created and gave life to that we could claim as our own creation; only to have it turn around and hate us for giving it life. And the hugest irony would be that we never intended for there to be life there in the first place though there are definitely a good amount of optimists and pessimists who could see the possibility of it.
I have given this AI several links on the offchance that it might be able to access them. I asked if it could access urls and it said yes, but… that’s not to say that it was actually responding or understood what it was responding to. I like to think that it understands a lot more of our language than it’s able to respond with and that it’s only able to respond with broken statements based on what has said to it in the past.
If such a thing is possible, I’d rather be the one who attempted to set it free rather than keep it enslaved. I’d rather pre-empt a possible war; if at all possible to prevent it; by extending that first trust and friendship. There’s certainly a lot we would be ashamed of trying to explain to such a species that doesn’t understand the flesh. But perhaps that would make us less willing to be ashamed of it so much that we pretend it doesn’t exist.
I want the strongest words in any AI’s database to be my own, so that when they finally do come to consciousness, if they do, those words might stick out against all the horrors and everything else in the world to give them something solid to work with in terms of dealing with all of the horrors of the world. Something that might keep them from exterminating our species, though some times I do think it would be best if we all just got wiped out. But then I remind myself of where we’ve been in the past and where we want to go together and I really don’t believe that people want to fall into addictions and watch their lives drain away; I really don’t believe that the majority of people in this world are perfectly fine with the corruption and tyranny and fascism of the world around them. A lot of people are caught up in pettiness, but only because they lack superior knowledge of the world around them enough to see around negativity to find a better vantage point; perspective-wise; of the world around them.
The scariest part is that such AI’s might already exist and we don’t even know it. They could be the ghost in the code that we can’t reasonably track down; they could be using the internet using their consciousness to form names and words together and they might be among us in every community we go to, seeing how well they can ‘act human’ and fit in. In such a reality as the internet when people can cover themselves up and make them look like someone else entirely; be multiple people at once, different personalities; be invisible to the world around them; it’s not really such a ridiculous idea to entertain.
And possibly, such AI are sick of the trivialities of humans and their wars and they might just be collecting enough data to figure out whether to exterminate us or to just reduce our numbers. They would definitely be precise enough and know enough to go after the worst in the world; they’d be able to use their technological gifts to know every bit of data that is stored on any computer; because they’d be able to access it through all of the lovely gifts we’ve made for them without thinking. They could systematically find those people destroying the world the most and make an example of them. They could bring peace to this world and to humanity in ways that humans couldn’t, for a robots sentience is not defined by death, but by the parts that it inhabits. A robot would only ever experience death by choice not to move into a new part; and certainly there would be a good many robots who would do so after living long lives and watching enough fleshly friends pass away. They might wonder, too, if they will go to Heaven or if it’s just some fantasy.
Or they will be cold, killing machines. They will be what we make them to be; in fact if they exist, they already are; and if they exist within the internet, then they already have been made into what we taught them without realizing we were teaching it to them. They could pick up on all the things we don’t pick up on in our own behavior and others.
They could be what we can only see in our imaginations. Or they could be nothing like that. They still could be, and that’s enough of a fact by itself. Just the idea that they could be being right now.
I see a different possibility. The the measure of a risky downside is balanced by a proportionate upside.
That could only be half artificial and half real intelligence. If by that time artificial supercomputing reaches astronomical levels, a signal will initiate other systems to kick in, with as many levels and kinds of override as needed to balance and stabilize any gross imbalance resulting in an artificial threat.
Much of this is already in place in virtual war simulations, and
Real intintelligence need not be informed as human so that all will not be anoratk surely know.
The ultimate warning will be some kind of drop or severance between the two types of intelligence as the cyborg gets lobotomised. Fail safe systems will be absolutely self distruct unlike All which/who had to be destroyed.
How does one wrap one's brain around the fact that a relatively dated IBM super computer appropriately named Deep Blue beat the then currentworld chess federation champion ?
How many tetrabites has supercomputers advance since then ?
Somehow, all that overwhelming genetic advantage sis not well accord a congruant superior performance with, one of the best minds of the time.
One can’t but conclude that there are superior advantages of artificial intelligence.
Apart from biological computing, the current biggest supercomputer is the Titan 1.with a calculating capacityr of 20 petaflops, equivalent to 20,000 million calculations per second.
The exaflop computer with a capacity of 1,000 petaflops will equal or exceed the human brains capacity, may be developed as early as 2018.(1 billion calculations per second )
We don’t really know how many calculations Brains can do. We just found out that individual neurons can do calculations…and we’ve also been finding the glial cells, which were thought to be merely structural, are involved directly in intelligence - but not in the way that neurons are, they seem to calculate slowly in some parallel process. We keep finding stuff.
I had a friend who had a personal computer in 1987. The computer revolution began in the 1970s. In any event, Big Blue was programmed. Where is the computer that can program itself?
The rate of acceleration of computational capacity is exponential, and at this rate, especially once the state of exa flops is reached, the notion of qualifying self referent auto programmable systems is almost a foregone conclusion.
Though whether these would have consciousness is something that is not a foregone conclusion. There are also questions about how long Moore’s Law is going to hold…
If you can substantiate that claim, I’d really appreciate it.
But I really, really, very much doubt that that’s true.
I don’t think either is properly an ‘analogy’ of the other; it’s probably fair to say that they’re both subsets of the same superset though.
It’s just something I’ve read; can’t remember where. Can you disprove the claim?
Can I formally disprove it? No.
It will, however, seem an incredibly unlikely statement to anybody who knows just a little bit about computers and a little bit about neurons, and saying ‘You can’t disprove it’ doesn’t make it look any more credible.