Oh dear James! Nearly 24000 posts on this philosophy forum, and yet your thinking is so painfully disordered.
Think about what people are referring to in the real world when they talk about a computer modelling something. The computer just sits there on the desk, with numbers appearing on the screen.
There are machines that can digest waste, but this isn’t “modelling digestion”, it is digestion.
Your question “else why bother with designing it” is just loopy. Did you think it through at all, or do you just write down whatever pops into your head? Life would be a lot easier if just bothering to design something meant that it would work extremely well, but that’s not how the world works. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
This seems pretty much like a delusion. It is not yet known how consciousness arises. It’s common knowledge that we don’t know that. The idea that a person like you could be “in the know” while all these researchers and philosophers are still in the dark about it is just laughable. Ideas like this make it impossible to take you seriously.
Btw I have solved how to make machines conscious, you just take e.g. a fly or birds brain from fetal stem cells, and grow them in a fractal mesh of veins delivering what it needs [blood and nutrients, oxygen etc]. now you got something looking through the camera lens at you, and operating its machine body. Got that [the body] covered too lol.
Reminds me of the teenager telling the old man how naive he is.
How about you think about what fuse was talking about when he mentioned modeling. He wasn’t talking about a computer sitting on a desk. Perhaps after a few thousand posts, you will learn how to read as well. … or maybe not. Although I’m sure that you believe that you already know how … despite the evidence.
When a machine digests in the same manner as a human digests, it is modeling the human digestion, without being a human. You are conflating “simulation” with “modeling”. “Modeling” means “making a likeness of”, not simulating in a computer, although in the case of making a likeness of a mind in a computer, it merely takes simulating a mind because there are no physical elements involved in a mind (which is why all of your retorts were nonsense strawmen - look it up). The model merely uses different physical elements to arrange for the same mental processes - a likeness.
I see that you are socially and psychologically naive as well as philosophically. But that is both a different thread as well as a different forum. People design machines specifically to do the things that men cannot do. That is precisely why they keep getting better and better at everything - because people design them that way for a purpose.
Interesting. I say that something is known - can be verified.
You say that something is not known - cannot be verified.
People like that are difficult to “take seriously”, especially when they can’t even define what it is that they are talking about.
He was talking about producing consciousness using some combination of transistors and vacuum tubes, after I had pointed out that computers could be made out of different kinds of things like that. So he was talking precisely about a computer sitting at a desk.
Like most words these have a range of meanings, I would guess it is more common to say “modelling on a computer” than “simulating on a computer”.
The question whether there are physical elements in the mind has been a major preoccupation of philosophers certainly since the time of Descartes. Your suggestion that I could go and look up the answer somewhere makes it seem as though you are completely unaware of the ongoing debate. You assume the truth of Cartesian Dualism, that the world consists of two substances, mind and matter, that matter is not mind and mind is not matter.
There are many other views. Materialism, idealism, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, neutral monism, etc etc.
The problem (well one of them) is that consciousness is associated with these very specific processes in the brain, and there’s really no reason to think that vacuum tubes and also transistors would produce the same effects.
Machines deprive millions people of work, they do. But still people servу the cyborgs
Afterall, it was noticed that people strive after genuine art which can’t be reproduced by robots.
Robot art would surely lack the emotion that creates a piece in the first place, but I’m sure the robot builders will come up with a random set of emotions created slot-machine style to resolve that issue, but it would probably be a soulless piece.
Change happens. It’s the one constant. An exact representation of how we think is not needed to replace us. Machines aren’t needed either. Change is bound to happen. The sun will melt us down without a machine assisted escape from the planet. However many years from now our future species will not be recognizable to us. Is that a negative thing? If we are replaced, is that a negative thing? Must we really go on? Should we forever be carving our names and our legacy on the bathroom stall of the universe? Obscurity is the way of the universe. Is that a bad thing? Or can we just have gratitude for existing today?
Looking at the original post it seems this is more about replacing jobs than causing extinction. That will happen, job loss. We just happen to be the sacrificial job losing generation. Making threads about it. I view the future of humanity much like Orson Wells did in The Time Machine. A race of light, frail jitterbugs, pushing buttons while laughing, apart from a race of underground grunts.
The machine is already, but only, an extension of us. And us an extension of something that existed before human form.
I’m a musician, I record myself each time I practise. Sometimes when I am practising I am utterly swept away by the music, full of emotion. But other times I am thinking about an argument I had earlier in the day, or about what we are going to eat later. Sometimes I am thinking about technical aspects of the music. The thing is, I listen to the recordings, and I can’t tell the difference, how I was feeling and what I was thinking about don’t get into the music.
I’ve noticed the same thing when performing live, sometimes you are thinking about where exactly you are in the piece, who is going to come in next, maybe looking at somebody in the audience, at other times you are focussing intensely on the music, trying to convey feeling, and again I record myself and I can’t tell what I was thinking about when I was playing.
I’m quite sure I’m not unique in this, and that it applies to other forms of art. I guess people don’t like to talk about it because it seems to take away the magic. But the magic wasn’t really there anyway.
Yes, Tortis, there is work being done in the narrative arena with computers. Computers pumping out chunks of text that would instantly compile as a story. It still does lack what I see you value. Don’t let me fault you for championing human creativity. Because if these computers can get the knack for creative juices we’ll be sitting around getting told stories by the electronic camp fire.
And at last a thing or many things, an individual or many individuals as a species are repaired (A), or replaced (B), or rotted (C), or, if time is considered too, repaired and then replaced (A and B), or repaired and then rotted (A and C), or replaced and then rotted (B and C), or repaired,then replaced, then rotted (A, B, C).
Do you think that a well-programmed machine could create unique music and art? nuances and all… I guess that brings us back to the question of emotions in machines, or really good programming and a tonne of algorithms as a substitute.
Such creations would be to showcase the companies’ talents and products, and people would buy robot art and robot music as a gimmick only, as we like our idols with a heart and pulse.
