Theory

[Evo]

The issue of AI suicide is of great personal importance to me. Evo, I'd love to hear the names of some of those science fiction stories that discuss it. I did several Google searches but, strangely, nothing came up.

The problem is that I have pulp sci fi magazines going back to 1948 - making for a lot of short stories to go through again to find you particular authors. I'll give it a go though.

[icycalm]

There are many questions--and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life--which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now.

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/r ... losophy.15

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/r ... losophy.16

Bertrand Russell is such a clown. Were I to begin explaining what is wrong with these essays, I'd probably end up writing a book. The Anglo-Saxons just have no talent for philosophy, and what gets to me is that I can't figure out why. It's not as if they haven't tried -- there have been dozens of very famous philosophers among them. Yet I couldn't point towards a single one as required reading.

[mees]

Have you read Russell's Problems of Philosophy?

I was reading it earlier this year and found it to be quite interesting. Some parts were pretty confusing, but others were really convincing (like the first chapter).

edit - oh crap should have looked at the title of those links lol.

So what i mean to say is, can you give me your opinion on the chapters about matter and induction, which I cannot find fault with?

[icycalm]

I only read the chapters I linked. If I decide to read the others I'll let you know, in a different thread. But for me, at this point, Russell is basically a waste of time. He doesn't seem to have anything worthwhile to say outside of logic. Whenever he approaches a large issue he degenerates into naive moralizing and old-woman wisdom (like, essentially, all the rest of the Anglo-Saxons).

[Archonus]

Contrast the profundity of the philosophers' thought with the shallowness of the lawyer's:

human beings will potentially enjoy the kind of powers and pleasures traditionally assigned to gods or beings in heaven: Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc.

http://sss.stanford.edu/others/glennreynolds/

The poor wretch actually thinks this would be a good thing.

I'm afraid I can't really understand what's so bad about having these fantastical abilities. I would just think that such accomplishments would be a byproduct (or a consequence, I suppose) of the natural progression of technology. More leisure options.

Is it that such abilities would somehow stupefy us? I think that's more a matter of self-discipline and not of the options you have when it comes to pleasing yourself. One can spend most of his life never working a hard day in his life, preferring instead to sit at home watching tv and eating microwaveable snacks, but that doesn't stop others from actually seeking something better.

[icycalm]

I'm afraid I can't really understand what's so bad about having these fantastical abilities.

Don't worry, you are quite normal. Practically all human beings are right there with you. Which is why technological innovations are being pursued with such thoughtless, wild abandon, and then applied without the slightest consideration of their long-term effects. Long live the herd!

[Archonus]

I'm afraid I can't really understand what's so bad about having these fantastical abilities.

Don't worry, you are quite normal. Practically all human beings are right there with you. Which is why technological innovations are being pursued with such thoughtless, wild abandon, and then applied without the slightest consideration of their long-term effects. Long live the herd!

Normalcy's generally a bad thing.

I understand it perfectly when you see it in the light of "reckless abandon and without consideration", but I'm thinking in terms of general technological progress. I'm seeing that we're eventually going to get to this point, with reckless abandon or not, if we don't kill ourselves first. But I suppose you're saying the method in which we'd reach such technological achievements is a bad thing and not the achievements themselves? Or should we just never even consider developing our technology to that point?

[Bradford]

Normalcy's generally a bad thing.

That's a little general - be careful with that one. I think it's very good that my blood pressure, for example, is quite normal.

I understand it perfectly when you see it in the light of "reckless abandon and without consideration", but I'm thinking in terms of general technological progress. I'm seeing that we're eventually going to get to this point, with reckless abandon or not, if we don't kill ourselves first. But I suppose you're saying the method in which we'd reach such technological achievements is a bad thing and not the achievements themselves? Or should we just never even consider developing our technology to that point?

I think the trouble you're having here that you are missing a far more basic point:

Things require context to have meaning or value.

Eg., pleasure/pain; wealth/poverty; life/death; good/bad; even good/evil, if you like. If you eliminate any one item from any of these these pairs, it's mate would cease to have either value or meaning. So if you personally value and would like to continue to enjoy such things such as fleshy pleasures, power, wealth, or life, eliminating their opposites would be a very bad idea.

This is in addition to the logistical concerns of a world populated with immortal people. If Wikipedia is to be believed, about half as many people die each year as are born. You would double the rate of population growth of the planet if no one ever died.

I, for one, don't really care for crowds.

[icycalm]

Normalcy's generally a bad thing.

That's a little general - be careful with that one. I think it's very good that my blood pressure, for example, is quite normal.

He was being sarcastic.

I think the trouble you're having here that you are missing a far more basic point:

Things require context to have meaning or value.

Eg., pleasure/pain; wealth/poverty; life/death; good/bad; even good/evil, if you like. If you eliminate any one item from any of these these pairs, its mate would cease to have either value or meaning. So if you personally value and would like to continue to enjoy such things such as fleshy pleasures, power, wealth, or life, eliminating their opposites would be a very bad idea.

It's a bit more complicated than that. These "pairs" you mentioned are not even opposites. This is where Wittgenstein comes in handy. They are opposites only in LANGUAGE: in the concepts themselves there is no opposition. In fact there is no such thing as "wealth" or "poverty", "hot" or "cold", "power" or "weakness" -- these concepts do not exist -- there is only richer and poorer, hotter and colder, more powerful and more weak. These are only differences in degree, not kind. If you try to eliminate one of the (non-existent) "opposite" poles of any duality, you end up eliminating THE ENTIRE CONCEPT itself. It's basically a spastic-autistic knee-jerk reaction by those who are incapable of understanding concepts that have been made plain to us for millennia.

Here are some passages from Heraclitus, for example, who certainly understood what our "intelligent" and "educated" contemporaries are incapable of understanding, even though he lived 2,500 years ago, at a time when "science" had not even quite been born yet:

Hesiod is most men's teacher. Men think he knew very many things, a man who did not know that day and night are one and the same thing!

The road up and the road down are one and the same road.

It is the opposite which is good for us.

Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonises with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre.

It is sickness that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, plenty; weariness, rest.

It is cold things that become warm, and what is warm that cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened.

To a god all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.

It is no good for men to get all they wish to get.

Etc. etc. Nietzsche and Baudrillard are full of passages that say exactly the same things. And yet who understands them? No one, really.

[Bradford]

I detected no sarcasm. Perhaps my equipment is on the fritz.

Regarding the rest, I appreciate you making the distinction between the semantic and the conceptual. I was just trying to get at the idea that you can't define one without reference to its mate, and therefore you can't make sense of it. Understanding each pair as not separate but a singular concept existing as a spectrum is obviously a whole different (and fascinating) level.

Also, it occurs to me that these sort of conceptual dualities have been recognized and embraced (in some form) for a very long time in far eastern philosophy/religion, such as Confucianism and Taoism. I haven't read eastern philosophy with any depth, but just out of curiosity, have you made any study or have any impressions you'd be willing to share?

[icycalm]

Yes, I was expecting you or someone else to bring this up. I deal with it in detail in my book.

In short, yes, some eastern philosophers and mystics were also able to grasp what Heraclitus was the first to grasp in the western tradition, but what good did that do them? It is true that dualities do not exist in this world, but it is also true that man cannot operate without them. The trick then is to acknowledge this, and to become capable of switching between a holistic and a dual view of things on the fly, as circumstances demand. After all, it is only by adopting the (clearly false) dualistic viewpoint that we were able to make sense of the world in the first place: the microsciences, and all the things they brought with them, are not possible otherwise.

The scientific method was invented by the Greeks, and they and those who adopted it (i.e. the Europeans and their descendants) eventually came to dominate the world. This is what the eastern tradition missed: the power that dual thought can bring with it.

[icycalm]

And, by the way, you can discern the above principle everywhere in life. Take videogame genres, for example. Genres do not really exist, and every attempt to define them and sort games accordingly is doomed to eventually fail.

Yet it is impossible to get ANYwhere in game analysis without adopting some provisional genre scheme. Impossible to criticize, impossible to recognize and distill essential rules of game design -- impossible to do anything really apart from saying "I enjoyed this game" or "I did not enjoy this game".

Of course no one can understand this. So you basically end up having two kinds of people: on the one hand those who are obsessed with genre and who refuse to draw comparisons between games in different genres (the apples and oranges approach), therefore failing to arrive at universal rules of game design; and on the other hand you have those who see genres as useless and "stifling innovation", and who refuse to have anything to do with them.

Both kinds of people are fundamentally stupid, the first kind representing the dualistic thought of Western scientists (who are stupid), and the second kind the holistic thought of Eastern mystics and philosophers (who are also stupid). The only approach that is NOT stupid is to be able to use both approaches at the appropriate times, depending on the situation.

[icycalm]

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/c ... compu.html

[deusmeister]

"Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively."

"If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6217676/Immortality-only-20-years-away-says-scientist.html

lol. This guy is a fucking joke.

[Nebula]

You do not understand what I mean by "intelligence". Stephen Hawking is in no way intelligent in my use of the word -- he is in fact quite stupid. It's funny how, whenever the subject of intelligence is raised, people always mention some "clumsy empiricist" as an example of an intelligent person. Never a philosopher! Never a Montaigne or a Spinoza or a Baudrillard! It's always some little dude who mucks about in a dark room for three decades with half a dozen little equations. He shuffles them around for a while and then eventually, finally comes up with a new one! And that's what people mean by "intelligence".

I have read several of Hawking's books. Whenever he is NOT talking about equations I feel like I am being lectured by a 15-year-old.

I idly skimmed through A Brief History of Time this morning whilst sorting out a bookshelf and one passage near the end instantly reminded me of your above post.

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

"What a comedown", "not been able to keep up", "too technical" -- such supreme (and wholly laughable) arrogance...

[icycalm]

Haven't been able to "keep up", lol. The only ones who haven't been able to keep up are him and his kind. Philosophers have indeed asked the question "why" -- and pronounced it meaningless! But did he actually read Wittgenstein? Did he understand him? And then he blithely goes on to end his book with some idiotic blurb that when we find the equations that describe everything (which we will never find), we will have come to know "the mind of God" -- who doesn't exist, and who at any rate would not have a mind even if he existed.

Bleh. Scientists.