Hi Craig (and all), Now that I have a better understanding of your ideas, I would like to confront you with a thought experiment. Some of the stuff you say looks completely esoteric to me, so I imagine there are three possibilities: either you are significantly more intelligent than me or you're a bit crazy, or both. I'm not joking, I don't know.
But I would like to focus on sensory participation as the fundamental stuff of reality and your claim that strong AI is impossible because the machines we build are just Frankensteins, in a sense. If I understand correctly, you still believe these machines have sensory participation just because they exist, but not in the sense that they could emulate our human experiences. They have the sensory participation level of the stuff they're made of and nothing else. Right? So let's talk about seeds. We now know how a human being grows from a seed that we pretty much understand. We might not be able to model all the complexity involved in networks of gene expression, protein folding and so on, but we understand the building blocks. We understand them to a point where we can actually engineer the outcome to a degree. It is now 2013 and we are, in a sense, living in the future. So we can now take a fertilised egg and tweak it somehow. When done successfully, a human being will grow out of it. Doing this with human eggs is considered unethical, but I believe it is technically possible. So a human being grows out of this egg. Is he/she normal? What if someone actually designs the entire DNA string and grows a human being out of it? Still normal? What if we simulate the growth of the organism from a string of virtual DNA and then just assemble the outcome at some stage? Still normal? What if now we do away with DNA altogether and use some other Turing complete self-modifying system? What if we never build the outcome but just let it live inside a simulation? We can even visit this simulation with appropriate hardware: http://www.oculusvr.com/. What now? In your view, at what point does this break? And why? Best, Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
