On 2/27/07, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't know if I will live long enough to see the Singularity, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it is irrelevant. Once AGI can start improving itself, I think it will quickly advance beyond human intellect as humans are advanced over bacteria.
That is the definition of the singularity, basically. If you were a bacteria, how would the existence of human life affect you?
It sounds like a silly question, but what if the Singularity has already happened? How would you know? What would it be like for your intellect to be embedded as a speck in an enormous superhuman intelligence?
Perhaps it has; perhaps we are just a simulation, or a subroutine in a larger program which we can't see. Nevertheless, I would like my consciousness to continue - regardless of what it actually is due to. It seems to me that in order for you to retain some sense of identity, a
superhuman intelligence would have to run a simulation of your familiar universe. What is disturbing, is that you would have no way to know. The universe you experience now could already be simulated. How could you prove that it isn't. In fact, Hutter's AIXI model and the existence of Occam's Razor suggests that the universe is in fact a computation.
I don't find the idea that the universe is being simulated so disturbing. What I find disturbing is the idea that it might suddenly end or take a turn for the worse. The actual substrate of my consciousness is not in itself important. The original question was about life extension as motivation for
AGI. Humans, like other animals, are programmed through evolution to fear death and to believe in free will and self awareness, what we call "consciousness". If you were to build an autonomous robot, you would probably program it the same way to maximize its chances of survival. What you call "free will" is actually an algorithm that seeks to maximize an accumulated reward signal that you don't directly control. You don't eat because you choose to. You eat because you are programmed to behave as if you choose to.
I feel that my actions are neither determined nor random, and this is worse than an illusion, it's a logical impossibility. Nevertheless, what I feel is what I feel, illusion or not, and it's important to me that I keep feeling it (and yes, I know that it's important to me just because that's the way my brain works, but it doesn't stop it feeling important to me). Try as I might, I can't convince myself at an emotional level that nothing matters, even though intellectually I know that nothing does, because "mattering" is just a contingent fact about my brain chemistry. A higher intelligence need not be programmed to fear death Quite true: you can program it any way you like, not in the way evolution decided to program it. or to believe in
its own consciousness.
Well, if it wasn't conscious it would not believe anything, whereas if it was conscious it would be having a very peculiar delusion. Is it even logically possible to doubt that one is having an experience? I think you're just playing with the definition of "consciousness" here. It may be nothing more than a side-effect of information processing, but that doesn't mean I don't have it. What happens when you become a part of this
intelligence, when your memories are added to it? Presumably that is what would happen if you use AGI for life extension, to upload the information in your brain into a much more powerful computer. If we regard the brain as a computer, then death is the loss of all memories learned during your lifetime. But if the universe is simulated, then that information is not lost because the simulation could always be repeated.
The important thing as far as survival goes is not that my memories are preserved or that aspects of my life can be repeated, but that I continue to have new experiences from here on, which experiences contain memories of me in their past and identify as being me. That is, if I had a choice between living for 200 years and living for 100 years repeated 10 times (so that I had no idea which cycle I was in), I would not hesitate to choose the 200 years. In block universe theories of time, the past and present are "always there", but this is no comfort at all if I can't expect future new experiences. If you assume the universe is real, then what is the value of the
information in your brain? If all your memories were erased and replaced with those of a different person, would you be more or less alive?
I'd be dead. Conversely, if my body died but my memories and personality were transferred toi another person or machine, I'd be alive. I believe the universe is simulated. I don't know why the simulation
exists. Maybe there is an AGI working on some problem whose purpose we cannot understand. Maybe it is just experimenting with different universes for fun. Maybe there is no reason at all; the current universe is just one of an enumeration of all Turing machines. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
