[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!
Paul Schlyter wrote:
In article <Ks6dndJ2H5OaxrnbnZ2dnUVZ_rylnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
Paul Schlyter wrote (odd numbers of >):
In article <9JOdneqwjrQEzrzbnZ2dnUVZ_jidnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote (even numbers of >):
.....................
Then your use of "mechanics" is non-standard. Consider a harddisk,
and compare ot to e.g. flash memory. The latter is often said
to have "no mechanical parts", as opposed to the former. But to you
both are purely mechanical.
I think my meaning was pretty clear. I was referring to a fully
reductionist embodiment of conscious beings, in contrast to the
"wetware" embodiment we are familiar with.
BTW, how do you feel about quantum mechanics? ;-)
OK -- how do you feel about fluid mechanics then? ;-)
The biological "wetware" is just as mechanical as electronics, since
they're both based on quantum mechanics. Right?
OK, Paul--you get what I mean. I'm picked a relatively simple,
and perhaps imprecise, way of saying that "intelligent life" may
have substrates other than biological--that's all.
So to you, "life" is something different from "biology"? The very
word "biology" is derived from "bios", which is Latin for "life"... ;-)
If life can occur on some chemical platform other than the carbon
based organical molecules here on Earth, that life would surely form a
biology too!!!
The only biology that we currently know is based on organic chemistry.
The point I was trying to make is that inorganic "biologies" may also
exist. I was contrasting inorganic life with organic life--sorry for
using the terms confusingly.
True. And speed is not an issue when one judges whether a process
is mechanical or not. Consider e.g. celestial mechanics, where a
celestial body in the outer solar system may need centuries or more
to complete one revolution in its orbit. Bioligical electricity,
or mechanics if you so like, is much faster than that.
The point here is not "mechanism", but the possiblity of faster
and less massive substrates for intelligence than biology.
Earth's biology surely contains less massive substrates - ever
heard about microbiology? Although a biological cell is some 10
times larger than our smalles transistors, it can perform much
more complex operations than those 1000 or so transistors which
we might cram into the same volume as a call.
Much of the cell's mechanism is devoted to homeostasis of a complex
organic structure. Inorganic structures would require much less
"maintenance" (though power distribution and cooling must still be
addressed).
It is a reasonable assumption that intelligence requires a critical
number of "neurons", gates, logic functions, or whatever. These
can be realized with what used to be considered great density in
biological systems. But we are now on the threshold of creating
substrates for logic and computation that have many more elements
than brain tissue per unit of weight and power.
If so, we must already today be able to create substrates for logic
and computation that have somewhat more (i.e. not "many more")
elements than brain tissue per unit of weight and power. Can you
give a concrete example of such a project which ha ssucceeded?
And do you by "brain tissue" mean the brain of a human? Or of a rat
or other small mammal? Or of a crocodile or other big reptile or
fish?
Our logical substrates today are primarily two-dimensional. Moving
them into three dimensions with good volumetric density is progressing,
but has far to go. Another few decades should be more than enough time.
There is every reason to believe that we can build things on purpose
that significantly surpass what has evolved biologically--it's just a
small matter of engineering. ;-) We can get it done in a lot less
time, too. ;-)
How soon do you think this will happen? Ten years? One year? One
month? Less?` ;-)
I meant a lot less than the millions of years taken by biology. ;-)
If it's feasible for machines to have "personal consciousness", then
surely insects can have that too! They too are quite complex
machines, much more complex than anything we can build today.
Certainly. On Earth, we made it to "level 4 intelligence" first,
and will surely regulate the graduation of any other species on
the planet to that level (unless it's *very* sneaky ;-).
What's "level 4"? How many levels are they? Does a bigger number
mean more, or less, intelligence? And who defined these levels?
I was using it somewhat humerously as an indicator that there are
various levels of intelligent synthesis, placing humans at "level 4"
to indicate that there are clearly lesser levels (e.g. birds) and
suggesting that there may be more. (That's why the quotes.)
Still, a context must be known, or else the phrase "level 4" says
absolutely nothing.
Sorry for using literary license... I thought that the "throwaway"
nature of the term would be clear, together with its implication
that intelligence has degrees or differences, of scale and type.
You enjoy using buzzwords? You know, those words and phrases where
the meaning is at best unclear and at worst completely misunderstood...
Easy there--a little flip humor is par for this course.
<snip>
Exactly. And we don't have any way to *directly* make our experience
available to others, so we evolved/invented language to make it possible
to communicate them indirectly. Imagine the possibilities if a type
of intelligent being arises which can directly share experience with
others of its type. This brings a kind of "sexual" character to
communication which could greatly accelerate learning.
The Soviet biologist Lysenko believed that did actually happen, and claimed
that if the parents learnt some new skills, then their children would
inherit those skills....
Btw, learning has one advantage over genetic heritage: learning is
much faster, and learning can be changed much quicker to adapt to
changes in our environment. One generation is enough to give a
different focus in learning - many more generations are needed to
significantly alter the genetic heritage.
So there is at least a huge speed advantage if parents can pass the
whole corpus of their experience to their offspring.
Reminds me of the 50-year-old who says, "Ah, if I could be 20 again,
knowing what I know now..."
Such an "experience cloning" reproductive strategy would essentially
dispense with "childhood" from an intellectual point of view, but
might saddle the offspring with all the perceived limitations of
their parents. Perhaps it would be necessary to keep "generational
tags" on all "learning".
<snip>
Physical replication is not a theoretical problem, and it can exist
whenever we are willing to make it exist. The first cases will be
expensive, though. ;-)
Willingness isn't enough for this - you also need sufficient skill
and resources.
I think the skill is inevitable, and the resources come down to
"will" to do it. But to create artifical life would be a huge
scientific accomplishment, so the motivation is very great.
..... i.e. you think we already have the resources?
I think that we have all the needed materials and equipment--we
lack only the specific knowledge to do the "assembly"--and that
is coming quickly.
I expect to see this happen within a decade--on a small scale, of
course. There will probably be considerable effort to ensure that
the "organism" cannot escape the laboratory. ;-)
;-) ....and these efforts will, sooner or later, fail and those
self-reproducing machines will escape, if they're ever constructed.
See what happened to software viruses.... self-replicationg robots
would go out of control in a similar way sooner or later. Of course
we might succeed in exterminating them if that should happen.
Which is one of the reasons that we will try to engineer them so that
they require some "feedstock" that is not available in nature. The
danger of making early experiments "too adaptable" is clear.
I have often mused about whether or not modern humanity is actually
capable of surviving and "replicating" in a world in which various
"feedstocks" have been removed. It seems certain that our culture
is dependent on numerous products of technology whose supply could
be easily disrupted. Human biology might go on, but "life" as we
know it is relatively fragile, and not easily re-bootstrapped.
I think you mean civilization rather than "life" here. Yes, civlizations
may collapse, and that has already happened many times in human history.
But even if our current civilization would collapse, there may emerge
new civilizations in the future.
Yes, that is what I meant. I'm concerned about how future humans
who must start over might bootstrap themselves back to a technological
civilization.
Presumably in a way similar to our ancestors.... if it's been done once,
it can be repeated.
But we have gone pretty far in using up the resources readily available
to budding technologies--the "low hanging fruit".
While our ancestors climbed up a relatively gentle stairway, any future
crop will have a lot of "big steps" to get over.
And its clear that I identify with our technological civilization--I
have great hopes for it. ;-)
We'll have to find a way of living where we don't demand ever-increasing
available resources though ---- that's our biggest problem.
Or a way of living where there is a constantly increasing supply of
resources. The supply can be increased either by improved technology
(for extraction or synthesis) or by acquiring additional (off-planet)
resources.
<snip>
The question is whether those who succeed in travelling to other planets
are us, or if they are some who are descendants to us but still very
different from us - so different that they're no longer humans.
The question of what "human" means is truly interesting.
I suggested much earlier that kinship with us was primarily cultural,
and probably not all parts of our culture. ;-) Our "heirs" may be
hard for one of us to recognize, either in "body" or "thought"--but
then, a proto-human probably would think us unrelated, too.
Of course, we could agree about how nice fresh water is...
With our possible heirs, we might find common ground in music,
or humor in an unforseen logical contradiction. ;-)
"Ha, ha--that's very logical." ;-)
Humans have large components not based on logic.... emotions are
important too.
Agreed. Emotions are definitely a two-edged sword, though. It will
be interesting to see how much of what emotions should be designed
into future intelligent beings.
<snip>
The cryptographic problem is a different problem though: there you assume
the plaintext is written by someone from your own civilization and therefore
you have a fairly good idea of what it could look like. So your task is
to find out how to transform the ciphertext into this well-known form.
And you'll know at once if and when you've succeeded.
Interpreting messages from other civilizations is not quite that
straightforward.
Agreed. But most of what any civilization records is trivial and
repetitious--like sales receipts.
Perhaps our first intercepted message from an alien civilization would
be similar: it might be *their* sales receipt.....
If the corpus of documents is extensive, then there will be so many
cross references that everything would become clear quite quickly.
You ARE indeed an optimist!
Most cryptographical challenges are made difficult by the scarcity
of similarly encoded ciphertext. Having "gobs" of ciphertext that
is simply encoded makes this much easier than it might seem. Numbers
usually emerge first, then nouns, then verbs, etc., etc.
So it's then just due to human clumsiness, or laziness, taht there still
are many old dead languages we've failed to decipher?
In many cases, it's a consequence of having a very small
corpus of documents to decipher. A related problem is having
a relatively large corpus of very similar documents, so that
it's hard to get beyond their very limited "universe of discourse".
In other cases, it may simply be lack of sufficient interest... ;-)
If even a hundred capable researchers tackled one of these languages,
it would almost certainly either be deciphered or proven to be an
insufficient "basis set" for unambiguous deciphering.
The signs indicating that prerequisites for life are not rare say
nothing about the prerequisites for intelligent life. Is intelligent
life just a freak accident, or is it something which inevitably occurs
sooner or later wherever life occurs? We don't know. Here on Earth,
the only example of intelligent life we know about are the humanoids,
and we've been around for only a few million years during the Earth's
5 billion year history. So far, the Earth has had intelligent life
during 0.1% of its life span. Will we be around here for hundreds of
million years, or will we be gone within another million years or two?
We don't know.
Actually, we see many animals that have developed substantial central
nervous systems, and, should the environment demand it, they offer the
possibility of evolving what we usually call intelligence.
The brain probably evolved as a way of coordinating inputs from
more highly developed eyes, and then was put to work on other kinds
of "pattern recognition".
I think of intelligence as a normal, not an extraordinary, tendency
of evolution in a variable enviroment. Changing conditions makes
greater adaptability and learning capability a big survival advantage.
And when multiple organisms began to develop "crafty" adaptability,
then higher-order, reflective and planning intelligence became an
advantage.
None of this seems extraordinary. I would be surprised it it were
not a common tendency of life forced by a changing environment.
If so, why weren't there species with human-like intelligence during
a much larger part of the Earth's past natural history? Why don't we
find e.g. artefacts hundreds of millions of years old, made by
intelligent dinosaurs or insects?
Evolution is random, so it took several tries to get intelligence to
current levels. The change that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs
was a big step in that direction, as it happens.
The total elapsed time from single-celled life to intelligent life
was pretty long. The time from mammals to intelligent life was short
on that timescale.
Unfortunately, intelligence has not *yet* made us any less vulnerable
to the same mechanism that eliminated the dinosaurs.
We need to fix that.
-michael
NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."