Also, I think creating a virtual human being from scratch might be a bit harder than emulating something that already exists. Then again, if you copied a brain onto a computer, you'd probably have a perfect understanding of its inner-workings. Or would you? I could imagine that it's possible to have developed something you don't even understand (see Wikipedia Technological Singularity.)
edit:
Actually, creating a human being from scratch would be possible if you could perfectly emulate a human brain, but creating a unique mind? I don't know about that...
heh another example for you, though i can see how its so obvious you missed it is that we DO 'develope' something every day that we dont understand how it works. its called child birth.
your in esence talking here about the ability to take life from its 'natural' organic state that we exist in now (our bodys) and be able to transfer that life to other states, (computers, robots etc). too accomplish this we would need to understand how life is made at all in order to know what makes life, ALIVE, we dont now. we can explane the mechanics of sex to a large degree but we can explane how the chemicals combinations in a sperm can meet the chemical combinations in and egg and WAMO 9 months later a squalling smell shit machine pops out her vagina.
i think what alex is trying to say is that if we ever DO reach a point where we know how life is created in that insiant of egg meets sperm. what process happenes, where the very 'spark' of life originates, and we somehow manage to learn to controll this process outside the 'natural' bounds of egg/sperm than we will have to have such a level of understanding about how life is created to accomplish this that things like where that life will establish itself (either computer, robot, or flesh) wont really matter. when we can CREATE life and know HOW we do it, it will simply open the doors to much larger questions of ethics and where that created life would chose to reside wont matter much at this point in our development as a species. the question will simply have been overtaken by events.
mathias53: ... you would need a "blank slate" or tabula rasa to create new people. This whole conversation is about making robot babies if you recall.
But you don't need that hypothesis to be true. Not at all! The "tabula rasa" hypothesis doesn't help you at all here!
If I have the technological ability to simulate every physical aspect of a living brain, it's trivial for me to expand my technology to simulating the processes that created that brain. I can start with a simulated embryo and take it all the way through simulated human development and anything that's "innately" in the brain will be there.
If anything, it's the other stuff -- the developmentally acquired knowledge -- that would be harder to copy with precision.
-- Alex
Have you ever programmed anything? Like a graphing calculator or computer? I have, I know 3 computer languages. Being an experienced programmer I can safely say that nothing will ever happen with the computer without someone directly telling it to happen. You cant just say "oh here mr. computer make me a baby with this embryo". Even with a highly sophisticated chemical and genetic simulation engine you need someone to preprogram how to do it. You need to preprogram how an embryo becomes a baby. And in between the embryo stage and the full grown baby stage we do not know what happens. We have no idea if a baby's personality later in life is directly attributed to their parents through genetics, or through the experiences during that life. So if in the future we learn that a baby is born with no initial attributes, we need to fabricate a blank slate, so that every new person in this new world is different.
Wyatt: heh another example for you, though i can see how its so obvious you missed it is that we DO 'develope' something every day that we dont understand how it works. its called child birth.
your in esence talking here about the ability to take life from its 'natural' organic state that we exist in now (our bodys) and be able to transfer that life to other states, (computers, robots etc). too accomplish this we would need to understand how life is made at all in order to know what makes life, ALIVE, we dont now. we can explane the mechanics of sex to a large degree but we can explane how the chemicals combinations in a sperm can meet the chemical combinations in and egg and WAMO 9 months later a squalling smell shit machine pops out her vagina.
i think what alex is trying to say is that if we ever DO reach a point where we know how life is created in that insiant of egg meets sperm. what process happenes, where the very 'spark' of life originates, and we somehow manage to learn to controll this process outside the 'natural' bounds of egg/sperm than we will have to have such a level of understanding about how life is created to accomplish this that things like where that life will establish itself (either computer, robot, or flesh) wont really matter. when we can CREATE life and know HOW we do it, it will simply open the doors to much larger questions of ethics and where that created life would chose to reside wont matter much at this point in our development as a species. the question will simply have been overtaken by events.
Actually, I disagree. You would not need to necessarily know how the brain develops to make a medium designed to carry on a mind, like how airplanes don't flap their wings to fly (Although, larger airplanes actually do tend to have a bit of flex in the wings so they don't snap off). If you were just trying to replicate the current brain functions, why would you need to go through the entire process of growth? If you're making a carving of a tree, you don't need to know how a tree grows to make it do you?
Of course, we may very well need to know how the brain develops to create this kind of technology in the first place (i.e. strong AI) but it probably wouldn't directly affect the process of mind transferring....
I suppose it's kind of stupid to be arguing about something that is currently impossible though and I could be wrong. Either way, I'm too tired to think about this anymore.
edit: Changed the wording a bit, made it sound less like I was stating facts and more like theories, which they are.
mathias53: Have you ever programmed anything? Like a graphing calculator or computer?
I'm a software engineer by trade. I have a B.A. in Computer Science. Developmental robotics is by no means my specialty, but I've done more coursework in A.I. and developmental robotics specifically than you can possibly get in 95% of undergraduate institutions out there. Hey, I don't blame you if you've never studied A.I., since it's not exactly a priority in C.S. programs that focus on teaching you how to be a programmer in the business world, and there don't seem to be enough "new A.I." professors to go around anyway (and, reading the literature, a lot of them seem to be hacks anyway). But, given that you said "three languages", I'm gonna guess that I do, in fact, know more than you. Considerably more.
Have you ever coded up a neural network? How about a Braitenberg vehicle? A genetic algorithm? Do you know who Rodney Brooks and Hans Moravec are? Can you tell me how Deep Blue differs from TD-Gamon? Do you understand what "emergence" is? (That last one is critical.)
For that matter, have you ever coded up a physical simulation (an N-body problem, a fluid dynamics simulation, anything like that)? What do you know about the theoretical foundations of computer science (e.g. the Church-Turing thesis)?
mathias53: I have, I know 3 computer languages. Being an experienced programmer I can safely say that nothing will ever happen with the computer without someone directly telling it to happen. You cant just say "oh here mr. computer make me a baby with this embryo". Even with a highly sophisticated chemical and genetic simulation engine you need someone to preprogram how to do it. You need to preprogram how an embryo becomes a baby. And in between the embryo stage and the full grown baby stage we do not know what happens. We have no idea if a baby's personality later in life is directly attributed to their parents through genetics, or through the experiences during that life. So if in the future we learn that a baby is born with no initial attributes, we need to fabricate a blank slate, so hat every new person in this new world is different.
Like I said, the standard singularity-s.f. definition of "uploading" requires extraordinary knowledge of low-level physical processes. And an ability to map the cellular structure of a brain, of course.
Given that knowledge (which is a prerequisite for just "uploading" a fully-developed brain), however, everything else follows easily.
Your knowledge of low-level physical processes forms the rules of the simulation. The initial state for an embryo is pretty simple: one cell containing a specific blob of genetic data. If you can simulate all the stuff that goes on in an adult brain, down to the last synapse and neurotransmitter and potential weird quantum interaction between any two molecules, simulating the internals of a developing embryo is easy in comparison. Throw in a comparatively basic model of its environment, the womb -- nutrients, hormones, &c. -- and you've got all you need to develop a virtual baby.
That's because the higher-order features of biological development, including the organization of the brain, result from the low-level physical processes that occur.
This is all easily within the power of a civilization capable of true singularity-s.f. "uploading".
Okay, first thing usually brought up by, forgive me but, ignorant people is that Mind Uploading is "unnatural", often bringing religion and all that jazz into this.
More importantly however, there are issues such as hacking, which is made worse by an order of magnitude by the fact that these are human minds that are being hacked (see Ghost in the Shell), digital torture in which you would never die or go unconcious and they could just crank up the pain without even touching you and when you go insane they'll just reboot you and keep on going. There's also the problems of computer crashes, economics, emotional issues (what if your best friend/child/parent one day decided they were going to upload themself and you couldn't go with them or were unwilling to leave everything else behind).
Etc, etc.
That still doesn't have to do with ethics. In any sensible system you'd still have contact with the outside world, so if you uploaded yourself you wouldn't leave your friends behind more than if you moved to another country, or whatever.
The unnatural part I don't buy, it's a natural extension of what we already have, is a respirator unnatural? How about an artificial pacemaker? Or artificial limbs, or whatever? This is just the next logical step. If we have a soul it's not going to be bound to our bodies, our souls aren't in our fingers, or our hands, or legs, or heart, or whatever, why would it be in our brains? Since we upload ALL the information in our brains whatever soul we might have in there would transfer along with the rest anyway.
The issue with hackers or pirates aren't ethical either, it's a just a risk/gain ratio we have to consider before uploading ourselves. Just like it's not an ethical issue being robbed or murdered. It's not about the victim. Besides, there should be fail-safes of some kind, most likely a system like this wouldn't be connected to anything. It wouldn't be "online", so to speak, or at least you'd have an offline "back-up". If you get hacked, you just terminate your connection and clear your "ram", hacker gone, and you're safe. When you feel up for it, you can connect again, through a proxy or something, to confront your demons.
None of this is, in my eyes, about ethics. Only the whack-job religious part, but since I'm not a fanatic, that also doesn't apply to me.
I dunno, seems very "outsource to India" to me, although it doesn't seem wrong though. I bet there'll be some law banning it in the future, so I wouldn't get all hyped up about it. Ethical? Probably not.
The transhumanist take on ethics is pretty simple:
Frank Sulloway once said: "Ninety-nine per cent of what Darwinian theory says about human behavior is so obviously true that we don't give Darwin credit for it. Ironically, psychoanalysis has it over Darwinism precisely because its predictions are so outlandish and its explanations are so counterintuitive that we think, Is that really true? How radical! Freud's ideas are so intriguing that people are willing to pay for them, while one of the great disadvantages of Darwinism is that we feel we know it already, because, in a sense, we do."
Suppose you find an unconscious six-year-old girl lying on the train tracks of an active railroad. What, morally speaking, ought you to do in this situation? Would it be better to leave her there to get run over, or to try to save her? How about if a 45-year-old man has a debilitating but nonfatal illness that will severely reduce his quality of life - is it better to cure him, or not cure him?
Oh, and by the way: This is not a trick question.
I answer that I would save them if I had the power to do so - both the six-year-old on the train tracks, and the sick 45-year-old. The obvious answer isn't always the best choice, but sometimes it is.
I won't be lauded as a brilliant ethicist for my judgments in these two ethical dilemmas. My answers are not surprising enough that people would pay me for them. If you go around proclaiming "What does two plus two equal? Four!" you will not gain a reputation as a deep thinker. But it is still the correct answer.
If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says "Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad." If so - and here we enter into controversial territory - we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. With current technology it is not possible. But if the technology became available in some future year - given sufficiently advanced medical nanotechnology, or such other contrivances as future minds may devise - would you judge it a good thing, to save that life, and stay that debility?
The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question.
Transhumanism is simpler - requires fewer bits to specify - because it has no special cases. If you believe professional bioethicists (people who get paid to explain ethical judgments) then the rule "Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad" holds only until some critical age, and then flips polarity. Why should it flip? Why not just keep on with life-is-good? It would seem that it is good to save a six-year-old girl, but bad to extend the life and health of a 150-year-old. Then at what exact age does the term in the utility function go from positive to negative? Why?
As far as a transhumanist is concerned, if you see someone in danger of dying, you should save them; if you can improve someone's health, you should. There, you're done. No special cases. You don't have to ask anyone's age.
You also don't ask whether the remedy will involve only "primitive" technologies (like a stretcher to lift the six-year-old off the railroad tracks); or technologies invented less than a hundred years ago (like penicillin) which nonetheless seem ordinary because they were around when you were a kid; or technologies that seem scary and sexy and futuristic (like gene therapy) because they were invented after you turned 18; or technologies that seem absurd and implausible and sacrilegious (like nanotech) because they haven't been invented yet. Your ethical dilemma report form doesn't have a line where you write down the invention year of the technology. Can you save lives? Yes? Okay, go ahead. There, you're done.
Suppose a boy of 9 years, who has tested at IQ 120 on the Wechsler-Bellvue, is threatened by a lead-heavy environment or a brain disease which will, if unchecked, gradually reduce his IQ to 110. I reply that it is a good thing to save him from this threat. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle saying that intelligence is precious. Now the boy's sister, as it happens, currently has an IQ of 110. If the technology were available to gradually raise her IQ to 120, without negative side effects, would you judge it good to do so?
Well, of course. Why not? It's not a trick question. Either it's better to have an IQ of 110 than 120, in which case we should strive to decrease IQs of 120 to 110. Or it's better to have an IQ of 120 than 110, in which case we should raise the sister's IQ if possible. As far as I can see, the obvious answer is the correct one.
But - you ask - where does it end? It may seem well and good to talk about extending life and health out to 150 years - but what about 200 years, or 300 years, or 500 years, or more? What about when - in the course of properly integrating all these new life experiences and expanding one's mind accordingly over time - the equivalent of IQ must go to 140, or 180, or beyond human ranges?
Where does it end? It doesn't. Why should it? Life is good, health is good, beauty and happiness and fun and laughter and challenge and learning are good. This does not change for arbitrarily large amounts of life and beauty. If there were an upper bound, it would be a special case, and that would be inelegant.
Ultimate physical limits may or may not permit a lifespan of at least length X for some X - just as the medical technology of a particular century may or may not permit it. But physical limitations are questions of simple fact, to be settled strictly by experiment. Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, deals only with the question of whether a healthy lifespan of length X is desirable if it is physically possible. Transhumanism answers yes for all X. Because, you see, it's not a trick question.
So that is "transhumanism" - loving life without special exceptions and without upper bound.
Can transhumanism really be that simple? Doesn't that make the philosophy trivial, if it has no extra ingredients, just common sense? Yes, in the same way that the scientific method is nothing but common sense.
Then why have a complicated special name like "transhumanism" ? For the same reason that "scientific method" or "secular humanism" have complicated special names. If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.
But a moral philosophy should not have special ingredients. The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive, or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning. If the judgments are simple, that is no black mark against them - morality doesn't always have to be complicated.
There is nothing in transhumanism but the same common sense that underlies standard humanism, rigorously applied to cases outside our modern-day experience. A million-year lifespan? If it's possible, why not? The prospect may seem very foreign and strange, relative to our current everyday experience. It may create a sensation of future shock. And yet - is life a bad thing?
Could the moral question really be just that simple?
I won't even get into the the sci-fi part about how the process might work (since that is outside of the scope of the original question anyway), but I have this to say about the topic: I don't see why this is wrong, and hell no, I'm not ever doing something like that. If it is done by choice, whereby a person fully knows the consequences of such action, and the mind is kept in tact, then there is absolutely nothing unethical about it. My question would be, why would anyone do it? A lot of people carelessly throw around the prospect of eternal life, but how many would actually choose to gain eternal life? What is there to pursue? Higher knowledge? Most people don't even want to do their homework, let alone spending eternity to contemplate insane equations and god forbid, meaning of life. And how would I eat? I want my pie or virtual pie, and cake too!
I'm fairly sure I'm right, but I've been doing too much talking out of my ass recently, aka, speaking of things I don't 100% understand, so I'm going to stop ._.
Alex_P: But, given that you said "three languages", I'm gonna guess that I do, in fact, know more than you.
Ok you dont have to be a pompous ass, I know Java, C, and Assembly and currently work as a programmer for Ubisoft. I do not appreciate you assuming that I went to a bad school. I also think you should shut you mouth and focus on the original subject.
Alex_P: Have you ever coded up a neural network? How about a Braitenberg vehicle? A genetic algorithm? Do you know who Rodney Brooks and Hans Moravec are? Can you tell me how Deep Blue differs from TD-Gamon? Do you understand what "emergence" is? (That last one is critical.)
For that matter, have you ever coded up a physical simulation (an N-body problem, a fluid dynamics simulation, anything like that)? What do you know about the theoretical foundations of computer science (e.g. the Church-Turing thesis)?
I fail to see how any of this is relevant to our original conversation besides you letting me know that you do in fact know how to work wikipedia.
Alex_P: Like I said, the standard singularity-s.f. definition of "uploading" requires extraordinary knowledge of low-level physical processes. And an ability to map the cellular structure of a brain, of course.
Given that knowledge (which is a prerequisite for just "uploading" a fully-developed brain), however, everything else follows easily.
Your knowledge of low-level physical processes forms the rules of the simulation. The initial state for an embryo is pretty simple: one cell containing a specific blob of genetic data. If you can simulate all the stuff that goes on in an adult brain, down to the last synapse and neurotransmitter and potential weird quantum interaction between any two molecules, simulating the internals of a developing embryo is easy in comparison. Throw in a comparatively basic model of its environment, the womb -- nutrients, hormones, &c. -- and you've got all you need to develop a virtual baby.
That's because the higher-order features of biological development, including the organization of the brain, result from the low-level physical processes that occur.
This is all easily within the power of a civilization capable of true singularity-s.f. "uploading".
-- Alex
You said your self that you have a degree from the univerity of smartass in computer science but you still arent getting the single fundamental fact through that frighteningly thick skull of yours. Computers are dumb, you have to specifically tell it what will happen when a child develops. And because we do not yet know what happens we cannot predict how a computer will handle it. With what you are saying we could take this same principle, but instead replacing your chemical genetics engine with a chemical physics engine and completely create a universe then suddenly we will now exactly what a black hole is and why it is created. Let me be the first to say that this is not possible. You are saying that if we give a computer chromosomes, genetic information, nutrients, hormones, etc then it will know exactly what to do with them and make a perfect baby the way god intended. It doesnt work like that, you need to specifically tell the computer how to use the hormones and nutrients to create something. But if we do not know what that something is in its entirety (original genetics, any precharacteristics) then how the hell will the computer know what it is? Then it brings us around full circle to the fact that we are not all as smart as you apparently and do not know how exactly a baby is formed and whether or not it is born with its personality. So now feeling like a broken record, i feel as though I need to reiterate that in order to create a baby represented in electrical 1s and 0s we need to be able to fabricate a blank slate so that babies in this virtual world will not be all identical.
Actually, I disagree. You would not need to necessarily know how the brain develops to make a medium designed to carry on a mind, like how airplanes don't flap their wings to fly (Although, larger airplanes actually do tend to have a bit of flex in the wings so they don't snap off). If you were just trying to replicate the current brain functions, why would you need to go through the entire process of growth? If you're making a carving of a tree, you don't need to know how a tree grows to make it do you?
Of course, we may very well need to know how the brain develops to create this kind of technology in the first place (i.e. strong AI) but it probably wouldn't directly affect the process of mind transferring....
I suppose it's kind of stupid to be arguing about something that is currently impossible though and I could be wrong. Either way, I'm too tired to think about this anymore.
edit: Changed the wording a bit, made it sound less like I was stating facts and more like theories, which they are.
but the thing is we DO know how to fly, we just didnt designe our planes to flap their wings but we know how the mechanics of wing flapping work. in fact given the materials we had to work with when flight was first developed a fixed wing plane was more efficent than a flapping wing design. we are just now approaching the materials complexity to beging to ponder how to make a huge plane fly 'like a bird'
take the B2 bomber for example, we KNEW from the start that a designe without vertical surfaces was possable we just didnt have the material ability to do it. using these example it shows what i mean when i say that we need to know the basics before we can actualy accomplish anything. we didnt build a fixed wing plane without knowing how the basic mechaincs of flight worked and it started with scientists looking at birds actualy figuring out how flapping wings worked and moved on from there. transfer of LIFE from its natural state into a mechanical one will first require that we know how life comes about in the natural in order to control it to such a degree that we can transport it too an un-natural medium.
and it seems self evident too me that carving a stature out of a tree and creating life and being able to transfer it from one medium to another are nearly the same level of complexity. to use your tree example, you would not only need to be able to carve that statue but you would need to make that statue alive when your done and not just a random 'alive' but it would need to be a very specific life, yours for example. you would need to know how to make a carved tree into you. and untill you kow how YOU were made you just wont be able to do it.
mathias53: You said your self that you have a degree from the univerity of smartass in computer science but you still arent getting the single fundamental fact through that frighteningly thick skull of yours. Computers are dumb, you have to specifically tell it what will happen when a child develops. And because we do not yet know what happens we cannot predict how a computer will handle it. With what you are saying we could take this same principle, but instead replacing your chemical genetics engine with a chemical physics engine and completely create a universe then suddenly we will now exactly what a black hole is and why it is created. Let me be the first to say that this is not possible. You are saying that if we give a computer chromosomes, genetic information, nutrients, hormones, etc then it will know exactly what to do with them and make a perfect baby the way god intended. It doesnt work like that, you need to specifically tell the computer how to use the hormones and nutrients to create something. But if we do not know what that something is in its entirety (original genetics, any precharacteristics) then how the hell will the computer know what it is? Then it brings us around full circle to the fact that we are not all as smart as you apparently and do not know how exactly a baby is formed and whether or not it is born with its personality. So now feeling like a broken record, i feel as though I need to reiterate that in order to create a baby represented in electrical 1s and 0s we need to be able to fabricate a blank slate so that babies in this virtual world will not be all identical.
im sure alex will have a rousing reply of his own here but id just like too say that from my point of view, this whole topic seems self evident to me that we wont be able too accomplish this uploading without true AI to help us.
we will first have to be able to make our computers 'alive' before we have any hope of tranfering a human mind into them. after all i may be a bit thick from some points of view but if we intend to create a computer with the ability to contain a humans soul/mind would that computer not also have to be capable of being a true AI as well?
im gunna leap off into la la land and say this. in almost all the sci-fie example ive read about transferance of minds into machins there is hand in hand with it some form of an AI civilization allready established. and in all cases its the AIs that make the human migration possable. we create the AIs and the AI create a form of their enviroment that will allow us to join them there. but in all these examples we needed to learn how to create life in a mechanical medium first and that life is AIs, then in a combination of human and AI we eventualy cross the barrier and allow Humans too join the AIs in their 'world'. so the whole argument about how computers are 'dumb' is moot because in order to have a shot at doing this for real our computers will HAVE to become alive themselves.
xitel: I think if someone is on their deathbed, and they opted to do this, it would be ethical, as it would give them a chance at a sort of eternal life. But it brings up the question of whether your self is defined by your soul, or a series of brain waves that could be transferred to a computer.
Regardless of how you define yourself, in my scenario, you would indeed by self aware inside the simulation, as you are no doubt [self-aware] at this moment, reading this quote message.
Umm, if I did this would I still be allowed to play my video games?
mathias53: With what you are saying we could take this same principle, but instead replacing your chemical genetics engine with a chemical physics engine and completely create a universe then suddenly we will now exactly what a black hole is and why it is created. Let me be the first to say that this is not possible.
That's how it works: initial state of a system + accurate model of the interactions that occur within the system + sufficient computational resources = working virtual copy of that thing. If you had what physicists call a Theory of Everything (the correct one), then, yes, you could run an entire universe "inside" any machine of sufficient scale.
mathias53: You are saying that if we give a computer chromosomes, genetic information, nutrients, hormones, etc then it will know exactly what to do with them and make a perfect baby the way god intended. It doesnt work like that, you need to specifically tell the computer how to use the hormones and nutrients to create something.
As I've said ten times, you also need a model of how all those elements interact. That model is already a prerequisite for effectively "uploading" adult minds.
Therefore, going from "uploading" a brain to creating a purely virtual child is a relatively small, incremental leap of science and technology.
And, by the way, you've already accepted the premise of "uploading" or even creating purely-virtual children (you just added that "tabula rasa" caveat) but now you're doubling back on that. Which is it? Because that's two completely different arguments right there.
mathias53: But if we do not know what that something is in its entirety (original genetics, any precharacteristics) then how the hell will the computer know what it is?
Like I said, the initial state is trivial. We know what's in an embryo. It's a single cell! It's the "rules" of the simulation that are hard -- but, again, we get the vast majority of them for free if you stipulate that we already have the near-magical technology to "upload" people in the first place.
mathias53: Then it brings us around full circle to the fact that we are not all as smart as you apparently and do not know how exactly a baby is formed and whether or not it is born with its personality.
This "brings us around full circle" to the fact that you seem to be really attached to a relic of the "nature vs. nurture" debate that's largely irrelevant here.
If a baby is "born with" something, than a simulated child created through a perfect model of that same process will be "born with" it, too. If it's not, then it won't be. Whether or not genes code for some kind of innate knowledge doesn't help or hurt the simulation's ability to put together whatever the genes do happen to code for.
mathias53: So now feeling like a broken record, i feel as though I need to reiterate that in order to create a baby represented in electrical 1s and 0s we need to be able to fabricate a blank slate so that babies in this virtual world will not be all identical.
Rephrase, please. You seem to be using "blank slate" quite differently from how you're using it elsewhere.
I think that would be AMAZING! Right now I feel quite the foolish failure...I could hide in their forever! And then I'd be a foolish failure who was having fun!
Alex_P: Whatever Alex has said over the past bajillion posts
I cant help but get the feeling that you are suffering from schizophrenia. You keep meandering around the initial point and i am getting tired of this. The whole topic is how do we continue the human race even when we are all computers. There are only three options to create new people: 1. we use pre-created thoughts and feelings Blade Runner style, 2. we use an equal mix of characteristics from the computer memory of the "parents" to create a sort of mutt of the two people, or 3. we create a blank slate so that as this computer child grows up he will aquire his characteristic personality wise from his surroundings. I do under stand where you are coming from though, if we did have a perfect genetic program that can make a child using the two parents DNA then we wouldn't need to worry about any of these options but you fail to remember chance. You being the master computer science nerd that you are should know that nothing in a computer is random. When you call a random function it doesn't actually roll a die to get a random number, it selects a number from a pre generated list of true random numbers created by the function creator. With chance out the window it is impossible to accurately use the genetics program to get a naturally born baby. With something as serious as people's lives we cannot leave this up to a pre rendered list of numbers because there will always be somebody who says "I blame the programmer of this for creating a program that allowed the guy before me's child to be a saint and mine's a jerk". If we used option 3 then we would not have this problem and the genetics program will most likely automatically use option 3 because thats the way I think it works.
mathias53: I cant help but get the feeling that you are suffering from schizophrenia.
That's because this "blank slate" concept you're working with is schizophrenic. You keep implicitly redefining it a bunch of times as you go.
"Tabula rasa" is a term for the idea that human beings are born without preexisting knowledge. Its opposite is "innatism", which is the belief that human beings have preexisting knowledge: for example, famous linguist Noam Chomsky argues (when he's not talking about political crap) that human beings naturally possess a working model of grammar, and that learning languages is really a matter of fine-tuning that model a little bit for that particular language, rather than actually learning structure from scratch.
In other words, "tabula rasa" is just a fancy rehash of "nurture" from the tired old "nature vs. nurture" debate.
As far as cognitive science is concerned, "nature vs. nurture" is a pretty dated concept. It can be useful to talk about whether individual aspects of cognition are innate or acquired, but the idea of a sharp separation harkens back to a time when people still thought of acquired knowledge and "hardwired" instinct as completely different things, almost like hardware and software -- and we've know for a quite a while that that's not how it actually works: new knowledge forms new structure.
The point I've been trying to make repeatedly is that it doesn't matter whether something is the product of innate knowledge or early learning, because a well-simulated brain would have the same innate knowledge that a natural one would, since they both develop in the same way.
Whether the proverbial "slate" starts out "blank" is irrelevant when you've got the ability to copy the process that gives us a virtual "slate" in its starting state -- which is why I find it frustrating that you seem to be arguing that a point of minor curiosity is a make-or-break thing for creating simulated brains.
mathias53: The whole topic is how do we continue the human race even when we are all computers. There are only three options to create new people: 1. we use pre-created thoughts and feelings Blade Runner style, 2. we use an equal mix of characteristics from the computer memory of the "parents" to create a sort of mutt of the two people, or 3. we create a blank slate so that as this computer child grows up he will aquire his characteristic personality wise from his surroundings.
Rather than a "blank slate", we'd be creating a simulated facsimile of whatever would normally be created. It will be "blank" in the ways the natural one is "blank" and non-"blank" in the ways that the natural one is non-"blank".
Doing this is ridiculously difficult, but it mostly involves the exact same insight and effort as the related task of "uploading" existing humans. It would be a notable improvement over the basic tech that facilitates "uploading", but still a rather incremental one, probably achievable in only a few years once "uploading" itself is perfected. (Not that I take the transhumanists' vision of the future wholly for granted. I'm sure there are a lot of other ways things could pan out.)
mathias53: I do under stand where you are coming from though, if we did have a perfect genetic program that can make a child using the two parents DNA then we wouldn't need to worry about any of these options but you fail to remember chance. You being the master computer science nerd that you are should know that nothing in a computer is random. When you call a random function it doesn't actually roll a die to get a random number, it selects a number from a pre generated list of true random numbers created by the function creator. With chance out the window it is impossible to accurately use the genetics program to get a naturally born baby. With something as serious as people's lives we cannot leave this up to a pre rendered list of numbers because there will always be somebody who says "I blame the programmer of this for creating a program that allowed the guy before me's child to be a saint and mine's a jerk". If we used option 3 then we would not have this problem and the genetics program will most likely automatically use option 3 because thats the way I think it works.
This issue is likewise trivial because, being the "master computer science nerd" that I am, I know how to use /dev/random. :)
Pumping outside noise into a digital system isn't difficult. Heck, you don't really have to look very far "outside": the machine creates its own entropy in the form of waste heat. Or just slap some kind of detector onto the thing's power source and you're pretty much good to go.
Modern computer systems just don't bother with anything more advanced than adding a few lines of code to the hard disk driver because, well, there's no reason to at this point -- most of what we do with computers isn't sufficiently advanced to require or benefit from true randomness. We use algorithmic pseudo-randomness more out of convenience than necessity.
heh another example for you, though i can see how its so obvious you missed it is that we DO 'develope' something every day that we dont understand how it works. its called child birth.
your in esence talking here about the ability to take life from its 'natural' organic state that we exist in now (our bodys) and be able to transfer that life to other states, (computers, robots etc). too accomplish this we would need to understand how life is made at all in order to know what makes life, ALIVE, we dont now. we can explane the mechanics of sex to a large degree but we can explane how the chemicals combinations in a sperm can meet the chemical combinations in and egg and WAMO 9 months later a squalling smell shit machine pops out her vagina.
i think what alex is trying to say is that if we ever DO reach a point where we know how life is created in that insiant of egg meets sperm. what process happenes, where the very 'spark' of life originates, and we somehow manage to learn to controll this process outside the 'natural' bounds of egg/sperm than we will have to have such a level of understanding about how life is created to accomplish this that things like where that life will establish itself (either computer, robot, or flesh) wont really matter. when we can CREATE life and know HOW we do it, it will simply open the doors to much larger questions of ethics and where that created life would chose to reside wont matter much at this point in our development as a species. the question will simply have been overtaken by events.