Frank

Frank, 10 days ago

I’m getting the impression that you would think they were a different person, and I would not, and that disagreement lies not in any measurable process but rather our personal beliefs.

Frank, 10 days ago

Aight I think we might be stuck in a semantics disagreement here. I’m using brain to mean the actual brain organ plus whatever other stuff is needed to support brain function - the endocrine system, nervous system, whatever. The physical systems of cognition in the body. i do not mean literally only the brain organ with no other systems.

Frank, 10 days ago

And people survive all of that stuff, and are still people. I really don’t understand what you’re getting at here.

Frank, 10 days ago

This is just god of the gaps. “we don’t know so it’s not possible”. Saying “just copy the brain” is a reductive understanding of what’s being discussed. If we can model the brain then modelling the endocrine system is probably pretty trivial.

Frank, 10 days ago

This really sounds like mind-body dualism. Setting aside the body, which you could just stick the new brain back in your body and hook the nervous system back in, why would you be cut off from your sociocultural and historical material context? Go home. pet your cat with your robot arms. Hang out with your family, eat breakfast. Wherein lies the problem? All of those things exist inside your brain. Your brain is taking the very shoddy, very poor information being supplied by your sensory organs and assembling it in to approximations of what’s happening around you. We don’t interact with the world directly. Our interaction is moderated by our sensory organs and lots of non-conscious components of the mind, and they’re often wrong. If you hook up some cameras and a nervous system and some meat to this theoretical digital mind it has all the things a meat mind has. The same sensory information.

Like, really, where is the problem? A simulated brain is a brain is a brain. Put the same information in you’re going to get the same results out. Doesn’t matter if the signals are coming from a meat suit or a mathematical model of a meat suit, as long as they’re the right signals.

Frank, 10 days ago

Okay, imagine your family does not recognize your mind upload as a person.

That’s the day to day lived experience of like half the queer people in the world. I rejected part of my family and kicked them out of my life. i don’t have to imagine it, I’ve lived it.

You seem to have an assumption that some kind of digital transfer of consciousness would not physically interact with the world. You could just plug them in to a body. If you can run an entire brain on a computer hooking it in to a meat suit sounds fairly trivial. You can go right on eating hot chip and paying taxes. I think we’re operating from different perspectives here and I’m not sure what yours is. A digital mind could have a digital body and eat digital hot chip and they’d definitely be forced to pay taxes.

Frank, 11 days ago

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

I mean, protip, if you ask people to discard all of their language for discussing a subject they’re not going to be able to discuss the subject. This isn’t a gotcha. We interact with the world through symbol and metaphors. Computers are the symbolic language with which we discuss the mostly incomprehensible function of about a hundred billion weird little cells squirting chemicals and electricity around.

Yeah I’m not going to finish this but it just sounds like god of the gaps contrarianness. We have a symbolic language for discussing a complex phenomena that doesn’t really reflect the symbols we use to discuss it. We don’t know how memory encoding and retrieval works. The author doesn’t either, and it really just sounds like they’re peeved that other people don’t treat memory as an irreducibly complex mystery never to be solved.

Something they could have talked about - Our memories change over time because, afaik, the process of recalling a memory uses the same mechanics as the process of creating a memory. What I’m told is we’re experiencing the event we’re remembering again, and because we’re basically doing a live performance in our head the act of remembering can also change the memory. It’s not a hard drive, there’s no ones and zeroes in there. It’s a complex, messy biological process that arose under the influence of evolution, aka totally bonkers bs. But there is information in there. People remember strings of numbers, names, locations, literal computer code. We don’t know for sure how it’s encoded, retrieved, manipulated, “loaded in to ram”, but we know it’s there. As mentioned, people with some training and recall enormous amounts of information verbatim. There are, contrary to the dollar experiment, people who can reproduce images with high detail and accuracy after one brief viewing. There’s all kinds of weird eiditic memory and outliers.

From what I understand most people are moving towards a system model - Memories aren’t encoded in a cell, or as a pattern of chemicals, it’s a complex process that involves a whole lot of shit and can’t be discrete observed by looking at an isolated piece of the brain. YOu need to know what the system is doing. To deliberately poke fun at the author - It’s like trying to read the binary of a fragmented hard drive, it’s not going to make any sense. You’ve got to load it in to memory so the index that knows where all the pieces of the files are stored on the disk so it can assemble them in to something useful. Your file isn’t “stored” anywhere on the disk. Binary is stored on the disk. A program is needed to take that binary and turn it in to readable information. 'We’re never going to be able to upload a brain" is just whiney contrarian nonesense, it’s god of the gaps. We don’t know how it works now so we’ll never know how it works. So we need to produce a 1:1 scan of the whole body and all it’s processes? So what, maybe we’ll have tech to do that some day. maybe we’ll, you know, skip the whole “upload” thing and figure out how to hook a brain in to a computer interface directly, or integrate the meat with the metal. It’s so unimaginative to just throw your hands up and say “it’s too complicated! digital intelligence is impossible!” Like come on, we know you can run an intelligence on a few pounds of electrified grease. That’s a known, unquestionable thing. The machine exists, it’s sitting in each of our skulls, and every year we’re getting better and better at understanding and controlling it. There’s no reason to categorically reject the idea that we’ll some day be able to copy it, or alter it such a way that it can be copied. It doesn’t violate any laws of physics, it doesn’t require goofy exists only on paper exotic particles. it’s just electrified meat.

Also, if bozo could please explain how trained oral historians and poets can recall thousands of stanzas of poetry verbatim with few or no errors I’d love to hear that, because it raises some questions about the dollar bill “experiment”.

Frank, 10 days ago

So, ironically I think the author is falling in to the trap they’re complaining about. They’re talking about an “upload” as somehow copying a file from one computer to another.

Instead, consider transferring your brain to a digital system a little at a time. Old cells die, new cells are created. Do you ever lose subjective continuity during that process? Let one meat cell die and a digital cell grow. Do you stop being yourself once all your brain cells are digital? Was there ever a loss of phenomenalalaogy?

Frank, 5 days ago

I remain astonished at how he is the personal architect of so many crises"

Frank, 13 days ago

And the wild thing remains - it’s always our fault. Never the Dems for being wildly unpopular. Never dem voters for failing to mobilize their own people. And never ever anyone’s fault for failing to do anything to mobilize the vast number of American non voters. And, of course, it’s never the gop’s fault.

It’s us. It’s always us.

Frank, 12 days ago

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I take it back. Gun violence is cool. 40k dead every year is a small price to pay to avoid whatever is happening on Terf Island. I am sitting here with a kabuki dragon cao cao memorial addition deathstabber right now so Keir Sturmer fuck off.

Frank, 12 days ago

I seriously think we need to investigate what is happening in the minds of euros that they’ve effectively removed weapons from their society and have little or no violent crime but they still feel the need to expand arms control regimes to the point that simple pocket knives are considered a serious threat to public safety and order. There’s something happening there. There is *psychology".

Frank, 12 days ago

I’m pretty sure any object with one or more acute angles is already banned under UK knife law.

I cannot get over the idea that many European countries do not trust adults with knives.

Frank, 12 days ago

I remember a period in American news history where, every night, for at least 20 minutes, for months or possibly years, there was a segment on the dangers of salmonella in the kitchen, salmonella cultured from samples in a seemingly clean kitchen, salmonella here, salmonella there, salmonella everywhere. I guess nothing was happening that year. But whatever the news is trying to scare people with, I always think about all those salmonella scare segments from when i was a kid.

doesn’t amerikkka have something similar about how every street corner in detroit/chicargo/wherever is swarmed by teens who are Definitely smoking fentynol?

Yeah, we absolutely do. All the white boomers living in the suburbs that surround all our cities are terrified to go in to the cities because they think it’s constant guerilla warfare with roaming gangs of murder-thieves. They really, seriously believe it and the fear is real. It’s bizarre and absurd. They live in this firmly entrenched delusional world created by the 24 hour news cycle.

Meanwhile there’s less violent crime in the US than at any point in the last, idk, 50 years.

Something I think about a lot, under one of the law codes in “Viking” Europe, apparently slaves were legally allowed to carry a knife of a given size and use it in self defense even against free people. That just sticks with me - Medieval slaves were allowed to carry a knife, trusted to do so, it was considered normal and unexceptional. Knives are one of our oldest, most important tools. The idea of free people being forbidden from carrying a simple knife under threat of being thrown in a cage strikes me as irredeemably perverse.

Frank, 7 days ago

Man fuck all these fucking nazis.

Frank, 6 days ago

Oh look it has no ability to recognize or manipulate symbols and no referrents for what those symbols would even represent.