Artificial Super Intelligence - are we ready for it?

[trish]

The value of zero is zero.
The value of zero plus six is six.
The value of six times zero is zero.
The value of six to the zero power is one.
The value of me equals the value you,
but our values can't be added, divided nor on a computer run.

Zero is simply the identity element of the additive group canonically embedded within the complete real closed field. Our field is open, our identity incomplete.

[Stavros]

The value of me equals the value you,
but our values can't be added, divided nor on a computer run.

So we are not machines, and we have souls -unique souls?

[trish]

Not all machines are digital computers. The brain has aspects of a neural net, but it's not temporally synchronized, nor completely digital in all of its aspects. This doesn't mean you aren't a physical system. But all that is beside the point: my comment on Buttslinger's post is about value, not the origins of sentience. I'm merely suggesting that the values we attach to things aren't always numbers, or even abstractions that can be easily compared. What, for example, was the value Bikini Atoll before it was obliterated? The U.S. military may have attached a dollar amount to the value. Others would've been hard pressed to to express their value in those terms. But it doesn't mean the Bikini Atoll had a soul. Perhaps it did. Perhaps not. But to say it isn't an electronic digital computer and it has an incomparable value doesn't decide the issue.

[Stavros]

Trish we are not really getting anywhere with this. Science can tell us so many things about the body, perhaps not as much about the brain as it would like, but is still floundering when it comes to explain why humans with the same constituent parts do not produce the same things over and over again, or rather, as in fact humans are very repetitive creatures, why one human can paint and another cannot, where a unique imagination separates his or her work from everyone else's. Whether you call it the mind or the soul, we are surely more than the sum of our parts. But why?

[buttslinger]

Stavros and Trish both love to LORD it over us with their engorged vocabularies, I think my only unfinished business here would be to hear Trish admit to at least the POSSIBILITY of a Universal God that starts to cook where our paths end.

[trish]

Stavros and Trish both love to LORD it over us with their engorged vocabularies, I think my only unfinished business here would be to hear Trish admit to at least the POSSIBILITY of a Universal God that starts to cook where our paths end.

Of course. Way up beyond the clouds in a parallel set of dimensions there may exist a race of spider-legged gods that creep along the cosmic web, oozing out the Nambu strings of which the universe is woven. We worshipfully commune with the awful Mother of that nest by the thin filaments upon which we tug with our prayerful thoughts. The trick is finding reason to believe such a thing and then to act meaningfully on that belief. Should some poor father stand accused of murdering his son because he thought the Web Mother bade him to do it, would you find him guilty or non-guilty by reason of insanity?

[buttslinger]

Of course. Way up beyond the clouds in a parallel set of dimensions there may exist a race of spider-legged gods that creep ......, would you find him guilty or non-guilty by reason of insanity?

I'd probably find him not guilty, if he killed his wife or business partner I'd find him guilty. Let's play hardball. Are you telling me that all the black people that go to Sunday School are ignorant?

[trish]

A snow flake consists of nothing but H2O and yet each is unique. Why? Not because it has a soul, but because of the multitudinous variations physics allows in the formation of ice crystals and the multitudinous fluctuations in the ambient environment of these delicate lattices as they grow. So too with living creating creatures.

There are one hundred trillion neurons in a human brain. It would require two to the power of one hundred trillion bits of information just to describe with exactitude the physical state of that machine. Clearly we won’t ever be predicting human behavior on the level of neurons. To understand why humans sometimes write poetry we need higher level concepts. Perhaps ideas belonging to fields other than science. But clearly, with so many available biological variations and so much variation and fluctuation in our environment and our lives as we grow, mature and learn, it is natural to expect that when one human is found who writes poetry, not all will necessarily do so. Souls are not needed to understand the uniqueness of human beings. They may be needed to explain other things about humans, but I haven’t been told yet what that might be, or how such explanations work.

Whether you call it the mind or the soul, we are surely more than the sum of our parts. But why?

I’m not sure what “sum” means here. Surely it doesn’t mean the same as it does in arithmetic. Nor does it mean the same thing as “aggregate”, “collection” or “union.” We are not the mere collection of all of our parts, that’s for certain. But then, neither is a car engine. Take your car apart and put all the pieces into a huge box. It will no longer be your car. A car is not a simple sum of all of its parts. The parts of a car are integrated and interfaced in such a way that the state of the cars is intimately related by the laws of physics to the state of the car at later times.

The question of this thread is can human-designed, man-made machines achieve intelligence? sentience? and if so are they an existential danger to humans? You seem to think that no man-made machine will ever have a soul and so we will never have to grant such a machine our empathy, our sympathy, our respect etc. The hypothesis that thinking beings require divinely bestowed souls grants you a slam-dunk argument. I think it’s very unlikely that humans will ever create sentient machines, but I don’t have a slam-dunk argument that concludes no such thing is possible. Indeed I think our very existence illustrates the principle of a sentient physical system. So I can’t rule the possibility that we may want some day in the future to grant to some of our machines the same respect that we (ought to) afford others.

[trish]

I'd probably find him not guilty, if he killed his wife or business partner I'd find him guilty. Let's play hardball. Are you telling me that all the black people that go to Sunday School are ignorant?

We are all sadly, sadly ignorant. To address your question more directly, many Sunday School attendees have Faith, which ultimately presupposes a kind ignorance...doesn't it?

[buttslinger]

We are all sadly, sadly ignorant. To address your question more directly, many Sunday School attendees have Faith, which ultimately presupposes a kind ignorance...doesn't it?

Nobody on earth has a Faith that sees beyond personal ignorance?