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Cyclopath
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PostMon Nov 11, 2019 6:24 pm 
There's been a lot of hand wringing lately about self driving cars, but in the grand scheme of things that's a pretty simple task. They've trained rats to drive miniature cars, the rats find it calming. The internet has chatbots that come off as more intelligent than some people I've met. moon.gif Ray Kurzweil predicts it's only a matter of time until humans build a working computer model of the human brain, aided by fMRI imagery. AIs will appear to have free will, and existential angst about their place in the universe. They will get together with likeminded AIs and cultivate spiritual experiences. People do it, that at least proves it's possible.

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Malachai Constant
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PostMon Nov 11, 2019 7:04 pm 
My daughter is a neuroscientist at a prominent eastern university involved in brain modeling. It is far more complex than you may think because the brain does not have real dedicated areas for different purposes. Different areas can substitute for others at many times. She is modeling addiction which one would think is quite simple but reveals itself to be amazingly complex. The brain appears to have the capability to reprogram and reorganize in real time. Something as esoteric as spirituality will be difficult to model. It could however, spontaneously occur without programming in a complex machine.who knows what the result might be. I have read a lot of sci-fi and feel we have no clue.

"You do not laugh when you look at the mountains, or when you look at the sea." Lafcadio Hearn
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Randito
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PostMon Nov 11, 2019 7:15 pm 
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe wrote:
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

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Randito
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PostMon Nov 11, 2019 7:21 pm 
Douglas Adams neatly summarizes the "self driving car" thread.
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt wrote:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

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Seventy2002
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PostMon Nov 11, 2019 7:35 pm 
QT-1, a robot in Issac Assimov's 1941 short story Reason, believes itself to be the prophet of a deity it calls "The Master." It coverts other robots and makes their assigned functions a religious duty.

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Anne Elk
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 1:42 pm 
Malachi Constant wrote:
The brain appears to have the capability to reprogram and reorganize in real time. Something as esoteric as spirituality will be difficult to model.
The research currently being done on psilocybin therapy at Johns Hopkins and other places suggests the opposite, that mystical "states", normally the product of a lifetime of meditation practice et al, can be accessed with guided chemical shortcuts. Here's a fascinating documentary on the current state of research, picking up where things left off in the 60's after the gov't reclassified psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, thanks in no small part to dingbats like Timothy Leary. A New Understanding 60 Minutes recently featured a segment on this research: Psilocybin Sessions The interviews with the terminally ill patients are especially noteworthy, and in the 60 Minutes segment, there's a graphical representation of brain connections pre- and post- psilocybin sessions.

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
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neek
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 2:08 pm 
This is a difficult topic, but... it's never too early to sit down with your computer and talk about drugs. Just say zero. It's that simple.

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Anne Elk
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 2:23 pm 
Neek, you should watch the docs. Neither I nor the researchers involved are advocating wholesale availability of psilocybin, as with pot. I'd do anything to get a close relative into those therapeutic sessions, who is facing a terrible degenerative disease for which medicine can offer nothing. He isn't dispositionally wired for mindfulness practice at this point, and in any event, there's little time. If such could bring him the peace of mind that the patients in the docs have experienced, it would be invaluable.

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
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neek
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 3:14 pm 
Anne Elk wrote:
Neek, you should watch the docs.
Thanks for the links. You might enjoy Michael Pollan's book. I think he includes some of the same brain imagery and connection diagrams. He does plenty of Leary bashing, but concludes that his role in the scene was a bit more nuanced. For example "set and setting" is still a critical concept. Unless you want to delve into contemporary panpsychism, it's hard to deny a materialist view of consciousness, i.e. that mind is matter. We are complex biochemical machines, including consciousness and everything that goes along with that (including "spirituality" I guess). Yet I suspect the complexity of the human mind goes well beyond what the self-serving Silicon Valley geniuses are trying to tell us. Evolution has had a billion years to hone the brain, which as far as we know is the most complex object in the universe. Despite the progress of the past few decades, it's pure hubris to assume we'll figure it out before we destroy ourselves. Anyway I hope we don't, because it's not a matter of whether we recognize machines as conscious--it's whether they recognize us as such. Or, after a short bit of post-singularity self-improvement, whether it'll even matter.

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Anne Elk
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 3:38 pm 
Neek - I do have Pollan's book, I'm about half-way through it. Pollan is interviewed in the 60 Minutes segment, too. It's pretty exhaustive in the history sections, almost too much info to keep me engaged. Just starting the chapters where Pollan documents his own "tour" thru the psychedelics. In re "panpsychism" etc, I've no particular axe to grind with respect to philosophy, phenomenology, religion, science, etc. I'm only grateful to have escaped the confines of my early upbringing. As with everything that humanity has explored/exploited/attempted to understand, each decade reveals increasing levels of complexity and inter-connectivity that we'll probably never fully fathom (like fleas trying to comprehend a dog). We're made of the same star stuff as the farthest galaxies, a part of the universe that's achieved an astounding measure of self-consciousness. Layer over that the infinitesimal probability of any individual's coming into existence. No dogmas required to appreciate the magnitude of that.

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
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coldrain108
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 3:56 pm 
Anne Elk wrote:
that mystical "states", normally the product of a lifetime of meditation practice et al, can be accessed with guided chemical shortcuts.
The story teller makes no choice, his job is to shed light, not to master...

Since I have no expectations of forgiveness, I don't do it in the first place. That loop hole needs to be closed to everyone.
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Cyclopath
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PostTue Nov 12, 2019 11:13 pm 

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Randito
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PostWed Nov 13, 2019 4:06 am 
Anne Elk wrote:
thanks in no small part to dingbats like Timothy Leary.
You are seriously uniformed. The schedule 1 classification was about creating a tool for law enforcement to arrest anti-war protesters. It was later used to accomplish mass incarceration of people considered inconvenient. Leary's work with psychedelics was funded by the CIA as part of the MKUltra mind control experiments. Discrediting Leary was part of a disinformation campaign to maintain secrecy about the MKUltra project. Using psychedelics to repattern thought patterns as promoted by Pollen is interesting, but note that the dosages used are a tiny fraction of those used for recreational purposes during the '60s Also the states of awareness obtained by meditation practices are distinct from those obtained through the use of psychedelics. Though it's a bit of an eBike vs regular bike type distinction.

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Cyclopath
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PostWed Nov 13, 2019 3:08 pm 
The patent and trademark office wants public input about 13 questions to do with art created by AI. https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20961788/us-government-ai-copyright-patent-trademark-office-notice-artificial-intelligence

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Cyclopath
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PostWed Nov 13, 2019 6:30 pm 
neek wrote:
Unless you want to delve into contemporary panpsychism, it's hard to deny a materialist view of consciousness, i.e. that mind is matter. We are complex biochemical machines, including consciousness and everything that goes along with that (including "spirituality" I guess). Yet I suspect the complexity of the human mind goes well beyond what the self-serving Silicon Valley geniuses are trying to tell us. Evolution has had a billion years to hone the brain, which as far as we know is the most complex object in the universe. Despite the progress of the past few decades, it's pure hubris to assume we'll figure it out before we destroy ourselves. Anyway I hope we don't, because it's not a matter of whether we recognize machines as conscious--it's whether they recognize us as such. Or, after a short bit of post-singularity self-improvement, whether it'll even matter.
I think drugs like LSD (which is already being talked about in this thread) and ecstasy are convincing proof of the materialist view. If you can hold a thing in your hand that can so profoundly change your state of consciousness, well, what other conclusion can you draw from that? Five years ago, if you wanted to know what a dog would look like with a cat's head, you had to imagine it. Now, we have software ("deep fakes") that can imagine it for you and spit out a video file. There's a lot more ground to cover, but progress is frighteningly quick.

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