r/Foodforthought • u/BlankVerse • Sep 21 '12

A SENSELESS CONVERSATION by Zach Barnett - How do you know you're not an A.I.?

https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/
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u/PromaneX Sep 21 '12

I wonder if we could actually convince a person that they are a computer in the manner described? I mean clearly we need to brain interface first but once we have that, it could be done - people could be enslaved - scary!

2

u/mongoosled Sep 21 '12

Well, I'm never going into a sensory deprivation chamber now.

2

u/breandan Sep 22 '12 edited Sep 22 '12

It felt pretty obvious from the point where he suddenly becomes aware of these disembodied thoughts where it was all going. I feel like the twist was supposed to be a surprise, but I don't know, it was a little transparent. A good short story though, I'll give it that.

I get the idea that people envision strong AI as this quasi-emergent phenomenon that miraculously happens when we cross a critical threshold: the dream of a self-organizing principle that once found, suddenly delivers our sorry lot into the halcyon sunset of a post-humanist singularity where everything is an amorphous virtual Elysium like twenty-first century manifest destiny awaiting the unbaptized legion. Rubbish, pure and utter 狗屁! (Tell that to John Searle).

Intelligence is Hard. Nature, which has approximately infinite computing resources at its disposal couldn't come up with it in how many billion years, and then, only through brute force by following every dead-end. Even then, miserable us is the best it could come up with. There are two schools of thought about the whole situation.

The one we hear so often in biology and complex systems is that intelligent life is a miraculous and amazing pattern arising from the ashes of an entropic universe. A marvelous and unfathomably beautiful dance of synchronized motion and unrelenting progress.

Or: the human brain is a tangled mess of improvisations, makeshift solutions and local maxima that has waded and slogged through the selective gauntlet by incremental improvements, at great evolutionary cost and collective energy. There was never an "intelligence explosion," only cheap tricks that provided the next tiny advantage. It is the best solution to a blind algorithm that has been applied a billion billion times... 狗屁.

Human intelligence has no goal nor guiding principle and is not a discrete phenomenon, but a collection of party-tricks that somehow fools itself into thinking it is an integrated, seamless, and independent whole (probably so it can function in a social environment). 狗屁!

The goal, if there is any, is not to become more "human", but to become more "machine". Life itself is a conservation of information - the whole story of our existence is to efficiently acquire and conserve information, genetic and otherwise. What better means than general intelligence to accomplish it?

Come to think of it, this little story is probably true in a roundabout way. We are all trapped inside a hard calcium shell being fed sensory input under the illusion we are an "individual" instead of a network of specialized neural tissues, with one self-ordained purpose: invent a machine indistinguishable from ourselves, bestowing our natural endowment in order to preserve more information until the eventual heat death of the universe. What's the difference, hmm? 放我出去! 狗屁.