Hi Craig,
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:46 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote: > If the doctor became more ambitious, and decided to replace a species with > a simulation, we have a ready example of what it might be like. Cars have > replaced the functionality of horses in human society. They reproduce in a > different, more centralized way, but otherwise they move around like > horses, carry people and their possessions like horses, they even evolve > into new styles over time. > But cars are an implementation of the very small subset of horseness that humans care about. One single cell of a horse is orders of greatness more complex than a car. Why would you expect such a kludge to evolve structurally? > > Notice, however, that despite our occasional use of a name like Pinto or > Mustang, no horse-like properties have emerged from cars. > A few have, at the social level. For example, cars evolved in social-meme-space as a way to impress the ladies and as a sports activity. > They do not whinny or swat flies. They do not get spooked and send their > drivers careening off of the road. They did not develop DNA. Certainly a > car does not perform as many complex computations as a horse, but neither > does it need to. The function of a horse really doesn't need to be very > complicated. A Google self-driving car is a better horse for almost all > practical purposes than a horse. > > Maybe the doctor can replace all species with a functional equivalent? We > could even do without all of the moving around and just keep the cars in > the factory in which they are built and include a simulation screen on each > windshield that interacts with Google Maps. With a powerful enough > artificial intelligence, why not replace function altogether? > That's the entire point of technology -- but funnily enough most technology fetishists don't realize it. Deep down they know that they actually like the gadget for it's own sake, but they always talk of "productivity". Productivity towards what? A question rarely asked in this philosophy-starved society. We want our experiences to be richer and richer, as god-like as possible. Function has nothing to do with it. Cheers Telmo. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
