Thanks Jason. The ant or the fish or the ape will retain whatever as long as it produces survival, now, no longer just a biochemical thing. I once thought of creating a comic where a room temp QC chip could be attached to a sponge in a fishbowl. Developing consciousness, the chipped sponge decided he could do better than hanging about the lab. Thus, Mr. Sponge along with bowl absconds with a humanoid type, robot body, and a professors' English Fog trench coat to seek his fortune in the city. Falling on hard times, Mr Sponge engages in a life crime to sustain his interests, which is chiefly, the stock market, doing muggings of elderly women from alleyways. At this point I ceased my comic efforts because, I could either make Spongy a gang boss, or get him onward as commander of a Hedge Fund? Beh! My point is that with as physicist Greg Benford wrote of decades ago, you Uplift something dumb into something smart and resourceful, you end of with the nearly same result. A conscious colony of algae, forming a very bright intelligence on Seti-Alpha 6 would eventually get to maths, metals, maybe morals (if we humans ever do?), and gaze starward. Different starting place, same eventual result. The physics of the cosmos I will leave to you. Right now the only thing humans can achieve currently is the nascent simulation entertainment industry. Yeah, astronomers are doing good withs with computational astronomy. GIGO as far as I am concerned. If the observations are accurate (and why not?) then their sims are wonderful. Benford also wrote a book 2 years ago called Re-write, in which he was one of a few humans who were reborn into the same cosmos-worldline after they died, retained memory of their pasts, and sought to make a more justice oriented worldline. It's applied MWI, and was a nice story in the Heinlein sense of things. Heinlein is one of the characters that carries knowledge past each world.
I yak about MWI, but I'd rather have working solar power across the planet for survival's sake. -----Original Message----- From: Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> To: spudboy...@aol.com Cc: everything-list@googlegroups.com <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Thu, May 5, 2022 2:46 pm Subject: Re: Is Artificial Life Conscious? On Tue, May 3, 2022 at 6:50 PM <spudboy...@aol.com> wrote: Beyond my intellectual pay scale Jason. So far, nobody has developed a Turing passable machine that knocks us down with it's effectiveness to pass as a human "soul." I would be happy to let humans be human and instead, & amp up our technological capabilities via machine intelligence. It becomes a practical question then, how much can we augment human capabilities while retaining our humanity. If you gave an ant human-level intelligence, how much would remain of its ant-ness? Thus, making wonderful medicines, and anti-pollution systems, and keep the conversations from human to human. For neurobiology I suppose I know what I read. :-( Beyond this, for me it's akin to postulating whether there is a multiverse and if it is initiated by Everett's MW, or Linde (and company) Eternal Inflation? I would say both are initiated by the same source: platonic equations. Eternal inflation is the result of certain satisfactions of GR/QM equations, while Everett's MW is a manifestation of observerhood within an infinite ensemble of indistinguishable situations (which again, I think share a common source in platonic objects, which exist necessarily as denying them leads to contradiction). So the other shoe needs to be dropped: Do we get a choice in this? If we do, can we travel back and forth for trade missions to either clone earths, or entirely different inhabited worlds unrelated to being copies and variations? I don't think that QM will allow this, but simulation will allow us to explore other worlds, and also we might enable trade and interaction between such simulated worlds, when they are not entirely closed off. If we are conscious do we get a choice with this over that? imitating, via complex computer processes that imitate or emulate what spindle cells do might make machinery conscious, maybe? Should this, will this get a budget? The EU has given over a billion euros to the human brain project, which has the stated goal of simulating the human brain. Jason -----Original Message----- From: Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> To: Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Mon, May 2, 2022 7:18 pm Subject: Re: Is Artificial Life Conscious? On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 3:39 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: I had read that spindle cells delineate consciousness, according to neurobiologists. Anyone see anything different? Spindle neurons are very large cells, with their fibers stretching long enough to connect distant brain regions. I would think then, an equally valid explanation of spindle neurons is they are a necessary adaptation in any creature with a sufficiently large brain. Since we tend to associate consciousness with complex behaviors, and complex behaviors are often associated with animals that have large brains, I think may account for the correlation between the presumed consciousness of other species and presence of spindle neurons in those species' brains. At least, I think this is a reasonable alternative explanation. Jason -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUjNiiPu%2B-Zi%2BvbYJt7nmL874jFiAiF5WKvdtViSYY0CXg%40mail.gmail.com. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/69676962.247557.1651874965599%40mail.yahoo.com.
