Re: [singularity] Re: Intuitive limits of applied CogPsy

[Josh Treadwell]

Great book.  Diaspora and Permutation City were my favorite Egan books.  Anyhow, Bruce, I have to slightly disagree.  What is intentionality, other than a constantly changing multiple-input "meme cloud" that is affecting your decisions at any moment?  Human embryos all start out as non-intentional (although autonomous) clusterings of cells, and slowly grow into a system that acts based on certain environmental cues.  Eventually, we expand from those meager cellular dispositions and develop sets of systems that reinterpret output of other whole systems in real-time.  We are products of a purely autonomous logic system in a universal medium.  You could make the argument that "current machine technology isn't compatible with the requirements for human-like intentionality", but if we erupt from a basic self-organizing system, self-organizing software could be used to expand an idea.  The agent for the basic self-organization wouldn't matter.  Perhaps there is something innately quantum about our form of consciousness, but the propagation of ideas and systems doesn't require a personal perspective.  Emotions, epiphanies, and that "hint of symmetry" we use to derive truth are simply chemical releases based on interpreted information.  Worst case scenario: given some seriously futuristic hardware, a big enough memory buffer and a conceptual list of patterns (buried in a constantly compiling hierarchy, with each hierarchal level's product summarized into numerous variable scales for input elsewhere) a computer could emulate, adapt to, understand and make use of the trends of our "intentionality" and learn it's use.  What good is human intentionality if a machine could learn everything it was ever useful or not useful for? Nathan Barna wrote: Bruce, Thank you for clarifying further. If you ever have the opportunity, Ithink you'd be deeply interested particularly in the second chapter,"Truth Mining," in the science-fiction novel /Diaspora/ by Greg Egan.Since your ideas seem similarly attracted, perhaps you've already readit. Indeed, it's highly sympathetic to our concern with knowledgedynamics. An excerpt: "If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right—making and testingvis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemannand Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca—then Yatima knewthere were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Minesfirsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, aroute no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the oldresults. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of theMines—idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotatedlike no one else's—could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein ofundiscovered truths lay buried." -----This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/emailTo unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- This message has been scanned for viruses anddangerous content by MailScanner, and isbelieved to be clean. -- Josh Treadwell      Systems Administrator         [EMAIL PROTECTED]         direct:480.206.3776 C.R.I.S. Camera Services 250 North 54th Street Chandler, AZ 85226 USA p 480.940.1103 / f 480.940.1329 http://www.criscam.com This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.