_NoName_

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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    tomemes@lemmy.worldDeprecated
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    21 days ago

    For those wondering, the AI singularity is a concept in which an AI becomes intelligent enough to improve its own intelligence and does so. The idea is that it continually improves itself over and over until it reaches the highest level of intelligence possible.

    It is a potential Deus Ex Machina scenario - a God from a machine.

    Edit: to be clear, this is not a scientific idea, it’s not really proveable, falsifiable, or even testable in any straightforward fashion. It’s mostly a philosophical thought experiment. A hypothetical.



  • This convo has gone on for centuries at this point. The Brain in the Jar, the teleportation conundrum, Thesius’ ship, it’s all already been covered over and over. people like you still keep crawling out of the woodwork thinking you know better than every philosopher that already waxed over this problem ad nauseum.

    Your ‘continuous self’ is just as worthless as a concept. The idea that your ‘sense of being the same person’ is being held together by being apart of your plumbing just as much of an illusion. It’s worthless.

    To elaborate, you are not the brain. You are the observer, the thing which exists as a byproduct of the brain’s processes, perhaps even a process yourself within. There’s also plenty of times when you will lose time other than sleep, like concussions, getting blackout drunk, panic attacks, and after those times you have no memory of making decisions or acting in your own accord, but you were. You, the observer, were absent while the brain kept working. So where were you?

    You act as though you’re sure you are still the same observer as the one who went to bed. That is completely unsubstantiated. You may have just been born into your body when you awoke today, and will only have until your body falls back asleep again before you cease to exist, replaced by another process that thinks itself is you, another observer.

    And if ‘you’ one day woke up in a digital world, like our own, it’s you’d be none the wiser, because your self is simply a collection of processes and memories. It’s arbitrary. It’s all dust. There’s not some special ‘continuity’ that keeps you alive somehow.











  • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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    tomemes@lemmy.worldDeep thoughts.
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    2 months ago

    I think it’s kind of hilarious some of the insanely close conclusions some ancient philosophers got to being correct.

    For example, Xenophanes observed that there were fossils of fish and shells, and correctly concluded that Greece was at one point underwater. He also had a bunch of insane claims on top of that, but the underwater part was correct.

    His teacher, Anaximander actually said humans came from fish, which is hilariously close to correct despite the incorrect reasoning.

    Empedocles is probably the most interesting. He concluded that humans and animals originated from these disembodied organs, which found each other and would form wholes. The catch was that many weird forms came about, like people with heads in the center of their bodies, and any other creation you can think of from just slapping animal organs together. He asserted that the forms which were unfit for life died out, leaving only the ones which worked to continue living. Empedocles almost describes a concept adjacent to multicellular organisms forming from single-celled symbiotic relationships (obviously Empedocles didn’t know about bacteria or cell theory), and then goes on to pretty accurately describe the mechanisms of natural selection.