On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:28 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Saturday, April 18, 2020, at 2:20 PM, James Bowery wrote: > > Essence precedes existence. -- Avicenna > Existence precedes essence. -- Sarte > Identity precedes existence. -- Rota > Existence Identifies Essence. -- My attempt to express Langan > > What about 'Existence Identifies Existence'? It's all hogwash, all that > exists in space is particles, and we are just talking about them > (apparently (self sarcasm joke)). There's no essence other than particles, > which exist. There is no identity, you can create clones and similar > machines, all that exists is particles and bonds/magnetism between them. > Humans only say feelings exist, in English, I personally wouldn't > understand you if you spoke Chinese. > Philosophical arguments tend to boil down to disagreements over the meanings of words. I do not deny the existence of feelings. Feelings are reinforcement signals. A positive reinforcement signal modifies an agent's behavior to take actions that it predicts will lead to more of the signal in the future. We can certainly write reinforcement learning algorithms without too much difficulty. Our brains are programmed to positively reinforce perceptions, thinking, and actions. In order to keep these signals coming, we have to not die. We name the things we are trying to preserve consciousness and free will. Computers have inputs, storage, processing, and outputs just like human brains do. But we don't normally program them to want to keep running. Your sense of identity is the belief that a copy of you is not you. What needs explaining is how this belief evolved before we have the technology to upload minds. Most likely it means that knowing that if an actor can successfully pretend to be you, it doesn't make you feel any better about dying. Doing this with robot actors will require convincing people that there is a magical process of transferring your consciousness to a computer. Will you wake up in the body of a robot? You will understand the illusion of identity when you understand that the question is meaningless. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T117bc2d94b89dd03-M27583c95ac393b3f657caca4 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
