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Mind/Body Query

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Tue, 2013-09-03 14:17
Ilmarinen Ilmarinen's picture
Yes, that is a roughly
Yes, that is a roughly accurate description of what exhumans are trying to do. But you insist on stating that cognitive biases and heuristics eat up processing, when they do the exact opposite. [url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/?report=classic]This... is what happens when you take a neural network and take out the parts that are supposed to categorize things as important or not important (cognitive biases). The whole thing ends up as a giant mess that can't problem solve effectively because it has no way of separating relevant facts from irrelevant ones. Exhumans are basically searching for ways around those limitations, but they don't really know what they're doing so the attempts tend to make them exactly as crazy as you'd expect.
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Tue, 2013-09-03 14:32
davethebrave davethebrave's picture
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm aware that currently, the processing power saved by evolution's software is the best we've encountered. But we also haven't started engineering new software yet, whereas in Eclipse Phase people are...and those people are exhumans by and large...and those exhumans are nutjobs by and large...which is a large part of the exhuman's contribution to this setting's theme of horror...so I don't think we're disagreeing here on any one point that I can see.
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Yours, Dave the Brave
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Tue, 2013-09-03 18:57
Ilmarinen Ilmarinen's picture
I think my point is that they
I think my point is that they're most likely nutjobs [i]because[/i] of the radical mind engineering, though the mindset that led them to try experimental psychosurgery in the first place isn't helping.
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Tue, 2013-09-03 19:03
davethebrave davethebrave's picture
Agreed on both counts!
Agreed on both counts!
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Yours, Dave the Brave
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Fri, 2013-09-06 06:00
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Ilmarinen wrote:Smokeskin
Ilmarinen wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
Well, why don't you go first. I'd love to hear how you think qualia arises. In terms of atoms.
Easy. The sensory organs pass along information to the brain and the brain changes in response to it. Then it changes in response to those changes and to new sensory information, until death. In other words, each experience and each thought changes the pattern in which the atoms are arranged.
So you have no idea of the actual mechanism. You couldn't, say, determine if someone else had qualia, what kinds of comatose or brain-damaged patients had qualia, what animals have qualia, if an artificial intelligence had qualia.
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Fri, 2013-09-06 06:30
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Ilmarinen wrote:It doesn't
Ilmarinen wrote:
It doesn't have much to do with the subject because as long as we can all agree that qualia must reside in the brain the exact method through which they're expressed is basically irrelevant.
I agree that qualia resides in the brain, but I don't think that makes the method of their expression irrelevant in all cases. If you made an exact copy of me, that copy would experience qualia like me. But I would still be in my body experiencing my qualia, and the copy would be in its body experiencing its qualia. There are two running instances. You argue that there is no difference between such two instances. If you replaced my son with an exact copy, indeed I wouldn't notice. But by simple observation of my instincts and emotions I seem to care deeply about my own instance continuing to run - the existence of a copy doesn't mitigate my unwillingness to stop my own instance of running. To make another parallel, someone could claim that the loss of 5 billion people doesn't matter, all that matters is that humanity survives. I would consider the loss of 5 billion a massive tragedy. Is there a scientific argument for the first position over mine? Maybe, but as far as I know, we don't have that yet.
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