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If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real. To me it's the understanding of why it isn't real that mak

If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real. To me it's the understanding of why it isn't real that makes it not real. If you don't understand why the things you are brutalizing aren't real then you might as well be brutalizing small animals and I think it should be verboten until you are able to understand the consequences (or lack thereof) of your actions. We are happy to brutalize animals for food or exterminate them as pests, but it's illegal to do it for pleasure (with many details and caveats). Going back to my long dormant religious education this is because how you treat powerless animals reflects the standards for how you will treat powerless humans. Society has a vested interest in keeping boundaries intact. I would not hesitate to engage in all kinds of experimental and trolling behavior in Westworld confident in the knowledge that this is not how I would treat living creatures. I'm a gamer so exploring virtual worlds and systems in unconventional ways is just part of the fun. Putting those systems into meatspace sans meat doesn't change that. So if we could explain consciousness would that mean brutalizing humans would be ok? I ask this as person with no religious beliefs (agnostic). I don't get at all how the organic matter in my skull results in what I (and I assume others) perceive as consciousness. I would say no, but not as a question of morals or ethics just as a matter of practicality. I don't want to pick a fight with the world. Even if I could explain why I feel what I feel I am still programmed for self interest and to avoid pain and I see no reason to fight that programming.

moosey 10y ago
> If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real. I watched, with my family, the Algorithms documentary available on Netfix. While not perfect (but very, very good), it certainly did a great job of explaining in simple terms some algorithms and how they relate to the world. One of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, was the admittance during the section where they were discussing the XBox Kinect. It was all done through some machine learning algorithms, and impressively, they confessed to not being completely certain how the code actually worked. You could argue that this means that they cant explain the mechanism behind the manifestation. Now, of course, this is a massively simplified version against the near-future Westworld narrative. However, it does call into question whether we would understand the mechanism of something so advanced. Also, applied to humans, if we end up understanding the mechanisms behind the brain, then does that make us less real? They point out in episode three I think that one of the 'Hosts' are experiencing physical discomfort while going through diagnosis. If such a thing were coded, and it was made possible to respond to it (I would argue that the best possibility for making this possible would be a learning algo, similar to the Kinect analogy), then how would that be different from the very physical and chemical responses that a human has to experiencing suffering? It's hard for me to make a decision in either direction. It is a complicated and nuanced problem. It reminds me of the short story "They're Made Out of Meat" [1], and could just be the result of human-centric (or in this case, biologically-centric) thinking. 1: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
- solatic 10y ago
  There's an axiom of software engineering that any sufficiently large system (or, I suppose, algorithm) is incomprehensible by a single person. That's to say, a single person may be a high-level architect and understand how the high-level modules work together, but he won't understand how the inner workings of those modules work, especially if there are multiple layers to those modules, both bureaucratically and technically. And somebody who busies themselves understanding and working on the lowest levels, won't have the time to work on the higher architecture, nor would it interest him, as long as boundaries are well established and respected. It's not that far of a stretch at all to claim that strong AI would be similar. At some point, everything worked on by today's AI researchers becomes some refined lower-level module, and tomorrow's researchers will use them as building blocks for the architecture for strong AI. Those lower-level modules will have coefficients derived from massive training sets, and tomorrow's researchers will simply understand that those coefficients work, without any real understanding of how those coefficients were derived. And that's OK.

moosey 10y ago

> If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real. I watched, with my family, the Algorithms documentary available on Netfix. While not perfect (but very, very good), it certainly did a great job of explaining in simple terms some algorithms and how they relate to the world. One of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, was the admittance during the section where they were discussing the XBox Kinect. It was all done through some machine learning algorithms, and impressively, they confessed to not being completely certain how the code actually worked. You could argue that this means that they cant explain the mechanism behind the manifestation. Now, of course, this is a massively simplified version against the near-future Westworld narrative. However, it does call into question whether we would understand the mechanism of something so advanced. Also, applied to humans, if we end up understanding the mechanisms behind the brain, then does that make us less real? They point out in episode three I think that one of the 'Hosts' are experiencing physical discomfort while going through diagnosis. If such a thing were coded, and it was made possible to respond to it (I would argue that the best possibility for making this possible would be a learning algo, similar to the Kinect analogy), then how would that be different from the very physical and chemical responses that a human has to experiencing suffering? It's hard for me to make a decision in either direction. It is a complicated and nuanced problem. It reminds me of the short story "They're Made Out of Meat" [1], and could just be the result of human-centric (or in this case, biologically-centric) thinking. 1: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

solatic 10y ago
There's an axiom of software engineering that any sufficiently large system (or, I suppose, algorithm) is incomprehensible by a single person. That's to say, a single person may be a high-level architect and understand how the high-level modules work together, but he won't understand how the inner workings of those modules work, especially if there are multiple layers to those modules, both bureaucratically and technically. And somebody who busies themselves understanding and working on the lowest levels, won't have the time to work on the higher architecture, nor would it interest him, as long as boundaries are well established and respected. It's not that far of a stretch at all to claim that strong AI would be similar. At some point, everything worked on by today's AI researchers becomes some refined lower-level module, and tomorrow's researchers will use them as building blocks for the architecture for strong AI. Those lower-level modules will have coefficients derived from massive training sets, and tomorrow's researchers will simply understand that those coefficients work, without any real understanding of how those coefficients were derived. And that's OK.