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>none of those layers involve magic This is a bold claim. How do you know? The brain could be magical. I think everyone on this forum who is not a Christian
by logicallee 9y ago
>none of those layers involve magic
This is a bold claim. How do you know? The brain could be magical.
I think everyone on this forum who is not a Christian can agreee that the Christian God is in some sense "magical". Further, Genesis 1:27 says "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
While this falls short of saying that, like God, humans are magical, to date we have no proof they are not.
In that case the brain might be, for example, a magic antenna to another plane.
See my comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230
The choices are that the brain is magical or that strong AI that can do anything a human brain can do (make judgments, parse text and images, underdtand culture, communicate intelligently with humans), is in some sense inevitable.
You cannot simply discount the possibility of magic. You must let people who are committed to denying the future have their out.
If I were speaking with Lord Kelvin I would allow him the possibility that birds are magical and not subject to the laws of physics, whereas any machine humanity might ever build is - so that it is certainly possible that in 100,000 years, no one will build a heavier-than-air flying machine.
The essence of flight might be magical. So, too, the essence of thinking.
- vinceguidry 9y agoUltimately that boils down to a semantic distinction, and not one advancing the state of knowledge. Calling some phenomenon magical or mysterious just means you don't want to study it, not that it can't be studied.
- logicallee 9y agoI don't believe in the existence of magic so at a practical level I have to agree with you.
- shawnz 9y ago> the Christian God is in some sense "magical" ... In that case the brain might be, for example, a magic antenna to another plane. If those things were shown to really exist, then they would be part of what we understand to be our reality. So they wouldn't be magical, it's just that our understanding of what makes up reality could be incomplete.
- logicallee 9y agowell I meant it to be far-fetched. If we had no access to the other plane, there's not much we could do to understand the brain calculation happening there. whereas if it's not an antenna then it's just 3 lbs of meat.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoOK, but they would be non-physical. And that would mean that a materialist understanding of humans would be incomplete. It might also mean that we cannot ever build a human-equivalent AI.
- SuperGent 9y agoClarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- logicallee 9y agoFor posterity I would like to mention that my reference to a magical God is made ironically: the brain is driven by simple laws of physics and not attached to any ethereal plane! There is no magic involved.