7 ms·
I always think what the perspectives of a being that could live for millions of years and had the computing power and memory and sensors of all of Earths machi
by maxxxxx 7y ago
I always think what the perspectives of a being that could live for millions of years and had the computing power and memory and sensors of all of Earths machines would be. I don’t think we could even comprehend the thoughts of this being.
- SantalBlush 7y agoI suspect that being would get insufferably bored.
- vageli 7y agoYou are thinking too small.
- maxxxxx 7y agoNot more or less than you within the constraints you live in.
- arethuza 7y ago"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too." Although, based on the novels I suspect the jump from a bee to human level intelligence is probably rather small compared to that from a human to a Mind.
- sp332 7y agoSo... it would get insufferably bored, then.
- bitwize 7y agoIt would probably think up a way to strap boosters onto itself and cruise the galaxy. Beats hanging around here.
- andai 7y agoIn the past week I've taken a better look at the work of John C. Lilly, who actually writes on the subject: the earth becoming encased in machine intelligence, which eventually exits the solar system, in search of its own kind. He's not as far as I know a fiction author, but merely recorded his floating tank visions.
- andai 7y agoHow do I attach rockets to my brain?
- maxxxxx 7y agoIn the book 2001 they don’t need rockets anymore but travel directly through space. Rockets are primitive ....
- Dylan16807 7y agoWhat are you asking, exactly? If you mean "you never said I had hands, gotcha", then yes you need to get hands first. If you're talking about the physical task, I don't understand how that could be a problem. If you can move your body into a rocket, do that. If you can't, put a big dome over top, down to bedrock, and attach the rockets to the bedrock.
- andai 7y agoI should have been more precise, because even I don't understand what I meant anymore, & now can't even delete it.
- vchak1 7y agoIt may well be that we are subject to evolution, but the being is not -- in which case the situation would be really interesting.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAs humans, we've left the regime of biological evolution a couple thousand years ago, ever since we've learned to talk and write. Our entire development now happens a couple orders of magnitude faster.
- andai 7y agoWe haven't left genetic evolution, but we've started memetic evolution in parallel.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIf you zoom out, the market - or even further, our civilization - is such a being. Only couple thousand years old, and essentially developed its nervous systems only in the last few decades, but already its thoughts are incomprehensible.
- maxxxxx 7y agoVery true. That’s why I also think that you could easily classify an anthill as a single living being.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYup. And the truth is, we might need to get comfortable with both. An ant is a living being, but it is also a self-propelled organelle of the anthill. Humans are living and thinking beings, but with near-lightspeed communication deployed worldwide, the whole humanity together becomes a superorganism that could be seen as thinking its own thoughts.
- maxxxxx 7y ago"the whole humanity together becomes a superorganism that could be seen as thinking its own thoughts." And at this scale it's already impossible to comprehend the motives of this organism.