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Hofstadter is a usually great. But he takes distasteful shots at AI researchers who disagree with him, here. He embraces protecting animals and other semi-con

Hofstadter is a usually great. But he takes distasteful shots at AI researchers who disagree with him, here. He embraces protecting animals and other semi-conscious beings, but doesn't extend that sympathy to AIs, or other potentially conscious beings. That's a bioelitist stance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism#Contrasting_stance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism#Contrastin... He even celebrates slow developments in computing, as a good thing.

LPTS 18y ago
His critique of Kurzweil as exceptionally afraid of dying and that distorting his scientific validity is spot on. Kurzweil is rigid in exactly the same way as a religious person who believes his body literally will live forever. He just identifies his experiential body as information processes instead of flesh, and has a mythic-technical, instead of mythic-poetic, or mythic-conventional, approach to the details of his eternal life. He's a priest, not a scientist, at least when he speaks about singularity. He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be. This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.
- coffeeaddicted 18y ago
  On the other hand the dead but immortal No.1 LSD Dealer and life long consciousness pioneer Timothy Leary did switch to teachings similar to those of Kurzweil for example in is book "CHAOS & Cyber Culture" written in '94. So maybe you need to get past acid to understand that Kurzweil is a lot closer to the source of consciousness than any drug will ever get you.
  - mojuba 18y ago
    LSD solves everyone's individual problems but it's definitely not the carrier of some ultimate truth. LSD can bring some buddhism into someone's life and it can free from buddhism some other person.
    - LPTS 18y ago
      Yeah. I remember way back in the day being on psychedelic mushrooms once, walking through the woods, and talking to Buddha, who had appeared in a rock wall in a tunnel I walked past. Then I was like "I just saw Buddha, I should say hi and talk to him." I turned back said "hi" and he was like "Dont be a Buddhist, figure it out for yourself." So I know exactly what you mean.
  - bkovitz 18y ago
    "Cryonics is the second-stupidest thing I ever heard of. Being eaten by worms is the first-stupidest." --Timothy Leary. He gave up cryonics before he died, though, and was cremated.
  - LPTS 18y ago
    Leary was a clown. A holy fool (maybe). But a clown none the less. He did lasting damage to our ability to unlock the potential in psychedelics with his antics, and his more extravagant ideas cloud what we can actually learn from psychedelics. Fuck Tim Leary.
- rms 18y ago
  >People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness. You had me until that line.
queensnake 18y ago
Yeah - here's a talk from 2007 where he slams Kurzweil (a bit unfairly imo). http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914 Particularly, where he says that there is no 'knee' of an exponential curve - well duh, where the slope hits 1. I get the impression that he's a bit lost to life since his wife died.
- hugh 18y ago
  I was in the audience for that talk, it was brilliant. Hofstader gave the second talk (first was Kurzweil) at the Singularity Summit, and completely yet classily trashed Kurzweil's talk, including his apparent failure to understand basic mathematics (of course there's no "knee" in an exponential curve, you can just rescale the axes to put the "knee" somewhere else). Bad, bad haircut though.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - queensnake 18y ago
    Well, so, just choose units that are meaningful to you, and stick with the knee that falls out of that.

LPTS 18y ago

His critique of Kurzweil as exceptionally afraid of dying and that distorting his scientific validity is spot on. Kurzweil is rigid in exactly the same way as a religious person who believes his body literally will live forever. He just identifies his experiential body as information processes instead of flesh, and has a mythic-technical, instead of mythic-poetic, or mythic-conventional, approach to the details of his eternal life. He's a priest, not a scientist, at least when he speaks about singularity. He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be. This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.

coffeeaddicted 18y ago
On the other hand the dead but immortal No.1 LSD Dealer and life long consciousness pioneer Timothy Leary did switch to teachings similar to those of Kurzweil for example in is book "CHAOS & Cyber Culture" written in '94. So maybe you need to get past acid to understand that Kurzweil is a lot closer to the source of consciousness than any drug will ever get you.
- mojuba 18y ago
  LSD solves everyone's individual problems but it's definitely not the carrier of some ultimate truth. LSD can bring some buddhism into someone's life and it can free from buddhism some other person.
  - LPTS 18y ago
    Yeah. I remember way back in the day being on psychedelic mushrooms once, walking through the woods, and talking to Buddha, who had appeared in a rock wall in a tunnel I walked past. Then I was like "I just saw Buddha, I should say hi and talk to him." I turned back said "hi" and he was like "Dont be a Buddhist, figure it out for yourself." So I know exactly what you mean.
- bkovitz 18y ago
  "Cryonics is the second-stupidest thing I ever heard of. Being eaten by worms is the first-stupidest." --Timothy Leary. He gave up cryonics before he died, though, and was cremated.
- LPTS 18y ago
  Leary was a clown. A holy fool (maybe). But a clown none the less. He did lasting damage to our ability to unlock the potential in psychedelics with his antics, and his more extravagant ideas cloud what we can actually learn from psychedelics. Fuck Tim Leary.
rms 18y ago
>People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness. You had me until that line.

queensnake 18y ago

Yeah - here's a talk from 2007 where he slams Kurzweil (a bit unfairly imo). http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914 Particularly, where he says that there is no 'knee' of an exponential curve - well duh, where the slope hits 1. I get the impression that he's a bit lost to life since his wife died.

hugh 18y ago
I was in the audience for that talk, it was brilliant. Hofstader gave the second talk (first was Kurzweil) at the Singularity Summit, and completely yet classily trashed Kurzweil's talk, including his apparent failure to understand basic mathematics (of course there's no "knee" in an exponential curve, you can just rescale the axes to put the "knee" somewhere else). Bad, bad haircut though.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- queensnake 18y ago
  Well, so, just choose units that are meaningful to you, and stick with the knee that falls out of that.