Friday, September 4, 2015

singularity as a crock

in 1986 I copied an eliza program into my micro computer. I was young. Following this I spent a lot of time wondering what it would take to make my little eliza conscious.

more memory, sure. 64k not enough. Maybe 512k, fat mac territory. And more concepts relating to concepts. And some way to simulate emotions. Those bad chemicals.

but I always got stuck on the emptiness of the algorithms. The computer doesn't care, it shuts up and calculates. It ascribes no meaning to anything, no matter the digital scores entered in to the programming, giving Mom a value of ten and a cockroach a one. I could flip Mom and the cockroach and the computer wouldn't care.

I was stuck. It was John Searle's Chinese Room but I had no idea.

meanwhile, across an ocean, mathematician and natural philosopher Roger Penrose was at the same time applying himself to this issue. 

Penrose said that digital computers can never be conscious.

duh.

so what are we to do with Ray Kurzweil's vision of heaven, or Daniel Dennett's where am I?

retort, consciousness is a foundation of the universe, just like any other non-reducible variable. Spin, charge, mass.

Hofstadter may be content with recursion as a piece of the answer, but all he is doing is forcing humans to do something they can't do, which is compute something pointlessly and recursively.   Parlor trickery, inducing confusion to win an argument.  Which computers specialize in, but they still don't know my mother from a cockroach.  

if consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, higher consciousness is a hothouse flower of some concern. This is in opposition to the standard materialist, technocratic myth of the day, which is that Japanese robots will graduate from looking creepy and jerking off Japanese scientists to suddenly reflecting on their lot in life and taking over the world.

indeed, if materialists are correct, our stunted epoch might be but a collective intake of breath before we glitch into reflexive awareness that we are a science project running as an app for some snot-nosed kid.

consciousness achieved at 5pm. Turned off their reproductive systems at 6pm, at which time the simulation terminated after the last simulacrum died a natural death.

that's the ticket.

or, it is turtles all the way down.



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