Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, April 11, 2009

That One's for Robin


A line from the last post was a valentine to Robin, who knows much more about this stuff than I do, and who may not have had the patience to wade through the whole tedious thing to get to the tootsie-roll center of the tootsie-pop:

Intelligence isn't math, it's a squishy sloppy-wet mess, like a kiss.

14 comments:

Robin said...

You just made my heart grow 3 times bigger.

jimf said...

> You just made my heart grow 3 times bigger.

Call me the Grinch. My heart is two sizes too
small. (Just ask Michael Anissimov.)

Giulio Prisco said...

I have no doubt that Robin deserves many valentines and kisses, but your analogy is just (pseudo-)poetically framed nonsense. Go study some biology, leave your mystic vitalism aside for a moment, and try to understand that kisses and other squishy sloppy-wet messes are physical phenomena that can be, if needed, analyzed with some math.

That does not mean that I make conscious mathematical calculations when I kiss somebody. I just enjoy it like everyone else. But I don't worship squishy sloppy-wet messes just like I don't worship anything else.

Dale Carrico said...

Go study some biology

...and then like everybody else who studies biology I'll become a Robot Cultist like you who expects a post-biological superintelligent Robot God to arrive any time now, and if Friendly solve all our problems for us, or if unfriendly End Everything, and pine for techno-immortalization via either superlongevity medicine aborning in the super-secret Robot Cult labs in the asteroid belt or through "uploading" whereby your squishy enbrained mined "migrates" with loss into eternal cyberspace, and expect swarms of self-replicating programmable multipurpose room-temperature nanobot slaves to make you rich and powerful beyond the dreams of avarice. Everybody knows that people who actually study biology believe all that stuff like the Robot Cultists do. It's only muzzy-brained pseudo-poetic humanities types who aren't smart and knowledgeable and go-gettery enough to get with the sooper-sciency Robot Cult program.

Robin said...

But I don't worship squishy sloppy-wet messes just like I don't worship anything else.

Did I miss where you accused him of worshipping squishy sloppy-wet messes?! Because I thought this was a family blog. (No, I didn't).

I feel like this is a scene from one of those "Reading Is Fundamental" commercials from the 80s.

Dale Carrico said...

I think he is accusing me of worshipping them, because I grant their salience rather than handwaving all that aside with a self-loathing shudder along the inevitable road to Robo-Heaven.

Giulio Prisco said...

Re "I think he is accusing me of worshipping them, because I grant their salience rather than handwaving all that aside with a self-loathing shudder along the inevitable road to Robo-Heaven."

I also grant their salience, especially when a headache, a spell of bad mood, bad digestion or an attack of diarrhea prevent me from doing what I want. Same for age and death.

But I see these things as annoying problems to be solved, not as Sublime Manifestations of the Sacred Squishiness, Finitude and Vulnerability of the Holy Body.

Whereas whenever you discuss this you sound like a priest of the Church of the Holy Squishy Body. I could copypaste your own words, and I know that.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, yes, diarrhea. Death is a "problem" to be "solved," and those who would attribute finitude to the human condition are just quitters and Death-worshippers. The go-getters will bulldoze their way to godhead and they won't have icky bodies or have ooky contingencies to deal with ever again. I've heard your whole dog and pony show a million times by now. Honestly, what's the point? You're too stupid to talk to, Giulio. Go talk to people who don't find you stupid. There are plenty of pampered boys with toys who are eager to buy what you're selling in your Robot Cult.

Giulio Prisco said...

Yes, when one is in a corner, insulting others is easier than trying to find something intelligent to say in support of a hopelessly stupid position. Not that I expected anything else of course.

Dale Carrico said...

Indeed, you shouldn't expect anything else. You're a ridiculous person who says ridiculous things and what you get from me is ridicule and nothing more. But let's be very clear about this, Giulio. This isn't about "insulting others" in which you get to indulge the cheap sentiment of becoming in your own inner-theatre some sanctimonious representative of intelligent conversation. This is about insulting you. You who are a relentlessly idiotic robot cultist too crazy and too stupid and too demonstrably incapable of reading my work on its own terms for me to pretend to give you the benefit of the doubt or devote the energy or generosity of a hearing. There are limits, Giulio, and you've reached them, you've passed them, the limits are a dot to you. Saying anything intelligent to you is intelligence utterly wasted. Making fun of you, however, reading you for filth, is, when the mood strikes me, when I've got the time, still good for a laugh and perfectly appropriate. There are few more utterly damning facts in all the world than that the superlative futurologists I critique and deride actually have promoted you to such a high profile position within their organizations. A perfect clown for the clown college of Robot Cultism. Gosh, you're right! Insulting you was easy! And a pleasure.

Giulio Prisco said...

The pleasure is mine Dale, and rest assured that I share your feelings. I also think you are an idiot and a clown, and enjoy making fun of you every now and then.

But I wish you were honest, and not lying as usual, when you pretend that this is only about insulting me.

Should I start copying and pasting some of the unnecessary insults that you use instead of serious arguments against _everyone_ who dares disagreeing with you? It would take hours, and perhaps days.

Dale Carrico said...

Yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap.

jimf said...

Dale wrote:

> [Giulio Prisco wrote:]
>
> > I don't worship squishy sloppy-wet messes. . .
>
> [H]e is accusing me of worshipping them, because
> I grant their salience rather than handwaving all
> that aside with a self-loathing shudder. . .
>
> [Giulio Prisco wrote:]
>
> > I also grant their salience. . .
> >
> > But I see these things as annoying problems to be solved,
> > not as Sublime Manifestations of the Sacred Squishiness. . .
>
> The go-getters will bulldoze their way to godhead and they won't
> have icky bodies or have ooky contingencies to deal with ever again. . .

Unless, of course, the "ooky contingencies" turn out to be
the sine qua non of "intelligence".

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review--into-the-heart-of-the-human-brain-bright-air-brilliant-fire-on-the-matter-of-the-mind--gerald-edelman-viking-20-pounds-1551202.html

BOOK REVIEW / Into the heart of the human brain:
'Bright Air, Brilliant fire: On The Matter of the Mind'
by Gerald Edelman:
DANAH ZOHAR
Sunday, 13 September 1992

. . .

Like others who write on mind in the age of artificial intelligence,
Edelman wants to distance himself from notions that the brain is a
computer. Minds are conscious, computers aren't. Minds have experience,
computers don't. But, also, consciousness in the brain is associated
with evolving structures that in no way resemble the point-to-point
wiring systems in computers.

For Edelman, like William James, the human brain is more a dynamic
process than a thing. His theory of 'neural Darwinism' suggests the
brain is constantly laying down new neural pathways in response to
the environment and to its own internal experience. It is a marvellously
flexible organ whose ever-changing structure first originates in
response to cellular movement within the developing embryo and continues
throughout life. No two brains have the same experience, no two brains
are alike. No brain is like itself from moment to moment. The genetic
code is more a set of constraints than a blueprint.

Edelman's own theory of consciousness is 'based remorselessly on physics
and biology'. He suggests the key to basic problems of mind can be found
in the brain's complexity and by fundamental new organising principles
that originate at the level of complex biological systems. The brain
has many, many levels of structure and organisation, each of which
has evolved in different ways, at different times, in response to
different needs. Each level is linked by a system of interactive loops.
The whole construction 'is more like a jungle than a computer'.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/books/the-brain-it-s-a-jungle-in-there.html

"The Brain? It's A Jungle in There"
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Saturday, March 27, 2004

. . .

There is no overseer in the brain setting rules and making connections.
There are also no '"spooky'" forces, as Dr. Edelman puts it. Neither is
the brain a machine or a computer. For Dr. Edelman, there are only the
"unlabeled world" and the "embodied brain," a confrontation of unstructured
immensities. . .

[Edelman] believes that what organizes the brain is precisely what led
to the organization of the eye -- or the evolution of species. It is als
the process he found at work in immunology: he showed that the body produces
the precise antibody required not by manufacturing it according to a specific
set of rules, but by making available an incredible diversity of material
from which the appropriate antibody is selected. . .

The brain will always have more going on than seems necessary, more randomness
and variation than any humanly designed system. There is enormous redundancy
(which Dr. Edelman refers to as "degeneracy") in the brain's functioning,
giving it remarkable resilience and evolutionary possibilities. No brain
event happens the same way twice. Even memory is always a variant, he
says -- a re-creation, never a repetition. . .

The brain is not a logically structured organ; these processes of connection
resemble the processes of metaphor more than those of logic. . .

[I]f [Edelman's theory of "neural Darwinism"] succeeds, it will show
that out of accident and diversity, something as miraculous as human
consciousness can be born. But this vision can also spur discomfort,
because it implies that there is no supervising soul or self -- nobody
is standing behind the curtain. This, for Dr. Edelman, is Darwin's
final burden.


And I posted on the Extropians' mailing list, in more innocent days:

Edelman has emphasized the intimate dependence of the
selectionist shaping of the brain on the richly-varied
repertoires made possible by its morphology and biochemistry, and
has warned that these cannot be easily brushed aside by those
looking to build artificial brain-like devices. The economies of
mapping of function to form achieved by evolution taking
advantage of the fine-grained variation available to biological
systems may have to be sacrificed when simulating such a
selectionist system on a computational substrate with a simpler
and more regular structure, but the feasibility of this project
will, once again, depend on the empirical determination of the
computational penalty for doing so, and on the economics of the
available hardware. In CaTAI, Yudkowsky writes: "The
nanotechnology described in _Nanosystems_, which is basically the
nanotechnological equivalent of a vacuum tube - acoustic
computing, diamondoid rod logics (4) - describes a one-kilogram
computer, running on 100 kW of power, which performs 10^21
ops/sec using 10^12 CPUs running at 10^9 ops/sec. The human
brain is composed of approximately 100 billion neurons and 100
trillion synapses, firing 200 times per second, for approximately
10^17 ops/sec total". If hardware such as this becomes
available, it might be economically feasible to throw away a
factor of 10,000 in computational capacity just to simulate the
morphological granularity of the brain on a simpler substrate --
what might be called the selectional penalty.

In the meanwhile, and depending on the relative rate of
advancement of biotechnology compared to that of other fields,
it's conceivable that the first conscious artifacts may, in fact,
be based on biological tissue, perhaps genetically engineered to
suit the purpose. Having proto-neurons that can both
self-replicate and follow gradients of Cell Adhesion Molecules
and Substrate Adhesion Molecules to wire themselves together, as
a living nervous system does during embryogenesis, solves the
sort of manufacturing difficulties alluded to by Gordon Moore in
the June 19, 2000 special issue of _Time_ magazine entitled "The
Future of Technology": "I'm a bit of a skeptic on molecular
chips. Maybe I'm getting old. It's hard for me to see how those
billions of transistors can be interconnected at that level"
(p. 99). Squishy, biologically-based AIs seem to be getting more
common in contemporary science fiction, as, for example, with the
bacterial AI "Roddy" in Greg Bear's _Slant_ (Tor Books, 1997, see
p. 476), or with the current televison series _Star Trek:
Voyager_'s reference to "bio-neural gel packs" in a couple of
episodes (see _The Star Trek Encylopedia_ [expanded edition], by
Denise and Michael Okuda, Simon & Schuster, 1999, p. 45). People
may be more squeamish about using squishy AI -- imagine a smart
car with a synthetic brain in a tank perfused by nutrients and
oxygen. Imagine leaving that car parked at the mall on a hot
summer day and coming back to find that the the power went off
(due to a faulty fuel cell, perhaps), leading to the failure of
the squishy AI's artificial heart/lung/dialysis machine and its
air-conditioner. He's dead, Jim. Smells like it, too. What
would you tell the kids? People on this list do not fantasize
about being "uploaded" into giant squishy, gurgling, pulsating
biological brains; diamondoid processors are a much more
appealing idea. We want to ditch these squishy bodies, not be
transferred into even ickier ones.

Dale Carrico said...

Unless, of course, the "ooky contingencies" turn out to be the sine qua non of "intelligence".

Quite so. The jury's out. And the Robot Cultists are out of their minds.