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retina_sam

4 karma · joined November 21, 2016

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retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
> If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory

That's just lazy. You can't shift the burden of proof on me when OP was the one making the extraordinary claim (sufficiently sophisticated synapse simulations are guaranteed to result in emergent strong AI). If you want to demand proof of my claims, you'll need to post your demands to the comment in which I made the extraordinary claim.

retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
> But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse. Therefore god doesn't exist?

Isn't this type of thinking a form of cargo cult science, though? According to Facebook's AI director [1]:

> The equivalent [of cargo cult science] in AI is to try to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge. That’s cargo cult AI. There are very serious people who get a huge amount of money who basically—and of course I’m sort of simplifying here—are pretty close to believing this.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

At any rate, that's a theory you have there (that simulating neurons results in emergent AI), now you have to prove your theory before I will admit God doesn't exist. I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.

retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
> Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.

Right, so either way, the slip of paper doesn't survive.

I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable. I just thought it would be fun to write it down in the off chance that it is true, so that people can later amuse themselves in hindsight.

If you were a scientist in the 1600s, and you read in the newspaper in the anonymous comments section that someone thought that "Time slows down the faster your travel. Time and space are two orthogonal dimensions of the same invisible fabric.", wouldn't it be funny for you to later find out that the random stranger that gave you that forgettable, idiotically insane theory in the paper actually somehow had astonishing insight?

retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
> sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor.

I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it.

However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law.

If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?

retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
Yes, basically.
retina_sam··on 4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
> If weird assemblages of water, carbon, calcium and trace minerals can be self-aware, why not?

Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can think independently of the body, and that's the true reason we are conscious/self-aware. The body is merely a glove for the spirit. Before birth and after death your spirit still exists and is self-aware (don't take my word for it; try it out - when you die, think to yourself "wow, I'm still conscious without a body!"). Spirits are created by God beings from intelligences (which is a spiritual resource that can be neither created nor destroyed). Gods are created by granting humans more knowledge and powers. The progression is this: intelligence -> spirit -> human (body + spirit) -> God. However, not everyone makes it to God status since Gods choose which humans are to be granted further knowledge and power. And people that have been really bad can be stripped of their body and spirit to have their intelligence recycled back into the immutable pool.

Hence Strong AI is impossible since we aren't/don't know how to mine/utilize intelligences (the immutable spiritual resource) like God does.