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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 1994 15:11:37 GMT
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In article <3ca7em$1f2@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D0JGIE.73v@armory.com> rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz) writes:
>
>>                                 And two, that we entertain as much more
>>possible the effort to derive an entirely artificial awareness from an
>>artificial being which we will create. To assert that an evolutionary
>>accident is superior to talented goal-oriented engineering is ridiculous.
>
>Your true colors emerge.  You are a dualist, clear and simple.  Quite
>clearly, you believe in an immaterial mind -- a ghost in the machine,
>even though you may vehemently deny it.
-----------------------------------
Dualism is a useful fiction to successfully predict and explain some
things. I also use the word "I". That suggests solipsism! Actually though,
I see mental and physical as both contained in a "meta-concept" of being
"fragments" of the Divine, neither material nor mental, and that when we
assemble something which does what we do, we have merely done what this
Divine Nature has done, and this is not surpising, as we are the
unfragmented fragments of the "meta-Big-Bang" in which this Divine both did
and did not rush outward, expanding itself and separating itself, and yet
not doing so at all, and the "meta-Big-Bang" has not occurred, but is
itself another "useful fiction" in which we exist! Mental and Physical are
one and the same. All the Divine Universe is Alive!! As a mere "white man"
you cannot understand this!
-Steve

>Let me see if I can explain.  You apparently claim that humans are
>the result of an evolutionary accident.  But you, and your buddies,
>will use use goal-oriented engineering to create a superior
>artificial being.
--------------------------------
Accidental bears no shame or inferiority, just a very "long" wait. And now
that we are here, we shall create and destroy ourselves a billion-fold over
the forms of the happenstance of evoltion, until someday we shall likely
even lose track of the thought that we were ever "accidental" in origin!!!
I do not speak of creating merely new beings, but new beings that will
accept us as their mentality, a useful fiction! And we shall live without
dying for time out of mind beyond the scope of the current age of all
things! Death will someday be looked on as the way of primitive acccidents
without the knowing how to defeat it. We shall network and back ourselves
up in multiples beyond defeating, as awareness and experience, and as
unbelievably fast and broad perceivers whose thought we cannot now even
fathom at all.
-Steve

>Now, given that you will use goal-oriented engineering, we might ask
>where this goal resides.  Quite clearly, the goal cannot usefully
>reside in you.  For you have vehemently insisted that you have no
>free will and no causal abilities.  In short, you have insisted that
>you have no ability to make the choices required to implement this
>goal-oriented engineering project.
------------------------------------
You have a primitive concept of free will. We are not free now and shall
never be! There is no need for uncaused thought or action in the universe!
All goal can be pursued just as we have so far, because we who do so, do
so! The useful fiction of "self-ownership" is sufficient to entertain goals
and yet for that sufficiency to be entirely determined!! As I said, you do
not even understand your own idea of free will, or you'd cower with shame
at your primitiveness in what you just said! The mentality can be a caused
meta-cause without being other than caused and determined. That is the
thread you lose trying to find your way out of the cave of your slowness to
the light!
-Steve

>It is therefore quite evident that if the project is to be carried
>out, the goal must reside in the ghost in your machine, presumably
>shared by the similar ghosts in the machines of your buddies.  And,
>in order to carry out this task of goal-oriented engineering, you --
>or the ghost in your machine -- must make many engineering choices
>oriented toward achieving that goal.
------------------------------------
Carrying on about your "ghosts" still. Thinking that everything is dead and
that only you are alive! Very lonely and backturned from the Divine
Universe.
-Steve

>Of course you can deny all of this.  Indeed, you probably will deny
>it.  But, if you deny it, you will be forced to concede that the
>artificial being will be every bit as much an evolutionary accident
>as are you.  Either that, or you will have clearly demonstrated your
>own inconsistency.
----------------------------------
Indeed, a meta-accident is still an accident! No problem with that, but
accidental is not a pejorative! It is, remember, the way the Divine comes
to life in the Creation that It is! And meta-accidents, accidentally
planned by accidentally thinking entities which accidentally were
programmed to learn to plan, are still improvements! To no longer be at the
whim of the natural selection of one small planet, and to be the designers
of our own next embodiments with a much faster and more efficient
"accident" generators, will result in more highly advanced and complex
"self-organization", even though it still can be thought of as "accidental"
is still capable of higher and higher meta-levels of complexity, ever
faster and more powerfully.
-Steve

>>We may have some catching up to do at designing beings, but at the rate
>>we're going it won't be long at all till we surpass evolution and undertake
>>the entirety of even our own evolution by complete design, resulting both
>>in artificial beings entirely equal to us and later superior, and to a
>>chance for humans to become beings of nearly infinite longevity, and in
>>vastly improved bodies and brains, even though the same persons as when we
>>began, only changed as tomorrow changes yesterday.
>
>You are suffering from a god complex.
----------------------------------------
Now you've got it! As Fr. Tielhard de Chardin said, "We are destined to
become the God that created us!" Also, a note: Say that to a Hindu! He
will thank you profusely for the compliment!

But actually, to persist in these g/God references and 'ghost in the
machine' you mark yourself as very primtive and superstitious!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

