Cristi,

Thank you for a fascinating essay. You really cover a lot of ground... the importance of freedom, the elusive definition of "I", the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, the ontological status of simulations, the origin of altruism, the fact that the well being of human beings is the ultimate value, the danger of ideology, the importance of education without manipulation, the role of religion, the impact of the Internet, the future of work, the coming of the cybercitizens...

Concerning education, your write that

"For people to be free, they have to be informed, and to understand what's going on, what choices they have, and what are their consequences. [...] But by education I don't mean manipulation. This is why education must include critical thinking."

I wholeheartedly agree with you. In my essay, "To Steer Well We Need to See Clearly: the Need for a Worldwide Futurocentric Education Initiative", I propose that we should work hard to put together a "futurocentric curriculum" aimed at schools but also at lifelong education, in order to raise the level of public interest and knowledge about the topics that are the most relevant to the future of humanity. The risk of disinformation and manipulation is already high enough when we merely try to describe the current status of the world, so any discussion about the future is likely to be even more "ideologically loaded", with all the manipulating attempts that it entails. So, as you say, education must focus on critical thinking... but for most people, critical thinking is what other people should have in order to see that it is their own point of view that is correct! So we have a lot of job to do...

If you have time to read my essay, rate it and comment on it, it would be quite appreciated. I am also interested in finding out the opinion of others concerning which are the most important topics that should be part of a futurocentric curriculum...

Marc

    Dear Marc,

    I am happy you visited my page and read my essay, and I thank you for the comments. I agree with your comments, and I you said so well that "education must focus on critical thinking... but for most people, critical thinking is what other people should have in order to see that it is their own point of view that is correct! So we have a lot of job to do...". You know, just like pseudoscience contains elements of science, one can speak of "pseudo critical thinking", which uses elements of critical thinking as just other tools for manipulation. About a futurocentric curriculum, this seems important to me. I look forward to read more about it in your essay.

    Best regards,

    Cristi

    Christinel,

    You did perhaps understand humanity not as mankind. Otherwise, you missed the topic. At least we might agree on that humanity is not a system that is waiting for a recommendation how to steer.

    Eckard

      Eckard,

      Interesting remark. Now, that you mention, I think that the meanings of the word "humanity' are interdependent, in the sense that I think humanity as mankind needs humanity as a virtue. In my opinion, my essay is concerned with the topic of the contest, which I understand to be the future of mankind, and how to make it better. One can object that I did not focus on political and social solutions applied to the entire mankind. Indeed, I focus on the individual, and empowering him or her with freedom, education and critical thinking. The reason is that I think that no viable solution can ignore the individuals, this would lead to intolerance and dictatorial regimes. So I think my essay is topical. I avoided discussing other things I find interesting, if they did not serve the topic as I understood it. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify this.

      Best regards,

      Cristi

      Dear Cristi

      Thanks for your reply.

      You said: you seem to believe even that this occupy the first half of the essay.

      Not at all, I perfectly understand what you did. But you indeed discuss the topic of simulation.

      You: ..remind me of the philosopher Nick Bostrom". Did you already read some of my ideas in his works?

      In your essay you deal with the topic of a simulated reality and Bostrom also worked this topic. That's all. I'm not saying that you proposed the idea, just that while reading about the simulation reality, that reminds me Bostrom. :)

      You: but not discussing about it, this is a totally different story

      I agree, that's a good justification.

      You: I don't claim that the world is simulated, and I don't claim to have a proof that it can't be simulated.

      I understand this. I'm not saying that you are claiming anything about the simulated reality, do not misunderstand me.

      You: First, it is not clear to me what you mean by "soul".

      In you essay you asked: Where resides the soul of a human? I should be asking "what you mean by soul?", "soul" has different connotations. I'm just asking if you think humans have a soul; that's all.

      You: so I would not replace life, even in the narrow sense of duration which you are using, with health.

      Ok, perhaps it is just a matter of taste :)

      You: how can I be sure this is you, and not the government accessing your FQXi account?

      Who knows!

      BTW, thanks for reading my essay and leaving your comments. I just reply to them.

      Good luck in the contest!

      Regards

      Israel

      Hi Cristi,

      1. Excellent Essay

      2. Also liked your Q&A with Christian Corda, I am closer to Einstein than to Bohr.

      3. Do you think the myth of Procrustes, is evidence that the ancient Greeks had a sense of humor?

      Thanks,

      Don Limuti

        Hi Don,

        Thank you for reading and commenting the essay and also some comments, and for your kind words. I look forward to read your essay.

        > 3. Do you think the myth of Procrustes, is evidence that the ancient Greeks had a sense of humor?

        Ancient Greeks had a sense of humor - they coined the term "comedy". Although it seems that it is considered that they separated tragedy from comedy, I tend to agree with you that the myth of Procrustes has comic elements.

        Best regards,

        Cristi

        5 days later

        Cristi,

        I've saved your essay as I knew it'd influence my final moderation. I wasn't disappointed as again it was wide ranging and original with some interesting views. I did need that odd pinch of salt but as a debater you did a good job of covering the ground and raising the issues. We both tend to challenge conventional views with sound propositions, but in different ways.

        Here the fundamental challenge seemed to be to the topic's assumption that 'steering' is a good thing, or even possible, suggesting individual freedoms are more important. They can be mutually exclusive as you suggest but Is there not a limit? May it not be as dangerous to let everybody wander aimlessly in different directions when we may need to work together to advance understanding. I'm thinking of the planets ecology, where lack of understanding of nature and the common will to make the necessary sacrifices may consign us to extinction?

        I agree that a utopia or "The idea that humanity should drive its way toward a perfect society" can be dangerous, but suggest that's not the only 'aim setting' there is. What I'm 100% behind is Buckminster Fuller's thesis that we should learn better how to think critically and spend more time doing so. But there must be an aim for the better thinking, and what better aims are long term survival and improvement?

        You rightly identify; "by education I don't mean manipulation" which I agree is important. Almost all education is manipulation in terms of indoctrination. In fact it seems there are no facts beyond the less than '1,000th of 1%' (AE) we understand, so we should be teaching how to better use our brains to test and challenge, and to find more coherent answers to complex puzzles. I subtly weave in challenges to conventional Earth bound thinking to my own essay. I liked your trip away from Earth and indeed I take Bob even further from his loved one and test entanglement in multiple ways.

        Very well done for a well written and argued essay. I confess my own inclination is to find ways ahead to advantage mankind without the sacrifices, to improve our understanding of the I, but that's not to distract from the quality of your entry. We seem again perhaps destined to finish closely. I have a firm policy of commenting before marking and not 'marking down' close neighbours (few essays are nonsense!) and I wonder if you agree?

        I suggest my own essay is unique and ground breaking in self evidently deriving the predictions of QM classically with a mechanism which also allows SR to be interpreted in a compatible manner, unifying physics with vast implications. Perhaps the 1,000th of 1% may even be doubled! Science seems a little short of the right kind of thinking to allow the paradigm challenges needed so perhaps we should implement your proposals first to allow the greater vision required. I greatly look forward to and value your comments and opinion.

        Very best wishes and best of luck over the coming bumpy week.

        Peter

          Hi Peter,

          Thank you for reading the essay and for the nice comments.

          You ask very rightfully:

          "May it not be as dangerous to let everybody wander aimlessly in different directions when we may need to work together to advance understanding. I'm thinking of the planets ecology, where lack of understanding of nature and the common will to make the necessary sacrifices may consign us to extinction?"

          I agree that people can use their freedom to do bad things. On the one hand, I think that when they do this, they affect others' freedom in a negative way, so I don't think such a behavior would actually be in conformity with guaranteeing freedom for everyone. But here is a blurred line, since when people have to share the same resources, anything can be viewed as a violation of freedom for others. On the other hand, I also think that education (without manipulation) and critical thinking are important in defining freedom, so perhaps these may help people see better where are the limits you mention. What better antidote to the "lack of understanding of nature and the common will to make the necessary sacrifices" which you mention is, than education?

          Thank you for the comments, and for the brief summary of your essay, which I look forward to reading! Good luck with the contest!

          Best regards,

          Cristi

          • [deleted]

          • Post #80

          Dear Cristi,

          Thanks for submitting your thoughtful and wide-ranging essay.

          There seems to be a strong consensus in many essays that advanced computer systems will have a major impact. Having been involved with software all my life (including AI), I agree, though the claims in my essay for what they can do were a bit more muted ( Three Crucial Technologies - your critical comments and score are welcome!).

          Your axiom, "The most important things in life are life, consciousness, and happiness" is a great first step, especially when you later added our fundamental need of freedom.

          But isn't it more important to love and be loved? After all, it is the source of true joy (as opposed to the fleeting emotion of happiness). Also, Viktor Frankl showed that having a meaningful life is more important to survival than mere happiness.

          You wrote that the definition of humanity doesn't matter, as long as we always let humans be what they want. But what if some people want to be intolerant, ignorant, and domineering? What if they, like Ghengis Khan, think that it is good to drive your enemies before your, crush them into the dust, and hear the wailing of their women and children? Bad definitions of humanity and bad definitions of freedom will result--and has resulted--in the death of millions of innocent people.

          You seemed to define freedom as "anything people want to do." Do we have the freedom to sell ourselves into slavery, become addicted to drugs, porn, gambling, or greed? Physically, I suppose it's possible to do those things (we do them every day), but those things certainly do not make us free.

          You idea of writing a detailed description of God as a specification for a AI program was ...um... unique. If God was really God, could we really understand Him well enough to specify him? At any rate, it would be rather difficult to implement omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence even if we really knew what they were. AI is not magic.

          Have you seen the Arnold movie "The Sixth Day", about cloning and copying memories. There is a great scene in it that exposes the weakness of your claim that "observable difference" is all that matters. It would certainly matter to the person being copied or uploaded.

          You kept saying that God punishes those who do not worship Him. It doesn't work that way. If God really is God, and He really created us because he loves us, then doesn't it make sense that any adequate anthropology will conclude that worshiping our loving creator is natural and good for us? In this light, not worshiping God is like playing in traffic. There are always bad consequences for self-destructive behavior.

          Finally, if God really is God, then would He not also be Truth? It would be necessary for Him to be Truth in order to create such a fine-tuned universe. And wouldn't He also be Love? Otherwise why would He bother creating the universe in the first place? Now that would be God worth worshiping. And it would require us to amend your axiom to the four most important things to be Existence, Truth, and Love (and consciousnesses, because Love and awareness of Truth are impossible without it)?

          Sincerely,

          Tee

            Hi Tee,

            Thanks for your comments, but I think you misunderstood my words.

            You said: "You kept saying that God punishes those who do not worship Him."

            I don't understand why you claim I "kept saying" this. What I said is that there are people who claim this.

            > But isn't it more important to love and be loved?

            It would have been easy for me to say "love is the most important", many people say they love mankind, but when it comes to love a person, the things become more difficult. When we think others should be and think in a certain way, and if they are not, we tend to judge them, then how can we love them? Isn't then easy to say that we love them, but they deserve to be punished? We say we love them, but we would not do the tiniest effort to understand them, and we prefer to distort what they say to justify our hate. So I think that the best way to love people is to let them be free, and try figure out why they are different or have different opinions without judging them. Especially for someone who believes in God, let's let God do the judgement.

            > You idea of writing a detailed description of God as a specification for a AI program was ...um... unique. If God was really God, could we really understand Him well enough to specify him?

            Again, I did not discuss about simulating the "true" God, whatever this means. I discussed simulating God as imagined by people in their religions. Implementing God in a simulation, isn't this what religions descriptions of God do? It is true that theirs is not a computer simulation, but it is a model of the world and God, a "graven image". But since this is already a "graven image" in their minds, why this couldn't be implemented in a computer simulation? Software engineers often encounter clients who give informal specifications, but at the end, the software is done. Similarly, some religious people give a description of a God who has this or that attribute. Think at a computer game, and one player has all the powers. Of course it all comes about definition of "omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence". But this is the same in religion too, people debate for millennia what does it mean that God is omnipotent and the other attributes, and you know that these omni-* attributes come with contradictions, so there is no consensus. By the way, the omnipotence paradox is very similar to the problem of freedom you raised, that if you let people be free, they may become Genghis Khan. But doesn't this mean that they may break the freedom of others? So, do you really believe that freedom is the cause of violating the freedom, and hence is not desirable in the first place?

            I will stop here, because it seems to me that your comments are based on misunderstandings of my words, and adding words would just add more opportunities for misunderstanding :)

            Cristi

            Dear Torsten,

            Thank you for reading and commenting my essay. I also liked your essay. I wish you all the best!

            Cristi

            Hi Cristinel,

            I wanted to thank you for a thoughtful, thorough examination of what it means to have a sense of self in a universe like ours. I appreciated the consideration you put into your evaluation of education (what it ought, and ought not to be), and I'm in agreement as per its importance. I am, though, given to wonder whether education (even if separated from manipulation) will provide sufficient tools for humanity to escape the cognitive paradigm emergent throughout our species' evolutionary history, at the very least to the degree necessary to evade our species' demise (whether at our own hands, or if not, by failing to prevent existential threats from flowering).

            Again, I just wanted to thank you for the thought you put into your work, and tell you how stimulating it was. I wish you well in the competition, and look forward to hearing more from you soon.

            Best regards.

              Dear Cristi Stoica

              You write a nice essay. It can be used also as a reference. But, I disagree with one detail.

              "There is nothing in science that could prevent us to build automata that do what we do. If these automata don't feel what we feel, at least they can do what we do when we feel what we feel. Maybe someday one can replicate a person, so that observers chatting with it don't distinguish the copy from the original. But you are inside yourself, so you know better than what an outside observer knows. You know that you are. Can science explain this?"

              Probably you want to say that we cannot distinguish a philosophical zombie from conscious person. I wrote about this in old essay, but something also in this essay. I try to distinguish this distinction with quantum consciousness. It is well to broke this problem into fundamental units and I hope that I succeeded.

              You also write: "So how can we help humanity, when we don't know what humanity is?" Thus you are answering on my question in my essay, why humanity need theory of everything. I claim that consciousness belong to theory of everything, where belongs also quantum gravity theory.

              In old and new essay I try to prove that consciousness is more important than matter. I think that you claim the same.

              If you will read my essay, you will see that I have a lot of similar ideas and views as you. For instance, I wrote that almost everyone, can work something useful.

              You mentioned also to live in virtual reality. Here it is an interesting question for me, what is the minimum of real matter needed for someone who live in virtal reality. This is connection of quantum gravity physics, information and consciousness ...

              Best regards

              Janko Kokosar

                Dear Janko Kokosar,

                Thank you for the comments. You said "Probably you want to say that we cannot distinguish a philosophical zombie from conscious person." Well, I mean that one can't distinguish them, by objective means, or from the outside. However, one can't deny the subjective side of the problem, which tells us that we are more than philosophical zombies. Perhaps quantum mechanics can shed a light on this, because it suffers, in a way, from the same feature: one can only hope that there is some reality underlying the measurable outcomes.

                You said "Here it is an interesting question for me, what is the minimum of real matter needed for someone who live in virtal reality. This is connection of quantum gravity physics, information and consciousness ...". Well, that's a good question, with the implications you mentioned, and whose answer I don't think I can even roughly approximate.

                I didn't get a chance yet to read your essay, but I look forward to read it soon enough. Good luck at the contest.

                Best regards,

                Cristi

                Hi Alex,

                Thanks for the comments, and for such a great question: " whether education (even if separated from manipulation) will provide sufficient tools for humanity to escape the cognitive paradigm emergent throughout our species' evolutionary history, at the very least to the degree necessary to evade our species' demise". If our evolutionary history is responsible for this cognitive paradigm, then it did a great job. I don't want to say at all that this paradigm is good enough, but it is really something, much more than what we would have without evolution. So if we arrived here, even if this place is not perfect, I think it is justified to hope for even more. Especially since I consider education (including using our own minds) to be a bit better than evolution, which is blind.

                Thank you for the comment, and good luck with the contest!

                Best regards,

                Cristi

                Christi,

                I shoehorned my reasoning into an interpretation of Nobel's attitude. As far as I know, he always considered the society, not individuals. You are of course correct in that the society consists of individuals whose feelings are important. Total steering each individual would be horrible.

                Is humanity in the sense of unrestricte freedom a sufficient virtue? I would like to question this unless we are ready to balance human rights by adding tabooed human obligations to the notion of humanity. Isn't this a truly basic question?

                I see restricting loyalty to a nation, loyalty to some we and even to my I, not always completely tolerable from the perspective of mankind.

                Best regards,

                Eckard

                Eckard,

                That's an excellent observation. Society is made of individuals, but is not just a sum of individuals. It is like interference, sometimes constructive, sometimes instructive. In my essay, I emphasized the freedoms of individual, but I think this affects society in a constructive way. There are so many social tensions, which take us so much resources, which have their origins in the incapacity of people to accept others as they are. Tolerance would not necessarily lead to isolation of the individual, but to a better cooperation. People are social beings, but their egotistic side is so pregnant also because of the fact that society comes with norms that may differ from the personal aspirations of each of us, and puts a pressure. In addition, society cultivates egotism and makes appeal to it as justification for cooperation. For instance, you mentioned very well "restricting loyalty to a nation, loyalty to some we and even to my I". I think that these social constructs start with the sense of urgency each one of us have when it comes about us as individuals, or as families, etc. Society builds on top of this instinct (which is by nature about the individual) larger egos, which are social classes, clans, favorite soccer team, nationality, religion... It is just a way to enlarge the ego. So, your remark "I see restricting loyalty to a nation, loyalty to some we and even to my I, not always completely tolerable from the perspective of mankind", suggests a rather opposed perspective, which is that we have a natural sense of universality, which is cut down and reduced by the local society around us. And I agree with you. I believe that the individual, provided that is free, would choose universality, loyalty to mankind, rather than loyalty to small local circles. It is the peer pressure which makes us to adhere to small circles, and be loyal to them. Friends who tell us that we have to support the local soccer team, parents who tell us that we have to adopt the religion of our kind, even that there is such a thing called "our kind" etc. And if you say that it is better to be loyal to mankind, rather than to small circles of interest, I fully agree with that. I see individual freedom exactly as the liberation of the narrow local circles, as an understanding of the fact that we are inhabitants of a larger sphere (so far this is the Earth).

                Best regards,

                Cristi

                Hi Cristinel,

                Thanks for the lovely essay. I found that it resonated with my essay on computationally intelligent personal dialogic agents. I'd appreciate a rating, if you can do that, since I am a bit short on ratings.

                If you haven't, I suggest you read "I and Thou" by Martin Buber. Thinking about your essay in light of Buber's work raises some interesting perspectives.

                Ray