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

            Hi Ray,

            Thank you for the nice comment, and for the suggested reading by Martin Buber. I look forward to read your very interesting essay. Good luck in the competition!

            Best regards,

            Cristi

            Hello C

            I found your essay interesting but would like to add one extremely important addition to your abstract's final sentence (and something that needs to be expanded into the text). Your final sentence stating that "freedom has to be protected by access to information, education, transparency and critical thinking" is correct, I believe, but freedom will only be maintained if "accountability" is assured and rapidly addressed. Basic human behavior is genetically constrained and has not changed in millennia and most people not held accountable for their behaviors will attempt to get all they want by what ever means they cam.

            Cheers,

            Don Barker

              Hello Mike,

              Sure, sincere criticism is always welcome. I look forward to read your essay and comment on its page.

              Best regards,

              Cristi

              Hello Don,

              "freedom will only be maintained if "accountability" is assured and rapidly addressed. Basic human behavior is genetically constrained and has not changed in millennia and most people not held accountable for their behaviors will attempt to get all they want by what ever means they cam."

              Yes, you are right that the temptation to abuse freedom to break others' freedom exists and should be prevented. Holding people accountable for their behaviors is a tool that is and should be better used to maintain freedom. On the other hand, we already established that people tend to abuse their power, and this applies also to those who are in charge with the law. People are punished for any kinds of reasons, and currently this is used more as a tool against freedom, rather than for freedom. Who will guard the guardians? An open society seems to me a good starting point, and I defended this in the text. Thank you for emphasizing the complementary aspect and giving me the opportunity to detail.

              Best regards,

              Cristi