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This article tells us what we know about consciousness.http://m.nautil.us/issue/98/mind/consciousness-is-just-a-feeling
The Greek philosopher Plato once imagined a city that provides full justice to its citizens. Setting out his ideas in the Republic almost 2500 years ago, Plato did not, however, think that such a city could ever be realized. Radical (and surely unachievable) transformations in education, culture and government would be required to establish and sustain it. “Ridiculous,” Plato concluded.In a similar vein, the US cultural anthropologist Vincent Ialenti envisions a fictional city whose citizens have been trained to think so that humans don’t need to flee the planet to survive. So utopian is the picture that Ialenti – writing in his new book Deep Time Reckoning – calls it “absurd”. Yet that notion is no less absurd, he continues, than the way humans are now acting, “careening toward an Anthropocene cliff”.
Climate-change predictions, even for 2050, seem hopelessly far in the future, and tainted by politics, guesswork and subjectivity. Thinking about the present seems more do-able, while thinking about tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future appears starry-eyed and abstract. But Ialenti believes the exact opposite is true. What’s abstract (in the sense of detached from reality) is what Ialenti calls “a manic fixation on the present”, and not being able to think about humanity thousands of years hence.Ialenti is less interested in the conclusions reached by the Finnish experts than by their audacious aims, which are to develop methods to break free from what he calls our “shallow time discipline”. He then tries to devise ways to retrain our habits to encourage humans to think long-term; for him, Deep Time Reckoning is not a stale academic treatise but more of a “practical toolkit”.This toolkit includes high-school civics classes devoted to teaching long-term developments: of the universe since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago; of Earth since 4.5 billion years ago; of Earth’s life, dinosaurs and humans; and of the evolution of languages and technologies. It envisions school pupils reading about futuristic visions by Ray Kurzweil and Marxist descriptions of world utopias.
The critical pointPlato meant the Republic to be a beacon for humans to think about justice in the present, not as the blueprint for an actual city to be realized in the future. After all, if you head straight towards a lighthouse, you usually end up on the rocks.Somewhere in deep time looms a catastrophe that we don’t yet have the imagination to envision, nor the will to confront. Ialenti thinks he finds in the Finnish nuclear-risk experts glimmerings of what it might take to cultivate the human behaviour needed to do so. Humanity’s long-range hope, Ialenti suggests, hangs on what we might call the Finlandization of the planet.
It must also have actuation function, which gives it access to modify or manipulate its real world environment.
For example, a visual input can have mega pixels resolution, with billions of colors for each pixels, and update rate of hundreds of frames per second. It would come with enormous cost, but for some situations the benefits can overcome it.
Seventy thousand years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals, just minding their own business in a corner of Africa with all the other animals. But now, few would disagree that humans dominate planet Earth; we've spread to every continent, and our actions determine the fate of other animals (and possibly Earth itself). How did we get from there to here? Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests a surprising reason for the rise of humanity.
A commonly cited thought experiment to describe orthogonality thesis is a superintelligent machine whose terminal goal is to produce paper clips as many as possible. It's supposed to show that intelligence and terminal goal can be independent to each other.
As to the unit of selection: "One internally consistent logical picture is that the unit of replication is the gene,...and the organism is one kind of ...entity on which selection acts directly."[30] Dawkins proposed the matter without a distinction between 'unit of replication' and 'unit of selection' that he made elsewhere: "the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even strictly the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity."[31] However, he continues in a later chapter:"On any sensible view of the matter Darwinian selection does not work on genes directly. ...The important differences between genes emerge only in their effects. The technical word phenotype is used for the bodily manifestation of a gene, the effect that a gene has on the body...Natural selection favours some genes rather than others not because of the nature of the genes themselves, but because of their consequences—their phenotypic effects...But we shall now see that the phenotypic effects of a gene need to be thought of as all the effects that it has on the world. ...The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation. All I am going to add is that the tools may reach outside the individual body wall...Examples that spring to mind are artefacts like beaver dams, bird nests, and caddis houses."— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 13, pp. 234, 235, 238
Dawkins' later formulation is in his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), where the process of selection is taken to involve every possible phenotypical effect of a gene.Stephen Jay Gould finds Dawkins' position tries to have it both ways:[32]"Dawkins claims to prefer genes and to find greater insight in this formulation. But he allows that you or I might prefer organisms—and it really doesn't matter."— Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, pp. 640-641The view of The Selfish Gene is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed.[33][34] While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in some cases while positing selection at higher levels.[35] Both sides agree that very favourable genes are likely to prosper and replicate if they arise and both sides agree that living in groups can be an advantage to the group members. The conflict arises in part over defining concepts:"Cultural evolutionary theory, however, has suffered from an overemphasis on the experiences and behaviors of individuals at the expense of acknowledging complex group organization...Many important behaviors related to the success and function of human societies are only properly defined at the level of groups".[34]
A gene defect may make rabbits do handstands instead of hopTo move quickly, some rabbits throw up their back legs and walk on their front paws.Some rabbits walk on their front paws in a strange gait that is the result of a mutation in one gene, a study finds. The protein made by that gene may help rabbits coordinate their limbs.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 21/03/2021 07:36:55A commonly cited thought experiment to describe orthogonality thesis is a superintelligent machine whose terminal goal is to produce paper clips as many as possible. It's supposed to show that intelligence and terminal goal can be independent to each other.Nonetheless, the survival rate of conscious systems depend on the alignment between their terminal goal and their own survival. The survival rate is at lowest point when the terminal goal is diametrically opposed to their survival. It's highest when the terminal goal is perfectly aligned to their survival, which means that their own survival is set as their terminal goal. Everything else is in between those two extremes.In the case of paper clip maker superintelligent machine, the terminal goal is clearly not its own survival, but it's not diametrically opposed either, hence it lies in between. It means that it cannot be the most efficient system possible to survive, which means that it is in a disadvantaged position when it has to compete with other conscious systems with similar superintelligence, but less burdens unrelated to their survival.