They aren’t showing up in comments on the older posts though (see above links). Perhaps the folks looking at the code now can explain why.
ScottMessick
Karma: 254
Yes, or here. Wow, this is bizarre.
Yes, same symptoms. With the letters and the blockquotes.
EDIT: Also, it’s not consistent for me even on this page. I can see the ‘c’ (letter after ‘b’) in “blockquotes” in your post that I replied to, and in a few other comments, including mine, but not in the original post.
Disclaimer: my formal background here consists only of an undergraduate intro to neuroscience course taken to fulfill a distribution requirement.
I’m wondering if this is actually a serious problem. Assuming we are trying to perform a very low-level emulation (say, electro-chemical interactions in and amongst neurons, or lower), I’d guess that one of two things would happen.
0) The emulation isn’t good enough, meaning every interaction between neurons has a small but significant error in it. The errors would compound very, very quickly, and the emulated mind’s thought process would be easily distinguishable from a human’s within minutes if not seconds. In the long term, if the emulation is even stable at all, its behavior would fall very much into the trough of the mental uncanny valley, or else be completely inhuman. (I don’t know if anyone has talked about a mental uncanny valley before, but it seems like it would probably exist.)
1) The emulation is good enough, so the local emulation errors are suppressed by negative feedback instead of accumulating. In this case, the emulation would be effectively totally indistinguishable from the original brain-implemented mind, from both the outside and the inside.
My reason for rejecting borderline cases as unlikely is basically that I think an “uncanny valley” effect would occur whenever local errors accumulate into larger and larger discrepancies, and that for a sufficiently high fidelity emulation, errors would be suppressed by negative feedback. (I know this isn’t a very concrete argument, by my intuition strongly suggests that the brain already relies on negative feedback to keep thought processes relatively stable.) The true borderline cases would be ones in which the errors accumulate so slowly that it would take a long time before a behavior discrepancy is noticeable, but once it is noticeable, that would be the end of it, in that no one could take seriously the idea that the emulation is the same person (at least, in the sense of personal identity we’re currently used to). But even this might not be possible, if the negative feedback effect is strong.
I would love to hear from someone who knows better.
While beautifully written; it does sound all an idealist’s dream. Or at least you have said very little to suggest otherwise.
More downvotes would send you to negative karma if there is such a place, and that’s a harsh punishment for someone so eloquent. In sparing you a downvote, I encourage you to figure out what went wrong with this post and learn from it.
I downvoted the OP. A major turn-off for me was the amount of rhetorical flourish. While well-written posts should include some embellishment for clarity and engagement, when there’s this much of it, the alarm bells go off...what is this person trying to convince me of by means other than reasoned argument?
See also: the dark arts.
Robin Hanson had an old idea about this which I liked: http://hanson.gmu.edu/equatalk.html
It’s not going to be a silver bullet, but I think it would work well in contexts where the group of people who are in the conversation and how long it should last are well defined. Situations where an ad hoc committee is expected to meet and produce a solution to a problem, but there is no clear leader, for example. (Or there is a clear leader, but lacking expertise herself, she chooses to make use of this mechanism.)
It’d be nice to see a study on whether “EquaTalk” can produce the high “c” value observed in this study. (Disclosure: I didn’t read or even skim the linked paper.)
Fascinating question. I share your curiosity, and I’m not at all convinced by any attempted explanations so far. Further, I note that the trend makes a prediction: an economic crunch will be followed by a swell of corresponding magnitude. So who wants to go invest in the US stock market now?
But I think those are examples of neurons operating normally, not abnormally. Even in the case of mind-influencing drugs, mostly the drugs just affect the brain on its own terms by altering various neurotransmitter levels. On the other hand, a low-level emulation glitch could distort the very rules by which information is processed in the brain.