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Says who? It's still a sentience and there are people who are genuinely concerned about the rights of artificial beings. It's just less than the concerns about using physical beings because it's harder to get people to care about a being that can't bee seen or touched.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:18
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JamieTheD posted:We've deforested a fair bit (A lot of it on our way up to the current level of tech), I want to comment on this a bit, not to cause offense but because I want to say things are becoming better. While we did cut down major parts of forests in Europe on our way to where we are now, we are currently actively reforesting. Two main reasons I can immediately think of are, in no particular order: 1) Wood-based industry have become pretty strictly monitored and there are several different competing voluntary "Sustainable logging" or "Forest husbandry" certification programmes that major industrial customers demand from them. 2) Actively legislating for reforestation by Governments. Those two, and the fact we dont' build ships & cities mainly out of wood anymore, the European forest mass has already surpassed what it was in the beginning of 1900's Courtesy of Washington Post: 
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Feb 6, 2015 15:26
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GIFs that are coming from the Amazon basin seem to be pretty much reversed. (If I'm not mistaken.)Kurieg posted:Says who? It's still a sentience and there are people who are genuinely concerned about the rights of artificial beings. It's just less than the concerns about using physical beings because it's harder to get people to care about a being that can't bee seen or touched. I just want to make a reminder that 20 years ago some people predicted that there would be genuine artificial consciousness 10 years ago. And we really couldn't tell whether that was overoptimistic. Theoretically we could have created AI 10 years ago and there wouldn't have been any legislation whatsoever. For a while you would be able to do really sick things to thinking beings without any repercussions whatsoever... I mean, yeah, when it happened people would have been concerned, but that would have been a bit late. Oh, also, before 10 years ago people would probably have been laughed out of Congress (or the legislative body of your preference) for suggesting laws pertaining to AI.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:23
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If your issue is that we don't have legislature protecting the rights of truly sapient AI then I think you're looking a bit too far ahead of yourself. We don't even have animal-level-intelligence AIs yet. As the technology develops and we approach that threshold we'll probably start seeing these issues being raised, and laws will probably start to make their way through the legislature. But a development on the scale of a truly intelligent program isn't something that a company could keep hidden, and it's probably not something that will just happen overnight.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:51
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That's all correct. My point is (if I still have any  ), we are actively working to create AI, there are no laws or safeguards, and we don't know how far we are in our progress. But improving the intelligence of animals is off the table? (Although I don't know if that's only in scifi.)
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Feb 6, 2015 18:08
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There are laws in place that require getting permission from national regulatory commissions before beginning work on a new GMO.
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Feb 6, 2015 18:22
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omeg posted:Did they forget that stars move relative to each other? I guess the probe may not last long enough for that to matter, but on the other hand interstellar space is so incredibly empty it shouldn't be in much danger. The 'stars' are actually pulsars (I had it wrong in my earlier post.) The numbers on the line are the periods at which each pulsar pulses, the length of the line shows the distance of the pulsar to the sun. There's also a line showing the distance of the sun to the galactic center. Now, pulsars slow down over time, so the idea is that Sufficiently Advanced aliens would be able to look at the relative difference between the pulsars, find out where they are, and also find out how long it's been since the plaque was made. quote:Sound records seem like a pretty weird thing to send. What are the odds that whoever finds them even perceives sound? Life that evolves on Earth-like planet probably has a good chance because sound is a nice communication medium there. But what about (hypothetical) life forms that can live in vacuum? Or hell, machine intelligence? We're so anthropocentric even in those attempts at interspecies communication. Agreed. Even with all the tricks to make these things understandable for any intelligent species, it's all very anthropocentric. I don't really know what to do about that, though. We can't think in any other way. Even in science fiction about beings that seem to have nothing in common with humans, you'll find recognizable (human!) emotional themes, because it wouldn't be comprehensible any other way. Kurieg posted:The morality of uplifting is a common sci-fi trope, and it usually falls on the side of it being ethically wrong. Even if you're doing it with the absolute best of intentions you're still imposing your will on another creature, and probably your own morals and culture. I recommend to those interested in this topic, that they read the short novel Three Worlds Collide. It's about humans meeting two species of aliens: the first is You can read the full novel here, or download it in pdf format from the same page.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:09
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Something I thought was interesting. In Douglas Adams' Salmon of Doubt there's an extract about defining life itself. For something like hand-writing recognition, you have to distinguish a doodle into category "letter A" or category "letter B." There's a right or wrong answer; if the intention was to write "Apple" the correct answer for the first doodle is "A" and there is no discussion about it. How about distinguishing things into "alive" or "not alive"? Well, humans go into alive, rocks into not alive. What about algae? Fungi? Coral? Now, DNA being a big fan of Dawkins, even though these days he's busy falling into the "not alive" category, would say we have difficulty with distinction because there is no definite answer. There is no creator, so life is a continuum from rock, over Coral and Douglas Adams himself, to 4chan posters and finally dogs, cats and people. I'd argue there's a clear parallel for intelligent life. What is intelligence, what are persons? Heck, even what is human? There is no clear boundary because there is no creator, there is no intention. Now, how does this relate to the game? Well, here there clearly IS a creator or group of creators! Shouldn't that make it possible to define artificial life or intelligence? Artificial life/intelligence is what the creator intended it to be. Unless, of course, the creator is trying to just mimic the natural world, like making furniture out of the scrap you get in a box from Ikea. Sometimes, you get a perfectly workable broken chair, and sometimes you get saw-dust and 7 left-over Allen keys. But sometimes you get some unworkable bean bag chair thing out of what was supposed to be a cushion: neither furniture nor not-furniture. So, we're trying to impose a discrete characterization on what is really a continuum, and we're trying to create what we don't fully understand. klafbang fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 21:23
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klafbang posted:Now, how does this relate to the game? Well, here there clearly IS a creator or group of creators! Shouldn't that make it possible to define artificial life or intelligence? Artificial life/intelligence is what the creator intended it to be. But does the AI necessarily have to reflect the creator's vision? As history has shown, creating something that perfectly reflects the vision of the creator is drat near impossible. Furthermore, the creator can only define a systemic thought process with the capacity to learn, probably with with some set of guiding rules or suggestions, but in the end that system can perform vastly differently than was intended. Just like making a simulation that behaves in a totally different way than expected. klafbang posted:So, we're trying to impose a discrete characterization on what is really a continuum, and we're trying to create what we don't fully understand. Problem is, we can extrapolate that concept to literally anything and drive ourselves insane. Humans require arbitrary limits and boundaries in order to effectively categorize and describe the world. We cannot imagine living without that capacity. Oh, and on the nature of defining life, idk if this was mentioned already but people recently discovered a new type of bacteria that no organic metabolism and instead breaths rocks by breaking them down with an electric current. Basically we don't have the slightest loving idea how to define life anymore. ViggyNash fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 04:21
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Okay, I know this is a scifi ego-stroking station, but I've recently watched a video by a... well, a biology enthusiast... this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N29Itq8gs3Q, and it was pretty convincing (don't mind the intimidating glare) about the fact that everything that's alive comes in cells. I'd also add that it would probably contain at least RNA. Anyway, where were we? Ah. Life is an elusive, undefinable property...
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Feb 7, 2015 06:56
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Carbon dioxide posted:You can read the full novel here, or download it in pdf format from the same page. Ahh yes, the story in which the author suggests that rape really isn't that big a deal, if you just redraw your personal boundaries a bit.
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Feb 7, 2015 07:17
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Nevermind.
paragon1 fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 07:20
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supermikhail posted:Okay, I know this is a scifi ego-stroking station, but I've recently watched a video by a... well, a biology enthusiast... this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N29Itq8gs3Q, and it was pretty convincing (don't mind the intimidating glare) about the fact that everything that's alive comes in cells. I'd also add that it would probably contain at least RNA. Viruses are not cells. They may or may not be alive, depending on your definition. One thing that all life (seem to) have in common, is that it can self-propagate, and use some form of energy from its surroundings to create some kind of structure (which is what self-propagates). This makes all cellular life fit in: a cell is a structure, built from matter and energy of its surroundings, and it divides to self-propagate. Viruses do a similar thing. So do prions (the 'misfolded' proteins that cause mad cow disease, among other things). Most non-religious theories on the origin of life say that at one point a small organic molecule formed that was like the prions. It worked as a catalyst on the formation of more copies of itself. Sometimes, this little thing would make a mistake, and a copy would change a bit. At that moment natural selection came into play, if the new copy was a better catalyst than the former, it would overtake the former. That way, it started working better and better, at some point apparently using other molecules as co-catalysts, in a more and more complex interplay... until at some point it (probably) formed the precursor to RNA (which is interesting, as in modern life it works as both an encoding mechanism and a catalyst/enzyme. It can do the two most important things of life all by itself). Natural selection pushed RNA to form a sort of protecting shell around itself, and what we got was... a sort of proto-virus or proto-bacterium. With some stretch, you could call it the first cell. Not that this happened in one generation, it probably took billions. RNA later split up in DNA, RNA, proteins, and some other stuff, and the rest is history. Now, if you adhere to the cell theory of life... at what point did that origin become life? Which of those billions of generations of more and more complex blobs of molecules was the first cell? How do you even define a cell if there are things that are clearly somewhere in the continuum between cells and dead matter? There is no definite answer to those questions. Ergo, the cell theory does not give a complete definition of life on earth, let alone possible life elsewhere.
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Feb 7, 2015 10:39
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Since we are now talking about what's alive and not though, there's only a few categories of things that aren't obviously alive or obviously not alive - it's basically just viruses and the occasional self-replicating molecule. I feel like there's a good chance we're going to develop some kind of self-replicating machine that technically fits a lot of the criteria for life and blurs the lines on that before we create an AI that makes us reevalauate the definition of person. Probably not as relevant to the game's theme, though, I'll give you that. EDIT: mostly beaten by a much better post
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Feb 7, 2015 10:48
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Maybe it's just my narrowness of mind, but I don't understand how viruses or the origin of life negate the cellular definition of modern life. Or how "human" is useful unless referring to Homo sapiens... Actually, there probably is something wrong with me. For example, I don't understand poetry. It probably has something to do with that. 
supermikhail fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 13:19
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This is probably totally wrong, but here are my defining traits of life:
qe: As for what I mean by arbitrary goals, it could be something as complex as a human declaring their life's dream to be going to the moon, or as simple as a bacteria deciding it wants to move that way (imagine my hand pointing somewhere). Maybe I'll find more things to add to the list, but as of now I think that sufficient. I thought about adding "Ability to Reproduce New Members", but where would that leave the genetically altered animals that can't reproduce or die off too fast from complications? I think it's possible for something to be alive and not have the ability to reproduce, which gives AI a good chance if a sufficiently capable one is created. supermikhail posted:Maybe it's just my narrowness of mind, but I don't understand how viruses or the origin of life negate the cellular definition of modern life. Or how "human" is useful unless referring to Homo sapiens... Actually, there probably is something wrong with me. For example, I don't understand poetry. It probably has something to do with that. Viruses don't fit under the classical definition of life. I don't remember why, it's been a while since my last biology class. I've found enjoyment of poetry to be a learned experience. Poetry is basically distilled rhetoric. ViggyNash fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Feb 7, 2015 |
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Feb 7, 2015 15:55
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Virii ( ) are fascinating. There obligated intracellular bacteria whose genome is smaller than the genome of some viruses. Why is one alive and the other not? They really straddle the line between alive and just super complex gathering of molecules. Other dumb facts about them: Some virus can actually add their genetic sequence to that of their host (for example, retroviruses). We have in our DNA sequences of virus that infested humanity ages ago, that got incorporated and never left. Some scientist a while ago purported to have revived one of those virus from their sequence. There exists another genetic element called a transposon: it's a DNA sequence that sometimes will just up and decide to excise itself from it's current position and go insert itself in some other position. They are either devolved virus, or the actual origin of them, or maybe have a completely different origin. They were discovered first in plants (and the lady who discovered them got completely ignored for years, think they gave her a Nobel afterwards), don't remember if they exist in animals (they do in Bacteria pretty sure). Viruses and genetic engineering in general are a really interesting subject, and very accessible if you are actually interested in the topic (and I could sperg about both at large, but it's not the current direction of discussion). I think the question of viruses is also interesting in the face of the search for extraterrestrial life. I am of the idea that ET life will be completely different to that on earth, so most of the current attempts that are based on the life we know here are doomed to fail. Viruses themselves are just so weird, and they developed here next to us, who knows what could originate from one star away?
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Feb 7, 2015 16:15
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ViggyNash posted:Viruses don't fit under the classical definition of life. I don't remember why, it's been a while since my last biology class. I think it's mostly because they have no metabolic processes. They need host cells to do anything.
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Feb 7, 2015 16:15
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I really don't understand why "consisting of cells" is not a satisfactory definition for life. Viruses aren't considered properly life because they don't have cells, and instead have to borrow cells of others to function. They are an exceptional, edge case. If you want, you can define cells as having a lipid membrane and a nucleic acid for self-replication (actually, I'm pretty sure there are some other components without which a cell would be considered an aberration). There are cells that can't self-replicate, in fact a lot of them in metazoans, but they wouldn't be alive without the body as a whole. Actually I'm pretty sure at the core it still comes to the matter of definition before observation, that is, we have defined that what is like us alive, plus mobile animals. We weren't sure that plants were like us and we lumped them together with non-living matter, but then we discovered that we all consist of cells. We could have continued classifying plants as not properly alive but for some reason that property was important. The same with the origins of life. For some reason biologists say that before there were cells, it was "the origins of life", and after that "the process of life proper".  (Unless I have access to the wrong end of the scientific consensus.) You could also define life as whatever biologists study. In conclusion, in an area like this human language is pretty much useless for dealing with the world. Also I have spent way too much time deciding whether what I've written is pointless  or actually makes some sense.
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Feb 7, 2015 16:36
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supermikhail posted:I really don't understand why "consisting of cells" is not a satisfactory definition for life. Viruses aren't considered properly life because they don't have cells, and instead have to borrow cells of others to function. They are an exceptional, edge case. If you want, you can define cells as having a lipid membrane and a nucleic acid for self-replication (actually, I'm pretty sure there are some other components without which a cell would be considered an aberration). There are cells that can't self-replicate, in fact a lot of them in metazoans, but they wouldn't be alive without the body as a whole. The problem with your cell-based definition is that you can mix a bunch of DNA and some phospholipids in a test tube and you'll get a "cell" by your standards. Also I'm pretty sure some classes of virus emerge from cells carryying a lipidic membrane. Double also, mitochondria and chloroplasts have lipidic membranes, their own genes, and replicate independently of the owner (not surprising given their origin as symbiotic bacteria). Those would all fall under that definition. There are some protozoans that even merge their cells in reproduction or other events, so it gets muddy there. A metabolic criteria just seems more appropriate. Life excises change in it's environment in a way most other matter just can't. Personally I would go with a mixture of metabolism + replication for my definition of life. But now you need to define each of those criteria and it's a bottomless hole 
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Feb 7, 2015 16:56
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I understand that virii are a grey area, but prions are a life form? Different from its host? I don't get that. My understanding was that a prion is a misfolded protein that induces similar nearby proteins to misfold the same way. And unlike viruses or bacteria, the original protein can create itself; you don't have to be "infected" from an outside source. To me that's just a normal chemistry and physics, something naturally heading towards a lower energy state. I'd love to know more if anyone else does.
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Feb 7, 2015 17:37
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You could also chop off a finger and call it alive because it's a collection of cells, that's one problem. But from another perspective, having cells be a base requirement could be bias on our part. Perhaps, like in The Swapper (Swapper spoilers, obviously) a bunch of rocks could form a sort of neural network that allows them to be conscious, and even telepathic, even though they aren't organic.
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Feb 7, 2015 17:41
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I was waiting to make this point and you've walked right into it! We don't know what kinds of life exists / is allowed in the universe. We can't make a future-proof definition. The best we can do is describe what we see. Which brings me to the following suggestion again: definition by examples. As I've said, the term "living" once applied only to mobile animals, but then we quite arbitrarily extended it to the animal kingdom, plants, fungi, various kinds of microbes. And we then decided that viruses aren't quite alive. Why are some weird kinds of bacteria added to living organisms upon discovery? Because they look similar to other, more normal kinds of bacteria. Why are viruses semi-alive? Because they have the kinds of chemicals we used to find only in things we termed living. Basically, inclusion by comittee and memetics. Markovnikov posted:A metabolic criteria just seems more appropriate. Life excises change in it's environment in a way most other matter just can't. Personally I would go with a mixture of metabolism + replication for my definition of life. But now you need to define each of those criteria and it's a bottomless hole Also can be defined as something that is similar to what human cells do. The definition of "similar" open to interpretation by comittee and memetics.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:11
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GuavaMoment posted:I understand that virii are a grey area, but prions are a life form? Different from its host? I don't get that. My understanding was that a prion is a misfolded protein that induces similar nearby proteins to misfold the same way. And unlike viruses or bacteria, the original protein can create itself; you don't have to be "infected" from an outside source. To me that's just a normal chemistry and physics, something naturally heading towards a lower energy state. I'd love to know more if anyone else does. Prions aren't a life form by any 'official' definition. However, in certain ways they act like one. For instance, they replicate. And as they are so simple, they could give us insights in the origin of life. I'd say there's a continuum being alive and lifeless, for instance 1. Living bacterium 2. Hibernating bacterium (the kind that simply turns itself off and loses nearly all its water in extreme environments, can exist like that for a century, and then continues living when there's water available at a reasonable temperature) (There's probably something in between here, but I don't know about it) 3. Virus (A protein- or other shell containing genetic code for said shell and for enzymes required to copy said code, but needs another cell to copy itself) 4. Satellite virus (A tiny tiny virus-like thing that has nothing but a shell and a bit of RNA coding for the shell protein. It replicates by using a regular virus' RNA-synthesis mechanism, by infecting a cell at the same time its regular virus 'host' does so. Satellite viruses tend to cause a worsening of symptoms for the regular virus' host cell.) 5. Viroids (Simply a virus-like strain of RNA that can "live" in plant cells, does not encode for any protein, but does get replicated and gets spread to other cells by using the cell's or some virus' mechanism. 6. Prions (See the explanation in the quoted post above) 7. Rocks By comparing each of these things that are neither clearly alive nor clearly dead, we can learn a lot about what life actually is. But there's a problem... ViggyNash posted:But from another perspective, having cells be a base requirement could be bias on our part. Perhaps, like in The Swapper (Swapper spoilers, obviously) a bunch of rocks could form a sort of neural network that allows them to be conscious, and even telepathic, even though they aren't organic. Exactly. Our sample size of 'ways life could have developed' is as of now limited to n=1. Life on Earth. That's it. A single anecdote. Defining life as 'cells' is reasonable for most biological/daily life things (until you run into the above list), but it's not an absolute definition. It's quite conceivable that life on another world could be in another form that we don't see as cells. If we want to leave the science behind and go into the philosophy of the conceivable, it becomes clear that 'cells' as a definition is not complete. Most likely, no single definition would be complete, because we don't know everything that is possible. But some definitions are clearly better than others. Cells are a very limited definition while there are more options. ViggyNash's two traits are already much better. They are more generic and are likely to include many possible alien and artificial lifeforms. We have to make sure we don't go too broad, through. Fire is something that has many properties in common with life. It uses up energy from its environment. It replicates and grows. It can even seem to have 'arbitrary goals'. Yet, most people will agree that fire is quite obviously not alive. I think supermikhail is having trouble with this line of thought, because they stop at a working definition. That is fine in a lot of cases, but not if you want to look at the possible broader implications. At all possible origins of intelligence. For that, we need to leave science and enter philosophy. Supermikhail might be one of the people who simply aren't interested in philosophy. I truly hope that during my lifetime they can make n=2. Discover lifeforms completely unrelated to life on Earth. On Mars, or perhaps in the ocean on the moon Europa. That would at least give us something to work from, from a more scientific point of view.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:27
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GuavaMoment posted:I understand that virii are a grey area, but prions are a life form? Different from its host? I don't get that. My understanding was that a prion is a misfolded protein that induces similar nearby proteins to misfold the same way. And unlike viruses or bacteria, the original protein can create itself; you don't have to be "infected" from an outside source. To me that's just a normal chemistry and physics, something naturally heading towards a lower energy state. I'd love to know more if anyone else does. Yeah, that's pretty much what prions are. But some of them are infectious, they come from other organisms, like Mad Cow Disease. Also they can't create themselves, they need another protein around that's similar to them and that they can misfold to get into their fray. They are very interesting still. Things have a tendency to lower energy states, but they also have a tendency towards disorder (entropy). A short while back some physicists came up with a deduction that life (as in self replication) was an imperative thermodynamical consequence or some such, don't know much more or if it was actually bullshit (probably) but I do remember a bunch of biologists getting all pissy at the idea. I don't know much about prions specifically, bt I do have some Biochem background if you have some questions. Or I'm sure there's a Biology thread in SAL.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:27
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For what near-zero value it has, my personal opinion is that imperfect self-replication or descendance from such is enough to count as life. That is, everything down to virions is life and assuming the mechanism by which prions self-replicate allows change over 'generations', they count too. The descendance clause is there for organisms that can no longer reproduce unassisted or at all. Under this definition, a self-replicating robot with some kind of evolutionary programming would be alive, which I'm fine with, but it would make a sapient but sterile one not alive. I figure we can give anything conscious a back door into the alive club, though.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:48
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HMS Boromir posted:I figure we can give anything conscious a back door into the alive club, though. OK, now define what consciousness is. 
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Feb 7, 2015 18:55
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...you got me there.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:56
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I would think that life (as is known right now) would consist of something a contained set of genetic data encapsulated in a membrane that is capable of metabolising an environment so as to obtain the necessary elements required for maintenance, growth and replication and having the cellular mechanisms to do so.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:04
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Carbon dioxide posted:I truly hope that during my lifetime they can make n=2. Discover lifeforms completely unrelated to life on Earth. On Mars, or perhaps in the ocean on the moon Europa. That would at least give us something to work from, from a more scientific point of view. I very strongly believe we're going to find life ( or what used to be life) on mars and it's going to be similar enough to life as we know it that it's going to raise more questions than it answers. Was our solar system seeded by a comet or something? Are we descendants of Martian life? Or is it parallel evolution? I believe this because why would we as a species ever find an easy answer to anything. It's just too perfect a scenario to not have happen.
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Feb 8, 2015 02:38
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omeg posted:OK, now define what consciousness is. Ill bite. One's innate sense of self awareness and individuality. Something that isn't conscious wouldn't be able to perceive itself.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:49
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The trick is, I know I'M conscious. Descartes has a point there. But I only suspect that other people are conscious. With human beings, there's no reason to believe I'm any different from other human beings, so you all get a pass for being conscious too. But nailing down what it is that makes us conscious-- that's the trick. We have no flipping idea. A lot of guesses, but we don't know-- possibly can't know. Or at least we don't currently have the foundational knowledge required to be able to know.
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Feb 8, 2015 05:36
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The most generic, straightforwards answer we can give is that it is the product of a complex system of thought that develops the capacity to acknowledge itself. But then we have the issue of defining the nature and origin of thought, which we could say to be the metaphysical product of a complex network of firing neurons, but that doesn't explain any of the whys or hows of the process. All we know is that one thing leads to another, which leads to another, and voila, here I am, and so are you. I really hope we manage to fill in the missing pieces of how thought forms from firing neurons within my lifetime. There has to be a way to decode thought, but unlike the binary domain of electronics I suspect that there could be an analog system at play. Then again, neurons individually seem to reflect the binary nature of electronics, so maybe the problem is a lot simpler (relatively, of course) than I thought.
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Feb 8, 2015 05:49
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ViggyNash posted:The most generic, straightforwards answer we can give is that it is the product of a complex system of thought that develops the capacity to acknowledge itself. But then we have the issue of defining the nature and origin of thought, which we could say to be the metaphysical product of a complex network of firing neurons, but that doesn't explain any of the whys or hows of the process. All we know is that one thing leads to another, which leads to another, and voila, here I am, and so are you. We have several hints on how this works. First of all, we know that each person's brain is wired differently. So not even the thoughts and memories are different, the 'programming' and even the 'hardware' is different in each case. This will make decoding very difficult. You'd have to reverse engineer it one brain at a time. Secondly, we know that A) chemicals (hormones, drugs) change the way our neurons fire and B) that brain neurons tend to have many connections each. This could mean things are more complicated than simple binary. And thirdly, as a way to show that a system based on binary logic doesn't need to be binary, I'd like to refer to Adrian Thompson's work on evolving circuitry. What he did is quite simple to understand. He took a programmable logic chip, and first filled it with random crap. His goal was to build a system that would give a high voltage if a certain frequency (a tone) was inputted, low voltage if another frequency was inputted. But he programmed the chip in an unusual way. He wrote an algorithm that would make a bunch of random variations of what was on the chip, test them, and choose the best working ones. Those would be the 'parents' for the next generation. An evolutionary algorithm. The end result was unexpected. It worked alright. With way less logic gates than normally needed. It also, somehow, didn't use binary logic. There were groups of logic gates that weren't connected to anything, but were necessary for the chip's functionality. It was theorized that these caused some kind of magnetic interference that changed the way the circuit operated. Another interesting result was that the 'program' would not work (as well) on another chip of the same kind. Apparently tiny, tiny things such as the distance between the wiring or even the exact thickness of the wires, or perhaps something else entirely changed the way this system operated. They never managed to understand the full workings of the tiny system of only 40 logic gates. Brains evolved, so I would not at all be surprised if similar shenanigans were at work in our heads. And our brain is significantly more complicated than 40 logic gates, while the differences between brains are much larger than between chips of the same kind. I don't believe 'decoding' brains is going to be trivial in any way or manner. We can't even 'decode' a simple artificial system made by similar principles.
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Feb 8, 2015 09:12
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Carbon dioxide posted:I'd like to refer to Adrian Thompson's work on evolving circuitry. I think they also failed to work outside of a very, VERY narrow temperature range too.
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Feb 8, 2015 13:58
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Evolution is fascinating. For my master's I've programmed something similar to Avida. Basically, a simplistic virtual CPU with some memory where multiple programs using constructed assembly instructions could run. Each "generation" was rated after a given number of "CPU clocks" according to its performance in various ways (efficiency, growth, replication, some others I don't remember). Then the system performed some genetic operations (crossover, mutation) on the most successful programs and seeded the next generation. The end goal was to see how the system's entropy as a whole behaved over time. Can complexity arise from randomness given sufficient rules and enough time? Can hand-built "organisms" evolve to be even more efficient? The answer was "maybe". I remember seeing improvements in hand-coded programs. Starting from randomness was more difficult, it took ages to run a sufficient number of generations that any structural change appeared (and I didn't have access to any supercomputer ). Still, system's entropy did seem to very slowly decrease.Now I want to get into tinkering with that stuff again. 
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Feb 8, 2015 14:35
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Carbon dioxide posted:And thirdly, as a way to show that a system based on binary logic doesn't need to be binary, I'd like to refer to Adrian Thompson's work on evolving circuitry. What he did is quite simple to understand. He took a programmable logic chip, and first filled it with random crap. His goal was to build a system that would give a high voltage if a certain frequency (a tone) was inputted, low voltage if another frequency was inputted. But he programmed the chip in an unusual way. He wrote an algorithm that would make a bunch of random variations of what was on the chip, test them, and choose the best working ones. Those would be the 'parents' for the next generation. An evolutionary algorithm. Holy poo poo, this really happened?  And yeah, with that as an analogy to the design of the human brain, it now seems nigh impossible to map the neural network of a brain. It seems almost as if the exact molecular structure of the chip plays a role in its effectiveness, which is not something that's in any way feasible to map even on that small scale. omeg posted:Evolution is fascinating. Randomness can only create the semblance of our organically formed world, but with enough structural rules and selective Darwinian iteration randomness can come pretty drat close. The Hello Games managing director Sean Murray did an interview about the tech in No Man's Sky that shows off a lot more than we've seen so far, and it's absolutely mind-boggling what procedural generation can accomplish. Obviously, they aren't recreating objects from the atomic level, but it generates details like the exact placement of a small pebble on the desert floor. He even says at one point that different machines in the office had a different universe running on it, and even notes how strange it is to say that.
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Feb 8, 2015 17:14
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ViggyNash posted:Holy poo poo, this really happened? Of a human brain, I agree, just not of any brain in general. The nematode worm for one has already been mapped out. What that hardware thing discovered was not that the brain depends on that sort of put-it-on-different-hardware-and-it-fails thing, just that their own system came up with that as an optimal solution. If they'd ran it for thousands(, millions?) more generations and introduced 'working-on-different-hardware' as a thing in the fitness function, they might have come up with more general solutions, or solutions that were specific, but only to the hardware they tested against. The majority of scientists working on these things have come to realise that 'artificial neural networks' and 'genetic algorithms', despite what they sound like, could only come up with a human's brain through evolution if they had the same inputs, desired outputs, and test environment that the human brain evolved in, and even then it's a slim chance it'll come up with the same thing. Because the brain isn't what a scientist would call an 'optimal solution'. It's essentially a vast artificial neural network, that can do an abnormal amount of things, but most of those things weren't even being considered against the fitness function while it was evolving. Being smart enough to write up an essay wouldn't have gotten you zilch two thousand years ago, but now it may or may not give you a certain advantage. However, a genetic algorithm being used to evolve an artificial neural network will come up with something that actually looks optimal for the task at hand, for however specific your desired outputs are. Those chips were doing exactly what the genetic algorithm was testing for: "Differentiate between these two tones, on the exact same hardware you were given in these exact test conditions, regardless if you have to use too many/too few logic gates, etc." It could have come up with a solution that didn't depend on everything being just right, it's just that the algorithm wasn't set up to do that. As for what that says about us understanding human brains. For the same experiment instead of logic gates, you could set up the inputs to vary the speed of a rope pendulum and use the speed of the end of the pendulum as an output, and for a specific set of weighting input -> pendulum rotor, a set of weighting output -> value of output, length of rope and rotor speed, you would end up with the same sort of "But how does it work?!" reaction, because the mechanism isn't obvious. It doesn't mean it's better or somehow more intelligent, it's just a roundabout way of finding the solution, just like three isolated logic gates influencing the others was. e: Basically, what I'm saying is that artificial neural networks, esp. developed with genetic algorithms, try to set up the inputs to match your desired outputs in your test environment, no more no less. They can do that in insane ways, or completely obvious ways, because they don't care about that. They just find the first solution that does that and stick to it. Evolution in our case, didn't do that. It tried to get us to survive and spread our genes. No more, no less. Red Mike fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 18:47
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Very interesting. I discussed this for a bit with off-site people, and they linked me to this: http://www.modha.org/blog/SC12/RJ10502.pdf It's a short article that doesn't say too much, but basically they're trying to model a neural network with a complexity similar to the human brain. It has no direct relation with the way our brain is built, but I wonder if combining that complexity with the logic used in that nematode research would be enough to create an AI resembling a human. And as the nematode article says, this would lead to philosophical questions on whether you created new life, new consciousness, or not.
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Feb 8, 2015 19:34
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Red Mike posted:Brains. What you explained is what I meant to say, in long form. It just so happened that arbitrary details happened to play a role in discovering a working solution, which I'd equate to the human genome being in part the product of millions of genetic mutations, regardless of how seemingly inconsequential they are. And I'm sure there must be other solutions that the genetic algorithm could have produced that would have worked as well or better than the particular chip he found to work, just as humans each have a unique neural network. But when it comes to mapping and decoding a human brain, there's no way of knowing what arbitrary details to look out for, like the 3 disconnected logic gates that shouldn't, but did, influence the function. On the topic of the nematode worm, 302 neurons seems like a small enough number that decoding it would be feasible with today's tech (which it apparently was), but compare that to the billions of neurons in the human brain and the sense of impossibility just increases. Carbon dioxide posted:Very interesting. I discussed this for a bit with off-site people, and they linked me to this: http://www.modha.org/blog/SC12/RJ10502.pdf Wasn't there a european project to simulate an entire human brain? I remember it being in the news because it was a 1 billion euro project or something absurd. That also reminds me about IBM making a neurosynaptic processor, as in a physical chip. Last I heard they'd made a chip containing 256 neurons and a couple hundred thousand synapses. Now... http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/brainpower/
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Feb 9, 2015 01:58
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