A rather disturbing view of the furture of warfighting

exactly.. you summed it up perfectly on why ai has issues becoming aware- it's only in error because our beliefs are opposite.. which is fine- I mean nexxo me and you are older so we are pretty much stuck in our ways

like think a lot of what described in that list as self awareness is hard wired.. I don't see a monkey picking his ass or ripping a ladies face off as intelligent

do we really need monkey action shots from google

 

also computer parts aren't reproducing for the supposed mutation in programming to take effect.. I mean really it's not the same comparing apples and oranges

aye sorry thought was edit..

 

Is a human doing the same intelligent? No, but it is a concious choice. Why shouldn't it be the same with monkeys?

 

yeah sure you can follow your urges.. those hardwired into everyone and every animal- but that's what I'm talking about

like look at nexxos wolf analysis.. he thinks hunting in packs and having a alpha wolf implies self awareness.. I lean towards they know what they are doing because they are born with these things hardwired into them

they do it.. but they don't know why they do it, or even bother to deny what they are and go do something else (like become a vegetarian xD).. we are different in that respect- we are able to contemplate our actions and see ourselves as a person, can relate where we are in the world.. just those basic things already puts us on another level

to be compared to a monkey.. go to the zoo and when the monkey throws his **** and it hits you in the face and you roid rage.. what do you think is going through his mind

I bet it's not part of a larger plan, it's more instant gratification

 

hippoz, watch that documentary I posted...it'll go a long way towards dispelling your anectdotal assumptions

 

It is instant gratification, and he is responding to urges, exactly the same as the person would be. You are right on this, but manage to miss the point entirely. The point is that the monkeys aren't ripping each others faces off or flinging poo all the time. They do other things such as grooming each other, building social bonds and generally being a social animal. Much the same as a person, in fact. Point is, we really aren't all that different, and certainly nowhere near as different as you wish.

Sometimes I wonder why people are so insecure as to react so vehemently against comparisons with other animals and maybe, shock horror, the fact that we are nothing but hairless apes with large brains and a faceless outlet for pointless arguments.

 

True, monkeys and wolves engage in a lot of unreflected, instinctive behaviour. Then again so do humans. You want to see a human ripping someone's face off? Visit Broadway, Birmingham on a Friday night. You want to see a human deliberately cutting up a girl's genitals for cultural reasons, visit Somalia.

These examples highlight two things: that we are prone to descend into 'animal' behaviour all the time (if the supermarkets run empty by noon, it's Lord of the Flies by sunset), and that even conscious, reflected behaviour based in uniquely human cultural motivations does not make them any more 'intelligent'.

No, but programs are. Natural selection has been simulated on computers: write a program that does a task; create 100 copies with randomly altered bits of code (genetic mutations) and run them again. Keep the best functioning one, discard the rest, rinse, repeat. In a few thousand generations (which is not very long in computer terms) you end up with a program that does the task really well --far better than a human-coded program could ever do. You also end up with code that no human programmer can read or understand anymore. It has evolved beyond our understanding. The same thing has been done with simulated electronic circuits, with the same results. When these inscrutable circuits have been built in real life, they work perfectly. It's just that nobody understands how.

Now if someone who did not know of the experiment came across this bit of code or that electronic circuit, inscrutable but so very efficient and purposeful at doing a task, they might logically conclude that someone of immense genius must have designed it. A Godlike programmer or electronic engineer, if you will. But they weren't. They were the product of random mutation and natural selection.

Ah, you now say, but the initial ancestor program or circuit was designed by a human! Yes, but it did not have to be. The experiment could have started with a random bit of gibberish code, or random collection of electronic components, and it would still have worked. It would just have taken a few million more generations.

Now consider how much opportunity there has been over the last few billion years for basic chemical reactions to take place and organise into basic blasts, and for trillions and trillions of those single-cell life form structures to procreate, mutate and evolve, it is almost inconceivable that evolution could not have taken place.

Now replace those cells for neurone (the electronics) and their processes for programs. Procreate, mutate, select, repeat. Is it any wonder that we have a brain that does inscrutable things?

 

What are you trying to say here? I don't really see how your arguments have anything to do with your wider point. I'm not sure you do, either.
The face-ripping monkey incident occurred because the woman who kept him as a pet had essentially been fulfilling the role of mate, and the interloping woman was perceived as a threat. I wouldn't call that 'instant gratification'.

Perhaps you could explain your concept of the 'larger plan'; when I fart, or scratch my balls, is that part of the grander plan simply by virtue of the fact that I am a sentient being and am able to consider the wider meaning of my actions as I perform them?

The number of cases in which animals have been shown to learn and adapt those behaviours which you so adamantly claim are hard-wired into them are legion. Elephants, magpies, bottle-nosed dolphins and apes all show some sense of self-awareness as well as more complex emotional and social behaviours.

Here's an example, from the famous case of 'Washoe', a chimpanzee who was taught to sign:

"People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human. (Chimpanzees don't shed tears.) Kat later remarked that that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences."

I suppose anthropocentrism comes easily to someone raised in an ethnocentric culture, though

 

I think that thehippoz (and we) get confused because he lumps together various concepts such as consciousness, self-awareness and intelligence (as in: reasoned behaviour, I assume). They are not at all the same thing, nor are they that easy to define. Nor are they discrete, unrelated phenomena; they are at the simplest level hierarchical. You need consciousness to be self-aware; you need self-awareness to reason halfway intelligently.

The other confusion is the assumption that just because humans can function at a high level, that they always and exclusively do. Coupled to that is the assumption that these three things (consciousness, self-awareness and intelligence) are binary states, and that therefore either you (humans) have them, or you (animals) don't.

 

No, you do not get to shrug it away that easily.
You made blanket statements that are, to my knowledge, false, and as such you will have to defend your statements or retract them. So I ask you again; present your evidence, or retract your statements. I would have no problem admitting to being wrong and change my stance if indeed it was demonstrated to me - I have already acknowledged the fact that I could very well be wrong, but that I have currently seen no evidence to indicate that I am.

Indeed.
Just observe students at their graduation parties.

 

oh please, it seems only nexxo gets it out of the last few posts.. nothing I believe is any more wrong/right than what you believe.. but of course you'll attack me instead because your atheist beliefs are threatened (but like said I totally believe from what I've seen atheism is nothing more than know it all bs)

it's not so cut and dry.. the monkey ripping the face off is just an example.. I think we covered people can follow that path also.. but to compare us it's not even close..

anyways.. it's nice to know your so closed off the truth.. you might wake up one day and realize your not a monkey! well some of us

yeah and nexxo your example with the code is what I was talking about earlier too.. you write the code that writes itself.. that code it writes is not going to mutate- it will be the exact code the programmers wrote when a certain condition is met

guess you have to program to understand this.. or you believe the code magically mutates from the original source (or you run windows 95 and watch the memory leaks)

or you believe things like memory leaks instead of crashing the whole process, somehow will make it better.. that doesn't make sense in programming.. the computer is not going to all of a sudden start diverting from it's code

the optimizations you talk about are going to be written in the source by a person.. the machine will execute that to the letter- make it's changes to the letter.. a diversion will likely cause a crash not a magic moment

but if that's what you think will happen.. what can I say

 

It would seem that Nexxo's view is that you're lacking an understanding of the subject at hand and making flawed assumptions based on lumping independent concepts together and seeing things as binary propositions, i.e. you have it or you don't without any middle ground between the two. Is that really what you've been trying to make us get?

Actually the subjects we're discussing fall squarely in the realm of science so yes what you believe can be more wrong/right than what others believe. And in the case of this discussion you've demonstrated a lack of understanding/misunderstanding of not only the the primary subject under discussion but the secondary subjects that link into it and provide the framework.

I don't think anyone's "attacked" you, they've asked for you to substantiate your claims or pointed out where they're lacking in understanding but you've not been attacked. Similarly I don't think anyone feels their "atheist" beliefs are threatened because you've not said anything that constitutes a challenge. If you want to challenge someone's beliefs then present a reasoned, well-researched argument with appropriate evidence (which is what Journeyer is asking you to do); making claims with no evidence beyond stating it's what you believe is not a challenge and is not going to make any rational, logical thinking person feel that their beliefs have been threatened. As for you repeated claim about atheism being "nothing more than know it all bs" I do find it somewhat ironic considering your position thus far in this thread appears to be nothing more than repeating the same things, ignoring the evidence put forward by other posters and then stating that what they've said is wrong without providing any of your own evidence to back that up.

Why? What is it that makes us so different from monkeys? We still have many of the same primal urges and insticts and it's been demonstrated that monkeys can be taught, can solve problems, are aware of themselves as a separate entity to other monkeys and many other things that demonstrate a level of self-awareness/conciousness and intelligence. Sure it's not upto human levels but it's still there. Not to mention that, as Nexxo has pointed out, you can see evidence of humans acting in the same ways as monkeys in plenty of situations, especially when they've had their higher reasoning functions suppressed by things like alcohol.

No, we're not monkeys but we started off at the same place as them.

Except that's exactly what genetic programming does. The program alters and writes itself, albeit along lines originally set out by the programmer, but the code is not predetermined and is not written by a human ready to be inserted when certain conditions are met. The code changes by cross-overs and random mutations, just as DNA does, and what you end up with is certainly not what you started out with, hasn't been written by a human and may not even be understandable by the original programmer or anyone else for that matter.

 

Actually I dabbled in machine code as far back as '84.

Let's call it a day because from your responses I get the impression that I'm talking over your head. There is a whole crapload of fairly mind-bending, counter-intuitive knowledge and principles you'd need to understand to talk about this in a meaningful way. I'd have to send you off to the library with a reading list just to get you up to speed. I think we can both do more fun things with our time.

 

I'm just going to leave this here....

 

I understand what your trying to get at.. but from what I've seen programming (and I've done quite a bit myself)

what your talking about with code going beyond the understanding of the programmer(s) is pure fantasy.. you show the modified code to the original programmer and it will be something he's probably seen a hundred times before in debugging and could probably optimize it even more xD

telling me to go to the library doesn't change this.. it's why we have no ai today- if what your saying is true.. an algorithm that 'magically' mutates into something outside it's programming

that's the same belief that we had a 'magic' mutation in some super monkey in africa and we all decended from that.. sorry can't buy it.. it doesn't make any sense.. at least what I believe makes sense if you think about it

but yeah let's call it a day before we go in this loop

actually with the world the way it is today.. I don't blame anyone believing in magic- friend sent me this today

http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff2/black-reporter-shomari-stone-white-supremacist-fight/

monkeys?

 

There's nothing 'magic' about it, it can all be explained perfectly rationally. Just because you don't understand the maths and science behind it doesn't make it 'magic'. On the contrary the need for the intervention of a supernatural deity does require a belief in 'magic', it involves throwing rationality and logic out of hte window and basically dumbing it down to 'magic man done it'.

 

It does make sense that's, why you need to go to the library to understand it.

 

"Truth is stranger than fiction because it does not have to make any sense." --Mark Twain

 

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/98865914.html

humans?

Or is this solid evidence rather than anecdote and therefore not worthy of consideration?

I think science really needs to sort itself out and help to increase public understanding of the discipline when I get stuck in conversations like this. No wonder the Tea Party can gain power if people understand so little of how we as a civilisation has advanced over the last two centuries.

Come to think of it, does anyone else appreciate the delicious irony that the thing that probably sets us most apart from apes is the very same thing that those of a religious bent enjoy denying?

 

hippoz, would you ffs watch that documentary I posted...it doesnt just explain, but demonstrates all the things that you are claiming are impossible. If you don't have the attention span to watch a whole hour long documentary, atleast watch the last 10 mins of it where it shows the how the type of programming you claim is doesn't exist has actually contributed a few video games you've no doubt played i.e. NaturalMotion's Euphoria engine.

Although, please do watch the whole thing as it'll give you a good foundation in the concepts.