S.W. Hammond's Blog, page 12

AI and Immortality: MindCloud

Immortality awaits! Suppose the kind corporate folks at MindCloud offer you the following "deal":

In exchange for your earthly, bodily existence (and maybe a few ducats), MindCloud will upload all of your memories, hopes, aspirations, and emotional and affective dispositions up onto a secure place in the cloud. In this place "you" will be able to explore and experience the ever-increasing contents therein, where "you" may contribute to such content by building up a new cloud-based narrative of "your life," and where "you" will also be able to satisfy virtual analogues of felt bodily urges and needs, without having actually to attend to the hassles of tending and caring for a corporeal body.

Would or would not accept such a deal? What would your concerns be? Here's what I think:

MindCloud is entertainment. MindCloud is fiction. And I can’t help but take the idea to its absolute—becoming God.

The Soul and Plato

What is the soul and how does it work? Is your soul exploited by the State through the Noble Lie?

Plato (429—327 BCE) serves as the backbone of Western civilization and philosophy–recounting and preserving the theories of his contemporaries, as well as his own. Socrates (469—399 BCE), having never written a surviving word himself, is captured by Plato and acts as his mouthpiece. Though the duo seem inseparable, Plato credits Socrates as the original source of thought and almost all the philosophical work is presented by or through him.

Socrates is a proponent of ante rem dualism; presuming a prior existence of the soul [i.e., spirit / mind / psyche] and its separation from the body. The soul is a non-composite substance that is indescribable and existed among the Forms (partaking and understanding of their true / necessary perfections) prior to becoming, or existing through its encapsulation of the sensible body; the soul creating a bridge between the reasonable and empirical.

2017 Bakersfield Comic Con

November 18 & 19 – Kern County Fair Grounds

As seen on The Big Bang Theory! Happy to be making the trip over to Bakersfield for a couple days of fandom. Stop by Artist Alley where I will be signing and selling The Final Book: Gods and The Mixtape Manifesto. Bring on the cosplay, I'll be taking pics!

Visit the official Bakersfield Comic Con website for ticket information, schedule, and special guests:

http://www.bakersfieldcomiccon.com/

Galaxy Fest Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/Bakersfield-Comic-Con-145474598818517/

2018 Colorado Springs Galaxy Fest

February 9, 10, 11 – The Antler's Hotel, Downtown

Full circle? A homecoming of sorts?? COS was my "base camp" for about a decade, always coming and going but returning to the place I would consider home. Very happy to be a part of the 2018 COS Galaxy Fest! Swing by Artist Alley where I will be signing and selling The Final Book: Gods and The Mixtape Manfiesto. Look forward to seeing everyone and hope you can make it out!

Visit the official Galaxy Fest website for ticket information, schedule, and special guests:

http://www.galaxyfest.org/

Galaxy Fest Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/GalaxyFest/

2018 Albuquerque Comic Con

January 12, 13, 14 – Albuquerque Convention Center

Very happy to be a part of the 2018 ABQ Comic Con! Swing by Artist Alley where I will be signing and selling The Final Book: Gods and The Mixtape Manfiesto.

Visit the official Albuquerque Comic Con website for ticket information, schedule, and special guests:

http://albuquerquecomiccon.com/

Albuquerque Comic Con Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/albuquerque.comiccon/

2017 Las Vegas Book Festival

October 21. Historic 5th Street School.

Adult Section: Booth 10

The largest book festival in Las Vegas! Stop by my tent where I'll be signing and selling The Final Book: Gods and the new hardcover edition of The Mixtape Manifesto.

For more information, schedule, and list of special guests, please visit: http://www.vegasvalleybookfestival.org/

The Challenge of AI

The greatest challenge to General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is human intelligence.

We as humans would be the GAI’s creator and its dependency lies in our ability to first understand our own intelligence—a field of study that is improving, but has yet provided answers to the most glaring questions. Once, and if, the questions of thinking, consciousness, and intelligence are answered, we’d then need the technical skill of developing that through duplication or imitation.

With that said, I believe human-compatible GAI is one day possible but it’s a long time coming. This isn’t so much of an issue of hardware or processing power, but due to how little we know about the human brain and how that lump of gray translates into a personality (“I” or consciousness) and intelligence.

The Soul and Parmenides

Things are One and Being is truth.

The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who is thought to have been born between 540 and 515 BCE (dates are contested between Plato and Diogenes) is often dubbed “the father of metaphysics” and the first noted dualist. As the first a priori philosopher, Parmenides developed the modality of necessity, positing that true knowledge is obtained by reason alone, and largely rejecting a posteriori knowledge, or sense experience, due to the senses being misleading or causing false judgement.

In Parmenides’ poem, On Nature, he states that all knowledge should begin with “it is” and proceeds with reasonable deductions to explain being. This mental exercise yields certainty of truth (way of truth), and therefore is superior to empirical knowledge that can only offer a high probability of truth (way of seeming).

AI and The Replicant Mind

Is our understanding of intelligence anthropomorphic? How can we simulate the human mind when we can't even define it?

The Turing Test, as currently understood, is simply this: if a computer can perform in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish its performance from that of a human, then it is said that the computer also has that ability. So, the goal for programmers seeking to design intelligent computers is to design programs that will simulate human cognition in such a way as to pass the Turing Test.

However, Searle counters that a computer passing the Turning Test isn’t an actual intelligence and that the computer wouldn’t truly “understand” what it is doing, rather the computer would only be imitating / simulating believable human behavior. Under Turing’s test, even if the computer mirrored human behavior flawlessly, Searle posits that the computer still wouldn’t “really know” what, why, or how it came to the conclusions or responses that it did, or attribute any meaning to them—he demonstrates this in his famous example of The Chinese Room.

The Soul and Heraclitus

Embrace change wholeheartedly, and accept contradiction. Knowing these words–and understanding them–are two entirely different things.

Heraclitus preceded Parmenides, living from 535—475 BCE, and like Parmenides, none of his writing has survived in its complete form. Heraclitus’s philosophy on the surface is in direct contrast with Parmenides by positing a natural argument (I say “on the surface” as their ultimate conclusions, Parmenides’ “All Is One” and Heraclitus’ “World-Fire”, seem to be saying the same thing, but the two taking two drastically different approaches to arrive at the same place).