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Comment by Mentat_Enki | Hacker News Reader

Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able to become mentats, we'd still be limited by the tenants of information theory and what is computable. The fact that human intelligence is emergent leads me to believe that machine intelligence will be the same, albeit very different than a simian mammal's intelligence. Fish are smarter than we are at swimming. Think ants.

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Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals

The poster you are responding did not claim that humans are the shit. They merely pointed out the fact that we have so far proven incapable of proving that we aren`t said shit. Now, you could argue that such a hypothesis could only be falsified by the construction of a machine consciousness. That, however, is orthogonal to the fact that it remains possible that there is in fact some bizarre quality of the universe or the human race that makes machine consciousness impossible. Not a terribly scientific position to take, perhaps, but a perfectly sound philosophical one.

yeah perhaps I drew him into this one, but "innate quality of human organic compounds" seemed like a bit of human elitism to me. To which I say "hey buddy, just because we are (apparently) the most dominant species on the planet (which I also am not too certain I agree with), doesn't mean we are the end all be all, or worse, somehow different than all the animalia we happen to try to place ourselves "above" or something. Trust me, when humans wear out their welcome here (which seems to be coming with great alacrity with regard to cosmic timescales), the insects will be more than happy to eat our corpses and continue on happily without us. We are adaptable, but not THE MOST adaptable organism on the planet. And regarding the philosophical position business, I also call bollocks, as there was not one rational argument presented to back his premise regarding the "innate quality of organic human compounds". Is the human neuron somehow magically different than a chimp's neuron? Methinks not, i.e. it is particularly unsound to somehow make our molecules different than any other organisms molecules simply because we are human.

No, human intelligence is an emergent quality, and I fathom that even our massive representations of humanity's information (akin to what Google is compiling) will soon begin to exhibit interesting qualities of its own once it becomes complex enough to exhibit perhaps interesting, unanticipated emergent qualities (in fact, if it didn't I would be absolutely shocked). Many strange and unpredictable (or at the very least unanticipated) things arise from even the simplest of "complex systems" (Conway's game of life and some of Wolfram's automata), much less the wonderful systems detailed by our individual neural mappings and our individual genomes. (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_behavior)

People always think that some human will "write" an AI like HAL or the like, but it is much more likely that nature will roll its own AI once we have made a comfy enough nest for it to germinate. After all, isn't that how we got here? (from an evolutionary biologists standpoint anyhow...)

And again, sorry for being contentious. I just despise the "religious" argument (even if there is no "named religion" being expounded... Let's keep Ockham's Razor at the ready here....)

There is a difference between being the most dominant species on the planet and being composed of living cells, resulting in breathing, aging, dieing, and reproducing. An organic thing should not be looked at in the same light as something that is not.

Why do you assume that our artificial intelligence will not be organic? Look to the rise of wetware, my friend.

@nwatson - That is a religious belief. It may not be a conventional religious belief, but it is a religious belief. Not to dismiss all religions (although, as an atheist, I tend to), but more to note that the GGP had pointed out that he assumed no religious belief.

humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance.

See, there goes that story-telling and thinking we're "the shit" again. Thanks for providing a concrete example.

any time

Humans have a connection with something larger than the universe? What does that even mean?

From the biological point of view, the simplest species is AS SUCCESSFUL as the most complex species, since both are still alive and procreating.

Why do humans have eternal significance? To whom?

There's no way to prove we're unique in the universe. At most you could say the known universe, but even then you're going to have a hard time convincing people of that.

At most you could say the known universe

Known to who? I don't like this very self-referencing way of thinking. Very similar to the discovery of America... people were already in America way before Columbus came and "discovered" it. (although apparently he didn't even realize he hadn't arrived to India)

My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with.

How about an opinion that's so muddled that it's not even wrong?

It's akin to having a group of people sketching on a large piece of paper, trying to build on each other's marks to create an accurate representation of a scene, and someone comes in a scribbles all over it saying "but I see scribbles! All pencil marks are valid! Don't be so limited!".

He/She's allowed to have such an opinion, but this discussion is trying for a particular feel and that isn't contributing helpfully to it.

How are we unique? Do you know there is no other life in the universe similar to us? Can you prove there is no other life in the universe similar(or the same) as us? What do we have a connection to? God? Am I less significant because I don't feel this connection, because I don't feel humans have eternal significance?

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