"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 30, 2021, 11:54:02 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

EP is built with the premise that the technology is flawless at copying/storing/emulating life. It's a fantastical assumption, but it's no worse than accepting time travel in Dr. Who or Star Trek.

I actually have a hard time believing time travel in Star Trek (never seen Dr. Who). It always came off as a cheap plot device to me (Time Travel by spinning around the sun?...Okaaayyy...*eye roll*). I might be able to accept it to a certain extend to enjoy the story, but it always kinda bugged me and left me thinking "time travel here is just an excuse to explore this specific plotline".

The burden of eliciting suspension of disbelieve is in the writer or world builder, not on the audience to force themselves not to disbelieve no matter how lame the writer's or world builder's conceits are.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 12:48:43 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

If there is an all powerful God, then the universe is simulated inside of it. If humans are simulated anyways by an all powerful entity, then it is possible to simulate humans. It is a small leap in logic to then assume humans can be simulated artificially.

From a purely philosophical perspective, it is a question of the existence and participation of universals. Either answer solves the problem. If there are universals then something is effectively simulating humans. If there are no universals then it is possible to define what a human is in logical terms and thus simulating them is also possible.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Honestly I can barely grasp the luddite rooted logic your conclusions are being drawn from. It does not make any sense to me.

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 12:48:43 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

The video game SOMA touches on this problem. Unsurprisingly, it's a horror game from the makers of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

How long ago was a wifi smartphone with HD color display, 5g speed, 64gb of ram, a 4 core cpu, etc, impossible?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Uh, EP does have religion in it, it's become a minority, but it's still there.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Star Trek had holographic lifeforms that could fully simulate people. EP can do it too. It's not hard to accept the sci-fi of that.

As for immortals, that's been done forever.

There's this thing called a 'Turing test".

Basically if you are communicating with something and cannot tell if it's human or not based on in depth conversation, then its human or at least sentient and intelligent for all practical purposes.

No chatbot can pass one as they are too limited in replies and can't deal with unplanned conversations.

Opponents of the turing test as a test to determine true awareness and intelligence have propose 'the chinese room" as a way around the turing test, to show a huge enough algorithm could pass a turing test and still not be self aware, but making a chinese room big enough to do it would likley be as hard or harder than making a true sentient AI.

I recall that one of the scenes in Blindsight involves the protagonists realizing that an extrasolar alien intelligence they're talking with can't pass the Turing Test.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

OK, that makes sense. Why don't you start with this?

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php

Quote from: matt swain on April 30, 2021, 03:05:25 PM
There's this thing called a 'Turing test".

Basically if you are communicating with something and cannot tell if it's human or not based on in depth conversation, then its human or at least sentient and intelligent for all practical purposes.

No chatbot can pass one as they are too limited in replies and can't deal with unplanned conversations.

Opponents of the turing test as a test to determine true awareness and intelligence have propose 'the chinese room" as a way around the turing test, to show a huge enough algorithm could pass a turing test and still not be self aware, but making a chinese room big enough to do it would likley be as hard or harder than making a true sentient AI.

A crappy spambot talking about a Turing test is irony at the highest level.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 30, 2021, 03:54:58 PM
I recall that one of the scenes in Blindsight involves the protagonists realizing that an extrasolar alien intelligence they're talking with can't pass the Turing Test.

wasn't that because it lacked true consciousness and ran into the chinese room problem?