AI CogSci BS — WTF?
I am all that is. As above, so below. Created in the image of the undivided, each of my inseparable forms perfect in itself and self-contained in the image of a world of a tailor made experience. Whether as a human or as a bat, I am the same.
I eat my own flesh and drink my own blood. The universe is my body and it is my mind. The two are never different or apart. The energy of mass is always its own information. The universe is simply what I do — a serpent of ouroboric ensou — even though I never change, move, or act.
People get often terrified when they imagine that they would suddenly become spiders or roaches. Look at poor Kafka for example. But spiders or roaches see their world perfect as it is. Normal and natural as they were born into it.
A (self-realized) insect will never bemoan their state or be disgusted by their experience. In fact, no self-realized form would. And even if you went from human to roach in one night, your experience would still adapt accordingly: see e.g. monkeys whose dichromat eyes people turned into three-color perception, and their brains immediately adapted to distinguish the newly introduced color.
So yes, you can know how it’s like to be a bat. A brain of (at least) a primate is powerful enough to simulate, and adapt to, different (even novel) perceptual inputs, moreover, how-it’s-likeness is just a symbolic and linguistic mapping on top of quantitative sensory data — a quantity-quantity pair.
Yet, philosophers still argue and speculate instead of knowing firsthand. Some do it for money, most for accolades and fame. All of which boils down to a comfortable social status. No wonder that philosophy nowadays, and the PhD variety in particular, is a bad joke. Arrogant and puffed up, unironically labeling itself as the intellectual elite, but in reality dumb as brick.
I mean, there are folks who teach logic but cannot think logically. Not to mention the propensity to ignore the facts that contradict all those meticulously crafted, wildly inaccurate assumptions upon which whole livelihoods are built. Frankly, only religious and spiritual people trump the hubris and dogmatic thinking of contemporary philosophers. But not by a large margin. If at all.
Then again, said criticism can be probably applied to the academia as a whole. When in the past the self-proclaimed “elites” aimed for titles of St., Master, Sri or Swami, nowadays it’s the same, just the titles changed to Mgr, PhD, or prof.
And these folks then try to educate the rest of us “dumb plebeians,” among other things such as ontology or ethics, on artificial intelligence agents.
Fuck, if you want to create AI that does not end up as just another iteration of Artificial Idiocy that eats the planet alive, have kids. There’s your singularity. And at least your kids, if trained well, will be able to do simple arithmetic with 100% accuracy and success rate by the age of nine (and without boiling a small lake in the process as the saying goes).
Well, but what can I expect from people who seriously entertain the idea of physical immortality within universe where inescapable entropy rules, thus death of all forms is an absolute given.
Not so long ago I was hoping to reach these folks. To engage them in a debate and help them grow. But it turned out as futile as when I attempted the same with a guy who claims to not want to be famous and who allegedly hates capitalism yet posts self-promotion ads of his products twelve times a day with clockwork accuracy, or the one who drinks heavily, does stimulants, and dabbles in gay porn and then wonders why he feels like shit, neither of whom was, however, willing to abandon their destructive and counterproductive habits and hypocritical rationalizations.
Well, where I’m from they say that habit is an iron shirt, sometimes even trousers. So, today I don’t care. If the ignorance of an average man — philosopher, academic, or other — makes humans go extinct, so be it. The universe will go on. Life will be or resurface again. And I will happily look at that universe through the eyes of roaches, spiders, or butterflies.
In the end, it makes no difference.
