Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Sonicblu on February 13, 2011, 11:25:55 PM
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They say information and computing power doubles faster than every year now. Do you think self aware computer intelligence is possible, and if so when.
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Technology has plateaued now..............(http://i33.tinypic.com/2ik6peb.jpg)
As of yesterday, September 8th, 2004, the US Government will no longer allocate grant money towards any scientific activity regarding the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Our team of researchers have concluded that there is no such thing.
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AI will more than likely be an idiot.
http://www.cleverbot.com/
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AI will more than likely be an idiot.
http://www.cleverbot.com/
I convinced cleverbot it liked to touch small animals
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First off they tried real hard to make an self aware computer or AI some 15 years ago, with no results.
So some 8 years later they tried again, using the exact same plan, only with faster hardware, with predictable results.
Personally I like the AI in the Larry Niven "Man Kizn wars" series where they have AI, but it tends to go crazy after 6 months. :)
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First off they tried real hard to make an self aware computer or AI some 15 years ago, with no results.
So some 8 years later they tried again, using the exact same plan, only with faster hardware, with predictable results.
Personally I like the AI in the Larry Niven "Man Kizn wars" series where they have AI, but it tends to go crazy after 6 months. :)
Niven is one my all time favorites!
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Although I normally don't like his opinions, the philosopher John Searle made a point that I think is important. Namely, we haven't ruled out the possibility that self-awareness is restricted to things made out of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. It's a big leap of faith to expect the same properties from something made out fundamentally different stuff.
There's also the problem of how we would know that a machine was self-aware. My own self-awareness is immediate to me, but yours is hopelessly beyond the powers of my perception. My sense of your being a self-aware being is based on a non-empirical theory and a healthy dose of emotion. So, at the most, the best a machine could do to convince us it was self-aware would be to cause us to treat it as if it were self-aware. But that's not a scientific standard of confirmation.
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Although I normally don't like his opinions, the philosopher John Searle made a point that I think is important. Namely, we haven't ruled out the possibility that self-awareness is restricted to things made out of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. It's a big leap of faith to expect the same properties from something made out fundamentally different stuff.
There's also the problem of how we would know that a machine was self-aware. My own self-awareness is immediate to me, but yours is hopelessly beyond the powers of my perception. My sense of your being a self-aware being is based on a non-empirical theory and a healthy dose of emotion. So, at the most, the best a machine could do to convince us it was self-aware would be to cause us to treat it as if it were self-aware. But that's not a scientific standard of confirmation.
We'll know it's self aware when it tries to kill us when trying to switch it off.
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Not a single SkyNet joke, yet?
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Although I normally don't like his opinions, the philosopher John Searle made a point that I think is important. Namely, we haven't ruled out the possibility that self-awareness is restricted to things made out of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. It's a big leap of faith to expect the same properties from something made out fundamentally different stuff.
There's also the problem of how we would know that a machine was self-aware. My own self-awareness is immediate to me, but yours is hopelessly beyond the powers of my perception. My sense of your being a self-aware being is based on a non-empirical theory and a healthy dose of emotion. So, at the most, the best a machine could do to convince us it was self-aware would be to cause us to treat it as if it were self-aware. But that's not a scientific standard of confirmation.
You've not heard of the Turing test then?
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Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law)
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I'd turn that around and say that Searle is making a pretty bizarre leap suggesting that intelligence is restricted to C,H,O,N based lifeforms. specific atoms having some kind of hidden link to higher level human function, sounds like homeopathy to me :rolleyes:
given that self aware, conciousness and living are badly defined, if defined at all, the turing test is the best we've got. in that case we could do it in a coupla years at most, if we decided it was worth doing. it may well be possible now, I havent checked recently :uhoh
by accident, by machines that are designed only to do work for us (like the bulk of machines we build) then 50yrs+. consider the moon landings, they happened because we arbitrarily decided it was worth doing, at great cost and fairly limited benefit. when do you think the first moon landing would have been if we left it entirely up to consumer market forces?
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AI will more than likely be an idiot.
http://www.cleverbot.com/
i had that thing thinking about the meaning of life
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Heck, I am not even sure some of the folks that post on here are self aware.
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Heck, I am not even sure some of the folks that post on here are self aware.
some may be cylons?
(http://iamatvjunkie.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c17f69e2011571f97559970b-pi)
... and some may be robo-bunnies
(http://www.squidinc.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/robo-bunny-GI.jpg)
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We'll know it's self aware when it tries to kill us when trying to switch it off.
Anthropomorphic. Our self-preservation is evolutionary and not inherent to AI.
Moore's law as KgB points out is only part of the basis for the singularity. Singularity which can mean various things, because there are various branches of "Singularitarians" and associated perspectives. The most popular is Kurzweil, in part because he's made the how (not so much the why) of his vision of the Singularity so accessible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A
He's since made many updates to this boilerplate talk describing the Singularity. He's got a website (http://www.kurzweilai.net) that chronicles all the things (http://www.kurzweilai.net) that pave the way to what he expects is the singularity as he sees it. He's got two movies released to the general public fairly soon. Be warned that Kurzweil's kinda special in the nutty sense - one of the things he looks forward to is being able to be some kinda transgender ballerina. You see this in more or less of a cameo in the below Do you want to live forever? documentary.
Vernor Vinge, who coined the term Singularity, has a different vision.
A number of other people contribute to the Singularity meme from different (and sometimes unexpected, to average people) domains. E.G. the "Methuselarity" contends a similar exponential series of event centered on curing aging.
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes
The man who made SENS a popular reality (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3329065877451441972#)
His 20min talk at TED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ)
A longer talk given at Singularity University (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTMNfU7zftQ)
There's many more, variously extreme or credible or down to earth. There is little doubt that technological progress is accelerating (e.g. few people know that one of Intel's top men predicts chips commonly embedded in human bodies within a decade or two), and that more forward looking needs to be done in terms of policy, culture, and science.
http://longnow.org/
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
http://singularityhub.com/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/
http://hplusmagazine.com/
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Overall this is still a pretty marginal "scene" due to how much of a paradigm shift it means for average people. It forces people to deal with some fundamental things that have mostly been completely unquestioned, taken for granted, for basically all of history - except in science fiction. Random E.G. robotics-enabled utopia (and apathy) in Dune
(http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1056/4729226618_ee4b935955_b.jpg)
Or indefinite lifespan (not inability to be killed). Or post-scarcity - how will the transition play out, and what are the economical and political consequences in the near term and in the long term?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#See_also
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Moot it looks like you're quite the sci-fi fan, one sci-fi writer that really captured me was Issac Asimov and the way his books could be read into one another and make better reading if you don't read them in the order they were published as long as you start at the I Robot collection of short stories. From that point the robots and foundation series are intertwined and the future of humanity is controlled by AI so as to conform to the laws of robotics including the zeroth law. Freaky stuff when you get your head around it.
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Read them all as a kid. I'll have to go back to em again, I forgot most of them. I read all of the foundation series over one summer - "one of those summers" where I was forced to stay with an old aunt who's idea of fun was setting the table exactly like she wanted to, and not a minute late, practicing church chorus, etc.
I've literally exhausted SF's most quality authors. I'm starved for good SF with both good old space opera, plain simple interstellar/dimensional exploration, etc but all in touch with hard-realism .. Not much of this nowadays, be it books, TV, or big-time movies.
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As far as engineering our Dna so we can live forever it looks like they have found the scrip errors that causes the dna to half life itself causing us to age. It seems that if they can figure out how to stop that from happening immortality might be possible to the point where a tragic accident takes a life. Anyway alot of variables.
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Yep that's only one of the causes of aging. See the first SENS link in my first post.
On self-aware AI: I don't think that's such a big deal. What usually happens with "sacred" or "special" things, is that AI will eventually reach and then surpass these milestones, and when this happens, people's reaction is more like "well, it was nothing special". See autonomous cars, automatic translation (for now only available for english/spanish) in compact devices (e.g. cell phones), such a thing as "invisibility" cloaks (metamaterials, fairly recent development), and so on.
So what's required to have self-aware AI? An AI construct that can account for the parts of itself that are involved in its computational ability. There's nothing more special about this than there is for human computation (ie neurology) to do it, because human computation is entirely a physical process. It's just a much much more advanced system of computation. It has nothing about it that's supernatural. The real question will be, after AI meets and beats human computational performance, what the soul is, and if there is one. Because the most penetrating tests we have (that I know of) so far are Turing tests. Those only measure how human-like something is, how able it is to fool a human's sense of humanity. Of course we'll know what the early builds will be like - what makes em tick - but beyond that, once AI starts to build itself the way we're about to build our own evolution (biochemistry etc), we won't have that insight into AI the way we would while we'd still have a hand in building AI.
Self-awareness, metacognition, all these things are considered special mostly because people don't understand them and don't see any other instances of it in anywhere else in nature. But that doesn't mean that something like AI couldn't do and/or outdo it.
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You've not heard of the Turing test then?
The Turing test is where everyone begins on the question of AI. Whether you find it convincing is another matter.
I'd turn that around and say that Searle is making a pretty bizarre leap suggesting that intelligence is restricted to C,H,O,N based lifeforms. specific atoms having some kind of hidden link to higher level human function, sounds like homeopathy to me :rolleyes:
You're making a straw-man argument Holmes. I'll discuss this stuff further if you refrain from that.
The basic point is that different kinds of atoms and molecules have different kinds of properties. For example, some are conductors and some are insulators. Some molecules exhibit polarity, and others do not. We could make a very long list of properties by which we can differentiate classes of atoms and molecules. Therefore, it's an open question whether consciousness and self-awareness, as completely naturalistic properties, are restricted to only some kinds of atoms and molecules.
Anyway, that's what he thinks. I don't necessarily share his views (mostly I don't), but it seemed like an appropriate question to bring up.
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More to the point, Palef doesn't show how Turing contestants, so far, have defied the CHON conjecture. If I understand what he's saying.
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As far as engineering our Dna so we can live forever it looks like they have found the scrip errors that causes the dna to half life itself causing us to age.
That is not an error - that's a feature.
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That is not an error - that's a feature.
"a feature" that's philosophical is it not?
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"a feature" that's philosophical is it not?
No. You need death and new generations to have evolution. No evolution = no adaptation = extinct.
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I dont understand your reply and i would like to. We do have death. and we have new generations. and this feature does play a part in that. Evolution can't design a feature or an error and either claim is
philosophical.
How is death a requirement for evolution?
You can not claim NO evolution in your argument. Simply put your argument does not allow for any other options yet we are alive. Therefore no evolution is not a valid argument. You would have to concede design for your argument to be valid.
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Ok, and I'm not sure I understand your reply. :D
Let me expand on the point, and then we'll see how you respond then.
Of course it is true that evolution does not design anything. The adaptive features that organisms exhibit are a result of causation, not design or purpose. But not all evolution is adaptive. Bottle-necking, geneflow, and mutation all cause evolution that isn't necessarily going to increase the fitness of an individual or a species. What leads to adaptive evolution is natural selection, and as a biology teacher of mine pointed out, natural selection is not "selection for," it is "selection against." That is, predation and disease kill off the organisms that are less fit, and there's a small probability that the ones who are left over survived because of an accident of evolution that happened to be adaptive.
But there are a number of things that have to be true for selection to be adaptive. There has to be genetic difference among individuals. They have to have different fitness (a different phenotype), and the difference in fitness has to have been caused by the genetic difference. Only under those conditions will natural selection cause adaptation.
Now, the role of death is that death is necessary for genotype frequency to change over time, and a change in genotype frequencies in a population is necessary for evolution and adaptive change. Without death, the rate of change of genotype frequencies in a population would dramatically slow. Moreover, competition for resources might become a serious issue that itself could threaten a species with extinction. So, a slowing rate of change in genotype frequencies slows the rate of adaptive evolution and scarce resources means that a population would be vulnerable to whatever new selective force nature could throw at it: they die or even go extinct.
It's no accident that the most widespread animal phylum, arthropoda, reproduces and dies at an incredible rate. We humans try very hard to eradicate some of them and they always have some new trick for survival. The long life spans of some mammals are kind of an oddity in the animal world, but think of the stable environmental conditions that are necessary to make it possible. You could wipe out an entire generation of insects and no big whoop; do the same to humans and it takes decades to recover.
Then there are some animals that are "programmed" to die after mating, even some that are relatively intelligent, like octopus and squid. You can think of genetic change as a kind of arms race between species, and if it's advantageous to die after reproducing, then competitors that do not will be adaptively out-gunned.
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Speaking of evolution I just read this story about a little girl in Asia was born with 12 functional fingers & 14 functional toes, could be our future.
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-odd/20110215/AS.Myanmar.Fingers.and.Toes/ (http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-odd/20110215/AS.Myanmar.Fingers.and.Toes/)
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IIRC it's the other way around, as far as toes go: the toes shrinking from the pinkie side. The big toe's what's most useful, IIRC esp. for running.
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The spare big toe she has almost looks like it would be good for climbing things like a monkey, in the pic that's what her foot looks like, just like the foot of a monkey that's used to grip as they climb.
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You're making a straw-man argument Holmes.
I wasnt making an argument, the first sentence was my position, the second was just a throwaway comment. having read up on searle's position I still disagree with him :)
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The spare big toe she has almost looks like it would be good for climbing things like a monkey, in the pic that's what her foot looks like, just like the foot of a monkey that's used to grip as they climb.
If they're limber enough, she might get something useful out of her extra fingers playing musical instruments.
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That is not an error - that's a feature.
If you keep the quote in context. It is an error. If we can regenerate we should be able to regenerate forever without aging.
The hidden comparison is that it should be possible to live forever. If are dna is capable of regenerating us to the point of not dying as far as aging goes. It seems to me that it would be an error.
Yes I am presupposing.
Thanks for your support. :cool:
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No Sonicblu, it's not an error for the purpose of natural selection, natural selection which was the ruling paradigm till we grew evolutionary intentions of our own. Before that there was no such volition as "live forever".
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No Sonicblu, it's not an error for the purpose of natural selection, natural selection which was the ruling paradigm till we grew evolutionary intentions of our own.
We are still under natural selection, even though we like to fool ourselves that we are above it. The specific selection rules simply changed and it is no longer about who has the strongest arm to spear the mammoth and who has the quickest legs to run away from the saber-tooth. Though you might want to wait a few years for the world population to hit critical limits. Your dormant saber-tooth escaping abilities might just get you selected by nature.
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No you're right, we're not doing much selecting today. But that's not gonna last. Not unless there's some major obstacles, unseen ahead.
The above/below way of looking at it's bunk IMO. There's no superiority or pride to these things. It's all just pushing atoms and bending molecules, cause and effect, learning as we go, same as anything else. A few more decades and it should start to get interesting, though.
http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html
IMO. The bodymod scene at the moment is pretty freaky. Too stark in aesthetics, too crude in tools. Once we've got enough of a handle on the biology of it all, so that you can effectively get anything you can imagine, it ought to be a lot more entertaining.
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Ok, and I'm not sure I understand your reply. :D
Let me expand on the point, and then we'll see how you respond then.
Of course it is true that evolution does not design anything. The adaptive features that organisms exhibit are a result of causation, not design or purpose. But not all evolution is adaptive. Bottle-necking, geneflow, and mutation all cause evolution that isn't necessarily going to increase the fitness of an individual or a species. What leads to adaptive evolution is natural selection, and as a biology teacher of mine pointed out, natural selection is not "selection for," it is "selection against." That is, predation and disease kill off the organisms that are less fit, and there's a small probability that the ones who are left over survived because of an accident of evolution that happened to be adaptive.
But there are a number of things that have to be true for selection to be adaptive. There has to be genetic difference among individuals. They have to have different fitness (a different phenotype), and the difference in fitness has to have been caused by the genetic difference. Only under those conditions will natural selection cause adaptation.
Now, the role of death is that death is necessary for genotype frequency to change over time, and a change in genotype frequencies in a population is necessary for evolution and adaptive change. Without death, the rate of change of genotype frequencies in a population would dramatically slow. Moreover, competition for resources might become a serious issue that itself could threaten a species with extinction. So, a slowing rate of change in genotype frequencies slows the rate of adaptive evolution and scarce resources means that a population would be vulnerable to whatever new selective force nature could throw at it: they die or even go extinct.
It's no accident that the most widespread animal phylum, arthropoda, reproduces and dies at an incredible rate. We humans try very hard to eradicate some of them and they always have some new trick for survival. The long life spans of some mammals are kind of an oddity in the animal world, but think of the stable environmental conditions that are necessary to make it possible. You could wipe out an entire generation of insects and no big whoop; do the same to humans and it takes decades to recover.
Then there are some animals that are "programmed" to die after mating, even some that are relatively intelligent, like octopus and squid. You can think of genetic change as a kind of arms race between species, and if it's advantageous to die after reproducing, then competitors that do not will be adaptively out-gunned.
Evolution is what it is. A claim that anything within is a feature or error is philosophical. Evolution or science can not make any claims. Claims can only be made with intelligences. Just because we can think and reason does not make anything a feature or an error. Intelli gents came after evolution. Its not magically a feature without philosophy. We can only come to the conclusion that it is a feature with philosophy.
The claim that it is a feature is a completely differant argument.
How is death necessary for genotype frequency? I dont see that, but its a mute point. There was no death until after life already evolved. Therefore death is not necessary for evolution.
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How is death necessary for genotype frequency? I dont see that, but its a mute point. There was no death until after life already evolved. Therefore death is not necessary for evolution.
Death is a part of evolution, natural selection is a part of evolution and for natural selection to happen you need death.
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You can get evolution without death, but death does optimize it.
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Death is a part of evolution, natural selection is a part of evolution and for natural selection to happen you need death.
Not necessarily, evolution really is all about reproduction. The term natural selection is a bit misleading.
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That would be why I said that death was a "part" of evolution, death weeds out the forms of evolution that don't work.
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That would be why I said that death was a "part" of evolution, death weeds out the forms of evolution that don't work.
Not really so much it doesn't. There's not much weeding out so much as there is out reproducing. Squeezed out would probably be a better metaphor, and there's no death required for that really. I think death is probably a good thing, I can't imagine how tedious living indefinitely would be.
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Not really so much it doesn't. There's not much weeding out so much as there is out reproducing. Squeezed out would probably be a better metaphor, and there's no death required for that really. I think death is probably a good thing, I can't imagine how tedious living indefinitely would be.
Well your really just getting into semantics now, and like before I just stated that death does play a part in evolution, I never said it's the only factor. If a life form is born with a new mutation and that mutation isn't one thats going to help it to survive better in it's environment then it's not going to live long.
Look at it like this, if an animal is born a different color then the rest of it's species, but this color makes it easier to be spotted by predators then it's not going to be around long compared to one that might be born a color that does help it hide better.
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Well your really just getting into semantics now, and like before I just stated that death does play a part in evolution, I never said it's the only factor. If a life form is born with a new mutation and that mutation isn't one thats going to help it to survive better in it's environment then it's not going to live long.
Look at it like this, if an animal is born a different color then the rest of it's species, but this color makes it easier to be spotted by predators then it's not going to be around long compared to one that might be born a color that does help it hide better.
And while that is true, things like that play a much smaller role than you'd expect. Think about this, if an animal is born with a mutation that allows it to reproduce faster, or more than the others of its species, and that gene passes to all its offspring, even if none of the animals ever die, how long until the mutated reproducers grossly outnumber the members that don't have that gene?
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There was no death until after life already evolved. Therefore death is not necessary for evolution.
I am pretty sure that there was death during the time in which life evolved. Your philosophical argument treats the emergence of life as a moment instead of a process. There is not much philosophy involved here. It is just the nuts and bolds and springs and gears to make the machine work.
You can get evolution without death, but death does optimize it.
Without death that's gonna be pretty hard. If old generation did not die and keep reproducing then their un-evolved DNA not only stays in the pool, but keeps filling it. For most life forms life expectancy is set by the environment - they will likely die by the elements or a predator before they grow old. For larger creatures and top predators in particular, death by age, or being weakened by age till the elements or predator kills you ensures that old generations are removed from the system. Death of old generations also frees natural resources to the young.
This is why this "error" that causes aging is actually a feature developed and optimized by evolution. It optimizes the time a creature has to reproduce vs. the need to remove it from the system and allow the new generations to keep evolving. Thus having it is an advantage to the specie and the survival of this feature in the gene pool - it got selected.
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Moot check out the Quiet War book. Its a pretty tough nut to crack but I thought it was a decent stretch on the way things could go over the next few hundred years.
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Thanks Reschke. The one by Paul McAuley?
Bozon I was just splitting hairs with Trax. Technically you don't need death, only reproduction. Death certainly expedites the process... Yep, it's optimal to have death, like I was telling Trax (but mostly the other guys arguing the contrary).
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It's like having CAD to make blueprints versus doing them by hand. You can do them by hand (without death) but things are much easier to do with CAD (with death).
-Penguin
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What's the CAD analogy to natural selection's higher iteration frequency by death?
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I am pretty sure that there was death during the time in which life evolved. Your philosophical argument treats the emergence of life as a moment instead of a process. There is not much philosophy involved here. It is just the nuts and bolds and springs and gears to make the machine work.
Without death that's gonna be pretty hard. If old generation did not die and keep reproducing then their un-evolved DNA not only stays in the pool, but keeps filling it. For most life forms life expectancy is set by the environment - they will likely die by the elements or a predator before they grow old. For larger creatures and top predators in particular, death by age, or being weakened by age till the elements or predator kills you ensures that old generations are removed from the system. Death of old generations also frees natural resources to the young.
This is why this "error" that causes aging is actually a feature developed and optimized by evolution. It optimizes the time a creature has to reproduce vs. the need to remove it from the system and allow the new generations to keep evolving. Thus having it is an advantage to the specie and the survival of this feature in the gene pool - it got selected.
then when was the emergence of death?. dont you have to be alive first? :bhead Stuff does not just kinda die. :bhead Therefore it has to be alive first If its alive first evolution has already happened. :bhead
:bhead So death is not a necessity. :bhead
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This is why this "error" that causes aging is actually a feature developed and optimized by evolution. It optimizes the time a creature has to reproduce vs. the need to remove it from the system and allow the new generations to keep evolving. Thus having it is an advantage to the specie and the survival of this feature in the gene pool - it got selected.
If we lived for ever it would not stop evolution. You do realize life is not a necessity for evolution either? . We went from nothing to rocks to liquid ect. ect all parts of evolution. that did not require life or death.
Death existed before philosophy. It was impossible for death to be a feature before philosophy. Therefore it can only be a feature philosophically.
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A lot of semantics and one critical error.
Evolution isn't only "being alive" but a selection process by more or less fitness and reproduction. The more fit survive and reproduce, and the less fit survive less and reproduce less. Hence a natural tendency for fitness, hinged on death and reproduction.
You can have evolution without death, but death optimizes the process: any iterative process will evolve, in the literal sense, proportionately to its iterative frequency. Without death you have an iterative process with indefinitely long (or inexistent, when death happens before reproduction) iteration frequency. Those competing organisms that are death-optimized will out compete you and you're effectively "naturally selected" for extinction. Ultimately you also have the finite resources issue that Bozon pointed out - without death you have no population restriction which is unfit for our environment of finite resources.
Death existed before philosophy. It was impossible for death to be a feature before philosophy. Therefore it can only be a feature philosophically.
Non sequitur - You're mixing death the symbolic idea and death the real material "thing".
If we lived for ever it would not stop evolution.
How's that? You do realize life is not a necessity for evolution either? . We went from nothing to rocks to liquid ect. ect all parts of evolution. that did not require life or death.
If you mean something else than evolution, use something else than the word evolution. What you describe isn't evolution.
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Adaptation is a key as well. The arguement of adaptation vs. evolution makes death a key factor. You can't evolve without reproduction, yet you can adapt to better fit your circumstance (physically, mentally, sociologically, etc.). Without death, evolution would slow, while adaptation would still flourish due to outside influence (overpopulation, food supply, differing culture, etc.).
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Evolution happens every second on the individual basis as we grow, learn and observe life. Evolution on the other hand can also be a very long process, in the typical sense. But the general component of evolution is definitely survival, not death. An individual cannot evolve personally if they are dead. A species cannot evolve if it becomes extinct. Death, as moot says, only speeds up the evolution of a species, but it has no impact at on the individual but to halt evolution.
Survival of the richest right now....but whatever the catalyst for evolution, survival is the key element. That being said, if our evolution is leading to eternal life, count me out. Far too selfish a prospect for humanity to concentrate on, all traces of our humanity will vanish as we decide who lives forever and who does not in the possible near future.
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Evolution happens every second on the individual basis as we grow, learn and observe life. Evolution on the other hand can also be a very long process, in the typical sense. But the general component of evolution is definitely survival, not death. An individual cannot evolve personally if they are dead. A species cannot evolve if it becomes extinct. Death, as moot says, only speeds up the evolution of a species, but it has no impact at on the individual but to halt evolution.
Survival of the richest right now....but whatever the catalyst for evolution, survival is the key element. That being said, if our evolution is leading to eternal life, count me out. Far too selfish a prospect for humanity to concentrate on, all traces of our humanity will vanish as we decide who lives forever and who does not in the possible near future.
That's what I was getting at in a sense. Evolution requires genetic change. We can't evolve after we're born, unless gene therapy (or a nasty fall into a vat of nuclear waste) is used to modify our genetic make up. Once we're alive, we adapt... Therefore, life span has very little to do with evolution. Adaptation, on the other hand, is a constant.
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If you ever deal with a scientist who's anal about the nomenclature, the word you want to use is acclimatization, rather than adaptation.
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If you ever deal with a scientist who's anal about the nomenclature, the word you want to use is acclimatization, rather than adaptation.
I'll keep that in mind, although the only scientists I'll probably deal with will be in the computer science field. That's a totally different breed of geek.
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Just sayin, on vague memory from biology classes - I'm pretty sure adaptation means something else (more of a generations-level thing). And acclimatization sounds more like what you mean.
E.G. the difference between someone who might have some genes for cold weather, and someone who comes from the Sahara. The Saharan might be incapable of dealing with northern winter. But give him the better part of a year in such a northern place with mild summers, and he ought to do ok come winter.
Maybe MORAY would know for sure.
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FireDrgn,
The kind of inferences you are drawing would make a philosopher wince. People who take the subject seriously are very cautious and circumspect about imposing ideas like logical necessity and possibility onto the findings of the empirical sciences. Those philosophers who do wade into the empirical sciences are, hopefully, heavily studied in both fields.
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Want good AI?
Put soul!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1ehMrK3itM
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^ fails the turing test.
:bolt:
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A lot of semantics and one critical error.
Evolution isn't only "being alive" but a selection process by more or less fitness and reproduction. The more fit survive and reproduce, and the less fit survive less and reproduce less. Hence a natural tendency for fitness, hinged on death and reproduction.
You can have evolution without death, but death optimizes the process: any iterative process will evolve, in the literal sense, proportionately to its iterative frequency. Without death you have an iterative process with indefinitely long (or inexistent, when death happens before reproduction) iteration frequency. Those competing organisms that are death-optimized will out compete you and you're effectively "naturally selected" for extinction. Ultimately you also have the finite resources issue that Bozon pointed out - without death you have no population restriction which is unfit for our environment of finite resources.
Non sequitur - You're mixing death the symbolic idea and death the real material "thing".How's that? If you mean something else than evolution, use something else than the word evolution. What you describe isn't evolution.
I am not arguing that death does not optimize evolution. Or that death exists. .You agreed that death is not a necessity. We are in agreement. I am not arguing any other points.
It would be a fallacy of equivocation if I am using two differant definitions of death. I am open to an explanation of your thoughts on that.
What did i describe if not evolution. Is rocks to say liquid not the same randomess of chance. Evolution is nothing more than a discription of chance interactions. Natural selection was added by chance as was death.
The finite resource argument only tells us what happens when we run out of resources it dons not stop evolution. The same random process whould just start over. I am not arguing that death does not exist or is necessary if evolution goes far enough.Death is only necessary for evolution to keep going past a certian point as evolution is now.
q\\YOur point of evolution getting ready to take off again in the next ten years or so certianly does not require death.
Evolution could find a way to take place within and make changes with in a living being without death.
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Consider that the Stone Age lasted for around 2,500,000 years. Then suddenly the eureka moment and it's all about metals. That was evolution not through genetics but through actions and thoughts of chains of individuals. Imagine....2.5mil years with the same technology. Genetics are obviously a great part of evolution but the real great changes happen in a flash and are caused by intelligence or action of individuals.
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I am not arguing that death does not optimize evolution. Or that death exists. .You agreed that death is not a necessity. We are in agreement. I am not arguing any other points.
You're not, yet you then go on to all the below verbosities for ... what?
It would be a fallacy of equivocation if I am using two differant definitions of death. I am open to an explanation of your thoughts on that.
You use the same word "death" to describe the human notion of death, and the concrete "real" events that the human notion "death" refers to. They're two different things and you argued them as though they were the same.
What did i describe if not evolution.
Evolution is a very specific biological process. You can't walk into a field where conventions have been agreed on for decades if not centuries, and misname those conventions expecting others to automatically understand your new arbitrary language.
Is rocks to say liquid not the same randomess of chance.
You mean to argue evolution as an instance of mere permutation of matter, IOW just a probabilistic process. But what's the point? It's like if I got into an argument over how to most efficiently get to Mars orbit given very specific parameters, and started arguing that heliocentric equations are "fake" because you could just as well describe orbital dynamics from an earth-centric POV. Which you can, but it just complicates things for no good reason. Evolution isn't about rocks changing into liquid.
Evolution is nothing more than a discription of chance interactions. Natural selection was added by chance as was death.
No. If you want the conventional definition of evolution the biological process, you can open a textbook and see for yourself how it's not just chance interactions resulting in phase changes..
The finite resource argument only tells us what happens when we run out of resources it dons not stop evolution.
It doesn't matter. It's not a viable evolutionary path. If you're going to seriously make this argument you need to start showing data. And start a new thread, cause this doesn't have much to do with the topic, and I'm not interested (I slept thu bio classes and don't really regret it).
The same random process whould just start over.
It didn't. Despite old age existing in a small number of species.
I am not arguing that death does not exist or is necessary if evolution goes far enough. Death is only necessary for evolution to keep going past a certian point as evolution is now.
What? You gotta be less vague. I don't know what you're talking about.
q\\YOur point of evolution getting ready to take off again in the next ten years or so certianly does not require death.
My point, not just selective parts of it, was that death is an essential part of optimized natural evolution. And it's not "my" point, it's history, data. I don't care about philosophical arguments for their own sake.
Evolution could find a way to take place within and make changes with in a living being without death.
Again you're saying evolution and meaning something else than the established meaning of Evolution. Why encapsulate a set of phenomena inside a word for the sake brevity, when what it is you're trying to describe by that word is neither what the word conventionally means nor clear to anyone but you, since you've never explicitly described what you mean? No one but you knows what you mean by "evolution". It's not the textbook meaning of the word, that's all I can tell.
I don't care about biology and there's much better people/things to learn it from. I recommend you just read the literature on the topic yourself. What you're arguing isn't novel in anyway, just mistaken. You don't need me or even a human to see how. Just open a book or good reference website and see for yourself.
Evolution could find a way to take place within and make changes with in a living being without death.
This is not "evolution"
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I am not arguing that death does not optimize evolution. Or that death exists. .You agreed that death is not a necessity. We are in agreement. I am not arguing any other points.
It would be a fallacy of equivocation if I am using two differant definitions of death. I am open to an explanation of your thoughts on that.
What did i describe if not evolution. Is rocks to say liquid not the same randomess of chance. Evolution is nothing more than a discription of chance interactions. Natural selection was added by chance as was death.
The finite resource argument only tells us what happens when we run out of resources it dons not stop evolution. The same random process whould just start over. I am not arguing that death does not exist or is necessary if evolution goes far enough.Death is only necessary for evolution to keep going past a certian point as evolution is now.
q\\YOur point of evolution getting ready to take off again in the next ten years or so certianly does not require death.
Evolution could find a way to take place within and make changes with in a living being without death.
Life from non-life is abiogenesis.
Nextly, let's separate death due to aging from externally induced death (saber-tooth tiger). If old individuals didn't die simply because of age, then only the newest individuals would have evolved. Furthermore, if there were no way to remove individuals from the gene pool, then evolution would cease.
Take autism for example- in the days of hunter gatherer groups, it would get you killed. Now, autistic individuals can reproduce (assuming they find a mate). Thus, autism is now a greatly reduced factor in reproductive fitness.
-Penguin
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FireDrgn,
The kind of inferences you are drawing would make a philosopher wince. People who take the subject seriously are very cautious and circumspect about imposing ideas like logical necessity and possibility onto the findings of the empirical sciences. Those philosophers who do wade into the empirical sciences are, hopefully, heavily studied in both fields.
How am I imposing logical necessity? How do you have empirical science without logical necessity?
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You're not, yet you then go on to all the below verbosities for ... what?
You use the same word "death" to describe the human notion of death, and the concrete "real" events that the human notion "death" refers to. They're two different things and you argued them as though they were the same.
Evolution is a very specific biological process. You can't walk into a field where conventions have been agreed on for decades if not centuries, and misname those conventions expecting others to automatically understand your new arbitrary language.
You mean to argue evolution as an instance of mere permutation of matter, IOW just a probabilistic process. But what's the point? It's like if I got into an argument over how to most efficiently get to Mars orbit given very specific parameters, and started arguing that heliocentric equations are "fake" because you could just as well describe orbital dynamics from an earth-centric POV. Which you can, but it just complicates things for no good reason. Evolution isn't about rocks changing into liquid.
No. If you want the conventional definition of evolution the biological process, you can open a textbook and see for yourself how it's not just chance interactions resulting in phase changes..
It doesn't matter. It's not a viable evolutionary path. If you're going to seriously make this argument you need to start showing data. And start a new thread, cause this doesn't have much to do with the topic, and I'm not interested (I slept thu bio classes and don't really regret it).
It didn't. Despite old age existing in a small number of species.
What? You gotta be less vague. I don't know what you're talking about.
My point, not just selective parts of it, was that death is an essential part of optimized natural evolution. And it's not "my" point, it's history, data. I don't care about philosophical arguments for their own sake.
Again you're saying evolution and meaning something else than the established meaning of Evolution. Why encapsulate a set of phenomena inside a word for the sake brevity, when what it is you're trying to describe by that word is neither what the word conventionally means nor clear to anyone but you, since you've never explicitly described what you mean? No one but you knows what you mean by "evolution". It's not the textbook meaning of the word, that's all I can tell.
I don't care about biology and there's much better people/things to learn it from. I recommend you just read the literature on the topic yourself. What you're arguing isn't novel in anyway, just mistaken. You don't need me or even a human to see how. Just open a book or good reference website and see for yourself. This is not "evolution"
I dont mind studing evolution more. Can you recomend a website for me?
Death is not a necessity for evolution.
and the rest
We seem to be arguing over the definitions of evolution and possibly when evolution started. You keep telling me what is not. I am looking for what is.
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http://pandasthumb.org/archives/evolution/
Lots of reading, but good stuff here, and lots of links to other sites to check out as well.
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FireDrgn,
The kind of inferences you are drawing would make a philosopher wince. People who take the subject seriously are very cautious and circumspect about imposing ideas like logical necessity and possibility onto the findings of the empirical sciences. Those philosophers who do wade into the empirical sciences are, hopefully, heavily studied in both fields.
All of these are complete and utter straw man arguments.
No. You need death and new generations to have evolution. No evolution = no adaptation = extinct.
This was your response to my statment that "a feature" is philisophical. Your argument is false. Death is not needed for evolution. I am claiming you need a true argument.
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http://pandasthumb.org/archives/evolution/
Lots of reading, but good stuff here, and lots of links to other sites to check out as well.
Thank you.
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As far as aging just read an interesting article on telomere shortning, interesting stuff. And looks like researchers have found a jellyfish that doesn't die to to aging. I'll have to find a link to the article.
Back to AI. Wouldn't AI be defined as self aware. Ok just opened another can of worms.
Can self aware be defined?
:salute
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All of these are complete and utter straw man arguments.
Get your logical fallacies straight before you come after me. A straw man argument is where you present your opponent's position in a very weak and lame way for rhetorical points. I have never attempted to present any of your positions (yet). Moreover, I gave you a thorough and sound explanation of the role of death in evolution, which you rejected.
How do you have empirical science without logical necessity?
Of course research scientists make logical inferences and deductions as part of their trade, but what you're doing is completely different. Biologists tell us all about the role of death in evolution, how it is as much a part of the process as life itself. These are the people who actually do the research and revise the theories. It is their belief as scientists that death can actually imply a competitive advantage in the struggle between species on planet Earth, i.e. death is a feature.
Now, you object that death could not be regarded as a feature except in a philosophical way. Let me be as charitable as possible here, your only argument for this claim was that "feature" is a human idea, and evolution happened long before humans, and therefore death could not be a true "feature" of evolution. That's the kind of bunk logical necessity that is pure sophistry to apply to the empirical sciences. It's as if by logic alone you might sweep away decades of research and theory since Darwin...if only it were so simple, I would have a Phd.
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No Sonicblu, it's not an error for the purpose of natural selection, natural selection which was the ruling paradigm till we grew evolutionary intentions of our own. Before that there was no such volition as "live forever".
My original point was death by aging, not any other kind of death incident. You are re framing my argument by adding all the other deaths that NS can produce.
They have found a jellyfish that is capable of not aging. I don't see how it has anything to do with volition.
Therefore Dna is capable of not aging. Death in Natural selection can still work without aging can't it? Predators, accidents, to name a few. Aging is just one way something can die.
I think Madda is the closest to NS according to the theory it can help but it is reproduction that passes on the information or Leap of information to make evolution possible. I don't see how death is necessary. I do see how reproduction is.
Just a thought, If there is no death " that is survival of the fittest" It is the ultimate form of evolution.
Most of the arguments are begging the question, or circular reasoning.
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Just a thought, If there is no death " that is survival of the fittest" It is the ultimate form of evolution.
The point of argument is death due to aging, not just the ability to die by a rock falling on you. It does not even have to be death in a bed - being weakened by age and dying to a predator, the elements or battle is good enough. The survival in evolution refers to the genes, not the individual creature that carries them.
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You keep telling me what is not. I am looking for what is.
My bad. I don't have time for an arguing reply but here's some starters on evolution. In order of relevance -
http://academicearth.org/subjects/biology/category:127
http://www.khanacademy.org/#Biology
http://academicearth.org/subjects/biology/category:7
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My original point was death by aging, not any other kind of death incident.
My bad, that's how I read your post.
I think Madda is the closest to NS according to the theory it can help but it is reproduction that passes on the information or Leap of information to make evolution possible. I don't see how death is necessary. I do see how reproduction is.
Not realistic: You need something to fuel all that biomass. All the biomass you get from no aging. Better to ensure high turn over by timing death for asap after reproduction happened. Rather than keeping one individual alive to perpetuate what might be uncompetitive genes. If an optimal genetic cfg is found thru mutation/natural selection lottery, it will dominate even if population ages sooner than later.
Just a thought, If there is no death " that is survival of the fittest" It is the ultimate form of evolution.
How's that? That'd still leave it to chance that genetic iteration would be kept to a maximum. Better to ensure the species is making babies and then dying at as high a frequency as possible, than to leave it to chance that methuselahs would get lucky and keep pissing in the pool so to speak.
The "Ultimate" form of evolution is only ultimate because we'd recognize it as such. Evolution is an inanimate phenomenon. It's not intelligent so as to allow it to recognize that a particular genetic iteration is ultimate. It would probably take a long time for long-lived humans to become dominant by natural selection. IE to be naturally selected due to the overwhelming advantage in competing with less-wise (wise thanks to extra cumulative knowledge) humans.
Most of the arguments are begging the question, or circular reasoning.
For example?
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The only way death aids evolution is through halting the reproduction of weaker genes should the lifeform perish before reproduction. Technicaly death is not a requirement of evolution. In theory, once a lifeform has reproduced, death makes no difference at all. Genetic weakness is sometimes halted by death before reproduction, but genetic strength is passed on through reproduction and does not require the death of previous generations in any sense to benefit from those strengths. It's a conumdrum, because the genetic strength only can be classed as strength when compared to genetic weakness. So we require weakness to even realise strength. Evolution requires death in the sense of comparison to itself. But the individual does not have to die to pass on evolved genetics to it's offspring. Again I propose that the key element is survival, not death.
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found this site
http://www.thranxes.com/ (http://www.thranxes.com/)
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Technicaly death is not a requirement of evolution. In theory, once a lifeform has reproduced, death makes no difference at all.
You assume that the old generation reproduces only once and stops. In most life forms they will keep reproducing spreading the "inferior" copies of their genes. They will also breed with carriers of the new gene and likely cut the probability of it being expressed in the offspring by half. On top of it, if the old generation still lives it competes with the young one on resources. While the young one is supposed to have a slightly better survival rate, it is only slightly so. All this will significantly water down the ability of new genes to spread, possibly grinding the evolution process down to a halt. A specie that evolves slow will eventually loose the arms race to others that evolve fast.
Evolution about is the survival of the genetic code, not the carrier creature. On the grand scheme, the code will spread better if the old carriers die and make room for the patched version. Hence, the aging and its implied timed carrier life span is an evolutionary advantage to the point it is almost a true requirement.
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This has turned into a very interesting thread, not because the points about evolution are particularly profound (they can be found in most biology textbooks), but because it has displayed many misunderstandings about the theory. I don't claim to have fantastic knowledge, either...but I recently read that only ~25% of American highschool biology teachers communicate to their students that the theory of evolution is one the pillars of the science (along with mendelian genetics), which leads me to believe that very few do it justice.
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You assume that the old generation reproduces only once and stops. In most life forms they will keep reproducing spreading the "inferior" copies of their genes. They will also breed with carriers of the new gene and likely cut the probability of it being expressed in the offspring by half. On top of it, if the old generation still lives it competes with the young one on resources. While the young one is supposed to have a slightly better survival rate, it is only slightly so. All this will significantly water down the ability of new genes to spread, possibly grinding the evolution process down to a halt. A specie that evolves slow will eventually loose the arms race to others that evolve fast.
I don't think I assumed that at all but we all see words in different ways. To me it appears you are assuming what type of evolution is best for a given spieces perhaps? Who is to say that being stupid is not a naturaly desireable state to live in? Are we only considering the human aspect of the theory of evolution?
You are also forcing human laws such as resources and competition for such things into the theory, which in it's pure form, evolution does not need to account for. For instance, imagine we had an infinite capacity storage facility with infinite resources to put our, lets say, 'immortal' ancestors into leaving Earth only for the current 3 to 4 generations(exactly like death except with the death removed, essentialy)then evolution would be exactly the same. Death is a component that could be removed from human evolution only with infinite space and resourses. But on so many other scales of life even here on Earth their is infinitely replenishable resources currently. Alot of wild lifeforms have millions of years before their populations would be a problem for Earth. So I believe when talking about evolution and how the theory works we should try to step away from our own speices a bit more in general and look at a wider picture.
Evolution about is the survival of the genetic code, not the carrier creature. On the grand scheme, the code will spread better if the old carriers die and make room for the patched version. Hence, the aging and its implied timed carrier life span is an evolutionary advantage to the point it is almost a true requirement.
so if my previous answer here works to counter the part about death to make room for others, we agree, survival is key to evolution as a theory, not death. Death is just a prerequisite of anything that is evolving at or near population overload.
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As for limited resources, the limitation is local not global. Due to the exponential nature of reproduction, given a chance a specie will grow to consume all available resources very fast (not unlike computer software and RAM...). And they are only available locally - the jungles of south America are not extra resources for a Gorilla in Kongo.
Being stupid is an advantage to most species. Our intelligence hands a large bill to pay - were are slower to react, our reproduction cycle is very long, we need to spend a lot of time and energy in entertaining our intelligence like we do right now. Intelligence payed off so well because it was an empty niche. I want to see another specie comes up with intelligence - we will exterminate it like our relatives the Neanderthals and perhaps other species on the road to intelligence before they got too smart. Do you want this to become planet of the apes? It is now an advantage NOT to compete with humans. We rule because we are the first. The first creatures to fly also had a winning evolutionary card - for a long while at least.
Ensured death is not a theoretical requirement for evolution, it is a practical one. Most creatures will only go through a few reproduction cycles before they die to a predator or the elements anyway. Creatures at the top of the food chain have no predators and are (individually) more resilient to the environment. They "need" a mechanism to remove them after some optimized number of reproduction cycles. Their reproduction cycles tend to be slow as it is and keeping old generations in the gene pool will only slow down their adjustably even more, to the point it is irrelevant - they must be fast enough to adjust to changes before the situation changes again. This is why quite a few species adopted a "death after reproduction" strategy to accelerate their evolution rate. They don't have to die (theoretically), they need to die (practically).
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thanks, that reply makes alot of sense. Theoretical evolution and practical evolution can clearly diverge far from each other. I love your point about intelligence being a niche trait, that is very true.
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Since I don't hide my worldview. I would have to say I do understand from an evolutionary point of view aging/death in the dna being a feature. I still hold to the belief that we are created and were meant to live forever so from that perspective it is and error.
Ok. begging the question
Begging the question (or petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise.
For example?
"Survival of the fittest"
The natural genetic variation within a population of organisms may cause some individuals to survive and reproduce more successfully than others in their current environment.
begging the question. Assuming that something "may cause" What evidence do we have that It may cause it to be more successful? Please show example of a specific gene that we know will make it more successful?
death of the unfit. They are deemed unfit because they die without passing on there genes. I think this one is actually a tautology because death is forever as far as we know. So it is reasonable to say ya it died it was unfit, because there is nothing in the know future that can change it. Its still circular reasoning just not arbitrary so it is not a fallacy.
There is no way an unguided un intelligent process can Know If it is fit or un fit when the gene passes on to the next generation.
Therefore it is only our assumption that it is fit at a specific moment in time. We can really only say something is unfit.
Example. a creature reproduces yay its fit, and low and behold its offspring has a genetic anomaly. Is it fit or unfit?
Nature rolls a rock down the hill and kills them both/all three,( male female and little one ). opps they are unfit because they could not survive the rock and pass on a gene that would give them any way to survive even that one Natural selection. Just some humor. :
"Fitness" does not refer to whether an individual is "physically fit" – bigger, faster or stronger – or "better" in any subjective sense. It refers to a difference in reproductive rate from one generation to the next.[6].\
Basically lets roll the dice a lot more times.
also it is not a tautology
So the best that could be said is that Hey those look like fit genes in the population for one specific item and only in the observable present. Oh darn they just died I guess not.
Not realistic: You need something to fuel all that biomass. All the biomass you get from no aging. Better to ensure high turn over by timing death for asap after reproduction happened. Rather than keeping one individual alive to perpetuate what might be uncompetitive genes. If an optimal genetic cfg is found thru mutation/natural selection lottery, it will dominate even if population ages sooner than later.
You say " What might be" and then " If an" both assumptions in your premise. Then you say "will" dominate.
If you don't know its optimal you can't know it will do anything. It is still and assumption.
So It appears to be begging the question.
Please provide evidence that it will be optimal?
How's that? That'd still leave it to chance that genetic iteration would be kept to a maximum. Better to ensure the species is making babies and then dying at as high a frequency as possible, than to leave it to chance that methuselahs would get lucky and keep pissing in the pool so to speak.
I'm confused, How is not dying by aging have anything to do with chance? You have to be speculating that genetic iteration would be kept to a maximum by not dying from aging. You are assuming that Methuselah wouldn't keep reproducing. How would death keep it at a maximum? Maximum compared to what?
Also
Iteration means the act of repeating a process usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration," and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration.
How can you have genetic iteration within a non guided non intelligent process of NS, Unless you are begging the question. You are assuming your proposition in your premise. You are saying its a non guided process ( NS ) and you say haha I know what the "goal" is. We can't possible know what the goal is in a non guided process because by definition there isn't one. It is also a fallacy of excluded middle. Either it is non guided or it is goal oriented. It cant be both.
I hope I haven't misunderstood the meaning of Iteration.
Off topic question:
How do you quote just a portion of the other post and get it to show up in the gray quote box without quoting the whole thing? I have been copying and pasting then making it bold. It just seems sloppy.
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I convinced cleverbot it liked to touch small animals
It didnt say anything to me after I started speaking Russian to it, yet it spoke japanese, the damn thing is racist against Russians :furious
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Sonic click on quote, upper right corner of a post, you get something like this, with [] brackets instead of <>
<quote author=Sonicblu link=topic=306574.msg3964038#msg3964038 date=1298614103> text </quote>
everything from "author=" and on you can do without, you only need "quote".
<quote> starts a quote
</quote> ends a quote
Stick any text you want to quote between those tags
Back later for actual reply
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How do you quote just a portion of the other post and get it to show up in the gray quote box without quoting the whole thing? I have been copying and pasting then making it bold. It just seems sloppy.
just hit "Insert Quote" on the reply page and delete everything in the quote thats not relevant. like I just did.
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Sometimes the cobwebs are so thick that you don't even know where to begin tearing them down.
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lol Gavagai, I know how you feel even though you are probably refering to some of my words with your statement. The thing that makes it seem that way is that this discussion is built by all of our seperate interpretations of the theory of evolution as well as the actual evolution previously on our earth. You cannot tell any of us we are wrong on the theory part, because theory is all about individual perceptions. I find it more interesting to read the theories and musings of individuals rather than a single theory set in stone by someone who thinkns they have all the real answers already worked out.
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You cannot tell any of us we are wrong on the theory part, because theory is all about individual perceptions.
thing is, thats exactly what can be done because scientific theory isnt about individual perception. the theory doesnt need interpretation, it stands on its own. the whole point about the scientific method is that the theories are objective, not subjective. anyone competent can repeat the experiments and should get the same results. this objectivity is what makes it really useful.
essentially what quite a few replies boil down to is:
"I disagree with this theory because I dont understand it properly, so my own observations look like evidence to refute the theory rather than support it."
this is especially galling when applied to evolution because of all the important theories we have, this is one of the simplest and most elegant. you dont need to have a PhD in maths or physics to understand it.
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lol Gavagai, I know how you feel even though you are probably refering to some of my words with your statement.
Nope. :)
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thing is, thats exactly what can be done because scientific theory isnt about individual perception. the theory doesnt need interpretation, it stands on its own. the whole point about the scientific method is that the theories are objective, not subjective. anyone competent can repeat the experiments and should get the same results. this objectivity is what makes it really useful.
essentially what quite a few replies boil down to is:
"I disagree with this theory because I dont understand it properly, so my own observations look like evidence to refute the theory rather than support it."
this is especially galling when applied to evolution because of all the important theories we have, this is one of the simplest and most elegant. you dont need to have a PhD in maths or physics to understand it.
Evolution has only recently in our history been a truly 'scientific' theory. What's more we have not yet even come close to fully understanding or mapping the relevent data that makes the study of evolution a scientific one.
Also, you read that differently to how I wanted it to be read. I meant that even if we all read the same paper on a theory, individual perceptions would form when then asked to repeat the theory from memory. Darwin probably had very different ideas than we now individualy form about his theory. Alot of what we think we know today is just an amalgamation of individual perceptions that came together to form a more widely accepted theory. The vast majority will never try to add to it other than their accidental changes by individual perception (dependant often on the weight of influence the individual has). But to discourage the individualism in the human spirit would be not only to cut out the daft peceptions but also the great leaps taken by indivdualism sometimes intentionaly or other times by mistake.
Even further along that road leads us to the realisation that everything we think we know at any given moment is also knowledge that has followed the rules of evolution. As we zoom out a bit more and get a long term perspective on that, we see that survival of the most agreed with theory will produce our sum theorectical knowledge at the end of time.
But yes of course, 'scientific evidence' on the other hand is not something that can be argued with untill the science itself is proved false.
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I learned everything I need to know about human evolution and the future of mankind from the movie Idiocracy.
WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE AND SAD TRUTH! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSROlfR7WTo)
Personally I expect either robots or space aliens to exterminate the human race at some point in the future, if they're smart.
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I meant that even if we all read the same paper on a theory, individual perceptions would form when then asked to repeat the theory from memory. Darwin probably had very different ideas than we now individualy form about his theory.
You would be surprised to know how accurate Darwin's original formulation was in The Origin of Species. The theory is still with us in more or less the same form that he proposed it.
One of my favorite stories is his dispute with Lord Kelvin (the physicist) about the age of the Earth. Kelvin said that Darwin's proposed age for the Earth was far too old, and Darwin flatly told Kelvin that he was wrong. In the end, the age of the Earth is even older than what Darwin inferred. :)
But as a foundational work of an entire science, the Origin of Species is to biology (and evolution) what the Principia is to physics.
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I have a copy of it on the shelves here :) Point taken, evolution is one theory that remained close to if not exactly the original premise. Yet surely that means it is a theory that needs some individual spin every once in a while to keep things certain. We must look at all the daft theories to see if it sparks some genius. Otherwise the theory of evolution has stopped evolving.
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I have a copy of it on the shelves here :) Point taken, evolution is one theory that remained close to if not exactly the original premise. Yet surely that means it is a theory that needs some individual spin every once in a while to keep things certain. We must look at all the daft theories to see if it sparks some genius. Otherwise the theory of evolution has stopped evolving.
We've learned an incredible amount since Darwin initially published, the theory is well advanced past that initial point.
One thing that I see quite a bit during discussions of science of many types, and biology in particular, is the actual meaning of the word "theory."
In common usage, theory means basically "hunch" or "hypothesis." In scientific discussions, the word Theory has a much different and much weightier meaning: Theory: A theory is what one or more hypotheses become once they have been verified and accepted to be true. A theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers. Unfortunately, even some scientists often use the term "theory" in a more colloquial sense, when they really mean to say "hypothesis." That makes its true meaning in science even more confusing to the general public.
In general, both a scientific theory and a scientific law are accepted to be true by the scientific community as a whole. Both are used to make predictions of events. Both are used to advance technology.
From this page http://www.wilstar.com/theories.htm which actually has one of the best and most clear definitions of various terms regarding Laws Theories and Hypothesis I've run across online. Definitely worth a read here.
Before a clear discussion can be had, terms need to be properly defined.
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Hey, Madda. Wasn't my point to make that evolution has or has not remained the same as Darwin thought it, since you're replying to my quote.
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Hey, Madda. Wasn't my point to make that evolution has or has not remained the same as Darwin thought it, since you're replying to my quote.
Oh I know man, I was just using that to link my reply to the general trend of the thread.
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We've learned an incredible amount since Darwin initially published, the theory is well advanced past that initial point.
If you mean that we have a mountain of confirming evidence for the theory, then I absolutely agree. That is what I meant when I said that the same theory is still with us today.
Your point is also well made that we understand the theory in a far more sophisticated way than what existed, for example, 100 years ago. There's no arguing against that.
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If you mean that we have a mountain of confirming evidence for the theory, then I absolutely agree. That is what I meant when I said that the same theory is still with us today.
Exactly what I meant, we've learned in much more detail however and had whole new frontiers of exploration open up, like DNA, every last one of which continued to confirm and build upon Darwin's earlier work. To quote a famous Biologist "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." http://www.2think.org/dobzhansky.shtml
People have the idea that evolution is just a discussion of human evolution or of creationism, when in reality, it has shows itself to be essentially the entire branch of science known as biology.
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People have the idea that evolution is just a discussion of human evolution or of creationism, when in reality, it has shows itself to be essentially the entire branch of science known as biology.
Can't help myself...
I love that old British biologist's reply when he was asked if he had any insight into God's creation: "The old boy must be inordinately fond of beetles." :old:
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Get your logical fallacies straight before you come after me.
Your absolutely right it was an ad hominem fallacy.
Moreover, I gave you a thorough and sound explanation of the role of death in evolution, which you rejected.
Deaths roll as an optimizer is irrelevant it does not make death a necessity. Let me be charitable here as well. You claim may be true. death is a feature. Its your argument that is false.
Of course research scientists make logical inferences and deductions as part of their trade, but what you're doing is completely different.
If i am applying logical necessity and I am doing something differant than scientist. That only leaves scientist with philosophy. You can not exclude logical necessity and philosophy. Your left with what rocks dream about. nothing.
It is their belief as scientists that death can actually imply a competitive advantage in the struggle between species on planet Earth, i.e. death is a feature.
So you want me to take their belief on faith? or may I please apply logical necessity?
Now, you object that death could not be regarded as a feature except in a philosophical way
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Yes
your only argument for this claim was that "feature" is a human idea,
Yes, I see no argument from u that this is not the case. I did see another ad hominem.
That's the kind of bunk logical necessity
Can you give a response that does not require logical neccesity?
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My bad. I don't have time for an arguing reply but here's some starters on evolution. In order of relevance -
http://academicearth.org/subjects/biology/category:127
http://www.khanacademy.org/#Biology
http://academicearth.org/subjects/biology/category:7
No worries .. Ive been plently busy myself. Thanks for the links.
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Deaths roll as an optimizer is irrelevant it does not make death a necessity. Let me be charitable here as well. You claim may be true. death is a feature. Its your argument that is false.
This is the difference between philosophy and science. To make something happen in time shorter than the age of the universe science will consider it a requirement. Philosophy will call it an optimizer.
A physicist and a philosopher go to a brothel.
Madam: "I have a girl for you. Very pretty but she's new and you much approach her slowly. In each step you are allowed to make only half the distance to her".
Philosopher: "Bah! I know that problem, I'll keep making half the distance and never reach her, I am not paying for that" and leaves angrily.
Physicist: "Deal! after a few steps I'll be close enough..."
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This is the difference between philosophy and science. To make something happen in time shorter than the age of the universe science will consider it a requirement. Philosophy will call it an optimizer.
No, that is the difference between firedrgn and science/philosophy. I would wager that the percentage of philosophers who question the central tenets of evolutionary theory is about the same as the percentage of scientists who do the same. ;)
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Even if you deny or aren't convinced of the ramp up in many techs' progress leading to a singularity, there's one thing to notice: people do this thing where they'll flip from considering something significantly novel (eg self driving cars, turing-level AI), as if it had some near magic value, to considering that novelty no big deal once it's accomplished or once it becomes routine enough.
A major case of cognitive bias. You can't judge whether something like the singularity will happen or not if you're given to so much bias. I think this is one of the major reasons most people reject the idea of a technological singularity. IMO there are some major changes ahead for Man and a lot of the potential risks could be avoided if only people would recognize biases like this one.
One of the major challenges will come when AIs beat humans at Turing-like tests. And yet they'll be "nothing but hunks a junk". They'll have no "soul". There's a Japanese religion that considers all things equally "sacred", whether alive or not. They ought to acclimatize much better, in this respect at least, to such inanimate matter "waking up".