Do you so object to the nurture over nature school because it would throw quite a cog in your silly little Nietzschean idea of the 'Ubermensch'? (of which you've quite proudly alluded to several times here)? I suppose if I found out I was a horrible, disagreeable little person by choice rather than by design I would object as well.

I don't object to the nurture over nature school at all, as it so happens and as anyone that has actually read my posts will attest. I do reject the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable, that there is no such thing as nature at all. It is a patentely silly idea. No amount of time raising a human child among chickens will ever teach it to lay eggs.

I more particularly object to intellectual dishonesty, which is what this is mostly about now. You make ad hominem arguments, play with the straw man, cite irrelevant sources, use red herrings, and so forth with a sort of practiced ease that makes me wary indeed of believing anything you have to say. Nonetheless, I have actually read everything that you have posted here.

Why are you two antagonizing each other? And please don't claim "he did it first!" or "he did it worst!" Neither one of you is making a good argument.

This argument sounds very familiar. It is exactly the type of argument that computer scientists and philosophers have been fighting for years. The question of whether or not humans have "instincts" is very much like the qiestion of whether of not computers can "know" anything.

The problem, made evident by the last six or seven posts, is that "instinct" is a poorly defined concept. It belongs on the list with know, intelligence, idea, think, meaning, and understand. We use these words to describe what's going on inside our brains (and the brains of animals). We have only vague ideas (whatever that means) of what they mean. We don't really know what we're doing when we know something (whatever that means).

He said, "FYI, human beings have absolutely no instincts. That is to say, no single behavioral pattern that we cannot control. Often people confuse...."

I said, "If you define instinct as meaning only a "behavioral pattern that we cannot control" and then define all involuntary reactions as "physiological response"...."

He said, "I do so love to debate ...Perhaps one of the 10 smartest people I've ever met was a professor of humanities I once had. He taught..hmm...entry level World Civilizations, a generic freshman course. But, he also had earned his j.d. from Harvard and a PhD in neurophysiology -- to say he was brilliant would probably be an understatement. Anyway, one of the things he did...."

I said, "As I said before, the reason that his "challenge" is unbeatable is because he has defined instinct as something else."

He said, "...Dr. Werrant, my ex-professor (though I do consider him my still friend) has been awarded the Gellhorn prize in Neurophysiology, an American....In fact, may I ask your background? I highly doubt you've had anything remotely close as those awards, or the training in the particular field."

I said, "MrP, your Dr. Werrant is just being intellectually dishonest to gratify his own ego. You have noticed that he has one, haven't you?"

He said, "I've at least researched -somewhat- the topic, and, have talked to someone who's recognized in the field as an expert. You, on the other hand, are as narcissistic a person as I've never met."

I said, "Intellectual dishonesty can afflict anyone (even me) which is why thinking persons must analyze the internal logical consistency of statements rather than 'taking them on authority.'"

He said, "Here's a definition for anyone that still cares, though. I hope it's up to Survivor's amazing standards.
http://28.1911encyclopedia.org/I/IN/INSTINCT.htm

I said, "Sheesh, MrP, did you actually read this?"

He said, "I found it rather clear, actually."

I said, "Did you read the part where...." (to paraphrase, I pointed out that the "scientific" definition he dug up doesn't support the postion his precious Dr. Warrent takes)

He said "Whereas I've gone out and researched the topic and cited my sources and attempted to be civil, you've done exactly the opposite....Do you so object to the nurture over nature school because it would throw quite a cog in your silly little Nietzschean idea of the 'Ubermensch'?"

I said, "Veiled insults are insults still, and yours wear a thin veil indeed, MrP."

And that should bring us up to the current moment (for anyone that wants the substantive arguments rather than the insults, you'll just have to read the previous page [by the way, humans do have instincts]).

By the way, if cognitive science is to make any headway at all, we're going to have to assume that there are "hardwired" tendancies for our brains to develop in certain ways. Otherwise, we're stuck with "emergence theory"--the idea that if something gets complex enough, it spontaineously makes the leap to cognition. This may well be true (though I haven't noticed anyone communicating with thunderstorms and the like ), but it doesn't help us further our understanding of the fundamentals of cognition to throw up our hands and say "there aren't any fundamentals!"

Now I feel insulted! And I feel it so very much more than you do!

See my point?

I've lurked over a year, and I've read your posts. While you may not know me at all, I know you both a little bit, and from what I know I respect.
Seeing all this "flaming" causes negative emotions in you two, hurts the forum, and detracts from the purpose people come here for (to become better writers). And I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with feeling anger, or other feelings, but there's a place and time for it.

I actually don't mind having a discussion about human instincts, and what counts as an instinct and what doesn't, and in fact I don't even mind a discussion of whether humans have instincts (though I think it's a silly question, on the order of "do humans have neural tissue"). I only seriously objected to the idea that we must bow down to Dr. Werrant's superior intellect which we dare not question (right now I'm really hoping that MrP isn't secretly Dr. Werrant, because in that case I have gotten pretty personal with him...but I swear I didn't know--actually, I don't see any reason that he would secretly be Dr. Werrant...).

Anyway...:furious racking of brain for way to get back to original topic:

Think about it, Utopia is the place where you get the greatest feeling of enjoyment and tranquility while receiving the least amount of stress.

Humanity is slowly spiraling towards Utopia. Every generation is finding ways to make life as easy as possible for the next. Utopia may not be reached for a long time but, it is an impending shadow waiting at the end of the tunnel.

So, you want to know what Utopia is...?

Utopia is your birthbed and deathbed. Utopia is you in a pitch black room, feeling no stimulation at all other than the orgy of pleasures coupled with the overtones of a neverending cycle of selfishness; not selfishness born not out of some sort of spite...selfishness because it is also selflessness when you are no longer needed in any way.

Utopia is all you ever wanted...and absolutely nothing standing in the way of it.

Utopia is our fate. Humanity's desire for knowledge will rocket us towards this nondescript cage of ecstacy. Once we know everything (which will happen at some point) and have found the way to cage ourselves in, we will.

Humanity's virus is cureable. I have stated the cure right here in fact! But to make it as easy as possible for you (which is what you really want, isn't it), the cure is to not make things easier! Put sown your books and look for no more answers, no higher knowledge.

...But you won't do that
...will you?

Are you saying that 'humanity, the virus, is curable," that, "the virus afflicting humanity is curable," or are you saying that something else entirely is curable?

I think that the phenomenon that DevOp is referring to in the first part of his message is the accelerating development of information-industrial capacity in our world taken as a whole, which will result in technological progress becoming effectively "instantaneous" sometime within the next century. This means that--for some group of individuals--any practical effect that can be desired can be realized by developing technology as quickly as it can be "imagined" (here implying a computer aided form of the design/development cycle).

This is termed a "singularity" event by some researchers into the history of technology, in that it causes a mathmatical discontinuity in the curves denoting technological development, material wealth, information processing capabilities, and all related social phenomena (from home schooling rates to marriages to quality of life to international politics). Because of the fact that all our previous models of these trends become mathmatically invalid at the singularity point, it is impossible for conventional models to predict what will happen to society, except that the changes will be radical and far reaching. If so then "DeviantOperant" might be a clever referance to the mathmatical aspects of the phenomenon.

I don't believe that we'll reach the singularity point. Technological advances are increasing the stress factors for war, terrorism, and other more fundamental forms of social collapse even as they move us towards the singularity point. I predict a general collapse in the world economy brought on by a combination of war, terrorism, revolutions, and national failures (What's happening in Venezuela right now is a good example of a mild social collapse, if you're wondering), probably within the next thirty years. This will severely curtail technological development, even leading to a loss of basic advanced research capability as well as the most infrastructure intensive advanced technologies as more resources need to be devoted either to feeding or fighting the hoards of humanity cut off from advancement by progressive failure of social order worldwide.

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Utopia is all you ever wanted...and absolutely nothing standing in the way of it.

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I think this is a bad definition. As was discussed in the "creating a sport" thread, people want to have goals. People want to strive for those goals.

Would golf be more fun if the balls hit themselves into the holes perfectly every time, and the human golfer need not show up at all? Would chess be more fun if a supercomputer made all the moves for both players as quickly as possible, never making a mistake, and bringing every game to a draw in a fraction of a second?

Of course not.

As far as I'm concerned, Utopia has to be a fun place. And I can't have fun unless I've got some challenges. I might not want to go to an office for eight hours every day, but I would like to have something challenging and interesting to occupy my mind.

Survivor said:

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This is termed a "singularity" event by some researchers into the history of technology, in that it causes a mathmatical discontinuity in the curves denoting technological development, material wealth, information processing capabilities, and all related social phenomena (from home schooling rates to marriages to quality of life to international politics).

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I find this very interesting! Can you point me to a book or website where I might learn more about this concept?

Survivor said:

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Technological advances are increasing the stress factors for war, terrorism, and other more fundamental forms of social collapse even as they move us towards the singularity point.

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That's one point of view. My point of view does not place responsibility for these stress factors on technological advancement. Rather, these stress factors are caused by the inability / unwillingness of First World nations to abandon the Dark Ages view of personal responsibility and embrace the more realistic view of causality.

The problem is that if you regard humans as nothing more than complex machines, there is ultimately no reason to care about Utopia at all. After all, if humans actually don't have free will, then slavery is indistinguishable from liberty. If our sense of personal individuality is an illusion, than so are happiness or misery.

Let me do a search for singularity sites, there should be a few...here we are SingularityWatch.com (these goobers don't have a links page )
Extropy.com (who thought up their domain name, I wonder)
Some joke page about Vernerean Singularities and so forth
Singularity.org (I think this is the scariest web page design ever--almost as scary as the Tagament commercial where the Earth is destroyed by some kind of supernova or something).

In times past, human mistakes were limited by the power of an individual human. Now, they are becoming less and less bounded. One of the greatest problems of the modern world, the vast inequities in material wealth that many claim drive most domestic and international strife, are an inevitable result of technology, and would be impossible without it. The most powerful nation on Earth a hundred years ago depended more on the number and quality of its soldiers than on the superiority of its weapons. Today, our situation is entirely the opposite. Our soldiers depend entirely on technological superiority to win without expenditure of life. Even their relatively high quality is very dependent on technologies that allow them to be trained to a superior level.

At the same time, technology cannot be controlled. We cannot 'abolish' the Bomb, or the computer virus, or lethal engineered viruses, or any of the other perils that threaten to destroy us...because the technology has gotten free, and is begining to replicate and evolve independently of its creators.

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After all, if humans actually don't have free will, then slavery is indistinguishable from liberty. If our sense of personal individuality is an illusion, than so are happiness or misery.

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First, Skinner and I agree on almost nothing.

Second, I never said that humans don't have free will, only that we have a very poor understand of free will. I do believe in free will, however I disbelieve the Catholic interpretation of "causeless volition." We live in a cause-and-effect clockwork universe. The human brain is not an exception to causality. This does not mean that I am a determinist. The human brain will never be predictable, any more than the weather will be predictable. I can live with the concept of stochastic universe.

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In times past, human mistakes were limited by the power of an individual human. Now, they are becoming less and less bounded.

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I absolutely agree. The human race is becoming less and less fault tolerant. We already live in a time when even minor misbehavior (e.g. driving while intoxicated) can have terrible consequences.

This is a part of my Utopia. Imagine a world in which the poorest homeless person has personal control over to a thousand thermonuclear missiles. Personal responsibility is a very serious thing, and people cannot make mistakes, period.

If you have that picture in mind, stretch it out three generations later. At the time of my story, personal responsibility is much, much more serious than that.

I have great faith in the human race. I think it's possible to reach a time when no one will ever make a serious mistake every again. I'm certainly not claiming that my story will actually come to pass, only that it's an interesting story worth telling.

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I have great faith in the human race. I think it's possible to reach a time when no one will ever make a serious mistake every[sic] again.

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Human nature and history prove such a thing isn't possible without the Divine intervention of which Survivor spoke. The sort of people this scenario demands is an unemotional Spock-like breed--true human machines. But to say people "are nothing more than complex machines" is to deny the soul, and now we're definitely into faith and God.

The word "serious" is interesting here. That means they're making lesser mistakes, yet enough lesser mistakes in the right pattern can easily lead to immense repercussions. Also, the adage that he who is not honorable in the smallest transactions will be dishorable in larger ones would make this unrealistic. And who decides what is serious?

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Imagine a world in which the poorest homeless person has personal control over to a thousand thermonuclear missiles....If you have that picture in mind, stretch it out three generations later.

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Wow. And there are those who don't even trust the people with regular guns. The world wouldn't last those three generations, I dare say. How could anyone feel secure in such an environment? Each person individually armed for personal/family safety is one thing; everyone with the capacity to annihilate the world is another.

(Although why there are poor homeless people in a utopia eludes me, but I haven't been closely following this thread and you've probably explained it.)

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We will get out of a human what we put into it.["it"?] Unless every human on the face of the Earth is provided a high quality education, we will continue to have war, terrorism, and social collapse. Sadly, Americans are more a part of the problem than the solution, so the world will have to look to another nation to save us all.

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I don't care how much education the people get, the often great gulf between common sense and higher education would certainly enter in here. The disparity of natural talents, too, could spark envy and all its attendant evils even among the highly educated, not to mention passion.

America is not a panacea, but it's the best thing this Earth has seen--though the farther it strays from its founding principles the less likely it is continue so. And, although it eludes me where the United States has been commissioned to do it, can you really even imagine one of the present other nations "saving" anyone? This is the type of thinking that causes people to look to ET for deliverance and to ignore a God who demands personal responsibility and accountability.

Basically, if I "know" you well enough, then I can predict what you will likely do in any given situation (hence the term, "man, I don't even know you anymore" for a friend that begins to behave in an unfriendly manner). This does not imply that you do not have free will, only that your free will is not a completely random process.

On the other hand, when I throw a single die, I cannot predict what the result will be. This does not mean that the die has "free will", the outcome is simply a result of complex but deterministic physics.

The essential difference is that if I understand physics well enough, then I can determine the outcome of a die roll--not merely predict it--by controlling all the physical factors that lead to the outcome. Whereas I cannot determine (meaning cause) you to choose a certain course by controlling all your physical factors. Even if I force your body (and even your mind) to obey me, your will may resist--such that the moment I relax my physical control over you, you begin to rebel against me. As you say, if humans have no such volitional element in them, they are just machines--simulacra--and it doesn't matter whether they are happy or sad, slave or free, because all of that is just an illusion.

As for your last statement:

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I have great faith in the human race. I think it's possible to reach a time when no one will ever make a serious mistake every again.

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Now of course, you might say that this is not a world threatening mistake, but ultimately it is. If women in your Utopia tend to reward "cheating" behavior (and what this guy does is essentially cheating, because he seeks an outcome without regard to the rules of the system) then very quickly you have a situation where cheating behavior predominates. That sort of "ends justify the means" thinking inevitably leads to open conflict when enough people embrace it, and no system (except one in which all the cheaters are kept in virtual bondage) can survive it.

Shadow-x, go ahead and check out all of them. Singularity researchers are disproportionately represented on the web, and by the by also tend to be fairly intelligent. I may think that they're missing the bigger picture (namely that the singularity probably won't happen) but the reasoning they use is largely valid, merely incomplete because they fail to account for the fact that advanced technology in human hands is unspeakably dangerous.

By the way Kolona, remember that the Vulcans are the survivors of the galactic civil war that destroyed the rest of their civilization Even for them, it would be impossible. Doc didn't really mean literal homeless people (in his Utopia if you fall below the "poverty" line [which is set pretty high] then the machines take over your personal finances and such), and he didn't mean literal nukes, only that every citizen has access to that level of power.

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But to say people "are nothing more than complex machines" is to deny the soul, and now we're definitely into faith and God.

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Ah yes, we are. The biggest question in my book is about the existence of God. The second biggest question in my book is about the nature of free will. I need to create my hypothetyical "Utopia" to ask these questions.

FWIW my characters never refer to it as Utopia. From their perspective their world is far from perfect, even though from our perspective here in 2002 their world will seem like a very appealing place. Or I should say it will seem very appealing if I do a good job writing it. That's far from a certainty!

Survivor said:

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As you say, if humans have no such volitional element in them, they are just machines--simulacra--and it doesn't matter whether they are happy or sad, slave or free, because all of that is just an illusion.

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This touches on the 64 dollar question: does the human brain obey the laws of physics, or is our free will controlled by what the Catholics call "causeless volition?"

Is it possible to build a machine, like HAL 9000, or C-3PO, or Data, that is capable of acting like a human? Once you can no longer distinguish the machine's behavior from a human, how do we know it doesn't have free will?

I have included such machines in my story, which I believe to be set sufficiently far into the furture. So my fictional answer to the first question is "yes, it is possible to build a machine that behaves like a human."

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from our perspective here in 2002 their world will seem like a very appealing place.

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But that's not really important. The main reason I expect readers to view my world as Utopia is that it's a fun place. No one has to work unless they want to work. Everyone's job is to enjoy their life as much as possible. Everyone is physically attractive and well educated. Life spans are very long.

In a nutshell, if you are the poorest person in my milieu you can live the life of James Bond (without bad guys trying to kill you). You can ride in luxurious cars and airplanes, and stay at luxurious hotels while being pampered in opulent decadence.

I like the psychotronic ethical dilemna that Doc raises. When does the ability to persuade by means of technology become the power to coerce outright? How can there be individual worth in a society that can remake the individual into anything desired?

What is a "soul" when your behavior is ultimately determined by flat out programming?

I've mentioned elsewhere (don't know where, exactly) that we're much closer to integrating a computer into a human brain than reaching human level AI. I believe that it is inherently unlikely that AI's (as such) would ever need to be developed, given that it is easier to immortalize a human and give them a mind/machine interface. If you wanted to simulate the function of an actual brain...let's see.

whatever gave you that idea?!

TTFN & ?

My perspective, from years of experience in Business Process Reengineering, is that we are getting closer and closer to a world where machines do all the non-cognitive work, leaving humans to do the cognitive work. We see it in factories, hospitals, even fast food joints.

To answer the other side of the question, we are already medically able to augment or replace both lost sight and hearing by direct stimulation of the neurons in the brain, and we have decoded the signals that precede conscious gross motor function (translation, we can hook you up to a sensor that can tell you are about to lift your arm or extend your toes before you actually do so). We have devised a number of electronic implants that can be used to identify or track particular animals (including humans) and know that they are safe and reliable.

Machines don't need cognition to handle face and voice recognition with greater accuracy than is possible for normal humans. And they don't need advanced cognition for anything else, once humans are equiped the devices to allow direct control via neural implants.

I stress that we already have working technologies that allow direct interface between a machine and a human brain. We already have machine technologies that allow accurate face and voice recognition (as well as machines that can drive, fly, and moniter [but not "care for"] the elderly and infirm).

We also have experimental confirmation that it is possible to immortalize human cells, such that they continue to repair and replicate themselves indefinitely. And there is active research on developing immortality drugs.

from the article:
"Telomeres, the repeated sequence found at the ends of chromosomes, shorten in many normal human cells with increased cell divisions. Statistically, older people have shorter telomeres in their skin and blood cells than do younger people.53,54 In the animal kingdom, though, long-lived species often have shorter telomeres than do short-lived species, indicating that telomere length probably does not determine life span.55,56,57 Solid scientific evidence has shown that telomere length plays a role in determining cellular life span in normal human fibroblasts and some other normal cell types.58 Increasing the number of times a cell can divide, however, may predispose cells to tumor formation.59,60 Thus, although telomere shortening may play a role in limiting cellular life span, there is no evidence that telomere shortening plays a role in the determination of human longevity."

TTFN &

"The purpose of this document is to warn the public against the use of ineffective and potentially harmful antiaging interventions and to provide a brief but authoritative consensus statement from 51 internationally recognized scientists in the field about what we know and do not know about intervening in human aging. What follows is a list of issues related to aging that are prominent in both the lay and scientific literature, along with the consensus statements about these issues that grew out of debates and discussions among the 51 scientists associated with this paper."

TTFN & lol

You previous post seems to say: "Even if Artificial Cognition were possible, no one would build it because human immortality would make it useless." The two are so unrelated that it's like saying no one would bother to build houses after we've invented the telephone. It's such a silly argument that I'm going to assume I misunderstood you.

The practicality or value of human immortality is irrelevant to this discussion. I have not made any claims about that subject either way. I'll eagerly grant that the market for products that granted immortality would be enormous. They would surely be the most sought-after products in the world.

If you have some evidence which describes the nature of self-awareness and explains why we are so far from achieving it in a machine, I'd like to see it.

The other reason to make a computer capable of simulating human level intelligence is as a means to immortality by copying the human brain into a computer...which is where biological immortality therapies come in.

By the way, Cosmi is very right to point out that right now, we do not understand how telomeres work well enough to activate the telomerase reaction safely (or rather, we don't know how telomerase works all that well, we actually know a lot about telomere decay). I wouldn't take to much account of the fact that a longer lived species tends to actually have a shorter telomeres, mortality mechanisms aren't limited to telomere decay, but it is the insuperable obstacle to indefinite extension of human life. Hormone treatments, on the other hand, particularly the novel therapies now being offered, actually shorten life span by accellerating the division of cells in persons that are...this is all irrelevant.

We do not now have a viable therapy to actually reverse aging at the somatic level. I do not believe that we will reach one before our society hits the crisis point.

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Thus, although telomere shortening may play a role in limiting cellular life span, there is no evidence that telomere shortening plays a role in the determination of human longevity.

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I understand and applaud the reasons that this was written, but looking though some of the entries, there is some bad science and outright deception here. This is not good. I know that some people believe that anyone that is not a card carrying "scientist" cannot be trusted to make intelligent decisions with complete information (in fact, I agree that it is unlikely that non-scientists will make intelligent decisions in any given situation, but I extend the same opinion to "scientists" as well), but deliberate falsehoods are not good.