Mind

George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture. “Theoretical physicist defends free will” at Mind Matters News

It sounded like such a great idea, right? Robert J. Marks: Well, actually, that’s very interesting because I think there’s a presupposition on Musk’s part that we are indeed algorithmic. That we can actually be represented by an algorithm, by a computer code… There’s good foundations and algorithmic information theory and computer science, which suggest that there are indeed non-algorithmic phenomena and there’s a strong evidence that the qualities such as creativity and understanding and qualia, are above and beyond the capabilities of algorithms and computability. “Can we really cheat death?” at Mind Matters News Better read this before you buy your ticket to transhumanism. .

As philosopher Richard Johns explains, sims do not understand simhood: How can Alice determine whether the strange little man in her apartment who claims to be her Programmer is telling the truth? Recently, philosopher Richard Johns (left), whose work was profiled here at Mind Matters News in “A philosopher explains why thinking matter is impossible,” has now written a piece for Medium. In it, he explains why we cannot create a sim that is a conscious, rational being. He uses a dialogue between “Alice” and “The Programmer” to unpack the idea: The dialogue begins with Alice returning from school to find a strange little man in her apartment. He seemed not to notice her entering the room, and remained seated Read More ›

Here, in human mitochondrial DNA — note the BLUE code start and the RED code stop; all HT to Wiki publishing against known ideological interest: Complex interwoven code is of course doubly functionally specific, so it is exponentially harder to account for, other than by exceedingly sophisticated and creative intelligently directed configuration. Indeed, when I had to write machine code, I thanked my lucky stars 2114’s and 2716’s were by then affordable RAM and EPROM chips, and proceeded from there. (BTW, a neighbour who was an engineer in an earlier era spoke of how people flew across North America just to see 1 MB of live RAM, in a video memory, a million dollar cost in itself.) We know v Read More ›