Metaphysics
- Chaos and order can Co-exist
- chaos increases in the universe,
- evolutionary processes create increasingly intricate order patterns
- An organism is part of the larger environment
- Evolution as a process
- written record of achievement to avoid finding solutions to already solved problems
- Examples
- Period required for salient event decrease as order increases
- chaos is measured as events that are relevant to the process
- order is information that fits a purpose
- organism’s purpose is survival
Technology
- Arthur C Clarke’s three laws of technology
- Anything a man can envision is almost always possible
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,
- The limits of the possible is discovered when we venture beyond them
- Language is a technology
- When elements of invention as assembled in the right way, they transcend beyond their individual parts
- Stages of technology life cycle
- Stage 1 – nascent stage
- curiosity
- scientific skills
- determination
- showmanship
- Stage 2 – Development
- Protected and supported by doting guardians
- Stage 3 – Pretenders
- Threatens to eclipse older technology
- providing distinct benefits
- missing some key element of functionality or quality
- Fails to dislodge existing technology
- Finally dislodges existing technology
- Stage 4 – Antiquity
- 10 percent of life cycle
- gradual decline
- purpose and functionality subsumed by new competitors
- Improving a solution to a problem increases order
- defining a problem is the key to finding the solution
- Technology is an evolutionary process
- speeds up
- innovative is multiplicative not additive
Organism versus evolution
- Organism – starts out fast and then slows down
- Evolution – starts out slow and then speeds up
Consciousness
- Schools of thought
- DJ Chalmers: The hard problem – the mystery of the experienced inner life
- Consciousness is just a machine reflecting itself
- We are too stupid
- Descartes:
- mind-body problem
- the paradox of how mind can arise from nonmind
Neural Networks
- Can learn subject matter with unreliable teachers
- Trained network reduces information
- information is destroy during training
human versus computer brain
- human brain better at pattern recognition than thinking through logical sequence
- human neurons very slow speed
- computers are really fast at performing logical sequence operations
Quantum computing
- Hard to test
- Answer is not there until we look at it
- potentially use DNA molecules
- Penrose: Consciousness observing quantum uncertainty causes quantum decoherence
Next steps
- Uploading of consciousness
- Since 1997, wealth increase is caused by knowledge content of product and services
- Machine dependency
- Technology imposed unemployment
- Inter-steller colonies
- Evolutionary algorithms
