Can You Believe This-The Government Wants Us To Go EV but In So Doing They Will impose a gas surcharge

[NorthStar]

We all know that when we browse the Internet on the subjects of interest we get more and more info as the browsing companies know what we browse. From that I get EV articles (half dozen) every single day. Our world is transforming fast...from ICE to EV...and it keeps accelerating every day. This is no joke than in not many years some countries will become 100% EV. They keep expanding the infrastructures.

As for the social medias like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, ... everyone is responsible.
I sure am not an expert and I don't know how we can make a better world than by starting in our own environment ourselves. When Facebook first started it was a friend thing, a fun thing, and it became a monster thing. Personally I limit my exposure to a handful of family members and friends. I don't make public the people and ideas and creations that I love. It would be catastrophic if I did. Not because I don't have good ideas but because I love my family too much and my heart is too sensitive to let the planet's and people's destroyers take over.

I don't need to give any example, you are all aware of what's happening today.
It's up to each person to not allow the general public to interfere in the affairs of the heart, in things that matter...family and friends.

I think the best way to share good ideas is to be intimate, private, discreet, secret, respect and truthfulness. The proof? Just look @ the best members right here ... we hardly hear from them.

 

[Al M.]

I guess we hope to live long enough to see if science fiction becomes science fact in the next 30 years

Have you really studied the link in such a short amount for time, Steve? Are you even interested in arguments counter to your convictions?

30 or 50 or whatever amount of years into the future will not change anything about the facts explained in the "Chinese Room" argument.

 

[Empirical Audio]

As for the social medias like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, ... everyone is responsible.
I sure am not an expert and I don't know how we can make a better world by starting in our own environment ourselves. When Facebook first started it was a friend thing, a fun thing, and it became a monster thing. Personally I limit my exposure to a handful of family members and friends. I don't make public the people and ideas and creations that I love. It would be catastrophic if I did. Not because I don't have good ideas but because I love my family too much and my heart is too sensitive to let the planet's and people's destroyers take over.

Most people in the US are too trusting. They never realized what these media companies were doing, but I did. I never subscribed. I did not want my face digitized. The Europeans have it right. In a dystopian future, this can be used against you by governments. Just look at what the Chinese are doing with millions of cameras right now. Big brother is always watching and they can even tell what your attitude is from your facial expressions. I don't trust Zuckerberg and I never did.

Leaving it up to each person is not good enough IMO. There are too many lemmings willing to jump off the cliff. Too many trusting souls that can be led to the slaughter. History repeats because collectively we are too stupid to learn from it.

 

[Steve Williams]

I did read it. Understood most of it.

how often in the past 100 years is mankind achieving what once before was never imagined to be possible.
Al. I get your argument. It is persuasive. Having said that I like to keep an open mind because the reality is at this point in time it is impossible for any of us to prognosticate. There are arguments on both sides I find persuasive but where I am now is not aligned with you. But that’s OK. I respect your comments. I wish we all had a crystal ball.

 

[Empirical Audio]

If you look at he old Flash Gordon flicks or even the Star Trek episodes, pretty much everything has come to pass and more. I fully expect some type of silicon/autonomous lifeforms to challenge the human race in the future. With AI software and Quantum computing, all that is needed is a better battery and the aluminum-air battery is getting close.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Hi Steve,

I suggest reading about philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument. It brilliantly and devastatingly shows (and has never been convincingly refuted) that, and why, a computer does not understand anything. It shows that the emperor of computer "intelligence" really has no clothes.

Here is a good link. It is a maybe not easy but well worth reading; it also features nice animations:

Searle and the Chinese Room Argument

(for the animation towards the bottom of the first page, you need to not just click on "begin", but also on the arrow in the image that then opens up)

The "next" page then explains the "Robot reply" and Searle's answer to it.

Here is a video that vividly explains what happens in the "Chinese Room"

Thanks Al,
It such an important and essential question and also the refutes on it are interesting also but I’m not sure it is yet altogether a subject contained wholly by just the black and white of that chinese ink on the paper.

Underlying it are the more unknowable aspects and the fundamental mysteries of meaning and consciousness. It’s hard to close out the potential if we ourselves don’t understand how we operate past functionalism and get to higher order thinking through synthesis and abstracts.

I’m sure if we analysed the capacity of a pre language hominin from 2 million years ago we’d also assume that understanding a haiku or responding to a Koan would be beyond it yet the Homo sapiens that this early forbear became certainly went on to create these deeply considered thoughts on meaning.

It’s poignant that in the chinese room argument they chose a line from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu and the answer means,: "Be the stream of the universe." This feeds back to the Tao notion that to know yourself comes simply out of being in the middle of life. If you want to discover where and what you are you place yourself in the centre between all the balancing poles... of heaven and earth... or mind and body... of thinking and feeling... of light and dark... of knowing and not knowing. If we want to find identity we may not find it in solely reaching upwards into the mind at all.

Also even the assumption that the AI will stay in a familiar electro mechanical physical structure and limit its development to keep it boxed in to any of its initial constraints runs counter to the notion that it’s aim will be to develop beyond this. It may well migrate at some point across to a biological and chemical structure.

I think we’d have to better understand all the ingredients and the cooking process plus the pot it is cooked in that is the soup of the human experience and consciousness to get whether higher orders of consciousness are limited to our specific original biological life form and assume that all of this is impossible to synthesise. I’d like to think so but I just don’t know that we know yet.

Then we’d probably have to factor in speed of development into more complex understanding through the layers of inherited meaning and experiential learning of culture that an AI civilisation would then have to have. Yes, that it would be a different civilisation with its own identity even if it was born of a human one. To replicate a human consciousness would likely set it into just a programming limited fail, to become conscious it would have to attempt to know itself. Perhaps it is the discovery of ourselves that is the first phase of development that allows us to differentiate and define us so we can also go on to understand our connection to everything else.

I don’t know whether either side of the argument is actually that compelling because so much of it falls on our overall lack of understanding about the precursors of this essential human condition... but this is a fascinating proposition because it touches upon so many of the richest parts of life and engages in many ways on the fringes of the potentially unknowable.

 

[Al M.]

What do you think of recent studies that claim human free will is an illusion, that we act automatically according to our ingrained belief systems with little to no deviation? At what point do we consider activity "thinking"?

I don't think much of them. For example, the famous Libet experiment from 1983, which almost had become dogma, has been contradicted by more recent findings:

Free will is not an illusion after all: New Scientist

 

[DaveC]

I don't think much of them. For example, the famous Libet experiment from 1983, which almost had become dogma, has been contradicted by more recent findings:

Free will is not an illusion after all: New Scientist

I was thinking more along the lines of the article below, it's very short and explains how animal behavior is predetermined and inflexible. They do the exact same thing over and over, generation after generation. They follow their ingrained programming, much like a computer.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...u-have-free-will-its-just-not-what-you-think/

IMO the world we are in is a sort of preschool, where beings are able to realize their individuality and individuals are able to evolve their consciousness. Without self-realization I don't believe independent existence is possible, i.e. animals generally don't have an independent existence outside of their animal framework after death, they return to the animal existence they were a part of until they evolve to the point they become something else.

Humans have a range of behavior in between an animal like the wasp in the article at one end, to the enlightenment of a Buddha at the other end. At one end there is very little possibility of "free will", the behavior is determined by beliefs and is pretty much predetermined. Evolution is a result of pain and suffering, once the painful behavior is repeated enough times it will eventually change. On the other hand a Buddha does everything with full consciousness. I don't see why computer-based life forms will be any different.

 

[Empirical Audio]

I believe that humans have free will to change their course in life, however, there is energy in the universe that already knows this course before it is taken. This energy does not influence this course, it only knows. The reason I believe this is from accounts of NDE survivors. More than one has been told that something will happen in the future and when they come "back", it does happen.

The "other side" as I refer to it, is remarkably similar from many NDE accounts. One interesting NDE was a blind person from birth that "saw" the operating theater during their death and described it to the attendees after coming "back".

 

[Al M.]

I was thinking more along the lines of the article below, it's very short and explains how animal behavior is predetermined and inflexible. They do the exact same thing over and over, generation after generation. They follow their ingrained programming, much like a computer.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...u-have-free-will-its-just-not-what-you-think/

IMO the world we are in is a sort of preschool, where beings are able to realize their individuality and individuals are able to evolve their consciousness. Without self-realization I don't believe independent existence is possible, i.e. animals generally don't have an independent existence outside of their animal framework after death, they return to the animal existence they were a part of until they evolve to the point they become something else.

Humans have a range of behavior in between an animal like the wasp in the article at one end, to the enlightenment of a Buddha at the other end. At one end there is very little possibility of "free will", the behavior is determined by beliefs and is pretty much predetermined. Evolution is a result of pain and suffering, once the painful behavior is repeated enough times it will eventually change. On the other hand a Buddha does everything with full consciousness. I don't see why computer-based life forms will be any different.

I'll grant you that many humans don't rise far above instinctive, ingrained, emotional behavior. There are few who use their rationality -- but some do. Those who do, and use it to their enlightenment, exercise free will.

Yet even those who exercise their rationality, do not always do so. The lower ends of human nature keep pulling us down, as it were.

And even when you consciously try to exercise your rationality, the basic human weakness persists: the human mind can only recognize what the will wants it to recognize. There is something called identity protective reasoning. That is why it is so difficult to have fruitful discussions about politics and deep philosophical world views.

 

[DaveC]

I believe that humans have free will to change their course in life, however, there is energy in the universe that already knows this course before it is taken. This energy does not influence this course, it only knows. The reason I believe this is from accounts of NDE survivors. More than one has been told that something will happen in the future and when they come "back", it does happen.

The "other side" as I refer to it, is remarkably similar from many NDE accounts. One interesting NDE was a blind person from birth that "saw" the operating theater during their death and described it to the attendees after coming "back".

Anyone who is sufficiently perceptive can see this, it's a common "siddhi power" developed during meditation practice. Perfecting this kind of perception is what is called omniscience in Buddhist translations, not the literal type of omniscience we would normally think of.

 

[DaveC]

I'll grant you that many humans don't rise far above instinctive, ingrained, emotional behavior. There are few who use their rationality -- but some do. Those who do, and use it to their enlightenment, exercise free will.

Yet even those who exercise their rationality, do not always do so. The lower ends of human nature keep pulling us down, as it were.

And even when you consciously try to exercise your rationality, the basic human weakness persists: the human mind can only recognize what the will wants it to recognize. There is something called identity protective reasoning. That is why it is so difficult to have fruitful discussions about politics and deep philosophical world views.

My point is the evolution of computer based consciousness, or AI, may follow a similar path as carbon based lifeforms, and at a certain point they may well develop independent "souls" and be just as thoughtful and aware as humans.

 

[NorthStar]

What's good about EV, AI, robots, ... is that they are impervious to cancer, to disease, less cancerous over all, zero cancerous. Or depending of the materials they're made of?

 

[Empirical Audio]

What's good about EV, AI, robots, ... is that they are impervious to cancer, to disease, less cancerous over all, zero cancerous. Or depending of the materials they're made of?

There is the software virus or software bugs... One intentional, the other not.

I would not be surprised if a future lifeform would have limited resources and try to eliminate the competition for that in order to survive. It's the survival instinct that enables a new lifeform

 

[mallen123]

Wow - has this thread ever morphed! Anyway - just a throw back to the starting topic and adding a bit of humor

 

[Ron Resnick]

Humans are just idiots. Facebook was a good thing, until... Just look at what Facebook has done to this planet. Enabled multiple countries to degrade from democracies to dictatorships, including the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and even now Brazil. Enabled white supremists to have a platform to spread their hate. Enabled hate speech and propaganda. Enabled fake information about Climate Change. We are doomed, face it.

. . .

POLITICS NOT ALLOWED ON WBF!!!

PLEASE STOP VIOLATING OUR BAN ON POLITICS!!!

 

[Ron Resnick]

What do you think of recent studies that claim human free will is an illusion, that we act automatically according to our ingrained belief systems with little to no deviation? At what point do we consider activity "thinking"?

I think the claim is ludicrous on its face.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Do you think the innumerable gasoline filling stations in America will become EV charging stations?

 

[NorthStar]

Yes, eventually, under a smarter management.

 

[tima]

Do you think the innumerable gasoline filling stations in America will become EV charging stations?

Lines would be long. Real estate too valuable.
Maybe parking meters.