rutherblood
There are a series of problems in decipherment of Minoan scripts from what I understand: 1. The Linear A & Cretan script are undeciphered in the sense that we do not know what phonetics the symbols stand for 2. The Minoan language hypothesized to be written in these scripts is undeciphered in terms of vocabulary (given we do not know the phonetics of the letter symbols) & by extension its semantics. At best a kind of crude syntax can proposed for it based on patterns of the word-symbols in texts of the hypothesized language written in those scripts.
1. Do understand it is the same group of 5-14 who go on to transition to becoming 15-24 & so after having their life experiences all of which contribute to suicide 2. Low rates among 5-14 might precisely be because they are currently sheltered from the shitstorm that is the world & wider implications of losing that innocence. Mass adoption of social media by that age group might directly accelerate that & atleast may cause a rise in suicide rates. Even a single life lost to such bullshit is devastating.
Please stop advocating for bs like social media that is really never required in our lives much less kids' lives.
Sometimes I wonder how much our sense of smell is connected to the gut microbiome.
> A risky move compared to keeping nature alive, but I doubt that anybody in power will maintain a rain forest over using the area for more efficient means of energy and resource creation.
> Maintaining nature only makes sense if we are interested in knowledge as the primary driver. But the primary driver is power.
I understand the sense in which you are saying all this, and I agree, this might be how things go about provided humanity even survives this century provided we reach this hypothetical synthetic economic optimal. lots of ifs. and risky as hell, very very risky. but yeah probably how things would go by, the best one can be is sad.
tbh if you ask me I really doubt human enduced climate change can ever be mitigated through collective human effort. we'd rather chose annihilation over it.
yet another Kurzweilian fallacy based on pure speculation when we hardly know anything about the nature of consciousness or how the brain works.
let's say i grant this, but will you employ the said tech unless it is useful for you to do so?
the question here is about the purpose of going all synthetic.
1. sure, if say man can devise a way to manufacture a multitude of food "synthetically", that us just one purpose served i.e. food. you can keep replacing these various purposes that plants provide to human life. Let's say at one point all non-human species become extinct by human means or otherwise. after this we discover a purpose through their lack (even without this said discovery, it can be likely that we might not even know what we have lost, that could be or even then might have been useful to us, humans). now isn't that a tragedy? basically even if the "synthetic" means of some purposes to which other species benefit us were to be made economical somehow, that does not justify wiping them out even looking only through the lens of HUMAN benefit.
2. what is "synthetic" and how can synthetic means of achieving these purposes be made economical? first to have such an economy we would have to replicate the chemical efficiencies of photosynthesis etc. basically, copying life. second, we would need the self-replicating capacity too since this goes a long way towards economy, right? again, copying life. we might as well discover something the scale of a cell with self-replicating molecular architecture might be the way to go about it. we could as well end up making something which looks a lot like life actually and take a hell of time to achieve it, even provided we end up copying a whole lot of it (because it would be massively difficult, even this being a huge understatement, without a reference point i.e. existing life). now if all life on earth except humans if wiped out hypothetically through some means, this effort would be justified even if prone to instant failure because of our imminent deaths. but otherwise i don't see a point.
I'm not discouraging gaining knowledge about life and how it works, only that the argument of wiping it out to be replaced by everything synthetic, even someday doesn't make sense. do understand there is no such thing humans someday having all the knowledge. that day will never arrive.
let's take the example of replacing all plants with something humans made. Let's take one function (among innumerable others we might know or not know of) performed by plants critical to life: photosynthesis to trap energy to organic material & fill the air with oxygen. could we make something cheap enough to do this? the plants currently do this for free for us. they're also self-replicating mostly. could we build something like that? wouldn't we end up making something similar to what plants were and how they worked albeit with all this unneeded effort? let's say we can even do this, wouldn't you end up making something so similar to plants that it could actually be a plant?
You can ask the same question for all the other functions that plants perform. most of these functions we might not even know of and only realize once it's missed.
in short, it's not economical for us to do. it might not even be possible for us to do fully given all that complexity that millions of years in evolution captures.
life on earth can be seen as a huge huge body of knowledge. dont people mourn of loss of ancient libraries or cultures for this very reason? many of the things entrapped in such a culture or body of knowledge are tacit, unknown, maybe even unknowable, it definitely cannot be exactly replicated once it's lost
EDIT: some grammar
Like I said all current theories are based on current state of observations. Who is to say we don't observe something in the future for which these laws need to be revised? Who is to say this doesn't keep happening indefinitely? If such a "bottoming out" cannot even be conceived of, saying that the physical world, even a part of it, is exactly computable AS IT IS (all aspects of it) is utmost arrogance.
What do we know about the brain? how does it generate cognition? why does the color 'red' look like the way it does to you; does it look like the same to me? Unless the nature of such cognition and such a being which embodies this cognition is known one cannot say it is reducible or "emergent" from the CURRENT set or even any FUTURE set of physical laws we know or will know about.
The map is not the territory however minute in detail it becomes. Sure this map can become the territory itself by becoming it but then we cease to call it a "map". Say you want to understand how pendulums work, you make a pendulum, play with it. No one's going to call this actual pendulum a "simulation".
How did you get to the conclusion that all physical world is computable? Rather a huge jump i would say. Sure some things are, but "all of it" would rather be a BIG assumption. Physical theories of the world are limited to our current state of observations and knowledge of the world, they AREN'T the actual world. Who is to say this continuous search, observation and refinement of theories will ever end and we'll have a FINAL theory of everything that we can then plug into a computer and simulate?
Sure you can now say "I don't require a theory of everything, I just need a "sufficient" amount of theory to simulate the part of the world from which I can have my intelligence & cognition emerge". Sure you can say that but that would again hinge on the assumption that such cognition is reducable to these "sufficient" laws.
Likewise saying that the whole physical world can be realized by a Turung machine is a bit rich when we don't even know if such a complete reduction of the physical world is possible and when such reduction to physical laws is surely not yet complete.
EDIT: grammar
Even physics seem to have this rule-obssessed assumption. Can we really simulate the universe AS IT IS? Sure we can some parts of it. But is there a theory of everything really? After such a theory we would need to know nothing. physics would be pretty much done with. This theory would explain all observations in the past, present and future of anything we make in the universe.
Even in our search for the smallest particles can such a "bottoming out" ever take place?
EDIT: grammar
One problem with computer scientists and AI researchers is the level of arrogance that they display about their state of knowledge.
It would have had been good for us to rather engage with the larger body of philosophical work (which has a long tradition of thinking about how the mind works, how meaning and cognition emerge, how such embodied cognition interacts with the world) and then conduct empirical research trying to verify a philosophical paradigm rather than just going at it blindly by sometimes assuming mind can be reduced to logical systems and sometimes trying to simulate a reductionist and incomplete model of neural networks.