AndreInfante

According to the PM I got, I had the most credible vegetarian entry, and it was ranked as much more credible than my actual (meat-eating) beliefs. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I feel like the dog brain studies are at least fairly strong evidence that quite a bit of information is preserved. The absence of an independent validation is largely down to the poor mainstream perception of cryonics. It's not that Alcor is campaigning to cover up contrary studies - it's that nobody cares enough to do them. Vis-a-vis the use of dogs, there actually aren't that many animals with comparable brain volume to humans. I mean, if you want to find an IRB that'll let you decorticate a giraffe, be my guest. Dogs are a decent analog, under the circ... (read more)

Sorry, I probably should have more more specific. What I should really say is 'how important the unique fine-grained structure of white matter is.'

If the structure is relatively generic between brains, and doesn't encode identity-crucial info in its microstructure, we may be able to fill it in using data from other brains in the future.

Just an enthusiastic amateur who's done a lot of reading. If you're interested in hearing a more informed version of the pro-cryonics argument (and seeing some of the data) I recommend the following links:

On ischemic damage and the no-reflow phenomenon: http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/ischemia.html

Alcor's research on how much data is preserved by their methods: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationAndFracturing.html

Yudkowsky's cou... (read more)

If we could “upload” or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans. Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.

Straw man. Connectonomics is relevant to trying to explain the concept of uploading to the lay-man. Few cryonics proponents actually believe it's all you need to know to reconstruct the brain.

The features of your neurons (and other cells)

That's... an odd way of thinking about morality.

I value other human beings, because I value the processes that go on inside my own head, and can recognize the same processes at work in others, thanks to my in-built empathy and theory of the mind. As such, I prefer that good things happen to them rather than bad. There isn't any universal 'shouldness' to it, it's just the way that I'd rather things be. And, since most other humans have similar values, we can work together, arm in arm. Our values converge rather than diverge. That's morality.

I extend that ... (read more)

But that might be quite a lot of detail!

In the example of curing cancer, your computational model of the universe would need to include a complete model of every molecule of every cell in the human body, and how it interacts under every possible set of conditions. The simpler you make the model, the more you risk cutting off all of the good solutions with your assumptions (or accidentally creation false solutions due to your shortcuts). And that's just for medical questions.

I don't think it's going to be possible for an unaided human to construct a model like that for a very long time, and possibly not ever.

The traditional argument is that there's a vast space of possible optimization processes, and the vast majority of them don't have humanlike consciousness or ego or emotions. Thus, we wouldn't assign them human moral standing. AIXI isn't a person and never will be.

A slightly stronger argument is that there's no way in hell we're going to build an AI that has emotions or ego or the ability to be offended by serving others wholeheartedly, because that would be super dangerous, and defeat the purpose of the whole project.

Your lawnmower isn't your slave. "Slave" prejudicially loads the concept with anthrocentric morality that does not actually exist.

I think there's a question of how we create an adequate model of the world for this idea to work. It's probably not practical to build one by hand, so we'd likely need to hand the task over to an AI.

Might it be possible to use the modelling module of an AI in the absence of the planning module? (or with a weak planning module) If so, you might be able to feed it a great deal of data about the universe, and construct a model that could then be "frozen" and used as the basis for the AI's "virtual universe."

Have you considered coating your fingers with capsaicin to make scratching your mucus membrances immediately painful?

(Apologies if this advice is unwanted - I have not experienced anything similar, and am just spitballing).

I made serious progress on a system for generating avatar animations based on the motion of a VR headset. It still needs refinement, but I'm extremely proud of what I've got so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klAsxamqkkU

For Omnivores:

• Do you think the level of meat consumption in America is healthy for individuals? Do you think it's healthy for the planet?

Meat is obviously healthy for individuals. We evolved to eat as much of it as we could get. Many nutrients seem to be very difficult to obtain in sufficient, bio-available form from an all-vegetable diet. I just suspect most observant vegans are substantially malnourished.

On the planet side of things, meat is an environmental disaster. The methane emissions are horrifying, as is the destruction of rainforest. Hopefull... (read more)

Technically, it's the frogs and fish that routinely freeze through the winter. Of course, they evolved to pull off that stunt, so it's less impressive.

We've cryopreserved a whole mouse kidney before, and were able to thaw and use it as a mouse's sole kidney.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/

We've also shown that nematode memory can survive cryopreservation:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3107805/Could-brains-stay-forever-young-Memories-survive-cryogenic-preservation-study-shows.html

The trouble is that larger chunks of tis... (read more)

The issue is that crashing the mosquito population doesn't work if even a few of them survive to repopulate - the plan needs indefinite maintenance, and the mosquitoes will eventually evolve to avoid our lab-bred dud males.

I wonder if you could breed a version of the mosquito that's healthy but has an aversion to humans, make your genetic change dominant, and then release a bunch of THOSE mosquitoes. There'd be less of a fitness gap between the modified mosquitoes and the original species, so if we just kept dumping modified males every year for a decade or two, we might be able to completely drive the original human-seeking genes out of the ecosystem.

Not much to add here, except that it's unlikely that Alex is an exceptional example of a parrot. The researcher purchased him from a pet store at random to try to eliminate that objection.

Interesting! I didn't know that, and that makes a lot of sense.

If I were to restate my objection more strongly, I'd say that parrots also seem to exceed chimps in language capabilities (chimps having six billion cortical neurons). The reason I didn't bring this up originally is that chimp language research is a horrible, horrible field full of a lot of bad science, so it's difficult to be too confident in that result.

Plenty of people will tell you that signing chimps are just as capable as Alex the parrot - they just need a little bit of interpretation f... (read more)

Yes it is a pure ANN - according to my use of the term ANN (arguing over definitions is a waste of time). ANNs are fully general circuit models, which obviously can re-implement any module from any computer - memory, database, whatever. The defining characteristics of an ANN are - simulated network circuit structure based on analog/real valued nodes, and some universal learning algorithm over the weights - such as SGD.

I think you misunderstood me. The current DeepMind AI that they've shown the public is a pure ANN. However, it has serious limitations be... (read more)

First off the bat, you absolutely can create an AGI that is a pure ANN. In fact the most successful early precursor AGI we have - the atari deepmind agent - is a pure ANN. Your claim that ANNs/Deep Learning is not the end of all AGI research is quickly becoming a minority position.

The deepmind agent has no memory, one of the problems that I noted in the first place with naive ANN systems. The deepmind's team's solution to this is the neural Turing machine model, which is a hybrid system between a neural network and a database. It's not a pure ANN. It is... (read more)

Yes, I've read your big universal learner post, and I'm not convinced. This does seem to be the crux of our disagreement, so let me take some time to rebut:

First off, you're seriously misrepresenting the success of deep learning as support for your thesis. Deep learning algorithms are extremely powerful, and probably have a role to play in building AGI, but they aren't the end-all, be-all of AI research. For starters, modern deep learning systems are absolutely fine-tuned to the task at hand. You say that they have only "a small number of hyperparamet... (read more)