Paradoxically, transhumanism’s goal can be reached only if transhumanism’s assumption of philosophical materialism is wrong, and mind is more than an epiphenomenon of matter …

Moving software around from machine to machine only works because computers are mass-produced. People, on the other hand, are unique. I expect that if there were some way to take a checkpoint of my brain, you would not be able to find another brain that could execute it.

I do expect that it will eventually be possible to move large quantities of *data* in and out; if you google Brainport you’ll find some intriguing stuff that points that way. Ultimately, I expect this to only be successful when it’s possible to install implants in infants so that as their brains learn about the world around them, they will also learn how to manipulate the implant. For them, moving large chunks of data will be as natural as speaking is for us.

I don’t expect the technology to be cheap, however, I suspect that there will be a variety of implants with different features for a range of prices. At some point, a child’s future may be determined by how far into debt their parents were willing to go to have a data port installed immediately after birth…

That, to me, is the big problem with AI. If we know how it works, we won’t consider it to be intelligent.

I totally disagree that “every thing humans do is the result if instructions given us by evolution”. Thats arguing that humans are no more sentient than machines are. If you believe that AI can happen then you have to believe in teh I part first. If you think we are just bags of meat and chemical stimuli then what point is there in developing AI?

We certainly can give a artifical organism sensors, and program it for behaviors, but the choice is going to be like your Netflix recommendations - derived from weighted averages, not a choice. Case in point is chess - computers dont play chess. They massively brute-force the game to assess eveyr possible branching move N moves donwstream of the present board, then calculate a metric of how “good” the outcome is along each of those branches, and then “choose” the highest-scoring branch. Thats chess as algorithm not chess as a game.

I will be a lot more impressed when an AI beats a 1p dan at Go.

Every single thing humans have done is carry out instructions given to us by evolution.

It cannot notice, it cannot choose to act, it cannot explore possible problem solving techniques, even if we laid those out for it.

Sure it can. If we can give it eyes, it can notice things. If we give it motivations, it can choose between them (just as we choose between eating, sex, work, etc at a given moment). Computers can already solve chess problems better than we can.

Quite a few, actually.

true, but you might as well argue that a human being is just a pile of water and some trace materials, but given a big pile of that stuff you don’t get a human, either The process by which those raw materials become more, is encoded as information in DNA, and also an emergent property. Thats all part of billions of years of evolution, and not something we can just replicate without effort. It’s like breaking an encryption code - just numbers, right? But which numbers?

Fhnu, your thought experiment is awesome. But I think its a lot easier to magically replace a neuron with an “artificial” one than it is to do so in practice. You also are implicitly assuming that neurons are discrete entities that function individually, but that is also not quite true. A given neuron is enmeshed in its neighborhood in such a way that by removing it, you’d cause damage to surrounding ones, or at the very least upset the regional equilibrium that makes that local areas’ processing function. A neuron by itself is easy to model but no neuron is an island, and thats what I mean by multiplicative complexity.

As a corollary to your thought experiment, replace one human being with an AI. Then two, then N… at what point does human civilization become something else? The question is flawed, of course.

Then again, it is my opinion that true AI is essentially a technical problem, not a metaphysical one. (The practicalities might prevent it from ever being done, sure.) My reason for believing this is a thought experiment:

First, note that the behaviour of individual neurons is well understood. Hence, in theory, we can take a person, and while he is still alive, replace one neuron with an artificial copy that behaves identically. Now, we all agree that the awareness of the individual isn’t affected. Now, repeat, step by step, until every neuron in his brain is artificial. Now the question: At what point does awareness go away? 3 options, that there is a sudden switching point, which seems kinda absurd. That awareness gradually declines, which doesn’t match the 1-0 feel of consciousness. Or that it never goes away, which seems to me the most convincing expectation.

Another argument is to realise that artificial intelligence already exists - in our children. The human reproductive system is ultimately just chemistry, DNA just a molecule, so it seems silly to say that we can’t consciously do using metal and electricity what we can already unconsciously do using amino acid bases, sugar molecules and a bit of heat and water, etc.