From: Tonie Putter (t.putter@ecoport.org)
Date: Mon 17 Apr 2006 - 13:37:56 GMT
Interesting food for thought, Robin:
> copying the memes from a person into a machine.....
If we were to feed the meme: 'Thou shalt not kill' into a machine, would
this be equivalent to attempting to separate 'wetness' from 'water', i.e.
are [minds x memes] locked in autopoiesis to the point where reducing a meme
to a string of representational ASCII would trivialise it beyond any point
of usefulness of the central idea of a meme itself?
On the other hand, *if* a machine does manage to create an equivalent
autopoietic holon between its 'program' and the 'meme-as-ASCII',
as might exist in any human (mind x meme)-holon, then we may have a
powerful alternative to the Turing Test for machine intelligence.
Memes-as-ASCII are 'useless' compared to memes as operands in the sense that
they play a role in 'activating' or being a 'voice' in the chorus of a brain
event (consciousness) existing as a dynamic, n-dimensional network of
connections between a tiny subset of the 100 billion neurons in the brain.
(See Susan Greenfield's 'The Private Life of the Brain' for a much more
eloquent and extended explanation of what a meme might be when it is in a
brain, thereby to become a feature of *that* mind.)
Imagine a hypothetical 'Fanatic Muslim Machine' like Dan Simmon's Shrike in
his SF novel 'Hyperion', getting high on the meme 'infidel'..... So, if
ever we do succeed in transferring memes to machines so that they have
equivalent effects there than they do in human minds, I hope that Arnold
Swarzenegger will still be on call. If not, I might settle for Lee Harvey
Oswald or the Ghost Busters.
May the gods protect us against the morals of sentient machines....
Tonie Putter
Footnotes; see:
-----------------
1.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Asc/AUTOPOIESIS.html
2.
Maturana H., Varella F. (1973): Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization
of the Living. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 42. Dordecht: D.
Reidel Publishing Co.
> From: Robin Faichney <robin@mmmi.org>
> Reply-To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
> Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:59:51 +0100
> To: Keith Henson <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: Corner cases was Robert Aunger essay
>
> Sunday, April 16, 2006, 6:13:00 PM, Keith wrote:
>
>> At 11:29 AM 4/16/2006 +0100, you wrote:
>>> Saturday, April 15, 2006, 9:11:22 PM, Keith wrote:
>>>
>>>> For example, when a human mind is
>>>> implemented in computer hardware does it get infected with a meme or a
>>>> computer virus?
>>>
>>> Just to show I'm not averse to discussion mutation: surely that's a
>>> computer mind, not a human mind?
>
>> Chunk of a fiction story I wrote currently in voting on K5.
>
> Mmm, "fiction", yes, I see...
>
> I don't believe it makes sense to consider minds as transferable
> between substrates. As implied by your mention of "spirits", that's a
> basically dualist view. And I know that language was intended for
> those who could not appreciate the technology. But it also illustrates
> where the concepts originated. You just took dualism full circle,
> which is appropriate, because it takes us nowhere.
>
> What would make more sense, as well as being more relevant to this
> forum, would be a story about copying the memes from a person into a machine.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Robin mailto:robin@mmmi.org
>
>
> ===============================================================
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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