andrewducker | (no subject)

(no subject)

People are not robots.

People are not perfect.

Bodies are made of flesh.

Flesh is no perfection, but just good enough

It is not steel or marble, cast and carved into shape, but grown through experience and infection and bruising and hard work and every experience you ever had.

You will never look like the photographs you see of the beautiful people because the beautiful people themselves do not look like that.

Accept that you are who you are, imperfections and all.

If you do not, who will?

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Personally, I've always found the perfection marble and steel as against squishy stuff, or of the perfection of the robot over the organic form, to be a somewhat backwards metaphor: Robots may be clean of line and pleasing to the aesthetic sense, but look how grossly limited even the most sophisticated of our current creations are, and look how we have only gotten them to be as sophisticated as that by modeling them on flesh! Squishy stuff is not to be reviled: it is to be celebrated, imperfections and evolutionary hangers-on and all.

Asbolutely.

Reading about neural networks, it's fascinating to me that there's basically a choice between giving a computer a set of rules to find a solution, which is kinda clunky but can be understood by us, or in setting up a neural network which can learn to find the rules, but ends up being incomprehensible to us once it's done so.

A bit like our own brains, or the universe etc.

There is no guarantee that we can understand everything that we can see/measure/detect/find - unless, I suppose, you are a fan of one of the strong anthropic principles.

Our explanations of the universe around us and everything in it are a series of analogies - the only real explanation is the actual thing itself. (it strikes me that this thought is amusingly like "In the beginning there was the WORD...")

I think I'm feeling very Friday....

Well, exactly. I have very little faith that we will ever have complete understanding of our own brains, because they aren't linear devices, but far more complex parallell devices whose power comes from the fact that they are so interlinked.

I'm willing to believe that we will understand bits of our brains, but even then we may have to build other minds to understand our brains for us :->

And yeah, it's all allegory, except for the thing, which we only have experiential access to. Very annoying.

Yes, and the fact that you get complex behaviours out of the interactions of exquisitely simple parts which themselves have no inclination to behave that way is bogglesomely cool. Wo could predict a termite mound from watching a single termite running around doing its termite thing? And yet we get 'intelligently' designed structures appropriate for their surroundings, with self-regulative ventilation. But of course no one could predict that from looking at one termite. It only falls out of the behaviour of the whole lot of them following very simple rules that have nothing to do with nest building. That's what's particularly cool about an evolved system like populations of termites: the problem is one of survival, and the solution is of obvious evolutionary benefit to the species. Go bugs!

/hug/

Thanks, Andy.

A.

Flesh heals and stone and steel do not, which is definitely a major plus for flesh, as is the fact that flesh can also feel. I could really get behind the idea of a seriously tinkered with and improved flesh body, with a few discreet and carefully made electronic add ons (a digital memory-backup comes to mind). Then again, I'm a weird transhumanist who thinks of human bodies as barely adequate residences that last far too short a time and lack many features that I want.

Then again, I'm a weird transhumanist who thinks of human bodies as barely adequate residences that last far too short a time and lack many features that I want.

Seconded!

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