Here is the expanded version (still not what I would consider an “entertaining” level of detail) of a sci-fi plot I talked about on Twitter. I’m thinking it might work well as interactive fiction. Please let me know if it’s too ambiguous or there’s something you don’t like or whatever.
Julio, a 12-year-old boy, is exploring a jungle island with his best friend, a talking dog named Maximiliano. The two of them are looking for the buried treasure of a Spanish conquistador.
Perception is essentially the problem of extracting high-level patterns from large amounts of raw-data (from sensors). Correctly recognizing the pattern/shape “dog” in a bitmap is one example of a tricky perceptual task. Note that the symbol “dog/not dog” is much less information than the raw image data. This compression is vital for being able to do quick computations further on in the mental process (“if tiger: run” is a good example of a conditional that depends on very abstract patterns for both tigers and running).
If we imagine that each sensor is a dimension, then we can say that distinguishing between images of dogs and not-dogs is a matter of partitioning a multidimensional input-space into two areas. Perception in animals is (almost?) never guided by top-down labels, though; animals learn *common* patterns/shapes, and then use these patterns in higher-cognition.
![[INSERT MEME HERE]](http://raelifin.com/files/pics/adviceDogBlog.png)
I am not a motorist. I dislike most everything about cars, and I do not drive (or even know how). I get rides between places that aren’t practical to walk to bike to, but when I have free time I like to be impractical and walk between them anyway, even if it takes me several hours.
In addition to exercise and fresh air (and significant personal risk of mugging, nowadays), these long walks help link my mental representations of these two places in my mind. When I take a bus from A to B, it seems like they’re on different worlds, only reachable by spacecraft, but when I take the time to go by foot they become anchored as part of a larger spacial model.
Linking two things, be they places, people, objects, events, or ideas, is what our brains are good at. The very structure of the neuron is built around the all important synapse—the link between cells. This morning I made a similar link, this time between cognitive science and economics. It’s somewhat trivial, but seeing as it’s taken me this long to work out, I figure that it might not be immediately obvious to everyone.
Earlier today Aaron Saenz, the lead writer at Singularity Hub (an excellent tech news-blog) wrote a piece called The Myth of the Three Laws of Robotics – Why We Can’t Control Intelligence. In it he dismissed fears of “robot apocalypse”, saying:
Let’s get something out of the way. I’m not worried about a robot apocalypse. I don’t think Skynet is going to launch nuclear missiles in a surprise attack against humanity. I don’t think Matrix robots will turn us all into batteries, nor will Cylons kill us and replace us. HAL’s not going to plan our ‘accidental deaths’ and Megatron’s not lurking behind the moon ready to raid our planet for energon cubes. The ‘robo-pocalypse’ is a joke.
I need to post what I write. I write often, to myself and to others, but so very often I feel as though the ideas and statements inside are somehow not worth publishing. This blog was only ever intended as a personal space; I have no obligation to post here, or any professional interest. So why don’t I share more? I donno. Let me do that.
The following is a message I sent to a new friend, where we were discussing transhumanism, ecology, and specifically whether the transhumanist perspective is egocentric and not concerned enough about environmental health and sustainability. I’m a neohippy and environmentalist, so I could totally relate to the values expressed, but I wanted to clarify a point about egoism.
As I see things (which may certainly be wrong), there is no objective moral system. (This is what I mean when I say I’m an amoralist or moral non-realist.) What this means, essentially, is that all notions of “good” and “bad” are inventions of people. (Same with “purpose”.) This doesn’t mean that ethics don’t exist–just that they’re entirely subjective (within an ethical context something can be good or bad, but it’s probably healthy to recognize that said context is artificial).
