Xenobots. Could self-replicating blissbots create a happiness explosion?
Seen in The hedonistic Imperative
“The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’”
The need of a “scenario completion”
“Fascinating concept that I came across in military/police psychology dealing with the unique challenges people face in situations of extreme stress/danger: scenario completion. Take the normal pattern completion that people do and put fear blinders on them so they only perceive one possible outcome and they mechanically go through the motions *even when the outcome is terrible* and there were obvious alternatives. This leads to things like officers shooting *after* a suspect has already surrendered, having overly focused on the possibility of needing to shoot them. It seems similar to target fixation where people under duress will steer a vehicle directly into an obstacle that they are clearly perceiving (looking directly at) and can’t seem to tear their gaze away from. Or like a self fulfilling prophecy where the details of the imagined bad scenario are so overwhelming, with so little mental space for anything else that the person behaves in accordance with that mental picture even though it is clearly the mental picture of the *un*desired outcome.
I often try to share the related concept of stress induced myopia. I think that even people not in life or death situations can get shades of this sort of blindness to alternatives. It is unsurprising when people make sleep a priority and take internet/screen fasts that they suddenly see that the things they were regarding as obviously necessary are optional. In discussion of trauma with people this often seems to be an element of relationships sadly enough. They perceive no alternative and so they resign themselves to slogging it out for a lifetime with a person they are very unexcited about. This is horrific for both people involved.”
…and the opposite: how is Elon’s Software?
The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. […]
Musk calls this “reasoning from first principles.” I’ll let him explain:
I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.5
My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:
When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
[…]
Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job without the right degree.
Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software came down on the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn’t in the Goal Pool anymore, and he trusted his software—so he made a macro change.
He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Four years later, they sold the company and Elon walked away with $22 million.
As a dotcom millionaire, the conventional wisdom was to settle down as a lifelong rich guy and either invest in other companies or start something new with other people’s money. But Musk’s goal formation center had other ideas. His Want box was bursting with ambitious startup ideas that he thought could have major impact on the world, and his Reality box, which now included $22 million, told him that he had a high chance of succeeding. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according to his Reality box.
So he used his newfound wealth to start X.com in 1999, with the vision to build a full-service online financial institution. The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. But again, Musk trusted his software. What he knew about the internet told him that this was inside the Reality box—because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet, the Reality box had grown much bigger than people appreciated—and that was all he needed to know to move forward. In the top part of his software, as his strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X.com’s service changed, the team changed, the mission changed, even the name changed. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Musk made $180 million.
source: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html
Bonus tip: about Tim Urban’s and Elon Musk’s idea of consciousness:
“One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.”
Source: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
David Cooper’s argument showing sentience to be impossible.
http://magicschoolbook.com/consciousness
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
“These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was among those briefed on the work. “It’s at the extreme of technical know-how, but not that different from preserving a kidney.”
The “mini brains” were technically “cerebral organoids,” made from the cells that make up the region of the brain known as the cerebellum. They started out as clusters of stem cells raised in a special medium designed to support brain development, eventually growing into organoids with a similar structure as a real-life cerebellum.
This paneudaimonia looks like the opposite of panpsychism.
“Paneudaimonia is the idea that the whole universe is absolute pleasure, except in the domain of what we know as sentient beings, in which all experiences imply different types of suffering.
Paneudaimonia is the idea that identity, and / or the “I” and / or consciousness are generated and / or are linked to suffering or pain. That is to say, that the self-consciousness is always painful. But the non-conscious experience (the not self-consciousness) is always pleasurable.
According to the idea “Paneudaimonia”, every time we experience something positive or pleasant, it is because we are losing self or identity; and when we experience the self or the identity, we experience it in a painful way.”
“Organoid” is the term generally used to refer to a small ball of human cells grown in cell culture from stem cells (human stem cells for human organoids). The stem cells may be embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, or other types of stem cells, but the effort has been to get cells that will all become one or more cell types found in an organ. Thus, there are human liver organoids, kidney organoids, gut organoids…and yes, brain organoids. The human neural organoids have been grown for over three years – and some of them have survived for over two years. They have diameters of about 4 millimeters (or a sixth of an inch), about the size of a very small pea. They have no vasculature and so the cells need to be in contact with the oxygen and nutrient bearing (and waste bearing-away) culture media. Currently human neural organoids have about two to six million neurons (no other brain cells so far, just neurons). They self-organize, grow synapses, fire, and continue to get more and more complex as time goes on. Still, by comparison, the human brain is estimated to contain approximately 86 billion neurons.
Chimeras – in this case, human/non-human brain chimeras – are creatures with some human brain cells and some non-human brain cells. (Thus far, in brains at least, they are always non-human animals with some human cells, not humans with some non-human cells.) Chimeras have been used in research for many years, though organoids are opening new possibilities: such as transplanting human organoids into rodent brains – which turn out to grow blood vessels for them.
Researchers have also long used human brain tissue kept alive outside the body – ex vivo tissue – but what is used and how is, like chimeras, becoming “new and improved.” Instead of keeping flat sheets of human brain cells alive in a dish, researchers are keeping alive and studying larger and larger chunks of human brains, taken from neurosurgical discards or from the recently dead. There are even some efforts, so far only in non-humans, to keep whole brains from dead animals “alive” apart from their bodies.
When conducting the mirror test, scientists place a visual marking on an animal’s body, usually with scentless paints, dyes, or stickers. They then observe what happens when the marked animal is placed in front of a mirror. The researchers compare the animal’s reaction to other times when the animal saw itself in the mirror without any markings on its body.
Animals that pass the mirror test will typically adjust their positions so that they can get a better look at the new mark on their body, and may even touch it or try to remove it. They usually pay much more attention to the part of their body that bears a new marking.
Currently, nine non-human animal species pass the mirror test. Not all individuals of each species pass, but many do.
The researchers successfully demonstrated that, like humans, cuttlefish brains can compute distance using incoming information from both eyes at once. However, they write in the paper, “Cuttlefish stereopsis is likely afforded by a different algorithm than in humans, and not just a different implementation.
❝ The birds’ generosity has animal scientists intrigued. It’s one thing to pass a partner a piece of grub; it’s another to give them the currency to purchase it. Such acts of charity have long been thought to be restricted to primates like humans, orangutans and bonobos. Few, if any, other mammals were thought capable of it, let alone a creature with a bird brain.
But big-brained African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) may be the first avian known to engage in this helpful behavior, Brucks’ team reports today in the journal Current Biology. Parrots, it seems, don’t just have the ability to comprehend metal rings as currency for food, but they also “understand the consequences their actions can have on another individual,” says Christina Riehl, an expert in bird behavior at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s pretty sophisticated reasoning.” ❞
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/parrots-share-currency-help-their-pals-purchase-food-180973917/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR2dcTMcb4AhTWYMUjU6N8ZiAAZ5Zt-g1uTgF5Z2JXkdnehTXf913RNbxI8