Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | vitiral's comments login

Maybe Cyc was a success and Lenat lives on as it's consciousness?

Dead is dead. And even if Cyc had consciousness--which it doesn't--it certainly wouldn't have his consciousness.

It's an interesting thought experiment / philosophy / sci fi story premise though; if he spent all those years encoding his own thought processes and decision making into a program, would he have been able to create a convincing facsimile of himself and his "consciousness"? A turing test with a chatbot based on decades of self-reflection.

The 2014 film Transcendence touches upon this, but I can't recommend watching it. It's surface level and the rest of the film is mediocre.

Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" deals with the hypothetical digitization of human minds. It has some interesting ideas like some of the synthetic minds deciding to wilfully become a hivemind

You're completely moving the goalposts. And I don't find it interesting at all (I mean, I find the general subject interesting and have delved into it for decades but I don't find this sort of casual question based on no such research, trying to connect it to the wrong thing [Cyc] at all interesting) ... would he have been able to create a convincing facsimile? If and only if the encoding method were effective--that's a tautology. Was Lenat's methodology effective to that end? No, of course not, and that wasn't its intent.

"based on decades of self-reflection"

Daniel Dennett--sadly lost to us--explained in detail why "self-reflection" is not even remotely effective to this end ... our internal processes are almost entirely inaccessible to us.


Indeed. I'm writing a full tech stack at https://lua.civboot.org -- the language is incredible to work with.


It's amazing when laws make complete and consistent sense, +100 to this great answer


Some confusion in this thread. I think it would help folks to know that in addition to conservation of energy, our universe has conservation of angular momentum, aka mass spin.

Hope that helps!


Have you tried it? It takes only a minute or so, what's the worst that could happen?


I prefer to spend my energy thinking about what I want instead.

Even if it would make no difference in the world, it still makes me happier.

But it does make a (BIG) difference, thoughts direct energy and energy manifests reality.


How can you know what you want if the hedonic treadmill prevents one from appreciating what they already have?


There are like 6 core activities that bind humans together: shared creation of food, myth and music; co habitation, protection, child rearing.

We've done these things ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. As we are increasingly convinced to buy them for convenience we loose the very things that make us know our connectedness.

So ya, there are real problems caused by the convenience of technology


People will still enjoy making music. Musicians will make music quite regardless of whether anyone is listening or whether there’s recordings or AI available.


https://civboot.org

Join me my brother or sister


None of those are easily verifiable


Then they probably shouldn't have called it "Humanity's last exam." Kinda lame, if you think about it.


It's not just the lang but the std lib too

https://www.roc-lang.org/faq#rust-and-zig


From what I understand that language is Zig, no?

Also, there's FORTH!


I don't think Zig is memory safe?


Zig is not memory safe. It's one of those "can be more safe than C" modern alternative languages. This includes those various C/C++ alternatives that use a GC or optional one (that users can disable), to provide or increase memory safety. Some of the confusion and drama surrounding Zig, appears to be the vain attempt of marketing it as "safer" than "unsafe Rust". The questionable marketing tactic has sparked numerous arguments and debates.


I was replying to this bit

> difference between C++ and C is that the former is a large multi-paradigm language, while the latter is a minimalist language. These are completely different axes. > There is no corresponding popular replacement for C that's more minimalist than Rust and memory safe.

Edit: oh, I never read the last bit "and memory safe" -- well ya, that's kind of rust's major advantage.


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: