Mer från Avoid-L

Jag citerade ett inlägg från diskussionslistan Avoid-L i ett tidigare inlägg http://apmel.blogspot.com/2008/06/can-machines-be-conscious.html. Här kommer ytterligare ett:

Before the printing press people memorized an enormous amounts of information. And this included your ordinary peasants. All of those old silly sayings and ditty-like poems where popular cases of how things were remembered by word association games. This has further changed with electronic media, where in some sense our text based way of thinking have become supplanted by visual imagery. The ways in which our brains process information is already profoundly different from how brains processed things just 50 or 100 years ago. As our thinking has been augmented by external technologies, print, sound, visual and now computer generated virtual realities we have made ourselves into literally different sorts of human beings.

Once we start interfacing neurons and human brains with computers the change will be profound. I would hazzard to guess that any of us would have a very difficult time talking with anyone who lived prior to 1900, and I think it would be virtually impossible with anyone prior to the 18th century. The only exception would be with some of the more luminary intellectuals of the age, yet the average early 21st century American would have a horrible time trying to have a relevant conversation with an average early 18th century Englishman. Imagine a CEO of a computer chip or petrochemical company trying to have a business conversation with an 18th century merchant. We are already far down the road to a psychological self-evolution, and this could potentially go much further and at an exponentially quickened rate. If you get a chance, listen to the song "High Hopes" by Pink Floyd.

Lawrence B. Crowell

A single snowflake never sees itself as responsible for the avalanche.

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