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Clinton And Brun - The Next Chapter?

Mawwage. Twue Wuv. :3
Renee gets a hold of Clinton. He has to get another cybernetic hand.
Emily finds out about Brun. She gets JEALOUS. Hilarity Ensues.
Brun disappears into the night, and is never heard from, ever again.
Dora mounts the harpoon over the specials board.
Cosette promptly burns COD down ten minutes later.
Another Faye and Bubbles arc!
MOAR PINTSIZE!
Who cares? All I know is One man. One bowl. One year's supply of cereal. A lifetime of memes.
Something completely different, of course.
NO PATREON SPOILERS!
(Some Patreon spoilers)
Brun turns out to be a secret AI ((secret))
Return of the Secret Bakery

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Author Topic: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)  (Read 46797 times)

blt

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #200 on: 10 Jun 2016, 10:13 »

All the discussion about AIs aside, is anyone else getting the feeling that there's something bothering Faye more than just existential dread?  Like her responses seem to indicate she's in a poor mood for some other reason.
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brasca

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #201 on: 10 Jun 2016, 10:53 »

All the discussion about AIs aside, is anyone else getting the feeling that there's something bothering Faye more than just existential dread?  Like her responses seem to indicate she's in a poor mood for some other reason.

It's not all that easy to tell with Faye.  She seems as surly as usual. 
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Kugai

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #202 on: 10 Jun 2016, 15:59 »

At least they haven't gone Borg on them
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QuestionableIntentions

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #203 on: 10 Jun 2016, 21:28 »

My take on conciousness is that it's beginning is "simply" a meta layer of reasoning about your own reasoning. Any being, machine or otherwise, that reflects on it's own thought porocess shows a degree of conscioussnes. It also shows intelligence in so far as it can improve it's own actions.

And, however you define intelligent, you don't have intelligence without the ability to improve itself, to learn.
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anahata

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #204 on: 10 Jun 2016, 23:37 »

Today's experimental driverless cars, for example, use a kind of cheat in that they have access to massive map databases which allow them to avoid having to process the large majority of their input data, and instead focus only on whatever is novel in whatever they are getting from their sensor arrays. Humans (and mobile animals) don't do this, at least not as a primary strategy.

I'm not buying that. Humans rely on either knowing where they are going because they've gone there before and remember the route, or they use maps, or somebody gives them verbal directions (and GPS is a combination of the last two). Self driving cars have a map because it's their only means of navigation; all the logic for avoiding obstacles and staying on the road is based on immediate sensory input. It couldn't be any other way.
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jheartney

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #205 on: 11 Jun 2016, 08:08 »

Today's experimental driverless cars, for example, use a kind of cheat in that they have access to massive map databases which allow them to avoid having to process the large majority of their input data, and instead focus only on whatever is novel in whatever they are getting from their sensor arrays. Humans (and mobile animals) don't do this, at least not as a primary strategy.

I'm not buying that. Humans rely on either knowing where they are going because they've gone there before and remember the route, or they use maps, or somebody gives them verbal directions (and GPS is a combination of the last two). Self driving cars have a map because it's their only means of navigation; all the logic for avoiding obstacles and staying on the road is based on immediate sensory input. It couldn't be any other way.
The maps give the driverless cars sign and signal placement, lane placement, lane direction, and placement of all durable landmarks. It's far more than navigation. Put a driverless car in an unfamiliar urban location and give it only basic navigational information (a simple street map), and the car will be unable to move.
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Akima

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #206 on: 12 Jun 2016, 02:28 »

Marvin Minsky pointed out that people in the 60s said that computers would never beat humans at chess,  because that requires intelligence and computers aren't capable of intelligent thought. When they eventually did, it was claimed that playing chess wasn't a test of real intelligence because computers could do it.
Essentially, we have no explicit definition of intelligence or thought, so it's hardly surprising this confusion arises. Generally, definitions boil down to little more than "thinking is what humans do". This is implicit in the Turing Test, in which a computer, in order to pass the test, simply has to be indistinguishable from a human being. It is probably no more than egotism that leads people to declare as "not real intelligence" any cognitive performance that can be explicitly defined, turned into algorithms, and programmed into a computer. It is rather like declaring a hole dug by a machine, rather than by a man with a spade, as not being a real hole.

As for the suggestion that a computer is "cheating" by being provided with pre-prepared information, that is rather like saying that doctors are not intelligent, because they go to medical school, and have access to Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the medical soap-opera).
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BenRG

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #207 on: 12 Jun 2016, 04:37 »

Purely FWIW, my definition of intelligence is 'being able to create new behaviours that are not automatically based on current or recent sensory input from the environment'. In other words, the ability to transcend instinct and try something totally new.
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Azaph

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #208 on: 12 Jun 2016, 05:18 »

Noone seems to have explicitly noted this yet, and it's driving me nuts:
That's not what a philosophical zombie is. Like, it's amost the exact opposite, actually, the whole point of a P-zombie is that it acts exactly like a person in every way, but has no internal experiences. The argument made using them explicitly rests on the fact that it is in principle impossible to tell that another person isn't a P-zombie - literally everyone else in the world might be a P-zombie, for all you know, because you can't tell what other people's internal experiences are like. Behavioural markers like lack of empathy and concern with one's own advancement cannot possibly distinguish a P-zombie, both because that would be an external difference (which P-zombies don't have) and because something can be inhuman and have experiences. Nor could one make a P-zombie, actually, since there's no way to really know that something isn't conscious either.
(For the record, the major argment using P-zombies is, simplified: 'P-zombies are not in principle a logical impossibility, therefore it is logically possible to have a being physically identical to a human without internal experience, therefore our experiences are not identical to anything physical, therefore physicalism is false.')
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Morituri

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #209 on: 14 Jun 2016, 19:17 »

t turns out that Sam Adams (the man not the company his father founded) was quite the bastard. The mob that caused the Boston Tea Party was pretty liquored up thanks to him. And the historical record shows that's far from the first time  he got a mob liquored up  and started a riot.

Of course he did!  He ran a brewery!  Liquored up mobs are good for business!  That whole revolution thing was an accident, really.

To John Adams we owe the founding principle of our democracy.  "Money Talks."
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Morituri

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #210 on: 14 Jun 2016, 19:43 »

In other words, if there were a hypothetical species that is able to solve insanely difficult problems, but is not able to meaningfully communicate (due to its evolutionary history or whatever) would be considered unintelligent.
This raises the question of how this hypothetical non-communicative species is going to grasp an insanely difficult abstract problem if there's no way to communicate the problem to it. Language is part of how we organize the world conceptually, and without language most of abstract reasoning is probably unreachable.

Indeed.  More to the point though, what use has a creature for the ability to solve insanely complex abstract problems, in the absence of an ability to communicate?  The ability would do the creature no good.  Thus evolution could not possibly create such a creature.

Specifically: human-style intelligence and communications are inextricably linked.  Intelligence was so valuable for our own ancestors (I think so anyway) because they could plan coordinated actions or specialize into individual tasks and communicate their needs and abilities to contribute.  Want complex problem solving?  Try to hunt deer that can run six times faster than you with spears and six guys.  You have to use the landscape and terrain, you have to use tactics, you have to execute them while widely separated after agreeing what they will be, and you have to anticipate how the deer thinks and what it will do.  Without communication, you can't do those things.

Want some more complex problem solving?  Mess around with hides until you figure out how to tan them into covers that will keep you warm when you sleep.  Want to leverage that problem-solving so it affects more than one band of people?  Now you need communication.  If our ancestors hadn't had communication, our brains would be a waste of biological energy.

I think about this stuff a lot.  If you want to read a series of articles spread over a bunch of months, I've written them.  If you don't, that's cool too; they're long.  But I hope that some of them may interest you and provoke further thought if you're thinking about this stuff.

http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/12/15/philosophy-science-and-consciousness/
http://dillingers.com/blog/2016/03/17/provoking-intelligence/
http://dillingers.com/blog/2016/04/29/the-world-of-an-ai/
http://dillingers.com/blog/2016/05/06/characteristics-of-human-style-intelligence/

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Storel

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Re: WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
« Reply #211 on: 19 Jun 2016, 21:38 »

Thanks for the links, Morituri. I've only read the first one so far, but it made lots of sense and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

A couple of people above mentioned the novel Blindsight, by Peter Watts, and I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already. It's a science fiction novel about first contact with aliens that appear to have intelligence without consciousness, and the author has some very cutting-edge research about consciousness in his bibliography. I don't generally gush about novels, but I would honestly call this a tour-de-force and I'd love to hear what you think about it. I got it pretty inexpensively as an e-book from Barnes & Noble, and I'm sure Amazon would have it too.
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