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Old 10-05-2021, 05:22 AM   #5
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: What is the ultimate vision for digital consciousness?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom H. View Post
As you hinted though, I'm still interested in what the advocates of approaching a digital and collective mental integration hope to achieve. How do they envision the dynamics of the state they end up with?
I'm not sure most of them do. The thing is that "ultimate" assumes there is some sort of final state. That's not the way the world works, whatever changes are produced by digital consciousness won't *end* change, and I think most people actually working in the field know that, and are aiming at the next shift or maybe the one after that and not some "ultimate" goal in the unknowable future.

I think even the more grounded of the "singularity" cultists know that - they're using singularity not in the actual mathematical sense, but as a metaphor. It's not that they thing processing power is genuinely transfinite, or the behavior of the system has passed beyond the *possibility* of description, but that it's passed beyond our limited ability to describe it.

Note that this is specifically not a vision of a goal, or of what it's like, but an assertion they have (and cannot have) any idea of what the state beyond that is. Singularity proponents using the term at all seriously are not only not expressing a vision, they are saying that "ultimate vision" is *impossible*.
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