A Look at Holograms and Ethics

[Riedquat]

I mean, I think that we live in a deterministic universe. Every action is the result of actions that occurred previously, which were in turn the result of even earlier actions, which were the result of actions earlier still, and so on and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang. If you knew the exact position, motion, and composition of every speck of matter/energy in the universe, and had a powerful enough processor to analyze all that data, you could determine every single thing that was going to happen in the future with 100% accuracy.

Knowing those details though is impossible - not difficult, impossible, thanks to the Uncertainty Principle. Randomness is built in to the very laws of physics.

[Thebestoftherest]

I mean, I think that we live in a deterministic universe. Every action is the result of actions that occurred previously, which were in turn the result of even earlier actions, which were the result of actions earlier still, and so on and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang. If you knew the exact position, motion, and composition of every speck of matter/energy in the universe, and had a powerful enough processor to analyze all that data, you could determine every single thing that was going to happen in the future with 100% accuracy.

Knowing those details though is impossible - not difficult, impossible, thanks to the Uncertainty Principle. Randomness is built in to the very laws of physics.

I would argue randomness is the only thing you could argue happen 100% of the time.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Determinism doesn't dictate our actions. That's a gross misrepresentation of what Free Will implies. Determinism is referential and has no imperative.

Free will is within social context, comparing specimens, not in making sure that one specimen's action can't be defined beforehand.

[Thebestoftherest]

Determinism doesn't dictate our actions. That's a gross misrepresentation of what Free Will implies. Determinism is referential and has no imperative.

Free will is within social context, comparing specimens, not in making sure that one specimen's action can't be defined beforehand.

I'm with you there.

[Fianna]

I mean, I think that we live in a deterministic universe. Every action is the result of actions that occurred previously, which were in turn the result of even earlier actions, which were the result of actions earlier still, and so on and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang. If you knew the exact position, motion, and composition of every speck of matter/energy in the universe, and had a powerful enough processor to analyze all that data, you could determine every single thing that was going to happen in the future with 100% accuracy.

Knowing those details though is impossible - not difficult, impossible, thanks to the Uncertainty Principle. Randomness is built in to the very laws of physics.

Oh, absolutely. Even if it weren't for the Uncertainty Principle, it would still be impossible to know all that, because you yourself are a factor in determining the course of future events, so any prediction of the future would have to take into account your own knowledge of the future ... and your knowledge of that prediction as well ... and your knowledge of that prediction of your prediction of your prediction, and so on and so on.

But the fact that you can't know all those details doesn't mean they don't exist.

We have the functional equivalent of free will, and in most circumstances, that's good enough. It's only when you try quantifying free will, and asking whether a particular being has it, that it becomes important to acknowledge that our "free will" is not anything special, it's just the mechanical systems of our brains being too complicated for us to understand.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Determinism doesn't dictate our actions. That's a gross misrepresentation of what Free Will implies. Determinism is referential and has no imperative.

Free will is within social context, comparing specimens, not in making sure that one specimen's action can't be defined beforehand.

I'm with you there.

These noobs.

[Beastro]

I can't agree with that, data is consider a person why would being made of data, electricity and metal be consider real when data electricity and light be consider not real.

I agree with C.Mirror. And time to be controversial - I don't think Data is a person either. He is a machine programmed to emulate humans as closely as possible. Why do you think that his deepest desire in life is to become more human?

I think the only Soong-android that was a true AI was Lore. He was clearly operating with desires and a will of his own. Only when Data received the emotion chip did he start to convince me that he had begun to break his programming - which was the entire reason why Soong made it.

So would Data be considered sapient? Someone who had their brain simulated on a computer? Someone who had their brain replaced with computerized neurons? Someone who had only part of their brain replaced with computerized neurons? My cat?

It's Chinese Room territory.

A cat has enough in common with us (and a line of common descent) to have enough faith in the processes which produced the critter that go back a very long time. That is a long way from something created over someone's lifetime like Soong's. Maybe if the descendants Data kicked about for a few hundred thousand years or more it might cement things better.

With that said that then asks the ethical question of what is worse: To treat a sapient being as a non-sapient being or treat something non-sapient as sapient.

I'd rather err on the side of caution and treat a machine as a person just in case even if I don't consider Data to be one.

Well... this gets into why I ridicule the idea of transhumanism. I simply do not believe that transferring a human mind into a computer is anything more than a copy and paste job. I died and then someone else walked off with my memories. And that's the best case scenario. I might be left a vegetable whilst someone else walks off with my memories.

As far as a I am concerned, any robot that has my memories is just a robot. Its a tape recording working a program. Nothing more.

Someone who only has part of their brain replaced for me depends on what part of their brain is replaced. A chipset to enhance your brainpower is fine; someone completely removing your prefrontal cortex is something else entirely.

All transhumanism is to me is a fancy way people would convince themselves into suicide. They'd keep going until nothing is left of their humanity and whatever they'd insist is their essence that would live on is just them making excuses for their ambitions to transcend the inherent limitations that make us what we are.

[Beelzquill]

Is our humanity our cells? Is it our bones, or is it the memories, personalities, and our ideas? I personally don't know if mind uploading would be a "copy and paste" job or not. Actually, wouldn't it be "copy, delete original, then paste copy? It's why I know that if Star Trek transporters were to ever come into reality I definitely wouldn't use except for a last resort.
Again though, don't we replace every cell in our bodies over a few year period, making us essentially organically not the people we were born as?

[Thebestoftherest]

Maybe it something more or less.

[Madner Kami]

The thought of AI and how they'd actually function is a fertile field to discuss. I'll pick just this one for now:

The problem with how Star Trek treats holograms is that the writers often demonstrated little understanding of the difference between software and hardware. Observe when the Doctor or Moriarty are transferred from one computer system to another, and it's treated as though they have been physically moved to a different location, rather than remaining on the old computer system while a copy of them is created on another one.

Now, I'm hardly well-versed in computer engineering, but my understanding is that it's nonsensical to talk about a program being intelligent or self-aware. A computer can be intelligent or self-aware, while the program determines the form of that intelligence.

For Data, that distinction is irrelevant, because his positronic brain is devoted entirely to running what could be called the "Data program", and no one tries running a separate program on his hardware or downloading his programming onto a different computer. But for the holograms, the self-aware ones are being run on the same computer system that's running all the non-self-aware holograms, as well as running all the props and settings and other aspects of the holodeck.

The crews treat each holographic character they encounter on the holodeck like it's its own, distinct entity, when really, it should be that the whole holodeck (or even the whole ship's computer system) is one vast entity, and the holographic characters are different roles it takes on to interact with the crew. Like, if I put a hand puppet on my left hand, and a different puppet on my right hand, I might be able to convince a toddler that each of the puppets is a different person, with separate identities and personalities, when really the only person the toddler is interacting with is me.

They can be their own distinct entities. A computer is entirely capable of running multiple programs at once, entirely independently from each other. Our computers do so routinely and do so even if you run multiple instances of the otherwise exact same program and while technically neither program will show (or should show) different results from the same input, they are still distinct entities. One input into one has no (or should not have) any impact on the other instance of the same program. Try to run the same game twice at the same time, for example (I often do so in EVE Online, running one copy of the client per screen). I can do entirely different things on my three screens and program-instances, without my input in one instance having an effect on the others, despite it being identical base copies of the program running in the RAM of the computer.

Conversely, have a look at split-brain patients. You are aware that our brains are made of two hemispheres, which are connected by and communicate via a "bridge" called the corpus callosum? Well, it's possible to sever that connection, be that by accident/injury, birth-defect or actual operation (in order to treat some forms of epilepsy). Well, there's some truely nightmare fuel shit going on in those people, if you think about it, because there are two independant and distinct brains working in that head and while normally one half acts subservient to the other, there are cases where both brains show clearly distinct behaviour, e.g. a hitting his woman with his left hand, while his right hand tries to hold the left or the case of a naturally born split-brain who can read a book twice as fast as normal human beings, because he can read one side of the book with one half of his brain and the other side of the book with the other side of his brain, simultaneously, except for the small detail, that each half of his brain only knows half the text of the book...