One man's mission to create a living mind inside a machine

Confusing cloud of objections. The idea fascinates me, though. To dispel Winterman's Torture Box, imagine that they first develop a way to generate a massive amount of fake input (there's no way they can do that in eight years, right? But let's pretend, so that we don't have to reject the idea right away). That should do away with Stygmata's philosophical argument as well - if you can fake a human brain and all the input it needs to keep ticking, you can also fake any craving and motivation you could imagine. And a working mind demonstrably doesn't stop or go crazy just because it can't get input, though it's obviously not happy or comfortable. I remember reading about sensory deprivation experiments causing the brain to start generating its own input, resulting in hallucinations in the style of giant purple spiders on the walls and imaginary friends called Wilson.

Which leads up to a more difficult objection - development. Those deprivation-induced hallucinations are products of a developed, functional mind running on empty, recycling stuff it's been fed with before. I bet that won't happen if you throw a pile of virtual brain cells in a bucket and kick them around a bit, even if you replicate the structure and operating rules of a real brainmeat. I don't see how minds are really "evolutionary" in any meaningful way; your brain won't listen to its genes, since brain cells rarely divide or change. Like the rest of your body once the shop opens, phenotype kicks in, and genotype doesn't really apply anymore. But you can't go to the other extreme either - just wire up a fully functioning mind, and throw the switch on a person with language, personality and an appreciation of Shakespeare. (Unless you had a way of perfectly copying the state of an existing mind, which amounts to the same thing, or possibly to cheating.) To really build a functioning virtual brain, you would need to simulate the neural pruning process and everything that goes with it. While I haven't got the hard data, I can't help but imagine that would need some titanic leaps - even bigger than those for the torture-box-avoiding-device - in both raw processing power, to handle the massive number crunching involved, and developmental psychology, to figure out the mechanics. (Of course, with enough processing power, and that massive sensory faker we imagined, maybe you could just fast-forward development and have a fully formed mind within minutes.)

Even so, while utterly unfeasible right now, there's no theoretical reason it can't be done, and done ethically. It's not superscience - I can't catch it breaking any laws of physics as we know them. Our own existence is proof enough of that.

Politics - When does the talk stop, and violence begin?

Sod it! One little click and my whole carefully worded rant disappears, links and all.

Ok, brief summary then:

@fan, a few comments back:

The BBC has a strict charter and is supposedly impartial, i believe this sometimes provides cover for times when it very blatantly is not.

We have legislation against incitement to religious and racial hatred, I believe this has made the BNP and their allies very careful of what they say in public and may make them appear more respectable to borderline supporters so fed up with being 'fucked in the arse by the same interests' again and again that they do not look to closely at what they perceive to be an alternative.

The implementation of anti-terrorist legislation here, on a number of occasions, has crossed the line between public protection and the imposition of thought crime.

The tendency of the government here, from Thatcher right through to Brown, to privatise and contact out formerly state run services is leading to a loss of democratic control over the nuts and bolts of everyday life and appears likely to end up with a rump government responsible for overall co-ordination and public order in a state run by and for the benefit of private corporations...hang on, who am i kidding? We're pretty much there already.

Wipes foam from mouth.../rant.

And yes, someone get Audley a rhythm track, i'd buy it!

The Windrow-Ravenswood Deck

@James Cunningham- what, that doesn't happen to people with normal decks?

OK, on to today's:

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Lost: Nothing’s Irreversible.

Time once again for the “Lost” running diary after the jump. Spoilers ahoy, you are forewarned. A brief mention about the clip show before the premiere. Michael Emerson could probably spend the rest of his career doing voice-overs. So very great. 9:01 – This recap would be more helpful if we hadn’t just had a clip [...]

The SMILE trailer

Raina Telgemeier’s dental drama is about to drop, and it now has a trailer.

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