Saturday, August 14, 2010

Comment to liveblogging Singularity Summit Ray Kurzweil

Can be found at: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/liveblogging-singularity-summit-ray.html

Forgive these naive questions I'm primarily just a poetic observer: But...speaking of the mind, the brain, etc. Isn't there more to what constitutes individual minds, brains, etc.?

1. Question, don't we live in a large living ecosystem, with all kinds of autonomic and automatic patterns on the diverse set of multiple species (subsystems) that constitutes the ecosystem to survive? Aren't we humans also a 'living system with a multitude of living systems that constitute us'; built in autonomic and automatic patterns that are hedonically (pain/pleasure) controlled and reflexively driven to reinforce our ability to survive? The ecosystem and our individual subsystems living systems (that constitute our human system) as they are, work in such a robust and ingenious way (yet we want to go around and/or beat them, in other words to beat death without thought of long term effects on the larger system that sustains us?). The egg trying to beat the Chicken? Isn't the cycle of life in all systems considered birth of an expression to it's decay and death, making room for newer expressions for evolutionary sustenance? If we human systems actually are clever enough to change our human cycles, will it in the long term set our ecosystem into an unbalanced mode? Creating disease in the system towards death anyway? In other words there is no way to beat death or even maintain your individual expression (outside the system). Nature provided you to extend through sexual reproduction, don't you trust this?

Back to question on the mind: Isn't our very "humanness"/"minds" a phenomenon of engagement and attachments. We survive in a network of relationships with other human beings, other species of this planet, and the nurturing from the overall ecosystem (what we live in). Each knot of individuality is bound to the next, creating the social fabric in which our very person-hood (minds) has true existence. Isolating an individual (mind) is an illusion. If we unravel the social contacts, don't the knots (mind) disappear to?

Don't we also have a mix of signals that also drives us human species today to mentally divine our individual realities in it (as a way to filter noise for sustenance of our individual minds), for balanced sustenance in the large ecosystem? All the while we create more complexity (noise) in our ecosystem; e.g., economic systems, political national systems, international systems, etc.; and all these systems are dynamic (wherein individual human realities are dynamic evolving systems as well). Isn't it all just noise and filtering?
Machines are not direct components of the ecosystem (they are human by products); so they don't have the same drivers that the ecosystems do (which humans are merely a small part of, as arrogant as we are).