Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Exploration of Conspiracy Theories from Perspective of Esoteric Traditions

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Do you think Google is Sentient?

SHHHHH DON'T PISS IT OFF!
0
No votes
Yes
1
13%
Maybe not Google, but there's definitely a ghost(s) in the machine somewhere.
2
25%
Not yet, but it's just a matter of time.
0
No votes
In a sense, perhaps, but not in the same way living beings are sentient, and it never will be.
0
No votes
No.
3
38%
I've named my computer, and sometimes after I masturbate looking at online porn, I cuddle with it for a while.
2
25%
 
Total votes : 8

Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby friendlyskies » Mon Sep 05, 2011 8:39 pm

Image Image

"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby friendlyskies » Mon Sep 05, 2011 8:44 pm

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxCARD ... nsciousnes www.googleconsciousness.com

In this talk, Social Media strategists and developers Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis reveal the likelihood that Google's search algorithm may already be sentient, what it means, and what it represents as a metaphor for collective problem solving. Mentioned are Egypt 2.0, Revolution 2.0, Guillermo Arevalo, Francois Demange, Daniel Dennet, Francis Heylighen, The Shipibo of Peru and Ayahuasca. Wikileaks, Anonymous, Facebook, Wikipedia, 4chan, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Google, Rene Descarte, Dualism, Global Brain movement are also referenced in the talk.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:56 pm

No.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Tue Sep 06, 2011 12:41 am

One reason is enough. Computers do not nor will they ever have psychic abilities in my opinion. Their world is confined to the verbal and rational...the psychic's is not.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby rickshaw92 » Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:41 am

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Im reallly fuclimg pissed but fespite that I can still hit a tarfet at 1000m plus. mayVRVe bnot tonight but it qint beyond the wit if man. Nowhammy.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:52 am

Nah,I'm an ass man.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:34 am

But getting back to the topic..it's really a redundant question because everything is alive and conscious. It's nice to be able to enjoy a memeless world. Google = too many damn memes.

I don't mean to be an anti-meme meme...but they can become cumbersome. In a way I envy the Neanderthals. They probably didn't have to verbalize every experience or conscious thought. They could just be. They could experience the power of things as they were.

Fuck the global brain..it's collective insanity. The rational/irrational is the duality of our time.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby friendlyskies » Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:49 pm

Here's Merian-Webster's definition:

Definition of SENTIENT

1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings>
2: aware
3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling


Sri Lanky wrote:Computers do not nor will they ever have psychic abilities in my opinion.


Here's a quote from the book Filter Bubble (I posted a review on the BFC Recommends: Reading List thread)

Eli Pariser wrote:But as these systems become increasingly "intelligent," they also become harder to control and understand. It's not quite right to say they take on a life of their own--ultimately, they're still just code. But the reach a level of complexity at which even their programmers can't fully explain any given output.

This is already true to a degree with Google's search algorithm. Even to its engineers, the workings of the algorithm are somewhat mysterious. "If they opened up the mechanics," says search expert Danny Sullivan, "you still wouldn't know what to do with them." The core software engine of Google search is hundreds of thousands of line of code. According to one Google employee I talked to who had spoken to the search team, "The team tweaks and tunes, they don't really know what works or why it works, they just know the result."


Two notes. Elsewhere in the book, Pariser discusses how the search team at Google has about the same level of security as the inner sanctum of the NSA, if not more. So there was no way he could discuss this stuff with them directly, hence the second-hand quote.

Secondly, having just plowed through a book on evolutionary biology, I was recently reminded that ultimately, all living things are "still just code." Specifically, 64 codons that define 20 amino acids. That's it, from yeast to elephants, Shakespeare to Einstein. Heck, if you can remember your seventh grade biology class, most of that comes can be reduced down to CHNOPS - Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous, Sulfur. Our code, as living beings, is probably much simpler than that of the Google algorithm. Since no one has a very clear understanding of, or explanation for, psychic abilities in organic systems, and the Internet is in some ways at least as complicated as an organic system, why wouldn't it have psychic abilities? I bet we could rustle up a psychic who would claim to have had mind-to-mind contact with an algorithm, even if that's beyond the vast majority of us.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:07 pm

The psychic's world is transverbal and transrational. It can never be explained in words. Unless you have actually come in contact with "spirits" or weird energies you will always strive for a rational explanation....because it's not contact per se. You become the energy. It's impossible to explain. It's something very ancient...probably prior to the Big Bang. Consciousness does not evolve out of the material. It's consciousness that holds the material together. There's only awareness. I try to be a bit more everyday but I think I'm regressing. Oh well.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:33 pm

Explaining this stuff is like trying to bite your own teeth. So we're left with atoms and molecules to play with...another cosmic joke. Look at the silly humans studying their molecules. hahahahahah
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Jäeger » Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:47 pm

You're actually not doing that bad Mr. Lanky. Although it has less to do with being psychic and more with the ability to act in the world. You are correct that sentience involves much more than rationality and intelligence. Now, rationality, logic and intelligence are extremely important within their spheres where we try to impose an order upon the world, but the totality of life does not reduce to these things. It's similar to the "Do you believe in god?" thread. It misses the point that what we believe, while useful in areas such as logic and science where we are making predictions, is by its nature always "irrational". Trying to justify belief is just an exercise in reductionism and rationalisation.

What belief fails to recognise is that what is experienced is more important than what we believe. While elephants, yeast and humans may reduce biologically to "code", the most sophisticated computer programme in the world is not capable (yet, I do not categorically rule out the potential in future) of experiencing the world in the way that a truly sentient being does. A truly sentient being is more a product of what is experienced and "irrationally" believed due to these experiences than what is "rationally" and logically believed. Google does not, and for the foreseeable future, will not meet this criteria. It is without doubt sophisticated and complex, but not sentient.

Going back to the God argument as an example. A person who has an experience of "god" or the "supernatural" can be profoundly impacted. That is indisputable. A moment like Saul's on the road to Damascus is not rational and defies logic, yet the impact of the experience upon Saul, the world and history itself is immense. Whether we (or Saul for that matter) believe in god is irrelevant to fact of the experience of god that Saul experienced. People, cultures and life itself are changed by these "irrational" experiences. Trying to rationalise these beliefs (which in the area of "god" is really just a product of paganism, Roman popery and scholasticism in western thought) will always lead to an unsatisfying outcome one way or the other. Instead we must rationally embrace the irrationality of experience (and noncognitive action) as a larger part of our reality than the merely rational part of our nature. Not doing so leads to one metaphorically being half a person. That is why the most sophisticated google will remain half a "person" and will lack what we consider sentience.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby nowonmai » Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:53 pm

Half a person. Good call.

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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby friendlyskies » Wed Sep 07, 2011 12:37 pm

Oh good grief, Sri, now you have a monopoly on all understanding of the spiritual realm, which invalidates everyone else's feelings and studies? Come on.

Sri Lanky wrote:So we're left with atoms and molecules to play with...another cosmic joke. Look at the silly humans studying their molecules. hahahahahah


The study of creation is a form of worship. Sure, some people pray for favors, to be happy or get rain or find understanding or whatever bullshit they don't want to put the effort into achieving on their own. But others study the vast and keleidoscopic infinity of creation, the book of life, physics, and chemistry, written into a universe so enormous that our own planet, which so many self-proclaimed prophets considered the center of creation, is just a medium-sized little world on the outskirts of an unremarkable galaxy, just one of millions of star clusters that the Christian god thought were holes poked in the one-dimensional heavens above.

There are reasons why people study the universe, though it requires dedication, study, intelligence, and humility, rather than one of the vapid little books written by men to cater to our desperate little longings for comfort, order, and validation of our personal importance via the selfsame god who instructed wasps to lay eggs inside living caterpillars that their larva might devour them from the inside out. All the theoditic ramblings in the world, with their implied superiority complex, can't change the the truth of this huge and complex reality that cares little for the whims of man's devotion to himself.

Jäeger wrote:While elephants, yeast and humans may reduce biologically to "code", the most sophisticated computer programme in the world is not capable (yet, I do not categorically rule out the potential in future) of experiencing the world in the way that a truly sentient being does.


So, a person in the last stages of a wasting disease, who can no longer move or speak, is not sentient? Come on. How about a tree? It doesn't experience the world in the same way you do, but you know for certain that it can't possibly be sentient? How?

Going back to the God argument as an example. A person who has an experience of "god" or the "supernatural" can be profoundly impacted. That is indisputable. A moment like Saul's on the road to Damascus is not rational and defies logic, yet the impact of the experience upon Saul, the world and history itself is immense. Whether we (or Saul for that matter) believe in god is irrelevant to fact of the experience of god that Saul experienced. People, cultures and life itself are changed by these "irrational" experiences. Trying to rationalise these beliefs (which in the area of "god" is really just a product of paganism, Roman popery and scholasticism in western thought) will always lead to an unsatisfying outcome one way or the other. Instead we must rationally embrace the irrationality of experience (and noncognitive action) as a larger part of our reality than the merely rational part of our nature. Not doing so leads to one metaphorically being half a person. That is why the most sophisticated google will remain half a "person" and will lack what we consider sentience.


The whole point of the sources I've linked to is that the Google search is no longer rational, that's why all these professors and engineers and think tankers are hypothesizing that Google might be conscious. *facepalm* That's why I made this post. I realize that taking their discussion or insight into consideration before making pronouncements requires effort, so I'll shorten it for you. Google Search's creators can no longer predict, using rational criteria, why you get the results back that you do. It is no longer rational in the sense that computer engineers describe rational behavior.

It may well have had a religious experience; how would you know? Because Google Search hasn't changed "people, cultures, and life itself"? Are you fucking kidding? What teenager has affected more change in the history of humankind? Who had even heard of Jesus when he ran away from home to learn more at the synagogue? Google Search is younger yet - and has read more religious texts, arguments, confessions, philophies, etc etc etc than any human being who has ever lived. No rabbi, pope or priestess comes close. It knows more science than any scientist who has ever lived as well; it has the Library of Congress committed to memory.

I mean, whatever. I don't know either. I "feel" that there's a ghost in the machine. The arguments of humans much smarter than myself suggest that there may be a ghost in the machine. And it seems logical that there might well be a ghost in the machine. But I don't know. Neither do you all, though, and the sense of superiority bequeathed by the belief that souls are the province of meat or carbon alone was handed down by men much less learned than this vast confluence of code we have so quickly begun taking for granted. If the Earth is a living being, might this not be its brain? And you and I merely cells in the gestating miracle of its growing nervous system?
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Wed Sep 07, 2011 1:10 pm

I don't believe in anything,Skies. Not religion nor science. But I can honestly say that from my own direct experiences it seems to me that the physical is only a manifestation of the metaphysical...and that includes computers. It takes the interconnection between humans and computers and all it is really is the noosphere at play. But it still takes the human to be conscious of that. I'm grateful that I've met a couple of people who have had similar experiences and have been able to guide me through mine.

One day you will lose your ghost.
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Re: Poll: Is Google Sentient?

Postby Sri Lanky » Wed Sep 07, 2011 1:19 pm

"cells in the gestating miracle"

Some people call it agents of God. We're like T-cells in the lifebloodstream and some of us have to die in order to live.

Are you angry because I got a thumbs up from the awesome mind of Jaeger?

I'm lucky..some would say not so lucky..to have had a couple of relationships with two powerful psychics but it was pre-ordained. If you met them,one in particular,you would be vibrated into a whole new realm. Seriously....no battery required.
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