In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Joseph Tracy]

Lovely line of thought. If only you could pass the tumbler around. I'm feeling dry. As far as bias,  it seems like biological replication with variations and limited duration of the individual is a kind of  long-term bias against entropy, an urge toward interdependent complexity . Entropy  itself seems a bias of sorts, or maybe just how a person pissed about death sees things. 
Does it seem odd to you that with all the ingredients of life forms and every possible combination of temp and conditions we can't get no single cell action. We can't get no single cell action but we try and we try... 
Sorry
You start to put one sentience after another sentience and pretty soon you've got a bad joke.
 
On Mar 16, 2012, at 11:34 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:

> And besides computers don't get high... he says,
> as he sits quaffing his second tumbler of frascati.
> 
> It does seem that consciousness requires a
> motivated self, and the primary motivation might be
> self-definition. Self-definition probably preceded
> consciousness- as self-reproduction, but why
> would a system want to reproduce itself? Initially
> they/it probably didn't want to, but given the
> inherent properties of space/time/mass/energy,
> mixed in the flask of the day/night/day... and all
> the other macroscopic repeating trends, found
> itself being replicated, on a more intimate scale.
> 
> But it didn't care. It hung together as much by
> inertia and The Principle of Least Action, as by any
> concern for self.
> 
> The line between tools, or artifacts, and the system
> selected for replication, by the conveniences of the
> day, must have always been fluid. Artifacts became
> internalized or essentials extruded as chance events.
> 
> Somehow motivation was dependent on a complete
> lack of motivation- a completely unbiased, inconsid-
> erate, neutral field of debris, that didn't care one way
> or the the other, and still doesn't, if some quirky sub-
> aggregation ends up evolving into a jackass. Or, do
> you imagine the field  to be biased somehow, is, I
> guess, what I'm asking.
> 
> AI might be impossible either way, but if life is the
> result of an accidental chain of events, there is
> nothing in the mix working against AI, other than the
> sheer difficulty of the engineering, and the anti-bias
> of the second law.
> 
> If life wasn't an accident- well then, have you ever
> known anything more motivating for our species than
> a good challenge?
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Fri, Mar 16, 2012 3:42 pm
> Subject: Re: In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph
> 
> 
> Well I just wrote a longish answer to your question, then somehow
> disappeared
> it. But here is the essence.
> I don't know what thought is. I am open to the possibility that what we
> call
> consciousness is really one of the dimensions of reality that is as
> fundamental
> as space or time and that thought is  a form within that dimension.  Of
> course
> it could be more a practical aspect of biological survival, but I have
> a hard
> time with the idea of wings coming from random mutations. Too much like
> rolling
> a rock down a mountain and getting the Nike of Samothrace. I suspect
> there is a
> deep connection between mind and body  or even mind and life that has a
> role in
> evolution.
> I listened to Rupert Sheldrake yesterday talking about homing pigeons.
> Scientists have studied them a lot and they don't know how the pigeons
> do it.
> They have done experiments to test all the ideas that seem to fit what
> we know:
> sight, smell, ability to discern and remember the path away from home,
> celestial
> navigation, sun navigation, magnetic field of earth. It appears you can
> completely block any and all of these and they still fly home, though
> without
> sight they can only get a couple hundred feet from home.  Science has
> no
> explanation for how they do it and there are several similar mysteries,
> that
> point to the possibility that we may be missing some real basic parts
> of our
> picture of consciousness.
> 
> Still it is a lot about how you define intelligence.  Chess programs
> beat
> chessmasters and computers can be programmed to solve very hard
> problems. But
> will they ever ask their own questions and want an answer? But maybe
> that isn't
> really what Pynchon is talking about , but more what happens when
> machines can
> do anything we can do faster and with no mistakes.
> 
> 
> On Mar 15, 2012, at 11:26 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> 
>> But do you imagine that thought is something
>> more than a physical process, or just some
>> physically embodied process that is way too
>> complex and self-referential to program from
>> the top down?
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 2:25 pm
>> Subject: Re: In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph
>> 
>> 
>> I personally think every prediction of AI so far is absurdly
> premature. The
>> premise still seems fundamentally bizarre to me. I just can't imagine
> self
>> generated thought apart from the kind of innate will that comes with
> being in
> a
>> bodily form with natural desires attributes and limits. The idea that
> you can
>> program curiosity, or desire to formulate and solve a problem into an
> electronic
>> device designed only to process  binary code just seems real iffy.
>> 
> 
>