https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/oexjq/will_house_spiders_die_if_put_outside/

https://soundcloud.com/hitchhikerofficial/11eleven

Perfect for this thread.

Quote from: Prime Kruphix on May 27, 2016, 11:57:42 AM

House spiders generally will die outside the house. It's like putting a lion raised in captivity out in the wild.

i don't actually think it's that big of a deal, but i guess that would depend on what counts as a house spider

Well, if the spider was inside your house, that means it found your home a suitable place to make a web or hunt, so you are putting it in a bit of an inconvenience by moving it. I don't know how often this ends up screwing the spider over, but I'd imagine it's usually gonna be fine. But if you find a spider during November and huck him outside, chances are he's gonna die of the cold.

OT: I usually don't care if I see a spider inside the house, they aren't very big where I live and I'd only do something if it was on my bed, where I definitely don't want a spider (I'm arachnophobic).

I can never have a partner now for sure at this point in my life.

You sound crazy stupid when you say things like this.

I think the fact that we would question our very own creator is pretty amazing

What the heck are you talking about?

We can't do much to stop the self perpetuating cycle, but that doesn't mean we have to contribute to it.

Actually, you might be able to things to stop the cycle, but that involves the shocking concept of not killing the species off so we can produce a better existence for ourselves and all life in the future. Which is why I think anti-natalism is a misleading philosophy.

I'm implying our instincts as animals
That is our "programming" is it not

I don't see your point.

This right here
You take our ability to grow and change as something that's a given but that's exactly what separates us from robots

No it isn't, robots can grow and change to adapt to a situation.

No but you're saying this comes from our "programming"

Fundamentally, everything does.

Which implies that we were preloaded with ways to react to certain situations
So how did these "struggles" change from surviving long enough to reproduce to worrying about turning in that assignment on time

Because I was born and put into the school system, then told that I needed to work hard and learn, otherwise my parents would yell at me, I wouldn't get a good job, and I'd be a loser when I grew up. All of those things are worries that strike at the core of how a human would naturally respond to negative stimuli, which is avoidance. So I worked hard, got into a good college, and will probably live a decently successful life as a result.

Me

Quote from: Winy on May 26, 2016, 04:48:37 PM

Quote from: IngloriousWho98 on May 26, 2016, 04:45:08 PM

Is robot "life" just following algorithms or is there something inherently there?

I mean, this is the same question I was answering. I'd say human minds are literally just following instructions, and that there's nothing particularly special about us other than the complexity of our brains. So I don't see why a sufficiently advanced robot, as far-fetched as that might be, couldn't be conscious in the same way.

What instructions are we following exactly because if you look at our evolutionary growth, we have not been sticking to one set of instructions

What does this have to do with anything?

Except it doesn't, because despite those organisms' biological simplicity, we still haven't been able to replicate it after being consciously aware of them for centuries. Not one time. Not even close.

Knowledge of abiogenesis is both a limited and recent addition to humanity's collective understanding of nature, and it isn't exactly a field of research that the government is eager to dump funding into, so you should expect this process to be slow. We haven't had the tools or information necessary to start experimenting with creating simple organisms until recently, and to argue that is can't be done because it hasn't been done isn't wise. You came into this thread and said "No," conclusively, but I've been sticking with "Maybe" while leaning towards "Yes." But it seems your answer is based on things that have yet to be shown as true; you're banking on people not finding things out in the future.

Yeah. By sexual reproduction.

We don't even understand how THAT works, in terms of how it creates life. We have no idea.

Which is why such things are ongoing areas of study. But you likely don't have to know every single thing about why life exists as it does to replicate the processes that allow for us to classify it as "Life."

In order to create life outside of sexual reproduction, you have to understand how that process even works first--and the thing is, we probably never will.

Maybe, maybe not.

Well, "smart" is kind of a dumb word. A smarter person would recognize that you can't bundle everything about intelligence in one little word and use that as a blanket metric for "general" intelligence. In terms of your education, you have a better education than a caveman, yes. In terms of your capacity to learn, your IQ, and the size of your brain? You probably have a caveman beat. Probably.

Thing is, that's not a great comparison, either, because you're moving the goalposts. If you're comparing relative intelligence from generation to generation, where you're adjusting for things like difference in education and average IQ for a given year, what reason do I have to believe that you're "smarter" than a caveman?

Big scales, though. If we were to take a caveman and throw him into a modern society and raise him as we do modern homo sapiens, he might be totally normal and indistinguishable in terms of intelligence. I'm not a neurologist, and I really don't know much about anthropology, so I can't say. However, if we go back further and take a chunk of primordial, organic soup that I formed from, am I smarter? Yes, and things just kept becoming more cognitive and complex from there. Even if "Smart" is an ambiguous word, its level of ambiguity doesn't reach so far that you can't use to to distinguish between my intelligence and that of a hamster.

So how complex does it have to get for you to say, "Okay, that's a facsimile for life."

I really can't say that I know, but complexity does seem to be a property of life as we know it, would you not agree? Fundamentally, we can reduce everything to we do to physical laws, but it seems you need to have a large, coordinated effort of bits and pieces working to produce our definition of "Life."

This is fallacious because you're assuming that "life" hasn't already existed for billions and billions of years. When life began, it was EXTRAORDINARILY simple. We're talking single-cell organisms here.

Correct, and the fact that such a thing was created out of non-living matter backs up my side of the argument, not yours.

We can't even create something as simple as a single-celled organism. How are we going to make something as complex as a sentient robot?

Time, effort, and technological advancements. Like any other hurdle humanity seems to overcome, really. And I'm not even arguing we should create conscious organisms, just that such a thing is theoretically possible. Nature can do it, so can we.

If you're going to call my comparisons shit, when they're actually brilliant, you're not allowed to make shit comparisons yourself. This is just stupid. You can't compare Einstein's education with his parents, because his parents didn't have the same education. Duh. That's not even remotely a fair comparison.

I'm not sure everybody's brain is identical, and Einstein excelled in mathematics in such a way that arguably made him different than those around him, regardless of his education. It seems that intelligence is not completely determined by how much effort you put into learning, there seems to be more to it. But actually, let's pretend that specific example doesn't matter, so I'll take a step back and analyze the process as a whole. Would you argue that I'm smarter and more capable than one of my ancestors from billions of years ago? Clearly, so it's absolutely possible to make something smarter than yourself over time. Evolution proves that.

One has a brain with neurons.

How does this help your position? Theoretically, an advanced civilization could replicate all of the properties that constitutes a neuron, and these could be used in a synthetic brain to allow for something to gain consciousness. Nature is random, and uncoordinated, yet was able to make all of these incredibly complicated biological structures given enough time. An actual, focused effort to replicate these sorts of things would arguably be capable of doing so with much greater ease.

Except for every single time we've ever created in an attempt to replicate conscious sentient behavior.

Which is why I have said that it's a possibility when a civilization become advanced enough.

Robots can ONLY be as intelligent as the person making it. A ball can never bounce higher than the point you dropped it at.

Those two statements are not analogous whatsoever, I'd imagine Einstein was smarter than his parents. The end result of two people creating something ended up being smarter than both of them. AI could function similarly, and likely will.

Quote from: Winy on May 26, 2016, 12:36:48 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on May 26, 2016, 12:30:34 PM

No, they can't.

How do you know?

Same way I know that the radio in my dad's car isn't actually saying "goodbye" to me when I shut it off.

That's a very poor comparison.