Er.. no, I'm saying if there's something magically special about our organic composition required to make a conscious being, then we can build machines out of the same organic compounds. If you want to get those compounds by disassembling people, well.. I guess waste not want not, but it isn't really what I had in mind ;)
"Consciousness is not computable" just means we need to build a new class of machine. Whether it's a blob of organic jelly in a box, or an IC with currently unknown structures on it to exploit certain handwavy quantum processes, or whatever; it just makes the task more complex, it doesn't make it impossible.
There is a difference between being the most dominant species on the planet and being composed of living cells, resulting in breathing, aging, dieing, and reproducing. An organic thing should not be looked at in the same light as something that is not.
If you define humans as machines - automated creatures based on input and output, then yes. However there is this thing called qualia (aka subjective experience) that I believe is very real. Machines are not capable of this. All of the AI today is based on complex algorithms with an input output model. There is nothing subjective going on inside.
We don't know for sure that machines are not currently capable of experiencing qualia. We don't know that machines cannot ever be capable of experiencing qualia. We don't even know if animals experience qualia, and if so, which ones. I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia.
I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia.
I'll go you one further and admit that I don't know for sure if I am experiencing qualia.
My brain certainly tells itself that I am, but how do I know it's not just wrong?
Perhaps qualia is, in the end, nothing more than the state of asserting to yourself that you feel qualia. In which case it's really more a question about whether your brain is properly structured to ask that question than about whether it really exists...
Ah, yes, we have arrived at the problem of being fundamentally unable to be sure of the nature of reality. We don't know if our sensors are reporting to us the "true" nature of the world and we don't know if our brains are reporting to us the "true" nature of our internal states.
I guess, like you, I am okay with accepting that experiencing qualia and my brain telling me that I am experiencing qualia are functionally indistinguishable if not equivalent states.
I believe that qualia arises out of specific, physical, quantifiable conditions. And so I think that would imply that machines can experience qualia as long as the initial conditions are there.
50 million dollars for a web app? Is facebook even profitable yet? Call me a cynic but i don't think their "billion dollar company" will withstand the sands of time. Just wait for the next paradigm shift.
Really? Have you seen their financial statements? How do you know they're far away from that? Because everybody else says so?
Last I heard, they were expected to post $550M of revenue in 2009. Any insider you talk to says it would be trivial for them to become profitable, if they wanted to. And, in fact, they may be quite close to doing so in their current plan.
But then again, I don't have any inside information either. One thing's for sure, though: Bringing out the tired "Facebook is overvalued" and "Facebook will never turn a profit" lines is seriously annoying.
I would focus it all on Montreal before you expand to any other cities. Once it gets popular, expand it one at a time, ala facebook. And I would make it look a little nicer.
