[drdaeman]

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not.

I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended.

If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and limitations of our preexisting biology, exercising more control of their own lives - that’d be wonderful.

I obviously have no idea wherever language models can lead to such dream, of would be a dead end.

[dwb]

I think attitudes like this are traitorous to the human species. You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise. Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits? I absolutely do not want a religious tone to any of this. Awful vibes.

[crancher]

I find this "traitorous to the human species" interesting. You could not form these thoughts without an accumulated knowledge stored/accessed outside human biology. No other species forms such explicit thoughts because they lack access to that accumulated pattern of useful sequences. We've already "transcended" our biology in that sense. Who is directing... that becomes interesting in new ways once outside-a-body sequences start to accumulate. My guess is that it's that accumulation that sets the trajectory, just as DNA's "accumulation" of useful sequences produced forms fit for the local environment(s).

[dwb]

Sure, we're cyborgs, but still very much of the flesh, and I think we have to draw a line somewhere.

[ben_w]

> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off.

Right now, necessarily so.

The more mysteries that science solves, the more we unweave the rainbow*, the worse the tension between rationality and our sense of what we are. Am I the atoms, or the pattern betwixt? Am I the present moment alone, my memories mere shadows of past patterns and my current form doomed to be a shadow to a future pattern of these self-same atoms?

Sometimes even the question is unbearable.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow

[dwb]

There are many mysteries of the universe, but who we are, to the extent that I am rejecting the comment I replied to, is not one of them. I would love to see how humans explore reality and being (if we survive!) as time goes on and we figure more out, but I hope we do so as a whole species and not through the designs of a handful of zealots.