LeCun is interesting. The way he reasons about AI X-risk makes him seem like a retard, let's not mince words. He's an actual example of a mind so specialized that it has lost the capacity for lateral thinking.
I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.
> would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore?
Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
> You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different?
I'm more interested in why it would be the same. As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with. I'm perfectly ok with conjecturing that sentience is not physical, given that we can't observe it, like we can with the physical. And I don't expect we will find some physics redefining discovery in the brain that will allow us to see us. Some philosophers hold that the more interesting question is why do neuroscientific accounts of the brain seem insufficient to us, but at that point the jig's up, you're doing philosophy and not science. Which is the problem of mind uploading, there's no scientific surety to it, believing in it will be conditional on not thinking too much about it, or on taking the position that "the philosophy is settled!".
I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough.
Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.
Regarding Garcia Martinez, I am still surprised "straight male" is such a disadvantage that being POC doesn't buy enough oppression points to allow you to criticize white women. Then again, maybe it's more that being Hispanic specifically isn't enough. I have a hard time imagining a black man getting fired for the same comments.
Interesting. I wasn't sure about blacks' position relative to jews on the oppression stack. I guess jews are actually above them (i.e. blacks cannot criticize jews the way they can whites)? Was this always the case? As I recall, Louis Farrakhan gets away with worse.
That isn't about grammar. Presumably, this "I" is real. Can you find it in the world? If you say it's the brain, there's only elementary particles there, same as everything else. We see no such "I" there. So where is this "I"?
He wrote a book called Two Hundred Years Together about the Jews in Russia. It wouldn't surprise me if it really is antisemitic, but it's utterly pathetic to give a damn about the thought-killing cliches of modernity such as antisemitism, racism, etc., so who cares?
> you experience discontinuity every night when you sleep
Something dubious about this. No one thinks they're annhiliated upon sleeping, then reconstituted upon waking.
Even adhering to materialism, the problem with mind uploads is the same problem as with teleportation:
a copy is being made. Destroying the original does not mean a consciousness transfer then magically occurs from the original to the target. For mind uploads, the only plausible sounding way around this is the Moravec transfer, but even that is reliant on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer.
Interestingly, no, it isn't fully explained as of today. Schopenhauer's quote of "Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle" is still true today.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
Doesn't appear to be a pardon, which involves the conviction being expunged. Commuting a sentence means more like "you have been punished enough, but we were right to punish you". A pardon is "we were wrong to punish you".