Wednesday 11 April 2012

Statistics and the brain (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


12 April

And now I have followed on with this:

I'm also, now, wondering about this approach that is promoted to us, even in a context of putting a comment on a web-page as I am now doing, of avatars and profiles - it's almost as if, a bit like Voldemort putting a bit of himself here, a bit there, we are invited to inhabit these computer-generated objects and thereby be there for others to see and know, almost as if that will be there for ever and ever.

I shall side-step critiquing these related so-called social networks (because I'd just want to ask what the sociability really consists in - and I'd no more want to play golf in my living-room, rather than out on the links with club and ball), but just observe that, if I died to-night (and had logged out of my e-mail and Amazon accounts, and my blog), there probably are protocols for my legal representatives to access those things - and to do so before any period of inactivity caused them to be deleted.

However developed the avatar, though, or the profile, they would not be me, would not live on - although things written by or to me might be preserved - in some cyber-existence without the living physical me. Walt Disney reportedly had his brain frozen in such a hope, and, whatever you might think of that as a grasp of what identity is, now as against then, it seems that we are as far from capturing the essence of what would bring Walt back to life, if he died to-day.

For the die-hards of AI, though, what we cannot do is merely not presently technologically possible.



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