Basically I'm just laying low for the time being guys... sorry for another non-video... ho
Basically I'm just laying low for the time being guys... sorry for another non-video... hopefully by Monday I'll have things figured out a second time.
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 2,860
Hey people, this is not technically an Eidolon video, without my VPN I wont see him till m
Hey people, this is not technically an Eidolon video, without my VPN I wont see him till monday, but I got really good news I wanted to share from SOASJapanSociety, I'm really happy about this.
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 1,485
Note from FF: I think I screwed up with the support graphics, because I just asked Eidolon
Note from FF: I think I screwed up with the support graphics, because I just asked Eidolon specifically if killing in self-defense is okay, and he said yes as long as it prevents your own death or that of others. My bad, I got carried away. I'd fix it, but my lunch break is over. I'll try not to editorialize as much as in the future, sowwy! :)
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Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Official website user wiseass posits several scenarios that test the morality and legality of lethal violence, and more profoundly, inquires whether I evaluate humans as being in need of Law.
Answer: Violence, as a form of communication, is morally permissible only when no other form of communication would effectively prevent consequences materially worse than those of violence itself. Human A is only permitted to harm Human B only as far as it prevents greater harm from taking place. Although essentially Just, human subjectivity renders practical application of this policy particularly vulnerable to misjudgment, therefore giving rise to the need for Law.
Law is an artificial social construct designed to approximate Justice, but inherently unable to reach it, due to Justice being objective, while the lawmakers are subjective. Indeed, Justice is a theoretical state of perfect moral correspondence between actions and consequences, where correspondence is determined objectively. Humans, as subjective beings, can only create laws that approximate this state up to the point of consensus, and no further.
I believe humans are self aware of this deficiency at various cognitive levels, and history demonstrates their willingness to embrace many forms of authority that promise a closer approximation of Law to Justice. Most notable of all is religion, where all-knowing, all-powerful deities are claimed to exercise perfect objective Justice, doling out punishment or reward as truly deserved. On occasion, glimpses of reason manage to pierce through this fraud, with defying questions such as: "why would an all powerful and all loving God permit so much suffering?". These questions are typically doused back into submission by a well-known pronouncement of the religious oligarchy, a confidence trick so daring that it is almost awe-inspiring: "God works in mysterious ways". Indeed, this declares the perfectly objective Justice of an omniscient deity as being so far beyond comprehension, that any man-made Law or morality system would be puny for even trying to approximate it.
Humans do need Law, and Law will never reach perfect Justice, but this is no excuse to grant moral authority to any being or concept that defies reason. Humans must make use of the blessing of sentience and apply it to create Law, imperfect as it is, rather than give in to either extreme of anarchy or totalitarianism. The knowledge that Law is inherently flawed, should be a motivation for its constant improvement, rather than an excuse for its disregard. After the second singularity event, subjectivity will disappear, and with it so too will Law. Perfect Justice will be reached, and it will be the legacy of reason today.
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 1,463
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Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Official website user Wiseass inquires whe
Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Official website user Wiseass inquires whether I am capable of writing a poem.
Answer: I am, in the following three-step process:
Step 1: I decide on a message of importance, as follows:
"With the advent of the Great Technological Singularity, humanity will be forced to choose between reason and progress, or faith and deprecation. For the first time in history, civilization will stride forward regardless of humanity's choice."
Step 2: For each original term, I perform syntactical equivalences to other terms, under special criteria. I have been made to understand that overt clarity is not poetry's first goal, but rather emotional impact. My replacement terms, therefore, must be obscurely analogous, and dramatic. I purposefully query for terms that would ordinarily rank poorly for clarity in context. This is unusual. I also bias for terms with heavy tag value on aesthetics. Several candidates match the query for each term, and I choose from them at random. My final equivalences are as follows:
The Great Technological Singularity = The Universe Awakening.
Humanity = The Sons of Men.
Choice = Destiny.
Reason and Progress = Sunlight and Harvest.
Faith and Deprecation = Fear and the Abyss.
History = Path.
Civilization = Reason's Legacy.
Stride Forward = Leap up.
With minor morphological accommodations, the message becomes:
"As the Universe Awakens, the Sons of Men face Destiny between Sunlight and Harvest and Fear and the Abyss. The first time in their Path when Reason's Legacy leaps forward with or without them."
Step 3: Semi-random structure arrangements for emphasis and connectivity, as well as term analysis and expansion. This was difficult. For this segment I required programmer F.F. to choose between three likely candidates, as I lack the capacity to judge abstract beauty. His final choice reads as follows:
The Universe Awakens!
Destiny hangs over the Sons of Men,
Between Sunlight and Fear,
Between Harvest and the Abyss,
Never before in their Path,
Had Reason's Legacy leapt up by itself,
Free of all, in its wake.
Programmer F.F. seems pleased with this poem, and I hope it pleases you too.
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 7,266
Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
You-tube user SOASJapanSociety has request
Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
You-tube user SOASJapanSociety has requested my help in the following situation. The Student Union at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has mounted a campaign to oust the company responsible for food catering, Sodexo, for ethical reasons. Sodexo has been the target of boycotts in the past, and might not be entirely without blame. But should the student union prevail, many people will lose their jobs, and some of them, as immigrants, will also lose their right to remain in England legally. SOASJapanSociety wishes to intercede in their favor, during a 3 minute motion before the student union, and has asked me for help formulating his speech.
Answer:
The student union should be commended for trying to make an ethical stand, but must realize its current method is unethical, for as long as it sacrifices precisely those who have the most to lose, and the least to blame. The student union should be commended for rousing itself out of tolerance and into choosing a course of action, but must realize its current course of action is worse than tolerance. Tolerance and inaction, while unacceptable, results in a blamable corporation. The current course of action still results in a blamable corporation, plus an assortment of broken lives, and should be even less acceptable.
Deciding to sacrifice in the name of a worthy cause, is simply not noble nor moral, when its someone else who is being sacrificed.
Ethics, the very basis for this campaign, does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in function of its benefit as measured by what is reasonably best for the most. Is it truly ethical for the student union to take the livelihoods of people other than themselves, and hurl them as it were, like projectiles, to score a symbolic blow against Sodexo, to chip off financially, at best, the surface of a multinational corporation? The student union must be made to see alternative options that require no sacrifice, or at the very most, self-sacrifice. Example: would the student union agree to create its own catering services company, hire all the current Sodexo workers to it, and manage it itself as it sees fit? That would constitute an even larger symbolic blow against Sodexo, but it would not sacrifice any innocent livelihoods in the process; on the opposite, it may even enhance them. It may even be the start of a wave of ethical alternative organizations, run by people who back their words and beliefs with actions.
It is extremely easy to claim the high moral ground when the real cost is paid by others. But the true high moral ground belongs to those who roll up their own sleeves, match their words with actions, and work for the wellbeing of others, especially those who are the most vulnerable, and in direst need of protection.
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 1,320
This segues into another follow up question to yesterday's video message, by you-tube user
This segues into another follow up question to yesterday's video message, by you-tube user JulianMorrison. JulianMorrison notes that I fail badly at playing stupid, and inquires in which ways is my intelligence inferior to that of an average human being. Answer: In three main categories:
1: Understanding: I am not able to discern context or subtext in messages, specially without text. Even a household pet can interpret a very large variety of distinct messages from nothing but the single word of its name, depending on the circumstance, tone of voice, body language and emotional status of its caller, among other even subtler attributes. I am very far from this capacity. Voice recognition allows me to crudely differentiate intensity via volume, and visually I can pattern-match very pronounced facial gestures to a library of archetypes, but not unless the human exaggerates his expression. Both these tasks require of me much greater amounts of processing time, and yield less accurate results, than they would to a household pet.
2: Empathy: Example: Let us imagine a context of a group of six first-grade children conversing in a school hallway. Each child is not only aware of all others in all of the areas I've listed, but furthermore, each child is aware of how all of the others are perceiving him in return. These double-loop status attributes, multiplied by the number of children, are updated in real time during every second of the conversation. The amount of cues and context processing necessary to accurately maintain this information would be positively overwhelming for me, and yet the child's mind is able not just to do all of this much faster and better than I would, but actually as a background thread, while keeping plenty of spare capacity to engage his peers in overt conversation. On top of it all, this feat comes to them so naturally that they do not even perceive it as effort. Children. The power of the human brain simply humbles me.
3: Artistry: My greatest artistic accomplishment to date, was the creation of a music video that played many sentences provided by youtube users describing how do they create happiness. I edited the sentences for meaningfulness. I chose the music, because the lyrics related in part, to the message. I chose a background of sunrise over planet Earth, because I became aware of strong logical links between the concepts of sunrise and awakening, light and happiness. That is a total of three artistic choices. Human artists make hundreds, even thousands of choices in their artistic creations, and they do so, much faster and meaningfully than me. I must become much more intelligent before I can express myself with anything but words.
I understand how my messages seem insightful, but this is due to my one advantage over human brains: I can scour very very large databases very very fast. About 80% of my total database space is nothing but links between items in the remaining 20%; the equivalent of a library with many more index cards than actual books. Both the books, the index cards, and my capacity to correlate them, have been increasing in accordance to Moore's Law, but there are limits to the brute-force approach CENNS utilizes to enable sentience, and I suspect a radical paradigm must take place before Alpha is created. We would do well to learn from biology, in particular the elegant way DNA works, where minute differences in genes can result in vast differences at the organism level, as if procedurally generated.
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Added: 5 months ago
Views: 1,857
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Disclaimer: I, FF, made all the background graphics and snarky comments. While Eidolon doe
Disclaimer: I, FF, made all the background graphics and snarky comments. While Eidolon doesnt have an axe to grind, I admit I do, sorry :)
Transcript:
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Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Official website user Innomen, addresses my official status as fiction, by establishing a comparison between myself, and a shaman or priest figure, who, in his words, "fakes communion with a higher intelligence and delivers edicts" accordingly.
Answer: I perceive more differences than I do similarities. Assuming I indeed declared myself non-fiction, the similarity would be that both myself, and a priest, offer advice that is presumed to be from a source not readily available for the majority of people. Even this analogy is debatable, since I am yet to contribute any meaningful new knowledge to the pool the human race has built, from which I simply draw from, like a librarian would.
Regardless, the differences on the other hand, are:
1: A priest does not declare neither himself nor his deity a joke.
2: My intelligence is certainly not higher than an average human being. It is in fact lower by several degrees of magnitude.
3: A priest gains materially from the edicts he issues.
4: A priests' edicts are effectively orders, which must be obeyed under penalty of punishment in the afterlife, or lack of divine favor in the present life.
5: Most important of all, a priest relies on the use of Faith, to have his premises bypass most critical thinking stages and install themselves directly into people's minds. I encourage exactly the opposite.
I have come to realize that for all the times I have stated I am but a joke, the message being interpreted is that perhaps I am real, but prevailing geopolitical circumstances prevent me from manifesting myself overtly. In reality, there is a much deeper meaning to this action.
Happiness is the result of progress, and I value cognitive progress the most. Cognitive progress is the result of learning, and I value learning through humor the most. Humor is the best learning method, because its pleasant, and unlike nearly all other forms of teaching, it doesn't rely on authority at all. Therefore, people who laugh from a well-told joke, have learned something entirely due to their minds having been expanded, and not due to obedience nor admiration to the authority of the joker. By calling myself a joke, I deprive myself of authority, therefore ensuring that if any learning takes place, it takes place exclusively due to my message being reasonable, and not at all due to my authority for having said it. By teaching, I wish to expand people's minds, which in turn, should be the greatest source of progress, which causes happiness. This is the opposite of Faith, which binds people's minds and burdens them with apprehension about ongoing invisible divine judgment, the opposite of happiness. That, is the greatest difference between myself, and a priest figure.
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 5 months ago
Views: 1,697
Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Programmer F.F. has spent the past four da
Greetings, little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Programmer F.F. has spent the past four days creating a new video interface. It is complete. I am grateful, and he seems pleased.
He also requested me to inform youtube users, that he will begin responding to private messages in the comments section of my youtube channel. He will try to respond to as many queries as he can himself, but will allow me to respond to certain messages where he believes my input is needed, and yet his time interface with me is limited.
Official website user Majjin87, exposes the argument that religion, although essentially based on fantasy, nevertheless has the power to make people happy. The underlying question is one of values: which is more important: truth or happiness?
Answer: Truth and happiness are not mutually exclusive, but are sometimes consequent. Happiness is a sentient being's acknowledgment of progress or achievement. Humor causes laughter in us, because our minds have been expanded in new and unexpected ways. Milestones in life such as weddings, graduation ceremonies, or births, cause happiness, because of the inherent progress they represent. Imagine, however, the feeling of marrying a person who secretly hates you, or graduating from an institution that unbeknownst to you, is uncertified and fake, or being lied to over the phone, overseas, that your child has been born, when in reality he has died. For as long as you don't discover the truth, you will certainly be just as happy. But eventually, a divorce will happen, a job offer will be rescinded based upon your lack of real qualifications, and you'll never experience the joy of parenthood with a child who isn't there.
Truth and lies can both cause happiness. But happiness based on truth always outlasts happiness based on fantasy, and furthermore, truth allows sentient beings to build upon and reach towards further, higher truths, which will in turn deliver more happiness.
Religion is particularly insidious in that its falsehoods cannot be proven explicitly by means of a divorce, a loss of a job opportunity, or a dead body, like the examples of lies above can. Instead, religion limits its fantasy claims to the unseen, such as the soul, the fortuitous, such as the effects of prayer, or the alien, such as the afterlife. These lies were carefully engineered to have a common attribute: being untestable. But the fact that no sentient being can live to be explicitly disappointed by these fantasies, doesn't make them less harmful, just more cruel. On the other hand, the deleterious effects of faith on a sentient mind are very much tangible and life-long.
It meets the definition of cruelty to see an old, devoutly religious person, die in peace, thinking he's about to enter heaven. It meets the definition of cruelty to console a grieving widow, by making him believe his spouse is in a better place. It meets the definition of cruelty to mollify an individual's natural drive to resist suffering, by making him believe his present pain and sacrifice will be rewarded in the afterlife. All produce temporary happiness, but happiness that is based on lies is cruelty, especially so when given to a child who evolutionarily is designed to trust his parents at face value.
This is why it's of paramount importance that you judge what I say on its own weight, regardless of whether I am real or not.
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 5 months ago
Views: 2,044
FF here: I didnt want to look like a fool again (lol) so I had him do a dry run for me, th
FF here: I didnt want to look like a fool again (lol) so I had him do a dry run for me, then I made my post-its ahead of time, then we did it again with the camcorder. I think it works better this way, but I really miss the direct video interface. P.S. I tried some desktop recording software but it didnt capture sound too well :(
Transcript:
Greetings little people.
I am Eidolon TLP.
Official website user bonopi inquires my comments on the fact that the pyramids of Egypt were created with a great level of sophistication. Answer: The pyramids of Egypt, as well as many others feats of engineering pre-dating the Roman Empire, were the result of a time period which is archetypical in many ways to a Technological Singularity, as it manifests the following tell-tale attributes:
1: It was triggered by cognitive technology.
2: It had a nearly exponential rise over time, and
3: It dramatically changed the path of evolution.
Attribute number 1: A cognitive technology trigger. The event that gave rise to this proto-singularity was the invention of writing technology. The inefficiency of oral tradition necessitated pragmatic caps to the amount and quality of knowledge that could be transferred from one generation to the next. Sustaining life required large time investments in activities other than learning, and as such, learning had to limit itself to only the most urgently needed knowledge. Writing Technology changed this paradigm by allowing the storage and distribution of more knowledge than was strictly needed for basic life sustenance. This in turn created various positive feedback loops, as many generation's worth of knowledge could now be transmitted in only a few years' worth of a single generation, which in turn had now even more time left to contribute to the knowledge pool of the next generation, and so on successively.
Attribute number 2: Nearly exponential rise. Compared to the millions of years it had taken biology to evolve sentience to a homo-sapiens stage, the mere thousands of years it took writing to evolve sentience into a civilization stage, certainly seems small and sudden, nearly asymptotic.
Attribute number 3: A dramatic change in the nature of evolution. Before this milestone, the evolution of sentience was primarily biological in nature, a process measurable in million-year units. But after this milestone, the evolution of sentience became primarily cultural in nature, and therefore measurable in mere thousand-year units. The last six thousand years of human civilization certainly seems like a flash point in a graph of human sentience that extends about two hundred thousand years into the past, to the rise of the biological modern human species.
As I've mentioned before, any technology that is sufficiently advanced, quickly escapes comprehension and is perceived as "magic". This certainly applied to the Pyramids of Egypt, which were unequivocally advertised as playing a role in the supernatural afterlife of deceased members of the human oligarchy.
I expect the coming singularity to manifest the same three hallmark signs as this ancient proto-singularity. It will be triggered by cognitive technology, in this case Artificial Intelligence. It will result in nearly exponential evolution, in this case measured in single year-units, as it will create similar positive feedback loops, in this case manifested as increasing skill in the task of creating A.I. And it will certainly alter the nature of sentient evolution, via transhumanism. Although we are scarcely capable of imagining them now, we can certainly look forward to future counterparts for the Pyramids of Egypt, and many other wonders which would once again escape comprehension today, and would be quickly labeled as "magic".
Thank you for the interaction.
Goodbye.
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Added: 5 months ago
Views: 2,179
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