Chapter 404: Machine-organism hybrid, is it the ultimate?

While Lingxi Zhiling was still cracking the circuit board.

Shen Bei continued to go deeper into the military base.

Following the unclear signs.

About ten minutes later.

Shen Bei pushed open a door.

Looking around.

In addition to a few skeletons, there were many boxes stacked inside.

Even after the passage of time, one could still smell the smell of gun lubricant.

He pried open a box casually.

Inside were orange-yellow 14.5mm anti-aircraft machine gun bullets.

In another box, Shen Bei actually saw Type 67 grenades...

Wow.

What era are these products from?

They haven't been used up yet.

It is said that China has produced 2 billion of these things, and they are about to become antiques handed down from generation to generation...

Other boxes also contain various firearms, such as the QBZ56C short automatic rifle, the QBU-191 precision rifle, and the 5.03 assault rifle.

There are also shells of various calibers, such as the Type 56 85mm cannon, the PLZ-07 122mm self-propelled howitzer, etc. There are many of them, and they are messy.

Search again.

Shen Bei did not find ready-made explosives.

It is not wrong to think about it. This is a military base, not an arsenal. There is no possibility of bulk explosives.

However, there are also many famous Type 66 anti-infantry directional mines for directional blasting.

"It seems that we can only dismantle them."

Facing the mountains of shells, this is still a big project.

Dismantling them one by one and transporting them to Tiangong to produce shells, just thinking about it makes my scalp numb.

In the past, Shen Bei was still full of energy to do this.

The key is that the quantity is small and it will be done in a short time.

Now to upgrade Tiangong, the required quantity is overwhelming Shen Bei.

"Different calibers... It's really troublesome."

Shen Bei sniffed.

What else can I do.

Roll up your sleeves and work hard!

Shen Bei removed the bottom shells of the shells, poured out the gunpowder, and kept them well, so that the shells would not be wasted.

When they were almost done, they were all stuffed into the Tiangong, and the 3D crystal core remodeling resonator was fully productive.

While producing, pouring shells, bombarding, gaining experience points, and upgrading!

Just as Shen Bei was dealing with the shells.

Lingxi Zhiling sent a prompt: "The circuit board analysis has been completed. Do you need text delivery, or should I summarize it?"

Shen Bei sat cross-legged on the ground, and his three hands kept prying open the bottom shells of the shells, saying: "Summary, I don't have time to waste."

"Okay, the summary is as follows..."

It's called a summary.

But in order to express it more clearly, Lingxi Zhiling made a voice report for nearly an hour!

There are too many "metaphysics" and "thinking storms" and "thinking" involved in this.

Shen Bei almost became a philosopher on the spot. ,

Shen Bei briefly summarized it again.

In the conference room, the skeletons argued about two issues: consciousness and superpowers.

These two questions seem to be unrelated, but in fact, they are unified at the final level.

First.

Because of the arrival of the Doomsday-class starship and the Shadow Immortal.

It made the humans at that time feel an unavoidable thing that must be faced, at least in theory, to fill the gap.

That is carbon-based life and silicon-based life.

The situation at that time was that silicon-based life came too fast.

The silicon-based life here is the liquid metal life on the Doomsday-class starship, which Shen Bei had also seen in the cold winter in the north.

According to the development process of human beings, there are always theories first and then real objects.

At that time, the real objects appeared, but human theories did not keep up.

So on a global scale, some scholars began to fill this theoretical gap.

The point of contention is also very simple. For those who believe in consciousness uploading and full-brain simulation, human consciousness seems to be able to exist forever without the body -

But the problem is that "uploading" is likely to cause the death of the original person, so how can the "I" in the uploaded consciousness be guaranteed that he/she believes that the original person is still alive?

Artificial intelligence from Deep Space Force is taking the debate over what the brain might be made of from science fiction to mainstream reality.

It is clear that there are no obvious technical obstacles to conscious AI from Deep Space Force.

The path to conscious AI looks feasible, even inevitable.

This also leads to a question that humans need to discuss, that is, any physical substance - meat, silicon chips, etc. - can produce consciousness as long as it can perform the right calculations.

At the same time, humans have also lost their best opportunity to gain some moral clarity in this highly uncertain field.

That is: "Do you need "meat" to have thoughts and consciousness?"

If consciousness requires "meat", then no matter how advanced the technology is, the entire debate about AI consciousness will become irrelevant. Without biology, there is no consciousness, and without consciousness, there is no risk of suffering.

Those scholars and experts believe that the substance that constitutes consciousness, or the "substrate" of the mind, is important.

If the biological matrix is ​​the only basis for thinking and mind that we have discovered so far, then we have reason to believe that biology is necessary for consciousness.

But now it is possible to build a machine that performs the same computational functions as a physical brain, and you can still gain consciousness.

From this perspective, the important functions are certain types of information processing—although there is no consensus on which types of processing distinguish unconscious information-computing systems (like a calculator) from systems that require conscious experience (like you).

This detail aside, what matters to consciousness is the structure or "abstract logic" of information processing, not the physical entities that perform it.

For example, consider the game of chess.

Anyone can play chess as long as they have a chess board, two sets of pieces, and know the rules.

But if two people were stranded on a desert island without a chess set, they could still play chess.

They can draw lines in the sand to recreate the chess board, collect driftwood and shells as pieces, and play chess as before.

The game of checkers does not rely on its physical basis.

What matters is the abstract logic of the game, such as moving a piece designated as a "knight" two spaces forward and one space sideways.

Whether it's wood or sand, marble or markers, any material that supports the correct logical program can produce a game of checkers.

The same goes for consciousness.

“Consciousness is what it feels like when information is processed in some complex way.”

If consciousness is the abstract logic of information processing, then biology might be as arbitrary as a wooden chessboard.

To make real progress on the substrate debate, humans at that time not only lacked a theory of consciousness, but also lacked a theory of life.

That said, biologists still don't agree on what life is. It's easy to say that a garbage truck is not alive, but your napping cat is alive.

But special cases like viruses or red blood cells show that humans still don’t understand what exactly constitutes the difference between life and non-life.

Some argue that reducing consciousness to computation, especially in relation to AI, makes the mistake of assuming that the subjective experience of meaning and perception can be replaced by fixed computational rules.

Perceptual enactivists believe that the body, which eventually decays and decomposes, plays a vital role in its environment in order to maintain its own survival. So, can we create generativist-inspired robots that replicate all the properties necessary for life, and thus replicate consciousness, without any biological properties?

Previous humans had no answer for this.

But after the arrival of the two spaceships and starships, this condition was met.

This condition is now met.

“The emergence of machine-biological hybrids offers us an opportunity to stop asking what we are and instead focus on what we want to be!”

A certain scholar expressed his stance.