A forum for discussion on consciousness, what it is, how it can be manipulated, with the ultimate goal of enabling its transference to another containment outside the human body.
Wrenj, I have to agree with your idea that if these aliens are here studying us then why?. They obviously being biological beings have the same drives to improve themselves through exploration research and discovery. Maybe the universe is replete with life all on the same quest, just in different phases. If the aliens had all of this advanced understanding why would they need to be harvesting our ova and sperm and implant us with devices to track our progress?
This would also proove that a "race" of beings can become so technologically advanced that they can traverse light years at a whim yet have not been able to evolve to a perfect state of being ala Patrick's quest to become eternally aware through artificial means.
These aliens seem to have the technology figured out to a vastly higher degree yet they may be physically devolved to the point where we humans seem like the better off creatures .
Maybe this "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" is a true universal conundrum. Maybe the grass is greener on the other planet with all of it's differences. That would explain a whole lot in terms of alien vehicle sightings and contact.
As far as a lawgiver for the laws. Universal truths opperate at the highest and most pure and perfect laws. As for a law giver--I personally believe in this but as far as comming up with a snapshot definition it just isn't possible.In my mind God is equivalent to "The Singularity" a conscious force that may have had a hand in the big bang and provides the control point for the spiritual dimentions.
Wrenj. That blog you linked was very enlightening as to how ingrained social media is becomming on a world wide level. I wonder how something so fragile as the www will be able to maintain it's influence for too much longer.
I am referring to the idea of technology more or less imploding via a world wide catastrophy. All we need is a few X class and larger solar flares(like are due to hit in 2012)and wala we are instantly back to 1880 technologically and for a good many years. That could be nature's way of pushing our reset button.
I really do wonder what would happen if everything with a logic circuit or semiconductor was instantly and permantly wiped out earth wide all that would survive would be analog technology--and that would only be usable if the power grid remained in tact.
I think at that time the lesser developed countries would have the leg up as they don't rely as much on technology. Just a cheery thought.
Been trying to find some hard evidence and it's distilled down to the search for a high bandwidth neural interface. Once this technology exists, it would be a simple matter of personal augmentation with existing technology. Consider your consciousness being the OS. Becoming aware of extra pathways is already a function of our software. It's called adaptation and we do it rather well. So then, I would suggest the entire focus of this blog has just shifted temporarily to finding means of high bandwidth neural interfacing. With that tool, the floodgates of hard evidence will start to move.
There's technology that simply monitors brain activity and that's not what we're after. Unless gamma waves can provide a data transfer to and from our synapses, I would suggest the only means of high bandwidth transfer is via direct means, ie a neural array.
Chris, you point out a few interesting things. If the story of alien implanted chips are true, then what quest are they on?
I would suggest one starting point for exploring this: death. Of all the variables in the world about life, this is the only constant.
Augustine of Hippo pointed this out almost 2000 years ago. He may not have been the first. When a baby is conceived, everything else about the future of that baby is qualified by "Perhaps..." Perhaps she will be born, perhaps she will be educated, perhaps she will get married, perhaps she will win the Nobel prize, perhaps...for countless other things.
But there is no perhaps about death. It is certain that this baby will die.
Recall again that we are on this side of that metaphorical steel door. We can control it's opening to a certain degree...to forcefully open it through suicide to cross to something beyond, or perhaps nothing.
Inevitably, the door opens for everyone, and once opened, we are unable to close it and step back, of our own choosing, to this side of the divide.
Death, once it arrives, takes the matter entirely out of our hands. And for all human beings, death is certain.
I can accept my body dying unless nanotechnology can keep it viable, however I hope technology will provide a means of escape for my consciousness, to allow it (me) to survive long past my biological physical limitations. The very next step to learning if this can happen is a neural interface. Once we have an interface, introducing various architectures will be easy.
I believe life and death are a commonality throughout the universe regardless of planetary origin. Just like other constants and laws of physical science so life and death are right up there with these constant universal and unbreakable laws. Death of the physical does not adress the spirit within the creature which is free to escape the body at that point. Humans are not unique as having a spirit which inhabits the body. If this is the case(and I'm not saying it is ) then we should be able to study the simplest form of life with an "animal spirit" in an endeavor to quantify the operational frequency and band width of the part of us that is eternal and transferable.
As far as an interface goes and in order for that to happen we would have to find a way to decode neural signals. As far as I know they are composed of an electro-chemical network utilizing chemicals which respond like switching networks at various frequencies and micro voltages. Like an integrated circuit composed of molecular switches controlled by salinity, acidity, pressures, and applied voltage.
I believe we can go beyond the steel door of death and come back. We just have to explore the area of hypnotic regression. Hypnosis has been well accepted by science as valid yet seems to be stuck in a corner. The information gleened might be all "word of mouth" but I think there is much to be discovered by looking into how it can be used for us to unlock memories of the other side.
A neuron is simply a binary switch. 1 or 0. An array of millions of silicon neurons brought up against millions of biological neurons should communicate. Organic biochemical changes being the medium of communication, the silicon array would have to be sensitive to the chemistry changes. Our natural OS being adaptive should explore and try to make sense of the new array, gradually becoming "aware" of it. Case in point, I read of a neural network made up from rat brains that was trained to fly an F-22 simulator (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/06/1102182227308.html). Adaptation seems to be in the OS for mammals on our planet. So then, is this our interface?
As for fantastic experiences, I have had my share and researched plenty from others and I just have the nagging question lingering in my mind, "Could all of this be imagination?". During a highly stressful time in my life, when I abandoned my faith in any form of deity, I began having fantastic experiences that I would have sworn were legitimate spiritual experiences. I really enjoyed them and they gave me hope, as well as removing my natural fear of death. I kept my questioning to a minimum because these thoughts felt good and I didn't want to learn it was my own mind generating them. I *needed* it to be real. Well, I don't *need* them anymore so I started to question and tried to pass my own tests to generate some proof. I and others got no proof. Chris, in your studies of Hypnosis, has there been any proof? Has someone recalled a past life experience such as, where they buried something 150 years ago and then found it again recently? It would be personally rewarding to learn of a body of evidences for such things. It would support my own fantastic experiences that I have all but abandoned by now.
When we review our use of language in everyday things, in the references we make, even as we have in this blog, it becomes evident that there is a large space full of unknowns, full of mystery.
To get by, to get on with daily life, we often have to resort, by default, to language that accommodates the existence of higher purpose, even if what that purpose is, or who it is that has such a purpose, remains unknown to us.
We discover something about ourselves quite early on: that we possess an extraordinary capacity to know and an extraordinary capacity to choose. Part of our discovery is also that we are subject to a set of truths (or looked at in another way, laws) which again are not of our own making.
We design a rocket that can take us to the moon. But we accept the principles of the attraction between bodies, which then explains gravitational pull, which can't be ignored in the design of a rocket ship. Actually, we can choose to ignore gravity. The consequence is that the rocket will fail.
This same line of reasoning can be applied to principles of a moral order too. We can choose to tell the truth or to tell lies. But there is a consequence that inevitably follows when it is discovered that we habitually tell lies. We become people who can't be trusted.
I see this happening in the small everyday things of life as well as in the larger things that shape societies, nations and civilizations. Reality smacks of laws and a law-giver. Humans smack of intelligence on another plane altogether, and powers of choosing again on another plane altogether. It seems we can accept or reject the laws, but we never quite manage to escape the consequences either way.
Chris had mentioned earlier, that the notion of escaping consequences by simply believing in Jesus, is hardly acceptable. I agree. It does seem terribly convenient to live life anyway we choose and get an escape route out of consequences we should face, if only to see the worth of the choices we've made.
I have encountered religious conversions, but despite the facades put up in some cases, I am yet to see how anyone successfully escaped consequences as a result.
Look at the lives of men and women who evoke our admiration by the courage with which they've lived: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and so many others. None of these great men seem to be able to successfully escape consequences of any kind, of a physical order or a moral order.
Look at the story of Jesus himself. There were consequences for taking the road he did. It ended in the crucifixion. You don't challenge the status quo without experiencing the consequences of doing so. He claimed to be God, and yet seems to have chosen the road of powerlessness in the final showdown.
Now here comes the paradox. Christians seem to say "Yes it's true, he was crucified. However, the story doesn't end on Good Friday. Actually, it continues on Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead." It seems that Jesus' resurrection is also not without consequences. Christianity that was seen as a collection of delusional people went on to shape human history in unimaginable ways.
Another paradox emerges. Take the life of Gandhi and its tragic ending. Some may have thought with a thankful sigh, that he was finally stopped. Yet what eventually happened? We have Martin Luther King, years later, inspired by this man, changing and shaping the history of America in ways that even the founding fathers would never have imagined.
I am reminded of a common scene, in the typical drama between a reformer trying to change the way things are and the powers that be who defend the status quo. There's always a point where the establishment wants to finish off the upstart, but a line of thinking comes up "Let's not do that. We may end up making him a martyr and that is even worse for us."
It seems every such "martyr" seems to have only one thing going for him or her: Truth with a capital T. It seems every genuine "martyr" has an ally in someone or something that we did not create but find ourselves inextricably wound up with. And at some point in their lives, this Truth, removes their fear of consequences and they take steps and roads, that we later refer to using the word courage.
Chris has raised a very valid point on the issue of interfacing: the need for decoding. Actually, it’s part of a larger need in the design of systems that inter-communicate: the need for encoding and decoding. A simple illustration of this is the modem which allows communication between a computer and the rest of the internet. Without it, this would not be possible.
Now, if we look into the innards of any system that is capable of communication, we not only see the need for processing power, memory and algorithms, we also see the fundamental need for a specific kind of algorithm: that which decodes and encodes. Without this, communication with the system is not possible. This encoding/decoding system is required both at the sending end, and at the receiving end.
Another simple illustration is something unique to human beings: language. We realize the need for an encoding/decoding system precisely when we’re trying to acquire a new one in the process of learning a new language.
It brings up a whole lot of other questions: what if the level of intelligence between sender and receiver are vastly different? How does that affect the depth and complexity of the communication?
Recall the representation I made for humans:
Human = f(a) + f(b)+ …
We now describe one of the variables that has come to light:
f(capacity to encode/decode).
This capacity arises specifically in beings that show signs of life (which among other things means the potential to die) and increases in complexity as we move from plants to animals to humans.
In humans, this capacity seems to have taken a qualitative jump, indicative of practically another order of communication.
Wrenj brings up the "human" equasion. Don't we as humans have to all suscribe to the more basic laws of conservation of energy etc. and the laws governing gravity and molecular function, due to the fact that we are all made up of light energy at the most basic levels?
It almost seems like there is a missing law or two concerning the function of energy and how it assimilates into matter. For if we had the complete set of laws we could easily decode energy to its component levels and manipulate them as needed. I really think this is at the heart of the quest for The Singularity. We need to learn to break down energy like we are able to break down matter. Then we will have our answer. I really feel this is the place to be looking.
I am a big subscriber to the qualitative jump theory of the capacity for advancement of humanity along with that higher undiscovered order of communication. That other higher order may well be part of an undiscovered as yet strata or subset of energy.
Energy is the most basic building block of matter as we understand it so far. It is also subject to the most basic of universal truths:all actions create consequences.
Pat that site is very cool but seems to be WAY overly optomistic and sidesteps much future world turmoil and disasters. I personaaly believe that in the next couple of years it is highly likely that we will experience an unprecidented solar storm. Think about the world impact and what Japan has taught us recently in this area.
If a magnetic pulse hit Earth just right we would have catastrophic electronic dammage to all unhardened devices say 99.999% of electronics could be affected. No electricity for extended periods right? What happens to all the HUNDREDS of nuke power and weapons plants around the world that rely on electricity to cool them? They will burn through thier generator Diesel in about 2 weeks max and then the meltdowns start on a global basis.
I don't think I'm very far off the mark on this one. This is a very real potential proboblem and is just around the corner! A world wide blackout for any extended amount of time = Game Over for most humanity as Japan and Chernobyl look like a popcorn fart in comparrison of radioactive dammage and pollution.
That was an interesting read. I have pondered how we'll evolve once being "human" isn't necessary anymore. Especially when that's exactly what I would want to preserve if I could "go digital". On the other side of the same hand, perhaps "human" is what every entity becomes once a specific complexity is achieved? That concept is one of the largest pillars of conjecture in my mind and one that I really feel will prove to be true.
Ramdom thought today. If other slightly older civilizations (or similarly aged ones that didn't lose a thousand years to a religious dark age) would evolve such technology as we're facing, then perhaps making contact will require similar levels of sophistication? We're heading towards miniaturization. Nanotechnology and all it's trappings, data rates and protocols devised by super AI, etc. Perhaps our galactic neighbors are quite plainly obvious, we just don't have the technology to see or interact with them yet? Perhaps even the "grays" or whatever alien body they employ is simply a container for a smaller portable consciousness housed inside? Perhaps they visit us in the form and size of insects? That would make much more sense considering the needs of interstellar travel and the energy requirements. So then, could the solution to our own evolution already be right under our noses?
You are assuming that it will be necessary to transport a physical being to make observations etc. What if these greys are really a type of bot/borg that basically act as a VR interface for a much larger intelligent being somewhere far off looking through them etc. An analog would be our Mars rovers.
Just to clarify the earlier statement, "perhaps "human" is what every entity becomes once a specific complexity is achieved", that should be considered an evolutionary stage. We assume, as humans, that we're at the pinnacle of what's possible and achievable. Consider that we are but a point on an evolutionary ladder both physiologically and conceptually. Once we can significantly evolve past our current stage, the question to ask is exactly what we'll want to carry with us and what we'll want to leave behind.
I must confess that the end result of being downloaded into a machine is bleak to say the least.
Chris's OBE is a much more interesting experience, though he seems to have had just a peek. Imagine moving just by willing it. It seems like he acquired the properties of a world beyond matter and the properties of matter (energy, density etc.)
Chris, if only you had been there long enough to laugh?
Would I want a universe where Shakespeare and Calvin & Hobbes were not appreciated?
Take any documentary on the life of a lion or an ant, devoid of the music and dramatic shots. It actually becomes devoid of all the interest, save for a few interesting intervals in a long yawn-filled piece.
What makes animations like Kungfu Panda or even Ratatouille so engaging and interesting? The drama, the humour, the agony, the contest between good and evil and so much else that is only associated with humans.
Through animation, we make animals more exciting, by giving them distinctly human qualities.
In contrast to that, having to live for eons as an algorithm (still an unlikely proposition as I see it) seems as exciting as being Google's current search algorithm.
I think it's highly unlikely that Google will evolve into God---LOL.
What is in a book like the Bible that makes some people accept it wholeheartedly, some others partially, and still others rejecting it?
To clarify this, take another book like Hitler's "Mein Kampf". What makes it acceptable to some people and not others whether now or 80 years ago?
In both cases, the writer encodes and the reader decodes. It doesn't end there. The reader can make a choice about the decoding, a choice that is chock full of consequences.
We talked about real evidence for other bridges to the human being earlier. Steve Jobs talks about faith, of believing, because we can connect the dots looking backward, when we try to understand the roads our lives has taken.
This is an example of data coming via a bridge which influences a man to do all the things that someone like Steve Jobs has done.
With clear evidence of such bridges, and a limited understanding of such bridges and as a consequence the structure of the human being (if we only go by a biological description) how then does it become possible to download the unknown simply by developing better and better machines?
It's almost like saying, keep working on the plug and the socket and maybe one day we'll be able to get out all the photos in the phone through the charging cable.
Not until the charging cable and the power socket cease to be only that!
They must become something capable of handling more than just the battery on the phone, capable of responding to more than the "dead" status of the phone's battery which then causes charging to start.
They must be capable of handling data that comes via the network, bluetooth, wifi, data cables or put into the phone by the manufacturer.
This is very interesting. The new properties required by the power cable will be determined by properties priorly established by the manufacturer of the phone.
So if some other company decides to innovate and elevate the capabilities of the power cable, it must necessarily take into account all the features set by the manufacturer which requires a full awareness of what these features are.
Until all the f(unknowns) in the equation become known, attempting a transfer into machines, will necessarily involve a loss of data. It could be vital and critical data.
It could be something like reading the comic book version of "Avatar".
Let us all consider our personal perspective in the desire or lack thereof to live on in an eternal databit environment. As Pat points out earlier, our drives our based on the economics of a desired outcome be it real or immaginary. When we don't have a goal or focal point for our lives--or even with one, we become the people attempting to get a picture from our phone's charging cord. That is kind of the whole point of this forum. Can we whip that cord hard enough to somehow bring out that photo data.
I think our percieved needs and desires for the future reflect much of what we lack in our lives right now.
As far as data transfer loss and coruption(it's real funny because I was just thinking of this today before reading Wrenj's input) If we are to store ourselves we would have to have some sort of redundancy of many layers and copies. Would this mean that each copy (being a full version of us) would in effect be another functionable copy of us--kind of like with cloning? Could we potentially have a thousand of us? I think this potential would need to be adressed and it would be very hard to figure out all of the angles.
Consider the technology I'm writing about is 35 years future distant. Recall technology 35 years ago. Cell phones didn't even exist. In fact, solid state mass produced communications devices were still bleeding edge and largely expensive. Vacuum tubes were still being sold at retail electronics stores and tube testers were commonplace at these same stores.
Unless Moore's Law crashes and burns sometime in the next 35 years, we have a fighting chance at seeing a shared evolutionary advancement with AI.
This advancement would have adequate headroom to account for as many f(x)'s as anyone would care to incorporate, likely in real time with biology.
This evolution will be with us, not in spite of us. I would also imagine that technology will be able to co-experience being "human" to gain a working understanding of it, as we gain a working understanding of "artificial" augmentation. Remember, this is EVOLUTION and as such, it's an infinite compilation of combinations. Nothing will remain exclusive.
The power cord analogy would fail as an evolutionary dead end. Of such I expect a great number. Of the countless bridges and directions, only a few will be "fit" and survive. Such is the nature of evolution.
"how then does it become possible to download the unknown simply by developing better and better machines?" …because the machines will be experiencing the unknown themselves. I suspect when the moment happens that bio and AI merge, it will be a subtle merging, and an awareness of the event after the fact.
"The bleak picture emerges.", similar words were spoken by audiophile adherents to the phonograph who now have repositories of digital optical media or the equivalent files on their hard drives. Downloading my consciousness into today's technology would be bleak to be sure but remember the 35 years future aspect.
I own an ICOM IC-701. It was bleeding edge technology in 1979. I sit that next to my Mac Pro to gain perspective. Both are/were taken very seriously by the groups that produced them. Extrapolating this side by side experience to 35 years distant makes me smile.
When I talk about the unknown, I refer to the dimensions that Chris refers to, for which there is still no material evidence today whatsoever.
If Chris is indeed right, and there is a life beyond death, then it has been going on right beneath our noses for as long as the human race has been.
Remember that going back and forth past that steel door is still not in our control, as it was from the beginning.
While Chris was having his experience, the rest of the people around went on as before totally unaware. No machine registered a blip. If it did, it certainly has not been repeated at will, which is the demonstration of our control over the issue.
This is the human being we're talking about: a human being who already seems perfectly capable of existing without matter. Energy, biology, physics, water, air all seem completely unnecessary. This is the unknown, a mystery which remains so up till now.
As for mysteries of a more material order, take the goings on in the Middle East, the financial meltdown, the recession none of which with all current computational capabilities were all totally unpredicted.
A very valid concept is the "black swan", the totally unforeseen event that can cause significant disruption to entire civilizations. These "black swans" need not be natural disasters.
If human beings are already capable of existing totally independent of the known universe, think what we can do moving undetected in a world of machines.
With our current limitations we're already so unpredictable. I wish someone would write a good story of what would happen when we get rid of the limitations of matter entirely but remain capable of influencing things in the universe.
Well, gods seem to fit that category of being free of the limitations of matter and remain capable of influencing things in the universe but as yet, there is no proof for them. So, they either don't exist or we're already in some digital simulation and there's a non-interference policy between us and them. If the latter is the case then all we're doing and can ever do is power cord shaking. (bangs head against wall)
Patrick says our drives are based on economics. I agree that some are. Not all.
Viktor Frankl, the nazi concentration camp survivor, talks about the will to meaning in his book "Man's search for meaning." I have found this to be the most fitting and adequate explanation for motives.
Even Patrick's identification of economics as a motive would fit in here. Some people derive the meaning from personal benefit even to the exclusion of benefits to others or harm coming to others. This is their meaning, adopted consciously or otherwise. It is impoverished but it still is.
This also explains a sudden turn in the path of individual lives. Remember the story of Buddha's conversion. He came out of the palace he'd been born and raised in, and found a different world. After a period of intense interior battle, he choose the road he ended up in.
There are others before him and after him who've been born and brought up in luxury and opulence and come in contact with poverty and misery and remain totally unmoved.
This is the fascinating thing about human beings. We're not like animals who are driven by instincts. We can choose, always choose.
Sometimes this choice will come at great personal cost. Gandhi wasn't the first to be thrown out of a train in South Africa. He may not have been the first to attempt to do something about it. But he was unmistakably one who attempted to do something.
Truth is among the many possible motives that human beings can be influenced by, universal Truth that we reflected on here.
I came across a question this week. It was something like "If you had a chance to teach one and only one thing, what would it be?" My reply was "To be open to Truth, and to allow oneself to be changed by Truth."
I have found a resistance to Truth inside me and around me. To live facing the truth is not a very comfortable option especially, as Patrick pointed out , in a world of self-interest that is not bad of itself, but acquires clear moral coloration when it does not stop at the cost of harm to others.
There is one corollary of this development in computational capabilities...a lot more is being revealed about the structure of the human being.
Things that human beings do like knowing and choosing are being better understood simply because of the effort to replicate these in machines. Replication is not yet successful. But understanding of these human operations has been growing tremendously.
This is where I see the greatest benefits of technology. As we humans try more and more to surpass our limits, we better understand those limits. The payoff is a spate of innovations based on this new knowledge which improves the quality of human life and finds remarkable solutions for our most pressing challenges.
Imagine aiming to move faster than light. We'll end up with a lot more speed in our transportation needs.
This is what never ceases to provoke wonder in me: not that we are able to surpass our limits at will, but that we have been able to do so much and there seems to be no limits to how we convert challenges into opportunities.
Yes, cataloged under "backup wishes", the technology push towards digital immortality hopefully will provide a means of longevity much greater than we know now. Biblical writ suggests man's maximum age will be 120. Well, if technology buys me more time, my odds of achieving a "fantastic event" improve greatly. I age linearly. Technology improves exponentially. If I can gain even a single day, I will have exposed myself to much greater technology.
Futurists sites suggest aging "parity" where today, we might be able to take one month a year off, parity would mean reversing 12 months of aging per year. They suggest such things as reasonably happening in the next 50 or so years. Only one little problem with that. By the time such things can be available to me, how much of my original neurological network will remain intact? What will I be preserving? Will I/someone have to redesign what was lost due to aging? Will I still be me?
Was pondering my huge cell bill and realized, notwithstanding obscene profits, it also affords them the capital to compete. This led me to wonder who are the competitors that will be motivated to engineer the technology I'm hoping for? I doubt the corporations that afford the necessary brain trusts are working towards that goal directly, but what in the consuming world is steering the boat in that direction? Is anyone monitoring such consumer trends?
As an aside, let me stick my neck out and make a prediction of my own. Texting. I absolutely love it. So do a lot of other people... that drive. There is a huge need for a text-interface that still allows people to concentrate on driving. This is knocking on the neural interface door, hard. There is huge demand for this and therefore profits. I suspect some interesting evolution to happen soon.
On a more serious note, evolution is a pretty widely accepted hypothesis for which the search for key missing pieces is still on.
Richard Feynman once defined science something like this: "First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it."
I fully agree. It accords with a classical definition of truth: veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus.
Roughly, it translates to: Truth is when reality and the mind are in conformity.
The reality out there, outside the mind, is always the reference point. When the mind conforms to this reality, then truth is said to exist.
So evolution remains a great hypothesis that is now taken as fact, and there's an attempt to explain everything else through the lens of evolution.
Patrick, what you say about businesses is very interesting. I shared the timeline site with a friend. We've been having a discussion on how economic enterprises survive.
I asked that with some of the technologies mentioned in the timeline, are businesses today preparing for such a future?
Ultimately we went into how an organization can actually survive. From experience few actually do.
This is where I found evolution to be a very interesting concept. It turns out that evolution is very useful in the understanding of the growth and development of enterprises, technology, societies, civilizations.
Evolution seems to be turning out to be a human-made concept best applied to human things.
Take political parties, that survive longer than business enterprises in any uninterrupted democracy. How do they do it? Because
- Generations come and go.
- Technologies come and go.
- Public interest issues come and go.
- Economic conditions come and go.
- Ideologies come and go.
We started discovering some remarkable things about what it may take for an economic enterprise to survive longer than current average lifespans. One word, evolution, with one unchanging goal: profitable growth.
he problem I have with the "evolution" of technology is tha almost all aspects of advancement rely on having faster and faster yet smaller hardware. We are rapidly aproaching the limits of miniaturization in regards to integrated circuits. hese circuits operate at a molecular level of miniaturization. Likewise we are nearing limits of the materials used in frequency driven clocks for our integrated circuits. You can get an atom or electron to only go so fast in this atmosphere and with the certain crystal matrixes in use.
Once we reach these limits there has to be some sort of stall in this unprecidented pace of evoluion and advancement.
We have already concieved ideas which exceed known manufacturing technology a this point. So how far can we(men) go as a species?
There's been talk of quantum computing as a solution to the atomic restriction problem.
I liked the quote from Bill Gates, “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.”. I can be quite happy with existing miniaturization with broader bandwidth. Imagine a 128 bit OS, or even a 512 bit system. Aren't there GPU's that are 512 bit?
Regardless what the limitations, there will always be some group trying to find a solution to it.
What is really driving all of this innovation? Is it greed? Desire to be a better person? The need for improvement in some way? Maybe it is purely for innovations sake. Maybe there really isn't a need for a 20 terabyte micro computer the size of a thumbnail opperating at 9000GHz right now.
It seems that at this point innovation and the drive to keep up the pace of consant retooling and redesign of things that work perfectly fine has almost gotten(I don't care if it isn't a word) out of control.
Right now it seems as if people need a few years just to catch up with all of this innovation and invention. We all could really use a good amount of time to put on the brakes and take a look at what has been acomplished and to what benefit. I know there are probably thousands of pieces of new technology that I of any of us have ever heard of or seen. Much of this technology will be "obsolete" in the near future without ever having had a legitimate chance to be used or even seen by a micro-fraction of the world population.
I think It is really time to take a look around the world and ask ourselves how can I live in my comfy home with all of my toys and technology when there are millions of people that don't even have power in their town or home. I think it is time to direct our focus en masse to the rest of the world that is still living with technology from the 60's and 70's having no idea abou what all is going on in the rest of the world The echnology gap is ever widening between the "pluged in" and the rest of the planet. Is this disparity purely as a result of economics?
What is driving the priorities behind what we are creating and why? How much further advancement is really necessary before the rest of the world has a chance to catch up?
"Once we reach these limits there has to be some sort of stall in this unprecidented pace of evoluion and advancement.", this has been said at every level of discovery over the last 100 years or more. Each person had quite valid reasons to believe the end is near for advancement. Even Moore himself thought his "law" was coming to an end. We just keep coming up with ways around the impossible.
I've been thinking allot obout this topic and I was wondering: aside form anti gravity technology, I'm hard pressed to think of anything that I saw in science fiction growing up that has not by now been made reality. I can only think of a handful of ideas that are still not within the realms of daily reality.
Antigravity tech. Superconductivity at room temp Cold fusion Teleporting Warp drive/ hyperspace speed of light drives And of course full VR integration
Full immersion VR is coming soon relatively speaking. The rest I have no clue.
As for what's driving it? The board of directors' fiduciary duty to the shareholders to supply growth and profit. For example, Intel has technology far ahead of what's available today but for the sake of market share and profitability, they supply it in economically profitable chunks, as well as what the software industry can support. What if they dumped 64 bit architecture on the public sector a decade ago? What if they dumped their bleeding edge technology on the market today and then had a long development time before the next series of marketable technology? What would happen to their workforce / brain-trust? To remain a solid, productive, marketable corporation, they need to control the rate of growth and innovation to maximize their mission statement to the shareholders. So evolution is controlled by economics.
Why do I persist in spending my time supporting technology instead of selling all that I have and donating it to charity and then living in a box under a bridge? Because I want to live forever and doing such things will be going in the wrong direction to achieve that aim. I'm sure en-masse the modern world will keep going as profitably as they can with little or no regard for the developing world. At least in this age of global communication, gross and blatant abuse of the developing world is more difficult for the modern world to get away with. But it's survival of the fittest in evolution. It's keep up or die. It's crass and ice cold, but true.
If we can achieve the "singularity" as spelled out in common understanding today, then evolutionarily speaking we stand a good chance at becoming utopian or distopian. I doubt the status quo will remain however. What will likely happen is a whole new strata of have and have not. The current separation of the modern and developing world will likely become smaller or eliminated and other modes of division will appear. This is all too large for us to predetermine with any level of certainty at this point. All we can know is if the singularity does happen, then the world is in for a change and the problems we face as a species will likewise be changed.
For the first time in history man has become one of the major forces in the process of evolution--or so it seems. But is it really evolution of man or somthing else?
Recall the work of Leonardo da Vinci, as a painter, an engineer and an inventor. He was centuries ahead of his time.
What motivated his work?
I do believe that in some cases technology exists which the market might not be able to sustain and so is not released. In other cases other motives drive the non-release.
Since innovation is not the exclusive preserve of anyone, progress seems almost relentless.
There is always the need to evaluate progress in the context of good and evil. We human beings must judge ourselves, what we do and how we do it. All the hazards, you both point out are very real. We've seen how manipulation is currently going on.
I can hardly imagine a case, even if theoretically it became possible to provoke the transfer of consciousness to an electronic network, how people would not seek special features and properties.
It would be just like blog themes or phone apps. Some would be free at a basic level, but others would come at a price for the corresponding features.
The contest will never cease, and so the requirements of an adequate moral framework will never cease, if only to guarantee a just outcome. But as our history and experience shows, there's hardly agreement on a common moral framework, much less agreement on its application.
The desire for heaven, however, seems intrinsic to our structure as human beings, a universe free of evil. Yet we never quite seem to manage to build heaven on earth. History, though, is not in short supply of those who have promised such.
The realization of these promises apart from being an exercise in futility, have been nothing short of exercises in bloodletting.
Wrenj, I apologize but I forgot to address the smoking earlier; I smoked for 25 years. I loved it. I still love the smell. I quit last August 15th. I smoked well over a pack a day if not two. How did I do it? Chantix and electronic cigarettes. When you start Chantix, you can "cheat" as you need to but the drug really does remove your cravings, physiologically at least. This is where the electronic cigarettes are essential. You only "smoke" what you need to get over the craving. If you torch up a real cigarette, you would likely smoke it to the butt like I would. This saturates you with nicotine whereas the electronic one would not with only a few drags. Dude, if it worked with me, it will work with anyone. Just ask Chris.
The benefits of innovation are not limited to places in the developed world.
In India, domestic call rates on mobile phones have dropped to as low as 0.7 cents per minute. Compare that to domestic call rates in the US.
These rates have been achieved without the Indian government allowing full and unhindered IP telephony. Imagine what would happen to the rates, when this is allowed.
I could cite many such examples of great technology available at a fraction of the cost.
As for our predisposition towards distopian social nightmares, the "singularity" will offer an alternative. Remember my earlier post re: North Korea? Well, full immersion VR will be reality for people. Have's and have not's alike. However, they can have their magical gods and actually experience the miracles and such that are promised and have as yet remained undelivered.
Thought....with such evolutionary advancement, we as a species may have evolved past the need for gods, heaven, and the traditional sources for overreaching comfort and order. But for those who still need such things, the experience will seem more real.
A real problem in VR today is rendering cost. I can afford to pretty much have any pleasant and status offering object in VR but it's all for not if the server hosting the environment lags due to all my stuff. So the really cool people are minimalists to keep speeds up. Almost Buddism by necessity -lol
I would surmise that an individual's consciousness would live on a dedicated self contained portable network. I envision something the size of a cell phone, that can be attached to an artificial body if you desire one. If that portable network gets run over by a truck in real life, then you're toast. However, I would imagine most people would live in a virtual world while their hardware is sequestered in a secure facility somewhere. Like underground on the moon perhaps? Then we would interact virtually. However true damage would be limited and psychological at worst.
Lots of people balk at the idea of a virtual existence but what your mind can generate to fill in the gaps of today's technology is simply amazing. Imagine when technology leaves very little for your mind to engineer. Lots of people "live" in VR already to escape real life as often as they can. To them, current technology is able to set their minds to believing they're really there. And we're 35 years away from full immersion. Wow
And the older I get the more I resent my biological limitations. I feel like a helpless hostage adrift in a sinking ship. It seems arcane to be stuck in here.
Random thought: our brain is a digital computer of finite size and capacity. It runs on software. Some people believe that software is a transdimensional static entity known as a spirit. This is up for evaluation but when we have artificially duplicated our own complexity, I can imagine evolution will dictate software similar if not identical to our own. IF this is not the case, then this may be considered as evidence of the transdimensional / supernatural aspect.
Having said all that, my thought was simply this: We have a non-magical highly complex brain that we know is a digital computer running software. How freaking hard does this really have to be? Just saying....
More random thought... I wonder if we can gain some insight by observing how the brain (of any species) develops in vitro. What develops first? Why? Is this sequence necessary for natural software development? I'll bet we can learn quite a bit for our "cause" by watching how it's done in nature.
To reflect on the anti-gravity and super-light velocity problems, we can't observe such phenomena in nature. We can only speculate mathematically. Well as far as digital immortality is concerned, we can observe this in nature. In fact, I could live forever right now if I could digitize my DNA to eliminate the analog losses within cell reproduction.
More thoughts: It would seem this evolution for us is something that needs to happen for our survival. As a species we're still increasing in number. Something's got to break when we max this planet out. So then what will it be? A massive culling through disease, famine, and war? Or do we ditch our biology and consume massively fewer resources respectively?
Nicotine triggers a neural response. If you were digital you could still smoke. It would taste the same, feel the same, smell the same, and may even be addicting. But it wouldn't kill you, it would be free, and you could quit at any time.
Sounds like liberation to me. I could blow past my caloric daily intake and never gain an ounce :-D
As a joke, I could make a "window licking" program as pleasureful as the most addictive drug. I can see it now, vast numbers of digital people spending their existence licking windows. So I'd guess one of your security protocols would be protecting the pleasure centers of your consciousness. For they can motivate you to do virtually anything. Some entity could enlist you to perform mundane tasks for a job and pay you (or enslave you) by controlling those pleasure inputs.
Okay guys, time for another fresh sheet :)
ReplyDeleteGreat opening lines: "Hard evidence"
ReplyDelete- What if we sat down to write out a list of 50 different things that we assume, and on which we run our daily lives?
- What if we wrote out the assumptions involved for each thing and the evidence for each assumption?
Actually doing this would lead to a discovery of how much "hard evidence" our lives actually run on.
Wrenj, I have to agree with your idea that if these aliens are here studying us then why?. They obviously being biological beings have the same drives to improve themselves through exploration research and discovery. Maybe the universe is replete with life all on the same quest, just in different phases. If the aliens had all of this advanced understanding why would they need to be harvesting our ova and sperm and implant us with devices to track our progress?
ReplyDeleteThis would also proove that a "race" of beings can become so technologically advanced that they can traverse light years at a whim yet have not been able to evolve to a perfect state of being ala Patrick's quest to become eternally aware through artificial means.
These aliens seem to have the technology figured out to a vastly higher degree yet they may be physically devolved to the point where we humans seem like the better off creatures .
Maybe this "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" is a true universal conundrum. Maybe the grass is greener on the other planet with all of it's differences. That would explain a whole lot in terms of alien vehicle sightings and contact.
As far as a lawgiver for the laws. Universal truths opperate at the highest and most pure and perfect laws. As for a law giver--I personally believe in this but as far as comming up with a snapshot definition it just isn't possible.In my mind God is equivalent to "The Singularity" a conscious force that may have had a hand in the big bang and provides the control point for the spiritual dimentions.
ReplyDeleteWrenj. That blog you linked was very enlightening as to how ingrained social media is becomming on a world wide level. I wonder how something so fragile as the www will be able to maintain it's influence for too much longer.
ReplyDeleteI am referring to the idea of technology more or less imploding via a world wide catastrophy. All we need is a few X class and larger solar flares(like are due to hit in 2012)and wala we are instantly back to 1880 technologically and for a good many years. That could be nature's way of pushing our reset button.
I really do wonder what would happen if everything with a logic circuit or semiconductor was instantly and permantly wiped out earth wide all that would survive would be analog technology--and that would only be usable if the power grid remained in tact.
I think at that time the lesser developed countries would have the leg up as they don't rely as much on technology. Just a cheery thought.
It's a blizzard here in Wisconsin today. So far we have 3 inches and it's dumping snow like it was Jan.15th
ReplyDeleteBeen trying to find some hard evidence and it's distilled down to the search for a high bandwidth neural interface. Once this technology exists, it would be a simple matter of personal augmentation with existing technology. Consider your consciousness being the OS. Becoming aware of extra pathways is already a function of our software. It's called adaptation and we do it rather well. So then, I would suggest the entire focus of this blog has just shifted temporarily to finding means of high bandwidth neural interfacing. With that tool, the floodgates of hard evidence will start to move.
ReplyDeleteThere's technology that simply monitors brain activity and that's not what we're after. Unless gamma waves can provide a data transfer to and from our synapses, I would suggest the only means of high bandwidth transfer is via direct means, ie a neural array.
ReplyDeleteChris, you point out a few interesting things. If the story of alien implanted chips are true, then what quest are they on?
ReplyDeleteI would suggest one starting point for exploring this: death. Of all the variables in the world about life, this is the only constant.
Augustine of Hippo pointed this out almost 2000 years ago. He may not have been the first. When a baby is conceived, everything else about the future of that baby is qualified by "Perhaps..." Perhaps she will be born, perhaps she will be educated, perhaps she will get married, perhaps she will win the Nobel prize, perhaps...for countless other things.
But there is no perhaps about death. It is certain that this baby will die.
Recall again that we are on this side of that metaphorical steel door. We can control it's opening to a certain degree...to forcefully open it through suicide to cross to something beyond, or perhaps nothing.
Inevitably, the door opens for everyone, and once opened, we are unable to close it and step back, of our own choosing, to this side of the divide.
Death, once it arrives, takes the matter entirely out of our hands. And for all human beings, death is certain.
I can accept my body dying unless nanotechnology can keep it viable, however I hope technology will provide a means of escape for my consciousness, to allow it (me) to survive long past my biological physical limitations. The very next step to learning if this can happen is a neural interface. Once we have an interface, introducing various architectures will be easy.
ReplyDeleteI believe life and death are a commonality throughout the universe regardless of planetary origin. Just like other constants and laws of physical science so life and death are right up there with these constant universal and unbreakable laws.
ReplyDeleteDeath of the physical does not adress the spirit within the creature which is free to escape the body at that point. Humans are not unique as having a spirit which inhabits the body.
If this is the case(and I'm not saying it is ) then we should be able to study the simplest form of life with an "animal spirit" in an endeavor to quantify the operational frequency and band width of the part of us that is eternal and transferable.
As far as an interface goes and in order for that to happen we would have to find a way to decode neural signals. As far as I know they are composed of an electro-chemical network utilizing chemicals which respond like switching networks at various frequencies and micro voltages. Like an integrated circuit composed of molecular switches controlled by salinity, acidity, pressures, and applied voltage.
ReplyDeleteI believe we can go beyond the steel door of death and come back. We just have to explore the area of hypnotic regression. Hypnosis has been well accepted by science as valid yet seems to be stuck in a corner. The information gleened might be all "word of mouth" but I think there is much to be discovered by looking into how it can be used for us to unlock memories of the other side.
ReplyDeleteA neuron is simply a binary switch. 1 or 0. An array of millions of silicon neurons brought up against millions of biological neurons should communicate. Organic biochemical changes being the medium of communication, the silicon array would have to be sensitive to the chemistry changes. Our natural OS being adaptive should explore and try to make sense of the new array, gradually becoming "aware" of it.
ReplyDeleteCase in point, I read of a neural network made up from rat brains that was trained to fly an F-22 simulator (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/06/1102182227308.html). Adaptation seems to be in the OS for mammals on our planet. So then, is this our interface?
Also, this was done SEVEN years ago. Makes you wonder.
ReplyDeleteAs for fantastic experiences, I have had my share and researched plenty from others and I just have the nagging question lingering in my mind, "Could all of this be imagination?". During a highly stressful time in my life, when I abandoned my faith in any form of deity, I began having fantastic experiences that I would have sworn were legitimate spiritual experiences. I really enjoyed them and they gave me hope, as well as removing my natural fear of death. I kept my questioning to a minimum because these thoughts felt good and I didn't want to learn it was my own mind generating them. I *needed* it to be real.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't *need* them anymore so I started to question and tried to pass my own tests to generate some proof. I and others got no proof. Chris, in your studies of Hypnosis, has there been any proof? Has someone recalled a past life experience such as, where they buried something 150 years ago and then found it again recently? It would be personally rewarding to learn of a body of evidences for such things. It would support my own fantastic experiences that I have all but abandoned by now.
When we review our use of language in everyday things, in the references we make, even as we have in this blog, it becomes evident that there is a large space full of unknowns, full of mystery.
ReplyDeleteTo get by, to get on with daily life, we often have to resort, by default, to language that accommodates the existence of higher purpose, even if what that purpose is, or who it is that has such a purpose, remains unknown to us.
We discover something about ourselves quite early on: that we possess an extraordinary capacity to know and an extraordinary capacity to choose. Part of our discovery is also that we are subject to a set of truths (or looked at in another way, laws) which again are not of our own making.
We design a rocket that can take us to the moon. But we accept the principles of the attraction between bodies, which then explains gravitational pull, which can't be ignored in the design of a rocket ship. Actually, we can choose to ignore gravity. The consequence is that the rocket will fail.
This same line of reasoning can be applied to principles of a moral order too. We can choose to tell the truth or to tell lies. But there is a consequence that inevitably follows when it is discovered that we habitually tell lies. We become people who can't be trusted.
ReplyDeleteI see this happening in the small everyday things of life as well as in the larger things that shape societies, nations and civilizations. Reality smacks of laws and a law-giver. Humans smack of intelligence on another plane altogether, and powers of choosing again on another plane altogether. It seems we can accept or reject the laws, but we never quite manage to escape the consequences either way.
Chris had mentioned earlier, that the notion of escaping consequences by simply believing in Jesus, is hardly acceptable. I agree. It does seem terribly convenient to live life anyway we choose and get an escape route out of consequences we should face, if only to see the worth of the choices we've made.
I have encountered religious conversions, but despite the facades put up in some cases, I am yet to see how anyone successfully escaped consequences as a result.
Look at the lives of men and women who evoke our admiration by the courage with which they've lived: Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and so many others. None of these great men seem to be able to successfully escape consequences of any kind, of a physical order or a moral order.
Look at the story of Jesus himself. There were consequences for taking the road he did. It ended in the crucifixion. You don't challenge the status quo without experiencing the consequences of doing so. He claimed to be God, and yet seems to have chosen the road of powerlessness in the final showdown.
Now here comes the paradox. Christians seem to say "Yes it's true, he was crucified. However, the story doesn't end on Good Friday. Actually, it continues on Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead." It seems that Jesus' resurrection is also not without consequences. Christianity that was seen as a collection of delusional people went on to shape human history in unimaginable ways.
Another paradox emerges. Take the life of Gandhi and its tragic ending. Some may have thought with a thankful sigh, that he was finally stopped. Yet what eventually happened? We have Martin Luther King, years later, inspired by this man, changing and shaping the history of America in ways that even the founding fathers would never have imagined.
I am reminded of a common scene, in the typical drama between a reformer trying to change the way things are and the powers that be who defend the status quo. There's always a point where the establishment wants to finish off the upstart, but a line of thinking comes up "Let's not do that. We may end up making him a martyr and that is even worse for us."
It seems every such "martyr" seems to have only one thing going for him or her: Truth with a capital T. It seems every genuine "martyr" has an ally in someone or something that we did not create but find ourselves inextricably wound up with. And at some point in their lives, this Truth, removes their fear of consequences and they take steps and roads, that we later refer to using the word courage.
Chris has raised a very valid point on the issue of interfacing: the need for decoding. Actually, it’s part of a larger need in the design of systems that inter-communicate: the need for encoding and decoding. A simple illustration of this is the modem which allows communication between a computer and the rest of the internet. Without it, this would not be possible.
ReplyDeleteNow, if we look into the innards of any system that is capable of communication, we not only see the need for processing power, memory and algorithms, we also see the fundamental need for a specific kind of algorithm: that which decodes and encodes. Without this, communication with the system is not possible. This encoding/decoding system is required both at the sending end, and at the receiving end.
Another simple illustration is something unique to human beings: language. We realize the need for an encoding/decoding system precisely when we’re trying to acquire a new one in the process of learning a new language.
It brings up a whole lot of other questions: what if the level of intelligence between sender and receiver are vastly different? How does that affect the depth and complexity of the communication?
Recall the representation I made for humans:
Human =
f(a) +
f(b)+
…
We now describe one of the variables that has come to light:
f(capacity to encode/decode).
This capacity arises specifically in beings that show signs of life (which among other things means the potential to die) and increases in complexity as we move from plants to animals to humans.
In humans, this capacity seems to have taken a qualitative jump, indicative of practically another order of communication.
Guys, check this out. Let your mind wander the possibilities.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.futuretimeline.net/
I wonder if someday, Google will evolve into a god?
ReplyDeleteWrenj brings up the "human" equasion. Don't we as humans have to all suscribe to the more basic laws of conservation of energy etc. and the laws governing gravity and molecular function, due to the fact that we are all made up of light energy at the most basic levels?
ReplyDeleteIt almost seems like there is a missing law or two concerning the function of energy and how it assimilates into matter. For if we had the complete set of laws we could easily decode energy to its component levels and manipulate them as needed.
I really think this is at the heart of the quest for The Singularity.
We need to learn to break down energy like we are able to break down matter. Then we will have our answer. I really feel this is the place to be looking.
I am a big subscriber to the qualitative jump theory of the capacity for advancement of humanity along with that higher undiscovered order of communication. That other higher order may well be part of an undiscovered as yet strata or subset of energy.
Energy is the most basic building block of matter as we understand it so far. It is also subject to the most basic of universal truths:all actions create consequences.
ReplyDeletePat that site is very cool but seems to be WAY overly optomistic and sidesteps much future world turmoil and disasters. I personaaly believe that in the next couple of years it is highly likely that we will experience an unprecidented solar storm. Think about the world impact and what Japan has taught us recently in this area.
ReplyDeleteIf a magnetic pulse hit Earth just right we would have catastrophic electronic dammage to all unhardened devices say 99.999% of electronics could be affected. No electricity for extended periods right? What happens to all the HUNDREDS of nuke power and weapons plants around the world that rely on electricity to cool them? They will burn through thier generator Diesel in about 2 weeks max and then the meltdowns start on a global basis.
I don't think I'm very far off the mark on this one. This is a very real potential proboblem and is just around the corner! A world wide blackout for any extended amount of time = Game Over for most humanity as Japan and Chernobyl look like a popcorn fart in comparrison of radioactive dammage and pollution.
Just some nice thoughts to cheer you up!
ReplyDeleteGreat site...but the end of the story is rather bleak.
ReplyDeleteThe quest for immortality then turns out to be a quest for longevity.
LOL--Google becomes God.
Here's an article worth reading:
http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-01/news/29493774_1_future-theologians-sir-martin-rees
That was an interesting read. I have pondered how we'll evolve once being "human" isn't necessary anymore. Especially when that's exactly what I would want to preserve if I could "go digital". On the other side of the same hand, perhaps "human" is what every entity becomes once a specific complexity is achieved? That concept is one of the largest pillars of conjecture in my mind and one that I really feel will prove to be true.
ReplyDeleteRamdom thought today. If other slightly older civilizations (or similarly aged ones that didn't lose a thousand years to a religious dark age) would evolve such technology as we're facing, then perhaps making contact will require similar levels of sophistication? We're heading towards miniaturization. Nanotechnology and all it's trappings, data rates and protocols devised by super AI, etc. Perhaps our galactic neighbors are quite plainly obvious, we just don't have the technology to see or interact with them yet? Perhaps even the "grays" or whatever alien body they employ is simply a container for a smaller portable consciousness housed inside? Perhaps they visit us in the form and size of insects? That would make much more sense considering the needs of interstellar travel and the energy requirements. So then, could the solution to our own evolution already be right under our noses?
You are assuming that it will be necessary to transport a physical being to make observations etc. What if these greys are really a type of bot/borg that basically act as a VR interface for a much larger intelligent being somewhere far off looking through them etc. An analog would be our Mars rovers.
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify the earlier statement, "perhaps "human" is what every entity becomes once a specific complexity is achieved", that should be considered an evolutionary stage. We assume, as humans, that we're at the pinnacle of what's possible and achievable. Consider that we are but a point on an evolutionary ladder both physiologically and conceptually. Once we can significantly evolve past our current stage, the question to ask is exactly what we'll want to carry with us and what we'll want to leave behind.
ReplyDeleteI must confess that the end result of being downloaded into a machine is bleak to say the least.
ReplyDeleteChris's OBE is a much more interesting experience, though he seems to have had just a peek. Imagine moving just by willing it. It seems like he acquired the properties of a world beyond matter and the properties of matter (energy, density etc.)
Chris, if only you had been there long enough to laugh?
Would I want a universe where Shakespeare and Calvin & Hobbes were not appreciated?
ReplyDeleteTake any documentary on the life of a lion or an ant, devoid of the music and dramatic shots. It actually becomes devoid of all the interest, save for a few interesting intervals in a long yawn-filled piece.
What makes animations like Kungfu Panda or even Ratatouille so engaging and interesting? The drama, the humour, the agony, the contest between good and evil and so much else that is only associated with humans.
Through animation, we make animals more exciting, by giving them distinctly human qualities.
In contrast to that, having to live for eons as an algorithm (still an unlikely proposition as I see it) seems as exciting as being Google's current search algorithm.
I think it's highly unlikely that Google will evolve into God---LOL.
Take the need for coding and decoding.
ReplyDeleteWhat is in a book like the Bible that makes some people accept it wholeheartedly, some others partially, and still others rejecting it?
To clarify this, take another book like Hitler's "Mein Kampf". What makes it acceptable to some people and not others whether now or 80 years ago?
In both cases, the writer encodes and the reader decodes. It doesn't end there. The reader can make a choice about the decoding, a choice that is chock full of consequences.
We talked about real evidence for other bridges to the human being earlier. Steve Jobs talks about faith, of believing, because we can connect the dots looking backward, when we try to understand the roads our lives has taken.
ReplyDeleteThis is an example of data coming via a bridge which influences a man to do all the things that someone like Steve Jobs has done.
With clear evidence of such bridges, and a limited understanding of such bridges and as a consequence the structure of the human being (if we only go by a biological description) how then does it become possible to download the unknown simply by developing better and better machines?
It's almost like saying, keep working on the plug and the socket and maybe one day we'll be able to get out all the photos in the phone through the charging cable.
Not until the charging cable and the power socket cease to be only that!
They must become something capable of handling more than just the battery on the phone, capable of responding to more than the "dead" status of the phone's battery which then causes charging to start.
They must be capable of handling data that comes via the network, bluetooth, wifi, data cables or put into the phone by the manufacturer.
This is very interesting. The new properties required by the power cable will be determined by properties priorly established by the manufacturer of the phone.
So if some other company decides to innovate and elevate the capabilities of the power cable, it must necessarily take into account all the features set by the manufacturer which requires a full awareness of what these features are.
Until all the f(unknowns) in the equation become known, attempting a transfer into machines, will necessarily involve a loss of data. It could be vital and critical data.
It could be something like reading the comic book version of "Avatar".
The bleak picture emerges.
Let us all consider our personal perspective in the desire or lack thereof to live on in an eternal databit environment. As Pat points out earlier, our drives our based on the economics of a desired outcome be it real or immaginary. When we don't have a goal or focal point for our lives--or even with one, we become the people attempting to get a picture from our phone's charging cord. That is kind of the whole point of this forum. Can we whip that cord hard enough to somehow bring out that photo data.
ReplyDeleteI think our percieved needs and desires for the future reflect much of what we lack in our lives right now.
As far as data transfer loss and coruption(it's real funny because I was just thinking of this today before reading Wrenj's input) If we are to store ourselves we would have to have some sort of redundancy of many layers and copies. Would this mean that each copy (being a full version of us) would in effect be another functionable copy of us--kind of like with cloning? Could we potentially have a thousand of us? I think this potential would need to be adressed and it would be very hard to figure out all of the angles.
Consider the technology I'm writing about is 35 years future distant. Recall technology 35 years ago. Cell phones didn't even exist. In fact, solid state mass produced communications devices were still bleeding edge and largely expensive. Vacuum tubes were still being sold at retail electronics stores and tube testers were commonplace at these same stores.
ReplyDeleteUnless Moore's Law crashes and burns sometime in the next 35 years, we have a fighting chance at seeing a shared evolutionary advancement with AI.
This advancement would have adequate headroom to account for as many f(x)'s as anyone would care to incorporate, likely in real time with biology.
This evolution will be with us, not in spite of us. I would also imagine that technology will be able to co-experience being "human" to gain a working understanding of it, as we gain a working understanding of "artificial" augmentation. Remember, this is EVOLUTION and as such, it's an infinite compilation of combinations. Nothing will remain exclusive.
The power cord analogy would fail as an evolutionary dead end. Of such I expect a great number. Of the countless bridges and directions, only a few will be "fit" and survive. Such is the nature of evolution.
"how then does it become possible to download the unknown simply by developing better and better machines?" …because the machines will be experiencing the unknown themselves. I suspect when the moment happens that bio and AI merge, it will be a subtle merging, and an awareness of the event after the fact.
"The bleak picture emerges.", similar words were spoken by audiophile adherents to the phonograph who now have repositories of digital optical media or the equivalent files on their hard drives. Downloading my consciousness into today's technology would be bleak to be sure but remember the 35 years future aspect.
I own an ICOM IC-701. It was bleeding edge technology in 1979. I sit that next to my Mac Pro to gain perspective. Both are/were taken very seriously by the groups that produced them. Extrapolating this side by side experience to 35 years distant makes me smile.
ReplyDelete1976-35=1941
ReplyDelete1941-35=1906
Kinda puts it into perspective.
Hope I'm still alive in 2046
LOL---whip the cord till the photos come out?
ReplyDeleteWhen I talk about the unknown, I refer to the dimensions that Chris refers to, for which there is still no material evidence today whatsoever.
If Chris is indeed right, and there is a life beyond death, then it has been going on right beneath our noses for as long as the human race has been.
Remember that going back and forth past that steel door is still not in our control, as it was from the beginning.
While Chris was having his experience, the rest of the people around went on as before totally unaware. No machine registered a blip. If it did, it certainly has not been repeated at will, which is the demonstration of our control over the issue.
This is the human being we're talking about: a human being who already seems perfectly capable of existing without matter. Energy, biology, physics, water, air all seem completely unnecessary. This is the unknown, a mystery which remains so up till now.
As for mysteries of a more material order, take the goings on in the Middle East, the financial meltdown, the recession none of which with all current computational capabilities were all totally unpredicted.
ReplyDeleteA very valid concept is the "black swan", the totally unforeseen event that can cause significant disruption to entire civilizations. These "black swans" need not be natural disasters.
Oops...error.
ReplyDelete"all totally unpredicted" should be read as "predicted"
Something is wrong...
ReplyDeleteKindly ignore the previous correction. Read as originally written.
LOL---I'm already running self-correcting algorithms.
Here's another thought:
ReplyDeleteIf human beings are already capable of existing totally independent of the known universe, think what we can do moving undetected in a world of machines.
With our current limitations we're already so unpredictable. I wish someone would write a good story of what would happen when we get rid of the limitations of matter entirely but remain capable of influencing things in the universe.
Well, gods seem to fit that category of being free of the limitations of matter and remain capable of influencing things in the universe but as yet, there is no proof for them. So, they either don't exist or we're already in some digital simulation and there's a non-interference policy between us and them. If the latter is the case then all we're doing and can ever do is power cord shaking. (bangs head against wall)
ReplyDeletePatrick says our drives are based on economics. I agree that some are. Not all.
ReplyDeleteViktor Frankl, the nazi concentration camp survivor, talks about the will to meaning in his book "Man's search for meaning." I have found this to be the most fitting and adequate explanation for motives.
Even Patrick's identification of economics as a motive would fit in here. Some people derive the meaning from personal benefit even to the exclusion of benefits to others or harm coming to others. This is their meaning, adopted consciously or otherwise. It is impoverished but it still is.
This also explains a sudden turn in the path of individual lives. Remember the story of Buddha's conversion. He came out of the palace he'd been born and raised in, and found a different world. After a period of intense interior battle, he choose the road he ended up in.
There are others before him and after him who've been born and brought up in luxury and opulence and come in contact with poverty and misery and remain totally unmoved.
This is the fascinating thing about human beings. We're not like animals who are driven by instincts. We can choose, always choose.
Sometimes this choice will come at great personal cost. Gandhi wasn't the first to be thrown out of a train in South Africa. He may not have been the first to attempt to do something about it. But he was unmistakably one who attempted to do something.
Truth is among the many possible motives that human beings can be influenced by, universal Truth that we reflected on here.
ReplyDeleteI came across a question this week. It was something like "If you had a chance to teach one and only one thing, what would it be?" My reply was "To be open to Truth, and to allow oneself to be changed by Truth."
I have found a resistance to Truth inside me and around me. To live facing the truth is not a very comfortable option especially, as Patrick pointed out , in a world of self-interest that is not bad of itself, but acquires clear moral coloration when it does not stop at the cost of harm to others.
There is one corollary of this development in computational capabilities...a lot more is being revealed about the structure of the human being.
ReplyDeleteThings that human beings do like knowing and choosing are being better understood simply because of the effort to replicate these in machines. Replication is not yet successful. But understanding of these human operations has been growing tremendously.
This is where I see the greatest benefits of technology. As we humans try more and more to surpass our limits, we better understand those limits. The payoff is a spate of innovations based on this new knowledge which improves the quality of human life and finds remarkable solutions for our most pressing challenges.
Imagine aiming to move faster than light. We'll end up with a lot more speed in our transportation needs.
This is what never ceases to provoke wonder in me: not that we are able to surpass our limits at will, but that we have been able to do so much and there seems to be no limits to how we convert challenges into opportunities.
Yes, cataloged under "backup wishes", the technology push towards digital immortality hopefully will provide a means of longevity much greater than we know now. Biblical writ suggests man's maximum age will be 120. Well, if technology buys me more time, my odds of achieving a "fantastic event" improve greatly. I age linearly. Technology improves exponentially. If I can gain even a single day, I will have exposed myself to much greater technology.
ReplyDeleteFuturists sites suggest aging "parity" where today, we might be able to take one month a year off, parity would mean reversing 12 months of aging per year. They suggest such things as reasonably happening in the next 50 or so years. Only one little problem with that. By the time such things can be available to me, how much of my original neurological network will remain intact? What will I be preserving? Will I/someone have to redesign what was lost due to aging? Will I still be me?
http://listverse.com/2007/10/28/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/
ReplyDeleteI found this inspiring.
Was pondering my huge cell bill and realized, notwithstanding obscene profits, it also affords them the capital to compete. This led me to wonder who are the competitors that will be motivated to engineer the technology I'm hoping for? I doubt the corporations that afford the necessary brain trusts are working towards that goal directly, but what in the consuming world is steering the boat in that direction? Is anyone monitoring such consumer trends?
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, let me stick my neck out and make a prediction of my own. Texting. I absolutely love it. So do a lot of other people... that drive. There is a huge need for a text-interface that still allows people to concentrate on driving. This is knocking on the neural interface door, hard. There is huge demand for this and therefore profits. I suspect some interesting evolution to happen soon.
I smoke. Everyone keeps telling me of the dangers. They tell me how each cigarette shortens my life span by a day.
ReplyDeleteI think I've found the perfect line:
Ain't gonna quit. Gonna live forever, zipping on a network all around the world--LOL
On a more serious note, evolution is a pretty widely accepted hypothesis for which the search for key missing pieces is still on.
ReplyDeleteRichard Feynman once defined science something like this: "First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it."
I fully agree. It accords with a classical definition of truth: veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus.
Roughly, it translates to: Truth is when reality and the mind are in conformity.
The reality out there, outside the mind, is always the reference point. When the mind conforms to this reality, then truth is said to exist.
So evolution remains a great hypothesis that is now taken as fact, and there's an attempt to explain everything else through the lens of evolution.
Patrick, what you say about businesses is very interesting. I shared the timeline site with a friend. We've been having a discussion on how economic enterprises survive.
ReplyDeleteI asked that with some of the technologies mentioned in the timeline, are businesses today preparing for such a future?
Ultimately we went into how an organization can actually survive. From experience few actually do.
This is where I found evolution to be a very interesting concept. It turns out that evolution is very useful in the understanding of the growth and development of enterprises, technology, societies, civilizations.
Evolution seems to be turning out to be a human-made concept best applied to human things.
Take political parties, that survive longer than business enterprises in any uninterrupted democracy. How do they do it? Because
- Generations come and go.
- Technologies come and go.
- Public interest issues come and go.
- Economic conditions come and go.
- Ideologies come and go.
We started discovering some remarkable things about what it may take for an economic enterprise to survive longer than current average lifespans. One word, evolution, with one unchanging goal: profitable growth.
I'm finally 75% repaired I'll do 1 more session with Microsoft tomorrow.
ReplyDeletehe problem I have with the "evolution" of technology is tha almost all aspects of advancement rely on having faster and faster yet smaller hardware. We are rapidly aproaching the limits of miniaturization in regards to integrated circuits. hese circuits operate at a molecular level of miniaturization. Likewise we are nearing limits of the materials used in frequency driven clocks for our integrated circuits. You can get an atom or electron to only go so fast in this atmosphere and with the certain crystal matrixes in use.
ReplyDeleteOnce we reach these limits there has to be some sort of stall in this unprecidented pace of evoluion and advancement.
We have already concieved ideas which exceed known manufacturing technology a this point. So how far can we(men) go as a species?
Sorry my "T" button has a bad contact.
ReplyDeleteThere's been talk of quantum computing as a solution to the atomic restriction problem.
ReplyDeleteI liked the quote from Bill Gates, “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.”. I can be quite happy with existing miniaturization with broader bandwidth. Imagine a 128 bit OS, or even a 512 bit system. Aren't there GPU's that are 512 bit?
Regardless what the limitations, there will always be some group trying to find a solution to it.
What is really driving all of this innovation? Is it greed? Desire to be a better person? The need for improvement in some way? Maybe it is purely for innovations sake. Maybe there really isn't a need for a 20 terabyte micro computer the size of a thumbnail opperating at 9000GHz right now.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that at this point innovation and the drive to keep up the pace of consant retooling and redesign of things that work perfectly fine has almost gotten(I don't care if it isn't a word) out of control.
Right now it seems as if people need a few years just to catch up with all of this innovation and invention. We all could really use a good amount of time to put on the brakes and take a look at what has been acomplished and to what benefit. I know there are probably thousands of pieces of new technology that I of any of us have ever heard of or seen. Much of this technology will be "obsolete" in the near future without ever having had a legitimate chance to be used or even seen by a micro-fraction of the world population.
I think It is really time to take a look around the world and ask ourselves how can I live in my comfy home with all of my toys and technology when there are millions of people that don't even have power in their town or home. I think it is time to direct our focus en masse to the rest of the world that is still living with technology from the 60's and 70's having no idea abou what all is going on in the rest of the world
The echnology gap is ever widening between the "pluged in" and the rest of the planet.
Is this disparity purely as a result of economics?
What is driving the priorities behind what we are creating and why? How much further advancement is really necessary before the rest of the world has a chance to catch up?
"Once we reach these limits there has to be some sort of stall in this unprecidented pace of evoluion and advancement.", this has been said at every level of discovery over the last 100 years or more. Each person had quite valid reasons to believe the end is near for advancement. Even Moore himself thought his "law" was coming to an end. We just keep coming up with ways around the impossible.
ReplyDeleteWe are now aproaching the limmits of our materials in many areas.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking allot obout this topic and I was wondering: aside form anti gravity technology, I'm hard pressed to think of anything that I saw in science fiction growing up that has not by now been made reality. I can only think of a handful of ideas that are still not within the realms of daily reality.
ReplyDeleteAntigravity tech.
Superconductivity at room temp
Cold fusion
Teleporting
Warp drive/ hyperspace speed of light drives
And of course full VR integration
Full immersion VR is coming soon relatively speaking. The rest I have no clue.
ReplyDeleteAs for what's driving it? The board of directors' fiduciary duty to the shareholders to supply growth and profit. For example, Intel has technology far ahead of what's available today but for the sake of market share and profitability, they supply it in economically profitable chunks, as well as what the software industry can support. What if they dumped 64 bit architecture on the public sector a decade ago? What if they dumped their bleeding edge technology on the market today and then had a long development time before the next series of marketable technology? What would happen to their workforce / brain-trust? To remain a solid, productive, marketable corporation, they need to control the rate of growth and innovation to maximize their mission statement to the shareholders. So evolution is controlled by economics.
Why do I persist in spending my time supporting technology instead of selling all that I have and donating it to charity and then living in a box under a bridge? Because I want to live forever and doing such things will be going in the wrong direction to achieve that aim. I'm sure en-masse the modern world will keep going as profitably as they can with little or no regard for the developing world. At least in this age of global communication, gross and blatant abuse of the developing world is more difficult for the modern world to get away with. But it's survival of the fittest in evolution. It's keep up or die. It's crass and ice cold, but true.
If we can achieve the "singularity" as spelled out in common understanding today, then evolutionarily speaking we stand a good chance at becoming utopian or distopian. I doubt the status quo will remain however. What will likely happen is a whole new strata of have and have not. The current separation of the modern and developing world will likely become smaller or eliminated and other modes of division will appear. This is all too large for us to predetermine with any level of certainty at this point. All we can know is if the singularity does happen, then the world is in for a change and the problems we face as a species will likewise be changed.
ReplyDeleteFor the first time in history man has become one of the major forces in the process of evolution--or so it seems. But is it really evolution of man or somthing else?
ReplyDeleteRecall the work of Leonardo da Vinci, as a painter, an engineer and an inventor. He was centuries ahead of his time.
ReplyDeleteWhat motivated his work?
I do believe that in some cases technology exists which the market might not be able to sustain and so is not released. In other cases other motives drive the non-release.
Since innovation is not the exclusive preserve of anyone, progress seems almost relentless.
There is always the need to evaluate progress in the context of good and evil. We human beings must judge ourselves, what we do and how we do it. All the hazards, you both point out are very real. We've seen how manipulation is currently going on.
ReplyDeleteI can hardly imagine a case, even if theoretically it became possible to provoke the transfer of consciousness to an electronic network, how people would not seek special features and properties.
It would be just like blog themes or phone apps. Some would be free at a basic level, but others would come at a price for the corresponding features.
The contest will never cease, and so the requirements of an adequate moral framework will never cease, if only to guarantee a just outcome. But as our history and experience shows, there's hardly agreement on a common moral framework, much less agreement on its application.
The desire for heaven, however, seems intrinsic to our structure as human beings, a universe free of evil. Yet we never quite seem to manage to build heaven on earth. History, though, is not in short supply of those who have promised such.
The realization of these promises apart from being an exercise in futility, have been nothing short of exercises in bloodletting.
Wrenj, I apologize but I forgot to address the smoking earlier; I smoked for 25 years. I loved it. I still love the smell. I quit last August 15th. I smoked well over a pack a day if not two. How did I do it? Chantix and electronic cigarettes. When you start Chantix, you can "cheat" as you need to but the drug really does remove your cravings, physiologically at least. This is where the electronic cigarettes are essential. You only "smoke" what you need to get over the craving. If you torch up a real cigarette, you would likely smoke it to the butt like I would. This saturates you with nicotine whereas the electronic one would not with only a few drags. Dude, if it worked with me, it will work with anyone. Just ask Chris.
ReplyDeleteThe benefits of innovation are not limited to places in the developed world.
ReplyDeleteIn India, domestic call rates on mobile phones have dropped to as low as 0.7 cents per minute. Compare that to domestic call rates in the US.
These rates have been achieved without the Indian government allowing full and unhindered IP telephony. Imagine what would happen to the rates, when this is allowed.
I could cite many such examples of great technology available at a fraction of the cost.
As for our predisposition towards distopian social nightmares, the "singularity" will offer an alternative. Remember my earlier post re: North Korea? Well, full immersion VR will be reality for people. Have's and have not's alike. However, they can have their magical gods and actually experience the miracles and such that are promised and have as yet remained undelivered.
ReplyDeleteThought....with such evolutionary advancement, we as a species may have evolved past the need for gods, heaven, and the traditional sources for overreaching comfort and order. But for those who still need such things, the experience will seem more real.
I would consider India part of the modern developed world though.
ReplyDeleteHow would disguises work if the transfer to electronic networks became possible?
ReplyDeleteWould it be a network that insisted on full transparency?
What would happen if some part of my algorithm got stolen?
What if some guy with a disorder pulled the plug on the part of the network I was roaming on?
Would we all have to go through some kind of verification and approval before being allowed to be uploaded?
Who would make the rules then?
What if I lost some vital part due to a malfunction during transfer?
A real problem in VR today is rendering cost. I can afford to pretty much have any pleasant and status offering object in VR but it's all for not if the server hosting the environment lags due to all my stuff. So the really cool people are minimalists to keep speeds up. Almost Buddism by necessity -lol
ReplyDeleteSuch concerns like those Wrenj do keep me up at night pondering.
ReplyDeleteI would surmise that an individual's consciousness would live on a dedicated self contained portable network. I envision something the size of a cell phone, that can be attached to an artificial body if you desire one. If that portable network gets run over by a truck in real life, then you're toast. However, I would imagine most people would live in a virtual world while their hardware is sequestered in a secure facility somewhere. Like underground on the moon perhaps? Then we would interact virtually. However true damage would be limited and psychological at worst.
ReplyDeleteLots of people balk at the idea of a virtual existence but what your mind can generate to fill in the gaps of today's technology is simply amazing. Imagine when technology leaves very little for your mind to engineer. Lots of people "live" in VR already to escape real life as often as they can. To them, current technology is able to set their minds to believing they're really there. And we're 35 years away from full immersion. Wow
And the older I get the more I resent my biological limitations. I feel like a helpless hostage adrift in a sinking ship. It seems arcane to be stuck in here.
ReplyDeleteRandom thought: our brain is a digital computer of finite size and capacity. It runs on software. Some people believe that software is a transdimensional static entity known as a spirit. This is up for evaluation but when we have artificially duplicated our own complexity, I can imagine evolution will dictate software similar if not identical to our own. IF this is not the case, then this may be considered as evidence of the transdimensional / supernatural aspect.
ReplyDeleteHaving said all that, my thought was simply this: We have a non-magical highly complex brain that we know is a digital computer running software. How freaking hard does this really have to be? Just saying....
More random thought... I wonder if we can gain some insight by observing how the brain (of any species) develops in vitro. What develops first? Why? Is this sequence necessary for natural software development? I'll bet we can learn quite a bit for our "cause" by watching how it's done in nature.
ReplyDeleteTo reflect on the anti-gravity and super-light velocity problems, we can't observe such phenomena in nature. We can only speculate mathematically. Well as far as digital immortality is concerned, we can observe this in nature. In fact, I could live forever right now if I could digitize my DNA to eliminate the analog losses within cell reproduction.
And I'd tweak a few things along the way. I could be a designer human within the seven year cellular replacement cycle.
ReplyDeleteMore thoughts: It would seem this evolution for us is something that needs to happen for our survival. As a species we're still increasing in number. Something's got to break when we max this planet out. So then what will it be? A massive culling through disease, famine, and war? Or do we ditch our biology and consume massively fewer resources respectively?
ReplyDeleteOne of these scenarios will happen.
Nicotine triggers a neural response. If you were digital you could still smoke. It would taste the same, feel the same, smell the same, and may even be addicting. But it wouldn't kill you, it would be free, and you could quit at any time.
ReplyDeleteSounds like liberation to me. I could blow past my caloric daily intake and never gain an ounce :-D
As a joke, I could make a "window licking" program as pleasureful as the most addictive drug. I can see it now, vast numbers of digital people spending their existence licking windows. So I'd guess one of your security protocols would be protecting the pleasure centers of your consciousness. For they can motivate you to do virtually anything. Some entity could enlist you to perform mundane tasks for a job and pay you (or enslave you) by controlling those pleasure inputs.
ReplyDeleteStarted a new post. Look for May 15, 2011
ReplyDelete