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These postposthumans can give birth to themselves, can vomit themselves, can consume and digest themselves...the feedback loops for which act as uteri for the young of some life-forms.
---------------
He is curled up inside his own uterus, causing an infinite feedback loop. His circulation, the feedbacking and the throbbing contradiction of curling up inside one's own uterus are all in synchronisation to one another.
http://www.hpluscommunity.com/photo/photo/show?id=2899471%3APhoto%3A8997
I like to envision that after several trillions of years worth of accelerating innovation, the constant of change itself will be broken out of. Yes, to break out of change is itself a change, just as if you broke out of infinity, you'd still be in infinity because infinity is infinite. But consider extreme postposthuman technology that will resolve contradictions, allow us to emerge from infinite strange loops and feedback, and to realise physically extreme illogic...to once be unable to break out of infinity because it is infinite, but to then actually do so; to once be unable to break out of the constant of change because doing so would still constitute as change, but to then actually do so.
I also like to envision that before any of that would happen, a (most likely) artificial universe would be created where (what we currently consider) extreme mathematical absurdities could actually exist, where, for instance:
1+1=2...and also 3,4,5 and everything else
2+2=4...and also 5,6,7 and everything else
Etc...
Where infinite mathematical problems have infinite solutions, as an example.
Speaker: Adam James Davis
Camera and recording: Adam Charles Summerfield
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: August 3, 2009
Alex Lightman Appointed Executive Director of Humanity+
Los Angeles, August 3, 2009 - The Board of Directors of Humanity+ is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Alex Lightman as its new Executive Director.
"Mr. Lightman brings to the job significant experience in the technology world and H+ is thrilled that he is taking the reins to help grow our organization," said Dr. James Hughes, Secretary, Humanity+.
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: August 3, 2009
Alex Lightman Appointed Executive Director of Humanity+
Los Angeles, August 3, 2009 - The Board of Directors of Humanity+ is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Alex Lightman as its new Executive Director.
"Mr. Lightman brings to the job significant experience in the technology world and H+ is thrilled that he is taking the reins to help grow our organization," said Dr. James Hughes, Secretary, Humanity+.
About Alex Lightman
Mr. Lightman is an author, serial entrepreneur, and futurist, who has made significant contributions to the adoption of IPv6, written and spoken on the future of technology since 1985 and has authored numerous articles and a book on technology and society. He is the author of the first book on 4G wireless broadband, Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet (John Wiley, 2002), which made predictions about the future of computers and communications that are consistent with the actual growth of Internet and mobile technologies. He has published over 130 articles, including six articles in H+ magazine in 2009, has spoken in over 40 countries, including at the United Nations space conference, at US embassies in Europe and Asia, and at hundreds of conferences.
He is currently CTO of FutureMax Group and CTO of the Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organization, and. His company, Charmed Technology, was a pioneer of wearable computers, and he holds patents in the fields of wearable/mobile/pervasive computing and related communications and software. He has sold wearable computers to military, industrial and academic users, deployed "Charmed Badges" at locations as diverse as a Navy ship and a CEO conference, and developed the first augmented reality for a live performance, with the UK tour of Duran Duran in 2001. He was the producer of Charmed Technology's "Brave New Unwired World" wireless technology fashion show, which has been performed over 100 times at venues in fifteen countries, including the US, Europe, Asia, Israel, and Australia. Mr. Lightman is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ('83), and attended graduate school at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
About Humanity+
Humanity+ is an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy sharper minds, healthier bodies, greater freedoms, and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well. Our website is: http://humanityplus.org/
Contact: Dr. James J. Hughes, Secretary, Humanity+
Phone: 860-297-2376 Fax: 860-297-4136
secretary@humanityplus.org
http://humanityplus.org/
Below is are some excerpts that Martine Rothblatt, a trangendered and dynamic entrepreneur, who among other things started Sirius Radio, gave at the Immortality Institute's Conference in January.
LEGAL RIGHTS OF CONSCIOUS COMPUTERS
or Why U R Transbeman 2?
“On Genes, Memes, Bemes & Conscious Things”
Martine Rothblatt - martine4 @ gmail.com
ImmInst.Org Life Extension Conference (Atlanta):
Introducing “Bemes” :
Bemes versus Memes
What is Beman BNA?
Introducing the Transbemans
Philosophical Differences between Transhumanism and Transbemanism
Psychology of Transbemanism
“Our godlike qualities rest upon and need our animal qualities. Our adulthood should not be only a renunciation of childhood, but an inclusion of its good values and a building upon it. Higher values are hierarchically integrated with lower values. Ultimately, dichotomizing pathologizes, and pathology dichotomizes.” Maslow, A., Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Ed., 192 (1999)
Transhumanists’ Catch-22: Positive Eugenics Not for Me
Philosophical Comparisons
More H+ & B+ Comparisons
Transhumanism Philosophy:
I just got off the phone with Reverand Tom. I'm very glad to have met such a brilliant and passionate man who deeply cares about where we are going. He has put forward a tremendous body of work that I believe finally addresses so many of our planetary problems head on. I have yet been unable to find serious argument with any part of his proposal. It is both visionary, and should be taken as such, but also a deeply thought-out and rigorous plan for making concrete and meaningful, positive change in the world The best part of Tom's ideas is he embraces ALL, and leaves no one out. His plan does not require some fundamental force in our society to change - whether it be good or evil, great or small. Rather Tom, like an Aikido master, lovingly colloborates with these forces for the benefit of all. Whether they be the super rich elite or the poorest child.
What Reverend Tom is proposing is nothing short of pure unbounded love fueled by hyper-rationality and spiritual gusto.
So what's next? I believe Tom is right. We are on the verge of a total breakdown of everything we know. All of our old systems our on the verge of collapse. Everything will break down. But not in a bad way. This breakdown will merely be a reshuffling of the deck, an economic renewal towards something greater - a new holistic system of planetary stewardship and radical accelerating transhumanist hyper economics into the cosmic frontier. It benefits everyone. And the only way this is going to happen is through macroscale engineering projects which the super-rich will decide is what they want to do next. Why? Because they will have to if they want to survive, and because it will be exciting for them. It will allow them to go to the next frontier. All the automation in the world is not going to be enough for the super-rich to bootstrap themselves to the stars. Not even nanotechnology is going to save them. They are going to need as many people as they can all participating in the greatest projects of our generation, of any generation. They will produce enormous wealth for those at the top, and more wealth for all us that we have never seen before. It's a win-win situation for all of us. To get a good idea of some of these starter macro-scale engineering projects, please Tom's articles, Collective Empowerment (pdf) and New Section XVI.
Please be nice to Tom. He is a super nice guy. Disagree, debate, argue, but please be nice. Tom is not crazy, only a brilliant, sensitive and caring man wishing to help, and I believe he is just the one to do it. Let's give him a chance.
I told Tom that his ideas are a few steps ahead of most people, and probably at least a step or two ahead of even the most astute Future Hi reader. What he has presented in these preliminary documents are first drafts, raw manifestos to get the ball rolling. Let's see where we can go next.
I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.
------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------
Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom
This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.
Religious Monotheism
|
...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
|
Paganism/Environmentalism
This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.
This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.
-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------
Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:
1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.
This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.
This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!
http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf
If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.
Sincerely,
Reverend Tom
Psymbiote
Adorned in titanium, latex, silicone, and electronic apparatus, isa/Psymbiote places herself in the eye of the storm: the conceptual terrain at the collision of bodies and machines, the mutation of her own identity through transformation of the body. Ultimately the project seeks to fully transform the artist into a seductively organic yet entirely unfamiliar hybrid organism, a human/machine chimera with fully integrated control systems. The costume is being animated with movement, sound, and light; activated by manual triggers, automatic body processes, and remote control. As her evolution progresses, Psymbiote appears in public spaces to stimulate dialogue regarding the future of technological enhancements to the human body. She has already been sighted at a number of universities, art shows, international conferences, and as host of the SIGGRAPH CyberFashion Show. The Psymbiote Project brings issues raised by the ongoing redefinition of our bodies into a public forum, highlighting some of the contemporary critical discourse surrounding cyborgs and all forms of human/technology integration.
The Archetype of the Shaman
Many years ago, I became increasingly fascinated with the archetype of the Shaman, the fearless explorer, the intrepid adventurer, testing the limits of body and mind in the quest for glimpses of the highest peaks and deepest jungles of the psychic landscape. Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and John Lilly became for me the heroes that set the standard for the essential and perennial human endeavor. I read of their experiences as those of an earlier age must have read of Lewis and Clark and Swen Hedin.
These men (all were men, odd that) became my heroes and my inspiration. I wanted to emulate them and in a small way I recapitulated some of their exploits, though never anything close to the experiences I read about so passionately. But I emulated them as best I could. The heroic nature of their adventures always inspired me, and does to this day. I wanted so much to be one of the fearless. One of those who could surf the big waves of the most extreme mental states, the Mavericks of the mind. To be one of those who could endure the most, soar to the highest heights and dive to the deepest depths. I always took more than those around me, more often, more combinations. I always wanted to be the alpha tripper.
I recall walking out of a Grateful Dead show one night (the Oakland Coliseum Earthquake benefit show 12/6/1989 to be precise) and walking behind a couple of veteran Deadheads who just blew me away. These guys were the real deal. When they walked by me I could see their eyes dilated like dinner plates. I could almost feel how far gone they were just being next to them. I could tell from their conversation that they were both veteran Deadheads, that this was what they did and who they were. I could tell from their demeanor, the way they moved, the look in their eyes and the expressions on their faces, that these guys were totally at home out in the billows where I was afraid to swim. They were Shamans, postmodern sadhus living on the fringes not just of society, but of reality.
I couldn’t get those guys out of my head for years. Whether they actually were who I thought they were doesn’t really matter, although chances are they weren’t. The thing was, to me they were archetypal, they represented a kind of ideal I had built for myself compared to which I was always lacking. My life was hopelessly mundane by comparison. I was struggling through school, recently married, working full time. I worried about spending too much money on concerts, I worried about getting home and to bed so I wouldn’t be too wiped out the next day, secretly hoping that the encore didn’t go on too long. I despaired at the prospect facing the reality of another work day, another school day, a cranky spouse, an irritating boss. All the burdens of householder consciousness lying like a blanket of fog between me and the Clear Light of the Void.
The Archetype of the Monk
At some point, I began to develop a different, I would say broader, perspective on the parable of surfing on the waves of the mind. The initial seed came from a very unlikely source. Having spent a truly inspirational night at the home of a friend, I was despairing the fading of the glow and my descent from the heavenly realms to the sub-ecstatic world. A long time acquaintance, then with a hundred dollar a day heroin habit that would soon reach several hundred a day and eventually claim his life, told me “you have to be able to deal with coming down.”
That line stuck with me. I came to understand this as a kind of quintessential heroic journey in and of itself. The art of the graceful fall from grace. The art of making a friend of despair, the openhearted resignation toward not being enough. The yoga of embracing loss, failure, not with hope or optimism, but with simple acceptance.
Presently, I realized that the essential skill of embracing planetside consciousness was not essentially psychedelic; what I had stumbled on was really a kind of deeply meaningful personal symbol for dukkha, for all the painful aspects of the entirety of life. I came to see the art of coming down as an embodiment of what in Buddhism was called “skillful means,” the art of living in a way that minimizes suffering to myself and others.
I constructed for myself another archetype, one that stood not so much in opposition to, but in contrast to, the Shaman: the archetype of the Monk. Where the Shaman has the skillful means to navigating the high energy realms, the Monk has the skillful means to navigate the planetside realms, the realms of dirty dishes, grocery shopping, parents, siblings, traffic, of life and eventual death. The Shaman is Prometheus, risking not just his life but his very soul, wresting fire from the Gods themselves and bringing to the village, only to suffer the agonies of having his liver eaten by vultures. The Monk is Sisyphus, struggling with the dreary toils of mundane existence, sighing as he turns to pace mindfully down the hill once more, perhaps taking in the view until the burden is shouldered once again.
Far too often, the Shaman scouts the same vistas again and again, but the work of personal transformation is never undertaken. The ecstacies glimpsed are never integrated, no lessons are learned, old patterns reassert themselves.
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I have known many who never seem to take anything of value from their nonordinary states other than temporary escape (not to be dismissed too lightly, admittedly). They return over and over to the well, but as the days pass, the memories fade and they are left as before, looking to the next trip for solace.
The Archetype of the Fool
As time passed I concluded that the Shaman opened doors but that the Monk walked through them. The Shaman left the earth, floated up into another dimension to view life from the above but after a few hours, it was the Monk who had to blaze the trail, making for the psychic landmarks the Shaman had spotted from the higher dimension. The work of the Shaman is terrifying, that the Monk, arduous. Where the core virtue of the Shaman is courage, the core virtue of the Monk is perseverance.
For those few with both courage and perserverence, a synthesis appears to be possible, but though many aspire to it, few realize it. This archetype finally coalesced for me when I began to study Tarot, revealing itself in the symbolism of the Fool. The Fool has a foot in each world. He maintains enough ego to negotiate the world of Maya, but the ego is his servant not his master. In contrast to the Monk, the Fool feels the burdens of the world lightly, fairly floating off the ground.
The true men of old
Knew no lust for life,
No dread of death.
Their entrance was without gladness,
Their exit, younger,
Without resistance.
Easy come, easy go.
They did not forget where from,
Nor ask where to,
Nor drive grimly forward
Fighting their way through life.
They took life as it came, gladly;
Took death as it came, without care;
And went away, yonder,
Yonder!
Minds free, thoughts gone
Brows clear, faces serene.
Where they cool? Only cool as autumn.
Where they hot? No hotter than spring.
All that came out of them
Came quiet, like the four seasons.
Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
The archetype of the Fool contains the path of integration of the ecstatic states into our lives generally. The Fool represents the summit, spied from afar by the Shaman, hard won by the Monk. The Great Work, the path of transformation, of integration, is great, and it is also work.
Transhumanism and The Way Forward
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes, one of the most ancient and revered foundational documents of the Western Mystery schools, offers the following insight: as above, so below. Only recently did it dawn on me that this is an ancient realization that reality is fractal. What appears at one level, reappears on other levels. We are each a Mandelbrot set, embedded within a larger Mandelbrot called culture, in a Mandelbrot Gaia.
As a transcendental and fundamentally mysterious future looms, many of us feel its pull. The prospect of an escape from the mundane is exhilarating, the temptation to put aside the mundane and abandon ourselves to the rapture compelling. I see intimations of this in the explosion of end times thinking around us. The prospect of walking away from our mundane lives, no strings attached, is an appealing one. There is a sense of freedom in the abandonment of the past.
BLAINE FAULKNER: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...
I want to be abducted by aliens.
JOSE CHUNG: Why? Whatever for?
BLAINE FAULKNER: I hate this town. I hate... people. I just want
to be taken away to someplace where I... I don't have to worry
about finding a job.
X-files episode 3.20, Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' (the one with Charles Nelson Riley)
The prospect of a transhuman “forward escape” feels exhilarating. But the escapist element feels uncomfortably familiar. I suspect that in our impending transhuman condition, we are entering into a condition not unlike that of the Shaman: higher energy, more extreme, unpredictable, magickal. But I suspect that the wisdom of Hermes will still apply: as above, so below. Our transhuman future may be much more akin to our present situation than we care to realize - because we will be there, we take ourselves with us. Where we are, there also is dukkha. The work of the Monk must continue if our transhumanist future is to realize its promise. The transhuman singularity evokes the cliff that the Fool appears poised to walk right off. If we are to avoid a brilliant plunge into the abyss, our humanity must not be abandoned.
There are only 2 days left (March 1st) to get tickets at the low price of $225. Click here to order. Both LVX, Mark Pesce (who is presenting) and myself (Paul) are all going to be there. For those of you coming, please contact me and we can all arrange to meet. Here are the details:
MIND STATES VI
MAY 27-29, 2005
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
San Francisco, CA
Over 30 speakers presenting on the theme of "technology & transcendence."
Topics include the latest psychedelic research, transcranial magnetic
stimulation, virtual reality, sensory substitution, techno-biological
enhancement, visionary art, electronic trance-dance, video game
environments, Reflections and Inspirations: The 50-Year Anniversary of R. Gordon Wasson's Psilocybe Discovery, skeptical consciousness studies, harm
reduction, plus vendor tables, book signings, and more.
Featuring Presentations From:
Paul Back-Y-Rita, Markus Berger, Piers Bizony, Susa N Blackmore, Vibrata Chromodoris, Mike Crowley, Delvin, Sijay, Naasko, Isis Indriya, Lynzee Dava Lynx, Rick Doblin, Frank Echenhofer, Robert Forman>, Charles S Grob, Charles Hayes, Julie Holland, Clark Heinrich, Sandra Karpetas, Ramez Naam, Mark Pesce, Durk Pearson (tentative), Tom Reidlinger, Katie Salen, Sandy Shaw (tentative), Michael Shermer, Allan Snyder, Paul Stamets, Donna Torres, Sylvia Thyssen, Jim Woodring,
and others TBA
THREE FULL DAYS
Featuring presentations on topics such as:
• visionary art
• brain fingerprinting
• sensory substitution
• electronic trance-dance
• video game environments
• cutting-edge science as art
• current psychedelic research
• techno-biological enhancement
• transcranial magnetic stimulation
• skeptical consciousness studies
• EEG-mapping of altered states
• Reflections and Inspirations
• harm reduction
• virtual reality and more
After Saturdays presentations there will be a late-nite benefit party for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors featuring a presentation by Alex Grey. Dance, music and more.
Discounted tickets currently available.
Buy now for best price!
Our past two conferences have sold out in advance.
$225 until March 1, 2005
$250 until May 15, 2005
$275 until the event
$300 at door.
Click below to buy with a credit card.
Or send a check or money order made out to “Mind States” to:
Mind States
POB 19820
Sacramento, CA 95819
JOIN OUR MAILING LIST!
Receive details about Mind States VI as they become available. This infrequent e-mail list generally sends out notices no more than once a month, and it will also keep you up-to-date about other similar events. To join, send an e-mail that says “JOIN” in the subject header to:
The following is a transcript of comedian George Carlin's(my all-time favorite comedian), poem/rap/cool-as-shit thingy that he performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on 11/15. It is impressive to read, and I wish I could post the video. Keep in mind, Carlin read this at an almost breakneck pace.
"I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive.
Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!
I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers.
I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail.
But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant.
I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn.
I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity.
I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!"
~George Carlin, a comedic genius and poet extraodinaire
Is this our future?
or this?
or something else altogether different?
Peak Oil is getting more and more attention these days. Most people either think that Peak Oil is decades away so we have nothing to worry about, or it is now upon us, or soon will be, and that society as we know it will collapse. Most of the latter think progress will not continue and we will not be able to transition to an alternative energy economy. They say most people, at least in the developed world, will die and those that are left will be living like the Amish; making do with what scraps they can find (Think The Postman). Do you agree, disagree? Why?
Some people say that we must transition to a hydrogen economy. Our pals over at World Changing, just posted an overview of the hydrogen economy, with some good links. I have become more skeptical of the hydrogen economy, in light of some of its proponents saying we may have to depend on centralized nuclear power to make it feasible. For me, that is two strikes against it - nuclear (with all of its waste), and centralized (controlled by elites). My opinion is that the more decentralized and ecologically sustainable our energy infrastructure is, the more democratic, and politically and environmentally stable our world would be. I'm hoping we can transition to an alternative energy infrastructure before it's too late.
Is it too late for a Design Science Revolution?
Do you think that we will transition past Peak Oil into a transhumanist future? How? Or is the future going to look like the Amish in rural Pennsylvania? Do you think that this whole question is the wrong question? Is Peak Oil a myth?
My main reason for starting this open forum is to hear from people who can provide a third point of view - one that acknowledges the peak oil problem, while providing a way out that does not consist of going back 200 years and living like the Amish.
Let the conversation begin.
Message from Galactic Coincidence Control Office
Tune in, Turn On, Blast Off!
We are timespace vehicles with probability drives.
The probability fields in which we exist in and perceive may be nothing more than arbitrary creations of higher intelligence. Probabilities only expanding as fast as we are ready to navigate them.. As we begin communicating with higher intelligence we can begin to reprogram more of our own probability fields, creating our own synchronicities, luck and destiny. Those who figure this out will take us to the stars and beyond.
As we begin to reprogram and metaprogram our probabilistic realities we can accept only what we want to and reprogram the rest - transforming ourselves into higher intelligence.
Everything that exists in "our current universe", our consciousness has chosen out of the infinite possibilities available. Keep in mind there may be other intelligence's (even terrestrial) who have programmed you and "your universe" This may even include what you perceive as life, gravity, matter, time, space... Consider the possibility that these phenomena our probabilistic realities you have been programmed to operate in, purely arbitrary and nothing more.
Other entities almost certainly conceive their realities in terms of logical models of which we have the least intimation. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps "they" are already here. If the cosmobiological continuities which we seek are already "known", perhaps are controlled by... someone... something... some hyper-cybernetic energy structure - some cosmic information warp.
Seeding space with our phallic vehicles, we ourselves perhaps have already been seeded, are already embryonically becoming that creature who will enter the labial stargate in apotheosis to conceive yet another being.
We are forcing ourselves continually to mutate and reprogram our conceptions of the cosmos - in spite of psychocultural forces, we are creating a radically in-process, holistic open-system cosmology.
Read history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and religion along with mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Create your own mythology or religion. Make it historic scientific in foundation and science fiction fantasy in style. Sign on your best friend for the journey (the buddy system is a safety net).
The details of your shamanistic starship are up to you. Think for yourself and do it everyday. Strive for comprehensiveness - specialization is for insects. Each shaman must find hir own way. With practice, patience and endurance you will end up with a shamanistic starship capable of reliably taking you to worlds of beauty and religious depth that have only been available so far to humanity's great geniuses, artists and mystics. The possible destinations of your starship are infinite!
Welcome to the neopaleolithic where we poor monkeys get back to the unfinished business of re-creating our selves and going to the stars.
Predictable improvements in lithographic methods foretell continued increases in computer processing power. Economic growth and engineering evolution continue to increase the size of objects which can be manufactured and power that can be controlled by humans. Neuroscience is gradually disecting the components and functions of the structures in the brain. Advances in computer science and programming methodologies are increasingly able to emulate aspects of human intelligence. Continued progress in these areas leads to a convergence which results in megascale superintelligent thought machines. These machines, refered to as Matrioshka Brains, consume the entire power output of stars (~1026 W), consume all of the useful construction material of a solar system (~1026 kg), have thought capacities limited by the physics of the universe and are are essentially immortal.
A common practice encountered in literature discussing the search for extraterrestrial life is the perspective of assuming and applying human characteristics and interests to alien species. Authors limit themselves by assuming the technologies available to aliens are substantially similar or only somewhat greater than those we currently possess. These mistakes bias their conclusions, preventing us from recognizing signs of alien intelligence when we see it. They also misdirect our efforts in searching for such intelligence. We should start with the laws on which our particular universe operates and the limits they impose on us. Projections should be made to determine the rate at which intelligent civilizations, such as ours, approach the limits imposed by these laws. Using these time horizons, laws and limits, we may be better able to construct an image of what alien intelligence may be like and how we ourselves may evolve.
To read the rest of the article by Robert Bradbury click here.
By Michael Anissimov from original article at Accelerating Future.
Step 1: Seeking Peak Experiences
Ever have a moment in your life that was just so great that you felt like jumping for joy, or crying in happiness? Many claim that these are the moments that make life worth living. The moment you finish writing a book, receiving a promotion, or sharing an intimate moment with someone special. How many "typical" days would you give for a single moment like that? Some might say 1, others 10, others even 100. Think about that - in a usual day, we're conscious for around 14 hours. Let's be conservative and suggest that the average John Doe would trade 5 typical days in exchange for a peak experience that lasts 5 minutes. The time ratio is about 1000:1, but many would still prefer the peak experience over the same old stuff.
This would imply that most people value life not only for the length of time they experience, but for the special moments that, as I mentioned earlier, "make life worth living". As the stereotypical quote goes, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Ethicists sometimes quantify such satisfaction as "utility" for the sake of thought experiments; we might say that each 5 minute peak experience is worth a thousand utility points, or "utiles". Correspondingly, each 5 days of typical activity would also count as roughly a thousand utiles, because one would trade one for the other. Although it may makesome of us uncomfortable to quantify utility, our brain is unconsciously performing computations accessing the potential utility of choices all the time,and the model is incredibly useful in the psychology of human decision makingand the field of ethics.
Following is an example of a typical human's lifelong utility trajectory. It plots utile-moments (u) against time (t). Let's say that the maximum u value reached is around 200 utiles/minute, or 1000 utiles for the 5 minute peak experience described above. For the sake of simplicitly, let's assume about 100 5-minute peak experiences per lifetime, and assume no other such experiences. Since peak experiences are so fun to have, much of the activity on "typical" days probably entails setting the groundwork for these experiences to happen; ensuring that one does not starve and so on.
The curve rises as the agent has a series of interesting new experiences, plateaus throughout most of adulthood, and subtly falls off in later years, until death is finally reached. It punctuates through peaks and valleys. Some might strongly associate utility with wealth or frequency of sexual activity, others might not.
Total utility: around 6,000,000 utiles, if we figure a lifespan of 80.
Step 2: Avoiding Premature Death
In life there is sometimes the danger of death. Death implies an immediate dropoff to the utility curve, a profoundly negative event. That's why people say stuff like "I'm too young to die!", or "I can't stop fighting, I have so much to live for". Humans despise death, because death is almost always a bad thing morally. People are willing to go out of their way to avoid it, and rightly so.
Let's introduce another aspect into the model. Say event X occuring at the
20-year mark has a probability 10% of eliminating all future experiences, which adds up to a risk of 4,000,000 utiles. In emotional terms, this would translate into arguments like those quoted above. There are some things that people would be willing to sacrifice those future experiences for. Just not too many of them. Death is a horrible thing if it stands in the way of living a fulfilling life. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to take actions to avoid event X if at all possible. Actions and thoughts leading to the avoidance of X have high utility; there are desirable in the same way that setting the groundwork for the occurrence of a peak experience is desirable. That's why we are so grateful when someone saves our life, and why we never drive under the influence after that one nearly fatal car accident.
The two possible trajectories after the decision instance are represented by red and blue lines. If we die, experienced utility drops to zero immediately. If we survive, it's business as usual. The purple line represents the curve before it splits.
Total utility of blue trajectory: same as above, around 6,000,000
utiles.
Total utility of red trajectory: around 2,000,000 utiles. Ouch!
I'm sure you can imagine the utility trajectories for events such as
rehabilitating illness, serious injury, and so on. These things really suck, so
people devote a lot of effort to avoiding them, which is clearly a good thing.
Step 3: Life Extension
It has been shown scientifically that regular cigarette smoking can lead to a shorter life, either due to an increased probability of contracting lung cancer or for some other reason. It has also been shown that good nutrition, good genes, or regular exercise all contribute to longer lifespan. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the average human lifespan was around 20, today it's four times longer; 80. Isn't that cool?
We're able to have a lot more interesting experiences per typical human life because our average lifespan has increased so greatly. This leads us to the notion that extending one's lifespan may be a worthy focus, a convenient path to increasing one's total experienced utility. We don't appreciate how lucky we are to live 80 years rather than a mere 20. Our entire culture has molded to the longer lifespans; it's now considered normal to live such long lives, so our default frame of reference tends to settle there. We should realize how spoiled we are relative to our ancestors, but also how transient and shallow our lives are from the perspective of a person with much longer life or more fulfilling experiences.
Say we want to add 5 years on to the end of our life by quitting cigarettes. This would imply that we value long life more than the short-term pleasure of a nicotine buzz. We may consider the added experiences and learning we could have as a result of this wise decision. We will have displayed the maturity to choose long-term benefits over short-term ones; some people might call this wisdom. I'm sure you can visualize the various utility trajectories and the desirability of choosing between them, but here is a picture anyway:
Here's where I start talking about potential sources of utility you might not
have heard of before.
Say that I have a few friends who offer to preserve the physical structure of my body in a deep freeze as soon as possible after my brain activity stops, and keep it that way until medical science advances to the point of being able to revive me safely. Let's say your friends happen to be employees of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they've been doing these cryonic suspensions for years. Their services are relatively cheap - life insurance pays for the suspension as long as you pay the bills while you are alive.
There are a series of risks - the cryonics company could go out of business, nuclear war might occur, your brain decay might be too severe to reverse, and so on. But there is potentially an immense benefit. If a civilization has the technology and desire to revive a freshly preserved frozen body, then this same civilization probably has a great degree of control over biological processes in general. Aging occurs in humans because ordinary biological processes produce byproducts that the body fails to remove completely. So they build up in the body, causing decay. Keep in mind that most byproducts are removed, only a small percentage of the total remains. But that is enough to cause aging. Stopping aging is a matter of amplifying the human ability to self-regenerate - that is all. There is no mysterious mechanism that forces all organisms to perish at a certain age in order to comply with some Cosmic Order. Ensure that the byproducts of our biology are contained and removed, or not produced in the first place, and you have cured aging.
So we are faced with the decision posed to us by our friends, "would you like to sign up for cryonics, or not?" Let's say we're being extremely conservative, and only estimate the likelihood of a successful future revival at 0.1%. Let's say furthermore that our estimate of successful elimination of aging after the initial revival is only 10%, remaining conservative. But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?
Character: Washu
Occupation: mad scientist
Age: over 10,000
Conclusion: 10,000 years is not so bad. In the future, it will be normal. The main challenge is aging.
So, what kind of utility function might a successful cryonics patient have?
Maybe something like that shown below. The curve dips down to zero when the patient is frozen solid, and quickly jumps back up after revival. (The squiggy line on the time axis implies that a ten thousand years passes during that time.)
Total utility of complete trajectory: a whopping 750 million! Much
more impressive than a mere 6 million.
From the perspective of the pre-cryonics human being, experiencing the huge 10,000-year future lifespan is not certain. As we said; the estimation of successful revival is only 0.1%, and the estimation of an aging cure is 10%. Combine these, and we get an aggregated probability estimate of 0.01% that the whole thing will work at all. So we divide the expected utility of the outcome, 744 million utiles, by our probability estimate, 0.01%. The result is 74,400 utiles only. But what if paying our life insurance isn't that big of a dea to us, and the opportunity cost of the lost money only works out to 10,000 utiles or so? In that case, it would make sense to buy life insurance and sign up for cryonics - the expected utility exceeds the projected cost!
If the scenario matches that described above:
Total utility of "yes" answer: 6,074,000 utiles.
Total utility of "no" answer: 5,990,000 utiles.
Many people have made that decision. They tend to be well educated, successful, scientifically literate, and intelligent. Here is a short list by Ralph Merkle, plus a longer study of attitudes toward cryonics by W. Scott Badger. If our estimate of the probability of success goes up from 0.1%, the utility trajectories diverge even farther, and saying "yes" to cryonics seems to be an extremely compelling choice. The prospect of cryonics can contain a massive amount of expected positive utility.
Step 4: Extending Life for Everyone, Not Just Yourself
Stuff like cryonic suspension, regular exercise, good health, and so on, only apply to you. Other people don't benefit from these practices. Some of us care about humanity as a whole rather than just ourselves, our nation, or our clique, so we devote effort to technologies with the potential to grant more life to wide numbers of people. For example, respected Cambridge biogerontologist and co-founder of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, Aubrey de Grey, would like to extend the healthy human lifespan an order of magnitude or more beyond its current limits within the next twenty to fourty years. Yes, this is a serious strategy for workable anti-aging. He explains fully on his website, please feel free to read it thoroughly. From his proposed Institute outline, de Grey seems to be suggesting that a cure for human aging may come with a price tag of only $10-100m. Not so bad for the benefits, huh?
Let's say that you continue experiencing 1,000 utiles per 5 days of normal living, but also experience an additional 1 utile per 5 days for every 1,000 people whose lives are extended when they would have otherwise been snuffed out at the arbitrary age of 80 or whatever. "Added years" that people only get to experience as a result of this extreme life extension. If you feel that the success of de Grey's Institute will lead to an anti-aging therapy available to millions within the first decade of its release and billions within the third with a probability of, say, 25%, then contributing to this effort would be well worth the time and money. Since you care about each individual person that gets to experience the benefits of added life, it means a lot to you to raise the probability that the necessary anti-aging technology is widely available before they fall to the injustices of aging and premature death.
On his website, Aubrey mentions lifespans that exceed 5000 years. So, if the Institute is successful, then let's assume that translates into around five million people with five-millenia lifespans shortly after the technology is invented, around five hundred million people with lifespans of that length a decade after, and five billion people two decades after. Considering the fast global adoption of techologies such as the Internet and cell phones, this distribution pattern seems extremely conservative. People would surely be willing to focus on buying a drug that extends one's lifespan to 5000 healthy years or more. Possibly it could be a one-time thing, or "booster shots" might be required every few decades for negligible cost.
So, you find yourself with a million dollars. You can either buy a mansion or contribute the money to aging research. Your assumptons are roughly in line with those outlined above; you have examined Aubrey de Grey's arguments in detail and regard them as valid. The lives of other human beings are important to you and you feel satisfaction when their lives are extended. You want to compute the expected utility of both outcomes; how does the math work out?
So, the resulting utility graph is a bit more complicated:
Total expected utility of donation: massive; billions of utiles or more.
Total expected utility of a mansion: not nearly as much.
Utility goes up more and more as additional lives are saved. This graph assumes that one considers the lives of all those living after his or her life to be meaningless. In real life, people often feel otherwise. The fuzziness of to the right side of the graph represents our uncertainty about the long-term consequences - 5,000 years may turn out to be a ridiculously low estimate, and our real lifespans may lie in the realm of the millions or even billions - who knows! If there are no huge cosmic disasters, no war, and you can repair yourself or back up your memories at a whim, who's to say that your lifespan won't be as long as that of the universe?
You'll also notice that the utility axis has been expanded in the upward direction. That's because contributing to the extended life of millions or billions of people is (presumably) a bigger deal than only extending your own life. Engineering the human brain to better experience pleasure may be another may to increase total utility, or perhaps through enhancing our intelligence, empathy, creativity, and so on. These speculations are the province of transhumanism. Feel free to read up on the topic if you're interested in learning more. See also the question on our FAQ, "wouldn't it be boring to live forever in the perfect world?"
Step 5: The Greatest Threat to Life - Existential Risk
The value of contributing to Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging project assumes that there continues to be a world around for people's lives to be extended. But if we nuke ourselves out of existence in 2010, then what? The probability of human extinction is the gateway function through which all efforts toward life extension must inevitably pass, including cryonics, biogerontology, and nanomedicine. They are all useless if we blow ourselves up. At this point one observes that there are many working toward life extension, but few focused on explicitly preventing terminal global disaster. Such huge risks sound like fairy tales rather than real threats - because we have never seen them happen before, we underestimate the probability of their occurrence. An existential disaster has not yet occurred on this planet.
The risks worth worrying about are not pollution, asteroid impact, or alien invasion - the ones you see dramaticized in movies - these events are all either very gradual or improbable. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns us of existential risks, "...where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Bostrom continues, "Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the “dark ages”, even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory." The four main risks we know about so far are summarized by the following, in ascending order of probability and severity over the course of the next 30 years:
Biological. More specifically, a genetically engineered supervirus. Bostrom writes, "With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality." There are several factors necessary for a virus to be a risk. The first is the presence of biologists with the knowledge necessary to genetically engineer a new virus of any sort. The second is access to the expensive machinery required for synthesis. Third is specific knowledge of viral genetic engineering. Fourth is a weaponization strategy and a delivery mechanism. These are nontrivial barriers, thankfully.
Nuclear. A traditional nuclear war could still break out, although it would be unlikely to result in our ultimate demise, it could drastically curtail our potential and set us back thousands or even millions of years technologically and ethically. Bostrom mentions that the US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Miniaturization technology, along with improve manufacturing technologies, could make it possible to mass produce nuclear weapons for easy delivery should an escalating arms race lead to that. As rogue nations begin to acquire the technology for nuclear strikes, powerful nations will feel increasingly edgy.
Nanotechnological. The Transhumanist FAQ reads, "Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological machinery. "Because nanomachines could be self-replicating or at least auto-productive, the technology and its products could proliferate very rapidly. Because nanotechnology could theoretically be used to create any chemically stable object, the potential for abuse is massive. Nanotechnology could be used to manufacture large weapons or other oppressive apparatus in mere hours; the only limitations are raw materials, management, software, and heat dissipation."
Human-indifferent superintelligence. In the near future, humanity will gain the technological capability to create forms of intelligence radically different than our own. Artificial Intelligences could be implemented on superfast transistors instead of slow biological neurons, and eventually gain the intellectual ability to fabricate new hardware and reprogram their source code. Such an intelligence could engage in "recursive self-improvement" - improving its own intelligence, then directing that intelligence towards further intelligence improvements. Such a process could lead far beyond our current level of intelligence in a relatively short time. We would be helpless to fight against such an intelligence if it did not value our continuation.
So let's say I have another million dollars to spend. My last million dollars went to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse Prize, for a grand total of billions of expected utiles. But wait - I forgot to factor in the probability that humanity will be destroyed before the positive effects of life extension are borne out. Even if my estimated probability of existential risk is very low, it is still rational to focus on addressing the risk because my whole enterprise would be ruined if disaster is not averted. If we value the prospect of all the future lives that could be enjoyed if we pass beyond the threshold of risk - possibly quadrillions or more, if we expand into the cosmos, then we will deeply value minimizing the probability of existential risk above all other considerations.
If my million dollars can avert the chance of existential disaster by, say, 0.0001%, then the expected utility of this action relative to the expected utility of life extension advocacy is shocking. That's 0.0001% of the utility of quadrillions or more humans, transhumans, and posthumans leading fulfilling lives. I'll spare the reader from working out the math and utility curves - I'm sure you can imagine them. So, why is it that people tend to devote more resources to life extension than risk prevention? The follow includes my guesses, feel free to tell
me if you disagree:
Those are my guesses. Immortalists with objections are free to send in their arguments, and I will post them here if they are especially strong. As far as I can tell however, the predicted utility of lowering the likelihood of existential risk outclasses any life extension effort I can imagine.
I cannot emphasize this enough. If a existential disaster occurs, not only will the possibilities of extreme life extension, sophisticated nanotechnology, intelligence enhancement, and space expansion never bear fruit, but everyone will be dead, never to come back. This would be awful. Because the we have so much to lose, existential risk is worth worrying about even if our estimated probability of occurrence is extremely low.
It is not the funding of life extension research projects that immortalists should be focusing on. It should be projects that decrease the risk of existential risk. By default, once the probability of existential risk is minimized, life extension technologies will be developed and applied. There are powerful economic and social imperatives in that direction, but few towards risk management. Existential risk creates a "loafer problem" - we always expect someone else to do it. I assert that this is a dangerous strategy and should be discarded in favor of making prevention of such risks a central focus.
Organizations explicitly working to prevent existential risk:
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Advanced nanotechnology can build machines that are thousands of times more powerful—and hundreds of times cheaper—than today's devices. The humanitarian potential is enormous; so is the potential for misuse. The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. An important organization doing genuinely valuable, positive work.
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a nonprofit corporation dedicated solely to the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence. The Singularity Institute sees no reason why we won't be able to eventually build such intelligences - it basically burns down to an engineering problem. If the first greater-than-human intelligence were a benevolent one, it could use its intelligence to further improve its own intelligence, the intelligence of human beings, and assist others in the pursuit of humanitarian causes.
Thank you for your attention!
Michael Anissimov
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends has a new post called Future of Computation Is Finite which discusses the conclusions made by a couple of scientists. I disagree with their conclusions. I think the more likely scenario is there are ultimately no limits to computation at all. But first, here is an excerpt:
According to PhysicsWeb, two cosmologists from Case Western Reserve University have shown that the acceleration of the expansion of our universe leads to physical limits on the total amount of information that can be stored and processed in the future. They also determined a time limit for Moore's law which will still be valid for the next 600 years. Finally, they calculated that the total number of computer bits that could be processed in the future will not exceed the 10120 range. In a previous story, "Universe is a computer," another physicist estimated that the number of calculations the Universe would have performed since the Big Bang -- if it was a computer -- and also came with a 10120 number. I'm not sure if both studies are speaking about the same exact things. But if they are, does this mean that we are exactly at the midlife point of our Universe?
The acceleration of the expansion of the universe places limits on future developments in technology according to two US cosmologists. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University have shown that the acceleration could put a fundamental limit on the total amout of information that can be stored and processed in the future. They also calculate that Moore's Law will remain valid for no more than 600 years -- although workers in the semiconductor industry are more pessimistic and think that the famous law will break down in the next decade or two.
They also found other physical limitations.
The duo calculated that the total number of computer bits that could be processed in the future would be less than 1.35120. This means that the effective information available to any observer within the event horizon of an expanding universe will be significantly less than the total so-called Hawking-Beckenstein entropy -- the entropy that is associated with a black hole -- in the universe. Many cosmologists predict that an accelerating universe will ultimately contain nothing but black holes, which will then eventually disappear themselves.
Right or wrong, the physicists seem to enjoy their work.
"It is remarkable that results from cosmology can provide such definite limits on the nature of technology," Krauss told PhysicsWeb. "In addition, it is also remarkable that simple laws of physics put such robust constraints on life, and technology, even when we don't know what that technology will be like."
For more information, the research paper has been published by ArXiv in its astrophysics section under the name "Universal Limits on Computation" on April 26, 2004. Here are the links to the abstract and to the full text (PDF format, 3 pages, 89 KB).
I disagree with these conclusions, and think they are made in part because of a confusion of semantics. For example, as our knoweldge of cosmology increases, we have had to continually revise what we mean when we say universe. The original definition of this word implied everything that is. Now it's quite common for cosmologists to refer to our universe as one among an infinite number of possibilities. Tegmark in last years SciAm introduced to the general public his "ensemble theory" which postulates an infinite number of other universe, not just an infinite number similar to ours but an infinite number of dissimilar universes. Since we are dealing with infinite sets of infinity, we are actually discussing a transinfinite set of universes of every "mathematical" possibility.
So when these scientist above discuss Universal computation, they aren't discussing something truly universal in light of the latest cosmological models. A more accurate way of articulating it might be to say somthing like, "These are the limits of computation as far as we know in our local finite bounded universe."
As I have postulated many times before, all of these predictions about the limits of computation are being devised by 3lb mind-brains on a small rock around an ordinary star. Given sufficient time and intelligence, all such perceived limits will evaporate in the presence of greater intelligence.
For more information on that idea, please read:
Sans-Celing Hypothesis
Apothesosis
Reality 3.0: Hypermediation & Paradise Engineering
By Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
- J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known"
Some philosophers have asserted that "altruism" does not truly exist, that kind people only help others because they enjoy doing it, so therefore they are ultimately doing it only for themselves. Others, such as myself, argue that this isn't how altruism should be interpreted; that having a decision process is not the same as a being having a self-centered decision process. This is called the "hedonism debate" and it has probably been argued since prehistoric times.
Gandhi got what he wanted, that is, helping others. The fact that he was working towards what he personally wanted does not mean that we should regard him as selfish. Thought experiment: should a being whose decision process approximated a democratic consensus be considered "selfish"? I'm talking about a being whose decisions are actually made based on the consensus vote of some group, not because the group is telling the being how to behave, but because the being is built to approximate democratic opinions. It has brainware that just does that. The simplest possible answer (think Occam's razor) to the question of "how is this creature behaving?" is not "selfishly, because it's brain is just channeling its own volitional urges", but "democratically, because this being was specifically created to approximate democratic actions". You can't look at an axe used to chop down trees every day and say "this axe is made out of wood and metal, and the use of metal and wood I'm most familiar with is pans and plates, so this axe must be used for cooking and eating". I mean, you can, but it's silly.
In recent times, the hedonism debate is being put in a new light. This comes from two factors. First is the potential for building new minds from scratch - AIs or new bio-beings, doesn't matter. Just as some god could theoretically have created the entire world a mere five minutes ago, simply implanting us with all our memories, some advanced alien race could have done the same, building us up, cell by cell, memories included. One day humanity will have the ability to create bodies and minds from raw materials. The second factor is the eventual possibility of the creation of minds that are smarter than humans, which does not seem to be avoidable in the long run. There is no law that states an intelligence can't build another intelligence smarter than itself, as long as it knows something about the fundamental principles underlying intelligence. Smarter-than-human intelligence could further upgrade itself and create still-smarter intelligence, opening up the possibility for a massive intelligence explosion. It could start with an "AI" (I use the quotes because the way that "AI" is always portrayed in fiction is laughably unrealistic) or with a human being that was cybernetically or neurologically enhanced.
These two new variables frame the hedonism debate in a whole new way. If high altruists really can't exist, then a smarter-than-human intelligence, who could turn its intelligence towards fooling humans or developing super-advanced technology, could easily murder all the humans on Earth; by accident, as part of a larger plan, or simply on a whim. Please do not visualize a noble rebel group of humans fighting back against a transhuman intelligence, a la The Matrix. In the real world, the AIs never would have needed humans as a power source to begin with. Even if they did, they could easily create the system in such a way that escape was totally, completely impossible. Even if that were not possible, any escapees could be crushed practically instantaneously; transhumans will be able to think and move at rates billions or trillions of times faster than us slow biological humans. Our bodies and minds move at a crawl in comparison to what is physically possible, a huge space of better designs. We just haven't had the intelligence or technology to reach out to that space just yet.
If high altruism is possible, then the creation of robustly altruistic transhuman intelligence could be considered a better event than you winning a trillion dollars. That's because transhuman intelligence would be genuinely smarter than us, and genuinely better at coming up with ways to eliminate poverty, suffering, disease, death, annoyance, and all other problems that intelligence can be applied to. It might be able to wipe these problems out entirely, it might not, but either way, it would be a huge event. If high altruism isn't possible, then we might expect the first transhuman intelligence to ignore us and/or kill us. Deliberate malice wouldn't be necessary for human extinction; transhumans could decide that atmospheric oxygen was getting in their way and move it somewhere else, or decide that they want to take apart the Earth to create a particle accelerator with the circumference of Mercury's orbit. And all of this might happen very quickly, considering that transhuman intelligences could be thinking with brain components billions of times faster than biological neurons, and acting with airborne nanotechnology, billions of times faster and stronger than human hands or weapons.
In anticipation of the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence, and for other reasons, some of us have decided to advocate altruism to the fullest extent. If the starting conditions and moral philosophy of the first transhuman intelligence are at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the "intelligence explosion", then the morals of the people that create or become the first transhuman intelligence(s) will be important. Since we want to see altruistic transhuman intelligence rather than the alternative, we are advocating positive morals.
In the longer term, what we need for mere humans to exist safely alongside transhuman intelligences is a sort of truce among all intelligence - especially the intelligences with the most power - otherwise death could be a threat forever. We don't want death to be a threat; we eventually want to lower the nonconsensual death rate to zero if possible. You can think of this as a sort of argument from one member of a council of say, 7 cybernetically enhanced humans, all with different ideas about morality, discussing how to approach the world after they realize they could probably have great influence over it if they wanted to. Would they be willing to make certain sacrifices, put aside their egos, in order to ensure that all the citizens of Earth could live in relative safety and peace for an indefinite length of time? If I were one of those special people, I sure would.
The point is that the creation of transhuman intelligence should be for the entire Earth, and thinking in terms of trying to bend the benefits towards yourself or your little group is the greatest possible example of unjust theft. Transhuman intelligence should not be viewed as a piece of meat we can just grab at. Disputes among transhuman intelligences could have the potential to turn into the worst humanitarian disasters the world could ever see, such as mass torture or extermination of quadrillions of unique sentiences. A single grain of sand could become a vessel of the worst imaginable tortures. This is because our current theories of intelligence seem to allow for "uploading" - that is, creating sentient beings as software programs in computers that actually have awareness, intelligence, and so on. If uploading is possible, then the amount of intelligence one could create would depend on how much computing power they could fit into a given unit of space. Even if uploading isn't possible, transhuman intelligence could still theoretically accomplish a lot of evil or a lot of good. The stakes are very high. The only morally acceptable option is to advocate that the benefits of the Singularity be distributed fairly among all sentients present. Otherwise you are stealing.
All the features of the world we find ourselves embedded in - human nature, terrestrial life, a reality made up of atoms, life, death, reproduction, etc - are roughly arbitrary. We don't know exactly why they're there and we didn't choose them. The situation was so confusing that for thousands of years we've had to pretend as if an unimaginably powerful old man created it all. (And many are still pretending.) People are designed (by evolution) to disturb and hurt each other simply by acting in their own best interests. That is a horrible system. We need to rearrange the system in such a way that people can act in their own best interests and nobody ever gets hurt or disturbed. Maybe we will do this by making compromises, treaties, physically revising our cognitive interpretations of disturbance or hurt, creating the perfect "guardian angel system", I'm not really sure. If I were smarter, I might have a better idea of which solution would benefit everyone the most. That's what smarter-than-human intelligence is all about.
Why do people read books, play video games, and live in their own mental worlds all the time? Because the mental worlds we imagine and create for each other are sometimes better than the actual physical world - we all know it. Why is this? Why weren't we born into worlds that were actually the best? Probably because we live in one of the most likely universes for observers to be born into, not necessarily the best. If it turns out that we can create baby universes, then I would want as many of them as possible to contain sentiences enjoying themselves, and not at each other's expense. I believe massive numbers of such universes are physically possible and more desirable than randomly generated universes, or universes containing people suffering. The creation of such "Heaven Universes" could have massive intrinsic value. We'd be like God, except we'd actually be benevolent. (The idea of anyone actually deserving eternal suffering, or any suffering at all except in the service of minimizing overall suffering, is appalling.)
We sometimes forget - there is more than enough matter in this universe for everyone to be maximally enjoying themselves all the time, for the rest of eternity, as long as we make the right decisions and never define "maximal enjoyment" as "having more than rival X". All we need to do is take that step, together, and we could very well become happy and satisfied forever. The "I need to have more than everybody else" mentality is a direct result from evolving in a zero-sum environment with scarce resources, where someone else succeeding often means you and your genes losing. Hopefully we will make a glorious transition from a largely "zero-sum" environment, the world of human intelligences, to a "positive-sum" environment, the world of transhuman and human intelligences coexisting, where everyone can do what they want, within certain consensus boundaries, forever and ever until the end of time. If any "competition" exists, it could be for the sake of fun or progress alone, and will never be coupled together with the negative emotions so typical of evolved creatures. We could literally engineer our brains so that we'd be happy and satisfied almost all the time, plus normal and sane too. (We don't require sadness to appreciate happiness anymore than we require slavery to appreciate freedom.)
In the past, sometimes, yes, victory over someone else or personal gain have often correlated with genuine progress, but progress doesn't need to work this way forever. The process of evolution has taken billions or trillions of casualties, (depending on whether you think primates, animals, etc. are sentient) and tortured the same number for very long durations of time. Biological evolution, basically, is evil. To carry the principles of evolution and selfishness with us over into a superintelligent society would be analogous to porting the minds of bacteria into an entire civilization of human beings, only to carry out bacterial goals and probably bite one another completely to death. Disgusting and horrible, neh? To assume that transhuman intelligences won't be capable of progressing and advancing without the use of dischord or fighting is to underestimate their potential capabilities.
Maybe our standards suggest that we're reaching for some sort of altruism that is physically impossible. We aren't - the best form of altruism possible within the constraints of physical law will have to do. I believe that when we can engineer minds with complete access to their own source code, with altruistic philosophies, then we will have created minds that are almost completely trustworthy. Whether such intelligences are physically possible is still not entirely certain, but there is evidence that they very well could be. If they are, then such intelligences wouldn't change their philosophies due to sudden events, as humans sometimes do; they could be willingly "stuck" as altruists forever. Our current understanding of intelligences suggests that such minds could be possible, although they would clearly be unhumanlike. They would be humane rather than human.
In evolution, molecules "just happened" to learn how to replicate themselves, and meta-arrangements of molecules "just happened" to begin to regulate their own temperatures, reproduce more rapidly, and mix genetic codes for more durable meta-arrangements, which "just happened" to take actions beneficial for one another, which, universe willing, will "just happen" to create a world where nonconsensual suffering, ignorance, and death are abolished. If this occurs, it will be largely thanks to high altruism, and high intelligence implementing that altruism.
The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" - future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.
A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!
As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.
Shock Level 0
Degree of Change: Flat.
Technologies: Same as today, maybe more TV channels, bigger cars or TV's.
The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
For people at this level, the future is seen as pretty much the same as it is today. If you could chart their concept of the future on a graph, you would see change reaching a plateau today and leveling off from here on out. Almost every economic and political paper about the future I’ve read falls into this category. When they discuss wide ranging implications of their policy decisions, there is hardly any mention of technological change at all, and only in the most mundane ways with concepts of Level 1 being described as something to be afraid of, with dangerous out-of-control implications. The current climate of fear over cloning and stem-cell therapy falls into this level.
Shock Level 1
Degree of Change: Logarithmic, then hitting a relative plateau in a decade or two.
Technologies: Virtual reality, living to a hundred, e-commerce, hydrogen economy, ubiquitous computing, stem-cell cloning, minor genetic improvements.
At this level you will find the majority of futurists and future oriented publications. Modern technological frontiers as depicted in Wired Magazine and books like Future Shock and Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. Included in this group are most scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers and technophiles.
Placed on a chart, future progress will continue upwards in a logarithmic fashion, with each year bringing the same amount of change as last year. Eventually this incremental change will lead to people living to a hundred, and optimistically in a society with clean energy, general economic prosperity, and conservative space exploration scenarios.
In my experience most of the people described above think about the future in relatively conservative terms. If you ever read a future oriented article by one of them they often say things like, “This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but perhaps my children or grandchildren will live to see it”, If you ever read a quote like that you know you're reading someone at SL1. Almost every report that comes out of NASA is hopelessly stuck at SL1.
Shock Level 2
Degree of Change: Logarithmic to Exponential
Technologies: major genetic engineering, medical immortality, interstellar travel, and new "alien" cultures.
At this level you’ll find your typical SF Fan. Literary SF and cutting edge magazines like Mondo 2000, Omni or Future Magazine of days past were filled with Level 2 ideas. Ironically, I don’t know of a single popular SF movie or TV show that exists comfortably at this level. Not even Star Trek qualifies for SL2, as it barely considers life spans past 100, with immortality remaining the exclusive domain of “super-advanced aliens”.
Up and until the 1980’s there wasn’t much discussion of future change past level 2, except in the most limited sense. This is probably because the concept of radical accelerating change was still beyond the radar of almost every forward thinking person at the time. Enabling Level 3 technologies like molecular nanotechnology were not even considered then. The only exceptions I know of are Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were completely at home with post-human evolution (SL3).
Shock Level 3
Degree of Change: Exponential
Technologies: Immortality, nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, intelligence increase, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration, megascale engineering.
Clearly identifiable people didn't exist at this level until the 1980’s when groups like the Extropians and transhumanists emerged. Writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary with his SMI2LE concept were the first people to my knowledge who discussed this level in any depth. However, it wasn’t until Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation that finally set the stage for concrete, detailed technological speculation of SL3 possibilities.
Shock Level 4
Degree of Change: Exponential to Hyperbolic (Accelerating Acceleration)
Technologies: Singularity, Matrioska "Jupiter" Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it."
The only people I know who are comfortable discussing change at this level are Singularitarians, and some cutting edge psychedelic pioneers like Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. Olaf Stapledon in his book Star Maker waxed poetic about SL3 megascale engineering and SL4 ultra-intelligences, and John Lilly discussed multiple encounters with a SL4 intelligences, which he gave names like "ECCO" and "Solid State Entities". The first writer to bring this into concrete technological terms was Vernor Vinge in his 1993 paper . These ideas were soon picked up by Extropians and Transhumanists, but as far as I know it wasn’t until the Singularitarians that this level was embraced concretely and enthusiastically.
As Eli says, If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!
Eli goes on to say,
If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened - shocked.
That's not to say you can't do it. In fact, you can take advantage of the future shock to carry the idea. You just have to be careful.
By a similar token, a Singularitarian can shock a science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian - the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. (Of course, if the person was already enthusiastic about Transhumanism, they might be wildly enthusiastic about the Singularity.) An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the "person on the street" - they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction - wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened - not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.
Below are some cut-up quotes from Terrence Mckenna on tapping into the Natural Intelligences that Flemming dicsussed earlier.
"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had over 4 billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance.
"The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind.
"The psychedelic experience is far more than instant psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.
"What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
"Now, why it is that when we dose ourselves with a human neurotransmitter like DMT, why we then encounter armies of elves teaching us a perfected form of communication, this is a very difficult question. When you go to traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures in the Amazon and put this question to them, they answer without hesitation when you ask about these small entities, they say "Oh, yes, those are the ancestors, those are the ancestor spirits with which we work all of our magic." This is worldwide and traditionally the answer that you would get from shamans if you were to ask them how they do their magic - it's through the intercession of the helping spirit who is a creature in another dimension. Well, we may have imagined many different scenarios, a future technological and social innovation, but I think very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real programme of shamanism would have to be taken seriously, and that shamans are actually people who have learned to penetrate into another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't, you see, as though we penetrate into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that this world is the realm of the dead and that there is a kind of higher-dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and a lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know - perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch and awareness with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy really can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind, and there's nothing airy-fairy about this notion; the living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as an unconfirmable rumour.
"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."
And quoting myself from 1997 on the site Gaia Logic, which sadly is no longer with us,
I see no contradiction between the Transhumanist and the Gaian positions. In fact, I would probably define my own philosophy in this regard as Eco-transhumanist; technology and gaianism being two complementary polarities, and technology is necessary if Gaia is to fulfill its potential and replicate biospheres through space (using trans-humankind as the brains cum genitals!)
Hence, I would suggest, Transhumanism and Gaianism actually need each other. That is, a non-transhumanist Gaianism would be limited to primitivism and resource scarcity, and unable to get off the surface of the planet. Eiether a man-made or a natural disaster could wipe out terragen life forever. And in any case eventually the sun will heat up and make life on Earth impossible. Conversely, a non-gaian transhumanism would be arid and sterile, mechanical or virtual without or with only the most superficial, sense of life. It is rather like Einstein's famous statement that "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame." If humanity and life is to survive and flourish in the future, this is the paradigm that is needed.
Thanks Deoxy, Omega Point Journal for the McKenna material.
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.
"The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."
"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."
"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.... It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."
"The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted."
"Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own."
To read the rest of this manifesto by David Pearce please visit The Hedonistic Imperative.
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
The Singularity holds out the possibility of winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the best-of-all-possible-worlds - not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being - growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever... or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive. That's the Apotheosis.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:
"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"
This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?
Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.
This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.
Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. And it's my guess, that if that's true the chances are the entities running it are compassionate, and wouldn't simulate a conscious being with deep desires for immortality or an afterlife unless it planned on delivering. :-)
But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amont of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.
Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.
~Work in Progress~
The idea is that as our brains become increasingly reconfigurable via nanotech-computer symbiosis our minds will increasingly experience the universe (inner/outer) hyperdimensionally. I imagine that our future nano-symbiotic selves will see hyperdimensional spaces as a baseline of experience. Perceptions of the outside universe will in turn be greatly enhanced, with the 3 dimensional view we currently have seen as a very low fidelity "flat" experience. Not to mention of course that our emotional states will be tuned into very high levels of ecstacy impossible for us to imagine in our current primitive state.
Nanobots will augment and ultimately replace our organs and expand our brain, Ray Kurzweil will argue at Time magazine's The Future of Life conference in the LIFESPAN: HOW LONG? HOW FUN? session.
In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body's physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.
I'm currently deep in the process of writing my first book which addresses many radical technologies we are likely to see and their implications for us personally as people, as conscious beings. I disagree with Bill Joy's article that the future doesn't need us. Quite the contrary, the future is going to need us more that ever. Rather than be replaced by advancing nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence, these technologies will enhance us. The future is not AI, but IA - Intelligence Augmentation. My first foray into serious writing is more daunting that I ever realized, but if for some reason I never complete the book, I have already written over 200 pages of original material, which I will publish on the net or perhaps under the Creative Commons License.