[extropy-chat] hope you can comprehend

[KAZ]

----- Original Message ----
From: Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 7:20:48 AM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] hope you can comprehend

> 1. If you can get back the genome of an individual, 
> you can get back part of the basis for "who" they were.
 
This is only true insofar as two identical twins raised separately are the same person.

> 2. If you have sufficient information about the person, e.g. biographies, 
> autobiographies, tax records, credit card histories, films of lectures 
> ( e.g. Feynman), etc. you have a pretty good idea of "who" or "how" they expressed themselves.
 
Yes, you should be able to, with sufficient psychiatric technology, make someone who /behaves/ like the person.
 
I doubt you'd even need their genome, though. And behavior isn't really the same thing as being the person. Not even close. That's like the famous turing test example where someone simply programmed a database with pretty much every question the tester might ask, and a sane response. The tester can be fooled into believing he's conversing with a real person, but the database still will not be sapient or sentient, even to the limited degree that humans are. It's still as stupid as a wind-up watch, in the human sense.
 
Likewise no amount of making someone /behave/ like the original will make him the original. The original person's true self will still be missing.

> 3. Depending upon the length of time one has been embalmed and the 
> precise recovery methods you should be able to extract the ultrastructural 
> information (neuron number, location, interconnection network, synaptic 
> strengths, etc.) from a "dead" brain. 

This is rendered moot, aside from how little embalming probably helps (and it may do an enormous amount of damage to the details of the brain, in fact), by my response to #2. 
 
The human mind is a complex application, developed in a trail and error way, essentially evolving over the course of the human's life. All the fine details comprise, at least as a whole, who the human is. The macro properties are only a framework, really.
 
Guessing the number and general structure/properties would no more create the individual, even with 1 and 2, than duplicating the complete user interface of MS Windows using black box development (to avoid copyright violation) means you've actually duplicated the OS itself.
 
Without the fine details of the source code, it's not the same "identity". 

> I doubt we understand the physiological & psychological complexity of individuals 
> sufficiently to be to evaluate when a "recreation" is or is not effectively the "real", J.D., 
 
I think we can safely say that what you outlined cannot be "real", unless we can actually determine the detailed state of most of the neurons after centuries in the dirt, which may be literally impossible. Maybe not; they've found soft tissue inside t-rex bones, and are working on inferring the genetics of dinosaurs from it, and just a few years ago we all would have agreed this was literally impossible. But it MAY be impossible to do this to neurons, dentrides, and synapses in specific detail. 
 
> Kaz, Dyson, Sasha, Feynman, Kennedy, etc.  A significant aspect of this 
> that Kaz (and many others) who consider this problem miss is how much 
> computer capacity in which to run and evaluate simulations we will have 
> at our disposal in the future.  One could wonder whether the "dark galaxies" 
> that exist in the universe are devoted to reconstruction & simulation activities 
> aimed at "bringing back" particular individuals who were critically important 
> to the evolution of the first "advanced" civilizations that evolved within those galaxies. 

Surely you're not thinking it'd take a galaxy to replicate a human mind's function. It wouldn't take more than a computer the same volume as a human skull, and probably considerably less.

> In order to be *really*, *really*, *really* dead in this day and age you have 
> to actually work at it.  It starts with a minimum requirement of having your body 
> incinerated.  You probably also have to incinerate your home, office and car 
> (leave *no* DNA behind), then you have to kill off a fair number of your living 
> relatives (who carry sufficient information that one can get back to a reasonable 
> approximation of your genome).  You shouldn't purchase things by credit card, 
> can't make investments, can't pay taxes, can't be employed, etc.  Of course 
> it goes without saying that you certainly shouldn't be posting to the ExICh list... 

Actually, all of that would be only if you're worried about them creating someone who ACTED like you. None of that will reconstruct YOU. Just your behavior.
 
It's the turing argument analogy, again. The actual consciousness of the entity created would "feel", from the inside, and function, internally, completely differently. Sorta like Windows versus those occasionally-trendy X shells which look, at a glance and even through casual use, identical to it.

> Going back to the original statement -- there is of course the "flip" side of the coin.  
> One could be quite extropic and choose not to sign up for cryonic suspension 
> because one doesn't want to be revived.  
 
Logically, if all other factors (leaving money to kids, wanting to spend it going out with a bang, et cetera) are set aside, this is in effect the same as saying "perhaps they'll want to commit suicide". If there is NO practical impediment, just not /wanting/ to be revived, then I see no difference between that and shooting yourself in the head right now, except WHEN you're choosing to off yourself.
 
> A *true* extropian will make the decision whether or not to undergo cryonic 
> suspension on the basis of whether or not they feel that activity will in the 
> future contribute towards increasing the quantity and/or quality of "useful" 
> information in the universe [3].  
 
I'm unaware of selflessness as a requirement of extropianism. 
 
In fact, I am 99.999% certain that SOMEONE, somewhere, has most of the information already. The odds that we, after sixteen billion years, are the first civilization to get to this point are insanely small. Probably we've had trillions of predecessors, spread over billions of preceeding years. And we may be just one p-brane in a 10 spatial dimension universe of other 3d universes, perhaps an infinity of them, or at least a number comparable to the particle count of this universe. And maybe the chemistry of the containing 4+ spacial dimension space supports sentience in some fashion, as well. Imagine how much room for intelligence there would be in a 6 dimensional chemistry system. The greatest intellectual system of our entire universe would be an idiot...not even worth calling a simple calculator...in comparison with what would arise at random there, perhaps. And then there's the question of whether our entire reality is contained in someone's simulation. 10 dimensional
 sentient beings in our universe could be worthless, mechanistic dolts compared to whatever runs their (and our) simulation.
 
So, to get back to the point, I'm not worried about "contributing toward the increasing quantity and/or quality of 'useful' information in the universe", because it's probable that SOMEONE has already gone so far beyond anything we will EVER do that it's hopeless.
 
No, I selfishly wish to HAVE the information. I hope to help the species get it mainly on the off chance that I'll end up being around. I even console myself with the idea of my descendants getting it in the short-term, if necessary. But, overall, "the universe"...especially if you include whatever contains it...has almost certainly got a ridiculous amount of access and organization being used by far more sentient beings, already.
 
And all that's aside from the distinct possibility that "the universe" is a self-referential form of that information. Really, better semantics would be "is being accessed by sentient beings", the information could be otherwise defined as useful by its very existence.
 
> One has to compare investing the financial resources in the preservation of 
> oneself as an ice cube for 20-50 years to say investing in the same financial 
> resources in other potentially more extropic efforts [4]. 

People motivated by /selfish/ desire to get the information will, in the long run, be far more productive at advancing knowledge than those who attempt to altruistically look for whatever will advance some abstract goal. Selfish action produces the modern Internet; careful attempts to work specifically toward future knowledge produces NASA. The former is the best we've produced, the latter among the most useless.
 
--
Words of the Sentient:
>From a psychological point of view, 'sins' are indispensable in any society
organized by priests; they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives
on sins; he needs the commission of sins. -- Friederich Nietzsche
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