From amara at amara.com Fri Sep 1 06:26:11 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 08:26:11 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Asperger's Syndrome and the gender disparity in the sciences Message-ID: For as long as I've read cosmicvariance, there have been discussions about why there are not more women in the sciences. This fellow with a mild Asperger's Syndrome hypothesizes that part of the reason might be due to that; more men have Asperger's and people with Asperger's Syndrome naturally gravitate to the sciences. http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/07/18/switch-hitting-part-ii/#comment-115581 Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 1 14:17:59 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 07:17:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Asperger's Syndrome and the gender disparity in thesciences In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609011432.k81EWWBx002422@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps > Subject: [extropy-chat] Asperger's Syndrome and the gender disparity in > thesciences > > For as long as I've read cosmicvariance, there have been discussions > about why there are not more women in the sciences... > > http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/07/18/switch-hitting-part-ii/#comment- > 115581 > > Amara Amara, his comments have the definite ring of truth. It sure sounds right to me. spike From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Fri Sep 1 14:14:48 2006 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 07:14:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Asperger's Syndrome and the gender disparity in the sciences In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060901141448.90857.qmail@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> > people with Asperger's Syndrome > naturally gravitate to the sciences. As a woman with Asperger's Syndrome who is involved in the sciences, I can definitely see how this could be true...I'd love to look for some real research on this (and will hopefully be doing so very soon) but there's a bit of a theory I've seen in the neurodiversity community that suggests that people on the autism spectrum depend on direct perception of the surrounding environment in order to gain information about it, while more neurologically typical people depend more on socially-transmitted information. Different groups seem "susceptible" to different memes, perhaps. --------------------------------- How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger?s low PC-to-Phone call rates. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Sep 1 18:55:51 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:55:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) Message-ID: <18946462.1029431157136951264.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Sep 1 18:44:11 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:44:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Asperger's Syndrome and the gender disparity inthe sciences Message-ID: <30645525.1028381157136251026.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From estropico at gmail.com Fri Sep 1 21:26:18 2006 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 22:26:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] =?windows-1252?q?ExtroBritannia=27s_September_even?= =?windows-1252?q?t_-_Simon_Young=3A_Transhumanism_=96_a_new_religi?= =?windows-1252?q?on=3F?= Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> ExtroBritannia's September event - Simon Young: Transhumanism ? a new religion? Transhumanism ? a new religion? Meme wars: the battle of the transhumanists. Beyond the religious right and liberal left. Transhumanism as a new metameme for the modern world. Simon Young, author of Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto http://www.designerevolution.net/ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006), and Founder of the World Transhumanist Society, http://www.worldtranshumanistsociety.com/ argues that Transhumanists should reject their outdated political baggage ? Transhumanism challenges all existing worldviews, political or religious, and is destined to become the dominant new belief system of the Modern World in the 21st century. But does that make it a new religion? Young's answer may surprise you. Find out why? Saturday the 30th of September 2006 at 2pm, Conway Hall (Artists' Room) in Holborn, London. The event is free and everyone is welcome. CONWAY HALL 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL tel 020 7242 8032 www.conwayhall.org.uk Nearest tube: Holborn MAP http://tinyurl.com/8syus --- The ExtroBritannia mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extrobritannia The ExtroBritannia Blog: http://www.extrobritannia.blogspot.com ExtroBritannia is the monthly public event of the UK Transhumanist Association: http://www.transhumanist.org.uk From riel at surriel.com Sat Sep 2 00:24:19 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:24:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) In-Reply-To: <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > Why? Because this is the native language of the majority of people > that we want to reach. Could that be religious? If I phrase my own transhumanist beliefs in a religious framework, I end up with something like the following (feel free to copy it): "If we are God's children, I believe we should grow up. If there are no gods (yet), I believe we should try to fill that void." Yeah, I realize that might not actually help much to convince the masses :) -- What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Sep 2 01:04:52 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 21:04:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] =?windows-1252?q?ExtroBritannia=27s_September_even?= =?windows-1252?q?t_-_Simon_Young=3A_Transhumanism_=96_a_new_religi?= =?windows-1252?q?on=3F?= In-Reply-To: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/1/06, estropico wrote: > [snip] ... re: Simon Young talk ... Saturday the 30th of September 2006 > at 2pm, Conway Hall (Artists' Room) in Holborn, London. The event is free > and everyone is welcome. I would plead for this to be videotaped and made available on the net -- we have enough people that could serve as Bittorrent hosts that distribution of this should not be difficult. [1] I was doing research in the Science Library at Harvard yesterday and was completely floored to find a copy of "Designer Evolution" (published in 2006!) with Forewords by de Grey and Freitas sitting right next to the books on stem cell therapies (RB 155.Y685). Now the question I'm puzzling about is *who* donated, or suggested to the management the purchase of, this book? Even the largest academic library in the world doesn't have *every* book -- particularly recent publications. As a side note, if you have a community or school you feel warmly towards, you might consider buying used TH books from Amazon and donating them to those institutions. A big piece of the problem regarding distributing "the word" may simply be that people don't have access to the body of knowledge. Robert 1. For those unfamiliar with Bittorrent it is Peer-2-Peer (P2P) software which allows shared distribution of files with minimal negative impacts on ones personal computer (in terms of CPU or network bandwidth). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sat Sep 2 01:37:06 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 20:37:06 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] =?windows-1252?q?ExtroBritannia=27s_September_even?= =?windows-1252?q?t_-_Simon_Young=3A_Transhumanism_=96_a_new_religi?= =?windows-1252?q?on=3F?= In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0609011837r2d408ab0s9ec2b5bf2cb6528@mail.gmail.com> Donating used copies of >H books to your local library is a great idea. It not only exercises charity, but more importantly--it works. Had the library where I grew up not had books such as The High Frontier, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, GEB, and others, I probably never would have ended up where or who I am today. I also suggest uploading the videos to Internet Archive, Blip.tv, and YouTube. On 9/1/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > On 9/1/06, estropico wrote: > > > [snip] ... re: Simon Young talk ... Saturday the 30th of September 2006 > > at 2pm, Conway Hall (Artists' Room) in Holborn, London. The event is free > > and everyone is welcome. > > > I would plead for this to be videotaped and made available on the net -- we > have enough people that could serve as Bittorrent hosts that distribution of > this should not be difficult. [1] > > I was doing research in the Science Library at Harvard yesterday and was > completely floored to find a copy of "Designer Evolution" (published in > 2006!) with Forewords by de Grey and Freitas sitting right next to the books > on stem cell therapies (RB 155.Y685). > > Now the question I'm puzzling about is *who* donated, or suggested to the > management the purchase of, this book? Even the largest academic library in > the world doesn't have *every* book -- particularly recent publications. > > As a side note, if you have a community or school you feel warmly towards, > you might consider buying used TH books from Amazon and donating them to > those institutions. A big piece of the problem regarding distributing "the > word" may simply be that people don't have access to the body of knowledge. > > Robert > > 1. For those unfamiliar with Bittorrent it is Peer-2-Peer (P2P) software > which allows shared distribution of files with minimal negative impacts on > ones personal computer (in terms of CPU or network bandwidth). > > -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Sep 2 02:03:13 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 19:03:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] ExtroBritannia's September event - Simon Young: Transhumanism - a new religion? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Bradbury wrote: > I was doing research in the Science Library at Harvard yesterday and was > completely floored to find a copy of "Designer Evolution" (published in > 2006!) with Forewords by de Grey and Freitas sitting right next to the > books on stem cell therapies (RB 155.Y685). > > Now the question I'm puzzling about is *who* donated, or suggested to the > management the purchase of, this book? Even the largest academic library > in the world doesn't have *every* book -- particularly recent > publications. I appreciate your excitement at finding this book at hand. You might be interested to know that this book is also on hand in the following libraries in California: OXNARD PUBLIC LIBRARY, Oxnard UCLA Library, Los Angeles Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles University of California, San Diego, La Jolla University of San Diego, J S Copley Library, San Diego Sunnyvale Public Library, Sunnyvale (and one scanned to PDF on my server.) - Jef From estropico at gmail.com Sat Sep 2 17:47:49 2006 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 18:47:49 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 36, Issue 1 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90609021047g4070f695u878b39e470c1e32e@mail.gmail.com> > Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 21:04:52 -0400 > From: "Robert Bradbury" > > On 9/1/06, estropico wrote: > > > [snip] ... re: Simon Young talk ... Saturday the 30th of September 2006 > > at 2pm, Conway Hall (Artists' Room) in Holborn, London. The event is free > > and everyone is welcome. > > I would plead for this to be videotaped and made available on the net We've been *experimenting* with partial recordings of our events, but so far we have only put online a few random bits from the Natasha and Anders event (see the right-hand column on the ExtroBritannia blog: http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/) We also have some other partial recordings that I will put online as soon as I manage. For the Simon Young event, we are planning to audio-record the whole thing for podcasting, but it all rest on logistics (equipment, etc). Should we manage to go ahead with it, fingers crossed, I'll let you know. Cheers, Fabio From sjatkins at mac.com Sun Sep 3 23:49:49 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 16:49:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) In-Reply-To: <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> Message-ID: <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> On Sep 1, 2006, at 5:24 PM, Rik van Riel wrote: > Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > >> Why? Because this is the native language of the majority of people >> that we want to reach. > > Could that be religious? > Define please. I don't see why a shift of language modality is or is likely to be religious. > If I phrase my own transhumanist beliefs in a religious framework, > I end up with something like the following (feel free to copy it): > > "If we are God's children, I believe we should grow up. If there > are no gods (yet), I believe we should try to fill that void." I have been asking "What happens when the 'children of God' grow up?" since I was 10. The question is usually not taken kindly much less pondered. Religions largely don't seem to be about any real exploration or truth seeking, oddly enough. > > Yeah, I realize that might not actually help much to convince > the masses :) Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. I do not like this conclusion of mine but that doesn't entitle me to reject it. > What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? Importance may only be assessed in a context of values, possibilities and so on. What we want is part of "what is true". Please clarify what you wanted to ask. - samantha From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 00:10:01 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 17:10:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212008,00.html Oy vey, damn. {8-[ spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Sep 4 01:13:15 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:13:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060903201003.022b7ef0@satx.rr.com> At 05:10 PM 9/3/2006 -0700, spike wrote: >http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212008,00.html >"Our anonymous donor sperm bank is essentially wiped out," Williams >told the Sun. >Oy vey, damn. {8-[ I'd offer to lend them a hand, but I killed all my sperm 25 years ago. Well, maybe not *killed*. Big sign, GOING WRONG WAY, round in cruel circles. Do I win a Darwin Award? Damien Broderick From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 4 01:25:24 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 02:25:24 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <008601c6cfc0$ffb96b50$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> People are constantly making sarcy remarks about my boring, overly technical view on things. It's precisely my boring, overly technical view that would have put some backups on the sensor system. John > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212008,00.html > > > Oy vey, damn. {8-[ > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 4 02:14:30 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 03:14:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused / make 10M pounds for free References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora><470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com><44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> Message-ID: <009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> > pondered. Religions largely don't seem to be about any real > exploration or truth seeking, oddly enough. What's even odder, and bitterly ironic, is that religion and science used to be genuine bed buddies. It was only when the discoveries of the religiously pious scientist threatend their dominance over the everyday man and woman, by presenting pathways by which they too could gain power over their environment without having to have masses of people below them to boss around, that they rapidly departed company. I recall the use of a particularly complex steam driven water pump, involving sliding weights and pulleys, to automatically open the doors of churches in an attempt to awe inspire their visitors. > Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to > convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. I do > not like this conclusion of mine but that doesn't entitle me to reject > it. This is an idea I've been working on recently as well. That you need to assess whether it's genuinely easier for you to 'inform and transform' the masses by standard means or to remain anonymous and only seed or initate the change once you've exploited the extra time and resources not having to inform them gives you to develop something to grab their attention with. You can argue with a religious guy until you're throat hurts and you have a headache, and he'll probably just feel even more certain in his beliefs. Instead, you could spend your time developing a cure to death. When it's ready, and he's about to die, he'll suddenly believe you. In fact, here's an example of my thinking that I tried out in reality; My sister used to sign on with the DSS and spend all of the money going out clubbing and paying for mood enhancing pills - at one point she was talking about "scamming" a few thousand out of a mental health program, although she didn't get round to that. Her friends used to routinely take part in questionable applications for additional support - "my back hurts!". My step sister has similar question marks floating around, e.g. she somewhat routinely checks into a psychiatric hospital and then checks back out (a nurse across the road from us told us this is something she's watched happen a number of times with similar patients). My friends at school used to sign on for EMA in sixth form then take the money (meant for books and equipment) out partying with them or visit strip bars and burn up 50UKP in a few minutes - about five times more than I had spare. The DSS stated on their site something to the effect of "If you're not working, you should sign on as you may be missing out on money you deserve". Despite not working and not having much money, I'd been brought up being told to save money and not take it unless I really needed it. So watching all this really, really annoyed me (especially as I'd previously spent some time in the box job mentioned later) and I tried to figure out ways of changing it. The DSS don't tell you what to spend money on. It's not illegal, for instance, to take it out clubbing with you and use it to buy socially acceptable drugs or pay strippers to wiggle around for five minutes. I devised a truely beautiful plan, to me anyway. I would sign on and take every pound of my benefits and spend it buying national lottery tickets - so in each week I'd buy about a year's worth of lottery tickets for a normal person. The only rule to this game was that I absolutely could not lie or cheat the people giving it to me - "my back hurts!" when it didn't, for example. Sounds terrible, however stop and compare it to something like... buying beer or paying strippers. Potentially, I could have won a gigantic amount of cash, never presented a tax problem again and have actually given a lot more to society than normal people do - I would have probably given at least some of it away to Chernoybl Child or the NSPCC. Neither do lottery tickets result in 70% of admissions to hospital A&E, lung cancer, 16 year olds addicted to legal drugs or legal assault by second hand smoke. Whilst the probability of winning the jackpot is still low, it's also much higher than becoming a multimillionaire by spending that same money paying for alcohol. My brother was having a fit about the idea and couldn't get over how morally wrong it was, despite it being perfectly within the rules of signing on. His comeback was, "If it bothers you, you should write a letter to the paper". The point I was trying to demonstrate was that if I won I could publically point out that I'd just won my 10 million pounds with fractions of other peoples' working lives. Fractions they prefer to forget about even though they're being spent on things arguably far less useful than lottery tickets by millions of people every Friday and Saturday night out. I'd be rich and not have spent a single penny. In effect, everyone else would have paid to make me thousands of times richer than them. This plan failed after just the first try due to a technical problem. They put me on disability benefits and I wasn't disabled. Rather, it was that I'd genuinely been too sick to make it up to my signing on appointment one day. I later discoverd I hadn't been changed to disability benefits and the ensuing confusion made me give up - not wanting to accidentally claim disability benefits when I wasn't genuinely disabled. I was also interested in judging first hand how active the system was in getting people back into work. Suffice it to say, you basically -can-not- remain unemployed for more than a few weeks without lying. It's really that simple. There are a multitude of companies that will pay you a decent amount of money a day to do boring contract work, like being on your feet for 12h box packing a few million baby wipes (which I did for a few days - neither do I have any idea how the world in it's entirity could possibly the quantity of baby wipe that left those machines each day). Theoretically, my rule about not lying to them was also incorrect. It was just to keep me legally and morally safe - the latter only seemed to work for me, everyone I told about this plan seemed quite angry with the idea, not grasping the greater picture (or if they did, they didn't grasp it correctly). My rule was incorrect in light of the fact that it's impossible to remain unemployed in the UK for more than a few weeks without lying - meaning that the people I was trying to make a point about had to also be lying. But it served as an excellent example of 'bring down a system from within' thinking. I could have made up as many smart memes and comments as I wanted and worked at it until I wore myself down and still not achieved anything. By winning the lottery with someone else's tax donations, I would have almost certainly forced an immediate review of the system once I told everyone how I'd done it. I think transhumanism is presently at a similiar point. The problem transhumanism faces is that there is still no serious motivation or evidence that the general public can grasp onto. We see the possibilities because we spend everyday reading about science and technology, allowing us to interlace all the new developments to see where it's potentially going. That takes a huge amount of commitment and just dropping the general points on people doesn't provide them with enough to make an accurate long range projection in the same way that we can. Neither is there something you can tease them with and have them believe you. They just think we're the same rambling nutters who were predicting moon bases and robot servants fifty years ago - and, to an extent, perhaps some of us are. My lottery plan provided a super tangible and worthy tease for the public - everyone wants to be mega rich and people are made mega rich twice weekly by the national lottery (buying huge quantities of tickets, like I did, also directly increases the chances of that happening - almost exponentially so in the eyes of the people who see you doing it). I also had an explaination set up for how we could reform the DSS to take account of all the people who waste tax money on alcohol, clubbing, and other 'useless' stuff - DSS credit cards that allow the tracking of money spent, swipe it at bargin booze every other day and your support is cut off; or just block purchases of certain items. I think transhumanism is at a point where it's worthwhile talking to the public about it, but the real drive should be to try and catch all the students and research staff who are doing related jobs - not wait a hope that they happen to tune into Radio 4 at the appropiate time or just drift in by themselves. They'll already have a much better background to interlace the things you prompt them with and see how they can be come together in the long term. There'll be thousands of students in A-Level years and University who'd make prime candidates for transhumanism, and take very little effort to enlighten, who'll be slipping by perhaps due to the catch net of transhumanists being aimed a little to wide at first - e.g. media campaigning the general public as opposed to university science departments. You have to weigh up the gain to effort balance. It's a sad fact as Samantha says, but, as with everything R&D based, I think it'll only be once transhumanism starts releasing tangible things that are desired by the general public, that the masses will wake up to the idea. By which time, most of the ground work will have already been done by people like us. Intially, a lot of transhumanists will see that as wasted effort that could have been distributed over a wider group. I'd agree with that. I'd only disagree on the group being targetted. E.g. The general public can't help drive R&D by buying transhumanist products since transhumanist products don't exist for them to buy at the moment - or are very indirectly linked and not desirable to a lot of them (like wind turbines). It'll also take forever for their opinion to build up enough to make valid changes on the way tax is spent. You'd be much better off just promoting science in general to the government, directly. Another point aimed more at the general public is that some of the transhumanist ideas end up being blocked by mass opinion. Stem cell research for instance. Again, arguably you could spend time explaining why it's right to those who oppose it, but ultimately the conversion yeild is probably going to be very low. Unfortunately, once most people are set they're set for life it would seem. They'll only want to know when all the work is finished, an ethical source developed (although not necessarily depending on the extent of the next bit) and they need it themselves (how many religious people argue against science and then take antibiotics to really stick one to God's opinion?). Raising awareness will help, but ultimately, you'll probably be better off going more directly towards the government again - trying to win it just by informing the public will turn you into a wreck. There are, of coarse, exceptions to everything. But I do really think that transhumanists who greatly disagree with these ideas seriously need to take a step back for a second and have a pragmatic think about things - like my brother needed to with his paper idea. My biggest personal problem with science is the frequency with which I see 'US Naval Yard' or 'Department of Defence' as the sole sponsors of R&D that should be used more creatively. As someone who's about to take a degree involving nanotech and electronics, that's probably also going to be something I'm involved with throughout my adult life. I will be practicing what I preach on arrival at university and attempting to get some of my fellow nanotech students involved. I'm impressed to see more and more women getting involved in transhumanism as opposed to just sci-fi nerdy geeks like me (just kidding you guys!)... Anna, Gina (Nanogirl), Samantha, Natasha. I'm used to seeing all of zero women on technical discussion groups. All the best, John From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 4 02:49:43 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2006 19:49:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused / make 10M pounds for free In-Reply-To: <009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora><470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com><44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> <009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <44FB9447.8050008@pobox.com> John wrote: > > You can argue with a religious guy until you're throat hurts and you have a > headache, and he'll probably just feel even more certain in his beliefs. > Instead, you could spend your time developing a cure to death. When it's > ready, and he's about to die, he'll suddenly believe you. Refuted by the case of cryonics. - E -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 4 02:57:51 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 03:57:51 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused / make 10M pounds for free References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora><470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com><44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com><009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> <44FB9447.8050008@pobox.com> Message-ID: <00eb01c6cfcd$e9743430$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> > Refuted by the case of cryonics. A cure that has yet to see a single person 'wake up' from. John From riel at surriel.com Mon Sep 4 03:28:27 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:28:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) In-Reply-To: <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> Message-ID: <44FB9D5B.7030508@surriel.com> Samantha Atkins wrote: > On Sep 1, 2006, at 5:24 PM, Rik van Riel wrote: >> Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >> >>> Why? Because this is the native language of the majority of people >>> that we want to reach. >> Could that be religious? > > Define please. I don't see why a shift of language modality is or is > likely to be religious. A lot of people seem to think and talk in beliefs, not necessarily reasoning. >> If I phrase my own transhumanist beliefs in a religious framework, >> I end up with something like the following (feel free to copy it): >> >> "If we are God's children, I believe we should grow up. If there >> are no gods (yet), I believe we should try to fill that void." > > I have been asking "What happens when the 'children of God' grow up?" > since I was 10. The question is usually not taken kindly much less > pondered. Religions largely don't seem to be about any real > exploration or truth seeking, oddly enough. They're about beliefs... >> Yeah, I realize that might not actually help much to convince >> the masses :) > > Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to > convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. What I wonder is whether extropian goals can be achieved without the momentum of supporters/believers. Not necessarily the blind faith believers you see in many other religions, but it might be useful/necessary/fun to organize extropian resources a little more. OTOH, anything organized tends to take on a life of its own, and eventually run counter to its original goals and philosophy... -- What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 4 03:58:32 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 04:58:32 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com><8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> <44FB9D5B.7030508@surriel.com> Message-ID: <015001c6cfd6$63bbc980$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> > They're about beliefs... Perhaps importantly, fear induced belief. Although let's not get all superior here when scientists scrabble away like rats to find answers in hope that they can avoid problems as well - like me, scared of death. It's just that the agnostic's end result isn't always a very happy one at the moment. Luckily for the religious, there are agnostics like me around to suffer for them, just like Jesus, and develop their mobile phones for them, all the time suspecting that I'm just going to blink out of existence in a few decades. I would stop and question at the exploration point, because I think there is some element of religion that does involve exploration of 'the bigger picture', although this is no way bound solely to religion and agnostic philosophy can provided something identical - assuming it is actually agnosticism and not Dawkin's-esque fundamentallism dressed up to look better. Neither do I think the majority of religious people, particularly in the West, actually engage in exploration of the bigger picture - actually, a lot probably do the opposite. But again, neither do all scientists - they can easily become caught up in the moment (see: nuclear bombs & all millitary funded research, which accounts for a truely staggering proportion of scientific R&D in my opinion). > What I wonder is whether extropian goals can be achieved without > the momentum of supporters/believers. I don't think we'll need a revolution in backing from the public to achieve it. They'll just need continued spoon feeding with things like more efficient turbines to make them realise the potential. A revolution would be nice, but it's probably unrealistic. It all comes back to the technological background point. I see the benefit of turbines because I understand where the power for my lightbulbs is coming from, and what it's doing both physically and philosophically (thermal equilibrium / the circle of life etc), and so I switch the light off when I walk out the room. It sounds simple, but until people can see the bigger picture of what that needlessly burning lightbulb represents, they'll carry on ignoring wind turbines until they match normal generation methods for feasibility. People who have DIY wind turbines in their backyard switch their lights off too (and many more things), making turbines already feasible for them due to their low energy demands. The most effective way of converting people to a transhumanist mind set might be to investigate what prompted these DIY turbine people in the first place and then trying to guide the public on from there, which will probably be cost (which will be viewed as penny pinching unless it's a substantial difference that can offset the lifestyle change & effort) and an appreciation for life as a whole - although I fear the majority of people will see the DIY turbine people merely as hippys due to their unshaking belief in how they deserve the right to leave their lights on 24/7 regardless. Best wishes! John From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 13:39:57 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 14:39:57 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/4/06, spike wrote: > > > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212008,00.html > > > Oy vey, damn. {8-[ > This has already happened to human bodies. Freezer failure ends couple's hopes of life after death Raymond Martinot and his wife were the toast of the world cryonics movement. For years they were France's best preserved corpses, lying in a freezer in a chateau in the Loire valley, in the hope that modern science could one day bring them back to life. But the French couple's journey into the future ended prematurely when, 22 years after his mother's body was put into cold storage, their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had started to thaw. ----------------- This is another point that worries me about cryonics companies. If they did get a freezer failure there would be a very strong temptation to just refreeze the bodies, keep quiet about it and carry on taking the maintenance fees. After all, nobody is going to find out until long after the present company employees have died themselves. BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 13:56:03 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 09:56:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90609011426q5f934452vcf068109b84a6aeb@mail.gmail.com> <200609040020.k840KUTF019117@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/4/06, BillK wrote: > But the French couple's journey into the future ended prematurely > when, 22 years after his mother's body was put into cold storage, > their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had > started to thaw. He should *never* have done this. While thawing and refreezing will cause more damage to the cells it is completely unclear whether it disrupts the ultrastructure sufficiently that recovery would be impossible. Mind you it might shift you from the "nanomedical cellular recovery" queue to the "complete mind upload" queue -- but there are significant probabilities that *all* cryonic suspendees will end up in that queue anyway! IMO there is a gross lack of understanding within the cryonics community of the impact of rapid sigularity era technologies on the choices that they should be specifying *before* they are suspended. For that matter, the DNA from the sperm was probably still viable and in a few years could have been sequenced and reconstructed. But if the point is having sperm for current era treatments then yes it would be sad. (Though its not as if it would be tremendously difficult to get more anonymous donor samples...) This is another point that worries me about cryonics companies. If > they did get a freezer failure there would be a very strong temptation > to just refreeze the bodies, keep quiet about it and carry on taking > the maintenance fees. After all, nobody is going to find out until > long after the present company employees have died themselves. As pointed out above, refreezing the bodies is the correct thing to do. But I presume most of the Cryonics company employees are signed up for reanimation -- so in theory they would be around for civil suits once they come back. Its an untested area -- whether one can sue (or jail) someone who has "come back from the dead". Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 14:57:28 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 07:57:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare > > On 9/4/06, spike wrote: > > > > > > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212008,00.html > > > > > > Oy vey, damn. {8-[ > > > > This has already happened to human bodies. > > Freezer failure ends couple's hopes of life after death > > Raymond Martinot and his wife were the toast of the world cryonics > movement...their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had started to thaw. This comment explains a lot: "I realised in February that after a technical incident their temperature had risen to -20C probably for several days. The alert system [on the freezer] had not worked and I decided at that point that it was not reasonable to continue," he told Agence France Presse. "I don't feel any more bereaved today than I did when my parents died, I had already done my grieving. But I feel bitter that I could not respect my father's last wishes. Maybe the future would have shown that my father was right and that he was a pioneer." Their son decided it was not reasonable to continue, but I suspect Dr. and Mrs. Marinot would have strongly disagreed. At -20C for some unknown time (how does Junior know it was several days?) I would assume a good chance there was information in those still-frozen brains. -20C is still fairly cool. His decision could have been influenced by an incorrect understanding of future data retrieval mechanisms. Then the comment "I don't feel any more bereaved today..." makes me suspicious that Junior thinks cryonics is really all about his bereavement. Perhaps it would make him feel less bereaved if the cost of running this freezer went instead for payments on a new Porsche. Did the the Martinots set up a trust fund such that the cost of maintenance comes out of what Junior has already begun to think of as his own money? Did they set it up to where the fund actually pays the custodian descendant so long as the corpsicles stay frozen, a fund that the descendant does not inherit under any circumstances? > This is another point that worries me about cryonics companies. If > they did get a freezer failure there would be a very strong temptation > to just refreeze the bodies, keep quiet about it and carry on taking > the maintenance fees. After all, nobody is going to find out until > long after the present company employees have died themselves. > > BillK There is that risk BillK, but I would be much less worried about that danger than in leaving my frozen corpse in the care of my own descendants. Eventually my ever more diluted genes will spawn some irresponsible slacker who thinks of me only as some deluded kook or a financial burden, who in fact does not want me coming back into her world possibly claiming part of her inheritance. She might think of me as unable to cope with the modern world, so that I would need everything, at her expense. Martinot Junior appears to me to have made a most unfortunate decision here. I want to set up my cryonics contract in such a way that my descendants have *no say* in what happens. They may have too much vested interest, or more precisely, vested disinterest in my future. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 15:14:36 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 08:14:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609041519.k84FJjs1023448@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury ... their son discovered the freezer unit had broken down and they had started to thaw... He should *never* have done this.? While thawing and refreezing will cause more damage to the cells it is completely unclear whether it disrupts the ultrastructure sufficiently that recovery would be impossible... Robert, we need to recognize that there are relatively few people in this world who really grok things like recovery mechanisms, nanotech, brain structure preservation, etc. There are relatively few who are not all screwed up by misguided religious or ethical notions about cryonics. Some may argue that every revived cryonaut causes 20 African children to starve. Some future earthlings my argue that this cryonaut was frozen before the world revolution, so why do we need another infidel on a planet that still has several million that have not yet been slain or forced to convert at gunpoint. >As pointed out above, refreezing the bodies is the correct thing to do... Ja, at -20C, they weren't really thawed. >? Its an untested area -- whether one can sue (or jail) someone who has "come back from the dead". Robert You don't actually jail someone who has come back from the dead. You refreeze them for the length of the sentence. Societies should be doing that now for those with sentences of life without parole: convert those sentences to 100 years in the nitrogen bath. spike From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 4 15:35:31 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 16:35:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <002d01c6d037$c2204030$de150751@heritagekd9czj> It'd be interesting to see what happens to the life status of freeze dried people when someone is finally brought back. At present, you're officially dead when a qualified medical individual believes there's no possible way to save your body - there is no finite 'they're dead' factor as far as I'm aware (a single thing to look for), just a collection of evidence that suggests it's impossible to help you. MEG scanners are the most sensitive tools for measuring neural activity, and they still require tens of thousands of quasi-simultaneously depolarisations to detect an event in the brain. So, even with one of these to check you dead people out, you're not 100%. Once a person is actually reanimated, there will be a way to help those people in cryo tanks, which would therefore make them alive and any failure of the tanks manslaughter by neglagence - with purposeful deactivation being murder. Although, I suspect the law will make an attempt to side step the whole issue somewhat by coming up with something in between, like "suspension", which grants the individual less rights than they'd otherwise have to make dealing with them easier. John From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 4 16:08:41 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 18:08:41 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <002d01c6d037$c2204030$de150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <002d01c6d037$c2204030$de150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060904160841.GV14701@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 04:35:31PM +0100, John wrote: > It'd be interesting to see what happens to the life status of freeze dried > people when someone is finally brought back. This is the first time I'm hearing about lyophilizicles. Are you sure you've not just invented them? > At present, you're officially dead when a qualified medical individual > believes there's no possible way to save your body - there is no finite > 'they're dead' factor as far as I'm aware (a single thing to look for), just > a collection of evidence that suggests it's impossible to help you. The exact procedure varies from country to country. > MEG scanners are the most sensitive tools for measuring neural activity, and Why are you mentioning MEG scanners? > they still require tens of thousands of quasi-simultaneously depolarisations > to detect an event in the brain. So, even with one of these to check you > dead people out, you're not 100%. I'm not getting your meaning here. > Once a person is actually reanimated, there will be a way to help those > people in cryo tanks, which would therefore make them alive and any failure > of the tanks manslaughter by neglagence - with purposeful deactivation being > murder. Once the legal status changes... but don't hold your breath. > Although, I suspect the law will make an attempt to side step the whole > issue somewhat by coming up with something in between, like "suspension", > which grants the individual less rights than they'd otherwise have to make > dealing with them easier. By law, they're dead. Currently. That's all what's relevant to know. Currently. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 16:16:15 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:16:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused / make 10M pounds for free In-Reply-To: <00eb01c6cfcd$e9743430$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> <009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> <44FB9447.8050008@pobox.com> <00eb01c6cfcd$e9743430$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: On 9/3/06, John wrote: > > > Refuted by the case of cryonics. > > A cure that has yet to see a single person 'wake up' from. But which can be pointed to as being much more probable than "waking up" after being disassembled by fire or bacteria (which cause a complete destruction of the information content) or "waking up" through "resurrection" unless you either want to violate laws of physics or choose to assume we are running in a simulation and "God" (or Aristoi) has a backup copy of you slightly prior to your death. The crux of the problem is not knowing that there are laws of physics and limits on what can reasonably be done in the known physuical universe. Its much easier to accept "magic" and and super-universe entitites. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 4 16:46:45 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 09:46:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> spike wrote: > > Martinot Junior appears to me to have made a most unfortunate decision here. > I want to set up my cryonics contract in such a way that my descendants have > *no say* in what happens. They may have too much vested interest, or more > precisely, vested disinterest in my future. Spike, it's probably fair enough and wise enough that there be *no* person - descendant or otherwise - who both has the power to defreeze you, and benefits from your defreezing. That's just common sense. No need to impute such horrible motives to your kids. Trust but verify; better yet, avoid the need for trust. It doesn't mean you suspect someone. It's not an insult. Just Standard Operating Protocol for any security-conscious person. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From kazvorpal at yahoo.com Mon Sep 4 17:04:48 2006 From: kazvorpal at yahoo.com (KAZ) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 10:04:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060904170448.36650.qmail@web50407.mail.yahoo.com> ----- Original Message ---- From: Robert Bradbury To: ExI chat list Sent: Monday, September 4, 2006 8:56:03 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare > He should *never* have done this. While thawing and refreezing will cause more > damage to the cells it is completely unclear whether it disrupts the ultrastructure > sufficiently that recovery would be impossible. Mind you it might shift you from > the "nanomedical cellular recovery" queue to the "complete mind upload" queue -- > but there are significant probabilities that *all* cryonic suspendees will end up in > that queue anyway! Yes, it is almost certain that the damage of being only twenty degrees below freezing would merely delay when they could be revived, not doom them. It strikes me as likely that this was just the son's excuse, because he either doesn't believe in cryonics or is so selfish that he doesn't care. He faced the maintenance cost and the legal fees, and found a way out. Gods, I hope I raise better kids than that. -- Words of the Sentient: The state not only taxes us to "feed the poor" while /paying/ farmers to slaughter milk cows and drive up food prices -- it then simultaneously turns around and subsidizes research on dangerous agricultural chemicals designed to increase yields of milk from the cows left alive. -- Chuck Hammill, 1987 E-Mail: KazVorpal at yahoo.com Yahoo Messenger/AIM/AOL: KazVorpal MSN Messenger: KazVorpal at yahoo.com ICQ: 1912557 http://360.yahoo.com/kazvorpal From kazvorpal at yahoo.com Mon Sep 4 17:08:53 2006 From: kazvorpal at yahoo.com (KAZ) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 10:08:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060904170853.59076.qmail@web50403.mail.yahoo.com> ----- Original Message ---- From: spike To: ExI chat list Sent: Monday, September 4, 2006 9:57:28 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare > Then the comment "I don't feel any more bereaved today..." makes me > suspicious that Junior thinks cryonics is really all about his bereavement. I think it is a confession that he never believed in the process in the first place. He felt "bereaved" when they "died", apparently, because he was certain it was permanant death and he was just carrying out a sham will. And he doesn't feel any MORE bereaved today, likewise, because he never thought they had the slightest chance of coming back anyway. Their estates, it would appear, should have been left to a trustworthy law firm (sorry about that oxymoron, but you know what I mean), not their son. -- Words of the Sentient: Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. -- Patrick Henry E-Mail: KazVorpal at yahoo.com Yahoo Messenger/AIM/AOL: KazVorpal MSN Messenger: KazVorpal at yahoo.com ICQ: 1912557 http://360.yahoo.com/kazvorpal From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 17:44:11 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 13:44:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence Message-ID: I've been wrestling lately with the question about how one justifies ones existence [1]. From an extropic perspective it would appear to me that one has to be acting on the stage in such a way as to contribute to sustainability, survival, evolution and presumably increasing complexity of humanity. I could argue that many people who are currently "retired" do not meet this criteria.[2] Many people living in the third world do not meet this criteria. Many people with strong religious beliefs do not meet this criteria. There are some "green" folks who would. There are some research scientists, technology developers, investment managers who do. The allocation of resources in large part determines the rate of progress along the singularity curve and how many people will end up dying. Ultimately even a Matrioshka Brain has limits on energy and information storage resources. The energy resources are probably much more limited than the information storage resources. So one gets into a question, not of whether to kill people (erase copies), but how much "run time" to give them and when they should get to have it [4]. This relates to the rich vs. poor discussions one gets into now-a-days of who has the resources and who doesn't (relating of course to taxation, relative needs, social safety net discussions, etc.). But I do not see in any current political system, religion or philosophy a "raison d'etre" which seems to justify ones "right" to a share of the resources (and in particular justifies a greater or lesser share of said resources). This can be thought of in near term perspectives -- does one buy a Flex Fuel car or a Hybrid car (or does one bike to work)? Is one "religiously" strict with oneself -- i.e. the money saved by buying a 1972 inefficient highly polluting vehicle (perhaps 20-40x cheaper than a new "green" car) invested in companies producing ethanol, solar cells, better food crops, lifespan extension, etc. Or do you take that money and use it for some "frivolous" purpose? Will a "justification for ones existence" perspective be created and adopted by many indivuals soon or is the only hope for it well into the post robust nanotechnology period when personal survival concerns have shifted from the "hard" reality to the "soft" (virtual) reality? Robert 1. Ignore the whole "survival and reproduction" programming built into ones genome and mind. It is after all *just* a program and as any programmer knows programs are created to be improved upon. 2. One can of course make investment payoff justifications, e.g. my father fought in WWII contributing to the survival of the "free" world as we know it and has therefore "paid" a debt to humanity that is now being repaid even if he is living an "unsustainable" lifestyle currently. I will freely admit these justifications can become quite elaborate [3] which is why I'm choosing to put them "on the shelf" for now. 3. For example one might justify the "evil" of Windows by the good the Gates Foundation is and/or may yet do. 4. I've been reading (and cursing) the Linux virtual memory swapping and scheduling code recently -- and what I've read isn't making me happy in terms of a "best of all possible worlds" perspective. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Sep 4 19:09:30 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:09:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) In-Reply-To: <44FB9D5B.7030508@surriel.com> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> <44FB9D5B.7030508@surriel.com> Message-ID: <04368EB7-0C21-4B89-B5A9-EC9664FA9E62@mac.com> On Sep 3, 2006, at 8:28 PM, Rik van Riel wrote: >> >> Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to >> convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. > > What I wonder is whether extropian goals can be achieved without > the momentum of supporters/believers. Not necessarily the blind > faith believers you see in many other religions, but it might be > useful/necessary/fun to organize extropian resources a little > more. > How many supporters and with what qualities are needed for which projects? How many uber-techie millionaires or billionaires would it take to say fully fund a few AGI projects or MNT? Why are we spending year after year bemoaning the lack of funding? The funds are out there and targeting them successfully does not require convincing the masses of anything as I see it. Even discounting a few deeper pockets why can't those of us reasonably well supplied in daily bread start a pool of say 5% of earnings and invest it in some of the crucial projects? Some of already give to various one off groups and projects now but it is one by one and perhaps not as effective as it could be. - samantha From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Sep 4 19:15:56 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:15:56 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> At 01:44 PM 9/4/2006 -0400, Robert wrote: > So one gets into a question, not of whether to kill people (erase > copies), but how much "run time" to give them and when they should > get to have it Who is this "one", white man? One might find oneself tarred&feathered and run out of town on a rail, or strung up quicksmart, if one judiciously starts musing aloud on how much runtime everyone else deserves to have. Damien Broderick From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Sep 4 19:25:10 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:25:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6045D66F-DF5D-4508-BBAC-467727A85C94@mac.com> On Sep 4, 2006, at 10:44 AM, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I've been wrestling lately with the question about how one justifies > ones existence [1]. From an extropic perspective it would appear to > me that one has to be acting on the stage in such a way as to > contribute to sustainability, survival, evolution and presumably > increasing complexity of humanity. I could argue that many people > who are currently "retired" do not meet this criteria.[2] Many > people living in the third world do not meet this criteria. Many > people with strong religious beliefs do not meet this criteria. > There are some "green" folks who would. There are some research > scientists, technology developers, investment managers who do. > Is this a problem? Does a butterfly need to justify its existence? How wonderful a creature we are that we have spare cycles to ruminate as to whether we are justified in simply being! Don't you have more productive things to do with your massive brain than question whether most people, perhaps even yourself, are justified in being here? > The allocation of resources in large part determines the rate of > progress along the singularity curve and how many people will end up > dying. Who exactly are you to allocate the world's resources? How will you choose among human brains without missing some critical spark of genius that has not yet flowered and may be in the wrong circumstances to ever do so? Why claim that progress toward Singularity, which could easily kill everyone in some exotic fashion, is the primary value against which all are to be judged? > Ultimately even a Matrioshka Brain has limits on energy and > information storage resources. The energy resources are probably > much more limited than the information storage resources. So one > gets into a question, not of whether to kill people (erase copies), > but how much "run time" to give them and when they should get to > have it [4]. This centralized control of the very moments of existence doesn't seem very appealing. > This relates to the rich vs. poor discussions one gets into now-a- > days of who has the resources and who doesn't (relating of course to > taxation, relative needs, social safety net discussions, etc.). But > I do not see in any current political system, religion or philosophy > a "raison d'etre" which seems to justify ones "right" to a share of > the resources (and in particular justifies a greater or lesser share > of said resources). I don't believe in positive rights generally. However, thinking in terms of scarcity seems to be a primary thread in your ponderings. I don't see that as terribly extropian. - samantha From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 19:33:21 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 20:33:21 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9/4/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I've been wrestling lately with the question about how one justifies ones > existence [1]. From an extropic perspective it would appear to me that one > has to be acting on the stage in such a way as to contribute to > sustainability, survival, evolution and presumably increasing complexity of > humanity. I could argue that many people who are currently "retired" do not > meet this criteria.[2] Many people living in the third world do not meet > this criteria. Many people with strong religious beliefs do not meet this > criteria. There are some "green" folks who would. There are some research > scientists, technology developers, investment managers who do. > At first sight this sounds a lot like your good ol' Puritan work ethic. Work becomes the meaning of life. Or are you restricting it even further to only a small percentage of work, for ends that you approve of? What about all the service industries supporting the lifestyle of the Lords of Creation that you think are doing useful work? How would they manage without hairdressers, lawyers, child minders, chefs, cleaners, etc. etc. If you state a justification for existence, then immediately list a series of huge exceptions that don't make the grade, then that is a good clue that your original justification is just plain wrong. What about taking time to smell the roses? Your point about consuming resources has to take account of all lifestyles. Some lifestyles leave a very small footprint. A first world SUV driver versus a desert island guru meditating on the meaning of existence. Many 'retirees' consume very few resources. Many have little choice to do otherwise. BillK From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Sep 4 19:30:09 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:30:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosophy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Bradbury wrote: > I've been wrestling lately with the question about how one justifies ones > existence [1]. From an extropic perspective it would appear to me that > one has to be acting on the stage in such a way as to contribute to > sustainability, survival, evolution and presumably increasing complexity > of humanity. Robert, this appears similar to people wrestling with Meaning of Life and Objective Morality. A difficulty with each of these is that people confuse the subjective with the objective. [Have I lost my audience already, with what appears to be an overly broad and overly vague statement?] In very practical terms, if you're trying to justify your existence to yourself (the Meaning of Life problem), it becomes quite obvious that you can't do it from an objective point of view. Probably everyone on this list has explored this philosophical avenue and either (1) abandoned it as irresolvable, (2) accepts the cognitive dissonance, or (3) realized that the question is based on mistaken assumptions. This is not the argument from "genetic survival and reproduction" that you mentioned. This is the argument from volition, stating that the very definition of an agent contains the core requirement of purpose. An increasingly rational agent acts in ways that are increasingly effective for achieving its purposes at any particular moment. There is no external justification. If you're trying to justify the existence of a particular agent to others (increasingly objective morality), then it's a problem of demonstrating that the continued existence of that agent serves to promote the values of those who will decide. Again there is no objective justification, the difference is that scope of the values-assessment is increasing. While there is evidence that the universe tends to increase in complexity, or (more likely) energy rate density, this has no direct bearing on individual or shared human values. In the subjective context of an individual agent there is no morality; "right" is only what seems to work. In the objective god's-eye view there is no morality, there is only what is. In between, actions are assessed as increasingly moral as they are seen to promote the values of an increasing population over increasing scope. In case the preceding still seems overly abstract, my bottom-line response to this and other posts in which you have suggested taking drastic action based on the assumption of an overarching morality is that you are making the same "scientifically justified" arguments as historical eugenicists and others who aspire to "perfect" the world, and you can expect to receive the same denunciations and strident opposition. Robert, I have great respect for many of your efforts, and would encourage you to apply seed-planting rather than pruning. - Jef > I could argue that many people who are currently "retired" > do not meet this criteria.[2] Many people living in the third world do > not meet this criteria. Many people with strong religious beliefs do not > meet this criteria. There are some "green" folks who would. There are > some research scientists, technology developers, investment managers who > do. > > The allocation of resources in large part determines the rate of progress > along the singularity curve and how many people will end up dying. > Ultimately even a Matrioshka Brain has limits on energy and information > storage resources. The energy resources are probably much more limited > than the information storage resources. So one gets into a question, not > of whether to kill people (erase copies), but how much "run time" to give > them and when they should get to have it [4]. This relates to the rich > vs. poor discussions one gets into now-a-days of who has the resources and > who doesn't (relating of course to taxation, relative needs, social safety > net discussions, etc.). But I do not see in any current political system, > religion or philosophy a "raison d'etre" which seems to justify ones > "right" to a share of the resources (and in particular justifies a greater > or lesser share of said resources). > > This can be thought of in near term perspectives -- does one buy a Flex > Fuel car or a Hybrid car (or does one bike to work)? Is one "religiously" > strict with oneself -- i.e. the money saved by buying a 1972 inefficient > highly polluting vehicle (perhaps 20-40x cheaper than a new "green" car) > invested in companies producing ethanol, solar cells, better food crops, > lifespan extension, etc. Or do you take that money and use it for some > "frivolous" purpose? > > Will a "justification for ones existence" perspective be created and > adopted by many indivuals soon or is the only hope for it well into the > post robust nanotechnology period when personal survival concerns have > shifted from the "hard" reality to the "soft" (virtual) reality? > > Robert > > 1. Ignore the whole "survival and reproduction" programming built into > ones genome and mind. It is after all *just* a program and as any > programmer knows programs are created to be improved upon. > 2. One can of course make investment payoff justifications, e.g. my father > fought in WWII contributing to the survival of the "free" world as we know > it and has therefore "paid" a debt to humanity that is now being repaid > even if he is living an "unsustainable" lifestyle currently. I will > freely admit these justifications can become quite elaborate [3] which is > why I'm choosing to put them "on the shelf" for now. > 3. For example one might justify the "evil" of Windows by the good the > Gates Foundation is and/or may yet do. > 4. I've been reading (and cursing) the Linux virtual memory swapping and > scheduling code recently -- and what I've read isn't making me happy in > terms of a "best of all possible worlds" perspective. > From scerir at libero.it Mon Sep 4 20:43:10 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 22:43:10 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence References: Message-ID: <003a01c6d062$bce90cc0$4f961f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Robert Bradbury: > So one gets into a question, not of > whether to kill people (erase copies), > but how much "run time" to give them > and when they should get to have it [4]. Days ago, trying to find something about Spreng's 'triangle'(energy, information, time), Google gave me a paper (not so interesting) about an 'equation' that relates system throughput capacity to resources, resource-sharing, and system threads. http://pharos.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Dienst/Repository/2.0/Body/ncstrl.ucalgary_cs/2000-656-08/pdf This paper may have something to do with the sustainability metasophy. Samantha: > Is this a problem? Does a butterfly need > to justify its existence? > How wonderful a creature we are that we have > spare cycles to ruminate as to whether we are > justified in simply being! The justification for the ExIstence reminds me of something Putman wrote about the question of 'realism' (in math), which (according to P.) is not the question of the existence (of math objects) but the question of the objectivity (of math). From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 23:18:09 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 16:18:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] new mersenne prime? In-Reply-To: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200609042318.k84NIAqb001366@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Whoa. We have an early report of a new Mersenne prime discovered this morning. Confirmation is underway, 44th if confirmed. If true, my time-based prediction model has gotten stupid-lucky four times in a row, with compensating errors accounting for the last two successes. In those last two, the GIMPS growth rate has been slower than I predicted and the tightness of the latest cluster is beyond bizarre. Stand by, I will have word back in about 10 days. I don't even know if it is one of the 10 million digit primes yet (worth 100k$), but my model shows only about a 30% chance that it is. I can't explain it. Just too weird. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 23:22:11 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 16:22:11 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification > for existence > > At 01:44 PM 9/4/2006 -0400, Robert wrote: > > > So one gets into a question, not of whether to kill people (erase > > copies), but how much "run time" to give them and when they should > > get to have it > > Who is this "one", white man? One might find oneself tarred&feathered > and run out of town on a rail, or strung up quicksmart, if one > judiciously starts musing aloud on how much runtime everyone else > deserves to have. > > Damien Broderick Ja, I have reluctantly concluded some time ago that even post singularity, these types of questions will be answered pretty much the same as they are now and always have been: by force. The processes which will get the most run-time will be those which manage to make it so themselves. Evolution hath spoken, regardless of whether we like what it says. spike From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 23:28:28 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 00:28:28 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> On 9/5/06, spike wrote: > > Ja, I have reluctantly concluded some time ago that even post singularity, > these types of questions will be answered pretty much the same as they are > now and always have been: by force. The processes which will get the most > run-time will be those which manage to make it so themselves. Evolution > hath spoken, regardless of whether we like what it says. > And yet I don't seem to find myself increasing my "run time" by going around to my neighbor's house and sticking a spear into him so I can take his stuff the way my ancestors used to. Evolution does sometimes produce progress, after all. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 4 23:45:59 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 16:45:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609042346.k84Nk2CY003654@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Russell Wallace Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence On 9/5/06, spike wrote: ... even post singularity, these types of questions will be answered pretty much the same as they are now and always have been: by force... >...And yet I don't seem to find myself increasing my "run time" by going around to my neighbor's house and sticking a spear into him so I can take his stuff the way my ancestors used to. Evolution does sometimes produce progress, after all. Ja, of course we are not yet post singularity. Spears wouldn't be the appropriate technology in any case, but rather something analogous to what you see if you hit control alt delete on a windoze computer. You see a list of processes, most of which you didn't ask for and don't know anything about, and are not working for you. In a very real sense, those processes are competing with each other for run time. Some mysterious process in the operating system is deciding which process gets the cycles, without consulting you, even tho you are paying the power bill. Some of those processes may be viruses or inadvertently downloaded advertising. This is very much in line with my understanding of evolution. spike From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 4 23:52:57 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 00:52:57 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence In-Reply-To: <200609042346.k84Nk2CY003654@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> <200609042346.k84Nk2CY003654@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609041652x7d503c05g92954c5c33006c23@mail.gmail.com> On 9/5/06, spike wrote: > > Ja, of course we are not yet post singularity. Spears wouldn't be the > appropriate technology in any case, but rather something analogous to what > you see if you hit control alt delete on a windoze computer. You see a > list > of processes, most of which you didn't ask for and don't know anything > about, and are not working for you. In a very real sense, those processes > are competing with each other for run time. Some mysterious process in > the > operating system is deciding which process gets the cycles, without > consulting you, even tho you are paying the power bill. Some of those > processes may be viruses or inadvertently downloaded advertising. This is > very much in line with my understanding of evolution. > Tried it just now and as usual, almost all the CPU time was going to Folding at home - which I did ask for, as part of my contribution to the war against our common enemy, death. Hey, I'm supposed to be the pessimist around here :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 4 23:59:43 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 16:59:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> Russell Wallace wrote: > > And yet I don't seem to find myself increasing my "run time" by going > around to my neighbor's house and sticking a spear into him so I can > take his stuff the way my ancestors used to. Evolution does sometimes > produce progress, after all. That ain't evolution, son. It's intelligence what did the trick. Yes, I know that natural selection produced intelligence to begin with; but I think, in this case, that it is particularly important to distinguish between natural selection and intelligence... Sigh. I know that reclaiming the word "evolution" is a lost cause, after all the abuse that's been rendered on it - but it leaves people with only a single mental bucket to represent two hellaciously different optimization processes. PS: Robert Bradbury, would you *please* stop advocating murdering everyone you don't like? It ain't movin' humanity forward. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 00:24:18 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 01:24:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609041724g2b78e74dq3e9b80ad7174636@mail.gmail.com> On 9/5/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > Sigh. I know that reclaiming the word "evolution" is a lost cause, > after all the abuse that's been rendered on it - but it leaves people > with only a single mental bucket to represent two hellaciously different > optimization processes. Well, memetics is something of a grey area where you have selection operating on entities which were created and modified by intelligence rather than random mutation; "evolution" can be taken to mean selection (of entities generated by any means) or the entire package of purely random mutation plus selection. That said, I'm not really trying to argue for the first usage, was merely providing a perspective plus data to back it up. PS: Robert Bradbury, would you *please* stop advocating murdering > everyone you don't like? It ain't movin' humanity forward. Agreed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Sep 5 01:16:40 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 18:16:40 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosophy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <200609042346.k84Nk2CY003654@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: Spike wrote: > You see a list > of processes, most of which you didn't ask for and don't know anything > about, and are not working for you. In a very real sense, those processes > are competing with each other for run time. Some mysterious process in > the > operating system is deciding which process gets the cycles, without > consulting you, even tho you are paying the power bill. Some of those > processes may be viruses or inadvertently downloaded advertising. This is > very much in line with my understanding of evolution. I think "synergetics" (with apologies to Bucky Fuller)is an apt term to describe the more general process, including stellar conversion of H to He and later generation of heavier elements, pre-biological efficacious arrangements of molecules, DNA-based biological evolution, human cultural development, and imminent non-biological organisms and superorganisms. - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Sep 5 01:24:47 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 18:24:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosophy as a justification forexistence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sorry about the poorly formatted quoting. Business requirements dictate I switch to Outlook and Exchange for both personal and business email. I'm working on workarounds. - Jef > Spike wrote: > > > You see a list > > of processes, most of which you didn't ask for and don't know anything > > about, and are not working for you. In a very real sense, those > processes > > are competing with each other for run time. Some mysterious process > in > > the > > operating system is deciding which process gets the cycles, without > > consulting you, even tho you are paying the power bill. Some of those > > processes may be viruses or inadvertently downloaded advertising. > This is > > very much in line with my understanding of evolution. From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Sep 5 01:40:25 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 18:40:25 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A framework for collaborative deliberation Message-ID: On a topic very close to my heart, TruthMapping.com has released a video describing their no-charge public framework for collaborative deliberation. - Jef From neomorphy at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 01:43:00 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 11:43:00 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9/5/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > This can be thought of in near term perspectives -- does one buy a Flex > Fuel car or a Hybrid car (or does one bike to work)? Is one "religiously" > strict with oneself -- i.e. the *MONEY SAVED* by buying a 1972 inefficient > highly polluting vehicle (perhaps 20-40x cheaper than a new "green" car) > invested in companies producing ethanol, solar cells, better food crops, > lifespan extension, etc. Or do you take that money and use it for some > "frivolous" purpose? > TANGENT: To compare the benefits of one option against another, you can use a "Life-Cycle Analysis" (LCA) for each option. Although rigorous LCA calculations can require a stupid amount of research, and an LCA can never cover all the aspects of an issue, a simple estimation can confirm whether your gut is sensible about the impacts of one option against another. Just say you plan to travel 5,000 km/year over the next 5 years. Your options are 1972 OldGuzzler, 2006 Hybrid or bicycle (Note: the following figures may be highly inaccurate) Time LCA: You'll be travelling an average of 100 km per week; a 10 km journey each way 5 days a week with nothing left over (or less per working day plus occasional/weekend travel). Driving this in a typical city might take 15 min each way (same for guzzler & hybrid); cycling might take 30 min each way. Over 5 years, this amounts to 500 hours driving, or 1000 hours cycling. Energy LCA: The Old Guzzler has effectively no embodied energy, if you're looking at saving it from the scrapyard. If its fuel efficiency is, say, 15 L/100 km (~16MPG), at 34 MJ/L, that amounts to 5.1 MJ/km. Over 5 years: 127 GJ transport energy, which is its total energy consumption. As a very rough guide, the manufacture of 1 kg of metal or plastic requires about 100 MJ to produce. For a hybrid, 1400 kg of car would therefore represent 140 GJ of "embodied energy" The transportational energy would require 4.3 L/100km (60MPG) at 34 MJ/L = 1.5 MJ/km. Over 5 years: 37 GJ. Over 5 years, that's a total of 177 GJ of energy, although you've still got a decent car at the other end. As for the bike, well, it requires maybe 2 GJ to manufacture, if that. The transport costs... are tricky. Sure, you need to eat more when you ride, but you do get healthier... Other factors: older vehicles and poorly maintainned vehicles produce FAR more "urban air pollution" than more modern vehicles with the equivalent fuel economy. Another consideration for the bike is that when it rains, they get wet. Which is not so tragic, but it seems to turn a lot of wimps off cycling. Cost LCA: Cost = fuel costs + depreciation over 5 years + maintenance (inc: rego, insurance) + the cost of your time. Again, the bike is tricky, because it also saves you from having to go to the gym... But just comparing Ol' G & New H (in A$): Ol'Guzzler: Cost = $7500 Fuel (25000km* 15 L/100km * $2/L) + $500 depreciation (cheap--> scrap) + $4000 maintenance (500/y repairs, 300/y insurance) + time = $12,000 + time New Hybrid: Cost = $2150 Fuel (25000km* 4.3 L/100km * $2/L) + $15,000 depreciation + $3000 maintenance (250/y repairs, 350/y insurance) + time = $20,150 + time Therefore, the new Hybrid is significantly more expensive over 5 years, but certainly not "20-40x cheaper than a new 'green' car". So? Well, I just like to look at the whole picture. People who drive a lot of miles should definitely be looking at leaner or greener cars, not only for environmental reasons, but for cost as well. However, don't look at the options as a dichotomy. For a moderate-level driver in a non urban environment, an older small vehicle might be appropriate. Then there's public transport - it's not only for the poor and disabled, despite what some people may think. Moving or changing jobs is also an (extreme) option! So... use "the right tool for the right job" -- Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Sep 5 02:26:29 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 22:26:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: Robert wrote: >> So one gets into a question, not of whether to kill people (erase >> copies), but how much "run time" to give them and when they should >> get to have it > > Who is this "one", white man? > Damien Broderick One who probably drives around with a "we live to grow the economy" bumper sticker? S. From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 03:48:57 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 04:48:57 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused / make 10M pounds for free References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora><470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com><44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com><8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com><009a01c6cfc7$db258ab0$cd150751@heritagekd9czj><44FB9447.8050008@pobox.com><00eb01c6cfcd$e9743430$cd150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <004601c6d09e$384209e0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> The crux of the problem is not knowing that there are laws of physics and limits on what can reasonably be done in the known physuical universe. Its much easier to accept "magic" and and super-universe entitites. Robert ------------------------------------- I do agree with you. I'm always careful not to totally tear their ideas apart with words like magic given that I still haven't managed to upload my consciousness and explain the universe yet. What's probably worse than the ideas themselves is the unquestioning belief in them, which is obviously necessary because to get to 80 and then change your mind isn't going to be much fun - at least I might be able to get to that age thinking "well, I've done something". There's a funny twist going on with cyronics in the way that religious people don't seem to think it's right. Yet they don't mind taking antibiotics. Or going to miracle healing sites. That's kind of like slapping god in the face I would have thought. And if it's because they're fallible humans, they should be able to except that the rest of us are fallible and therefore not valid targets for hate campaigns, looking down on and terrorist bombings. At least I'm not simultaneously kissing up to god and then telling him he's wrong in the same breath. Of coarse, there's also the fact that for them, it's easier to just believe you're going somewhere spiritually and not have to bother sorting out life insurance and cryo tanks during your waking life. Religion's all about efficiency. No need to care about dying or being nasty to people because you'll be forgiven, lots of spare time to do other stuff in for most 'believers' in the west - "I'm christian but don't go". John ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 03:52:36 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 04:52:36 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <200609041507.k84F7mSE013119@andromeda.ziaspace.com><002d01c6d037$c2204030$de150751@heritagekd9czj> <20060904160841.GV14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <006801c6d09e$b9999c60$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> >This is the first time I'm hearing about lyophilizicles. Are you sure >you've >not just invented them? It's the alternative to cryonics, for faster warm up times and a crisper crust finish. >Why are you mentioning MEG scanners? One method of determining if the individual is dead is to fit an EEG to their head and check for brain activity. My point being that EEGs are nowhere near as sensitive as MEG scanners, and even MEGs require quite a bit of activity before they'll detect events. John From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 03:54:30 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 04:54:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <20060904170853.59076.qmail@web50403.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <007101c6d09e$fdebff70$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> I wonder if before we get people reanimated it might be possible to store the tanks somewhere in space in a shadow to keep them cool 24/7. John From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 05:07:20 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 01:07:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> Message-ID: On 9/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > > That ain't evolution, son. It's intelligence what did the trick. Yes, > I know that natural selection produced intelligence to begin with; but I > think, in this case, that it is particularly important to distinguish > between natural selection and intelligence... Actually I question whether fear of negative consequences has much to do with intelligence. If you go back to William Calvin and much of human "intelligence" (in the form of predicting future outcomes based upon mental rehearsal of stone/spear throwing) *evolved* so we could put food on the table. So one does not steal from ones neighbor because socialization teaches you at a young age to avoid the consequences of doing so (or you predicted in advance that doing so is likely to have negative consequences). Natural selection by societies long ago eliminated the people who failed to consider the consequences of regularly stealing from ones neighbor. PS: Robert Bradbury, would you *please* stop advocating murdering > everyone you don't like? It ain't movin' humanity forward. Actually, I didn't advocate "murdering" anyone [1]. I considered whether or not people were entitled to equal shares of the available resources. This is a significant question considering the jump in resources that individuals will potentially have in 20-40 years and the restrictions societies may choose to impose upon *who* can grab (control) *what* [2]. One gets into complex questions like should we give the resources to Sadaam's relatives or Warren Buffet's relatives? What fraction of the resources are people imprisoned for "life" entitled to? These are non-trivial topics and the two primary transhumanist organizations at this point (the WTA and the WTS) seem to have two quite different approaches to such topics. The questions arose out of personal motivation debates. First, I am already clear that if I choose to make personal uploaded copies they will all understand from the start that if their use of resources is extropicly wasteful then I would probably support a reduction of their runtime. That is the foundation contract that I would presumably make with myself. It is simply a transfer of natural selection into the virtual realm. So I don't have to solve the question for myself but I do need to consider whether that solution is of any use given solutions that others may select. Second, as I believe that I understand the aging problem well enough now to make a more successful attempt at solving it *and* having been down the startup and build a company road *several* times I am asking myself whether or not I really want to go to all that trouble to again [3]. This is particularly true if the net result is to give the "gift of extended life" to a bunch of people whose lives can be considered quite unextropic [4]. Years ago I used to think that lifespan extension was a great idea. People would have more time, they would learn more, they would be more generous, etc. But if reality is that the "Type A" personalities are going to grab all of the marbles and leave most of the rest of humanity with little or nothing then I have no interest in that reality. Nor do I have any interest in a reality where it is all worked out by an AI caretaker (God by any other name). But perhaps the worst of the three would be the reality that looks like the one we have today (only with many more people with much longer lives) -- where it is clear, at least to some, that we could have much much more and have failed to develop the philosophical, economic and political systems which are necessary to enable that. Robert 1. Though I understand how many might make that assumption given how my previous arguments have been misconstrued. The hallmark of anyone who is a good debater is their ability to take *any* position and justify it. One should not equate the argument with the arguer. 2. Who "owns" the moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the asteroids, the non-Earth solar output of the sun, the raw materials in the Oort Cloud, etc. 3. For people who haven't done it, except for those few who enjoy building organizations and bureaucracies, it is a real pain in the ass. 4. The "nice" part about the world as it currently exists is that faulty genomes (and natural selection) will "murder" all the people lacking transhumanist insights -- I don't have to lift a single finger. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 05:37:40 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 06:37:40 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence References: Message-ID: <00e901c6d0ad$67993010$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> "Then there's public transport - it's not only for the poor and disabled, despite what some people may think." Darn right! I use public transport from time to time! Oh wait... I am poor. I think Robert has taken a bit of a one sided battering on this one. Although, I find I can at least somewhat see where he's going with it. This may have something to do with considering myself an innovative person. Whenever I see something I can't help but take it apart and see if there's anyway I can improve it, even if it's working fine before I touch it; "If it ain't broke, tweak it until it is!" My brother is a patent lawyer and I've spent a countless hours time chatting about ideas to him and investigating the possibility of filing patents on designs and ideas I've had for magnetic nozzles etc. One thing that has suprised me quite a lot is that basically, if you've had a great idea, you can almost bet your life that at least one other person is already onto something very similar or already filed for it. If you revisit the patent office with new ideas regularly, you'll see just how incredibly frequent this is - and how little most people appreciate the repetition of ideas. My brother, as someone who deals with the problems when the ideas cross over, can attest to the similarities and, often, almost insignificant differences between designs claiming to be unique. Not being a particularly religious person, I don't have a lot to comfort myself when it comes to the idea of death. But one of the few things* I do take some kind of strange comfort in is that even after I die, I'm sure there will be people with minds working in a similar pattern to my own. They won't be me, and they won't have exactly the same ideas, but they'll be approximations. My point here is that I think people sometimes over emphasise on each individual being unique in a superior sense. We're each unique, but I think there are a lot more similarities than differences - the motto of the IP guys being "Evolution not revolution!" Robert's argument is an absolute, and one that will likely take a long time to reach. By the time we do reach it, our capacity for computation will be disgustingly huge by comparison with today and there's almost no way our understanding of the universe or ourselves will be as it is now. It's quite possible we're making predictions for 'future shortages' that are never going to occur in the way we see them now simply because we'll discover some new layer of space previously known to us. E.g. 100 years ago - "We'll run out of coal and the world will stop", then along came nuclear physics. Also, I seriously doubt (and I really mean seriously) that our concept of self will still be anything like it is now - e.g. we might exist as a pool of consciousness (just mutation factors) that operate on one big shared pool of data, not individual memories and private ideas. In our pool, 'killing resources' won't be analogous to killing people as it is now, we'd be trimming off things everyone had access to and didn't want anymore. The only thing close to killing humans today here would be killing the individual 'mutation factors' (the 'randomness' that causes us to interconnect ideas in a less than perfectly linear fashion) and when you examine precisely how the human brain invents ideas even now, there is very, very, very little spontaneity about it (neurons interconnect by 'linear' logic as simultaneous depolarisations occur that can produce a better result, they don't 'just do it' in the romantic way an artist would like to think they do - and you should be grateful they don't, because it's the reason you're able to type a reply to the list). Even art has a linear nature to it, the artist isn't just making up randomness, they're trying to convey something, somehow directly from empirical experience (perhaps modified a bit in their mind's virtual environment, but modified with reference to other emprical experiences) - be it a photorealistic picture or abstract swipes with a 4" brush (Would an artist with no memory of empirical experiences be able to create art?). If you want to experience the romantic beauty of more random thought, try some magic mushrooms or acid. Perhaps once we can upload our minds, we can do even better by purposefully distorting our neural interconnections with randomising algorithms to increase 'spark' inventivity (To me, this is a perfectly valid use of psychoactive drugs). There is a large quantity (perhaps even a majority?) of redundant data shared between us that we just won't need in an upload type of environment (we can delete a whole load of it and still not loose -anything- unique, what so ever - you couldn't even really call it compression, it'd just be a vector format). So, pragmatically, in an upload environment, I think there'll initially be a huge amount of room for improving the 'efficiency' of consciousness by just getting ride of all the repeating memories we share. We'll start off needing loads of space for it all. Then, once we start sharing with each other, we'll go through a rapid efficiency improving stage as we realise that my memory of orange is virtually indentical to Robert's, and everyone else's (or at least parts of that memory are, meaning that they can removed stripped without any loss to 'uniqueness') In today's world, going out and hunting down 'lesser' entities wouldn't be necessary (If you're thinking in terms of SENS stuff). Controlled breeding and/or better education of their children would 'evolve' them out of the system as they died away naturally. Condoms and people using them would seriously help the population problem all on it's own. In Robert's ultimate, we might assume that the lifespan of our entities will be gigantic (that they burn up resources at an unacceptable rate, that endangers the entire group's survival, compared to discovering them), and so some form of active cleaning up would be required. This is already happening in places like Africa and China in a passive drive - trying to get them to use condoms or sign up for sterilisation. Theoretically, a single intelligence (Robert or I for instance) could grow and grow until it drains the entire universe of resources due to it's massive scale. So the entirety of humanity would only do that more rapidly given the same rate of expansion per entity. However, we can be a bit more pragmatic about it and take into account the ideas I mentioned above regarding an equally expanding understanding of the universe and a new understanding of consciousness counteracting the effect somewhat. Also, we can make an immediate effort to control the quantities of individuals entering into our 'dyson sphere super computer' rather than just waiting for them to spiral. Rather than be nasty and actively wipe out billions of people, you could start with only passing those consciousnesses into your sphere that already displayed some signs of a 'unique spark' rather than everyone that just prefers to cruise through existence. Of coarse, this can get quite complex given that part of the reason I'm not the latter is purely due to my education and environment. But this prelude before a person's mindset becomes solidified represents a big efficiency drive. Criminals are an example. Once a child grows into a criminal, it suddenly costs tens and tens of thousands of pounds (minimum) to deal with what would have cost next to nothing for the parents to avoid initially. When my mum smacked me and told me off as a kid, it meant that the rest of society wouldn't have to deal with a substantial tax burden when I grew up. My initial upbringing has also allowed my mind to remain open, which is perhaps one of the hardest things I think you can teach a child. I, for example, don't immediately cringe shut at the idea of allowing religious people to carry on thinking what they want to, or deleting individuals (like myself) when there are others who are similar and not enough resources to support us both. In a similar way, my primordial super computer upload space (limited rooms! apply now!) might not have the spare room to accommodate individuals who aren't already 'well behaved', that need subsequent parenting on the others' behalf. So instead, I might prime it with individuals judged by society to be 'unique' candidates (Not necessarily celebrities, no - since so many of them aren't that unique in reality. Celebrities like Jimi Hendrix might qualify). If society just flat out didn't have the money to pay for criminals to be dealt with in the way they are now, they'd just be shot for efficiency. It's only because we have the luxury of spare resources that they're not - lucky them hey? Saying all this, I do like the idea of smelling the roses and planting seeds as opposed to pruning. I also stop and question from time to time this unquestioning 'drive forward' we have. Again, as someone who constantly tweaks things and messes around to make them better, it's something very personal to me; understanding why I'm actually doing that in the first place. Sometimes, I like to read books, watch films, play slowly to drag out the experience (which is just allowing more memories to replay and more time for interconnections to form in my brain). It may be that we don't see a continuously exponential rise in our consumption (see the above bit about vector formatting away redundant junk) and intellect once we achieve uploading. That instead, we go through a boom phase and then begin leveling off, at least temporarily, before our consumption rate becomes unsustainable. There may only be so much to know. The curve will be dictated by a.) how quickly we acquire / process that knowledge and b.) how much of it there is in relation to resources available for processing it. E.g. If there's more possible knowledge (logic takes energy to process) than resources, the curve will still be rising when we run out of stuff to fuel the processing. Or perhaps there's enough energy to process all the knowledge possible, and so it'll start leveling off as the knowledge starts being regurgitated (and our cleaned up resources get messy again as we use up all the spare resources). But cutting everything short, the idea of 'uniqueness' (which is closely tied to compression) is something that really interests me. I suspect that it'll only become more and more important as we approach and enter uploading. In order to compress something, you need to be able to evaluate it for repetition, which is difficult when we all have private consciousnesses and memories. Once those are uploadable, the data they contain will be exposed and become discrete and highly quantative making it easy to route through things presently thought of as private and incapable of being judged by another and delete away the redundancies. This will also be aided as we develop better and better ways of converting huge fields of qualitative information into discretes that can be processed in a similar way, as well as better computers and algorithms for working through it all. John *One of the other things that makes death slightly easier for me is an appreciate for the cycle energy is passing through and knowing that perhaps some other form of life might be able to make some use of me to carry on with it's struggle against thermodynamic equilibrium if I'm unlucky enough to die. That I came from the soil and that's where might end up again, just as a transient arrangement of the the energy previously in the soil that happens to be. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 05:56:34 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 06:56:34 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609042256l87cd21na4ae30a5f08d6e84@mail.gmail.com> On 9/5/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > So one does not steal from ones neighbor because socialization teaches you > at a young age to avoid the consequences of doing so (or you predicted in > advance that doing so is likely to have negative consequences). > Fear of negative consequences is not in fact the only reason why I don't murder my neighbor and steal his property; and the sun wastes more energy in a second than we've used in our entire existence as a species, if only we can tap it; but leaving these aside... Certain things you have said could be construed to mean that you are a K-strategist, one who, given a wish on condition that his neighbor would have twice as much, would say "put out one of my eyes", one who genuinely believes death is good. If that is so - I don't know you personally, so I can't really tell one way or the other - then there is nothing more to be said between us; we are on opposite sides. But it seems to me that perhaps your intentions are good, and it is merely that you are mortally exhausted. And if that is so, then I can fully sympathize. "Dearly the Mother purchased the gift of life for us, and dearly shall our enemies purchase it from me in turn. Little love hath She for those who let Her gift fall through fingers slack with resignation." The quote is from memory and may not be exact, I forget where I got it from and even Google knows not of it, but I think the intent comes across. So my suggestion for what it's worth is that you do whatever works for you to catch your breath. Get plastered drunk and watch Pink Floyd: The Wall on DVD. Take a long walk late at night through the suburbs and the hills where the wind whistles through the trees and down to the beach where the moonlit waves wash on the sand and you meet a tired-looking hippie couple who give you a cheery wave at three o'clock in the morning and make you realize we all face things in their own way. Or whatever is your style. Then rise to your feet again, take up your weapon which is your mind, and rejoin the fight, for the Grim Reaper is not an enemy to whom you bare your throat; he does not follow the mammal protocol of sparing a surrendered enemy. Choose a battlefield - life extension is a good one, we're losing tens of millions every year on that front, but it looks potentially winnable. And go to it; perhaps you will fall regardless, but resolve to fall as part of a victory, not defeat. "Then we shall fight in the shade." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Tue Sep 5 05:47:30 2006 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 22:47:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <007101c6d09e$fdebff70$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060905054730.72664.qmail@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> John wrote: > I wonder if before we get people reanimated it might be possible to store > the tanks somewhere in space in a shadow to keep them cool 24/7. I always thought a cryonics facility in Antarctica would be an interesting idea for the same reason. At least, it would be a risk reduction. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 06:21:32 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 07:21:32 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com><200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com><8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com><44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> Message-ID: <00f801c6d0b3$8872dbf0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> >It is simply a transfer of natural selection into the virtual realm. Indeed. The only slight difference being that some form of intellignece is being allowed to judge, or even prejudge, when an entity or pathway has become none desirable. People don't like that, probably because they're so used to other humans trying to screw them over if possible for their resources. By leaving it to chance in the natural method of selection, it seems fairer to the majority I suspect. You could question, is it also fair that you're born predisposed to dying of cancer? And I think the majority would also answer no, that we should wipe out these predispositions and you would then die based solely on your interactions with the world, not on a predisposition. The religious might argue against that, until they get cancer. Unfortunately, the universe is not homogenous, so what about those people born in environment more threatening to them? They're also predisposed to an early death regardless of their genetics. How about randomness in general predisposing people to random deaths through no fault of their own? The utter chaos people like to think exists, doesn't. Everything you interact with on a macro scale today is probably (since I can't rule out god) happening because of something that's happened to it in the past. Gas molecules bouncing against your skin because they've spent the last few billion years bouncing against others, causing vector changes that have brought them to Earth and up close to your body. Maybe your boss will be angry with you today and so depress you, making you more likely to die earlier. Random? No. So, keeping all this predisposition in mind, the idea of an intelligence evaluating entities for resources doesn't quite seem so terrible after all. At least an intelligence is able to evaluate the randomness as well and make and effort to balance things out. Natural selection doesn't care one bit, you're predisposed, you die. It's like that great arguement "A drugs company killed people 10 people developing this drug, so there's been no gain". Leave it to natural selection and you'll have a few million times that number of deaths before some problems are solved, potentially billions or trillions more for other problems. Neither do we know for sure that the intelligence doing the selecting (humans) are entirely free entities themselves. A great deal of what we do is predetermined before we even think of doing it (see the boss example above - you being depressed has been partially set in motion by your boss before they even came into work). >This is particularly true if the net result is to give the "gift of extended life" >to a bunch of people whose lives can be considered quite unextropic [4]. >Years ago I used to think that lifespan extension was a great idea. People >would have more time, they would learn more, they would be more generous, etc. >But if reality is that the "Type A" personalities are going to grab all of the marbles >and leave most of the rest of humanity with little or nothing then I have no interest >in that reality. I also agree. As I've already said, I'm going to do electronics with nanotech soon. I can already anticipate that, without doubt, I will come up against the idea of developing something that will in some way be exploited by someone else for malevolent manipulation and exploitation of others. That's a hard one to justify for me because I'm not a flag waver. Although, I am open to the ontological question, why does killing someone for their wallet always have to be wrong? I made a post on hypocrisy to a web blog with a similar vibe just recently. If you know something is wrong, you can either uphold your own opinion to the letter and hope to 'inform and transform' or you can play along with that failing system as a normal member and attempt to crash it from there. The first is very romantically correct, the second can be far more efficient. You may develop a cure for death, and simultaneously doctor it to allow you to selectively wipe out those individuals stealing all the marbles so's that the remainder can share (although, I suspect you'll find a lot of new marble stealers offer to take up the position). Or maybe you'll become a marble stealer yourself. Or a marble stealer in a select group of entities 'worthy' of existence. With a little bit of consideration, marble stealing can become a perfectly valid job title that even agrees in some ways with your idea of trimming. I suppose what you really mean, however, is marble stealing for the sake of marble stealing. Like, being a billionaire and buying ten cars that you never actually remember you have. At least by doing the degree I am going to do, I will be a good position to partially influence the direct the results take. >Nor do I have any interest in a reality where it is all worked out by an >AI caretaker (God by any other name). Not so sure know about that myself, depends on how much the AI was doing. If it was just looking after everything, it might give me more spare time to do the things I was interested in. Even if it appeared to rule my experience of existence, I'd have to question whether or not it and I were truely separate entities - perhaps it might just be some separate area of my own conscious experience, as the subconcious (the thalamus for instance) in my brain that preprocesses all the data coming in from my sensory nervous system is presently my "AI caretaker". No one seems to mind that though. In fact, without it, like being without a linear, logical method of interconnecting neurons, we'd just turn out highly random, intelligence lacking junk. And after all, the propogation of intelligence is basically what transhumanism / extropy is all about - we don't really care about the continued propogation of space dust. It's not about humans themselves, with their flesh and bones, it's about the intelligence they contain. I think intelligence and caretaking (which is just intelligence on level that we can't directly, consciously experience for ourselves) can certainly live together, being simply different forms of a similar thing that can interact almost synergetically. >But perhaps the worst of the three would be the reality that looks >like the one we have today (only with many more people with much longer lives) >-- where it is clear, at least to some, that we could have much >much more and have failed to develop the philosophical, economic and political systems >which are necessary to enable that. Maybe we should get married. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at tsoft.com Tue Sep 5 05:56:31 2006 From: lcorbin at tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 22:56:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <6045D66F-DF5D-4508-BBAC-467727A85C94@mac.com> Message-ID: Leave it to Robert to get everyone to delurk a while, with a typical incendiary post :-) > > I've been wrestling lately with the question about how one justifies > > one's existence [1]. I agree with Samantha about this peculiar take on "justifies". Besides, that word pushes buttons for us Pan Critical Rationalism types. Damien responded: > One might find oneself tarred&feathered and run out of town on > a rail, or strung up quicksmart, if one judiciously starts musing > aloud on how much runtime everyone else deserves to have. Three things wrong with that, IMO. (1) it sounds like a threat! (2) it seems to bespeak timorousness or cowardice, that one might be assaulted for having merely opened his mouth (and Damien is hardly immune himself from opening his mouth in publicly- disapproved of ways), and (3) all the answers to Robert, including that one, fail in my view to adequately employ the Principle of Charity, i.e., to try to see what lies behind the words in the best light possible. Expanding on that, shouldn't we always ask ourselves if trivial rewordings would make a passage less objectionable? Robert went on: > > From an extropic perspective it would appear to me that one > > has to be acting on the stage in such a way as to contribute > > to sustainability, survival, evolution and presumably > > increasing complexity of humanity. Now I *could* argue that this is flagrantly incorrect: one does obviously not have to be acting in such a way: millions of people don't. However, I will try to see what he is trying to say: clearly he approves of behavior in other people---and urges us to approve ---when that behavior results in sustainability, survival, etc. But there is hardly anything wrong with that! We all say as much all the time. I don't see any euthanasia being advocated, either here or in the rest of his post. At most he is raising the very good question, "what kind of people should there be?". (That's a book title, by the way, a title that causes some people to get shrill. Hmm. Funny, I don't see it at Amazon, though I own a copy.) > > So one gets into a question, not of whether to kill people > > (erase copies), but how much "run time" to give them and > > when they should get to have it. I don't know if Robert is suggesting that existing people ought to have their runtime doled out by the government or by The People's Will. I will presume not. I will say that if I run people on my own machinery, then it's best that other folks mind their own business, and that no one intercede. It's an old argument, but respect for the rule of law and for private property has taken us quite far. BillK defends the retired with > Many 'retirees' consume very few resources and other arguments. But the best argument for defending their present use of resources is to attribute their effort and industry during their working years to a promise that they'd be looked out for later. Sure the system stinks, but that's government for you. Lee From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 06:28:49 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 07:28:49 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <20060905054730.72664.qmail@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <010c01c6d0b4$8c95dc40$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> That's a thought I've had as well. There are places around there that can get as low as -80C - I had been wondering if it would be possible to build a big CO2 condensing plant there to liquify the excess from the air (you don't want to know how much storage space you'd need if it worked - although it'd still probably be cheaper than the mica dust reflector idea). It would certainly help with reducing the energy loss from the cryostats. Since the bodies aren't going anywhere and don't require any complex electronics or servicing to support them (unlike big, complex physics experiments), it should be feasible I would imagine. John ----- Original Message ----- From: Anne Corwin To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 6:47 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare John wrote: > I wonder if before we get people reanimated it might be possible to store > the tanks somewhere in space in a shadow to keep them cool 24/7. I always thought a cryonics facility in Antarctica would be an interesting idea for the same reason. At least, it would be a risk reduction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 06:43:48 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 07:43:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence References: Message-ID: <013301c6d0b6$a45b4cf0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> >But the best argument for defending their > present use of resources is to attribute their effort and industry > during their working years to a promise that they'd be looked > out for later. A possible counter to that may be the argument; "If we assume they were also paid fairly at the time for their effort, they have already been allotted a fair amount of 'play time' which, if they are now in need of our support, they have already squandered." This is a thought the always comes back to me when I hear of prison sentences being reduced for the elderly on the grounds that they have less lifespan remaining. So therefore I, as a young person, am better suited to having my lifespan wasted during the years where I might be able to provide input to society and enjoy my life? Not only do I therefore get an unfair amount of extra time, I also get it positioned at a point in my life where it will do, arguably, the maximum amount of damage. It also reoccurs when I hear old people lecturing on the young. The young who are now paying tax to keep one person a in four bedroom house, to respect their dignity, whilst simultaneously not being able to afford a house for themselves and their kids (if they can afford them). I just generally don't like the attitude of a lot of old people. The attitude that lets them say things like "Young people can't do practical mathematics" whilst I'm sitting right beside them and then I watch them struggling to divide a number by 5 for a few minutes, in a group. As so many old people know, young people are stupid and tests are easy. This is why we can design things like Gravity Probe B to measure the distortion of time space - easy. John From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 06:48:34 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 07:48:34 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com><200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com><8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com><44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609042256l87cd21na4ae30a5f08d6e84@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <015901c6d0b7$4ec78910$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> "And go to it; perhaps you will fall regardless, but resolve to fall as part of a victory, not defeat." Klingon style! Personally, I prefer to runaway and hide, then stab whatever it is in the back. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 5 06:50:35 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 08:50:35 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <010c01c6d0b4$8c95dc40$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <20060905054730.72664.qmail@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> <010c01c6d0b4$8c95dc40$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060905065035.GZ14701@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 07:28:49AM +0100, John wrote: > > That's a thought I've had as well. There are places around there that Remote places. Very remote places. You will notice no one builds even data centers in Alaska. There is a reason for that. > can get as low as -80C - I had been wondering if it would be possible No one cares about -80 C. We need <-150 C. -196 C is actually quite cheap, why change it? > to build a big CO2 condensing plant there to liquify the excess from > the air (you don't want to know how much storage space you'd need if > it worked - although it'd still probably be cheaper than the mica dust > reflector idea). You aren't talking about launching stuff into space, are you? The risk is unacceptable, and you'll burn more cryogenic fuel that you'd need to store, nevermind that with the costs you could buy diamond-studded platinum dewars. > It would certainly help with reducing the energy loss from the > cryostats. That's Just Not The Problem. The bulk of costs are elsewhere. > Since the bodies aren't going anywhere and don't require any complex > electronics or servicing to support them (unlike big, > complex physics experiments), it should be feasible I would imagine. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 06:54:38 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 07:54:38 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] A framework for collaborative deliberation References: Message-ID: <017a01c6d0b8$28078860$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Thanks for the link, I'll have a read of it in a while. This is also a subject I'm very interested in. My brother being an IP lawyer means I've chatted to him about the practicalities of the idea a few times. The whole video network / think tank idea I've been messing around with is similarly related. My brother seemed extremely bothered by the idea of ensuring trust between the members even in a closed network. I suspect the only possible way of doing this would be to make the punishments terrible for abuse of the system - e.g. jail time. Which would require a government level of interaction. John > On a topic very close to my heart, TruthMapping.com > has released a video describing their > no-charge public framework for collaborative deliberation. > > - Jef > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 5 07:00:36 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 09:00:36 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <006801c6d09e$b9999c60$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <20060904160841.GV14701@leitl.org> <006801c6d09e$b9999c60$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060905070036.GC14701@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 04:52:36AM +0100, John wrote: > >This is the first time I'm hearing about lyophilizicles. Are you sure > >you've > >not just invented them? > > It's the alternative to cryonics, for faster warm up times and a crisper > crust finish. As I suspected, you're just inventing stuff, not bothering with irrelevant things like practicality. > >Why are you mentioning MEG scanners? > > One method of determining if the individual is dead is to fit an EEG to > their head and check for brain activity. My point being that EEGs are Dead depends on your definition. Your MEG (or EEG) would show zero activity after 20-30 sec of warm ischemia, while animals have been recovered after 14 min of warm ischemia. (It would be hours for cold ischemia). > nowhere near as sensitive as MEG scanners, and even MEGs require quite a bit > of activity before they'll detect events. MEG activity is not a relevant metric even for today's medicine. See http://eugen.leitl.org/cc3894.pdf for an intro. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 5 07:07:18 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 08:07:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare References: <20060905054730.72664.qmail@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com><010c01c6d0b4$8c95dc40$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> <20060905065035.GZ14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <019801c6d0b9$ece02ec0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> >Remote places. Very remote places. You will notice no one builds >even data centers in Alaska. There is a reason for that. Hence the bit about the tanks being low maintenance by comparison to a lot of other things. People don't build there because of the transit costs of moving around in the remote location. If you don't need to move much around, just dump something and leave it, it's nowhere near as bad. Data centers need reasonably regular maintenance and upgrading. >You aren't talking about launching stuff into space, are you? That was about the idea that you could build atmospheric conditioners to condense CO2 out of the air in some of the coldest areas of world. It'd use up lots of storage space and cost a lot, but the mica dust in space idea costs a crazy amount. Putting a dewar in orbit is in no way unacceptably risky - it's been refined to an artform. By the time we get round to reanimating people, launching things that size into space may no longer be prohibitively expensive. And I suspect we will reach that stage prior to reanimating what amounts to an already diseased frozen burger. >nevermind that with the costs you could buy diamond-studded >platinum dewars. Diamond is an excellent thermal conductor, you wouldn't want that on your dewar. Sequins, maybe. >That's Just Not The Problem. The bulk of costs are elsewhere. Agreed. Although, if you could get them into space the remaining storage cost would be virtually zero. You'd have to offset the launch capital against the potential saving you could make waiting for reanimation technology to reach an appropiate level of ability. Just a thought, not really all that serious since cryonics is really only a fail safe for me. John From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 5 09:40:17 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 11:40:17 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist's nightmare In-Reply-To: <019801c6d0b9$ece02ec0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <20060905065035.GZ14701@leitl.org> <019801c6d0b9$ece02ec0$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060905094017.GE14701@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 08:07:18AM +0100, John wrote: > >Remote places. Very remote places. You will notice no one builds > >even data centers in Alaska. There is a reason for that. > > Hence the bit about the tanks being low maintenance by comparison to a lot > of other things. People don't build there because of the transit costs of Are you familiar with permafrost building codes? Transport costs (helicopter)? Costs of maintaining a permanently manned polar station on a moving ice shield? These costs are at least two orders of magnitude higher than, say, operating a facility in Scottsdale. Or Michigan. http://www.thepoles.com/expguide/costs.htm "Polar expeditions are the most costly adventures in the world, exceeded only by space travel and deep sea submerging. The main reason is cost of transportation; namely air flights. In addition, the ruggedness of the Arctic Ocean requires expensive customized heavy duty materials and high performance gear. The sled alone is hand made of Kevlar and charges at least 4500 USD (2200 USD for the lighter South Pole version). Iljusin at Patriot HillThe logistic cost of Antarctica is around 140 000 USD per 1-2 person expedition and 250 000 USD for 3-6 (the cost is per payload). The charge includes roundtrip flight to the continent in a large heavy duty plane (Iljusin, Hercules, DC3), a few days stay at Patriot Hills Base Camp, and flight out from the SP in a Twin Otter or Cessna. The 15 minute flight out to the coast starting point (Hercules Inlet) comes extra with 7000 USD for Twin Otter (max 6 pers). Add cost for food, gear, insurance and travel to PA. Interestingly enough, it comes cheaper to join an ANI guided South Pole expedition. The charge is around 45 000 USD per person; all air transportation, food, gas, gear, 1-3 air food drops and guide included. The reason for this prize discrepancy is another typical ANI mystery." What if your LN transport lapses, because of snowstorm? > moving around in the remote location. If you don't need to move much around, > just dump something and leave it, it's nowhere near as bad. LN is a cheap industrial chemical. In most places. In Alaska, LN is suddenly becoming very expensive. LN in Antarctica is prohibitively expensive. Making LN in Antarctica is even more ludicrous. The boiloff rate difference between Arizona and Antarctica is negligible. Summary: it's a remarkably stupid idea. It is usually a very good strategy to drop stupid ideas, once having been pointed out their shortcomings. > Data centers need reasonably regular maintenance and upgrading. A cryonics facility is not a kurgan mound. > >You aren't talking about launching stuff into space, are you? > > That was about the idea that you could build atmospheric conditioners to > condense CO2 out of the air in some of the coldest areas of world. It'd use Dry ice is much too warm. > up lots of storage space and cost a lot, but the mica dust in space idea > costs a crazy amount. Putting a dewar in orbit is in no way unacceptably Agreed. Cryonics is crazy enough on earth. Cryonics in space is beyond crazy, it's insane. > risky - it's been refined to an artform. By the time we get round to > reanimating people, launching things that size into space may no longer be If you can build large cheap rockets, you can build even larger, cheaper dewars. If you build beanstalks, you don't have to freeze people -- you'll start nanoreconstructing people. > prohibitively expensive. And I suspect we will reach that stage prior to We don't freeze, we vitrify. Vitrification is likely to give you a viable (say, 10%) organ retransplant within less than a decade. Calling it frozen burger is uninformed. > reanimating what amounts to an already diseased frozen burger. LN is cheaper than milk. Launching a kg into LEO (at unacceptable failure rate, mark) costs several k$/kg: http://www.futron.com/pdf/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf#search=%22launch%20costs%20LEO%22 Your costs will be far higher, because your parking orbit has to be several Mm up. A neuro costs $50/annum LN boiloff -- at a very low risk of catastrophic failure. http://www.swissre.com/INTERNET/pwswpspr.nsf/fmBookMarkFrameSet?ReadForm&BM=../vwAllbyIDKeyLu/rscd-6sqdev?OpenDocument "Premium rates are highly dependant on the complexity of the satellite and may be as high as 20% of the sum insured for the launch and first year in-orbit period. The yearly in-orbit rate is in the area of 1.5 up to 3.5% and will not only be a reflection of the technical health status of the satellite but also of the coverage required and the amount of margins, deductibles, redundancies etc." At 20%, what do you think the odds are? Pretty close to playing russian roulette, I'd hazard. Not a good sell to risk-averse clientele, I'm afraid. > >nevermind that with the costs you could buy diamond-studded > >platinum dewars. > > Diamond is an excellent thermal conductor, you wouldn't want that on your > dewar. Sequins, maybe. You could build excellent dewars from isotopically pure diamond. (You'd have to engineer the neck bridge properly). The insulation is done by vacuum and IR barriers. (Comebacks sound better, when they at least make some sense in some domain). > >That's Just Not The Problem. The bulk of costs are elsewhere. > > Agreed. Although, if you could get them into space the remaining storage > cost would be virtually zero. You'd have to offset the launch capital In theory, in some remote future. In a future remote enough where nanoreconstruction is possible. It's about the same as paleolithic futurists plotting trading routes for chert and flint for 2006 A.D. By the time you're there it's Just No Longer Relevant. > Just a thought, not really all that serious since cryonics is really only a > fail safe for me. Your odd calculations are askew. With an overwhelming probability, you'll die just fine, so cryonics will be your only option. And given how little progress the meek logicistics and politics have shown in the last half century, you might well have to fight the same issues half a century from now. Assuming, you have half a century, of course. So how's your CR going? Nutrition? Excercise? At least, metformin much? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 12:30:59 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 13:30:59 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence In-Reply-To: <015901c6d0b7$4ec78910$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060904141204.022bb1c8@satx.rr.com> <200609042322.k84NMNJ7018430@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <8d71341e0609041628k32db72cax344aca68ff3c1ae8@mail.gmail.com> <44FCBDEF.2060804@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609042256l87cd21na4ae30a5f08d6e84@mail.gmail.com> <015901c6d0b7$4ec78910$9c150751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609050530p2c05b789y6c8cfdadf2b4e43f@mail.gmail.com> On 9/5/06, John wrote: > > Personally, I prefer to runaway and hide, then stab whatever it is in the > back. > I like that idea! Now if I could just figure out how to stab a force of nature in the back... :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Sep 6 01:08:21 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 18:08:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609042256l87cd21na4ae30a5f08d6e84@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609060116.k861GZ2O029195@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Russell Wallace ... Then rise to your feet again, take up your weapon which is your mind, and rejoin the fight, for the Grim Reaper is not an enemy to whom you bare your throat; he does not follow the mammal protocol of sparing a surrendered enemy. Choose a battlefield - life extension is a good one, we're losing tens of millions every year on that front, but it looks potentially winnable. And go to it; perhaps you will fall regardless, but resolve to fall as part of a victory, not defeat. "Then we shall fight in the shade." Russell! Damn, this is good. Thou hast hidden thy talent 'neath a bushel my verbally gifted friend. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Sep 6 01:32:34 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 18:32:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Hey cool, this is an idea I posted a couple years ago. Your privacy is protected by having a searchbot post a bunch of phony searches, hiding your real internet searches in piles of phony data: Internet Tool Generates Fake Searches to Protect Privacy http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,211710,00.html They finish with this comment: "...[TrackMeNot) is also not foolproof. Someone knowing the list of terms TrackMeNot uses can simply strip those records out of the databases. Developers say they are working on expanding the list." Easy solution I say. Search, choose a random site out of the top 10, then randomly choose 3 words from that site to form the next search. Repeat once a minute as long as the screen saver is running. I challenge the snoops to figure out the genuine searches among the thousands of searches thus generated. We could also generate random email traffic from random sentences or paragraphs selected from our inboxes, emailed to recipients with prearranged spam filtering. Thus our email history could be buried in reams of meaningless bits. It would require a human agent or human equivalent intelligence to distinguish the real email from the randomly generated variety. spike From femmechakra at gmail.com Tue Sep 5 12:57:38 2006 From: femmechakra at gmail.com (Anna Taylor) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 05:57:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Still confused:) In-Reply-To: <11cc03d50609041818q5c722e9cgb3ffa19ba7d8bbe0@mail.gmail.com> References: <23389966.913931157034827068.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <470a3c520608310912w2adac4b3x95370fcee8ba6038@mail.gmail.com> <44F8CF33.7080503@surriel.com> <8D70A1FB-C8DB-413A-B603-F055AEE3A503@mac.com> <11cc03d50609041818q5c722e9cgb3ffa19ba7d8bbe0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <11cc03d50609050557x7c29bcb7heb284bb00e6c63a4@mail.gmail.com> Samantha wrote: Define please. I don't see why a shift of language modality is or is likely to be religious. Anna writes: I agree, I don't think people should look at Transhumanism as a religion, I think people should look at it as a new way of thinking. A new language. Samantha wrote: Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. Anna: I don't agree. Technology will continue to progress, people need to know this, as well as all the negative and positive outcomes of technology. Samantha: Importance may only be assessed in a context of values, possibilities and so on. What we want is part of "what is true". Anna: Exactly. That's what i'm still confused about. What is true within the framework of Tranhumanism and how to describe it to the masses? Samantha: The funds are out there and targeting them successfully does not require convincing the masses of anything as I see it. Anna: In my opinion, the masses are the ones that decide if something is successful or not. If you want to fund a project like cryonics, you would need mass support and at the present time I don't think it's really a topic that interests the masses. If you bulk the projects together and call it Transhumanism, make it a good cause and then try to get the masses interested, I believe that the separate projects will likely benefit in return. But then again, i'm still confused and trying to figure out exactly how I see Transhumanism, so I may be way off. Just an opinion Anna:) On 9/4/06, Anna Taylor wrote: > On 9/3/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Define please. I don't see why a shift of language modality is or is > likely to be religious. > > Anna responds: > Religion and technology have nothing to do with each other. > Information is the response given. > Technology is the futur. > Religion is the past. > How can you create a scenerio that involves the both? > > Language. > I don't believe that a shift in language has anything > to do with religion, at this time. > Last year, I posted a response on "Why red is red". > > I now understand, why green, is a color. > Why is green, green? > Some will Tell me what compares to the color green; > nature, the leaves, the grass and money. > Some will see what THEIR green is; > My desk, my plant, my listerine package. > Some will ask why is green, green. > Universally, in at some point, green has been determined > as that, green=green. > This is a what point I would like to begin with, not the > past explanations. > > Transhumanists=Technology > Does everybody agree? > > One piece of the puzzle? > > Anna:) > > > > > > > > > > > > Green is nothing more than a word. > A word that has been accepted universally. > Isn't it important to understand why words become > universally known. > > If you take a word like "green" and translate it, > it would become "vert or whatever" but universally > it still means the same. > > > > > > > > > > > > > If I phrase my own transhumanist beliefs in a religious framework, > > > I end up with something like the following (feel free to copy it): > > > > > > "If we are God's children, I believe we should grow up. If there > > > are no gods (yet), I believe we should try to fill that void." > > > > I have been asking "What happens when the 'children of God' grow up?" > > since I was 10. The question is usually not taken kindly much less > > pondered. Religions largely don't seem to be about any real > > exploration or truth seeking, oddly enough. > > > > > > > > Yeah, I realize that might not actually help much to convince > > > the masses :) > > > > Increasingly I believe the masses are irrelevant and the attempt to > > convince them is an utter waste of precious time and resources. I do > > not like this conclusion of mine but that doesn't entitle me to reject > > it. > > > > > What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? > > > > Importance may only be assessed in a context of values, possibilities > > and so on. What we want is part of "what is true". Please clarify > > what you wanted to ask. > > > > - samantha > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 6 07:49:46 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 08:49:46 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/6/06, spike wrote: > > Hey cool, this is an idea I posted a couple years ago. Your privacy is > protected by having a searchbot post a bunch of phony searches, hiding your > real internet searches in piles of phony data: > > > Internet Tool Generates Fake Searches to Protect Privacy > > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,211710,00.html > > The Computer Security people don't think much of TrackMeNot. Their main point is that it doesn't conceal your searches or anonymize them, it just adds junk searches. If you search for 'underage goat sex' then the NSA supercomputer will find it, regardless of how many other searches you do. All you get is some level of plausible deniability. 'It wasn't me, it was TrackMeNot that did it'. But by then it will be too late. Your computer will have been seized for forensic examination and your home searched from top to bottom. As I see it, the main point of TrackMeNot is to generate a lot of junk traffic for search engines and send them a message that people don't like them storing search logs and they should stop doing it. Anonymizing searches properly is a whole separate subject, but a good start is BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Sep 6 02:52:42 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 22:52:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609051952r12ad4664o251f8ef191e317a1@mail.gmail.com> This is a monumental waste of resource. I realize the current cost of bandwidth is negligible whether it is utilized 100% or not at all. Net neutrality may change that. Are you willing to pay for the extra cost of the "phony data" in an effort to minimize your search signal to noise ratio? Do you believe that the resources that can be applied to heuristically separate the wheat from the chaff are not already powerful enough to make this a trivial exercise? If Google/Your-search-engine isn't already doing it, then a group of merely curious open-source developers running a distributed cluster project do it for fun - or the us government decides to feed this stream of garbage to carnivore simply because it has nothing better to do. My $0.02 on this problem is to return to the anonymity we had as a faceless crowd. If we all were running client software to allow open relay through everyone else running the client, there would never be a single point of identity. Of course if this technique were proven truly effective, it would also be illegal just to run the client. On 9/5/06, spike wrote: > > > Hey cool, this is an idea I posted a couple years ago. Your privacy is > protected by having a searchbot post a bunch of phony searches, hiding > your > real internet searches in piles of phony data: > > > Internet Tool Generates Fake Searches to Protect Privacy > > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,211710,00.html > > > They finish with this comment: > > "...[TrackMeNot) is also not foolproof. Someone knowing the list of terms > TrackMeNot uses can simply strip those records out of the databases. > Developers say they are working on expanding the list." > > Easy solution I say. Search, choose a random site out of the top 10, then > randomly choose 3 words from that site to form the next search. Repeat > once > a minute as long as the screen saver is running. I challenge the snoops > to > figure out the genuine searches among the thousands of searches thus > generated. > > We could also generate random email traffic from random sentences or > paragraphs selected from our inboxes, emailed to recipients with > prearranged > spam filtering. Thus our email history could be buried in reams of > meaningless bits. It would require a human agent or human equivalent > intelligence to distinguish the real email from the randomly generated > variety. > > spike > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 6 08:27:58 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:27:58 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060906082758.GD21640@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 06:32:34PM -0700, spike wrote: > > Hey cool, this is an idea I posted a couple years ago. Your privacy is > protected by having a searchbot post a bunch of phony searches, hiding your > real internet searches in piles of phony data: That's largely useless, I'm afraid. But fret not, there are things like http://tor.eff.org and http://www.i2p.net/ and http://freenetproject.org/ might be usable in the next release. If you want to minimize hassle, just use http://torpark.nfshost.com/ (remember to donate http://tor.eff.org/donate.html.en or volunteer running a Tor server). > > Internet Tool Generates Fake Searches to Protect Privacy > > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,211710,00.html -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 6 08:34:05 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:34:05 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <62c14240609051952r12ad4664o251f8ef191e317a1@mail.gmail.com> References: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <62c14240609051952r12ad4664o251f8ef191e317a1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060906083404.GE21640@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:52:42PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > My $0.02 on this problem is to return to the anonymity we had as a > faceless crowd. If we all were running client software to allow open > relay through everyone else running the client, there would never be a > single point of identity. Of course if this technique were proven > truly effective, it would also be illegal just to run the client. Tor is not illegal in most jurisdictions. Of course, if you run a server you have to be prepared to point individuals or LEOs, occasionally, to the according FAQ entries. "No sir, it ain't me. No sir, there aren't any logs. No sir, if there were any, they'd still be useless. I'm sorry for the abuse, but that's just the price we have to pay for freedom. Sorry again, and have a nice day." Now it were to become illegal, we'd have to camouflage the traffic, use malware to install nodes, and generally slide into borderline illegal behaviour. So what? Rebellion is always illegal, in the eyes of the establishment. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Sep 6 13:57:18 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 09:57:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <44FC5875.3060106@pobox.com> <200609060132.k861WXJw025237@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/5/06, spike wrote: > > We could also generate random email traffic from random sentences or > paragraphs selected from our inboxes, emailed to recipients with > prearranged > spam filtering. Thus our email history could be buried in reams of > meaningless bits. It would require a human agent or human equivalent > intelligence to distinguish the real email from the randomly generated > variety. Bonk! Spike loses his personal discount for therapies under the Bradbury patent on an extended life genome for suggesting a stupid waste of resources (i.e. promoting unsustainable activities). My Gmail spam folder has 252 items in it this morning (I haven't emptied it in a couple of days) -- we do *not* need more SPAM, pointless searches, etc. generating more *noise* using up useful network bandwidth and computing resources! [1] As others point out there are good solutions to the "be anonymous and avoid big brother" problem. There are extropic (sustainable) things one can do with ones computing resources (the @HOME projects [2]) and bandwidth (the distributed routing/proxy projects others have mentioned or even BitTorrent sharing of "extropic" texts). Robert 1. Examples of the extropic value of minimizing unproductive use of network bandwidth and dedicating ones "extra" bandwidth to "useful" activities include: - Faster searches and web page downloads (available human mind time is currently a primary constraint on the singularity -- humans are not very good at context switching (thinking about something else) when the time slices are measured in seconds). - Allowing the people in police states to have greater access to "prohibited" information (e.g. let the Chinese read about their 'real' history and discuss it if they want to). - If we manage to stamp out SPAM, useless queries, etc. the network bandwidth will be available to enable human mind level AI to be developed independent of "state" control (a few thousand PlayStation 3's on a Verizon FIOS network should be sufficient [at least in terms of the processing power requirements -- I make no calls on the software requirements]). 2. The best of these I believe is still Folding at Home. SETI at Home is probably a complete waste of time and GIMPS falls somewhere in between. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Sep 6 14:14:19 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:14:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: <6045D66F-DF5D-4508-BBAC-467727A85C94@mac.com> Message-ID: On 9/5/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Leave it to Robert to get everyone to delurk a while, with a > typical incendiary post :-) But but but... That *wasn't* intended as an incendiary post. :-) No, when I post something incendiary -- it will be *very* clear. I was genuinely trying to to engage in the discussion of resource allocation for the purpose of optimization (of lives saved, greatest complexity achieved soonest, greatest fraction of the phase space of molecular designs explored (and mostly discarded), greatest amount of art, music or literature created, etc.) -- almost *anything* but more of the boring sameness on the TV, in the political arena, in peoples lives (live, make babies, die), etc. A seminar I took many years ago pointed out that there are only 3 things in life -- "more", "different" and "better". I'm trying to see whether there is any hope for "different" and particularly "better" gaining the upper hand over "more" [1]. Robert 1. I consider the "more" addiction to be quite common in the U.S., perhaps in the "developed" countries in general (More SUVs, bigger houses, more money, more of our "enemies" killed before they kill us, etc.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Sep 6 15:45:43 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 08:45:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609061556.k86Fucjm007437@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer On 9/5/06, spike wrote: >>We could also generate random email traffic from random sentences or paragraphs selected from our inboxes... >Bonk!? Spike loses his personal discount for therapies under the Bradbury patent on an extended life genome for suggesting a stupid waste of resources ( i.e. promoting unsustainable activities)... Not so fast my therapist friend. Consider: >? My Gmail spam folder has 252 items in it this morning (I haven't emptied it in a couple of days)... Why should you need to empty it? If we fixed Gmail to *automatically* delete emails from cooperating anonymatons, it wouldn't fill up your inbox nor your spam folder nor your recycle bin. > -- we do *not* need more SPAM, pointless searches, etc. generating more *noise* using up useful network bandwidth and computing resources! [1]... The notion I have in mind would devour negligible computing resources. Wouldn't even show up in the third digit. >As others point out there are good solutions to the "be anonymous and avoid big brother" problem...Robert ... >2. The best of these I believe is still Folding at Home.? SETI at Home is probably a complete waste of time and GIMPS falls somewhere in between. Cool. I would be interested to hear some of our net gurus estimate how much computing resources would be wasted by my scheme of having the machine select three or four random words from a website to use for the next search, repeat on intervals of about a minute, whenever the machine is idle. How much would be used from randomly creating emails and sending them to cooperating auto-deleters, again on about a one minute interval, text only. My suspicion: the computers and the cable wouldn't notice the difference. spike From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Sep 6 16:23:46 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 09:23:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosophy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Bradbury wrote: > I was genuinely trying to to engage in the discussion of > resource allocation for the purpose of optimization (of lives > saved, greatest complexity achieved soonest, greatest > fraction of the phase space of molecular designs explored > (and mostly discarded), greatest amount of art, music or > literature created, etc.) -- almost *anything* but more of > the boring sameness on the TV, in the political arena, in > peoples lives (live, make babies, die), etc. Many on this list share values such as these. But "greatest complexity achieved soonest" rings of "greatest good for the greatest number" and suffers similarly from the assumption that there can be a truly objective "good". Better to organize around principles of action that work over increasing scope, with increasing complexity (of a kind [1]) as a side effect rather than a goal. > A seminar I took many years ago pointed out that there are > only 3 things in life -- "more", "different" and "better". A key message of such seminars is that one is personally empowered to make change. As mentioned previously, it is essential for effectiveness -- and ultimately, survival -- that any agent believes it is able to make progress toward its goals, but it's important when dealing with others, to realize that these goals are subjective. To the extent that one's goals are workable and shared with others, synergetic advantage can be obtained. > I'm trying to see whether there is any hope for "different" > and particularly "better" gaining the upper hand over "more". What works, persists and grows. What works to promote increasingly shared values over increasing scope is seen as increasingly good. We understand that "difference" is essential for growth. We understand that simply "more" of something leads to eventual stagnation. See [2]. Whether you can have hope for things getting "better" depends on your alignment with what works within your sphere of affectivity, not on any supposed ultimate objective measure. - Jef [1] There are many disjoint definitions of complexity and little agreement on even a central concept pointing back to our anthropic and cultural biases with regard to "meaning". [2] The law of requisite variety is often overlooked by those who imagine an ultimate solution to ecological problems. From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Sep 6 16:34:56 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 09:34:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609061556.k86Fucjm007437@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: Spike wrote: > Cool. I would be interested to hear some of our net gurus > estimate how much computing resources would be wasted by my > scheme of having the machine select three or four random > words from a website to use for the next search, repeat on > intervals of about a minute, whenever the machine is idle. > How much would be used from randomly creating emails and > sending them to cooperating auto-deleters, again on about a > one minute interval, text only. > My suspicion: the computers and the cable wouldn't notice the > difference. But adding random noise only increases the number of samples required to separate the signal from the noise, it doesn't completely obscure the signal. Spike, did fatherhood change your views on transparency? - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Sep 6 16:42:53 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 09:42:53 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosophy as a justification forexistence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I meant to say "sphere of effectivity", but come to think of it, it works both ways. - Jef > Whether you can have hope for things getting "better" depends > on your alignment with what works within your sphere of > affectivity, not on any supposed ultimate objective measure. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 6 16:48:39 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 18:48:39 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: References: <200609061556.k86Fucjm007437@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060906164839.GM21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:34:56AM -0700, Jef Allbright wrote: > Spike, did fatherhood change your views on transparency? Transparency for *whom*, I wonder? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Wed Sep 6 17:07:50 2006 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 10:07:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] nanoantenna Message-ID: Extropes, Harvard University engineers demonstrate laser nanoantenna New laser could lead to higher density DVDs, more powerful microscopes and novel tools for biology and engineering http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/hu-hue090606.php This isn't really news, more like the ordinary march of progress in an extraordinary age. I remember, when the technology was new, a Scientific American article on Winchester disk drives. I mean waaaaay back in like 1985, before ho hum ubiquity truncated the term to simply "hard" drive. It mentioned how the capacity limits had just about been reached, a comment proven wrong almost before the lips ceased their flapping, yet confidently repeated several dozen times since. "One day, consumers might be able to back up three terabytes data on one disk." I do love technology. -- Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From amara at amara.com Wed Sep 6 17:44:20 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 19:44:20 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Etna in motion Message-ID: Etna has been an uncharacteristically nervous lady (see blog : http://www.hotelcorsaro.it from a hotel that keeps tabs on her), and not breathing in her usual way (1). After flowing and stopping suddenly last July, then shaking a bit, then taking a rest in August (while I visited her), then sputtering a bit last weekend, she is now relaxing into her more typical lava flow. The webcam view of Etna is beautiful at night now: http://www2.etnatrekking.com/webcam_b1/index.php Amara (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus_(mythology) -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Sep 7 00:04:03 2006 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 17:04:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Resource Dispersal In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060907000403.77743.qmail@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Just a quick question: For the sake of this question, lets assume that the first super-intelligent mind is derived purely from AI research (ie. there aren't yet any cyborgs running around) and that this occurs in the relatively near future (~10 years from now or less). Let's assume that it is "friendly" and pursues altruistic goals. Do you guys believe that the AI, acting consistently with "friendliness", would "peacefully" enforce an equal distribution of resources (eg. energy, matter, etc.) among all conscious beings on earth? Or, would you guess that the AI would feel compelled for any reason to preserve something similar to the weighted economic/ethical system that we have today (in the Democratic countries at least). (Note: I'm not yet indicating my preference on this matter, I'm just curious about what some Extropians think). Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich P.S. Sorry if this question has already been asked a hundred times before. :-) --------------------------------- Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Sep 7 01:03:20 2006 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 18:03:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Lee, Sorry to do this again, but I have to take issue with something you wrote. Lee writes: "I will say that if I run people on my own machinery, then it's best that other folks mind their own business, and that no one intercede. It's an old argument, but respect for the rule of law and for private property has taken us quite far." In all but the most extreme and bizarre circumstances, I also strongly believe in "private property" and "the rule of law" provided that the laws are "just". (I know that this is wide open for debate, but I'm going to leave it at that for the time being). However, we should examine more carefully the notion of "owning property". In particular, we should explore the limits of the concepts of "property" and "owning". I must ask you: Why do you feel that you have the "right" or "entitlement" or "freedom" (or whatever *word* you want to use) to create and/or run conscious, artificial beings on your hardware and then do absolutely anything you want with them - morality being at your sole discretion? What is it that makes a conscious, artificial being your "property" in the first place? Is it your "property" simply because you created it (or simply ran the program)? If I create a human child with my wife, does that child immediately become my absolute "property" which I should be allowed to do any number or horrible things to, simply because I created it? Does a conscious machine, become your "property" simply because you paid for the hardware/software? If I travel to Thailand and purchase a 12 year old sex slave with my hard earned cash, should I be allowed to do absolutely anything I want to her? Ultimately, the 12 year old girl is a conscious machine, is she not? Of course, I would never do any of these terrible things. Just attempting to stimulate more thought on the limits of the concept of "property". So in conclusion, in my opinion, the concept of "property" does not extend past the boundary of conscious beings (although I'm aware that many other people don't feel this way, particularly when it comes to non-human, conscious beings). Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Sep 7 01:39:10 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 18:39:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609070149.k871nacb020268@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > > Spike, did fatherhood change your views on transparency? > > - Jef Very much so. My own views on openness were based on my own lack of desire to hide anything about my life. I have no interest in prying into other's privacy, but I have little to hide myself. I recognize that in this world there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to keep a low profile. My son deserves to make his own decisions on how much privacy he wants or needs. Regarding transparency, there are many unanswered questions. Consider for instance that PGP program that was available free a few years ago. I downloaded it and used it to encrypt email perhaps a dozen times. None of those cases really needed encryption. Eventually the site was taken down and has never returned as far as I know. The fact is, encryption does enable crime. For instance, a group of criminals, terrorists or even ordinary angry citizens could arrange to form a flash mob to attack a person by showing up from all directions at a prearranged time and place, each hurling a single baseball at the victim. Being beaned once is hardly dangerous, but what if 200 people each hurled one ball? The flash mob would then disappear as quickly as it formed, wandering off in all directions. The authorities would likely catch no one, and even if they did, the participants would not know each other. A recently-paroled child molester for instance, might find herself the victim of a sudden hailstorm of baseballs. The question of transparency is problematic. spike From pgptag at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 02:29:25 2006 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 04:29:25 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: References: <6045D66F-DF5D-4508-BBAC-467727A85C94@mac.com> Message-ID: <470a3c520609061929o339344ffx7762f44730968aff@mail.gmail.com> This justifies slavery, and many other atrocities. G. On 9/5/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > I will say that if I run > people on my own machinery, then it's best that other folks > mind their own business, and that no one intercede. It's an > old argument, but respect for the rule of law and for private > property has taken us quite far. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 02:48:30 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 03:48:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609070149.k871nacb020268@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609070149.k871nacb020268@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609061948i6a999318y7b91c958e5a4fdab@mail.gmail.com> On 9/7/06, spike wrote: > > The fact is, encryption does > enable crime. As do automobiles, crowbars, baseball bats, telephones and the postal service. "X enables crime" is not an argument for making X illegal. The law should be directed against the crime, not against the tool. For instance, a group of criminals, terrorists or even ordinary angry > citizens could arrange to form a flash mob to attack a person by showing > up > from all directions at a prearranged time and place, each hurling a single > baseball at the victim. Being beaned once is hardly dangerous, but what > if > 200 people each hurled one ball? The flash mob would then disappear as > quickly as it formed, wandering off in all directions. They could but they didn't; and we didn't need Big Brother looking over our shoulders to stop them. ...and this is one of those infinite-loop debates, I know, so I'll refrain from commenting further on the subject :P -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 03:00:21 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 23:00:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] nanoantenna In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <62c14240609062000x7bfcbce3t1e3586141abd8452@mail.gmail.com> On 9/6/06, Jeff Davis wrote: > > "One day, consumers might be able to back up three terabytes data on one > disk." > Yeah, and that will likely be one 2 hour movie along with 30+ hours of unwatchable "extras" in 'better-than-HD' resolution. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Sep 7 03:07:31 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 20:07:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] experimentation in young humans In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609061948i6a999318y7b91c958e5a4fdab@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609070323.k873NUjt010929@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I witnessed an interesting experiment performed by my two month old son. He was in his bouncy chair, which has a favored rattle toy suspended above it. He gazed intently at the toy, then suddenly commented YEEEARG and swung his arm, which hit the rattle and made a most delightful noise. (He loves noise. This bodes ill.) For the next several minutes he YEEEARGed and batted the toy. Then he tried YEEEARGing without swinging the arm. No rattley noise. So he tried swinging the arm without YEEEARGing. Rattley noise. He discovered he needs to only swing the arm, and the magic word YEEEARG is unnecessary. At two months he has discovered the value of experimentation and evidence based living. {8-] spike From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 7 04:54:45 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 21:54:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification for existence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060907045445.72988.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- Robert Bradbury wrote: > I was genuinely trying to to engage in the > discussion of resource allocation > for the purpose of optimization (of lives saved, > greatest complexity > achieved soonest, greatest fraction of the phase > space of molecular designs > explored (and mostly discarded), greatest amount of > art, music or literature > created, etc.) Robert, I think you are putting the cart before the horse. In this reality, the only justification anything needs for existence is thermodynamic stability. The stars of heaven are tested against the slings and arrows of entropic time. If countless suns deserve to exist by simple virtue of their being, why should we emphemeral bits of protoplasm fret about the wheretofores of our existense? Your time is better spent doing everything you can to continue to exist and dancing in light of the fact that you have succeeded thus far. Seek not to justify your existence with philosophy, instead endeavor to vindicate your philosophy by your continued existense. If your philosophy of extropic sustainability is true, you will be successful. If you are successful others will try to emulate you. You can't bring order to the world with violence anymore than you can make ice cubes with a stove. But a seed crystal fashions its immediate universe into its own image with hardly any effort at all. Those that lead by example, rule the world not with an iron fist but with the invisible hand of God (or Adam Smith for you atheists). Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 7 04:59:20 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 21:59:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] experimentation in young humans In-Reply-To: <200609070323.k873NUjt010929@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060907045920.76437.qmail@web60512.mail.yahoo.com> --- spike wrote: > I witnessed an interesting experiment performed by > my two month old son. He > was in his bouncy chair, which has a favored rattle > toy suspended above it. > He gazed intently at the toy, then suddenly > commented YEEEARG and swung his > arm, which hit the rattle and made a most delightful > noise. (He loves > noise. This bodes ill.) For the next several > minutes he YEEEARGed and > batted the toy. Then he tried YEEEARGing without > swinging the arm. No > rattley noise. So he tried swinging the arm without > YEEEARGing. Rattley > noise. He discovered he needs to only swing the > arm, and the magic word > YEEEARG is unnecessary. At two months he has > discovered the value of > experimentation and evidence based living. LOL. I am glad your son is measuring up to his design specs, Spike. Ain't it wondrous? :) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From scerir at libero.it Thu Sep 7 06:02:18 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 08:02:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] nanoantenna References: Message-ID: <002601c6d243$2dc36620$0f931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> [from 'Physics News Update'] LASER OPTICAL ANTENNAS represent a relatively new approach to getting around the old diffraction limit characterizing conventional optics, namely the inability of a lens to focus light for imaging purposes to any better than about half the wavelength of the light being used. Like a rooftop antenna which grabs meter-sized radio waves and turns them (courtesy of a tuned circuit) into signals far smaller in physical extent, so the optical antenna converts visible light into an illuminating beam of much higher resolving power. For example, 800-nm light can produce images with a spatial resolution of no better than about 400 nm. A new device, built by the groups of Ken Crozier and Federico Capasso at Harvard, producing spot sizes as small as 40 nm using 800-nm light, is the first optical antenna to be fully integrated (laser and focusing apparatus on one platform) and the first to prove (by directly measuring light intensities) the narrowness of the focused spot of light. Their method combines two proven techniques---plasmonics, in which light waves, striking a metal surface, can create plasmons, which are a sort of electromagnetic disturbance (see http://www.aip.org/pnu/2006/split/770-1.html for background) with a wavelength less than that of the incoming light; and near-field microscopy, in which the diffraction limit is avoided by placing the specimen very close to the imaging device. In the Harvard setup the antenna consists of two gold patches (130 nm long by 50 nm wide) separated by a 30 nm gap. Light falling on the gold strips (which sit right on the facet of an ordinary commercial laser diode) excites a huge electric field in the gap. A specimen located beneath this gap sees it as a 30-nm wide burst of light (although at this stage in the work the spot size is more like a 40 nm x 100 nm rectangle). In many forms of subtle microscopy, power is sometimes feeble, but here, in pulsed operation, the antenna can generate a robust peak intensity of more than a gigawatt/cm^2. (For comparison images recorded with a force microscope, an electron microscope, and the new laser antenna, see http://www.aip.org/png/2006/266.htm ). Crozier (kcrozier at deas.harvard.edu, 617-496-1441) says that spot sizes of 20 nm should be possible and that likely applications for their laser antenna will be found in the areas of optical data storage (where 3 terabytes of data could be stored on a CD), spatially-resolved chemical imaging, and near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). (Cubukcu et al., Applied Physics Letters, August 28, 2006; lab website at www.deas.harvard.edu/crozier ; see also http://www.aip.org/pnu/2004/split/701-1.html) [and something for extropic artists, maybe...] LARGE-AREA SENSOR SKINS AND MICROPHONES might be possible with flexible transistors made from cheap ferroelectret packing foam. Just as in ferromagnetic materials tiny magnetic dipoles become permanently oriented in the presence of an applied magnetic field, so in ferroelectric materials electric dipoles become permanently polarized by the application of an electric field. Ferroelectrets, a novel class of cheap electroactive materials based on cheap polymer foams, are often used as packing material and for thermal insulation. But now physicists at the Johannes Kepler University (in Linz, Austria) and Princeton University (US) have shown that ferroelectret films can muster electric fields big enough to trigger (switch) a field effect transistor. Hence many of the things transistors are good for can be engineered using flexible, cheap ferroelectret materials as building blocks. Already the researchers have demonstrated in the lab working versions of flexible touch-sensors and microphones. Ingrid Graz (ingrid.graz at jku.at) says that her new form of soft electronics could be useful for producing flexible paper-thin keyboards and flexible microphones for mobile phones, active noise control devices, toys, hearing aids, and surround-sound systems. (Graz et al., Applied Physics Letters, 14 August 2006) From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 7 08:30:58 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 10:30:58 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <200609070149.k871nacb020268@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609070149.k871nacb020268@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060907083058.GU21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:39:10PM -0700, spike wrote: > Very much so. My own views on openness were based on my own lack of desire > to hide anything about my life. I have no interest in prying into other's Would this go so far as to post your complete earning statements, your daily diary (containing your every thought, of course), and to install webcams into your every room? Toilet included, of course? I've known of an artist who set up a glass living room in a city's car-free zone. Would that be perhaps something for you? > privacy, but I have little to hide myself. I recognize that in this world > there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to keep a low profile. My Indeedy. > son deserves to make his own decisions on how much privacy he wants or > needs. Yup. Just wait until he's a teenager... > Regarding transparency, there are many unanswered questions. Consider for > instance that PGP program that was available free a few years ago. I > downloaded it and used it to encrypt email perhaps a dozen times. None of > those cases really needed encryption. Eventually the site was taken down Have you never had to exchange emails with a customer who insisted they to be encrypted? What do you think would happen if competitors would intercept the cleartext of a pharma R&D chemical search query? A friend of mine works for an email encryption company. Almost all of their customers are military and intelligence organizations from all over the world. > and has never returned as far as I know. The fact is, encryption does http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pgp&btnG=Google+Search is link #3. But you should use GPG instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPG > enable crime. Film at 11: most things enable crime. Cars enable crime, should we outlaw cars? Kitchen knives enable crime, should we do away with them, too? Cryptography is essential and you're daily using it without being aware that you do. If you outlaw cryptography, you're helping the bad guys. Why would you be helping terrorists? Why won't you think of the children? > For instance, a group of criminals, terrorists or even ordinary angry > citizens could arrange to form a flash mob to attack a person by showing up > from all directions at a prearranged time and place, each hurling a single > baseball at the victim. Being beaned once is hardly dangerous, but what if > 200 people each hurled one ball? The flash mob would then disappear as > quickly as it formed, wandering off in all directions. The authorities You know, spontaneous fluctuation of air molecules could cause a victim to just suffocate in a pocket of vacuum. Perfectly possible... just not at all probable. > would likely catch no one, and even if they did, the participants would not > know each other. A recently-paroled child molester for instance, might find But they would have to interact before, in order to form a conspiracy. Assume we want to assassinate president Bush. How do you find fellow co-conspirators in a large body of people, without leaking your plan? Your friendly NSA is doing traffic analysis on encrypted traffic. Sending email without revealing your point of orgin takes skills. Speaking of Tor, a little bird told me that it's empirically broken for a specific TLA adversory. You can assume you will get special scrutiny if you connect to the Tor network. > herself the victim of a sudden hailstorm of baseballs. > > The question of transparency is problematic. Not really. We know that technology has become arbitrarily invasive, so personal privacy needs protection. No buts about it. This does not apply to government and company privacy. There we need a standartized API for public scrutiny (but for a few protected areas, of course -- and occasional probe that this is not being used as a shield to conceal nefarious activities -- e.g. as the Bush administration blocking judicial probes). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 7 09:24:52 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 11:24:52 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resource Dispersal In-Reply-To: <20060907000403.77743.qmail@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060907000403.77743.qmail@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20060907092452.GY21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 05:04:03PM -0700, A B wrote: > For the sake of this question, lets assume that the first > super-intelligent mind is derived purely from AI research (ie. there That's overwhelmingly unlikely. Classical AI research is sterile. You would have to bet on computational neuroscience, which is strongly biology-inspired. > aren't yet any cyborgs running around) and that this occurs in the I'm not sure there will be any cyborgs running around, ever. > relatively near future (~10 years from now or less). Let's assume that We'd be lucky to have the hardware by 2040, or so. But having the hardware is just a potential. It may sit there utilized suboptimally for several decades. > it is "friendly" and pursues altruistic goals. Do you guys believe Why should it be friendly? > that the AI, acting consistently with "friendliness", would > "peacefully" enforce an equal distribution of resources (eg. energy, It's good that you put that in scare-quotes. > matter, etc.) among all conscious beings on earth? Or, would you guess > that the AI would feel compelled for any reason to preserve something > similar to the weighted economic/ethical system that we have today (in > the Democratic countries at least). (Note: I'm not yet indicating my > preference on this matter, I'm just curious about what some Extropians > think). I think if you've made a naturally superintelligent system, and there is no possibility to hitch a ride on its ascent, you're instant fossil record (metaphorically -- you'd need sediments for the fossil record). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From alito at organicrobot.com Thu Sep 7 11:25:37 2006 From: alito at organicrobot.com (Alejandro Dubrovsky) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:25:37 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] experimentation in young humans In-Reply-To: <200609070323.k873NUjt010929@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609070323.k873NUjt010929@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1157628337.25814.242.camel@alito.homeip.net> On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 20:07 -0700, spike wrote: > > I witnessed an interesting experiment performed by my two month old son. He > was in his bouncy chair, which has a favored rattle toy suspended above it. > He gazed intently at the toy, then suddenly commented YEEEARG and swung his > arm, which hit the rattle and made a most delightful noise. (He loves > noise. This bodes ill.) For the next several minutes he YEEEARGed and > batted the toy. Then he tried YEEEARGing without swinging the arm. No > rattley noise. So he tried swinging the arm without YEEEARGing. Rattley > noise. He discovered he needs to only swing the arm, and the magic word > YEEEARG is unnecessary. At two months he has discovered the value of > experimentation and evidence based living. > hehe Here's an AIBO involved in very similar experiments http://www.csl.sony.fr/Research/Topics/DevelopmentalRobotics/index.html I don't think the AIBO came to the same metaconclusion on the value of experimentation though. From amara at amara.com Thu Sep 7 14:17:56 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:17:56 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mises article today: "How we come to own ourselves" Message-ID: The Mises Institute's daily article today : "How we Come to Own Ourselves" http://www.mises.org/story/2291 is closely related to the heavy discussion we had here several months ago under the Subject: "What the #$?! are rights anyway?', a topic that generated some anger among some women in the community (including me (*)). Perhaps this article can help to put the topic in a philosophical framework in order to further the develop the concept for the H+ community. Amara (*) My primary comment in that extropy-chat thread: "I would think 'right' to one's body as the most basic right that one can have. I do not know why H+ people feel a need to debate this and why such a basic issue is being brought up. If one doesn't accept this, then everything else that people in the transhuman community have discussed during the last 20 years as desirable for their future collapses." -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 15:52:29 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 11:52:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mises article today: "How we come to own ourselves" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7641ddc60609070852n47c75866gd6623814d664fe1@mail.gmail.com> On 9/7/06, Amara Graps wrote: > The Mises Institute's daily article today : > > "How we Come to Own Ourselves" > > http://www.mises.org/story/2291 > > is closely related to the heavy discussion we had here several months > ago under the Subject: "What the #$?! are rights anyway?', a topic > that generated some anger among some women in the community > (including me (*)). Perhaps this article can help to put the topic > in a philosophical framework in order to further the develop the > concept for the H+ community. > > Amara > > > > (*) My primary comment in that extropy-chat thread: > "I would think 'right' to one's body as the most basic right that one can > have. I do not know why H+ people feel a need to debate this and why > such a basic issue is being brought up. If one doesn't accept this, then > everything else that people in the transhuman community have discussed > during the last 20 years as desirable for their future collapses." > > -- ### I agree in general terms with the position outlined in the article linked above but I tend to concentrate in my normative analysis on a related but distinct issue: self-ownership of one's computational substrate. The body is only important as a supporting structure for the computational substrate which, by a mysterious mechanism, leads to the subjective experience that is of concern to me, and imbues the world with value. If you perform the same sort of analysis as done by Kinsella but looking at the ownership rights to the brain, then some conclusions follow more smoothly - your parents may own your body before your brain comes into existence but once your desires start being computed (as in saying "no") these rights are naturally voided due to the direct link established between your motor cortex and the body's muscles. On lazy days I like spinning webs of thoughts about the world and me, where the usual personal pronouns and conventional terms are progressively replaced by the impersonal vocabulary of science and the digital culture. Like, "The essence of desire, a form of subjective experience attendant to the functioning of human (and most likely many other) computational substrates, is the steering of thought to the satisfaction of goals encoded in the structure of the individual computational substrate.The purpose of formulating general ethical precepts is to further the satisfaction of individual desires by improving the efficiency of interactions with other individual computing devices. Due to limitations of computing power and other practical considerations, an important element of many such precepts is the delineation of a reference class of computing devices, such that the desires of members of this class are optimized preferentially over the goals of other devices. Failing to define a reference class appropriate for both one's desires and one's computational resources results in non-computability of ethical precepts, leading to the failure of satisfaction of desires, invalidating the ethical analysis performed. Rational thought is a thought that leads to, rather than away from, the attainment of goals. Therefore, a rational and useful ethical analysis is one that specifies rules with computable outcomes that lead to the satisfaction of the desires of a reference class of computational devices." Etc, etc. :) I noticed that the exi-list was rather drowsy of late, so maybe I can stir something up by noting that the above piece of dense prose could be interpreted as militating against caring about people you don't understand, or caring about dolphins. It could even be a veiled assault on CEV. Any takers? Rafal From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Sep 7 18:19:59 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:19:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question Message-ID: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Sep 7 18:41:42 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 11:41:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: _____ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:20 AM To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org; extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org; transhumantech at yahoogroups.com Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question I'm working on the book and I've left a crucial, climactic section quite vague that I need to start to flesh out in detail. You know the kind of vague I mean: hero neutralizes the threat and action ensues. Only I was naughty and eager to just get writing and hadn't completed my research for it. So this is a theoretical question for all you engineers and physicists and just plain smart folk: What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures at an atomic level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or simply screws with them enough to render them neutral/inactive/harmless? To give you some possibly important detail, these are medicinal bots and would be used internally in the brain. They would need to pass the blood/brain barrier after ingestion. And there are a whole lot of them. Remove their external energy source, or if they're using the host metabolism then possibly poison it (without killing host), or relocate their energy source as a means of controlling their behavior, or...) (they're too small to carry their own fuel, right?) Modify their programming (with a virus, or by communicating with their controller, or lots of other possibilities here) to either stop them or convert them to some useful purpose. Exploit some bug in their programming in an unexpected way,.Force them out by infiltrating their command and control structure with similar, but benign nanobots. Find and activate the secret failsafe or deadman switch built in by their designer. Give them a decoy host brain and when they're all there, destroy it. (Sorry, I'm sure that's too simple.) I don't know of any chemical means to dissolve the diamondoid atomic bonds without killing the host, but I am not a chemist. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3654 bytes Desc: not available URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 18:50:46 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 19:50:46 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609071150m1183da92tf1895d8711d24d1@mail.gmail.com> On 9/7/06, pjmanney wrote: > > What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific > question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures at an atomic > level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or simply screws with > them enough to render them neutral/inactive/harmless? > Oh, lots of things. Household drain cleaner should do the job nicely, for example. > To give you some possibly important detail, these are medicinal bots and > would be used internally in the brain. > ...but, you want to destroy them after they've been absorbed into someone's brain, and preferably without killing the patient? That's a bit trickier, unless there's a deactivation switch of some sort built into them you'll probably need to give the patient a dose of counternanites specifically programmed to track down and destroy the original nanites (and then eliminate themselves) without damaging anything else. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Sep 7 18:58:01 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:58:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question Message-ID: <25012484.235611157655481531.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 19:47:47 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:47:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 9/6/06, A B wrote: > > I must ask you: Why do you feel that you have the "right" or > "entitlement" or "freedom" (or whatever *word* you want to use) to create > and/or run conscious, artificial beings on your hardware and then do > absolutely anything you want with them - morality being at your sole > discretion? > [snip] With the "children" case for a long long time they were essentially viewed as "property". Parents had more children to work in the fields (or because they didn't know how to prevent their conception and $!#$#% nature made the process of creating them so hard to resist). You are *wired* to care for children. Its only recently that the concepts of "consciousness" and "children's rights" have arisen. They derive in part from a genetic inheritance which motivates us to care for children and those less fortunate than us (human social 'tribe' promotion genes). So I *strongly* question whether one can divorce oneself from heritage enough to discuss this from an unbiased perspective! (Its easier if you have a high Asperger's quotient I think). I don't see anyone anywhere arguing that ideas that pop into my head have rights. I run through hundreds or thousands of them on a daily basis. There is an overlord going, no, bad, stupid, push that on stack 7, oh wait -- there's something interesting, etc. Now the only difference between the ideas popping into my head and those in a child or those in another human being is quantity (number of neurons devoted to them), quality (derived from my installed knowledge base and neural network) and some genetic & biochemical hardware (due to the instantiation in this current RJB body). I don't see anyone screaming, threatening to throw me in jail or terminate this instantiation because I am abusing, torturing, destroying or otherwise manipulating *my* thoughts. And I'm sure that some of those thoughts (or a collection of them) would love to assert "But I'm really am conscious!" [1]. So one is either in the camp that ones thoughts (and presumably anything else that runs on ones hardware) is ones own property to do with as you see fit or you are in the "Thoughts have rights too" camp. This line of discussion is a close relation to the "Can you kill your copies" discussion which was to the best of my knowledge never resolved. My current working solution is that all of *my* copies going in know that they are subject to deletion -- just as my thoughts are. Robert 1. In a voice similar to "But I'm not dead yet!" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 19:56:15 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 14:56:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] Transhumanism group in Flickr In-Reply-To: <45001E9C.6030300@betterhumans.com> References: <45001E9C.6030300@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0609071256v55389528w50621ebfa161a6@mail.gmail.com> Thursday, 7 September 2006 (Forwarded from wta-talk) If anyone hereabouts has images from the Extropy Institute conferences, Flickr makes a great place to share them and an okay place to archive them. On 9/7/06, George Dvorsky wrote: > I've created a transhumanism group in Flickr. It's a place for people to > post their photographs of anything related to transhumanist people, > events, places and things. > > The link: > http://www.flickr.com/groups/10856685 at N00/ > > Or simply search for the transhumanism group. > > I've already added my photos of the HETHR conference and a recent > cryonics meet-up here in Toronto. > > Please join in and add your photos to the pool! > -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From amaraa at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 20:02:24 2006 From: amaraa at gmail.com (Amara D. Angelica) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:02:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <25012484.235611157655481531.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <021501c6d2b8$89ffdca0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> PJ: You might take a look here for ideas: Lifeboat Foundation Nanoshield, http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0685.html. You can also post your request for help there. Please let me know about your book for possible mention on KurzweilAI.net when it's published. - Amara D. Angelica, editor, KurzweilAI.net _____ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 2:58 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Research question Thanks Jef! Crucial piece of info: these nanobots are still OUTSIDE the body at this point. And there are a whole lot of them ready to be deployed. To a whole lot of people. PJ _____ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:20 AM To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org; extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org; transhumantech at yahoogroups.com Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question I'm working on the book and I've left a crucial, climactic section quite vague that I need to start to flesh out in detail. You know the kind of vague I mean: hero neutralizes the threat and action ensues. Only I was naughty and eager to just get writing and hadn't completed my research for it. So this is a theoretical question for all you engineers and physicists and just plain smart folk: What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures at an atomic level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or simply screws with them enough to render them neutral/inactive/harmless? To give you some possibly important detail, these are medicinal bots and would be used internally in the brain. They would need to pass the blood/brain barrier after ingestion. And there are a whole lot of them. Remove their external energy source, or if they're using the host metabolism then possibly poison it (without killing host), or relocate their energy source as a means of controlling their behavior, or...) (they're too small to carry their own fuel, right?) Modify their programming (with a virus, or by communicating with their controller, or lots of other possibilities here) to either stop them or convert them to some useful purpose. Exploit some bug in their programming in an unexpected way,.Force them out by infiltrating their command and control structure with similar, but benign nanobots. Find and activate the secret failsafe or deadman switch built in by their designer. Give them a decoy host brain and when they're all there, destroy it. (Sorry, I'm sure that's too simple.) I don't know of any chemical means to dissolve the diamondoid atomic bonds without killing the host, but I am not a chemist. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Thu Sep 7 19:39:25 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 21:39:25 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question References: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <084201c6d2b5$546bc3e0$e2941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> pjmanney > What would theoretically destroy nanobots? [..] > Or simply screws with them enough to render > them neutral/inactive/harmless? Nano-tubes? Nasty nano-bots fuelled by ZPF or Casimir forces? Nano-marines or even nano-submarines? http://focus.aps.org/story/v13/st27 http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=163 Usual homeopathic medicine? From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Sep 7 20:14:14 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:14:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] a primate uplifting cautionary tale Message-ID: <13548088.243971157660054671.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Sep 7 20:21:37 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:21:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <25012484.235611157655481531.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <25012484.235611157655481531.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: On 9/7/06, pjmanney wrote: > > Crucial piece of info: these nanobots are still OUTSIDE the body at this point. > And there are a whole lot of them ready to be deployed. To a whole lot of people. Oh, that's easy. Artificial nanorobots are only slightly different from "natural" nanorobots, i.e. bacteria. So.... the classical defenses -- heat, pressure & radiation will all work. Deep UV, X-rays and Gamma ray photons all have sufficient energy to break atomic bonds. IR causes the atoms to vibrate sufficiently that the bonds break. Light, if tuned to the right frequencies might force electrons out of the atoms and disrupt the atomic structure (diamond itself is transparent -- but "diamondoid" isn't just pure cubic diamond structures -- you have other atoms present to vary the structure -- those atoms may not be transparent to various frequencies -- I don't think this area has been studied to any great degree). Similarly, if you have nanorobots within the body they have to be running off of some power source, commonly glucose if you are using nano-fuel cells (unless they are consuming (oxdizing) body tissue. So if you cut off either the glucose supply or the oxygen supply they will grind to a halt fairly quickly. If they are running on an internal Gd-148 (or similar radioactive) power source things are a little trickier. Then you probably have to block them with physical barriers. I've never seen calculations regarding the limits to nanorobots using steel, titanium, hafnium carbide, uranium plate, etc. but I suspect they exist. Nanorobots aren't like electrons -- they can't just tunnel from one side of the plate to the other (at least not in our lifetime) -- they would have to drill holes and that is going to require energy and time. I'm not sure how drill bits wear (I suspect it is local force breaking the bonds on the atoms at the intersecting surfaces) which would imply that even a diamondoid drill tipped nanorobot is going to have a tough time going through hafnium carbide (or diamond) plate. As it destroys the drill surfaces it is going to have to slow down and replace them or resynthesize them. That means that the nanorobots have to be bulkier, carry more spares, use more energy, etc. i.e. are "slower" than most "worst case" scenarios would tend to suggest. By and large its a mass-mass and energy-energy problem -- which ever group has the greatest mass or energy at its disposal is likely to take the field. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From george at betterhumans.com Thu Sep 7 13:29:00 2006 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:29:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism group in Flickr Message-ID: <45001E9C.6030300@betterhumans.com> I've created a transhumanism group in Flickr. It's a place for people to post their photographs of anything related to transhumanist people, events, places and things. The link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/10856685 at N00/ Or simply search for the transhumanism group. I've already added my photos of the HETHR conference and a recent cryonics meet-up here in Toronto. Please join in and add your photos to the pool! Cheers, George From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Sep 7 22:00:07 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:00:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a primate uplifting cautionary tale In-Reply-To: <13548088.243971157660054671.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <13548088.243971157660054671.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060907165915.023ee030@satx.rr.com> At 04:14 PM 9/7/2006 -0400, pjmanney wrote: >This story is so depressing... so... I can't even find the words. Christ, if you can't find the words, pj, we're all buggered. Damien Broderick From neomorphy at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 01:18:19 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 11:18:19 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: On 9/8/06, pjmanney wrote: > > I guess the more specific question would be: what disassembles > diamondoid nanostructures at an atomic level and reverts them back to > harmless carbon atoms? Or simply screws with them enough to render them > neutral/inactive/harmless? > 800 degrees C and oxygen. I've no idea how you'd effect that inside a body without, uh, some serious colateral damage. -- Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 01:20:11 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 21:20:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: References: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609071820q786bd17dkaf09992212f04edd@mail.gmail.com> If those "copies" are running in a quantum computer, 'you' have killed every non-you copy at every probability wave function collapse. In the evolution of this moment, you are/were currently the most "fit" for actual (non-virtual) existance. It is [un?]fortunate fo your that we are all entangled on the hardware that runs reality, else you really would be on your own. In that case you might find yourself in this situation: http://devernay.free.fr/paradoxlost/html/solipsist.html On 9/7/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > > On 9/6/06, A B wrote: > > > > I must ask you: Why do you feel that you have the "right" or > > "entitlement" or "freedom" (or whatever *word* you want to use) to create > > and/or run conscious, artificial beings on your hardware and then do > > absolutely anything you want with them - morality being at your sole > > discretion? > > > [snip] > > This line of discussion is a close relation to the "Can you kill your > copies" discussion which was to the best of my knowledge never resolved. My > current working solution is that all of *my* copies going in know that they > are subject to deletion -- just as my thoughts are. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Sep 8 01:50:43 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:50:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] a primate uplifting cautionary tale Message-ID: <13657487.267901157680242801.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Touche, Damien. I read it and sent it on immediately. Now that I've gotten a few hours perspective on it, I've got plenty -- But I'm sure you do, too! PJ >At 04:14 PM 9/7/2006 -0400, pjmanney wrote: > >>This story is so depressing... so... I can't even find the words. > >Christ, if you can't find the words, pj, we're all buggered. > >Damien Broderick > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Fri Sep 8 01:59:44 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:59:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: <62c14240609071820q786bd17dkaf09992212f04edd@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240609071820q786bd17dkaf09992212f04edd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4500CE90.1000702@goldenfuture.net> And people wonder why Transhumanism and Extropy don't appeal to the masses... Joseph Mike Dougherty wrote: > If those "copies" are running in a quantum computer, 'you' have killed > every non-you copy at every probability wave function collapse. In > the evolution of this moment, you are/were currently the most "fit" > for actual (non-virtual) existance. It is [un?]fortunate fo your that > we are all entangled on the hardware that runs reality, else you > really would be on your own. In that case you might find yourself in > this situation: http://devernay.free.fr/paradoxlost/html/solipsist.html > > On 9/7/06, *Robert Bradbury* > wrote: > > > On 9/6/06, *A B* > wrote: > > > I must ask you: Why do you feel that you have the "right" or > "entitlement" or "freedom" (or whatever *word* you want to > use) to create and/or run conscious, artificial beings on your > hardware and then do absolutely anything you want with them - > morality being at your sole discretion? > > [snip] > > This line of discussion is a close relation to the "Can you kill > your copies" discussion which was to the best of my knowledge > never resolved. My current working solution is that all of *my* > copies going in know that they are subject to deletion -- just as > my thoughts are. > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 02:49:16 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 22:49:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: <4500CE90.1000702@goldenfuture.net> References: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240609071820q786bd17dkaf09992212f04edd@mail.gmail.com> <4500CE90.1000702@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <62c14240609071949y2476c671xcb901c3f28827823@mail.gmail.com> On 9/7/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > And people wonder why Transhumanism and Extropy don't appeal to the > masses... > What people? Are we supposed to be concerned about the masses? I really am not trying to be snarky (it's a natural skill) Seriously though, is this list supposed to be a place for like-minded Transhumanists and Extropians to discuss ideas amongst themselves - or is this a place to encourage "the masses" to understand the philosophy using sanitized language and small words? I do believe it is important to know the audience before attempting to deliver a point. If you were just throwing out a quip and I missed the tone, then "i get it now" - if not, can you direct me to another resource for the etiquette of this list? (ex: I don't remember a specific suggestion for top or bottom posting. My last post was top- out of habit. Unless there is a preference I usually try to bottom-post to lists so i remember to trim the quotation) To make a further comment about appealing to "the masses" - perhaps people would like it more if we renamed it iTranshumanism and iExtropy. Or you know, if the iPod is not the thing, maybe capitalize on how much people love plasma Television and make it Plasmahumanism, or maybe drop the redundant letters and just call it Xtropy. You know, people generally love gimmicky stuff like that :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 03:12:51 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 23:12:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resource Dispersal In-Reply-To: <20060907000403.77743.qmail@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060907000403.77743.qmail@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609072012m8b60b19t7da04ee97ebf2479@mail.gmail.com> On 9/6/06, A B wrote: > > For the sake of this question, lets assume that the first > super-intelligent mind is derived purely from AI research (ie. there aren't > yet any cyborgs running around) and that this occurs in the relatively near > future (~10 years from now or less). Let's assume that it is "friendly" and > pursues altruistic goals. Do you guys believe that the AI, acting > consistently with "friendliness", would "peacefully" enforce an equal > distribution of resources (eg. energy, matter, etc.) among all conscious > beings on earth? Or, would you guess that the AI would feel compelled for > any reason to preserve something similar to the weighted economic/ethical > system that we have today (in the Democratic countries at least). (Note: I'm > not yet indicating my preference on this matter, I'm just curious about what > some Extropians think). > Let me answer your scenario with another scenario. Suppose there is already a super-intelligent mind observing, collating data on and reacting to perceptions of this world. There are a large number of faithful followers of this super-being who truly believe they are impacted daily by vis influence. Are they/we any more likely to act in accordance with friendliness or peacefulness because of this phenomenon? I don't think either of those terms have an exact enough definition for a sufficiently predictable evolution through either iterative or recursive improvements in understanding higher orders of intelligence/insight/perspective/other_vaguely_subjective_terms -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 8 04:38:59 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 21:38:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <084201c6d2b5$546bc3e0$e2941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <200609080439.k884dLoj017214@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > > pjmanney: > > > What would theoretically destroy nanobots? [..] > > Or simply screws with them enough to render > > them neutral/inactive/harmless? H+ ions? Atomic oxygen? Any strong acid or base? spike From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 8 04:34:18 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 21:34:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer In-Reply-To: <20060907083058.GU21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200609080439.k884dl4h004906@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 1:31 AM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] internet search privatizer > > On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:39:10PM -0700, spike wrote: > > > Very much so. My own views on openness were based on my own lack of > desire to hide anything about my life... > > Would this go so far as to post your complete earning statements... {8^D Hmmm, ja, anyone who cares could easily estimate my salary to one digit precision, which would be close enough for any practical purpose I can imagine. > your daily diary (containing your every thought, of course)... My ExI posts are this in a way, as much as I take the effort to record. At one time I spent much more effort and time posting my thoughts and ideas here. > ...and to install webcams into your every room?... That would run into money. I don't see the sense in spending good money to spew information to the masses who likely wouldn't even want it. > > Have you never had to exchange emails with a customer who insisted > they to be encrypted?... I should point out that in my workplace all the email is encrypted. We have IT people that take care of that. I don't know how it works. They do. > > enable crime. > > Film at 11: most things enable crime. Cars enable crime, should we > outlaw cars? Kitchen knives enable crime... Point well taken. I am a gun ownership advocate, and that definitely enables both crime and deterrence. On that note, I had an idea while reading your post. We could get a group of openness advocates, and sprinkle among them decoys whose information openness would serve as attractive targets for identity thieves. Then if anyone did attempt to use credit line of one of the decoys WHAM ya got em, because the merchants would have a computerized list of decoy identities. Then any time an identity thief discovered what appeared to be an easy ID theft target, she would immediately suspect a trap. She would then look for a more difficult ID theft target. Perhaps digging for information would create a clearer trail for the authorities. Likewise with lawsuit lottery players. Create some decoy fictitious wealthy person. The lawsuit lottery player arranges to have an accident on the front lawn of the decoy, lawsuit goes forth, no money there. We could perhaps penetrate terrorist sleeper cells with decoy fanatics. Then when the real fanatics appear, the others don't trust her. But I digress. {8^D spike From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Sep 8 06:28:44 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 23:28:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Message-ID: <00c001c6d310$412e2b00$0200a8c0@Nano> Please come vote for my animated video that I submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a rational gamble" often quoted through out the cryonics history and he currently works for Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - we could really, really, use this money. But I need your votes to win. My submission is the one called "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they will ask you to register, it's free and really quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please also forward this on to anyone you know who will also help out with votes for my work. Here is where you can vote for me: http://www.windblows.us/ Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org 3D/Animation http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm Microscope Jewelry http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rskennan at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 08:37:40 2006 From: rskennan at gmail.com (R. Scott Kennan) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 04:37:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends In-Reply-To: <00c001c6d310$412e2b00$0200a8c0@Nano> References: <00c001c6d310$412e2b00$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: Done. Good luck. On 9/8/06, Gina Miller wrote: > > *Please* come vote for my animated video that I submitted for a wind > energy competition, the prize is 10 thousand dollars. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 08:48:07 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 01:48:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? Message-ID: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Can anyone send me the text of this New Scientist article? http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 8 09:24:30 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 10:24:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/8/06, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Can anyone send me the text of this New Scientist article? > > http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html > Google on Shawyer emdrive You'll get plenty to read. BillK From hemm at openlink.com.br Fri Sep 8 12:17:11 2006 From: hemm at openlink.com.br (Henrique Moraes Machado (oplnk)) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 09:17:11 -0300 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0a0d01c6d340$b71b1190$fe00a8c0@cpd01> The best I've found so far is here: http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: "BillK" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 6:24 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? > On 9/8/06, Michael Anissimov wrote: >> Can anyone send me the text of this New Scientist article? >> >> http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Sep 8 15:01:47 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:01:47 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question In-Reply-To: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20060908095924.041c7ce0@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 01:19 PM 9/7/2006, pjmanney wrote: >What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific >question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures at an >atomic level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or simply >screws with them enough to render them neutral/inactive/harmless? To give >you some possibly important detail, these are medicinal bots and would be >used internally in the brain. They would need to pass the blood/brain >barrier after ingestion. And there are a whole lot of them. I don't want >to say anymore in a public posting, since all my postings seem to be >accessible on Google lately! [What's that about???] If you have any >questions that I can answer with more specifics, that will lead to a >better overall answer, please email me privately. I discussed this with Robert Freitas who said that you might direct them to the Lifeboat Foundation NanoShield proposal (http://lifeboat.com/ex/nanoshield), which discusses a number of disabling methodologies for rampaging nanorobots (in the "emergency" section), that might possibly be relevant. But maybe the bigger question is how do we encourage creative and artistic pursuits within and around transhumanism to work toward possibilities for our future and to help society move away from doomsday scenarios. Best wishes, Natasha Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist.Designer-Media Artist.Futurist Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brian at posthuman.com Fri Sep 8 16:05:23 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 11:05:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <450194C3.4040901@posthuman.com> I posted the full text to the transhumantech list two days ago. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From sentience at pobox.com Fri Sep 8 17:46:42 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:46:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4501AC82.2090700@pobox.com> > The best I've found so far is here: > http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm On the one hand, it claims that this operates within the laws of physics; that is, a conventional calculation will show that this is a reactionless drive. On the other hand, they provide no numbers or calculations and while IANAP I'm pretty damned sure that the laws of physics prohibit this. To be specific, it appears to violate conservation of momentum. As I understand it, conservation of momentum is a fundamental consequence of the laws of physics being invariant under translation in space. Since every elementary event known to physical law obeys conservation of momentum, all larger systems also obey conservation of momentum. If they told me that microwaves shot out the other end, I'd be far more willing to believe it. As it is, my reading is that if this were true it would be front-page news in every newspaper on the face of the Earth and would necessarily involve DRASTIC changes to the fundamental laws of physics. IANAP but this sounds completely unbelievable. But then it is not the place of transhumanists to substitute themselves for the physicist community in judging claims of perpetual motion or reactionless driving. When it hits the cover of _Science_, then report on it. (New Scientist is not a trustworthy source.) Of course it is also possible that e.g. microwaves do shoot out the other end, and the nontechnical press has simply failed to grasp this. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com Fri Sep 8 17:22:24 2006 From: jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com (Jose Cordeiro) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 10:22:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Synthetic biology: Life 2.0 Message-ID: <20060908172224.90353.qmail@web32807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Synthetic biology Life 2.0 Aug 31st 2006 | BERKELEY, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND >From The Economist print edition The new science of synthetic biology is poised between hype and hope. But its time will soon come IN 1965 few people outside Silicon Valley had heard of Gordon Moore. For that matter, no one at all had heard of Silicon Valley. The name did not exist and the orchards of Santa Clara county still brought forth apples, not Macintoshes. But Mr Moore could already discern the outlines. For 1965 was the year when he published the paper that gave birth to his famous ?law? that the power of computers, as measured by the number of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip, would double every 18 months or so. Four decades later, equally few people have heard of Rob Carlson. Dr Carlson is a researcher at the University of Washington, and some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that he drew a few years ago look suspiciously like the biological equivalent of Moore's law. By the end of the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day. At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but that may not stop it from sticking) is making that possible. In the short run such engineering means assembling genes from different organisms to create new metabolic pathways or even new organisms. In the long run it might involve re-writing the genetic code altogether, to create things that are beyond the range of existing biology. These are enterprises far more worthy of the name of genetic engineering than today's tinkering. But since that name is taken, the field's pioneers have had to come up with a new one. They have dubbed their fledgling discipline ?synthetic biology?. Truly intelligent design One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And life, in his opinion, is a kludge. No intelligent designer would have put the genomes of living organisms together in the way that evolution has. Some parts overlap, meaning that they cannot change jobs independently of one another. Others have lost their function but have not been removed, so they simply clutter things up. And there is no sense of organisation or hierarchy. That is because, unlike an engineer, evolution cannot go back to the drawing board, it can merely play with what already exists. Biologists, who seek merely to understand how life works, accept this. Engineers such as Dr Endy, who wish to change the way it works, do not. They want to start again. So Dr Endy has developed an idea invented by Tom Knight, one of his colleagues at MIT. Dr Knight calls the idea ?BioBricks?. His inspiration was a children's toy called Lego. What makes Lego successful is that any part can attach to any other via a universal connector. A BioBrick is a strand of DNA that has universal connectors at each end. BioBricks can thus be linked together to form higher-level components and also joined into the DNA of a cell so that they can control its activity. '); // --> on error resume next MM_FlashCanPlay = ( IsObject(CreateObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash." & MM_contentVersion))) EXSB_DoFSCommand(sCmd,sArg) = 0) || navigator.userAgent.indexOf("WebTV") >= 0) { document.write(''); } // --> Dr Endy likes BioBricks because they promise the synthetic biologist the standardised set of parts that has been one of the advantages enjoyed by the electronic engineers behind Moore's law. If an engineer wants a particular component for a job, he can go to a catalogue, find a widget with the right parameters and order it from a supplier. He does not have to design it himself. He does not even have to know how it works. Dr Endy thinks BioBricks can put biologists in the same position. The DNA of a BioBrick contains a combination of genes that acts as a standardised component. When translated into protein in a cell, it makes that cell do something?and that something is often more than just ?make more of protein X?. In particular, Dr Endy is interested in switches and control systems that regulate other genes. Such switches are the basis of electronics and he hopes they may one day become the basis of an industrialised synthetic biology. At the moment, BioBricks, like Lego, are still a toy. They have been used for proof-of-principle studies such as taking photographs with films made of modified bacteria, but not yet for serious applications. But there are a lot of them around?many in the public domain at MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Such ?open wetware? is one reason for the emergence of biohacking (see article). Whether BioBricks will come to dominate the field remains to be seen. One difficulty they face is the cussed tendency of biological things to evolve. An electronic component, once designed, can be turned out reliably in a factory. BioBricks are bred, rather than made, and that introduces scope for error. Meanwhile, other researchers are content to work with things that more closely resemble natural components, although they still assemble them in unconventional ways. A new synthesis One of the leading proponents of this method is Jay Keasling, of the University of California, Berkeley, who also believes that synthetic biology will ultimately need standard, well-characterised parts if it is to thrive. But he is trying to get there via a practical project, rather than by generating lots of components and waiting for others to think of what to do with them. Dr Keasling's project is to do biologically what no chemist has yet managed to accomplish?to synthesise an antimalarial drug called artemisinin cheaply. At the moment, artemisinin is a herbal remedy. It is extracted from Artemisia annua, a type of wormwood, and the best source is in China. Making artemisinin by standard chemistry requires so many steps that it is impractical. So Dr Keasling persuaded the Gates Foundation to back his idea for doing the job using synthetic biology. For this, he has built a metabolic pathway in yeast cells that synthesises a chemical called artemisinic acid which chemists can easily convert into artemisinin. Some of the genes to do this have come from Artemisia, but others have been created from other sources. Dr Keasling's project is not the only one to lay down artificial metabolic pathways. One goal of synthetic biology is to make what is known as cellulosic ethanol. At the moment, ethanol?whether for wine, beer or fuel?is made by fermenting sugar or starch. But even in crops such as sugar cane and maize, which have been bred for their high yields, a lot of the plant is wasted. Although yeast cannot digest cellulose or lignin, the molecules that form a plant's skeleton, some bacteria and other species of fungi are able to do the job. Identifying the genes for the enzymes that do this, modifying them and assembling them into new pathways would produce systems that could digest the whole plant and turn it into ethanol. Nancy Ho, of Purdue University, in Indiana, has already worked out a way to enable yeast cells to ferment the sugars produced by breaking down cellulose?which natural yeast cannot do. This is important stuff. Cellulosic ethanol is the great hope of many environmentalists since its carbon, unlike that in fossil fuels, comes from the atmosphere and thus cannot make a net contribution to global warming when it returns there. The ultimate proof of the success of synthetic biology, though, would be not merely an artificial metabolic pathway, but an artificial organism. That is the goal of Craig Venter. Dr Venter, the man who first sequenced the entire genome of a living creature (a bacterium) and then went on to run a private-enterprise rival to the publicly funded Human Genome Project, has re-invented himself again. This time he is synthesising genomes, rather than analysing them. Three years ago he made the first viable synthetic virus from off-the-shelf chemicals. (It is a parasite of bacteria, not humans.) Now he has a bacterial genome in his sights. To make the task easier, Dr Venter is first creating what he and Hamilton Smith, his collaborator at the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, call the minimal genome. This is a stripped-down bacterial genome that contains the smallest set of genes consistent with life in the cushy environment of a laboratory. Such a genome would have several advantages for synthetic biologists. First, being small, it would be easier to make. Second, it would not survive in the big, bad world outside the laboratory, should it chance to escape. Third, it would not dissipate its biochemical effort on non-essential tasks. That means it could be used as a platform on which to bolt commercially useful pathways. According to Dr Venter, the raw materials for those pathways are abundant. As he observes, half the mass of living organisms on the planet is made of bacteria and these bacteria are divided into zillions of species with countless unidentified genes. For the past couple of years he has been sampling the oceans and collecting bacterial genes. He has identified about 6m. Among them are, for example, 20,000 genes for hydrogen-metabolising proteins. That is of particular interest, since Dr Venter sees synthetic biology as a source of new energy-generating technologies?and he has the backing of America's Department of Energy to prove the point. He has also found numerous genes for versions of rhodopsin. In vertebrates this protein is found in retinal cells, where it transduces the energy of light into a nerve signal to the brain. What it is doing in so many bacteria is not known, though one possibility is signalling how deep they are in the ocean as a consequence of how dark it is. Whatever the cause, the energy conversion that rhodopsin brings about is also of interest. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it Dr Venter reckons he will be able to synthesise a working bacterial genome from scratch within two years. More complex genomes, of the sort that make plants, animals and fungi, will take longer. But they, he thinks, should be possible within a decade. Even this definitive erasure of the distinction between the living and non-living worlds is not, however, the most radical idea in synthetic biology. Some people want to go beyond the toolkit that evolution has provided and create biological systems that work with a chemistry that is not found in natural living things. Biology's operating system relies on two sorts of molecule: nucleic acids and amino acids. Nucleic acids (DNA and its cousin, RNA) act as information stores. The information they store is how to assemble amino acids into proteins, which are chains of linked amino acids. Proteins then go on to do the work of sustaining life. They manufacture other sorts of biological molecules, such as fats and sugars. They process energy. They provide structural support for cells. One of the recurrent principles of evolution is ?if it ain't broke, don't fix it?. That is why the kludges Dr Endy is trying to eliminate have endured across the millennia. Once the nucleic acid-amino acid operating system came into existence it could never be ?fixed? into anything else by evolution, because the immediate consequences would have been so serious. But that does not mean it cannot be changed by an intelligent designer, and a number of such people are looking into how this might be done. One obvious improvement would be to increase the number of amino acids that can be assembled into proteins. At the moment only 20 are used routinely in biology, but chemists can make thousands of others. Proteins containing those ?non-biological? amino acids would have novel properties, and some of those properties might be useful. That, at least, is the thinking behind the attempt by Lei Wang, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, to extend the amino-acid parts set. Dr Wang's starting point is the redundancy of the genetic code used by nucleic acids. This code is spelled out in the genetic ?letters? A, C, G and T, which correspond to chemical sub-units of nucleic acids. The letters are grouped into three-letter ?words? known as codons, meaning that there are 64 of them. All but three of the codons correspond to particular amino acids, and the order of the codons in the nucleic acid corresponds to the order of the amino acids in the protein. The remaining three are signals that the protein is complete. But, with more codons than amino acids, many amino acids have more than one codon to describe them. There is also a superfluity of stop signals. Dr Wang has managed to reassign one of the stop codons in E. coli, the bacterial workhorse of geneticists, to recognise an unnatural amino acid. This can now be incorporated into proteins made by the bacterium. Peter Carr of MIT and Farren Isaacs of Harvard Medical School have an even more ambitious plan. They intend to recode E. coli completely, eliminating the redundant codons. They have settled on one codon for each natural amino acid and one for the stop signal and plan to go through the bacterium's entire genome replacing alternative codons with their chosen ones. The idea is that the cleaned up bacterium will be more efficient. That remains to be seen; natural selection has been working on E. coli for a long time, so whether two intelligent designers can do a better job is questionable. But if their new bacterium is at least viable, it will have 43 codons that can be re-assigned to other tasks. The debate evolves Where all this will lead is anybody's guess. But synthetic biologists themselves are aware of the risks. The most obvious is that somebody, whether a malicious biohacker or a political terrorist, will do something deliberately nasty. The other risk is that something will escape accidentally. No technology is risk free, but synthetic biology has the twist that its mistakes can breed. Today the risks are not great. As David Baltimore, the president of the California Institute of Technology, observes, ?nature is a very tough critic?. Any organism modified in a laboratory is unlikely to make it in the outside world in competition with creatures toughened up by natural selection. Nevertheless, as knowledge increases, so will the risk that something truly nasty might be unleashed. To avoid that and the opposite problem of hasty legislation to curb their activities, researchers are trying to get their retaliations in first by promoting public debate. Their historical model is the Asilomar conference of 1975, when the first biotechnologists met to agree on self-denying ordinances that went a long way towards establishing their credentials as responsible and trustworthy people. Despite initial fears, biotechnology has not, up to now, caused any serious problems. A recent meeting of biosynthesists in Berkeley issued a discussion document; the Sloan Foundation has paid for a report, coming out soon, on the risks and social implications of synthetic biology. So far, perhaps surprisingly, the wider public has shown little interest. Perhaps it should. La vie est belle! Yos? (www.cordeiro.org) Caracas, Venezuela, Americas, TerraNostra, Solar System, Milky Way, Multiverse -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 8 20:19:11 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 22:19:11 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] [>Htech] Research question In-Reply-To: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <21509200.231391157653199122.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <20060908201911.GR21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 02:19:59PM -0400, pjmanney wrote: > What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific The question is rather: what would allow them to function? The medical kind would have to be equipped with multiple safeguards (think PAL), in order to be licensed. This is even more true for anything which can live and multiply in the environment. In fact, if you have the latter, your environment have to be divided into compartments, each heavily instrumented with diagnostic and enforcement gear. The real toner wars wouldn't be anything as benign as you read in once-trendy science fiction novels. > question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures at an > atomic level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or If you have a runaway self-rep nanoinfestation in the environment, and have no nanocountermeasure, you're fucked. There's nothing you can do. The ecology is a goner. If you have a bunch of nanomachines under controlled conditions, there are many ways. Immobilize them by foam. Wash them down from the air, if you can. Use complementary designer nanowidgets to plug their intake and generally foul up the works. Derive them of sunlight, if they're phototrophs. If they're driven by fuel oxidation, derive them of air. Derive them of fuel, if you can (not an option, if they've got fuel vesicles). Roast them (but take care to not make them ride up on convection streams -- this is the major reason why nuking is a bad idea). Attack them with corrosive chemicals (fuming nitric/hydrofluoric acid is tough). Irradiate them with a massive dose of radiation. Depending on their design, the things have many vulnerabilities. You will notice that none of this is practical outside of controlled (laboratory/cleanroom) conditions. Friendly fire is extremely severe. This is why you need really aggressive yet very selective nanocavalry if you're not in control (the bad guys won't give you any favors, so assume you're not in control). If this sounds bad, it's because it is. It's about the nastiest form of warfare I can imagine, save of melting this planet's crust. > simply screws with them enough to render them > neutral/inactive/harmless? To give you some possibly > important detail, these are medicinal bots and would be used > internally in the brain. They would need to pass the blood/brain If they're inside, and won't listen to commands, and you don't have nanocountermeasure to get in, and terminate them in situ, you're fucked. > barrier after ingestion. And there are a whole lot of them. I don't > want to say anymore in a public posting, since all my postings seem to > be accessible on Google lately! [What's that about???] If you have That's not a bug, it's a feetchur. The mailman archives are web-visible, and indexed by web crawlers. > any questions that I can answer with more specifics, that will lead to > a better overall answer, please email me privately. > > Crichton used the magnet gag in Prey. Therefore, I'd like to avoid > that if I can. Hell, I'm not even sure that made a whole lot of > sense! But a lot in that book didn't make a whole lot of sense. > > [Just so you all know upfront, I am not demonizing nanotech. I am no > Crichtonesque technoscold. I have good people and bad people and they > are both using nanotech. Guns don't kill people. People kill > people...] > > Consider your assistance a step toward popularizing the H+ meme. > Anyone who nails it gets a big, wet, sloppy thank you in the > acknowledgements! (There are a few of you in there already, BTW.) > > Thanks for your help! -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 8 21:09:01 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:09:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends In-Reply-To: <00c001c6d310$412e2b00$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> Hi Gina, Great video. I checked them all out and yours really is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for you from two different computers. Both time a check mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case did the number of votes listed for your video incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? --- Gina Miller wrote: > Please come vote for my animated video that I > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > cryonics history and he currently works for > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > will ask you to register, it's free and really > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > also help out with votes for my work. > Here is where you can vote for me: > http://www.windblows.us/ > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Participating Member > http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > http://www.extropy.org > 3D/Animation > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > Microscope Jewelry > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Sep 8 21:44:37 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:44:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano> Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina www.nanogirl.com ----- Original Message ----- From: The Avantguardian To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Hi Gina, Great video. I checked them all out and yours really is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for you from two different computers. Both time a check mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case did the number of votes listed for your video incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? --- Gina Miller wrote: > Please come vote for my animated video that I > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > cryonics history and he currently works for > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > will ask you to register, it's free and really > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > also help out with votes for my work. > Here is where you can vote for me: > http://www.windblows.us/ > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Participating Member > http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > http://www.extropy.org > 3D/Animation > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > Microscope Jewelry > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Fri Sep 8 22:14:48 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:14:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Masses (was Re: The Limits of "Property") In-Reply-To: <62c14240609071949y2476c671xcb901c3f28827823@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060907010320.44092.qmail@web37408.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240609071820q786bd17dkaf09992212f04edd@mail.gmail.com> <4500CE90.1000702@goldenfuture.net> <62c14240609071949y2476c671xcb901c3f28827823@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4501EB58.8080405@goldenfuture.net> It was indeed a quip on my part, but hopefully one with a larger point. That is, I wasn't speaking for the content of this list (over which I have no control, naturally), but to the general level of discourse within Transhumanism (and Extropianism) in general. There is, IMNSHO, a tendency for >H email lists to veer off into the most obscure points of philosophy, making the most erudite discussions of medieval monks about the nature of angels seem downright homey. The average person (gasp!) is simply not going to find such discussions accessible, and that does >H a disservice. Mock all you want about the need to appeal to the masses, but it is precisely those masses who want to shut down research into most of the technologies that >H espouses. Transhumanist organizations are laughably under-supported and under-funded. That's because we are pitifully under-represented. And that is never, ever going to change unless we start bringing in new people. Not just people from the rarified intellectual elites, but ordinary folks. Because there are a LOT more of them than the elites, and numbers, frankly, mean power of all sorts; economic, political, social... We need to ditch the sort of intellectual snobbery which has been one of >H's hallmarks for years. Don't understand Bayesian logic? Begone! Can't produce a pages-long essay on the problem of Identity in the context of quantum mind-uploading? Maybe you'd be better off among the peasants in the *sniff* World Future Society. So, no; I'm not saying the Extropy list should be any different than it is now. I'm saying that Transhumanism in general should be a lot more accessible than it is now. Less erudite and more practical. Chortle about gimicks all you like. If they help to open peoples' minds about what we are, what we want, and help to convince them that what we want isn't the work of the Devil, then I say let's do it. We've been a fringe of a fringe of a fringe too long. Joseph Mike Dougherty wrote: > On 9/7/06, *Joseph Bloch* > wrote: > > And people wonder why Transhumanism and Extropy don't appeal to the > masses... > > > What people? Are we supposed to be concerned about the masses? I > really am not trying to be snarky (it's a natural skill) Seriously > though, is this list supposed to be a place for like-minded > Transhumanists and Extropians to discuss ideas amongst themselves - or > is this a place to encourage "the masses" to understand the philosophy > using sanitized language and small words? I do believe it is > important to know the audience before attempting to deliver a point. > If you were just throwing out a quip and I missed the tone, then "i > get it now" - if not, can you direct me to another resource for the > etiquette of this list? (ex: I don't remember a specific suggestion > for top or bottom posting. My last post was top- out of habit. > Unless there is a preference I usually try to bottom-post to lists so > i remember to trim the quotation) > > To make a further comment about appealing to "the masses" - perhaps > people would like it more if we renamed it iTranshumanism and > iExtropy. Or you know, if the iPod is not the thing, maybe capitalize > on how much people love plasma Television and make it Plasmahumanism, > or maybe drop the redundant letters and just call it Xtropy. You > know, people generally love gimmicky stuff like that :) > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Sep 8 22:32:14 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 15:32:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> <014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano> Okay, they say the problem is solved over there but it appears as though you will need to revote for me! Sorry about that, again, thank you so much! http://www.windblows.us/index.php I am "Wind Makes the World go Round". Gina ----- Original Message ----- From: Gina Miller To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:44 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina www.nanogirl.com ----- Original Message ----- From: The Avantguardian To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Hi Gina, Great video. I checked them all out and yours really is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for you from two different computers. Both time a check mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case did the number of votes listed for your video incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? --- Gina Miller wrote: > Please come vote for my animated video that I > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > cryonics history and he currently works for > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > will ask you to register, it's free and really > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > also help out with votes for my work. > Here is where you can vote for me: > http://www.windblows.us/ > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Participating Member > http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > http://www.extropy.org > 3D/Animation > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > Microscope Jewelry > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 9 00:17:32 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 17:17:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant Message-ID: <20060909001732.41539.qmail@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> I am impressed whether the elephant actually understands what it is saying. Especially because it had to figure out out to use its trunk to make the noises. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060908/ap_on_fe_st/talking_elephant_1 Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Sep 9 01:17:50 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:17:50 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <20060909001732.41539.qmail@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20060909001732.41539.qmail@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060908201629.02241d20@satx.rr.com> At 05:17 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, Stuart wrote: >I am impressed whether the elephant actually >understands what it is saying. Especially because it >had to figure out out to use its trunk to make the >noises. > >http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060908/ap_on_fe_st/talking_elephant_1 Yeah, but can it drive, that's what I want to know. Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Sep 9 01:02:55 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 21:02:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <4501AC82.2090700@pobox.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060908205330.051ded08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:46 AM 9/8/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > > The best I've found so far is here: > > http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm > >On the one hand, it claims that this operates within the laws of >physics; that is, a conventional calculation will show that this is a >reactionless drive. > >On the other hand, they provide no numbers or calculations and while >IANAP I'm pretty damned sure that the laws of physics prohibit this. To >be specific, it appears to violate conservation of momentum. As I >understand it, conservation of momentum is a fundamental consequence of > the laws of physics being invariant under translation in space. Since >every elementary event known to physical law obeys conservation of >momentum, all larger systems also obey conservation of momentum. > >If they told me that microwaves shot out the other end, I'd be far more >willing to believe it. I wouldn't. You have any idea of what a microwave generator with 2 gms of thrust would do to the countryside? >As it is, my reading is that if this were true it would be front-page >news in every newspaper on the face of the Earth and would necessarily >involve DRASTIC changes to the fundamental laws of physics. > >IANAP but this sounds completely unbelievable. But then it is not the >place of transhumanists to substitute themselves for the physicist >community in judging claims of perpetual motion or reactionless driving. Reactionless drives *are* perpetual motion machines. If you can't visualize why I can explain the obvious. > When it hits the cover of _Science_, then report on it. (New >Scientist is not a trustworthy source.) > >Of course it is also possible that e.g. microwaves do shoot out the >other end, and the nontechnical press has simply failed to grasp this. See above. Keith From sentience at pobox.com Sat Sep 9 01:53:46 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:53:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060908205330.051ded08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060908205330.051ded08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <45021EAA.10306@pobox.com> Keith Henson wrote: > > Reactionless drives *are* perpetual motion machines. If you can't > visualize why I can explain the obvious. Actually, I can't see this as obvious. Suppose the reactionless drive requires a thermal differential to drive it, and equalizes the thermal differential in the process. How would it necessarily violate the second law of thermodynamics in the course of violating conservation of momentum? >> If they told me that microwaves shot out the other end, I'd be far more >> willing to believe it. > I wouldn't. You have any idea of what a microwave generator with 2 gms of > thrust would do to the countryside? The thought had occurred to me, but as a matter of fact, I didn't know off the top of my head. Also, my statement was just with respect to the prospect of producing thrust. Laying waste to the countryside doesn't violate *physical* law. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From nanogirl at halcyon.com Sat Sep 9 04:44:27 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 21:44:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com><014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano> <019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano> P.S. Save your password info, I might submit a second one later! : ) Gina` ----- Original Message ----- From: Gina Miller To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 3:32 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Okay, they say the problem is solved over there but it appears as though you will need to revote for me! Sorry about that, again, thank you so much! http://www.windblows.us/index.php I am "Wind Makes the World go Round". Gina ----- Original Message ----- From: Gina Miller To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:44 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina www.nanogirl.com ----- Original Message ----- From: The Avantguardian To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Hi Gina, Great video. I checked them all out and yours really is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for you from two different computers. Both time a check mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case did the number of votes listed for your video incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? --- Gina Miller wrote: > Please come vote for my animated video that I > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > cryonics history and he currently works for > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > will ask you to register, it's free and really > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > also help out with votes for my work. > Here is where you can vote for me: > http://www.windblows.us/ > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Participating Member > http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > http://www.extropy.org > 3D/Animation > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > Microscope Jewelry > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Sep 9 04:54:49 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:54:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:53 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, you wrote: >Keith Henson wrote: > > > > Reactionless drives *are* perpetual motion machines. If you can't > > visualize why I can explain the obvious. > >Actually, I can't see this as obvious. Suppose the reactionless drive >requires a thermal differential to drive it, and equalizes the thermal >differential in the process. How would it necessarily violate the >second law of thermodynamics in the course of violating conservation of >momentum? Thought experiment. The power you can get out of a moving object is the product of speed and force. So let a vehicle with a reactionless drive on a zero friction bearing accelerate to a high enough speed. Then you lower a wheel and draw enough power to run the drive. Let it go a little faster and you are making power. (This assumes the drive force is invariant to the reference frame.) QED, a reactionless drive is the same thing as a perpetual motion machine that *makes* power. > >> If they told me that microwaves shot out the other end, I'd be far more > >> willing to believe it. > > > I wouldn't. You have any idea of what a microwave generator with 2 gms of > > thrust would do to the countryside? > >The thought had occurred to me, but as a matter of fact, I didn't know >off the top of my head. Also, my statement was just with respect to the >prospect of producing thrust. Laying waste to the countryside doesn't >violate *physical* law. True, but it would sure make the news. The article mentioned 2 gms. That's the wrong unit, but assuming they were talking about supporting 2 gms in a 1 g field, that/s about .020 Nt. For a photon drive, the force is equal to power (in watts)/c or P = .02 x 3 x 10^8 = 6 x 10^6 watts or 6000 kW. The heck with it as a reactionless drive, I want use it to heat my house! Keith From pgptag at gmail.com Sat Sep 9 05:53:23 2006 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 07:53:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends In-Reply-To: <044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano> References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> <014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano> <019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano> <044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <470a3c520609082253s113f33dcs2fe99ef2a014cde0@mail.gmail.com> Done. You have now 35 votes. Luck G. On 9/9/06, Gina Miller wrote: > > > P.S. Save your password info, I might submit a second one later! : ) Gina` > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 3:32 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Okay, they say the problem is solved over there but it appears as though you > will need to revote for me! Sorry about that, again, thank you so much! > http://www.windblows.us/index.php I am "Wind Makes the > World go Round". > Gina > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:44 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this > problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm > not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you > know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina > www.nanogirl.com > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: The Avantguardian > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > Hi Gina, > > Great video. I checked them all out and yours really > is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for > you from two different computers. Both time a check > mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case > did the number of votes listed for your video > incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to > register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? > > > > --- Gina Miller wrote: > > > Please come vote for my animated video that I > > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > > cryonics history and he currently works for > > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > > will ask you to register, it's free and really > > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > > also help out with votes for my work. > > Here is where you can vote for me: > > http://www.windblows.us/ > > > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > > Nanotechnology Industries > > http://www.nanoindustries.com > > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > > Foresight Participating Member > > http://www.foresight.org > > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > > http://www.extropy.org > > 3D/Animation > > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > > Microscope Jewelry > > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 9 05:33:15 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 22:33:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060908205330.051ded08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20060909053315.44507.qmail@web60524.mail.yahoo.com> I read up on it. It generates a static force (like friction) there is no net impulse just the reduction of external forces. (i.e. it cancels out a few grams of g). Its like an optical gyroscope. It can't propel anything but may still be useful. Although it has to have better mass to force ratio to do much good. --- Keith Henson wrote: > At 10:46 AM 9/8/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > > > The best I've found so far is here: > > > http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm > > > >On the one hand, it claims that this operates > within the laws of > >physics; that is, a conventional calculation will > show that this is a > >reactionless drive. > > > >On the other hand, they provide no numbers or > calculations and while > >IANAP I'm pretty damned sure that the laws of > physics prohibit this. To > >be specific, it appears to violate conservation of > momentum. As I > >understand it, conservation of momentum is a > fundamental consequence of > > the laws of physics being invariant under > translation in space. Since > >every elementary event known to physical law obeys > conservation of > >momentum, all larger systems also obey conservation > of momentum. > > > >If they told me that microwaves shot out the other > end, I'd be far more > >willing to believe it. > > I wouldn't. You have any idea of what a microwave > generator with 2 gms of > thrust would do to the countryside? > > >As it is, my reading is that if this were true it > would be front-page > >news in every newspaper on the face of the Earth > and would necessarily > >involve DRASTIC changes to the fundamental laws of > physics. > > > >IANAP but this sounds completely unbelievable. But > then it is not the > >place of transhumanists to substitute themselves > for the physicist > >community in judging claims of perpetual motion or > reactionless driving. > > Reactionless drives *are* perpetual motion machines. > If you can't > visualize why I can explain the obvious. > > > When it hits the cover of _Science_, then report > on it. (New > >Scientist is not a trustworthy source.) > > > >Of course it is also possible that e.g. microwaves > do shoot out the > >other end, and the nontechnical press has simply > failed to grasp this. > > See above. > > Keith > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From nanogirl at halcyon.com Sat Sep 9 06:02:35 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 23:02:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com><014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano><019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano><044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano> <470a3c520609082253s113f33dcs2fe99ef2a014cde0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <048401c6d3d5$8d942970$0200a8c0@Nano> Thank you thank you! You know I always notice your posts because I often sign my name G in my personal emails! G` (yeah, like that!) - keep em coming gang! ----- Original Message ----- From: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 10:53 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends Done. You have now 35 votes. Luck G. On 9/9/06, Gina Miller wrote: > > > P.S. Save your password info, I might submit a second one later! : ) Gina` > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 3:32 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Okay, they say the problem is solved over there but it appears as though you > will need to revote for me! Sorry about that, again, thank you so much! > http://www.windblows.us/index.php I am "Wind Makes the > World go Round". > Gina > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:44 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this > problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm > not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you > know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina > www.nanogirl.com > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: The Avantguardian > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > Hi Gina, > > Great video. I checked them all out and yours really > is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for > you from two different computers. Both time a check > mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case > did the number of votes listed for your video > incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to > register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? > > > > --- Gina Miller wrote: > > > Please come vote for my animated video that I > > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > > cryonics history and he currently works for > > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > > will ask you to register, it's free and really > > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > > also help out with votes for my work. > > Here is where you can vote for me: > > http://www.windblows.us/ > > > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > > Nanotechnology Industries > > http://www.nanoindustries.com > > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > > Foresight Participating Member > > http://www.foresight.org > > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > > http://www.extropy.org > > 3D/Animation > > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > > Microscope Jewelry > > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Sat Sep 9 06:04:04 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:04:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <45025954.9010201@pobox.com> Keith Henson wrote: > At 06:53 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, you wrote: > >>Keith Henson wrote: >> >>>Reactionless drives *are* perpetual motion machines. If you can't >>>visualize why I can explain the obvious. >> >>Actually, I can't see this as obvious. Suppose the reactionless drive >>requires a thermal differential to drive it, and equalizes the thermal >>differential in the process. How would it necessarily violate the >>second law of thermodynamics in the course of violating conservation of >>momentum? > > Thought experiment. The power you can get out of a moving object is the > product of speed and force. > > So let a vehicle with a reactionless drive on a zero friction bearing > accelerate to a high enough speed. Then you lower a wheel and draw enough > power to run the drive. Let it go a little faster and you are making > power. (This assumes the drive force is invariant to the reference > frame.) QED, a reactionless drive is the same thing as a perpetual motion > machine that *makes* power. Only if the reactionless drive requires no power to run, or if it requires less power to run than the corresponding work produced. They made some strange claims, but not that one. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 9 06:33:05 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 23:33:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060908201629.02241d20@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <20060909063305.67125.qmail@web60511.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > At 05:17 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, Stuart wrote: > > >I am impressed whether the elephant actually > >understands what it is saying. Especially because > it > >had to figure out out to use its trunk to make the > >noises. > > > >http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060908/ap_on_fe_st/talking_elephant_1 > > year, researchers > found that elephants can learn to imitate sounds, > according to > Everland. The study featured the case of an elephant > mimicking truck noises. > > > Yeah, but can it drive, that's what I want to know. I say hand them a joystick (I don't think they have the nasal dexterity for the newer controllers) and find out. If they can drive better than their trainers, then I vote that we take them off the menu. ;) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." - Shankarachanya __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hal at finney.org Sat Sep 9 08:04:29 2006 From: hal at finney.org (Hal Finney) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 01:04:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? Message-ID: <20060909080429.2815A14F6BE@finney.org> Keith's example may not have worked, but Dirk Bruere explained a few months ago that a reactionless drive is inconsistent with conservation of energy. This is true even if the drive uses power to produce thrust. Suppose constant power leads to constant thrust, as the principle of relativity would require. Constant power implies that total energy used will be proportional to time; but constant acceleration makes velocity proportional to time, and kinetic energy is proportional to v^2, which means it is proportional to time squared. Any time you have input energy proportional to time while output energy is proportional to time squared, you will go over unity after enough time. Hal From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Sat Sep 9 10:42:29 2006 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 12:42:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <45025954.9010201@pobox.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <45025954.9010201@pobox.com> Message-ID: <4902d9990609090342j723dac6dk47e12e6048143627@mail.gmail.com> > Only if the reactionless drive requires no power to run, or if it > requires less power to run than the corresponding work produced. They > made some strange claims, but not that one. Actually, they did. On http://www.emdrive.com/ they say "No propellant is used in the conversion process". In the previously linked page there was the example of a satellite that needs 1.7 tons of propellant, which wouldn't be required with their drive. So it's a perpetual motion machine, which happens to be reactionless. The best of both worlds :-) Alfio From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Sep 9 14:20:27 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2006 10:20:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <45025954.9010201@pobox.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909101123.035f10e0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:04 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: >Keith Henson wrote: > > At 06:53 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, you wrote: snip > > Thought experiment. The power you can get out of a moving object is the > > product of speed and force. > > > > So let a vehicle with a reactionless drive on a zero friction bearing > > accelerate to a high enough speed. Then you lower a wheel and draw enough > > power to run the drive. Let it go a little faster and you are making > > power. (This assumes the drive force is invariant to the reference > > frame.) QED, a reactionless drive is the same thing as a perpetual motion > > machine that *makes* power. > >Only if the reactionless drive requires no power to run, or if it >requires less power to run than the corresponding work produced. They >made some strange claims, but not that one. The claim is implicit, a consequence of any claim to have produced a reactionless drive. And no matter *how* much power the drive takes, you can always get more power than it takes to run it by going to a high enough velocity. It's not that I dismiss reactionless drives out of hand, it is just that if you have one, it can be used to create energy out of nothing. Which would be really amusing. Keith Henson From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Sat Sep 9 18:15:08 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 11:15:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909101123.035f10e0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060909005446.02fbec20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <45025954.9010201@pobox.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060909101123.035f10e0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10609091115s359bdc8g6ae6e30e2581379a@mail.gmail.com> Brian Wang has just blogged about this: http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2006/09/propellant-free-microwave-space.html -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From sentience at pobox.com Sat Sep 9 18:44:54 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2006 11:44:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <20060909080429.2815A14F6BE@finney.org> References: <20060909080429.2815A14F6BE@finney.org> Message-ID: <45030BA6.2050804@pobox.com> Hal Finney wrote: > Keith's example may not have worked, but Dirk Bruere explained a few > months ago that a reactionless drive is inconsistent with conservation > of energy. This is true even if the drive uses power to produce thrust. > > Suppose constant power leads to constant thrust, as the principle of > relativity would require. Constant power implies that total energy used > will be proportional to time; but constant acceleration makes velocity > proportional to time, and kinetic energy is proportional to v^2, which > means it is proportional to time squared. Any time you have input energy > proportional to time while output energy is proportional to time squared, > you will go over unity after enough time. Understood. Also: "Shawyer cautions that the calculations only work for static thrusts. ?You can?t beat the laws of physics. If it is used to accelerate, the Q value drops. It is best used to lift a body and oppose a force, for instance to counteract gravity. It cannot be used to accelerate further.?" Sounds like this violates the equivalence principle in General Relativity. Staying put against gravity = accelerating in free space. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From mike99 at lascruces.com Sat Sep 9 19:35:48 2006 From: mike99 at lascruces.com (mike99) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 13:35:48 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] RE: Research question In-Reply-To: <18895608.235401157655335896.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: The simplest means for stopping your nanobots is, as Jef said, to **assume** that they have in-built systems designed to prevent uncontrolled spread, and that your hero/heroine can hack into these systems and activate them. Many types of security systems are imaginable. But, again, for the sake of simplicity, you may assume that the most comprehensive fail-safe is based on reversible computing. When activated, the reverse-compute security system would cause the nanobots to retrace their steps, undoing what they had already done, and ceasing further activity as soon as they reached the starting point of their activity trace. Regards, Michael LaTorra WTA Publications Director Board of Directors, World Transhumanist Association: www.transhumanism.org > -----Original Message----- > >From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > >[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney > >Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:20 AM > >To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org; extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org; > >transhumantech at yahoogroups.com > >Subject: [extropy-chat] Research question > > > > > > > >I'm working on the book and I've left a crucial, climactic section quite > >vague that I need to start to flesh out in detail. You know the kind of > >vague I mean: hero neutralizes the threat and action ensues. Only I was > >naughty and eager to just get writing and hadn't completed my > research for > >it. So this is a theoretical question for all you engineers and > physicists > >and just plain smart folk: > > > >What would theoretically destroy nanobots? I guess the more specific > >question would be: what disassembles diamondoid nanostructures > at an atomic > >level and reverts them back to harmless carbon atoms? Or simply > screws with > >them enough to render them neutral/inactive/harmless? To give you some > >possibly important detail, these are medicinal bots and would be used > >internally in the brain. They would need to pass the blood/brain barrier > >after ingestion. And there are a whole lot of them. > > > >Remove their external energy source, or if they're using the > host metabolism > >then possibly poison it (without killing host), or relocate their energy > >source as a means of controlling their behavior, or...) (they're > too small > >to carry their own fuel, right?) > > > >Modify their programming (with a virus, or by communicating with their > >controller, or lots of other possibilities here) to either stop them or > >convert them to some useful purpose. Exploit some bug in their > programming > >in an unexpected way,.Force them out by infiltrating their command and > >control structure with similar, but benign nanobots. > > > >Find and activate the secret failsafe or deadman switch built in by their > >designer. > > > >Give them a decoy host brain and when they're all there, destroy it. > >(Sorry, I'm sure that's too simple.) > > > >I don't know of any chemical means to dissolve the diamondoid > atomic bonds > >without killing the host, but I am not a chemist. > > > >- Jef > > > > > >_______________________________________________ > >wta-talk mailing list > >wta-talk at transhumanism.org > >http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk > _______________________________________________ > wta-talk mailing list > wta-talk at transhumanism.org > http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk > From scerir at libero.it Sat Sep 9 20:46:35 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 22:46:35 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <000901c6d451$0afab5c0$03941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Michael Anissimov > Can anyone send me the text of this New Scientist article? Read also this one :-) http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw82.html There is a certain number of (more or less apparent) 'reactionless' drives. They are based on broken symmetries: particles / antiparticles; dielectric-A / dielectric-B; construct. interference / destruct. interference; subluminal group velocity / superluminal group velocity. From jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com Sun Sep 10 14:37:10 2006 From: jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com (Jose Cordeiro) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 07:37:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Global Energy Scenarios for 2020: with a transhumanist high-tech scenario Message-ID: <20060910143710.1710.qmail@web32814.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear transhumanist friends, The Global Energy Scenarios for 2020 are already available in print. The "State of the Future 2006" by The Millennium Project covers the energy scenarios and other fascinating topics, some of them related to human enhancement and transhumanism. The book was the number one best-seller during its launching at the World Future Society Conference in Toronto, Canada. You can order directly through The Millennium Project or Amazon.Com: http://www.amazon.com/State-Future-Jerome-Theodore-Gordon/dp/0972205152/sr=8-2/qid=1157898549/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-2322790-3374263?ie=UTF8&s=books Thank you to those of you who contributed to the input for the report. I coordinated the third energy scenario, based on a high-tech economy, which has a clear transhumanist flavour:-) Transhumanistically yours, Jos? Cordeiro (www.cordeiro.org) Chair, Venezuela, The Millennium Project (www.StateOfTheFuture.org) ========================================================== State of the Future 2006 Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon American Council for the United Nations University, 2006 The Millennium Project Summary available at: http://www.acunu.org/millennium/sof2006-exec-summ.pdf Website: http://www.acunu.org/millennium/sof2006.html ? .The capabilities of civilization to build a better future are rich but terribly inefficient. Improving efficiency requires seeing the status of the whole and its parts as objectively as possible. For example, the avian flu could mutate and kill 25 million people, higher oil prices could plunge some economies into depressions, increasing natural disasters are causing massive human misery, and millions of people are caught in deadly conflicts around the world. Yet it is a fact that the world is becoming more peaceful, prosperous, and healthy. The first Human Security Report found that the number of armed conflicts declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s, that genocides and politicides fell 80% between 1988 and 2001, that international crises declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001, that the dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003, and that the number of refugees dropped by some 45% between 1992 and 2003. The IMF estimates that the world economy grew 4.8% in 2005, while the population grew 1.15%, increasing annual per capita income by 3.65%. The UN Millennium Development Goals continue to help focus international cooperation and increase sensitivity to global long-term perspectives in policymaking. Although criticized by some as too ambitious, these goals are increasingly becoming the benchmarks for global progress and measures for international efficiency. Over half of the world's $62-trillion economy is generated in developing countries. Over a billion people (16% of the world) are connected to the Internet. The digital gap continues to close, helping to democratize the coming knowledge economy with tele-nearly-everything and providing self-organizing mechanisms for emerging collective computer/human intelligence and management systems. A worldwide race to connect everything not yet connected is just beginning, and great wealth will be generated by completing the links among systems by which civilizations function and flourish ..? Table of Contents ? Print Section Foreword Acknowledgments Executive Summary - 1. Global Challenges 2. State of the Future Index - 3. 2020 Global Energy Scenarios - Scenario 1. Business as Usual­: The Skeptic Scenario 2. Environmental Backlash Scenario 3. High-tech Economy: ­Technology Pushes Off the Limits Scenario 4. Political Turmoil 4. Emerging Environmental Security Issues- 5. Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the State of the Future and the Millennium Project ? Appendix Millennium Project Participants Demographics Acronyms and Abbreviations - -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com Sun Sep 10 22:23:02 2006 From: jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com (Jose Cordeiro) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 15:23:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] KurzweilAI.net reviews the "State of the Future 2006" Message-ID: <20060910222302.21580.qmail@web32808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear friends, A quick review from KurzweilAI.net: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D5843 Transhumanistically yours, La vie est belle! Yos? ======================================== The Millennium Project's 2006 State of the Future published KurzweilAI.net, August 21, 2006 The Millennium Project--a global participatory think tank--has released its 10th annual State of the Future report. The report distills the collective intelligence of over 2,000 leading scientists, futurists, scholars, and policy advisors who work for governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and international organizations. Among its findings: Dramatic increases in collective human-machine intelligence are possible within 25 years. It is also possible that within the same time frame single individuals acting alone might create and use weapons of mass destruction. Just as computer code is written to create many kinds of software, genetic code will be written to create many varieties of life, including those that make hydrogen from plants. 25 million are likely to die if avian flu mutates for human-to-human transmission. The 2006 State of the Future comes in two parts: a 125-page print executive summary and a 5,400-page CD. The CD contains all the research behind the print edition, plus the Millennium Project's 10 years of cumulative research and methods. La vie est belle! Yos? (www.cordeiro.org) Caracas, Venezuela, Americas, TerraNostra, Solar System, Milky Way, Multiverse -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From riel at surriel.com Sun Sep 10 23:54:42 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 19:54:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4504A5C2.10509@surriel.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 11:37:43AM +0100, BillK wrote: > >>> Of course this is racketeering, and if you do business with >>> RBL operators you're directly supporting the mafia. >>> >> Your argument really only applies to 'overkill' spam blacklists, like SPEWS. > > All RBLs are not very accurate (outdated at least). > Just inherit a cursed IP address and try to get it cleared. > Doesn't hurt spammers one bit, but legitimate users plenty. Before making sweeping generalizations like the above, you might want to verify whether they're true. You guessed it, they're not. Many of the DNSBLs out there have fairly short expiry times, on the order of days or weeks. A number also have no-questions-asked removal forms on their web sites. -- What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 03:08:42 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 23:08:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] KurzweilAI.net reviews the "State of the Future 2006" In-Reply-To: <20060910222302.21580.qmail@web32808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060910222302.21580.qmail@web32808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 9/10/06, Jose Cordeiro wrote: > Just as computer code is written to create many kinds of software, genetic code > will be written to create many varieties of life, including those that make hydrogen > from plants. I love it when people know *just* enough to appear really stupid. There are already many microorganisms that could be viewed as making hydrogen from plants (in anaerobic conditions). Of course it would be a bit tricky to harvest hydrogen from plants as plants normally respire CO2 and O2. So separating out H2 would be a bit nontrivial. As is the "minor" problem that the H2 is going to want to combine with the O2 to produce H2O. If our forward direction is being managed by the people who wrote the summary for the report then all hope is lost. (If the report is similarly based on people saying things that they know little or nothing about then it isn't worth the paper it is printed on). Sigh. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 03:21:26 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 04:21:26 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] KurzweilAI.net reviews the "State of the Future 2006" In-Reply-To: References: <20060910222302.21580.qmail@web32808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609102021i139685bev8b0922b227ae031d@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > If our forward direction is being managed by the people who wrote the > summary > for the report then all hope is lost. > If our forward direction is being managed, all hope is lost; the intermediate words are unnecessary. Fortunately, our forward direction is quite beyond the ability of anyone or any group to manage; and therefore there is still hope. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 04:48:01 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:48:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 7/31/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > domain sending out the spam in the first place. > > 80% to 90% of all email traffic is now spam. And now that spammers are > > switching to 'image' spam to avoid detection, the storage and > > Well, who'd thunk. But this stuff is so easy to filter. I never receive images from anyone (or almost never). The people I would want to receive images from are whitelisted. All the email that contains binary data, images, undesirable character sets, a host of easy to identify Subject line misspellings, etc. gets flagged very early on before the rule based or Bayesian filtering processing. I would bet less than 1% of it has to be "thought" about. I'd only have to move this slightly upstream (before qmail receives the entire "text" of the message) and it would get terminated before it has consumed a fraction of its potential bandwidth. The real problem involves (a) virus/trojan infected relay machines and (b) ISPs who don't censor widespread spammers. Those can be solved by forcing the infected machines off of the network (it isn't hard for ISPs to monitor and flag accounts which have high outgoing SMTP activity to "unusual" locations and ISP operating "standards" (would you allow a physicians with dirty hands to operate on you?). I think the recent U.S. Court action classifying spammers as trespassers and subject to fines and jail time in line with that is a big step in the right direction. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Mon Sep 11 04:50:23 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:50:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <00c001c6d310$412e2b00$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <01ed01c6d55e$34ad69e0$0200a8c0@Nano> Thank you so much R. Scott! Gina ----- Original Message ----- From: R. Scott Kennan To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 1:37 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends Done. Good luck. On 9/8/06, Gina Miller wrote: Please come vote for my animated video that I submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize is 10 thousand dollars. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Mon Sep 11 05:06:09 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:06:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com><014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano><019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano><044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano> <470a3c520609082253s113f33dcs2fe99ef2a014cde0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <030501c6d560$4c183770$0200a8c0@Nano> Thank you so, so, very much. Sorry about that re-vote thing they had going on over there, but I really appreciate your help! Gina ----- Original Message ----- From: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 10:53 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] P.S. Please help - fellow extropes and friends Done. You have now 35 votes. Luck G. On 9/9/06, Gina Miller wrote: > > > P.S. Save your password info, I might submit a second one later! : ) Gina` > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 3:32 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Okay, they say the problem is solved over there but it appears as though you > will need to revote for me! Sorry about that, again, thank you so much! > http://www.windblows.us/index.php I am "Wind Makes the > World go Round". > Gina > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gina Miller > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:44 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > > Thank you so much for those words. I have been hearing a lot about this > problem today so I sent an email and indeed they are having problems. I'm > not sure what this means but they said they are working on it. I'll let you > know what happens, I really appreciate the help! Gina > www.nanogirl.com > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: The Avantguardian > To: ExI chat list > Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:09 PM > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Please help - fellow extropes and friends > > Hi Gina, > > Great video. I checked them all out and yours really > is the coolest. I have tried twice so far to vote for > you from two different computers. Both time a check > mark appeared beneath your video but in neither case > did the number of votes listed for your video > incremement. Does it take a while for ones vote to > register? Or is there a glitch in the web page? > > > > --- Gina Miller wrote: > > > Please come vote for my animated video that I > > submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize > > is 10 thousand dollars. As you all know my husband > > is Jim Lewis who's famous cryonic support letter "a > > rational gamble" often quoted through out the > > cryonics history and he currently works for > > Foresight (has for 10 years). We have been through a > > lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple > > myeloma cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy > > and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist > > who only gets sporadic offers for commission work - > > we could really, really, use this money. But I need > > your votes to win. My submission is the one called > > "Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they > > will ask you to register, it's free and really > > quick, they are not super nosey or anything! Please > > also forward this on to anyone you know who will > > also help out with votes for my work. > > Here is where you can vote for me: > > http://www.windblows.us/ > > > > Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to > > Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina > > > > > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > > Nanotechnology Industries > > http://www.nanoindustries.com > > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html > > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > > Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > > Foresight Participating Member > > http://www.foresight.org > > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute > > http://www.extropy.org > > 3D/Animation > > http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/index.htm > > Microscope Jewelry > > http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm > > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From emlynoregan at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 05:48:13 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:18:13 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <20060909063305.67125.qmail@web60511.mail.yahoo.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060908201629.02241d20@satx.rr.com> <20060909063305.67125.qmail@web60511.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0609102248h57c99b73q92cbe85d65d8c6b@mail.gmail.com> You can buy paintings by elephants: http://www.novica.com/artistdetail/index.cfm?faid=3159 or here... http://www.elephantart.com/ -- Emlyn http://emlynoregan.com * blogs * music * software * Music downloads are online again! On 09/09/06, The Avantguardian wrote: > > > > --- Damien Broderick wrote: > > > At 05:17 PM 9/8/2006 -0700, Stuart wrote: > > > > >I am impressed whether the elephant actually > > >understands what it is saying. Especially because > > it > > >had to figure out out to use its trunk to make the > > >noises. > > > > > > >http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060908/ap_on_fe_st/talking_elephant_1 > > > > > year, researchers > > found that elephants can learn to imitate sounds, > > according to > > Everland. The study featured the case of an elephant > > mimicking truck noises. > > > > > Yeah, but can it drive, that's what I want to know. > > I say hand them a joystick (I don't think they have > the nasal dexterity for the newer controllers) and > find out. If they can drive better than their > trainers, then I vote that we take them off the menu. > ;) > > > Stuart LaForge > alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu > > "The 'I' is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it > is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion." > > - Shankarachanya > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Sep 11 06:12:17 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 01:12:17 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0609102248h57c99b73q92cbe85d65d8c6b@mail.gmail.com > References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060908201629.02241d20@satx.rr.com> <20060909063305.67125.qmail@web60511.mail.yahoo.com> <710b78fc0609102248h57c99b73q92cbe85d65d8c6b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060911011056.0241cea0@satx.rr.com> At 03:18 PM 9/11/2006 +0930, Emlyn wrote: >You can buy paintings by elephants: > >http://www.novica.com/artistdetail/index.cfm?faid=3159 You can even buy fiction written by elephants, but I have to warn you that they're mostly trunk novels. Damien Broderick [tusk, tusk] From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 06:22:27 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:22:27 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I think the recent U.S. Court action classifying spammers as trespassers > and subject to fines and jail time in line with that is a big step in the > right direction. > You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? That puts you over the line, I'm afraid. Sorry, but there are limits. This transgresses them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 06:57:23 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:57:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 07:22:27AM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? But spammers don't do that. They break into people's computers, and install malware. They steal resources from their victims. They're also disrupting communication, and give a bad name to a perfectly good medium. People's time is worth a lot, whether private, or corporate. > That puts you over the line, I'm afraid. > Sorry, but there are limits. This transgresses them. I disagree. I would give life sentence to particularly egregious cases. If I do damage to the economy to the tune of 50 gigabucks, why shouldn't I go to jail? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 11 07:07:41 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:07:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> Russell Wallace wrote: > > You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? > > That puts you over the line, I'm afraid. > > Sorry, but there are limits. This transgresses them. Which of the following transgresses your limits? 1) On your private property, releasing nerve gas to float through the air and slaughter your neighbors. 2) On your private property, blasting out sounds loud enough to permanently damage ears and break glass in your neighbors' houses. 3) On your private property, screaming out advertisements for your used cars, at 2AM, using a 110-decibel bullhorn. 4) On your private property, screaming out your personal political opinions, at 10PM, using a 90-decibel bullhorn. 5) On your private property, shouting "Beware of Peak Oil!" to every passersby. Now, where does spam fall in this ranking? In my book, it falls somewhere around (3). -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 07:07:33 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:07:33 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20060911070733.GD21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 12:48:01AM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: > But this stuff is so easy to filter. I never receive images from For now, it is easy to filter. For you and me. Not for most people. > anyone (or almost never). > The people I would want to receive images from are whitelisted. All I've never bothered with whitelisting. Way too much work. > the email that contains binary data, images, undesirable character > sets, a host of easy to identify Subject line misspellings, etc. gets > flagged very early on before the rule based or Bayesian filtering I deny most Windows mailware at MTA level: v64:/etc/postfix# cat body_checks.regexp /^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA\/\/8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA$/ REJECT Keep your executables! v64:/etc/postfix# cat mime_header_checks.pcre /^Content-(?:Disposition:\s+attachment;|Type:).*\b(?:file)?name\s*=.*\.(?: ad[ep] | asd | ba[st] | chm | cmd | com(?=$|") | cpl | crt | dll | eml | cpl | crt | dll | do | eml | exe | hlp | hta | in[ifs] | isp | js | jse? | lnk | md[betw] | ms[cipt] | nws | ocx | ops | pcd | p[ir]f | pps | reg | rm | sc[frt] | sh[bsm] | swf | url | vb[esx]? | vxd | zip | ws[cfh] | \{[[:xdigit:]]{8}(?:-[[:xdigit:]]{4}){3}-[[:xdigit:]]{12}\} )\b/x REJECT Windows executables not allowed > processing. I would bet less than 1% of it has to be "thought" about. > I'd only have to move this slightly upstream (before qmail receives > the entire "text" of the message) and it would get terminated before Yeah -- but I recommend choosing postfix over qmail (which is abandonware, and can't be adopted due to the license). > it has consumed a fraction of its potential bandwidth. > The real problem involves (a) virus/trojan infected relay machines and > (b) ISPs who don't censor widespread spammers. Those can be solved by > forcing the infected machines off of the network (it isn't hard for Doesn't work. Most spam today is just some ten messages from a single machine, which is not enough even for human diagnostics. > ISPs to monitor and flag accounts which have high outgoing SMTP > activity to "unusual" locations and ISP operating "standards" (would Anything beginning with "people should" doesn't work on a large scale. > you allow a physicians with dirty hands to operate on you?). > I think the recent U.S. Court action classifying spammers as > trespassers and subject to fines and jail time in line with that is a > big step in the right direction. What I've receive spam from the U.S.? Doesn't help me one bit. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:09:48 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:09:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > But spammers don't do that. They break into people's > computers, and install malware. They steal resources > from their victims. They're also disrupting communication, > and give a bad name to a perfectly good medium. > People's time is worth a lot, whether private, or > corporate. > Then recommend community service and/or compensation for economic damage done. Do you know what it's like being in prison? Me neither. But I've known people who've been in there. Rapists and muggers, fine, I won't shed a tear for them. A cruel punishment is appropriate for cruel men. But people who typed stuff on a computer keyboard? Do you understand what's going to happen if you allow your government to imprison people for that? I stand by my original comment. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:12:31 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:12:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060911070733.GD21640@leitl.org> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <20060911070733.GD21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110012t18081314o4427ac12aab4d3f0@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > For now, it is easy to filter. For you and me. Not for most people. Subscribing to Gmail isn't exactly hard. It filters more than 99% of spam. I repeat: Do you understand what will happen if you start letting your government imprison people because it doesn't like what they typed on their computer keyboards? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:14:02 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:14:02 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110014o6ee55836l6f6a739577470d3c@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > Now, where does spam fall in this ranking? In my book, it falls > somewhere around (3). > I am very, very relieved that you cannot create or become a god. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:18:37 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:18:37 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > 3) On your private property, screaming out advertisements for your used > cars, at 2AM, using a 110-decibel bullhorn. > ...but no, I wouldn't be so extraordinarily cruel and evil as to put a man in prison for that either. I might very well go and challenge him to a fistfight if he didn't go away, and expect the law to find I was adequately provoked. But prison, no. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 11 07:36:49 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:36:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110014o6ee55836l6f6a739577470d3c@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110014o6ee55836l6f6a739577470d3c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <45051211.6010503@pobox.com> Russell Wallace wrote: > On 9/11/06, *Eliezer S. Yudkowsky* > wrote: > > Now, where does spam fall in this ranking? In my book, it falls > somewhere around (3). > > I am very, very relieved that you cannot create or become a god. Logical fallacy: Ad hominem. I didn't even say you should be put in prison for (3) - you just assumed it was what I meant. You also didn't answer the question of where spam falls in your ranking. I suspect scope neglect on your part - all those zeroes in the part about "slightly annoying a hundred million people" just glazing over in your vision. Slightly annoying 1e8 humans probably adds more negative hedonic to the universe than one prison sentence; moreover, a prospective prison sentence may stop many such incidents. The question is about rights and freedom, not hedonic balance. My own attitude in this matter is not about annoyance, it's about human infrastructure. If what were at stake were humanity's capability to send email, then yes, I would put people in prison to defend it. But of course the current regime has been totally ineffective at stopping spam; humanity will find an effective technological solution, or else learn as a species that we are not ready for email. It's actually pretty damned sad when you think about it. Forget nukes or nanotech, the human species can't handle bloody text messaging. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:38:39 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:38:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10609110038y6067050i7d8855aef94b90b6@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > > ...but no, I wouldn't be so extraordinarily cruel and evil as to put a man > in prison for that either. I might very well go and challenge him to a > fistfight if he didn't go away, and expect the law to find I was adequately > provoked. But prison, no. Fistfights - the libertarian solution to tough problems? I agree that prison is evil, but having to fistfight someone to get them to shut up is quite silly. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 11 07:39:46 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:39:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <450512C2.1090707@pobox.com> Russell Wallace wrote: > On 9/11/06, *Eliezer S. Yudkowsky* > wrote: > > 3) On your private property, screaming out advertisements for your used > cars, at 2AM, using a 110-decibel bullhorn. > > ...but no, I wouldn't be so extraordinarily cruel and evil as to put a > man in prison for that either. I might very well go and challenge him to > a fistfight if he didn't go away, and expect the law to find I was > adequately provoked. But prison, no. So now you're resorting to vigilante violence and expecting society to socially sanction it? Instead of having a written legal system where people can look up what is prohibited? Russell, someone can disagree with you about what "crosses the line" without being a horrible, horrible person. Do you understand the principle behind stare decisis, respecting precedents? It's that the law has to be *predictable*. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:52:22 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:52:22 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <45051211.6010503@pobox.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110014o6ee55836l6f6a739577470d3c@mail.gmail.com> <45051211.6010503@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110052x6d8575d0v3829837d1545f9e3@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > I suspect scope neglect on your part - all those zeroes in the part > about "slightly annoying a hundred million people" just glazing over in > your vision. Slightly annoying 1e8 humans probably adds more negative > hedonic to the universe than one prison sentence; moreover, a > prospective prison sentence may stop many such incidents. The question > is about rights and freedom, not hedonic balance. I'll answer this one because it's the relevant part. And I'll answer it with a repeat of what I said last time, which _you_ passed over: Do you understand what ends up happening when you permit your goverment to put a man in prison because it didn't like what he typed on his computer keyboard? Hint: It's not "things end up the way Eliezer wants them". (Oh, you also passed over the fact that Gmail handles spam just fine, falsifying the last part of your message. But that's really not important. If there were no spam filters, I'd be saying precisely the same thing. Do you understand what you're saying when you advocate _prison_ as a remedy for _bytes of data_?) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 07:56:58 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:56:58 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <450512C2.1090707@pobox.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> <450512C2.1090707@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110056j569751c7w5abb494301d22d5f@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: Okay, I'll answer these parts too... So now you're resorting to vigilante violence Actually I have never in my life resorted to vigilante violence. and expecting society to > socially sanction it? Instead of having a written legal system where > people can look up what is prohibited? Nor have I advocated that. Russell, someone can disagree with you about what "crosses the line" > without being a horrible, horrible person. Yeah. Frankly, I ran out of patience with the original poster after having repeatedly and patiently explained to him why his suggestions aren't morally or ethically acceptable. Go back and check my posts - I was far more damned patient than anyone else. Do you understand the > principle behind stare decisis, respecting precedents? It's that the > law has to be *predictable*. > Of course. Do you understand that the law also has to be _just_? More importantly in this context, do you also understand the slippery slope principle? Do you really think you would still be permitted to speak your opinions in the ultimate version of the principle that the government can decide what you are allowed to type? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 08:04:58 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:04:58 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <45051211.6010503@pobox.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110014o6ee55836l6f6a739577470d3c@mail.gmail.com> <45051211.6010503@pobox.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110104yf440f19qa2fed5df2c8e7012@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > Logical fallacy: Ad hominem. > ...oh, and granted logical fallacy in this particular argument - but you can't with a straight face say it's not _relevant_ ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 08:46:26 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:46:26 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060911084626.GF21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 08:09:48AM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > Then recommend community service and/or compensation for economic > damage done. How do you propose to compensate for 100 million $/year damage a single large spammer easily causes? > Do you know what it's like being in prison? Me neither. But I've known > people who've been in there. > Rapists and muggers, fine, I won't shed a tear for them. A cruel > punishment is appropriate for cruel men. But people who typed stuff on > a computer keyboard? Do you understand what's going to happen if you If I type stuff on a computer keyboard, and steal 100 k$ from your bank account, would you propose that I would not go to jail? > allow your government to imprison people for that? If I type on my keyboard, and take over most hosts on the Internet, wipe and alter online information and keep the global network down for a week, causing hundreds of casualties, do you think your government should imprison people for that? Or if I type stuff on a keyboard, and make a nuclear reactor go china, should I be responsible for my actions? Should white-collar crime (mostly commited by keyboard) go unpunished? Etc. > I stand by my original comment. Apparently, the majority and the legislation think differently. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 08:56:29 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:56:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110012t18081314o4427ac12aab4d3f0@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <20060911070733.GD21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110012t18081314o4427ac12aab4d3f0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060911085629.GG21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 08:12:31AM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > For now, it is easy to filter. For you and me. Not for most people. > > Subscribing to Gmail isn't exactly hard. It filters more than 99% of Subscribing to Gmail is not an option for most corporations. In fact, if you value your privacy, you should not use any 3rd party services, *especially* Google. Don't use Gmail when planning to assassinate the president. > spam. > I repeat: Do you understand what will happen if you start letting your > government imprison people because it doesn't like what they typed on > their computer keyboards? You repeating that tired red herring doesn't make it more true. Spam isn't being sent by human beings. Spam is being sent by compromised (especially for that purpose) systems. Do you know the costs of recovering from a corporate-scale compromise? I most emphatically would like (not just my) government to lock spammers up. FYI, definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email (notice there is no "commercial" in it). Unsolicited is in the eye of the observer (the person targeted), not a government official. Notice that polical campaign spam is, of course, spam. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 08:57:47 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:57:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060911084626.GF21640@leitl.org> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> <20060911084626.GF21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110157t56cae93esbae08d2f5cc89094@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Apparently, the majority and the legislation think differently. That is why we are so desperately short of time. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From neomorphy at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 08:59:16 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:59:16 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/11/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > > > You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? > > That puts you over the line, I'm afraid. > > Sorry, but there are limits. This transgresses them. > Would you put someone in prison for killing, assault, theft? Because typing words on a computer can lead to just such acts... "But your honour, I didn't kill him. I just pulled the trigger on this here mechanical projectile device" "But your honour, I didn't kill him. I just wrote a blog article offering money to anyone who would." "But your honour, I didn't steal his money, I just typed some words on a keyboard" The fact that the intermediary step is typing, rather than any other act, is irrelevant. Cause is a funny thing. Furthermore: In Sensible land, you wouldn't get jailed for a few occasions of yelling unwanted advice your neighbour. You could get jailed for breaking into their house and spruiking with a megaphone. You probably wouldn't get jailed for throwing an empty drink container onto their lawn. If, however, you dumped trailerloads of garbage onto every house in town... So too with unsolicited emails. No-one in Sensible Land is going to advocate or be jailed for a few unwanted messages. If, however, the printed ones would fill soccer stadia... --Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 09:00:00 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:00:00 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/11/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? > That puts you over the line, I'm afraid. > > Sorry, but there are limits. This transgresses them. Too late. Governments and the law crossed that line ages ago. You can be put in prison for a lot *less* than typing words on a keyboard. Look up 'thought crimes'. Just thinking about doing something bad can send you to prison. (If you tell someone you thought it, of course). But thinking about many crimes ('planning' is the technical term) can send you to prison. In the UK, disruptive people get ASBO orders which ban them from certain areas because they 'might' commit crimes there. The second point is that almost all computer crime is 'just typing words on a keyboard'. Identity theft, hacking into bank accounts, libel, slander, race hate propaganda, etc. Looking at certain pictures on your computer gets you a prison sentence. Technically you are 'in possession' if they hit your screen. As around 90% of computers are malware infected, they are very likely to be involved in some criminal activity. Owning a computer is getting to be a dangerous business. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 09:11:15 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:11:15 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110157t56cae93esbae08d2f5cc89094@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> <20060911084626.GF21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110157t56cae93esbae08d2f5cc89094@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060911091115.GI21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 09:57:47AM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > Apparently, the majority and the legislation think differently. > > That is why we are so desperately short of time. Come on, the sky isn't falling. Yes, we're pathetically stupid as a species, but this doesn't mean we're going to pull another chapter out of Diamond's. P.S. I'm very strongly for protecting anonymous communication on the Internet, up to the point of getting faxes from the police and risk having a server seized (10 machines were seized in Germany last Thursday, including some 5 Tor operator machines). It's just that anonymity draws abuse, which is why it needs to be a niche, not default (strong authentication (not necessarily linked to a particular warm body) should be default). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 09:24:14 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:24:14 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060911092414.GJ21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 10:00:00AM +0100, BillK wrote: > The second point is that almost all computer crime is 'just typing > words on a keyboard'. Identity theft, hacking into bank accounts, > libel, slander, race hate propaganda, etc. Whenever I see "identity theft" I read "pathetic security design". It's reasonably difficult to clone a smartcard and obtain the PIN (which can be biometric), especially without a cooperating victim. Copying or guessing a short integer in order to impersonate somebody is not much of a crime. But building systems which rely on this as a sole method of authentication should be a jailable offense. I also disagree about race hate propaganda. I think it shouldn't be persecuted. Once you start with this, you'll have to build a global community based on the lowest common denominator. Obligate geocoding and filtering is already pretty widespread, which is a truly awful development. > Looking at certain pictures on your computer gets you a prison > sentence. Technically you are 'in possession' if they hit your screen. I think that's going way overboard. Actually, the last-Thursday german Tor bust was based on charges of pedophilia media trafficking. I don't agree that possession of pedophilia media should be a crime (but the making of such should very well be a serious crime, unless casted with synthespians). Here I also happen to disagree with public consensus and the legislation. > As around 90% of computers are malware infected, they are very likely > to be involved in some criminal activity. > Owning a computer is getting to be a dangerous business. It's interesting that no one so far has made Microsoft liable. If you buy an unsafe vehicle, you can sue the maker for damages. That this can't be done for mainstream software producers is a serious oversight that needs to be corrected. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 11 09:48:09 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:48:09 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <4504A5C2.10509@surriel.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <4504A5C2.10509@surriel.com> Message-ID: <20060911094809.GL21640@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 07:54:42PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote: > Before making sweeping generalizations like the above, > you might want to verify whether they're true. I *know* (personally first-hand, and from many second-hand narratives) that RBLs are inaccurate. Frequently, maliciously so (somebody on your netblock is a spammer, the entire netblock is in RBL in an attempt to get customers to complain to the ISP, in order for the ISP to shut down the spammer) -- seeing a slight problem with that logic? > You guessed it, they're not. Many of the DNSBLs out > there have fairly short expiry times, on the order of > days or weeks. A number also have no-questions-asked > removal forms on their web sites. Of course there are good RBLs. But there are several bad apples, which cause no end of grief to several bystanders. These are worse than spammers, and should share a cell with them. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From ben at goertzel.org Fri Sep 8 21:36:54 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 17:36:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] New email list for discussing Singularity related issues Message-ID: <638d4e150609081436w61fee14dw5d73b9425e2ff046@mail.gmail.com> Hi all, AGIRI (www.agiri.org) has launched a new email list, intended to parallel rather than duplicate its existing AGI (agi at v2.listbox.com) list. The new list is called the Singularity list (singularity at v2.listbox.com), and is intended to focus, not on technical discussions of AGI systems, but rather on the Singularity and related conceptual and scientific issues. If you would like to sign up for this list, you may go to the form at http://www.agiri.org/email/ Of course, the dividing line between Singularity issues and AGI issues is not fully crisp, but there are plain cases that lie on either side, e.g. ** examples of AGI-list issues would be: technical discussions of knowledge representation strategies or learning algorithms ** examples of Singularity-list issues would be: discussions of Friendly AI which don't pertain to specifics of AGI architectures; discussions of non-AGI Singularity topics like nanotech or biotech, or Singularity-relevant sociopolitical issues There is of course some overlap between this new Singularity list and existing lists such as SL4, extropy and wta-talk, and forums such as kurzweilai.net . However, I believe there is value in having an email discussion list that focuses specifically on the Singularity, and without a strong bias toward any particular point of view regarding the Singularity. (Though, one may expect some statistical bias toward discussions of AGI and the Singularity, due to the relationship of the Singularity list with AGIRI.) Discussion on the new list can be expected to be slow at first as the subscriber base builds up, but will likely accelerate before too long, in good Internet style ;-) Yours, Ben Goertzel From analyticphilosophy at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 12:50:16 2006 From: analyticphilosophy at gmail.com (Jeff Medina) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:50:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <45050B3D.80609@pobox.com> <8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5844e22f0609110550y65065ad0l3421173688e2d2c6@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 9/11/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > > 3) On your private property, screaming out advertisements for your used > > cars, at 2AM, using a 110-decibel bullhorn. > > > > ...but no, I wouldn't be so extraordinarily cruel and evil as to put a man > in prison for that either. I might very well go and challenge him to a > fistfight if he didn't go away, and expect the law to find I was adequately > provoked. But prison, no. First of all, noise pollution and disturbing the peace, of which Yudkowsky's third example is a case, *is against the law*. The police will give a warning, and then take you off to jail (Actually, I believe the initial penalty is a fine, and then the penalty escalates for repeat offenses). Point is, it really is illegal, it has been for quite a long time, and it hasn't led to thought police locking you up for badmouthing a politician. Second of all, if you challenge the noisy fellow to a fight and he doesn't accept, should you actually fight him, you would find yourself guilty of assault. Being noisy does not justify physical violence in response (under U.S. law, anyway). Also, if you indicate physical violence against the noisy person, you can still be found guilty of crimes (harassment, threats of violence, physical intimidation, none of them legally sanctioned). On a separate note... you referred to spam as bytes of data. This is about as accurate and useful as referring to poison in a water reservoir as mere quarks. The internet is one of humanity's environments; spam is environmental pollution. Cheers, -- Jeff Medina Sr. Systems Engineer, Lockheed Martin Sr. Programmer, Elemental Solutions Fellow, Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies "Do you want to live forever?" "Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years." (_Guards! Guards!_, Terry Pratchett) From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 14:57:44 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:57:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] New email list for discussing Singularity related issues In-Reply-To: <638d4e150609081436w61fee14dw5d73b9425e2ff046@mail.gmail.com> References: <638d4e150609081436w61fee14dw5d73b9425e2ff046@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/8/06, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > > ** examples of Singularity-list issues would be: discussions of > Friendly AI which don't pertain to specifics of AGI architectures; > discussions of non-AGI Singularity topics like nanotech or biotech, or > Singularity-relevant sociopolitical issues. Of course one *could* separate the classical singularity concept [1] as it is quite possible for lifespan extension, solutions to energy problems, advances in educational systems and even robust nanotechnology to occur enabling a relatively robus transhumanist flavored future *without* any of the disruption a rapid rate singularity era (including AGI). Robert 1. "Classical" meaning when change gets too fast for standard issue humans to absorb it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 11 15:37:48 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:37:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org><20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org><20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org><8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com><45050B3D.80609@pobox.com><8d71341e0609110018w753411b3ne70306ecd6234f4b@mail.gmail.com> <5844e22f0609110550y65065ad0l3421173688e2d2c6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <019a01c6d5b8$3c92cbf0$ef1f0751@heritagekd9czj> How fitting considering the recent discussion of privacy. >Look up 'thought crimes'. Pretty much any crime based around the simple possesion of something also qualifies. E.g. drugs & guns. If I have a handful of magic mushrooms, it's now a Class A offence in the UK. The fact I have a handful of them has nothing to do with what I'm going to use them for. By having them in my hand, I've done zero damage to the rest of society, or even myself. I could empty them into the bin, I could mix them into some sweets and hide them in a superstore. >Looking at certain pictures on your computer gets you a prison >sentence. Technically you are 'in possession' if they hit your screen. >As around 90% of computers are malware infected, they are very likely >to be involved in some criminal activity. I take it you might be talking about S&M porno. Which, for the guys in the US, has been under the spotlight in the UK just recently after a guy murdered a woman and they found a whole load of violent porn on his computer. So violent porno, even if it's just simulated violence, is now a criminal possesion. This is a very, very old discussion that's been going on since S&M and cameras got together. It's assault to just touch someone with your hand. It's not asault to have a surgen slice your face up for cosmetic reconstruction. Or a surgen operate on you without consent (e.g. barbaric, ritualistic circumcision of restrained infants without anesthetic), or to enter a boxing match, have people place bets on it and then televise it. Theoretically, it's assault to have someone spank you, even if you ask them to do so. A whole christmas sized pencil box full of greyscale. Course, the interesting thing that Bill points out is malware and redirects dumping this kind of stuff onto your computer whether you like it or not (And I know that a lot of people don't know how to empty out their histories etc even if they want to, and lots don't, because they don't even know it's there to begin with). Although, I've yet to experience a piece of malware that signs me up for a private torrent network and downloads 10GB of kiddy porn onto my computer, then posts messages in fora asking for specific kiddy porno - which is what the people with such content on their drives will try for. Which is, of course, not to say that we won't eventually have something that tries that. >It's interesting that no one so far has made Microsoft liable. >If you buy an unsafe vehicle, you can sue the maker for damages. True, but to be fair, a lot of the damages that could occur to you, a passenger in your car or a pedestrian will be through negligence or mistakes (your's or another driver's). Or if the car suddenly explodes through no fault of your's or any other driver's error. If, however, someone had purposefully lifted the lid of your car and emptied nitroglycerine into the engine, I doubt you'd get very far suing the manufacturer for not putting locks all over the caps and an 'anti-nitroglycerine system' in. Or if the car was stolen and the manufacturer hadn't fitted a lock to the door. However, if the car was sold saying "Fitted with locks" and it wasn't, then you'd have a reasonable complaint. If it was sold saying "Guaranteed, totally imprevious to being stolen", you're on for a winner - but definitly not a certainty. But they don't ever make such a stupid claim. It's just "Fitted with locks for added security". When someone is actively trying to damage a system, it liberates the manufacturers from a great amount of blame. And rightly so if you want to live in a world where anything is ever sold. >I don't agree that possession of pedophilia media should be a crime >(but the making of such should very well be a serious crime, unless >casted with ). Here I also happen to disagree with public >consensus and the legislation. I'd go one step further and risk having my door kicked in and face squashed into the carpet, I don't think the fundamental problem lies with the act it's self (be it with a simulation or an actual human), only the conditions under which in takes place (which seem universally traumatic for the children involved - manipulation, threats, physical violence, etc). But I do agree that the latter justifies a particularly extreme response. Perhaps a more fair response to the megaphone idea, whilst still maintaining everyone's freedom, would be whip out your own megaphone and shout back. Of coarse, this wouldn't be very fair to the neighbours having to listen in (This would be analogous to counter-spamming and hitting the wrong addresses). Arguably, it would be fair if everyone around him started to shout back as well, since they all had to listen to him in the first place. Provided you could contain your channel back towards him (so as not to annoy everyone else and make him enjoy the fact you're doing so, causing him to prompt you yet further and cause more disturbances himself) and only those people annoyed could shout back and for a roughly equal amount of time, that seems reasonably fair. You could implement some of these things with a private counter-spam system. E.g. I download a client. The client watches my email for junk from know spammers and/or with a known content and each piece gives me a counter-spamming credit (Maybe two or three per piece of junk as additional payment for initiating the waste of time in the first place). An _up to date_ server then redirects my counter-spam back to the sender. Following the Lycos idea, "Make love not spam". These kinds of systems would be too tricky for individuals to implement themselves, so it's not entirely analogous to everyone just implementing their own version of what's fair with their fists - it would be easier to regulate the amount of payback to keep it sane (no baseball bats for passing remarks). Spam is also a global crime, and so deserves a global reply. The quickest and easiest way of implementing this would be for some form of private torrent counter-spam agent. The reality of trying to get global harmonisation and cooperation on dealing with these guys is laughable. The amount of lag required to put it through standard legal proceedings will likely give even the slowest enough time to pick up his gear and walk away. I suppose the important bit is disconnecting agenda from the system. Lycos have an agenda in that they can encourage customers to like them with such schemes and increase traffic through their network (with counter-spam). But at the same time, Lycos don't also decide on whether or not I go to jail (and make up such policies as part of some spare of the moment popularity contest to get onto a higher soapbox). I'll be interested to see if over the next few decades we end up with an explosion in the number of 'freedom fighter' teams of hackers. The internet is one domain where sheer military might has next to no importance when the guy on the other end of the copper is an electronics / radio / computer genius with a lot of time, will and places to hide. When I was 16 or so, I worked alongside the chief of IT (head, or something similar) for our local police force. I'm 99.9% sure I could have raided his bank account and gotten away with it if I'd wanted to, even then. The only hope these guys have is that the other guy I was working with, who wasn't involved with the police, was reasonably minded and extremely able. And that people like myself don't generally raid the accounts of people who, on the whole, are just trying to help. An understanding returned when he handed me an envelope with 3k in it to count for him. This doesn't work if that same person decides they're going to start filtering out harmless aspects of my personal life. I believe it's quite normal for the police for to be in regular contact with small time (especially) PC repair stores; where the staff will almost certainly be very able and they're likely to get people with questionable content taking their drives (as opposed to PC World, although I'm sure lots do). Whether or not the searching for dodgy porno is the service you're paying for (or if the staff have just illegally searched your computer) is another question. I just noticed that last bits touch on something else I was thinking about just recently. That IT is the first topic where in a percentage of the students are already far more able than their teachers. Best wishes, John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 16:57:54 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:57:54 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609110957h6425b04dx911f0e575ea65a07@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, BillK wrote: > > Too late. Governments and the law crossed that line ages ago. Oh, aye. But I had expected to find higher moral standards on extropy-chat of all places. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 11 17:33:10 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:33:10 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <20060911091115.GI21640@leitl.org> References: <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com> <20060911065723.GC21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110009i18f82301rcce34da761160b00@mail.gmail.com> <20060911084626.GF21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0609110157t56cae93esbae08d2f5cc89094@mail.gmail.com> <20060911091115.GI21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609111033m81a5fa7he3ed57b939973521@mail.gmail.com> On 9/11/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Come on, the sky isn't falling. Yes, we're pathetically stupid > as a species, but this doesn't mean we're going to pull another > chapter out of Diamond's. > I hope you're right. Right now I'm just tired enough I could sleep for a million years. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Sep 11 19:06:07 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:06:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060911011056.0241cea0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <20060911190607.76993.qmail@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > At 03:18 PM 9/11/2006 +0930, Emlyn wrote: > > >You can buy paintings by elephants: > > > >http://www.novica.com/artistdetail/index.cfm?faid=3159 > > You can even buy fiction written by elephants, but I > have to warn you > that they're mostly trunk novels. > > Damien Broderick > [tusk, tusk] To be fair, I have it on good authority that the Pachyderm High Council has ruled that allowing elephants to actually publish their novels would jeapordize their control of the Republican Party. So long as people believe elephants are just dumb animals, they can paint themselves pink, move around the Republican National Headquarters unseen, and dictate policy to Bush administration as disembodied voices of possibly divine origin. Rumor has it they are going to strongly censure Kosik for making flapping monkey-meat noises in front of the media. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 12 01:03:27 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:03:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Talking Elephant In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060911011056.0241cea0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200609120114.k8C1ElUb023898@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick ... > > You can even buy fiction written by elephants, but I have to warn you > that they're mostly trunk novels. > > Damien Broderick > [tusk, tusk] Ivory much agree. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 12 01:53:10 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:53:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] 44th mersenne prime verified In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060908201629.02241d20@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200609120153.k8C1rIdh007189@andromeda.ziaspace.com> We just got word that the 44th known Mersenne prime has been verified today. This time the lucky exponent was 32582657. However, 2^32582657-1 contains "only" 9,808,358 decimal digits so the $100,000 EFF award for a 10 million digit prime is *still* up for grabs. This is a mind-boggling cluster of Mersenne primes way up here close to, but under, the 10 million digit mark. Perhaps we will have a long dry spell now, one that could go on for years, after finding five record breakers in under three years. Perhaps we just don't understand something fundamental about this odd subclass of primes. Could it be that the Mersenne primes somehow are distributed more densely as exponents get large? How could that possibly be? No way. In any case, here is a list of the 44 known Mersenne primes, where the second column is the exponent in the form 2^n-1: 1 2 2^2 -1 = 3, prime 2 3 2^3 -1 = 7, prime 3 5 2^5 -1 = 31, prime 4 7 2^7 -1 = 127, prime 5 13 2^13 -1 = 8191, prime 6 17 2^17 -1 = 131071, prime 7 19 2^19 -1 = 524287, prime 8 31 2^31 -1 = 2147483647, prime etc 9 61 (18 digit number) 10 89 11 107 12 127 13 521 14 607 15 1279 16 2203 17 2281 18 3217 19 4253 20 4423 21 9689 22 9941 23 11213 24 19937 25 21701 26 23209 27 44497 28 86243 29 110503 30 132049 31 216091 32 756839 33 859433 34 1257787 35 1398269 36 2976221 37 3021377 38 6972593 39 13466917 40 20996011 41 24036583 42 25964951 43 30402457 44 32582657 From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Sep 12 03:49:32 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:49:32 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 44th mersenne prime verified In-Reply-To: <200609120153.k8C1rIdh007189@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609120153.k8C1rIdh007189@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1578.163.1.72.81.1158032972.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: > We just got word that the 44th known Mersenne prime has been verified > today. > > This time the lucky exponent was 32582657. Yay! I remember finding Hans Riesel's book "On Primes" in the library as a kid. Heavy number theory. But at one point a footnote said that the greatest known mersenne prime is a certain number. Somebody had written the next exponent under, followed by a third in a different handwriting. I soon respectfully added the latest one. I'll see if I can update that book when I'm passing by Sweden next time. Hans held a Mersenne record for 14 days in the 50's, calculated using the first Swedish computer. My old highschool computing teacher had worked as a student on the system and had managed to crush his foot when a byte fell out of its rack and onto him. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Sep 12 14:20:06 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:20:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality creation, fragmentation and justification Message-ID: For a long time I used to operate on the basis of there being 3 realities. First, the physical (abstract) reality governed by the laws of physics which is rather (cough) weird when you start thinking about things like wave particle duality, space-time, multiverses, etc. Second, the shared (world) reality governed by what people generally agree on it being between the instantiations of conscious entities. Third, my personal reality (i.e. the society of mind bouncing around inside the wetware typing this message). Lately I've become more aware of the range of shared realities. Everything from the political right vs. left realities, the fundamentalist Christian & Muslim realities, the Raelian reality, the current and forthcoming virtual realities (esp. MMORPGs [1] one of which is SecondLife), etc. One thing which is striking to me is the extent to which these realities seem to have relatively little awareness of one another. The reality of retired people in their 70's and 80's overlaps little or none with the Raelian reality which in turn overlaps little or none with the MMORPG realities [2]. What prompted this note is an attempt to effectively "manage" the reality of a significant fraction of the population on the planet [3]. Do they just not "get" it (information will be free) or are they simply trying to stick their finger in the dam as long as possible? Also, it raises the question in my mind as to whether Extropianism or Transhumanism have any significant hope due to the lack of a breakout into the dominant realities [4]? There also appears to be a significant lack of discussion with respect to what will happen as the emerging realities *break* the old realities (paradigm breaking) [5]. The old strategy (found particularly in science) of the older generation dying off allowing the new generation's perspective to take hold isn't going to work when the emerging paradigm allows the old reality proponents to keep going and going and going... Given the speedup in the rate of change one would expect due to the singularity, how exactly is one going to deal with the fact that our inherited genetics and biochemistry makes most of us quite resistant to adopting new realities? Will humanity fragment in such a way that the old realities keep going and going and going? [6]. Robert 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs 2. It is interesting to note the penetration of specific organizing "attractors" -- MMORPGs in Korea, MySpace among teenagers, Facebook among college communities, Orkut in Brazil, various TV stations (or leaders) for Christian, Muslim and perhaps political followers, etc. 3. China to Control Reports of Foreign News Agencies http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/12/064219 4. "AI" has been around as a concept for 40+ years (though lacked the hardware to support it before "now"). Feynman's lecture was 47 years ago. Engines of Creation was published 20 years ago this year, etc. 5. Concepts involving lifespan extension, uploading and indefinite longevity clearly break the traditional mindsets of Christian and Muslims. 6. This gets back to my sustainability philosopy and resource optimization questions. *What* does one do when a significant fraction of resources are devoted to something completely pointless (say maintaining the fundamentalist Christian or Muslim realities?). Is there a concept of eminent domain [7] for belief systems, philosophies or realities? 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sm at vreedom.com Tue Sep 12 14:39:14 2006 From: sm at vreedom.com (sm at vreedom.com) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:39:14 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians Message-ID: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> For the German speaking part of the list: The newest edition of my podcast ?Das Abenteuer Zukunft? (Adventure Future) features some remarks about transhumanism and the extropians. You are presented as a positive and future-oriented way of thinking and living. ?Das Abenteuer Zukunft? is one of the leading business-podcasts in Germany. Hope this helps to spread the message. You can look for the podcast on www.dasabenteuerleben.de or on iTunes. Have fun Stephan Stephan Magnus, Bensafrim/ Portugal http://www.vreedom.com From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Sep 12 17:08:29 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:08:29 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians In-Reply-To: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> References: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060912120447.024958b8@satx.rr.com> At 04:39 PM 9/12/2006 +0200, Stephan Magnus wrote: >For the German speaking part of the list: >The newest edition of my podcast "Das Abenteuer Zukunft" (Adventure Future) >features some remarks about transhumanism and the extropians. Stephan, have you seen the German translation of my book The Spike: DIE MOLEKULARE MANUFAKTUR (Rowohlt, 2004)? The title made it seem far more limited in its central topics that it is, alas. Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Sep 12 17:38:03 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 13:38:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] the RBL racket In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0609102322p878b689k2e1a91677b3e4712@mail.gmail.com > References: <20060731082114.GX14701@leitl.org> <20060731100717.GI14701@leitl.org> <20060731105820.GK14701@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060912133419.03d65080@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 07:22 AM 9/11/2006 +0100, you wrote: >On 9/11/06, Robert Bradbury ><robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote: >>I think the recent U.S. Court action classifying spammers as trespassers >>and subject to fines and jail time in line with that is a big step in the >>right direction. > >You'd put a man in _prison_ for typing words on a computer keyboard? I would be more inclined to put them in a home for the terminally inept for *failing* to type. I get a lot of spam and every day or two I get one with "Message subject" in the subject line. That indicates the person using the spam software couldn't even fill in the blanks. Keith Henson PS pun intended. From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 12 18:25:00 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:25:00 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians References: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> Message-ID: <008e01c6d698$c2d28f30$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> Whilst not directly related to extropy, you might also want to check out the podcast from Nature; http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html It's usually done by Chris Smith at the department of viology at Cambridge and covers quite a wide set of topics. I'm having serious difficulty just keeping up with the volume of extropy / transhuman email alone I'm getting at the moment! Having someone talk to me makes a nice change. Maybe all the extropy / transhuman lists could get together and produce a podcast? Each one submits a section maybe? I might be up for helping with that. I know on Extrobritannia we're talking about (have done for a few) recording the group meetings. Hugs and kisses, John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 12 19:00:31 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:00:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life expectancy in the 'Eight Americas' Message-ID: Harvard University September 12, 2006 Longevity Gap: Who, Where And Why Americans Live Longer Or Die Sooner In the United States, the best-off people, like Asian women in Bergen County, N.J., have a life expectancy 33 years longer than the worst-off, Native American males in some South Dakota counties - 91 versus 58 years. So concludes the most comprehensive study to date of who dies when and where in this country. In order to determine how unequal life expectancy is in the United States, and why, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Initiative for Global Health analyzed census and health statistics data for the years 1982 to 2001. They found what they call "an enormous gap" in life expectancies based on race, counties of residence, income, and a few other social factors. The analysis led the researchers to the idea that there are "eight different Americas." White middle America and black middle America are different from each other (whites live longer than blacks) and from low-income white America, Southern low-income rural black America, Northern low-income rural white America, high-risk urban black America, and Asian America. "Put in a global context, the disparities in mortality among the eight Americas are enormous," says Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health at the School of Public Health. "Our analysis indicates that 10 million Americans with the best health have achieved one of the highest levels of life expectancy on record, three years better than Japan for women, and four years better than Iceland for men. At the same time, tens of millions of Americans are experiencing levels of health that are more typical of people in developing countries." ---------------------- The full research article is online here: BillK From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Sep 12 18:45:17 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:45:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians Message-ID: <380-220069212184517296@M2W009.mail2web.com> From: John john.heritage at v21.me.uk >Whilst not directly related to extropy, you might also want to check out the >podcast from Nature; >http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html >Maybe all the extropy / transhuman lists could get together and produce a >podcast? Each one submits a section maybe? I might be up for helping with >that. I know on Extrobritannia we're talking about (have done for a few) >recording the group meetings. Great idea. I have a podcast called Futurists Podcast Lecture Series, but for my practice at the University, I am developing a "Transhumanism Podcasts." I'd love for you to be involved. Best wishes, Natashqa -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Tue Sep 12 19:35:49 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:35:49 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians / extropy FM References: <380-220069212184517296@M2W009.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <00b501c6d6a2$a96ac2b0$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> Sounds like there might be a bit of scope for this then. I'm in the process of moving at the moment so every_thing is every_here, over the next month or so I should be able to settle down and provide more tangible input. I'll send this over to Fabio on Extrobritannia and see what he thinks. Best wishes, John > Great idea. I have a podcast called Futurists Podcast Lecture Series, but > for my practice at the University, I am developing a "Transhumanism > Podcasts." I'd love for you to be involved. > > Best wishes, > > Natashqa > > > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web - Check your email from the web at > http://mail2web.com/ . > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Sep 12 19:37:59 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:37:59 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Poetry of Stupidity Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060912143020.0247ff68@satx.rr.com> I see the New York Times has this headline today: ================= She Dreamed of the Stars; Now She'll Almost Touch Them By WARREN E. LEARY On Monday, Anousheh Ansari is scheduled to become the first woman to go into space as an amateur astronaut. ======================= So apparently word has not yet reached the NYT that the stars are *not*, after all, just up there slightly beyond space station orbit, stuck on a crystal sphere. It's not that I'm against poetry, dog knows, but for some reason this mawkish reversion to childhood really irritates the shit out of me. Damien Broderick From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Sep 12 20:13:50 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:13:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians / extropy FM Message-ID: <380-220069212201350484@M2W002.mail2web.com> Sure, and please send Fabio my warmest regards, Natasha Original Message: ----------------- From: John john.heritage at v21.me.uk Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:35:49 +0100 To: nvitamore at austin.rr.com, extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians / extropy FM Sounds like there might be a bit of scope for this then. I'm in the process of moving at the moment so every_thing is every_here, over the next month or so I should be able to settle down and provide more tangible input. I'll send this over to Fabio on Extrobritannia and see what he thinks. Best wishes, John > Great idea. I have a podcast called Futurists Podcast Lecture Series, but > for my practice at the University, I am developing a "Transhumanism > Podcasts." I'd love for you to be involved. > > Best wishes, > > Natashqa > > > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web - Check your email from the web at > http://mail2web.com/ . > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Sep 12 21:32:58 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:32:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Biotech: Ability to turn on and off P53 could extend life Message-ID: <380-220069212213258234@M2W016.mail2web.com> Today, an article by Anette Breindl, Science Editor, for BioWorld Today, daily biotech newspaper, suggests that the ability to turn on and off P53 could have a role in extending human life by slowing down the aging process. Subscription only. http://www.bioworld.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Sep 13 04:32:09 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:32:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Software: P2P realtime communication, esp. video conferencing Message-ID: I am interested in testing Linux-to-Linux or Linux-to-non-Linux chat and/or audio and/or video capabilities. I am particularly interested in testing Ekiga (formerly gnome-meeting?) but would be open to testing other systems such as Skype (though I think this needs an account), Google chat and/or Linux chat programs. I'd prefer to work with someone who has some experience in these areas so it isn't a complete case of the blind leading the blind. People can respond offlist, if there is a group collectively interested I may see if online meetings can be setup for a group. Though it wasn't exactly straight forward, I now have Second Life so it seems to be running on Gentoo Linux -- but am tending to frown on it since it is both large and closed source. It also doesn't serve my purposes from a "real" business standpoint. It is likely to remain difficult for some time to engage in "serious" discussions with an avatar in a VR. Thanks, Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 13 06:31:38 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:31:38 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians In-Reply-To: <008e01c6d698$c2d28f30$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> References: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> <008e01c6d698$c2d28f30$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <20060913063138.GX21640@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 07:25:00PM +0100, John wrote: > I'm having serious difficulty just keeping up with the volume of extropy / > transhuman email alone I'm getting at the moment! Having someone talk to me > makes a nice change. You must have some dead time on the commute. I don't like voice, it's slow and annoying. Reading is an order of magnitude faster at least. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sm at vreedom.com Wed Sep 13 08:43:34 2006 From: sm at vreedom.com (sm at vreedom.com) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:43:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians Message-ID: <1158137014.4507c4b67e36d@www.config-server.de> Hi Damien, >Stephan, have you seen the German translation of my book The Spike: >DIE MOLEKULARE MANUFAKTUR (Rowohlt, 2004)? The title made it seem far >more limited in its central topics that it is, alas. Yes, I was quiet astonished to see it in a shop while waiting in Frankfurt central station. It was positioned very prominently . . . Best, Stephan From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Sep 13 08:59:31 2006 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:59:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060913085931.42287.qmail@web37414.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Robert, Robert writes: ... "You are *wired* to care for children. Its only recently that the concepts of "consciousness" and "children's rights" have arisen. They derive in part from a genetic inheritance which motivates us to care for children and those less fortunate than us (human social 'tribe' promotion genes)." Yes, that may be true to a limited extent. But IMO, something like compassion (or emotions in general) do not lose value simply because they are ancient or naturally evolved. I still cherish my emotions even if they are an artifact of my imperfect ancestors. Sorry for waxing poetic for a moment but... Aren't our evolved emotions the whole source of our interest and fascination with life? Aren't they the reason that we generally believe that existence is preferable to nonexistence? Robert writes: "So I *strongly* question whether one can divorce oneself from heritage enough to discuss this from an unbiased perspective! (Its easier if you have a high Asperger's quotient I think)." If the vast majority disagree with you, are you confident that ours is the biased perspective? Robert writes: "I don't see anyone anywhere arguing that ideas that pop into my head have rights. I run through hundreds or thousands of them on a daily basis." ... I've had similar ponderings. As unsettling as it may be, it may be true that previous "versions" (or "thoughts" if you prefer) of myself were once "alive" and are now "deceased". However, the termination of those older "versions" was not a conscious decision by myself or anyone else. (And I'm not sure about the legitimacy of calling that pruning process an "unconscious decision" either). In any case, nothing at all can be done currently to save the "lives" of the older "versions" of myself. And furthermore, I suspect that the termination of passing thoughts (or "old versions") will always be unpreventable regardless of any technological advancement in the future (but this forecast may just be the result of a limited imagination). Intentionally murdering a separate conscious mind (such as a "copy"), however is entirely preventable, and I hope will be viewed as increasingly unnecessary and inhumane. Robert writes: "So one is either in the camp that ones thoughts (and presumably anything else that runs on ones hardware) is ones own property to do with as you see fit or you are in the "Thoughts have rights too" camp." I think this may qualify as a false dichotomy. It all boils down to the question: What kind of future world do we want to give to our descendants? Do we want to create a world that embraces compassion and restraint? Or do we want to create a world where the only relevant currencies are power and violence? The only ethical system we *must* follow is that which is constrained by the fundamental laws of physics. Do we really want to leave morality to *that* blind, cruel taskmaster? I certainly hope not. We can choose to steer a different course. Personally, I'd rather not be a drone in the Borg collective, dispassionately collecting data. Maybe emotions aren't so worthless after all ;-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich Robert Bradbury wrote: On 9/6/06, A B wrote: I must ask you: Why do you feel that you have the "right" or "entitlement" or "freedom" (or whatever *word* you want to use) to create and/or run conscious, artificial beings on your hardware and then do absolutely anything you want with them - morality being at your sole discretion? [snip] With the "children" case for a long long time they were essentially viewed as "property". Parents had more children to work in the fields (or because they didn't know how to prevent their conception and $!#$#% nature made the process of creating them so hard to resist). You are *wired* to care for children. Its only recently that the concepts of "consciousness" and "children's rights" have arisen. They derive in part from a genetic inheritance which motivates us to care for children and those less fortunate than us (human social 'tribe' promotion genes). So I *strongly* question whether one can divorce oneself from heritage enough to discuss this from an unbiased perspective! (Its easier if you have a high Asperger's quotient I think). I don't see anyone anywhere arguing that ideas that pop into my head have rights. I run through hundreds or thousands of them on a daily basis. There is an overlord going, no, bad, stupid, push that on stack 7, oh wait -- there's something interesting, etc. Now the only difference between the ideas popping into my head and those in a child or those in another human being is quantity (number of neurons devoted to them), quality (derived from my installed knowledge base and neural network) and some genetic & biochemical hardware (due to the instantiation in this current RJB body). I don't see anyone screaming, threatening to throw me in jail or terminate this instantiation because I am abusing, torturing, destroying or otherwise manipulating *my* thoughts. And I'm sure that some of those thoughts (or a collection of them) would love to assert "But I'm really am conscious!" [1]. So one is either in the camp that ones thoughts (and presumably anything else that runs on ones hardware) is ones own property to do with as you see fit or you are in the "Thoughts have rights too" camp. This line of discussion is a close relation to the "Can you kill your copies" discussion which was to the best of my knowledge never resolved. My current working solution is that all of *my* copies going in know that they are subject to deletion -- just as my thoughts are. Robert 1. In a voice similar to "But I'm not dead yet!" _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat --------------------------------- Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Wed Sep 13 10:45:11 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:45:11 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Solutions to Overpopulation Message-ID: <51ce64f10609130345h5bd6181fn7355c36696d1b0dd@mail.gmail.com> Recently written blog post on how the Earth could hold 100 billion individuals: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=174 Of course, we could probably boost our carrying capacity even more by hollowing out the crust or sucking up the mantle and making towers, but I'm trying to write for a pre-SL3 audience here. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Sep 13 11:14:02 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:14:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians In-Reply-To: <20060913063138.GX21640@leitl.org> References: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de> <008e01c6d698$c2d28f30$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> <20060913063138.GX21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <47627.72.236.103.77.1158146042.squirrel@main.nc.us> > I don't like voice, it's > slow and annoying. Reading is an order of magnitude faster at least. > Whee!! Somebody else has said what I have found! I've been feeling like the lone stranger - but let me assure you that when one is older and hearing is getting poorer that a webcast really fails to be useful. One can't slow down to study the material. It's gone in a breath. :( Maybe it's also related to learning styles/strengths? Regards, MB From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Wed Sep 13 12:59:56 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 13:59:56 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Podcast about Extropians References: <1158071954.4506c6928d0b4@www.config-server.de><008e01c6d698$c2d28f30$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> <20060913063138.GX21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <005501c6d734$84f863a0$852c0751@heritagekd9czj> >You must have some dead time on the commute. I don't like voice, it's >slow and annoying. Reading is an order of magnitude faster at least. Yep, I just bought a Pocket PC to give me some additional time to catch up with stuff while I'm on the move - I got an RX1955 iPAQ from HP and would definitly recommend one (I'm actually considering getting one or two more for other family members I'm that happy with it). I think reading is better for detail, but sometimes I just want an overview of a load of topics that will let me pick the ones I want to read into after so's that I don't need to spend too long reading each one sequentially to see what's going on. I'd like to be able to put my earphones in and catch up whilst I'm walking along. I thought it'd be good, for instance, to do something like "What's new this week!" and take some of the topics you post up on a regular basis, for example, and just do a super quick review of what's said to allow people to keep up to date without needing to necessarily be on all the lists or deal with the full volume involved. As MB suggested, it's never going to fully compete with text for detail, but that shouldn't be the aim of these ideas anyway - more just to cluster bomb with the primes for reading the detail. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Sep 13 18:07:10 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:07:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Origin of morality In-Reply-To: <20060913085931.42287.qmail@web37414.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060913135746.03623108@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> This should be of interest to the sl4 list as well if someone wants to post it there--though being evolutionary psychology, you might take flack for doing so. "He says the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, . . . " *If* it evolved, that means that there was a selective advantage in the EEA for it. Keith Author Interview The Bookshelf talks with Marc Hauser Greg Ross Oscar Wilde said, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." But how do we learn where to draw these lines? It's commonly understood that moral rules are instilled in church, school and home, but Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser believes that they have a deeper source-an unconscious, built-in "moral grammar" that drives our judgments of right and wrong. Widely known for his studies of animal cognition (see "What Do Animals Think About Numbers?" in the March-April 2000 American Scientist), Hauser has long been intrigued by the nature of human moral judgment (interested readers can take his Web-based Moral Sense Test). He says the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral intuition that's shared by people around the world. "Our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments," he writes. "Sometimes our moral intuitions will converge with those that culture spells out, and sometimes they will diverge." In Moral Minds (Ecco) Hauser draws ideas from the social and natural sciences, philosophy and the law to support his own findings for an unconscious moral instinct. American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed Hauser by e-mail in July 2006. Can you describe what you mean by a moral grammar? The core idea is derived from the work in generative grammar that [MIT linguist Noam] Chomsky initiated in the 1950s and that the political philosopher John Rawls brought to life in a short section of his major treatise A Theory of Justice in 1971. In brief, I argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar, built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible moral systems. By grammar I simply mean a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong. These principles are unconscious and inaccessible. What I mean by unconscious is different from the Freudian unconscious. It is not only that we make moral judgments intuitively, and without consciously reflecting upon the principles, but that even if we tried to uncover those principles we wouldn't be able to, as they are tucked away in the mind's library of knowledge. Access comes from deep, scholarly investigation. Paralleling language, the notion of grammar that has been developed in modern linguistics is virtually incomprehensible outside the field of linguistics. The grammar we learned in school has virtually no resemblance to the grammatical principles uncovered by linguists. In the same way, once we delve deeper into our moral faculty we will uncover principles that are virtually unrecognizable from the social norms that we articulate and live by in our day-to-day lives. And in the same way that the unconscious but operative principles of language do not dictate the specific content of what we say, if we say anything, the unconscious but operative principles of morality do not dictate the specific content of our moral judgments, nor whether we in fact choose to help or harm others in any given situation. Source: American Scientist http://www.americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/52880 From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Sep 13 18:14:25 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:14:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Solutions to Overpopulation In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609130345h5bd6181fn7355c36696d1b0dd@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609130345h5bd6181fn7355c36696d1b0dd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/13/06, Michael Anissimov wrote: > > Recently written blog post on how the Earth could hold 100 billion > individuals: > > http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=174 Haven't read it. But isn't this already largely covered in Nanomedicine Vol. I Sec. 6.5.7 on the global hypsithermal limit? A 10E15 W limit with 1x10^14 allocated to vegetation gives you 9x10^14 for humans. 9x10^14 / 10^10 gives you 9x10^4 W (90,000W per person) which I think is well beyond normal consumption (even in the U.S.). At 10^11 that gives you only 9,000W per person which may be cutting things a bit tight. An average house is wired for 200 amp service which is 20,000W. That doesn't take into account non-home fuel and electricity use. So there are some serious energy consumption, sustainability & conservation issues that need to be addressed. But humans are only 100W machines so 9x10^14W allows for the possibility of 9 *trillion* people without exceeding the hypsithermal limit. Of course if you cut that to heads in a vat, the brain only requires about 10W so you would be up to 90 trillion brains. But of course this all depends on how efficiently one can convert the solar energy into nutrients humans can run on. (Plants are doing 1-2% - to glucose, while solar cells are going to be pushing 40-60% to electricity). Switching from "ancient-tech" to "modern-tech" (*no* 'nanotech' required) would decrease the inefficient energy harvesting of the current system and allow a better coupling of incoming energy to computronium to waste heat production. Of course it goes without saying *why* would you want 100 billion, or 9 trillion human bodies (or 90 trillion brains) running around? They *aren't* exactly the most efficient machines one can think of. I am not sure how many fertile women there are on the planet -- perhaps 1.5 to 2 billion? So even if you forced them to have a child every year (*highly* unlikely) it would take you 30-40 years to reach a population of 100 billion. (What are the current estimates for when we would reach 100 billion? I suspect they are late in this century or the next century.) Given the rate of technology progress we will reach zero population growth for humans and accelerated population growth for AIs or uploads. So any exercise discussing 100 billion OEM "humans" on the Earth has to come up with an entirely fictional reality to justify such a discussion. Of course, we could probably boost our carrying capacity even more by > hollowing out the crust or sucking up the mantle and making towers, > but I'm trying to write for a pre-SL3 audience here. Why bother? Convincing people that something is possible that will never happen seems like a rather pointless use of time, intellectual energy and audience attention span. Go design a nanopart instead. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Sep 14 02:13:03 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:13:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] PJ is down for the count... Message-ID: <16838902.729651158199983675.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hal at finney.org Thu Sep 14 06:06:54 2006 From: hal at finney.org (Hal Finney) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 23:06:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] 44th mersenne prime verified Message-ID: <20060914060654.CC64714F6BC@finney.org> Spike wrote: > In any case, here is a list of the 44 known Mersenne primes, where the > second column is the exponent in the form 2^n-1: > > 1 2 2^2 -1 = 3, prime > 2 3 2^3 -1 = 7, prime > 3 5 2^5 -1 = 31, prime > 4 7 2^7 -1 = 127, prime > 5 13 2^13 -1 = 8191, prime > 6 17 2^17 -1 = 131071, prime > 7 19 2^19 -1 = 524287, prime > 8 31 2^31 -1 = 2147483647, prime etc > 9 61 (18 digit number) > 10 89 > 11 107 > 12 127 > 13 521 > 14 607 > 15 1279 > 16 2203 > 17 2281 > 18 3217 > 19 4253 > 20 4423 > 21 9689 > 22 9941 > 23 11213 > 24 19937 > 25 21701 > 26 23209 > 27 44497 > 28 86243 > 29 110503 > 30 132049 > 31 216091 > 32 756839 > 33 859433 > 34 1257787 > 35 1398269 > 36 2976221 > 37 3021377 > 38 6972593 > 39 13466917 > 40 20996011 > 41 24036583 > 42 25964951 > 43 30402457 > 44 32582657 This is a fascinating list, the way the numbers grow so randomly. Just write down the first digits and group numbers with the same length: 2357, 111368, 1156, 12234499, 112248, 11278, 11236, 122233... The weird thing is that these numbers are in a sense completely deterministic, defined by simple rules,, while at the same time appearing totally random. Other patterns involving the primes and many other kinds of numbers have this property, this paradoxical combination of determinism and randomness. One of the oddest ideas for the nature of reality is that we may, so to speak, live in this list somewhere. Or more generally, that we may be creatures of mathematics, what physicist Max Tegmark calls Self-Aware Subsystems (SASs) within mathematical structures. This mathematical feature of randomness within deterministic systems would explain the seeming random features of our own world. This is usually thought of as a variant on many-worlds and parallel- universe ideas, but I prefer another angle on it. One concept that many-worlders use to find order amid the chaos is that of "measure", that some systems have more of it than others, and high-measure systems are the ones that count. Wei Dai proposed a few years ago that measure could be defined based on Greg Chaitin's notion of algorithmic complexity. Basically systems that can be defined by simple rules have higher measure than those that require complex rules. When you put all this together you get that certain conscious systems, i.e. certain beings, have much higher measure than others. These are the ones that happen to have relatively simple mathematical descriptions, while at the same time being complex enough to be what we think of as conscious. It is then very likely (within this framework of ideas) that we are those beings; the unique ones which happen, by the raw, abstract structure of mathematics, to have simple descriptions. Mersenne prime patterns appear random and complex but actually are described by simple rules. The same may be true for us, and we may owe our existence to the combination of simplicity and complexity which makes us mathematically "prominent" in exactly the same way that Mersenne primes are. We can't really expect an answer to "why" Mersenne primes have the specific patterns that they do - it's just the nature of mathematics. And in the same way, we should not expect to say "why" our own lives are as they are; again, it is just the nature of mathematics that these particular lives are the ones with the greatest measure. Hal From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 14 13:19:49 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:19:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: <20060913085931.42287.qmail@web37414.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20060913085931.42287.qmail@web37414.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609140619u46d12afcx81a126442c491e5c@mail.gmail.com> Aside from the mechanics of chemistry in the brain, I believe the purpose of emotions is to represent a complex cascade of thoughts that we otherwise are unable to "think" in cost-effective time. Our hardware may just not be good enough to stepwise compute: there is a thing, it appears to fill a large percentage of the field of view, the percentage of field of view is increasing, increasing at a high rate, there is a sound, it is getting louder, this thing is a lion and the sound is growling and now I am lunch. It is more efficient for a primal fear to cause an immediate reaction - without "rational" thought. Perhaps we have evolved a way to compile a series of thoughts into an emotion for the purpose of encapsulating and reusing that process more effectively. I come to this observation from personal experience. My normal 'baseline' self is emotionally stable, with a tendency for equilibrium to generate stress. That stress builds until there is sufficient energy to destabilize the baseline state. During an emotional reaction, thoughts are just too slow to do anything more than observe or record. After the reaction, I can assess how I feel in the new state of mind. I think this is healthy. Without this process, i doubt there would be any productive growth at all. You only feel that way about the Borg because you are on the outside looking at the drone. From inside that distributed computing cluster, each individual consciousness may be experiencing their heart's desire - or have aligned their concerns with the greater good of the hive mind. We seem to have a natural reaction to be repulsed by the Borg archetype, though I believe it is a matter of perspective. I think we need to seriously examine the implications here before we can start uploading ourselves into computronium cubes. On 9/13/06, A B wrote: > > Yes, that may be true to a limited extent. But IMO, something like > compassion (or emotions in general) do not lose value simply because they > are ancient or naturally evolved. I still cherish my emotions even if they > are an artifact of my imperfect ancestors. Sorry for waxing poetic for a > moment but... Aren't our evolved emotions the whole source of > our interest and fascination with life? Aren't they the reason that we > generally believe that existence is preferable to nonexistence? > > Personally, I'd rather not be a drone in the Borg collective, > dispassionately collecting data. > > Maybe emotions aren't so worthless after all ;-) > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Sep 14 14:15:06 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:15:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Limits of "Property" In-Reply-To: <62c14240609140619u46d12afcx81a126442c491e5c@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060913085931.42287.qmail@web37414.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240609140619u46d12afcx81a126442c491e5c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60609140715j4cf0ce6bx627337211faac4db@mail.gmail.com> On 9/14/06, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > You only feel that way about the Borg because you are on the outside looking > at the drone. From inside that distributed computing cluster, each > individual consciousness may be experiencing their heart's desire - or have > aligned their concerns with the greater good of the hive mind. We seem to > have a natural reaction to be repulsed by the Borg archetype, though I > believe it is a matter of perspective. I think we need to seriously examine > the implications here before we can start uploading ourselves into > computronium cubes. ### I want to upload, and split off copies, as soon as possible, as many as I can pay for, make copies that love the Borg, copies that build the Borg out of their own minds, copies that run away from the Borg as fast as their lightsail ships can carry them, and every shade in between. I want to tile the Solar system, and all other systems, with evolving copies of myself, edging out the paperclips. There you have another existential threat to humanity: TEOTWAWKI by Rafal. Rafal From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 14 19:41:30 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:41:30 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality creation, fragmentation and justification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3458.163.1.72.81.1158262890.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> The trick is to use the long links in the small-world graph. Most people do indeed cluster into neighbourhood realities. But most also have a few links to more remote realities - the grandkid who listens to goth music, the friend who happens to read sf, the Chinese-Norwegian coworker. It is across these long links new memes tend to creep in. And the same goes for setting policy: network far and wide, and you will find that you can get your ideas into the memespaces of both far left and far right if you are careful to deliver the memes phrased in the right way. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From neomorphy at gmail.com Fri Sep 15 03:25:58 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:25:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Existential risks and CERN Message-ID: Just came across an actual figure for the existential risk posed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=325&objectid=10400645 Dr Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into the unknown and creating tiny black holes, the machine could even destroy the planet. "The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said. ... With that number, against the probability of other existential risks (eg: Gamma-Ut Ray Mi Burst), the risk is negligible against the noise. Question is: are these the real chances, or are they skewed by cognitive biases? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 15 06:40:20 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:40:20 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Existential risks and CERN In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060915064020.GL21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 01:25:58PM +1000, Olie Lamb wrote: > "The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said. > > ... > With that number, against the probability of other existential risks > (eg: Gamma-Ut Ray Mi Burst), the risk is negligible against the noise. > Question is: are these the real chances, or are they skewed by > cognitive biases? Natural processes achieve even higher energies. You know how long Earth existed, and from astronomic observation you know that catastrophic processes are rare. It's reasonably straightforward arithmetics. (And if you're wrong, you won't feel nary a thing). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From scerir at libero.it Fri Sep 15 06:22:14 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:22:14 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Existential risks and CERN References: Message-ID: <003a01c6d88f$49f2ce10$07931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> From: "Olie Lamb" > Just came across an actual figure for the existential risk posed by > experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: [...] > Question is: are these the real chances, or are they skewed by cognitive > biases? They are (very unlikely) disaster scenarios (production of: black holes, killer strange quark matters, etc.) inspired by hypothetical fundamental processes that might occur in high energy relativistic heavy ion collisions. (Note that such hypothetical processes would be interesting from some general energy supply perspective). The continued existence of the Moon, and Earth, after so many years of cosmic ray exposure, seems to provide evidence against the possibility of dangers. More here below ... http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009204 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9910333 From scerir at libero.it Fri Sep 15 08:40:22 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:40:22 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] 44th mersenne prime verified References: <20060914060654.CC64714F6BC@finney.org> Message-ID: <001801c6d8a2$95e12660$29941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Hal: > The weird thing is that these numbers are in a sense completely > deterministic, defined by simple rules,, while at the same time appearing > totally random. Other patterns involving the primes and many other > kinds of numbers have this property, this paradoxical combination of > determinism and randomness. Yes. I do not know if it is really paradoxical. Pure randomness (uncomputability?) alone and pure determinism alone would be more paradoxical maybe? [ This theorem seems to suggest a sort of thermodinamics of numbers, a concept that also G.Chaitin likes ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s-Kac_theorem ] > Wei Dai proposed a few years ago that measure could be defined > based on Greg Chaitin's notion of algorithmic complexity. > Basically systems that can be defined by simple rules have > higher measure than those that require complex rules. Dunno if 'simple rules' is so easy to define. In example is the 'superposition' (in linear QM) a 'simple' rule? (Maybe it is, in the sense of J.Schmidhuber's answer to the question 'So which is the best universe-computing algorithm for any decent "Great Programmer" with resource constraints?'). S. From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 15 14:07:10 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:07:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] 44th mersenne prime verified In-Reply-To: <001801c6d8a2$95e12660$29941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <200609151419.k8FEJu9j003055@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ... > > > Wei Dai proposed a few years ago that measure could be defined > > based on Greg Chaitin's notion of algorithmic complexity... Where is Wei Dai? Anyone know where he hangs out? I thought I saw a comment from him a couple years ago on SL4 or somewhere. If someone here is in contact with him, please invite him to come in to say hi and describe his life trajectory these days. spike From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 16 06:59:26 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:59:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Existential risks and CERN In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060916065927.51998.qmail@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> I must agree with Dr. Cox in this instance. My confidence comes from the "oh my God particle". A cosmic ray proton that was measured as having the kinetic energy of a major league baseball pitch (deadly force from a single proton? - AMAZING). If individual protons that have the relativistic mass (due to sheer velocity) of a major league baseball fastball don't pose a threat, it will be a while before I start to worry about the danger of CERN and other particle accelerators. Of course that being said, I wouldn't want to be hit by one, but even if I were, I am rather certain that you all would be safe. --- Olie Lamb wrote: > Just came across an actual figure for the > existential risk posed by > experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: > > http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=325&objectid=10400645 > > Dr Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into > the unknown and creating > tiny black holes, the machine could even destroy the > planet. > "The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus > 40," he said. > > ... > > With that number, against the probability of other > existential risks (eg: > Gamma-Ut Ray Mi Burst), the risk is negligible > against the noise. > > Question is: are these the real chances, or are they > skewed by cognitive > biases? > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From nanogirl at halcyon.com Sat Sep 16 21:49:56 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:49:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] I need your help again! References: <20060908210901.68485.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com><014b01c6d390$4e674560$0200a8c0@Nano><019301c6d396$aedf4220$0200a8c0@Nano><044801c6d3ca$a6a5b510$0200a8c0@Nano><470a3c520609082253s113f33dcs2fe99ef2a014cde0@mail.gmail.com> <030501c6d560$4c183770$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <00b501c6d9da$130a5520$0200a8c0@Nano> Okay I've made a second animation for the wind energy competition, this one has a funny plot and I like it a lot! It's called "Countrifried Oil". Please come and vote for my newest submission by going here: http://www.windblows.us/ If you signed up to vote for my first video than you only need to login to vote for my second. If you did not then just simply register, it's free and super easy! Afterwards you can vote for my animation. I need all the votes I can get as the number of votes determines who will win the ten thousand dollars! Don't worry this is my last submission to this contest! I would like to thank you all for your support!!! I couldn't do this without you! Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Crafts blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." >My original message for the first submission: >Please come vote for my animated video that I submitted for a wind energy competition, the prize is 10 thousand dollars. As >you all know my husband is Jim Lewis and we have been through a lot financially and emotionally due to his multiple myeloma >cancer diagnosis and following chemotherapy and stem cell transplants - and since I am an artist who only gets sporadic offers >for commission work - we could really, really, use this money. But I need your votes to win. My submission is the one called >"Wind Makes the World go Round", when you vote they will ask you to register, it's free and really quick, they are not super >nosey or anything! Please also forward this on to anyone you know who will also help out with votes for my work. >Here is where you can vote for me: http://www.windblows.us/ Please come vote, it would be a lot to me and to Jim,............. thank you so very much! Gina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Sun Sep 17 18:24:23 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:24:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> [Greg Egan writes, in sci.phys.research, ' A plea to save "New Scientist" '] > New Scientist is a British-based publication where many thousands of lay > people get their information on scientific matters, and (IMHO) it does an > excellent job about 70% of the time. But the combination of a > sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers (most > obviously in physics) is rendering it unreliable often enough to > constitute a real threat to the public understanding of science. > > There are many areas in cosmology, fundamental physics and so on where > there are controversies over issues that are hotly contested by various > competent, highly educated and respected scientists, and I have no > quarrel with New Scientist publishing views on various sides of these > debates, even when those from the opposing camp would consider the claims > to be nonsense. > > However, I really was gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy in > the article "Fly by light" in the 9 September 2006 issue, concerning the > supposed "electromagnetic drive" of Roger Shawyer. If Shawyer's claims > have been accurately reported, they violate conservation of momentum. > This is not a contested matter; in its modern, relativistic form it is > accepted by every educated physicist on the planet. The writer of this > article, Justin Mullins, seems aware that conservation of momentum is > violated, but then churns out a lot of meaningless double-talk about > "reference frames" which he seems to think demonstrates that relativity > somehow comes to the rescue. > > Mullins quotes one engineer who says Shawyer's claims are "a load of > bloody rubbish", but that's really not good enough, when the rest of the > article is full of apparent endorsements from various authorities. If > Mullins had tried, I'm sure he could have found someone to explain to him > exactly *why*, however clever Shawyer's design might be, the only > possible source of net thrust for this device would be the release of the > microwaves in a unidirectional beam, and that the ceiling on the thrust > imposed by relativity is P/c (where P is power), or 3.33 microNewtons per > kilowatt. As the article stands, it leaves readers with the impression > that while one engineer has raised some unspecified quibbles, it's quite > likely that Shawyer is correct. > > I wrote a letter to the magazine politely pointing out the relevant > physics, but even in the event that this letter, or similar comments from > other physics-literate readers are published, the underlying problem > seems to be the editorial culture at the magazine that allows this kind > of article to appear in the first place. Maybe it's unrealistic to > demand that every science writer who covers a physics story have a > physics degree, but surely there's some level of quality control that can > be introduced, to ensure that claims that flatly contradict established > and uncontroversial physical principles are either clearly flagged to the > magazine's readers as such, or (in cases of perpetual motion machines, > magic anti-gravity devices, etc.) just not published at all. > > So, this message is a plea to everyone who cares about the public > understanding of science. New Scientist has a very large readership, and > its reports are often quoted in the mainstream press as if they carried > the same authority as a peer-reviewed journal. I know that some people > think New Scientist is just a tabloid joke that should be written off as > beyond redemption, but I don't share that view; I don't believe its > mistakes come from bad faith or cynicism, but the editor and publisher > really need to get the message, both from the physics-literate portion of > their readership and the academic physics community, that they need to > raise their standards or risk squandering the opportunity that the > magazine's circulation and prestige provides. > > If any of these issues matter to you, please read the article and -- if > it worries you even half as much as it worried me -- please write to the > magazine and let them know. > > Greg Egan From ps.udoname at gmail.com Thu Sep 14 18:24:54 2006 From: ps.udoname at gmail.com (ps udoname) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:24:54 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <000901c6d451$0afab5c0$03941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <000901c6d451$0afab5c0$03941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <28553f510609141124m5e3ad4bndbb514c74c41ff60@mail.gmail.com> "Shawyer cautions that the calculations only work for static thrusts. 'You can't beat the laws of physics. If it is used to accelerate, the Q value drops. It is best used to lift a body and oppose a force, for instance to counteract gravity. It cannot be used to accelerate further.'" What if it opposes gravity, and then another force is used to accelerate it? Does the Q value drop then? Also this does not make it clear whether using the drive to accelerate is impossible or just impracticle. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Mon Sep 18 06:41:00 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 02:41:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer> I have a question about geology that I have not been able to find an answer to. We've all heard that diamonds come from volcanoes, but no modern volcano produces diamonds. The Tambora eruption in 1815 made a year without a summer but it couldn't make a single diamond, even the Yellowstone eruption 2 million years ago that was far larger than anything in recorded history did not produce diamonds. The super colossal eruption in India 65 million years ago managed to produce the second largest lava flow on the planet called the Deccan Traps, but it couldn't produce diamonds; the very largest lave flow is the Siberian Traps formed 251 million years ago, but again no diamonds. I had heard that the roots of a volcano that produced diamonds must go much deeper into the earth than normal volcanoes, and lava had to screams out of them with much much greater speed than your average vanilla volcano. I had assumed that sort of eruption only happened billions of years ago, after all the earth's interior was much hotter then; and indeed most diamond deposits are very old. But not all. The volcano that produced the Ellendale diamond field in Australia erupted only 20 million years ago. I don't get it. The Siberian eruption 251 million years ago was so huge it is a likely candidate for causing the greatest mass extinction of all time, but it produced no diamonds. The eruption In Australia 20 million years ago must have ejected gas and lava at enormous speed, far greater speeds and from far greater depths than any eruption a human being has ever seen, yet it produced no big extinctions. I just don't get it. I hope we have a geologist on the list. John K Clark jonkc at att.net From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 18 07:31:01 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 08:31:01 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions In-Reply-To: <003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> <003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 9/18/06, John K Clark wrote: > I have a question about geology that I have not been able to find an answer > to. We've all heard that diamonds come from volcanoes, but no modern volcano > produces diamonds. I think the article you want is: Summary: Volcanoes don't make diamonds. Diamonds are made deep in the earth's mantle over 100 million years ago. Only a specific type of small volcano brings these diamonds to the surface. Quote: "The explosive emplacement of the volatile-rich kimberlite magmatic fluid results in the development of near surface kimberlite 'pipe'." BillK From jonkc at att.net Mon Sep 18 07:54:53 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 03:54:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com><001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex><003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> "BillK" > Volcanoes don't make diamonds. Diamonds are made deep in the earth's > mantle over 100 million years ago. Only a specific type of small > volcano brings these diamonds to the surface. I realize that, I also realize that if the volcano didn't transport the diamonds from very deep in the earth to the surface much more rapidly than normal volcanoes the diamond would be turned into graphite. I can see no way such a incredibly explosive event would result in a "small volcano". I still don't get it. John K Clark From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 18 10:45:59 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 06:45:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions In-Reply-To: <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex> <003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer> <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 9/18/06, John K Clark wrote: > I realize that, I also realize that if the volcano didn't transport the > diamonds from very deep in the earth to the surface much more rapidly than > normal volcanoes the diamond would be turned into graphite. I can see no > way such a incredibly explosive event would result in a "small volcano". I > still don't get it. > > I think the key phrase from the article is "When a kimberlite pipe is emplaced, the surface expression is that of a small explosive volcanic eruption consisting of fragments and hot gases (pyroclastic). This volcanic explosion results in the formation of a small volcanic edifice consisting of a crater (Maar) and a pyroclastic (tuff) ring. Kimberlite volcanoes have not been documented mostly because they tend to be small in size and are easily eroded." It could have been a "large" volcano but one which eroded relatively quickly. Most volcanoes we are aware of today are *very* young in geological terms. You also have to deal with the size of the fracture through which the pipe is forming. If it doesn't open up the final volume of the volcano will be constrained (at the point at which the strength of the cooling surface material balances the subsurface pressure). The large traps are not good examples as they most likely involved very large fractures representing the release of large amounts of material over long periods of time (presumably allowing the decay of any diamonds). All releases of subsurface material do not result in "volcanoes" as evidenced by deep sea vents. It is a complex interaction between the area through which the surface is being accessed and the composition of the material being thrust to the surface (in terms of rock and gas composition). I am reasonably sure the composition and timing has to be such that contact of the diamond with oxygen has to be minimized. I believe that diamond will oxidize (burn) at temperatures above 800 deg. C resulting in CO2. As the temperatures of most magmas is significantly above that it may be true that a significant fraction of diamonds are being completely vaporized in typical surface volcanoes. An open question might also be the conditions under which C + 2H2O --> 2H2 + CO2. So bringing diamond to the surface might have to worry not only about exposure to oxygen but exposure to water. An interesting question in my mind would be why one doesn't find diamonds in rapidly upthrust rocks subjected to rapid erosion to remove the surface material (say the Himalayas)? Perhaps they are there but still many km beneath the surface due to the erosion requirements. The fact that I did find interesting that I was unaware of was the metastable state of diamond and that it will revert to graphite. I'd be interested in knowing the conditions that determine when that happens and whether it limits the longevity of diamondoid nanostructures. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 18 12:50:01 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:50:01 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com><001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex><003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer><005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <005301c6db20$f53f98a0$0202fea9@heritagekd9czj> Hi Robert, I was having a search around and found this; "The diamond phase of carbon is metastable with respect to the graphitic phase under normal conditions; that is, graphite is thermodynamically favored over diamond (?G = ?2.99 kJ / mol). However, the rate of conversion from diamond to graphite is extremely slow due to the presence of a large kinetic barrier to this rearrangement. At room temperature, it would take an extremely long time (possibly more than the age of the Universe) for an appreciable amount of diamond to decay into graphite." I also found an article titled "Size Dependence of Structural Metastability in Semiconductor Nanocrystals" from Science. I've posted it to you off the list. Best wishes, John ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Bradbury To: ExI chat list Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 11:45 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions On 9/18/06, John K Clark wrote: I realize that, I also realize that if the volcano didn't transport the diamonds from very deep in the earth to the surface much more rapidly than normal volcanoes the diamond would be turned into graphite. I can see no way such a incredibly explosive event would result in a "small volcano". I still don't get it. I think the key phrase from the article is "When a kimberlite pipe is emplaced, the surface expression is that of a small explosive volcanic eruption consisting of fragments and hot gases (pyroclastic). This volcanic explosion results in the formation of a small volcanic edifice consisting of a crater (Maar) and a pyroclastic (tuff) ring. Kimberlite volcanoes have not been documented mostly because they tend to be small in size and are easily eroded." It could have been a "large" volcano but one which eroded relatively quickly. Most volcanoes we are aware of today are *very* young in geological terms. You also have to deal with the size of the fracture through which the pipe is forming. If it doesn't open up the final volume of the volcano will be constrained (at the point at which the strength of the cooling surface material balances the subsurface pressure). The large traps are not good examples as they most likely involved very large fractures representing the release of large amounts of material over long periods of time (presumably allowing the decay of any diamonds). All releases of subsurface material do not result in "volcanoes" as evidenced by deep sea vents. It is a complex interaction between the area through which the surface is being accessed and the composition of the material being thrust to the surface (in terms of rock and gas composition). I am reasonably sure the composition and timing has to be such that contact of the diamond with oxygen has to be minimized. I believe that diamond will oxidize (burn) at temperatures above 800 deg. C resulting in CO2. As the temperatures of most magmas is significantly above that it may be true that a significant fraction of diamonds are being completely vaporized in typical surface volcanoes. An open question might also be the conditions under which C + 2H2O --> 2H2 + CO2. So bringing diamond to the surface might have to worry not only about exposure to oxygen but exposure to water. An interesting question in my mind would be why one doesn't find diamonds in rapidly upthrust rocks subjected to rapid erosion to remove the surface material (say the Himalayas)? Perhaps they are there but still many km beneath the surface due to the erosion requirements. The fact that I did find interesting that I was unaware of was the metastable state of diamond and that it will revert to graphite. I'd be interested in knowing the conditions that determine when that happens and whether it limits the longevity of diamondoid nanostructures. Robert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Mon Sep 18 15:53:26 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:53:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Volcanic diamond eruptions References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com><001f01c6da86$80af6910$32931f97@nomedxgm1aalex><003201c6daed$70bf08f0$30084e0c@MyComputer><005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> <005301c6db20$f53f98a0$0202fea9@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <001d01c6db3a$bf1701e0$40094e0c@MyComputer> John Wrote: > it would take an extremely long time (possibly more than the age of the > Universe) for an appreciable amount of diamond to decay into graphite." At room temperature yes, but if you heat a diamond without oxygen and without putting under very high pressure it will turn into graphite. Geologists have found deposits loaded with crystals shaped just like very large diamonds but they are made of graphite; 15% of this ore once contained diamonds of 10 carets or more, just one cubic foot of this stuff would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but now it's just land fill. They figure for diamonds to remain stable they had to shoot from about 150 miles down to the earth's surface in just a few hours, that is far faster and far deeper than normal volcanoes. I would have thought that would produce one hell of a boom but they don't seem to have caused as much devastation as many non diamond eruptions, hence my confusion. John K Clark From george at betterhumans.com Mon Sep 18 15:55:01 2006 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:55:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? Message-ID: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Sorry if this is has been discussed in the past, but.... What is the latest thinking in regards to the problem of simulation stacking (i.e. the prospect of endless simulations emerging within simulations). Is there merit to the suggestion that this is a problem and that historical simulations are thus set to be terminated at the time that advanced simulation technologies emerge? Or, are there computational options that could conceivably result in a virtually endless array of simulations (e.g. agonizingly slow clockspeeds, quantum computation, etc.) Cheers, George From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 18 18:36:24 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:36:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? In-Reply-To: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: On 9/18/06, George Dvorsky wrote: > > Sorry if this is has been discussed in the past, but.... George, it is true that we have discussed many things in the past. Part of the fun around this campfire is handing out light bulbs and explaining how electricity works. :-; What is the latest thinking in regards to the problem of simulation > stacking (i.e. the prospect of endless simulations emerging within > simulations). This is no problem from a theoretical standpoint. The only reason I could see to want to do it is from the perspective of universe (future) pathway analysis one is unwilling or unable to make some approximations or generalizations within the current (simulated?) reality. Imagining some of these is easy [1] but others are quite hard. One might want to do it for security reasons, i.e. better that the "Friendly AI" becomes unfriendly in a simulated universe than a real one. I.e. one wants sandboxes within sandboxes. Is there merit to the suggestion that this is a problem and that historical > simulations are thus set to be terminated at the time that advanced > simulation technologies emerge? Only if the entire purpose of the simulation could be to watch it evolve up until the point where they become capable of creating such simulations. But simulation stopping points could be entirely arbitrary. This one might be running until George Bush decides to pull the U.S. out of Iraq. If that happens to be the case I'm not particularly worried about it ending. I don't see why "simulation creation capacity" would always be the primary termination criteria. Speculating why "gods" do things is probably an exercise in making ones head hurt. Or, are there computational options that could conceivably result in a > virtually endless array of simulations (e.g. agonizingly slow > clockspeeds, quantum computation, etc.) Simulated realities will run slower than the host reality. But since one can presumably distribute resources among them and prioritize them at will (even suspending them for trillions of years) it isn't clear that the rates at which the simulations runs are very important. If we happen to be the basement reality, then the universe has the resources and time to run trillions of trillions of trillions (at least) of simulations of our perceived local reality (at least up until the point where we have uplifted the entire universe to KT-III level). If we aren't in the basement reality then speculations are pointless because everything from clock speed to quantum mechanics could be nothing but an invention for the experiment [2]. Going back to my question of whether "thoughts" have rights to exist, it is interesting to note that many thoughts, particularly those of a creative nature, involve limited future simulations. One is creating different futures in ones imagination and selecting those which have the most desirable characteristics to attempt to implement in this reality. The non-selected futures are generally ruthlessly discarded. Robert 1. For example it could be considered immoral to do certain things in this reality but quite acceptable to make simulated realities where nature is much more ruthless and much greater pain and suffering is experienced by the simulated entities. 2. One might expect that bored "gods" would entertain themselves by designing and simulating "weird" universes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Mon Sep 18 20:49:57 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:49:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The regrettable state of journalism References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <005301c6db64$46a63cb0$25094e0c@MyComputer> So, what was the most important news story of 1948? Undoubtedly every journalist on the planet at the time would say it was the Berlin airlift, embarrassedly even today most would agree, but they are wrong, dead wrong. Without a doubt by far the most important news event of that year was reported on July 1, 5 days after it was announced. It was reported on page 46 of the New York Times in its "News of Radio" column. The paper didn't even think it was the most interesting thing about radio that day because the small headline on page 46 was "Two New Shows on CBS Will Replace 'Radio Theater' During the Summer." When they eventually got around to it the article said: "A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday at Bell Telephone Laboratories....In the shape of a small metal cylinder about a half-inch long, the transistor contains no vacuum, grid, plate or glass envelope to keep the air away. Its action is instantaneous, there being no warm-up delay since no heat is developed as in a vacuum tube." "The working parts of the device consist solely of two fine wires that run down to a pinhead of solid semi-conductive material soldered to a metal base. The substance on the metal base amplified the current carried to it by one wire and the other wire carries away the amplified current." Then they started talking about the new radio shows on CBS. And the Times did one hell of a lot better than most newspapers; they didn't mention it at all. The Berlin airlift is an interesting footnote, but great poets will write epic poems about the invention of the transistor, poems that will rival Homer. I was reminded of all this when just today I read the following: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060918132740.htm John K Clark jonkc at att.net ----- From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Sep 18 21:26:24 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:26:24 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The regrettable state of journalism In-Reply-To: <005301c6db64$46a63cb0$25094e0c@MyComputer> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> <005301c6db64$46a63cb0$25094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060918162248.0222b7c8@satx.rr.com> At 04:49 PM 9/18/2006 -0400, John K Clark wrote: >great poets will write >epic poems about the invention of the transistor, poems that will rival >Homer. Well, they did about the invention of printing, antibiotics and the safety pin, why not about the transistor? Oh, wait -- Damien Broderick From sentience at pobox.com Mon Sep 18 23:26:26 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:26:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The regrettable state of journalism In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060918162248.0222b7c8@satx.rr.com> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> <005301c6db64$46a63cb0$25094e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20060918162248.0222b7c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <450F2B22.6010904@pobox.com> Damien Broderick wrote: > At 04:49 PM 9/18/2006 -0400, John K Clark wrote: > >>great poets will write >>epic poems about the invention of the transistor, poems that will rival >>Homer. > > Well, they did about the invention of printing, antibiotics and the > safety pin, why not about the transistor? Surely you don't think the greatest poets of humankind have already lived? -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 19 00:05:48 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:05:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? In-Reply-To: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <200609190017.k8J0HC0f009766@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of George Dvorsky > Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 8:55 AM > To: Extropy List > Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? > > Sorry if this is has been discussed in the past, but.... > > What is the latest thinking in regards to the problem of simulation > stacking (i.e. the prospect of endless simulations emerging within > simulations). ... George George I have wondered about this. Back in the days, we had Apple Panic on the Apple II running the eight bit 6502 at a blazing 2.8 MEGAHERTZ! Then we had the sixteen bit 12 MHz 68000, on which we ran Apple II emulators. Then we had the 90 MHz Pentiums, which should be plenty powerful enough to run a 68000 emulator, and now we have 32 bit Pentium 4s running at clock speeds a thousand times faster than the 2.8 MHz 6502, so we should be able to take a 4 GHz P4, run a P90 emulator running a 68000 emulator running a 6502 emulator running Apple Panic, which was actually a very cool game, one I have never seen again since 25 years ago. We should try it just for laughs. spike From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Sep 19 00:26:02 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:26:02 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? In-Reply-To: <200609190017.k8J0HC0f009766@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> <200609190017.k8J0HC0f009766@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609181726j3b359222m6765f29da24c9884@mail.gmail.com> On 9/19/06, spike wrote: > > George I have wondered about this. Back in the days, we had Apple Panic > on > the Apple II running the eight bit 6502 at a blazing 2.8 MEGAHERTZ! Then > we > had the sixteen bit 12 MHz 68000, on which we ran Apple II > emulators. Then > we had the 90 MHz Pentiums, which should be plenty powerful enough to run > a > 68000 emulator, and now we have 32 bit Pentium 4s running at clock speeds > a > thousand times faster than the 2.8 MHz 6502, so we should be able to take > a > 4 GHz P4, run a P90 emulator running a 68000 emulator running a 6502 > emulator running Apple Panic, which was actually a very cool game, one I > have never seen again since 25 years ago. We should try it just for > laughs. > It's been done in the mainframe world: there are a handful of 60s vintage programs, which embody too much domain knowledge to be easily rewritten, being run on modern IBM gear through three or four levels of emulation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 19 12:05:07 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:05:07 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? In-Reply-To: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <20060919120507.GS21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 11:55:01AM -0400, George Dvorsky wrote: > What is the latest thinking in regards to the problem of simulation The latest thinking is not different from old thinking. Emulators are a mature discipline. > stacking (i.e. the prospect of endless simulations emerging within > simulations). Is there merit to the suggestion that this is a problem > and that historical simulations are thus set to be terminated at the > time that advanced simulation technologies emerge? > > Or, are there computational options that could conceivably result in a > virtually endless array of simulations (e.g. agonizingly slow > clockspeeds, quantum computation, etc.) Since each matrioshka simulation contains less bits than the embedding simulation layer, the dolls do get smaller and smaller. Of course speed is too limited in the relativistic universe, so even massively parallel systems simulating massively parallel systems do bog down into unusable slowness, soon. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Sep 19 13:04:05 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:04:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? In-Reply-To: <20060919120507.GS21640@leitl.org> References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> <20060919120507.GS21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 9/19/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: [snip] Since each matrioshka simulation contains less bits than the embedding > simulation layer, the dolls do get smaller and smaller. Of course speed is > too limited in the relativistic universe, so even massively parallel systems > simulating massively parallel systems do bog down into unusable slowness, > soon. Bradbury takes off shoe and pounds it on the table to emphasize Leitl's point. It is only if you accept the "Blue People" explanation [1] for reality synthesis "on demand" that you can work around this problem [2]. As somewhat of a digression... Those of you who aren't using gmail to read this thread are missing out on the rather interesting set of links, both sponsored and related, that Google is selecting to stick beside the thread messages. [3] If this isn't an example of IA then I don't know what is. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "brain tap". The computer scientists and sociologists smart enough to realize what is going on are going to be able to write a slew of papers regarding the impact of "free" near domain and cross domain links [4] on the rate at which the singularity develops. Robert 1. A ExI thread probably 5+ years ago regarding the "Blue people" as an explanation for "Deja vu". 2. My "reality" is the only one running as I type this message. All of the rest of you are swapped out and are currently suspended in the spin states of electrons in large satellites composed primarily of iron oxide orbiting in the Oort cloud. 3. I shouldn't be citing them since it discourages one from finding ways to tap Google's "intelligence" in your own email interface (the simplest of course is to just use gmail)... But just to entice you... Sponsored: http://www.yasara.org/ (Molecular Dynamics) http://www.taloncom.com/ (FPGA & ASIC design) http://www.novas.com/ (Debugging software) http://www.altera.com/ (FPGA processors @ 65nm) Related: Hanging on by a thread? (string theory in USA Today) UCSB, Intel Develop First Hybrid Silicon Laser (press release on possible use of lasers to communicate between processors and memory to eliminate that bottleneck) MCS Preprints numbered 500 and above (ANL preprints for scientific papers involving various topics, some particularly related to grid computing). (I'm not including the full URLs since they are easy to lookup and are in the really long Google ad syndication format.) 4. It *used* to require real wet brain clock cycle time to come up with such links if you even knew enough to ask the right questions and knew where to look for the answers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 22 04:21:27 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:21:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play In-Reply-To: <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Perhaps you have heard the most irritating TV commercial in recent history, where they advertise a new topically absorbed pain medication by bleating several times: Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. This comment is repeated until one wants to clobber the evil wretch who invented the damn stuff, or at least the marketing department. But then I had an idea. I took several viagra tablets, ground them to a fine powder and mixed it with Head On. Works like nobody's business! Oh I will be soooo rich. Patent office here I come. I even know a great way to advertise it. Hire the same woman who does the other commercial and have her exhort repeatedly: Hard On! Apply directly to the foreskin. From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 22 05:01:38 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:01:38 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play In-Reply-To: <200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer> <200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060921235946.0226b638@satx.rr.com> At 09:21 PM 9/21/2006 -0700, spike wrote: >Hire the same woman who does the other commercial and have >her exhort repeatedly: Hard On! Apply directly to the foreskin. I tried selling that years ago, but the business tanked badly. Turned out placebos worked exactly as well. Damien Broderick From scerir at libero.it Fri Sep 22 05:58:27 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 07:58:27 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play References: <005f01c6daf7$be727ff0$30084e0c@MyComputer><200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060921235946.0226b638@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <001401c6de0c$20543080$57911f97@nomedxgm1aalex> > I tried selling that years ago, but the business tanked badly. > Turned out placebos worked exactly as well. > Damien Broderick 'Placebos'? Do they sell them? s. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 22 06:32:47 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 08:32:47 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play In-Reply-To: <001401c6de0c$20543080$57911f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060921235946.0226b638@satx.rr.com> <001401c6de0c$20543080$57911f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <20060922063247.GH21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 07:58:27AM +0200, scerir wrote: > 'Placebos'? Do they sell them? Of course. It's called homeopathy. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From user at dhp.com Fri Sep 22 18:38:06 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:38:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? Message-ID: I have recently been in the process of re-evaluating my diet as relates to health, longevity, athletic performance and environmental impact. As a result, I have been cutting out a fair amount of animal products, and specifically meat (and more specifically, red meat) from my diet. I definitely feel healthier, lighter on my feet, more agile, etc., and I think there are widely accepted benefits to limiting meat consumption, especially as regards cholesterol, blood pressure, and digestive health. However, certain thoughts keep nagging me, such as: - setting aside overconsumption, which leads to obesity and western-style ailments, increased meat consumption in the developing world has led to greater average heights, body masses and physical robustness - throughout history, meat has been more expensive than grain, etc., and the sorry plight of the poor in history (for instance, the pre-revolutionary french peasant) was illustrated by a lack of meat in the diet. - Primitive tribal structures often considered cattle as the primary measure of personal wealth, with great african chieftans defined by the thousands of head they owned. So it would seem that there is something to having meat in your diet - it would seem that its premium in (relative) price and its stimulative effect on growth and development are not imaginary. At the same time, I am reminded of a quote: "Short term expedients always fail in the long term"[1] ... and clearly meat fails in the long term (in relation to health and longevity) ... but if that is so, what is its short term expedient ? My own well being and positive results suggest I will continue to remove meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, but I'd like to have a better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in most basic terms, meat is good for. All comments appreciated. From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 22 19:53:42 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:53:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609221953.k8MJrlD8004059@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Ensel your comments are mixing two different things here: > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Ensel Sharon ... > > As a result, I have been cutting out a fair amount of animal products... > > However, certain thoughts keep nagging me, such as: > > - setting aside overconsumption, which leads to obesity and western-style > ailments... Definitely. Eat light, live long. > ...increased meat consumption in the developing world has led to > greater average heights, body masses and physical robustness... Hmmm, lots of assumptions here that need proving. Increased meat eating goes along with lots of things that lead to greater average heights, physical robustness etc, such as better health habits in general. I see little evidence that eating more meat by itself causes more robustness. ... > > My own well being and positive results suggest I will continue to remove > meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, but I'd like to have a > better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in most basic terms, meat > is good for. All comments appreciated... I can assure you that you can be very healthy with little or no meat, and can show you maaany examples of people who do so. They grew up big and strong eating no meat ever in their lives, and I do mean no beef, pork, fish nor foul, nothing that ever had a face. I have ethical issues with my own diet: red meat is farm grown, and these beasts would never have lived at all had we proles no desire to devour them, and some life is better than none I would suppose. Fish on the other hand are mostly taken from the wild. I eat a lot of fish but little red meat, so I do have a bit of a guilt thing about that. This can be assuaged by simply eating less food of all kinds. Most of us can get by on less food, and there are health benefits. Summary: you don't need red meat. Take an iron tablet occasionally, and a B12. Eat light, live long. spike From user at dhp.com Fri Sep 22 20:16:00 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:16:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: <200609221953.k8MJrlD8004059@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: Hi, On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, spike wrote: > Definitely. Eat light, live long. Right ... but there must be a flip side to that, right ? That is the point I am trying to get at. Not that I necessarily want that flip side, or that that flip side is anything more than an anachronism... > > My own well being and positive results suggest I will continue to remove > > meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, but I'd like to have a > > better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in most basic terms, meat > > is good for. All comments appreciated... > > > I can assure you that you can be very healthy with little or no meat, and > can show you maaany examples of people who do so. They grew up big and > strong eating no meat ever in their lives, and I do mean no beef, pork, fish > nor foul, nothing that ever had a face. I totally agree. But again, meat is expensive to produce and keep - even if the 10/1 ratio of feed input to meat output is not exactly right, there is still a negative ratio at work ... so why have people, historically, wanted it ? What short term benefits does it provide, and why was it worth the cost ? Do you have more testoterone ? Are you more aggressive ? Can you reach a higher amount of anerobic exertion, like high power or strength movements? These all sound like short term expedients that have long term negative side effects... I don't think it was just an accident of history that all of these primitive peoples worked and built themselves into a life of more meat consumption ... and I don't think that our own modern meat diets are purely the result of nostalgia, or the meat lobby. If meat has long term detriments, what are its short term expedients? Why did chiefs measure their wealth with it ? Why do people almost instinctively crave it ? From brian_a_lee at hotmail.com Fri Sep 22 20:30:30 2006 From: brian_a_lee at hotmail.com (Brian Lee) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:30:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At least historically animal products were useful in converting vegetable matter that humans couldn't digest (grass, straw, etc) into protein, milk, fuel, etc. I've found that it is certainly easier, in the US, to get one's nutrients through meat than through vegetable substitutes. Not to mention the cultural constraints of not eating meat. So path of least resistance leads to meat being consumed, historically and currently. I too, know some beefy, strong lifelong pure vegetarians so it is certainly possible (look at the population of India). BAL >From: Ensel Sharon >To: ExI chat list >Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? >Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:16:00 -0400 (EDT) > > >Hi, > >On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, spike wrote: > > > Definitely. Eat light, live long. > > >Right ... but there must be a flip side to that, right ? That is the >point I am trying to get at. Not that I necessarily want that flip side, >or that that flip side is anything more than an anachronism... > > > > > My own well being and positive results suggest I will continue to >remove > > > meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, but I'd like to >have a > > > better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in most basic terms, >meat > > > is good for. All comments appreciated... > > > > > > I can assure you that you can be very healthy with little or no meat, >and > > can show you maaany examples of people who do so. They grew up big and > > strong eating no meat ever in their lives, and I do mean no beef, pork, >fish > > nor foul, nothing that ever had a face. > > >I totally agree. But again, meat is expensive to produce and keep - even >if the 10/1 ratio of feed input to meat output is not exactly right, there >is still a negative ratio at work ... so why have people, historically, >wanted it ? What short term benefits does it provide, and why was it >worth the cost ? > >Do you have more testoterone ? Are you more aggressive ? Can you reach a >higher amount of anerobic exertion, like high power or strength >movements? These all sound like short term expedients that have long term >negative side effects... > >I don't think it was just an accident of history that all of these >primitive peoples worked and built themselves into a life of more meat >consumption ... and I don't think that our own modern meat diets are >purely the result of nostalgia, or the meat lobby. > >If meat has long term detriments, what are its short term expedients? Why >did chiefs measure their wealth with it ? Why do people almost >instinctively crave it ? > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From user at dhp.com Fri Sep 22 21:02:29 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:02:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Brian Lee wrote: > At least historically animal products were useful in converting vegetable > matter that humans couldn't digest (grass, straw, etc) into protein, milk, > fuel, etc. Yes, I certainly thought of this - although it is certainly bastardized now what with corn and meal fed cattle in the US... > I've found that it is certainly easier, in the US, to get one's nutrients > through meat than through vegetable substitutes. Not to mention the cultural > constraints of not eating meat. > > So path of least resistance leads to meat being consumed, historically and > currently. Ok. I think a decent conclusion would be that the downside of meat is its negative longevity and health ramifications, and the upside is the (sometimes) expedient nature of its production and storage. > I too, know some beefy, strong lifelong pure vegetarians so it is certainly > possible (look at the population of India). Right. There's the "but..." You see, I do look at the population of India. And further, I look at entrenched stereotypes about meat eaters and plant eaters. I notice that most indians, even rich second generation ones that have grown up in the US, are not exactly "big and strong". Further, we all know that there is a stereotype about plant eaters vs. meat eaters, and while I like to look beyond conventional wisdom, I have found that most stereotypes have some basis in fact. And the fact is, all else being equal, and with no prior knowledge of the individuals, I would pick a random meat eater to be my linebacker over a random vegan ... So again, I have a suspicion that the cost/benefit analysis goes beyond simply: (causes_high_cholesterol / easy_to_turn_non_edible_grasses_into_calories) And that there is some "benefit" (perhaps an anachronism) related to aggression or testosterone or strength and power, etc. ... Comments ? Apologies if I am being dense and/or beating this to death... From scerir at libero.it Fri Sep 22 21:15:12 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 23:15:12 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Is simulation recursion a problem? References: <450EC155.7000600@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <000201c6de8c$31b6f760$41941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> George Dvorsky > Or, are there computational options that could > conceivably result in a virtually endless array > of simulations (e.g. agonizingly slow clockspeeds, > quantum computation, etc.) It is perhaps interesting (generalizing the above) to point out there is a (new) problem of 'emergences' in physics [1]. The concept 'emergence' is close to the concept 'simulation'. In physics there are, since 1980, the so called bounds of prof. Cirel'son (or Tsirelson). These bounds set 3 different mathematical domains (which also have a huge physical meaning) for a specific (CHSH) correlation function of measurement outcomes of certain physical variables (or observables): -'classical', -'quantum', -'super-quantum'. In the 'classical' domain the absolute value of the bound (for that correlation function) is < 2. In this domain there are: determinism, commutativity of operators, separability of classically 'entangled' systems, locality (but not always, a sort of partial non-locality is also possible), causality or no ftl signalling (but in theory synchrons and tachyons are allowed [2]). In the 'quantum' domain the absolute value of the bound is < 2 2^1/2 . In this domain there are: indeterminism, non commutativity of operators, non-separability of quantum 'entangled' systems, non-locality in the sense of non-local dynamics (see the Aharonov-Bohm effect), (apparently) relativistic causality or no ftl signalling (in any case, no *controllable* ftl signalling). In the 'super-quantum' domain (it is well possible to perform experiment about it, since it is nor just a mathematical abstraction) the absolute value of the bound is < 4. Not much is known about this level. One of the few established things is a *stronger* non-locality (stronger than the usual quantish non-locality). But *very surprisingly* this even stronger non-locality seems still to live in a peaceful coexistence with the relativistic causality and with the no ftl signalling principle. (Not much is known about the non-commutativity of operators, in this 'super-quantum' domain). Now, it is well known that the 'classical' can be thought as something emerging from the 'quantum'. It is also possible that the 'quantum' may emerge from the 'super-quantum' domain. No, I'm not saying here there is a simulation, in the sense that the 'classical' is simulated by the 'quantal' reality, which in turn is simulated by some 'super-quantum' level. (One could even reverse the arrow of the above, during a trip of solipsism! [4]). I'm just saying that the physical picture might be more smoky than the usual mathematical recursion. And I'm saying that the physical picture (those 3 domains, and relations between them) may be much more meaningful if we look at it using different concepts (like complexity, measures, bits) instead of the old ones. (In this case we would not see something like 'agonizingly slow clockspeeds', but something like 'increasing difficult communications'.) I think the above is obscure enough to stop here. s. [1] There are several new models about fundamental 'emergences'. See, ie, Smolin and his cosmo-dynamics, as the source of quantum non-locality http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609109 . See also Adler's book about quantum mechanics as emerging from a pre-quantum 'trace dynamics' http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206120 . (In general these approaches consider problems like 'contextuality', hidden variables, etc.). [2] See the paper 'Wigner Classification for Galilei Poincar? Euclid ...' in the page http://federation.g3z.com/Physics/Index.htm [3] There are several problems here. In example Bohr's correspondence principle (classic = quantum in the limit of h ->0) is not a valid one. Much better is a coarse-graining approach like http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609079 . After papers by Legett and Garg there are several problems also with the empirical consistency of concepts like 'macro-realism', and the like. [4] "Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science." -Von Weizsaecker From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 22 21:21:51 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:21:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060922212152.56709.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- Ensel Sharon wrote: > Do you have more testoterone ? Are you more > aggressive ? Can you reach a > higher amount of anerobic exertion, like high power > or strength > movements? These all sound like short term > expedients that have long term > negative side effects... > If meat has long term detriments, what are its short > term expedients? Why > did chiefs measure their wealth with it ? Why do > people almost > instinctively crave it ? I think it is analogous to the genetic concept of "antagonistic pleiotropy". Although that term specifically refers to certain genes that confer a tremendous survival advantage during development but then turn around and become deleterious in old age. Examples of such genes are almost all of the so called oncogenes. You need all these genes to be going full bore to grow from being a single cell to the trillions of cells of an adult human. But once you are an adult, you need to shut these genes down to avoid the runaway growth known as cancer. Since natural selection only operates on organisms during their time-window of reproductive fertility, evolution rewards those genes, diets, behaviors, etc. that get you bigger, faster, and stronger in the early part of your life even if they turn around and kill you in your later years. Since by the time eating red meat kills you, you will probably have had whatever children you are going to have, natural selection does not penalize this behavior. Instead it rewards it with greater reproductive success since eating meat in your youth, makes you strong enough to escape predators, beat up your banana-eating rivals, and mate at an earlier age than otherwise. All that being said, if you are done growing, eating meat probably confers very little advantage unless you are trying to heal an injury. Of course it still tastes pretty damn good which is a shame for us unrepentent carnivores trying to live as long as possible. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Sep 22 21:46:33 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:46:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? Message-ID: <6575618.170241158961592450.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> When it comes to nutrition, it has been my experience that everyone is different. I was vegan for many years and even with supplements and food combining, they were the sickliest years of my life. As soon as I started eating meat (not coincidently during my first pregnancy, when anemia was a big problem), I got healthier. When I tried to go vegan again, I got sicker. Go figure. I've stayed (relatively) healthy with my occasional organic lean beef and regular organic chicken and wild fish. My body just works better with higher levels of high-quality protein. In Ensel's words, 'I am stronger and more powerful.' Can't say it's a scientific approach based on my sample of one, but it has worked for me. I apologize for the un-PCness of it, but keeping this body running sometimes seems like a full time job and I do whatever it takes. I can't afford the guilt. I'm assuming it's not so hard for others! Maybe in my next life/next body I'll get a better model -- the disgustingly healthy, ectomorphic vegan athlete -- if I get to choose, that is... Natasha would be the list expert, but I've also spent many years among competitive body builders and there isn't a vegan among them that I know personally. When dietary intake is what will make or break a winner, they all go for meat. Lean protein = new lean muscle. PJ >> I too, know some beefy, strong lifelong pure vegetarians so it is >>certainly possible (look at the population of India). > >I would pick a random meat eater to be my linebacker over a random >vegan ... From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Fri Sep 22 22:01:38 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:01:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45145D42.9070102@goldenfuture.net> Brian Lee wrote: >At least historically animal products were useful in converting vegetable >matter that humans couldn't digest (grass, straw, etc) into protein, milk, >fuel, etc. > >I've found that it is certainly easier, in the US, to get one's nutrients >through meat than through vegetable substitutes. Not to mention the cultural >constraints of not eating meat. > >So path of least resistance leads to meat being consumed, historically and >currently. > >I too, know some beefy, strong lifelong pure vegetarians so it is certainly >possible (look at the population of India). > Just a point of fact, here; the population of India is not vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination. Hindus eschew beef, but many eat lamb and pork (and other face-bearing critters) quite happily. Not to mention the 130+ million Muslims in India, who eat beef but don't eat pork, etc. I'm following the discussion on the merits of vegetarianism vs. omnivorism with great interest (being a committed omnivorre myself, purely from a basis of culture and personal bias, I freely admit); just wanted to point out a slight misconception. I think Brian's first paragraph (quoted above) encapsulates the long-term benefits of eating meat nicely. More biomass becomes available to humans for consumption, and from the human point of view, that's a good thing. And is, indirectly, perhaps a rationalist argument for consuming grass-fed vs. grain-fed beef, although it seems that the logical conclusion of that line of thinking would be to simply replace vegetation which is not human-consumable with that which is. I'm not sure I'm ready at this stage for a lawn of wheat, however... Joseph From user at dhp.com Fri Sep 22 23:14:11 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:14:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: <20060922212152.56709.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, The Avantguardian wrote: > Since by the time eating red meat kills you, you will > probably have had whatever children you are going to > have, natural selection does not penalize this > behavior. Instead it rewards it with greater > reproductive success since eating meat in your youth, > makes you strong enough to escape predators, beat up > your banana-eating rivals, and mate at an earlier age > than otherwise. Great - this is the idea I was getting at. You say "(eating meat) rewards it with greater reproductive success since eating meat in your youth makes you strong enough to escape predators, beat up your banana-eating rivals, and mate at an earlier age", and I don't know whether that is true or not, and that is essentially what I am trying to find out. Do you, in fact, agree with that statement you made, or was it just Devils Advocate ? If you do agree with it, can you conjecture as to how that is possible ? What is the basis of the benefits you speak of ? (or to repeat my original question, what is the upside of eating meat ? :) From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Sat Sep 23 00:01:33 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:01:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? Message-ID: <380-220069623013393@M2W024.mail2web.com> From: pjmanney >Natasha would be the list expert, but I've also spent many years among competitive body >builders and there isn't a vegan among them that I know personally. When dietary >intake is what will make or break a winner, they all go for meat. Lean protein = new >lean muscle. Steve Holt doesn't look too bad http://vegetarianbodybuilder.com/index2.html and his list of non-meat protiens is extensive http://ksteveh.tripod.com/protein.html I was a vegetarian for ten years. But when I noticed a percentage of my body mass shrinking I introduced fish back into my diet, and later chicken. We must have protein to function, just as we need our complex carbs, minerals, enzymes and vitamins. Best protein I think is salmon and tuna. I don't like chicken but I eat it. Being petite, I can't afford to loose body mass. I became a light-weight body builder as a preventative measure in delaying bone density loss and to build and cut muscle. Then I became somewhat committed to the sport. The only way to put on muscle is to consume protein. Protein comes in many varieties. Most body builders supplement their protein intake with protein drinks comprised of whey http://nutrition-and-health.com/wheyprotein.htm#prodinfo , soy http://www.puritan.com/pages/Categories.asp?xs=&CID=43&Page=0&sort= , egg whites, etc. You don't have to look like the men and women at Flex http://www.flexonline.com/ to set goals for building muscle mass, but following some of their advise on the website helps. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/index.html Brian Rowley (in "Muscle & Fitness" magazine) has some ideas on the topic http://www.muscle-fitness.co.uk/360.html Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Sep 22 23:58:52 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:58:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? Message-ID: <380-220069522235852578@M2W013.mail2web.com> From: pjmanney >Natasha would be the list expert, but I've also spent many years among competitive body >builders and there isn't a vegan among them that I know personally. When dietary >intake is what will make or break a winner, they all go for meat. Lean protein = new >lean muscle. I was a vegetarian for ten years. But when I noticed a percentage of my body mass shrinking I introduced fish back into my diet, and later chicken. We must have protein to function, just as we need our complex carbs, minerals, enzymes and vitamins. Best protein I think is salmon and tuna. I don't like chicken but I eat it. Being petite, I can't afford to loose body mass. I became a light-weight body builder as a preventative measure in delaying bone density loss and to build and cut muscle. Then I became somewhat committed to the sport. The only way to put on muscle is to consume protein. Protein comes in many varieties. Most body builders supplement their protein intake with protein drinks comprised of whey http://nutrition-and-health.com/wheyprotein.htm#prodinfo , soy http://www.puritan.com/pages/Categories.asp?xs=&CID=43&Page=0&sort= , egg whites, etc. You don't have to look like the men and women at Flex http://www.flexonline.com/ to set goals for building muscle mass, but following some of their advise on the website helps. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/index.html Brian Rowley (in Muscle & Fitness magazine) has some advise on the topic http://www.muscle-fitness.co.uk/360.html Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 23 01:10:12 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:10:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060923011012.76955.qmail@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> --- Ensel Sharon wrote: > Great - this is the idea I was getting at. You say > "(eating meat) rewards > it with greater reproductive success since eating > meat in your youth makes > you strong enough to escape predators, beat up your > banana-eating rivals, > and mate at an earlier age", and I don't know > whether that is true or not, > and that is essentially what I am trying to find > out. Although I did not mean for my statement to be analyzed with scientific rigor, it is indeed true in the sense that it is a well-reasoned opinion based on my professional knowledge of biology and evolution. It follows from several well-known facts. First meat is a highly concentrated source of protein and calories. Secondly well-nourished animals, human or otherwise, reach sexual maturity faster and reach a larger over-all size as compared to their under-nourished counterparts. Thirdly artherosclerosis and the other negative effects of too much cholesterol generally strike adults well past their prime. Keep in mind however that it is still conjecture, since I was not present for all human evolution to keep tabs on who was eating meat and who wasn't. > Do you, in fact, agree with that statement you made, > or was it just Devils > Advocate ? If you do agree with it, can you > conjecture as to how that is > possible ? What is the basis of the benefits you > speak of ? Yes, I agree with what I said, albeit I said it in a rather simplistic fashion trying to be colorful. And while I do think it is true, it certainly is not the whole truth as one cannot sum up the forces of natural selection operating over millions of years into a few sentences. There were and are numerous other factors to consider: 1. While today, with our modern agricultural techniques, we certainly have access to sufficient quantities and varieties of edible vegetation (both cereals and legumes are necessary to get all the essential amino acids) to ensure adequate nutrition, this was not always the case. Strict vegetarianism for our pre-agricultural ancestors was probably not a viable option. As hinted at by Joseph and the others, we cannot digest cellulose so we are very innefficient as strict herbivores. 2. Our ancestors had to survive climates that made vegetarianism impossible for hunter-gatherer societies. For example, during the last ice age, it is doubtful that there was adequate edible vegetation to be foraged for vegetarians to have survived. 3. There is ample evidence to suggest that we ate meat long before we actually became human. One of the more enlightening avenues for you to pursue would be to read up on the predatory behavior of chimpanzees as this will shed some light on the origins of the human penchant for meat. In chimps, it is an aphrodisiac that male chimps give the females to "put them in the mood" ;) http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/24543/page/4 So to sum it all up in a nutshell: the "upside of meat" is that it got our ancestors through some pretty lean times, it was sexy, and those that would not partake either starved or died of loneliness. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 23 01:53:27 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:53:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Ensel Sharon ... > > > ... But again, meat is expensive to produce and keep - even > if the 10/1 ratio of feed input to meat output is not exactly right, there > is still a negative ratio at work ... so why have people, historically, > wanted it ? ... Ah OK I understand the question now. Well having recently spawned a larva and observed insufficient mammary output by the mother, I can easily imagine a survival advantage of one's genotype in maintaining a cow or a goat as a milk supplement. That doesn't get at the question of why we like meat I realize. > Do you have more testosterone? Are you more aggressive?... This is an interesting question. I went to a college that strongly encouraged vegetarianism. Meat was not served at the college cafeteria or anywhere on a fairly isolated campus, so most of the approximately two thousand students were full-time lacto-ovo vegetarians, probably over 85%. This makes that campus an ideal laboratory for some insights that I will share. We have been hearing a lot about athletes taking steroid precursors. There are known pharmaceuticals that are not testosterone themselves, but which cause the body to make testosterone. Likewise with estrogen, as my wife and I learned about while taking the medications to create the afore-mentioned larva. At the time I was at the college, I always had the distinct impression that the men there were under-aggressive and the women there were over eager in the mating process. Today I explain this two ways: the male under-aggressiveness was a result of the absence of beef. The female over-eagerness was a result of eating soy-based meat substitutes, which are thought to be estrogen precursors. Ensel, what do you think of that notion? spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 23 02:21:27 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:21:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <200609230221.k8N2LXZp017963@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike > ... Today I explain this two ways: the male > under-aggressiveness was a result of the absence of beef. The female > over-eagerness was a result of eating soy-based meat substitutes, which > are thought to be estrogen precursors... spike Perhaps those males that devoured beef resulted in higher testosterone levels, which caused them to be more determined and more successful copulators than those that did not eat beef. We being the descendants of the more successful copulators would have inherited their relatively higher desire for beef. spike From sjatkins at mac.com Sat Sep 23 02:25:09 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:25:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play In-Reply-To: <200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609220432.k8M4WBWL022779@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: spike, you tripped the junk mail filter multiple times with that one. :-) On Sep 21, 2006, at 9:21 PM, spike wrote: > > Perhaps you have heard the most irritating TV commercial in recent > history, > where they advertise a new topically absorbed pain medication by > bleating > several times: Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. > > This comment is repeated until one wants to clobber the evil wretch > who > invented the damn stuff, or at least the marketing department. > > But then I had an idea. I took several viagra tablets, ground them > to a > fine powder and mixed it with Head On. Works like nobody's > business! Oh I > will be soooo rich. Patent office here I come. I even know a great > way to > advertise it. Hire the same woman who does the other commercial and > have > her exhort repeatedly: Hard On! Apply directly to the foreskin. > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Sep 23 02:42:01 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:42:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Mammary output - was what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <32999.72.236.103.231.1158979321.squirrel@main.nc.us> Spike writes: > Ah OK I understand the question now. Well having recently spawned a larva > and observed insufficient mammary output by the mother, I can easily imagine > a survival advantage of one's genotype in maintaining a cow or a goat as a > milk supplement. > What!?! Insufficient, spike? :( There are indeed levels they go through, when the child suddenly increases requirements and there are a couple days before mom's output can catch up, but it can usually be dealt with by nursing more frequently (every 2 or 3 hours instead of every 4) and increased fluid intake by mom. Then things settle down to a more reasonable schedule once more. Until the next growth spurt. Maybe my family was coming along at a more supportive time or place - we had childbirth classes, and there were groups for nursing mothers. There was lots of comraderie and support for both new mothers and new fathers. It was quite helpful. I hope y'all have the support and encouragement y'all need. We had a grandmother telling us the baby couldn't get enough to eat, but the pediatrician said otherwise. :) We later discovered there was a story behind the grandmother's comments, a sad story. Regards, MB From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 23 05:35:30 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:35:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609230549.k8N5n2t0025860@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] caution: mind at play > > spike, you tripped the junk mail filter multiple times with that > one. :-) Ja I was afraid of that. But that particular post was probably much better off in the bit bin anyway. I have an excuse: I was drunk. Well, OK I admit it, I was sober. But I was in a playful mood. I was trying to write an epic poem about transistors to rival Homer. I couldn't even come up with one to rival Ned Flanders. spike > > On Sep 21, 2006, at 9:21 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > Perhaps you have heard the most irritating TV commercial in recent > > history... Hard On! Apply directly to the foreskin. From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 23 05:43:51 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:43:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mammary output - was what is the upside / advantageof meat ? In-Reply-To: <32999.72.236.103.231.1158979321.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <200609230549.k8N5n2t1025860@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of MB ... > > What!?! Insufficient, spike? :( There are indeed levels they go through, > when the > child suddenly increases requirements and there are a couple days before > mom's > output can catch up, but it can usually be dealt with by nursing more > frequently > (every 2 or 3 hours instead of every 4) and increased fluid intake by mom... > Regards, MB Ja, fortunately mother and child are doing fine with a little formulaic supplementation. Before we began supplementing, the larva did often wail in a most heartrending way. I was disturbed to think of what would be the consequences had we not had all our technological advances to make the infant and his parents more comfortable. I thank evolution that we were born as late in history as we were. spike From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Sep 23 12:18:31 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:18:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Mammary output - was what is the upside / advantageof meat ? In-Reply-To: <200609230549.k8N5n2t1025860@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <32999.72.236.103.231.1158979321.squirrel@main.nc.us> <200609230549.k8N5n2t1025860@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <33070.72.236.102.88.1159013911.squirrel@main.nc.us> > Before we began supplementing, the larva did often wail in > a most heartrending way. I was disturbed to think of what would be the > consequences had we not had all our technological advances to make the > infant and his parents more comfortable. I thank evolution that we were > born as late in history as we were. > Agreed, heartrending wails are most painful to hear. Our first had colic and the sounds emitted were astonishing. And distressing. To all of us. Shudder... Fortunately our second was much more placid. Maybe we were better at understanding, the second time around!?! For sure, we were more placid as well. ;) Best. MB From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Sep 23 12:34:32 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:34:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: <200609230221.k8N2LXZp017963@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <200609230221.k8N2LXZp017963@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/22/06, spike wrote: > > > Perhaps those males that devoured beef resulted in higher testosterone > levels, which caused them to be more determined and more successful > copulators than those that did not eat beef. We being the descendants of > the more successful copulators would have inherited their relatively > higher > desire for beef. I'm not sure you can equate any modern meat consumption with historic (during periods of an evolving human genome). Eating meat from lean forrest animals or wild African plain animals is very different from eating modern farm bred (potentially drug treated) and feed lot fattened cows. I've heard statements attributed to hunters that wild deer or moose are quite different from hamburger or steak. Where ice age wooly mammoths (or whales) fall into this spectrum isn't clear. Is it known for a fact that "wild" animal consumption results in higher testosterone? (And clearly modern farm soy products (soy milk, soy burgers, etc.) were not available during genome evolution to effect female estrogen levels.) I would go with the high protein + high fat --> faster growth --> earlier sexual maturity --> more children and leave it at that. As far compensating for loss of muscle mass as one ages by switching from vegetarian diets to meat diets this approach has clear limits. You are losing muscle mass because (a) the cells are becoming increasingly less efficient at maintaining and turning over muscle mass; and (b) you are losing cells completely. This will not be corrected until those cells can be completely replaced with cells operating at childhood efficiency levels ( i.e. those with relatively "perfect" genomes). I'll point out two things. One, there is likely to be a fair amount of genetic variation with respect to the genes involved in tasting various foods, processing nutrients and downstream impacts on hormone levels, personality, etc. So starting from a "one size is best" perspective is going to be extremely problematic. Two, we are rapidly approaching the era where engineered solar pond grown bacteria (or perhaps algae) will be much more efficient [1] (and healther) than natural plant or meat food sources. In theory it should be feasible to produce these with any taste you want (the taste receptors are both limited and well known) so one will be dealing only with variables such as smell (which is a larger though not impossibly larger problem) and texture which can presumably be dealt with by the food processing industry. Robert 1. This solar pond approach eliminates the 1/10 vegetable->animal efficiency reduction argument. The number is probably more like 1/3 or 1/4 (but there is still a loss of energy). But plants are only functioning at 1-2% anyway and it should be possible to push that to at least 8% and eventually 10-20% before conversion to solar cells and completely synthetic food factories (electricity -> glucose/protein) are developed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Sat Sep 23 16:17:06 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:17:06 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? References: <200609230153.k8N1rXMd001018@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <002601c6df2b$b7f54490$f12d0751@heritagekd9czj> >The female >over-eagerness was a result of eating soy-based meat substitutes I think I'm taking some soy bean burgers to college with me. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From user at dhp.com Sun Sep 24 05:21:19 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 01:21:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? Message-ID: I recently read "Sex, Power, Suicide" by Nick Lane. It is a fascinating book and I highly recommend it. I realize that the research and development he chronicles in the book has been ongoing for some time, and is not his own, but for the purpose of this post I refer to it as the "nick lane viewpoint". For those who don't know, the synopsis is that free radicals are an essential signaling mechanism in the cell, the complete absence of which would be quite disastrous. Further, the respiratory chains inside of mitochondria, where the free radicals emanate from and do their damage, is not a location that one could even hope that ingested antioxidants could reach. I'm a skeptical person, so I will treat this new trend the same way I treated the old trend (that cocoa and vitamins and pom juice and green tea were the fountain of youth) with suspicion. However, it would seem that the whole notion of antioxidant regimens and ORAC rations and blah blah are just a bunch of bunk (which I suspected - honestly, if green tea and pomegranates and cocoa made significant impacts on longevity, we would have known it 1000 years ago ... it's not like people didn't take note of such things...). (comments ? Please ?) ----- So let's say I buy this theory, and let's say you buy it too .. where does one go from here ? I get my 5+5 servings of fruits and veggies per day, I eat good whole foods, stay trim and fit, etc. ... is that it ? I like to optimize ... and I like to hack ... and just because the whole antioxidant bandwagon is bunk doesn't mean I'm not interested in getting better performance and strength and injury recovery and stamina ... I am. So in the post-nick-lane world, what should I be studying/trying/testing ? Thanks. From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 24 06:34:07 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 23:34:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] More upsides to meat than meet the eye. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20060924063407.42716.qmail@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> --- Ensel Sharon wrote: > > I have recently been in the process of re-evaluating > my diet as relates to > health, longevity, athletic performance and > environmental impact. > > So it would seem that there is something to having > meat in your diet - it > would seem that its premium in (relative) price and > its stimulative effect > on growth and development are not imaginary. > > At the same time, I am reminded of a quote: > > "Short term expedients always fail in the long > term"[1] > > ... and clearly meat fails in the long term (in > relation to health and > longevity) ... but if that is so, what is its short > term expedient ? > > My own well being and positive results suggest I > will continue to remove > meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, > but I'd like to have a > better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in > most basic terms, meat > is good for. All comments appreciated. Actually in retrospect, my original answer to your question was more historically oriented which I think is less relevent to your own decision to cut animal products from your diet. Now that you have heard the conventional wisdom of eating meat, I will now tell you some the unconventional wisdom regarding meat. This is a bit more more speculative than the previous things I mentioned but is actually compelling enough to give me a rationale to not cut animal products from my diet. Since it is by no means proven and opinions differ, consider an experiment I am performing on myself. The best thing I can say in the defense of meat from a longevity stand point is that it has a glycemic index of zero. This means that no insulin is used to process it into energy. Type II diabetes, which is a form of premature aging, seems to be brought about in part from excessive carbohydrate consumption which I feel many vegetarians are prone too. While many vegetables, the high fiber-low carb ones like celery, spinach, and such are good for you, some like carrots and potatoes seem to be really bad. Metabolism is a complex system but it seems pretty clear that insulin is MAJOR growth factor and as such is implicated in aging, diabetes, and cancer. In as much as I seem to be able to control my diet with the manic urban lifestyle, I tend to try to emphasize high fiber content vegetables and lean meats like turkey (high in arginine). The exceptions to this are fish wherein, I think the fattier the better. Salmon, sardines, and tuna are all staples of mine. Omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil help prevent cholesterol oxidation which how free radicals turn a vital nutrient into an artery clogging poison. It also helps prevent inflammation and type II diabetes. Of course you can get omega-3s from vegetable sources as well. Nuts and seeds are good sources. Somewhat less defensible is my love of eggs. Yeah they got cholesterol but if you think about it, they are one of the few things evolution specifically designed to be eaten. I am hoping that my omega-3 intake will protect me. The one thing that would be a great would be a way to routinely monitor and control the size of the LDL particles in my blood. While LDLs have been getting a bad rap the last few years, a study of a cohort of centenarians conducted by gerontologists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine seems to suggest that it is the SIZE of the LDL particles and not the concentration that seems to be important for longevity. Centenarians tend to have as much LDL as anyone else but the sizes of the particles in their blood have a larger average diameter. How this is protective is unknown but it is theorized that the larger particles present less surface area for the oxidation of the cholestrol in those particles which as I mentioned above is the big culprit in heart disease. Any ways I hope all of this helps. Good luck. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From user at dhp.com Sun Sep 24 15:54:33 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 11:54:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] More upsides to meat than meet the eye. In-Reply-To: <20060924063407.42716.qmail@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Hello, On Sat, 23 Sep 2006, The Avantguardian wrote: > > My own well being and positive results suggest I > > will continue to remove > > meat, and animal products in general, from my diet, > > but I'd like to have a > > better grasp of what I am giving up, and what, in > > most basic terms, meat > > is good for. All comments appreciated. > > Actually in retrospect, my original answer to your > question was more historically oriented which I think > is less relevent to your own decision to cut animal > products from your diet. Now that you have heard the > conventional wisdom of eating meat, I will now tell > you some the unconventional wisdom regarding meat. Yes - thank you. That was exactly what I was trying to get at ... > The best thing I can say in the defense of meat from a > longevity stand point is that it has a glycemic index > of zero. This means that no insulin is used to process > it into energy. Type II diabetes, which is a form of > premature aging, seems to be brought about in part > from excessive carbohydrate consumption which I feel > many vegetarians are prone too. While many vegetables, > the high fiber-low carb ones like celery, spinach, and > such are good for you, some like carrots and potatoes > seem to be really bad. (snip) > Omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil help prevent > cholesterol oxidation which how free radicals turn a > vital nutrient into an artery clogging poison. It also > helps prevent inflammation and type II diabetes. Of > course you can get omega-3s from vegetable sources as > well. Nuts and seeds are good sources. Ok, great - that helps. I think I was leaning more specifically to: a) creatine, taurine and other micronutrients that _only_ come from meat b) second and third order side effects of meat such as increased testosterone production, increased aggressiveness and greater strength/mass from causes other than just the protein in the meat itself. It would seem that (a) is not that significant or necessary, and certainly not for longevity, and that (b) is highly speculative and difficult to prove - and perhaps even undesirable. But be that as it may, those were the areas of speculation I was trying to reach... Many thanks - and thanks in advance for any additional comments you may have... From brian at posthuman.com Sun Sep 24 15:55:45 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 10:55:45 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4516AA81.9040300@posthuman.com> Well for one thing, there are many supplements that act via other methods than anti-oxidation, so look into those. A simple example would be vitamin D. There is a pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it can help prevent multiple cancers and also help with other problems if you take it at levels above the current recommended daily levels. Also I think at this point there are some known supplements that can penetrate the mitochondria, with yet more in testing and under development. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From user at dhp.com Sun Sep 24 16:39:25 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:39:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: <4516AA81.9040300@posthuman.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Brian Atkins wrote: > Well for one thing, there are many supplements that act via other methods than > anti-oxidation, so look into those. A simple example would be vitamin D. There > is a pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it can help prevent > multiple cancers and also help with other problems if you take it at levels > above the current recommended daily levels. Ok, but are we talking about "levels above the current recommended daily levels" by a factor of 2 or a factor of 20 ? Or in other words, levels I can get from foods, etc., without a supplementation regime ? I remain very skeptical that any combination of foods or nutrients or exposures or lifestyles that are available in the natural world will ever produce meaningful longevity gains. If they could, someone would have noticed it 2000 years ago. My guess is that nutritional and behavioral optimization are fairly maxed out - perhaps we can raise the average age to 110 or 120, with some statistical outlyers getting to 130-140, but real gains in longevity will come from a technological solution that was not available to people thousands of years ago, like antioxidants and high fiber and whole grains and good exercise were. > Also I think at this point there are some known supplements that can penetrate > the mitochondria, with yet more in testing and under development. Can anyone comment further on this ? I found: http://www.aapsj.org/view.asp?art=aapsj080232 But I am not sure how this jibes with the free radicals being essential signaling mechanisms ... if we suppress those it would seem we would get other negative effects, namely, broken cells hanging around longer than they should... IANAD. Shrug. From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sun Sep 24 17:13:25 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:13:25 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: <4516AA81.9040300@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0609241013j4c96ae8dpf63df3cc50a2fab9@mail.gmail.com> Sunday, 24 September 2006 @ 12:11 PM I don't mean to nag, but if you search for this text at your local library or through WorldCat, using its correct title might help:" Power, sex, suicide : mitochondria and the meaning of life". Not in title case, I confess. Thank you for posting this to the list, Ensel. The text just rose several places on my to-read list. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Sep 24 17:31:20 2006 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 10:31:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Software: P2P realtime communication, esp. video conferencing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Robert, Skype doesn't need an account, UNLESS you're calling a conventional off-the-net phone. If you want to find out if a person has skype on their machine, you simply use their email or name, and skype on your machine will find them/out. If you load up skype, give me a call. I'll help you test it out. -- Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles On 9/12/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I am interested in testing Linux-to-Linux or Linux-to-non-Linux chat and/or > audio and/or video capabilities. I am particularly interested in testing > Ekiga (formerly gnome-meeting?) but would be open to testing other systems > such as Skype (though I think this needs an account), Google chat and/or > Linux chat programs. > > I'd prefer to work with someone who has some experience in these areas so it > isn't a complete case of the blind leading the blind. > > People can respond offlist, if there is a group collectively interested I > may see if online meetings can be setup for a group. > > Though it wasn't exactly straight forward, I now have Second Life so it > seems to be running on Gentoo Linux -- but am tending to frown on it since > it is both large and closed source. It also doesn't serve my purposes from > a "real" business standpoint. It is likely to remain difficult for some > time to engage in "serious" discussions with an avatar in a VR. > > Thanks, > Robert From brian at posthuman.com Sun Sep 24 17:31:19 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:31:19 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4516C0E7.1090007@posthuman.com> I'd suggest asking around the imminst forum, which is more active regarding this subject. And of course read read read more on your own. I don't expect vitamin D or many other current supplements to significantly affect my max LS, but that isn't why I take them. I'm just aiming to maximize my chances of a full normal major-disease-free LS. This along with cryonics and some other commonsense measures represent my attempts to maximize my chance of benefiting from expected powerful future technologies. We're living in a time where more helpful new things tend to become available almost like clockwork. But you still have to seek them out, stay up to date, and decide whether to make use of them as they become available. The strategy of sit back and just "eat healthy" may not be the best idea over the coming years as more and more powerful techniques become viable. On the other hand of course when it comes to new drugs and therapies, being the very first adopter may also not be optimal due to incompletely known risk profiles. Your appetite for these risks may depend on your age. If I was older I probably would lean more towards being an early first adopter... for now I'm more in the middle of the pack. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sun Sep 24 18:19:52 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 13:19:52 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] LINKS: Rucker's New Webzine, Lego CAD, Family-Simple RSS Message-ID: <5366105b0609241119o65201f51w9946f64e03bb73e9@mail.gmail.com> Sunday, 24 September 2006 @ 12:59 PM Hello all, For those of you who haven't already seen them on del.icio.us or digg, Obligatory transhumanist relevance at end. http://www.flurb.net/ Free ezine from Rudy Rucker with bizarre tales from Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Paul DiFillipo, Marc Laidlaw and Richard Kadrey http://www.ldraw.org/ Site collects information about the various CAD tools for Legos. http://cravingideas.blogs.com/backinskinnyjeans/2006/09/how_to_explain_.html The best non-technical explanation of feeds I've yet seen. Ob>H: Many people on both lists enjoy Mr. Rucker's works. Those who still play with Legos, or have children, or both, now have a place to go for virtual Legos. Play all you want with large numbers of parts. Clean-up just means pressing "Save"! You can't step on a Lego block made of bits. CAD for toys! How ultra-modern is that? Finally an explanation of RSS for your grandmother! RSS="I'm Ready for Some Stories." The critique of elitism commonly-leveled at >H has some basis in exclusion. Better communication tools, especially those made possible by computers, can weaken this critique and help solve the problem it identifies. Ideas that don't reach hungry minds do no more good than food that doesn't reach a hungry mouth. And yes, "How to explain RSS the Oprah way" does a much better job of explaining RSS than I just did of why you should read it! -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From eugen at leitl.org Sun Sep 24 19:12:40 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:12:40 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 01:21:19AM -0400, Ensel Sharon wrote: > For those who don't know, the synopsis is that free radicals are an > essential signaling mechanism in the cell, the complete absence of which > would be quite disastrous. Further, the respiratory chains inside of OMGWTFROTLFLMAO. > mitochondria, where the free radicals emanate from and do their damage, is > not a location that one could even hope that ingested antioxidants could > reach. Really? http://www.benbest.com/nutrceut/lipoic.html > I'm a skeptical person, so I will treat this new trend the same way I > treated the old trend (that cocoa and vitamins and pom juice and green tea > were the fountain of youth) with suspicion. I would not do multivitamins, unless you're on CR, or a junkfood diet (you should not ever be on a pure junkfood diet). Cocoa and green tea are quite excellent actually, I don't bother with green tea extract but drink 1-2 l of green tea daily (the coffeine is already worth it, and the taste is great). My cocoa comes as 85% (or 99%, if I can get it) cocoa chocolate. I'm also on linseed (flax seed) oil (not encapsulated, out of the bottle is cheaper, and I do like the flavour a lot), some little (because of potential heavy metal contamination) fish oil. Apart from that I'm currently doing 1 mg/day Deprenyl (selegiline citrate), and 1:4 R-lipoic acid and acetyl L-Carnitine (self-encapsulated bulk pharmateuticals). I might also pick up metformin (a CR mimic) at some point. I should drink a couple of glasses of red wine daily, but unfortunately I prefer pilsener. Maybe should just buy some resveratol extract, but above regime is a bit on the heavy side already. Oh yeah: I exercise, and eat little in general (and no junk food). > However, it would seem that the whole notion of antioxidant regimens and > ORAC rations and blah blah are just a bunch of bunk (which I suspected - > honestly, if green tea and pomegranates and cocoa made significant impacts > on longevity, we would have known it 1000 years ago ... it's not like A kiloyear back you were just so glad to have your basic calories. And your life expectation was pretty low in general, from other sources. > people didn't take note of such things...). No, people don't take note of such things. Not even medieterranean people didn't recognize their longevity came from the diet. > (comments ? Please ?) > > ----- > > So let's say I buy this theory, and let's say you buy it too .. where does > one go from here ? I get my 5+5 servings of fruits and veggies per day, I > eat good whole foods, stay trim and fit, etc. ... is that it ? That's a good starter. You're doing way better than the most. > I like to optimize ... and I like to hack ... and just because the whole > antioxidant bandwagon is bunk doesn't mean I'm not interested in getting Not everything is bunk. And you have to distinguish between the supplements which will shorten your life span, and those who don't. Some experiments are more costly than others. And, of course, the price is an issue. How much $/month is the game worth to you? > better performance and strength and injury recovery and stamina ... I am. > > So in the post-nick-lane world, what should I be studying/trying/testing ? You should not go overboard with testing. I'm not sure my regine is anywhere iron-clad, so I welcome anyone else's input. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Sep 24 19:40:20 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 15:40:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] More upsides to meat than meet the eye. In-Reply-To: References: <20060924063407.42716.qmail@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 9/24/06, Ensel Sharon wrote: > > > b) second and third order side effects of meat such as increased > testosterone production, increased aggressiveness and greater > strength/mass from causes other than just the protein in the meat itself. > [snip] > (b) is highly speculative and difficult to prove - and perhaps even > undesirable. Ultimately it may be a U-shaped function. One probably wants to build up the greatest cellular reserve capacity as possible when one is young before it gets "frozen" by puberty [1]. Then throughout much of life you want to weigh as little and consume as little oxygen as possible (because it is the primary source of the free radicals). That means caloric restriction to the greatest extent one is able. As one gets older and the cells become less efficient (or die completely) it would seem to make sense to try to supply the still functioning cells with as much raw material as they can possibly utilize. The entire micronutrient debate is *way* overblown (because there is a market for people who want to do anything other than hard core caloric restriction). It won't be gotten "right" until whole genome genotyping is available for individuals and one knows for certain what metabolic "defects" one has which are potentially lifespan limiting. For example whether testosterone is good or bad may depend upon which testosterone receptor variations one has, what uncoupling protein gene variants one has, what growth hormone production gene variants one has, etc., etc. Other than CR there are few (or no) one size fits all answers no matter how much people who write books or provide health prescriptions for the masses would like to "make it so". It is clear that greater muscle mass and strength may be essential to reducing ones hazard function (e.g. falls, hip fractures, etc.) when one is older. But prior to that time it may simply serve to increase ones oxygen consumption producing more free radicals and aging all of the systems involved in "whole body" maintenance at a more rapid rate. Robert 1. I'll freely admit that one is probably up against relatively hardwired personal genomic limits in these areas. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From user at dhp.com Sun Sep 24 21:02:07 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:02:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > mitochondria, where the free radicals emanate from and do their damage, is > > not a location that one could even hope that ingested antioxidants could > > reach. > > Really? http://www.benbest.com/nutrceut/lipoic.html Thanks - I will read that. Note - I wasn't saying that the above was _fact_, I was saying that the above was _the synopsis of his book_. Which I am as skeptical of as everything else. > > I'm a skeptical person, so I will treat this new trend the same way I > > treated the old trend (that cocoa and vitamins and pom juice and green tea > > were the fountain of youth) with suspicion. > > I would not do multivitamins, unless you're on CR, or a junkfood diet (you > should not ever be on a pure junkfood diet). Cocoa and green tea are quite > excellent actually, I don't bother with green tea extract but drink 1-2 l > of green tea daily (the coffeine is already worth it, and the taste is great). > My cocoa comes as 85% (or 99%, if I can get it) cocoa chocolate. I'm also > on linseed (flax seed) oil (not encapsulated, out of the bottle is cheaper, > and I do like the flavour a lot), some little (because of potential heavy > metal contamination) fish oil. Apart from that I'm currently doing 1 mg/day > Deprenyl (selegiline citrate), and 1:4 R-lipoic acid and acetyl L-Carnitine > (self-encapsulated bulk pharmateuticals). I might also pick up metformin (a > CR mimic) at some point. I should drink a couple of glasses of red wine > daily, but unfortunately I prefer pilsener. Maybe should just buy some > resveratol extract, but above regime is a bit on the heavy side already. Ok, great. That sounds exactly like what I have been doing - green tea + 80-90ish cocoa chocolate ... that was until I read that book and did some further investigation and found that it is unlikely that the antioxidants in tea and cocoa will actually anti-oxidize anything in a useful fashion. So ... I like tea and chocolate too, but is there any reason either of us should consider them any part of a _health regimen_ ? As for flax oil, I'm on board. As for the wine, I'm on board, although I think you hit the point of diminishing marginal returns very quickly ... as in one glass every 1-2 days. > > However, it would seem that the whole notion of antioxidant regimens and > > ORAC rations and blah blah are just a bunch of bunk (which I suspected - > > honestly, if green tea and pomegranates and cocoa made significant impacts > > on longevity, we would have known it 1000 years ago ... it's not like > > A kiloyear back you were just so glad to have your basic calories. > And your life expectation was pretty low in general, from other > sources. Agreed, but given a typical bell curve distribution of health effects, if we expect tea+pomegranate+cocoa+etc. to significantly prolong life _on average_, then we should also expect it to significantly improve life _immediately and noticably_ for some small part of the population. Which means _some people_ would notice the effects even if they got killed off by plague later, at a relatively young age. Poorly stated, but you get the idea I'm sure. > > people didn't take note of such things...). > > No, people don't take note of such things. Not even medieterranean people > didn't recognize their longevity came from the diet. This is incorrect. One can hardly get 100 pages through any comprehensive world history without coming across accounts of peoples self experimentation and theories regarding food, exercise and longevity. In fact, people _have_ noticed calorie reduction, and have noticed it for quite some time. Ghandi preached a low calorie diet rich in nuts and berries and spent a fair amount of time in self experimentation with his diet, etc. Ancient Jewish theologians spoke of "(not eating) all day like hens"[1] and that "more people die from overeating than from undernourishment"[2]. Here is a quote speaking of Maimonides: "He warned against overeating: 'The stomach must not be made to swell like a tumor'. he thought that wine was healthful in moderation."[3] Thomas Jefferson: "I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet." (TJ to Dr. Vine Utley, 21 March 1819) I could go on and on. People have been _quite attentive_ to their bodies and their nutrition for thousands of years, and one can barely read a western philosopher without reading of theories and cures and ideas from everything to diet and sleep and exercise to gout and TB and the decline of age. What we discuss on this list and what we do with our pills and powders and teas and juices is nothing new at all. It is couched in different terms and is slightly more informed, and there is larger participation due to our increased wealth ... but it's not new. Therefore I resubmit that: a) a combination of natural substances that greatly increases lifespan would have been noticed by now and further: b) if some combination of natural substances is going to greatly increase your lifespan, it must also be immediately noticable in some small portion of the population I don't think either are true. I think that optimization only goes so far, and that significant gains over 100-120 years of age will only come from a true technological innovation. [1-3] The Age of Faith, Will Durant (He has primary sources, but I'm too lazy to look them up in the index. Sorry.) From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Sep 24 21:50:43 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 16:50:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sanity-Stealing Penguins? Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> [a friend writes:] I saw a pub with a "Specials" board outside on which somebody has written "One by one the penguins are stealing my sanity". This struck me as a delightfully surreal comment but, at the same time, a trifle too surreal to be an off-the- cuff remark from a local inebriate so, on returning home, I googled the term to see if it came from somewhere. Rather to my surprise it seems to turn up everywhere, albeit with subtle variations, from bumper-stickers for sale on Amazons, to slogans on penguin sweat-shirts, to taglines on bulletin boards, to random comments made in passing. However, I can't find any trace of quite where the quotation comes from, or what it means :-( =========== any clues among the informati here? Damien Broderick From brian at posthuman.com Sun Sep 24 22:05:18 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:05:18 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sanity-Stealing Penguins? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <4517011E.3060609@posthuman.com> http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result;_ylt=AvCImD_C3zWU2czlJF_SyaHpy6IX?p=penguins+stealing The movie Madagascar possibly. It's free to ask there, so ask away... -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 24 23:53:35 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:53:35 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sanity-Stealing Penguins? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 9/24/06, Damien Broderick wrote: > [a friend writes:] > > I saw a pub with a "Specials" > board outside on which somebody has written "One by one the penguins > are stealing my sanity". This struck me as a delightfully surreal > comment but, at the same time, a trifle too surreal to be an off-the- > cuff remark from a local inebriate so, on returning home, I googled > the term to see if it came from somewhere. > > Rather to my surprise it seems to turn up everywhere, albeit with > subtle variations, from bumper-stickers for sale on Amazons, to > slogans on penguin sweat-shirts, to taglines on bulletin boards, to > random comments made in passing. However, I can't find any trace of > quite where the quotation comes from, or what it means :-( > As you have discovered, the quote is now part of pop culture. I think the origin lies in HP Lovecraft's story "At the Mountains of Madness". Full text here: A trading card game called Mythos was developed based on his tales. Rules here: Rule Excerpts: Your Investigator's Sanity is the most important value in the game. Sanity Points reflect your Investigator's capacity to withstand the shock of encountering the unutterable horrors that comprise the Cthulhu Mythos. Each Investigator begins a MYTHOS game with the number of Sanity points indicated on his or her Investigator card. Sanity will be gained and lost during the course of play. ------------------ Now it gets funky. Some searcging in Groups, discussing tactics for this game, yields some real gems, like: STRATEGIES ---------- * Drive Yourself Insane - As bizarre as it sounds, you can occasionally win the game after you've gone insane. This occurs if your number of points of completed adventures exceeds your opponent's adventure points plus his Sanity. Usually, even when you get the opportunity it's hard to pull off. You have to avoid Sanitariums, desperately cast spells, and even that's often not enough. Giant Albino Penguins can reduce your Sanity really quickly. Not only can each one cost up to 2 points (meaning that you can blow 8 Sanity if you have four in your hand), but they'll also make your opponents over-react, and put big Monsters opposite you. When you're sitting at 8 Sanity, but will win if you go insane, you can put down a two Sanity Penguin, and then take it in the teeth when your opponent reveals the Shoggoth he mistakenly pointed at you. 8 Sanity points are gone, and you win! --------------------- * Bait! - If you're putting enough Monsters out to attract Instability in the Mythos, Penguins are very helpful. If you're playing other Lesser Independents into your threat, and your opponent is sitting on top of a Summon/Control Lesser Independent Spell, Penguins will also be useful. Decks heavy in Joining Monsters or in Lesser Independents can both be supported by Penguins for this reason. ----------------------- I trust this is all now perfectly clear to you. :) BillK From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 01:03:52 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:03:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" Message-ID: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Can anyone make sense out of this? http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 01:14:05 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 02:14:05 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609241814t378dcba6nc134cc59a19f8eb2@mail.gmail.com> Heim's theory of quantum gravity, of which there was a brief flurry of discussion awhile back. I don't understand the theory itself of course - apparently professional physicists don't understand it either - but the following is what I picked up back then: Apparently the theory predicts the masses of the fundamental particles and this is its main claim to fame. This strikes me as dubious on anthropic grounds for what that's worth. Apparently it predicts a neutral electron. The neutrino could be regarded as such, but I gather from context that this is supposed to have the same mass as the electron and positron, and no such particle has been observed. It's been claimed that the theory predicts the masses of the fundamental particles to greater accuracy than would be allowed by the input data available in Heim's time, which would indicate there was something fishy going on. Analysis is difficult because Heim used some strange nonstandard mathematics that nobody can really follow. There was talk about the possibility of testing the theory (which would obviously be the ideal thing to do, if practical). I don't know what the story is on that at the moment. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 25 02:19:14 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:19:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609250219.k8P2JHOf029096@andromeda.ziaspace.com> The needle is pegged on my bogosity meter Michael. I am with Einstein when he commented: "...you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field." spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Michael Anissimov > Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 6:04 PM > To: Extropians > Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in > 3Hours" > > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 > > -- > Michael Anissimov From ben at goertzel.org Mon Sep 25 02:35:31 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:35:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150609241935o60ee1e4atb7f4b9232a45bff5@mail.gmail.com> On 9/24/06, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 IMO (and bear in mind I'm a mathematician, not a physicist, though I studied a bunch of physics at one point), this is speculative but not insane or totally implausible... There seem to be some new experimental results related to these ideas See report http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html and paper http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033 The results presented in this paper are not identical to those required for the proposed propulsion system to work, but are conceptually related.... Whether Heim theory (the basis of the proposed propulsion system) is accepted or not (I'm skeptical), it seems clear that there are large gravitomagnetic effects out there that are not explained by general relativity nor by any currently mainstream general-relativity/quantum-theory synthesis... -- Ben From ben at goertzel.org Mon Sep 25 02:39:38 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:39:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" In-Reply-To: <200609250219.k8P2JHOf029096@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> <200609250219.k8P2JHOf029096@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150609241939t20dd81efkaa6f8286b9f423d3@mail.gmail.com> Spike, The paper whose link I forwarded, submitted to Physica C, would appear to contradict this saying of Einstein's via empirical results. General Relativity is a beautiful theory so far as it goes, but it is not so outrageous to think that the unification of GR with quantum electrodynamics may lead to some odd phenomena.... Recall that Einstein failed to perform this unification, indicating that his physical intuition, while outstanding, was not flawless. ben On 9/24/06, spike wrote: > The needle is pegged on my bogosity meter Michael. I am with Einstein when > he commented: "...you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by > cranking up the electromagnetic field." > > spike > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Michael Anissimov > > Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 6:04 PM > > To: Extropians > > Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in > > 3Hours" > > > > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 > > > > -- > > Michael Anissimov > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 03:50:35 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:50:35 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 9/24/06, Michael Anissimov wrote: > > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 I'll leave the physics comments to the physicists. I'll comment from a practical point that unless one of these (hyperdrive based spaceships) can easily (&cheaply!) be built *Mars won't be there*. Mars is probably #2 (after the asteroids) for solar system bodies to be disassembled as soon as the technology becomes available. As sending the nanorobots there to start disassembly is relatively cheap (compared to say setting up a human colony) I would expect it to start much sooner unless some international solar system regulatory authority comes into existence which physically prevents people (& corporations) from executing such projects [1] . I'll also comment that *if* hyperdrives are feasible and can be developed by a presingularity development stage advanced technological civilization it makes the Fermi Paradox a *much* larger problem. (I.e. the observational fact that nearby stars (and galaxies) haven't been colonized (and taken "dark) implies that intelligent life (and ATC) are *much* harder than most astrobiologists would currently tend to believe. Robert 1. I consider there to be a significant non-zero probability that one path through the singularity involves police state(s) or AI overlord(s) effectively imprisoning its population to prevent non-state ("world") managed solar system development (or interstellar travel). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dmasten at piratelabs.org Mon Sep 25 06:10:05 2006 From: dmasten at piratelabs.org (David Masten) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:10:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1159164605.5358.56.camel@localhost> On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 18:03 -0700, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 > Yes. Unfortunately I can't make any sense out of the "award winning paper". Or rather, I get the general gist, but the authors fail to provide enough information to even check the math in the paper, let alone design an experiment to demonstrate the concept. I am rather disappointed in the AIAA for giving an award for it. The general gist is that if Heim-Droscher theory is correct, then a spinning mass in a powerful magnetic field will produce a force. With a large enough spinning mass and a powerful enough magnetic field, the force would not only be measurable, but also useful in propelling a spacecraft. Under the right circumstances, another effect can be produced which causes the device to slip into "hyperspace". In slipping into hyperspace the objects velocity undergoes a transform, causing a relative increase in the velocity magnitude. Also the speed of light in hyperspace is considerably higher, thus allowing higher velocities than would be otherwise obtainable. Doing an experiment to (in)validate the theory can be done with existing technology, a 6.3 Tesla field and a 100kg rotating ring would give a 3 Newton force. A useful implementation is still a bit away, the authors give an example of a 10^5kg spaceship with a 1000kg ring and a 13 Tesla field providing a 10^6 N force - a very slow ascent away from the Earth. Unfortunately, there is not enough information to do the detailed design for the experiment. Dave From scerir at libero.it Mon Sep 25 06:20:32 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:20:32 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> From: "Michael Anissimov" > Can anyone make sense out of this? Even Dr. Tajmar seems skeptical here http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412176 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0207123 From russell.rukin at lineone.net Mon Sep 25 08:46:16 2006 From: russell.rukin at lineone.net (Russell Rukin) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:46:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" In-Reply-To: <000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> <000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <45179758.1040505@lineone.net> This has a diagram at least http://www.keelynet.com/gravity/fingrav.htm I'm intrigued as it shares the same characteristics with Telsa's /1930's/ Electric Automobile http://waterpoweredcar.com/teslascar.html and some other so called "free" energy systems http://peswiki.com/index.php/Congress:Top_100_Technologies_--_RD. The points that come up with these systems seems to be 1. Very high voltage 2. Magnetism 3. Resonance or high frequency pulsing. All inventors/experimenters including Tesla seem to suggest they are tapping energy from the air (vacuum energy, zero point, dark energy etc). I'd like to see some solid scientific investigation into "any" of these theories. Russell R From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 25 10:07:45 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:07:45 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20060925100744.GA21640@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 05:02:07PM -0400, Ensel Sharon wrote: > Ok, great. That sounds exactly like what I have been doing - green tea + > 80-90ish cocoa chocolate ... that was until I read that book and did some You'll notice quite a few other ingriedients in the list above. Some of them natural, some less so. > further investigation and found that it is unlikely that the antioxidants > in tea and cocoa will actually anti-oxidize anything in a useful fashion. If you're just looking for antioxidants, then yes, green tea/chocolate are not worth it. However, I'm not just looking at antioxidants. Hit Medline, you might get a few surprises. > So ... I like tea and chocolate too, but is there any reason either of us > should consider them any part of a _health regimen_ ? Yes. > As for flax oil, I'm on board. As for the wine, I'm on board, although I > think you hit the point of diminishing marginal returns very quickly > ... as in one glass every 1-2 days. Actually, it's 1-2 glasses/day. The point of diminishing returns probably is somewhere in a bottle/day country. > Agreed, but given a typical bell curve distribution of health effects, if > we expect tea+pomegranate+cocoa+etc. to significantly prolong life _on > average_, then we should also expect it to significantly improve life > _immediately and noticably_ for some small part of the population. Again, life in around 1006 wasn't anything like 2006. Actually, for most people today life in 2006 isn't anything like life for you and me. > Which means _some people_ would notice the effects even if they got killed > off by plague later, at a relatively young age. Poorly stated, but you > get the idea I'm sure. No, I'm not getting the idea why you feel that the average bear in 1006 would do double-blind experiments. There might have been some socities in the murk of history who consciously engineered their diets for longevity, but I'm not historian enough to know whether this is documented. If anything, I'd look to China for that. > This is incorrect. > > One can hardly get 100 pages through any comprehensive world history > without coming across accounts of peoples self experimentation and > theories regarding food, exercise and longevity. Yes, and belief into gods, demons, curses and witches. Still going strong in some parts of the world, actually. > In fact, people _have_ noticed calorie reduction, and have noticed it for > quite some time. Ghandi preached a low calorie diet rich in nuts and > berries and spent a fair amount of time in self experimentation with his > diet, etc. Ancient Jewish theologians spoke of "(not eating) all day like > hens"[1] and that "more people die from overeating than from > undernourishment"[2]. I'm unfamiliar with either sources. Most societies I'm familiar with valued obesity as a visible sign of wealth and thus fitness. Most socities valued pallor, not melanin pigmentation from insolation. Etc. > Here is a quote speaking of Maimonides: > > "He warned against overeating: 'The stomach must not be made to swell like > a tumor'. he thought that wine was healthful in moderation."[3] > > Thomas Jefferson: > > "I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an > aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my > principal diet." (TJ to Dr. Vine Utley, 21 March 1819) > > I could go on and on. People have been _quite attentive_ to their bodies Yes, if you cherry-pick your sources you can prove about anything you set out to. Whatever it is, the archeological evidence speaks against about your data anecdotes. Let's face it, despite our mounting epidemic of obesity, we're the healthiest and most long-lived people to live on earth as a large society. This is reasonably well documented. > and their nutrition for thousands of years, and one can barely read a > western philosopher without reading of theories and cures and ideas from > everything to diet and sleep and exercise to gout and TB and the decline > of age. The point is that diet won't help much against TB, or syphilis, or malaria, or smallpox. > What we discuss on this list and what we do with our pills and powders and > teas and juices is nothing new at all. It is couched in different terms Yes, it is very much new. I don't use anything which hasn't passed a double-blind test at least in several animal models if not people, and preferrably it should come with a plausible mechanism. > and is slightly more informed, and there is larger participation due to > our increased wealth ... but it's not new. > > Therefore I resubmit that: > > a) a combination of natural substances that greatly increases lifespan > would have been noticed by now No, this strikes me as unplausible. Resveratol is natural, but lacking enrichment (ability to extract) the effect is weak. > and further: > > b) if some combination of natural substances is going to greatly increase > your lifespan, it must also be immediately noticable in some small portion > of the population No, the statistical effect would be very small, and not linked to a particular cause. Widely. There might have been small socities which did rationally practise a particular diet. Whatever they did, it didn't last. > I don't think either are true. I think that optimization only goes so > far, and that significant gains over 100-120 years of age will only come > from a true technological innovation. Um, CR is the only thing which has been shown to work. And it's perfectly natural. Notice: you will need supplmentation, or a carefully construed diet, if you're to engange in severe CR. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 11:59:10 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:59:10 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely Message-ID: Robert Bradbury commented: > 1. I consider there to be a significant non-zero probability that one path through > the singularity involves police state(s) or AI overlord(s) effectively imprisoning its > population to prevent non-state ("world") managed solar system development (or > interstellar travel). Ralph Cerchione writes in his Future Imperative blog: Fire and Forget -- Automating the Construction of Our Automated Weapons New Scientist reports on Lockheed Martin's unmanned aircraft, the Polecat, which is partially manufactured from "printed" parts. The article notes: ...the Polecat unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a 28-metre flying wing, weighing four tonnes. It was designed in part to test cheaper manufacturing technologies. Ralph comments: 'What does that mean for the rest of us? On the one hand, even more advanced weapons could end up in the hands of the world's very worst people. On the other, those of us who have access to such technologies in the advanced world will soon be in a position to manufacture more and more complex products and equipment, thus reducing our dependence on global supply chains and enabling innovative people and companies to turn inventions and refinements into reality with a simple change of the digital plans in our Fab Labs and RepRaps. (Slang for replicating rapid prototyping machines.)' ------------------- My comment: This points out the contradiction facing civilization in the very near future. Desktop labs and garage manufacturing give great power to individuals and small groups. Power for both good and evil. If governments allow this, (Can they stop it?), I see life developing into the same sort of ongoing arms race that Windows users currently face to keep viruses, spyware and spam out of their computers. Except that we will be facing the real life (TM) attacks of disease viruses, mini attack devices, mini spy devices, tracking and eavesdropping of every variety, etc. etc. coming from every disgruntled group, nutter and script kiddy. BillK From ben at goertzel.org Mon Sep 25 12:28:38 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:28:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" In-Reply-To: <000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> <000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <638d4e150609250528g9514100ufdda8db05ccf2c8a@mail.gmail.com> Thanks for digging this reference up... Indeed, while there seems to be empirical evidence in favor of gravity modification beyond what General Relativity predicts, the proposed application to propulsion relies on Heim theory which is very speculative, and not assumed by Tajmar's paper... Basically there are three separate things one may believe 1) that the empirical results on gravity modification are correct 2) that Heim theory, which provides one explanation for these results (but certainly not the only one) is correct 3) that the authors of the study on gravity modification based propulsion have applied Heim's theory correctly I have no strong opinion on 3. Regarding 2, currently Heim theory should be considered one among a host of speculative ways of unifying quantum electrodynamics with gravity. Regarding 1, I tend to be a believer; I see no reason to suspect fraud, and there have been a bunch of related results pointing in this direction during the past couple decades, of which the most recent one of Tajmar etc. is particularly clear and striking... -- Ben G On 9/25/06, scerir wrote: > From: "Michael Anissimov" > > > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > Even Dr. Tajmar seems skeptical here > http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412176 > http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0207123 > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 13:00:04 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:00:04 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> Monday, 25 September 2006 [snip] > If governments allow this, (Can they stop it?), I see life Having worked in machine tools not too long ago, let me point out that the ability to crank out firearms in basement workshops exists nowadays and has for some time. The British Sten Gun and Bill Holmes' books come to mind, but I Am Not A Gunsmith (IANAG). The scenario exists now in some sense. AFAIK we've not seen an explosion in crime driven by home-built guns. While a sufficiently foolish state might ban advanced machine tools, and a sufficiently aggressive state might enforce such a ban, that same would soon find itself outclassed by less restrictive states. A worldwide ban might come to pass, but even that doesn't affect motives to push the very limits of the ban: economic advantage and military self-sufficiency. > developing > into the same sort of ongoing arms race that Windows users currently > face to keep viruses, spyware and spam out of their computers. Except > that we will be facing the real life (TM) attacks of disease viruses, > mini attack devices, mini spy devices, tracking and eavesdropping of > every variety, etc. etc. coming from every disgruntled group, nutter > and script kiddy. > This rather overstates the case, I think. The raw materials of software, energy and bits, take little effort to get. Exotic materials such as aerospace composites and fuels take a more effort. Simply having an advanced home workshop doesn't mean any person, regardless of motive, has access to the capital or to the knowledge to make advanced hardware. What you describe, a very high level of nuisance attacks combined with an ongoing hardware arms race, seems possible, I do not expect to see backyard cruise missiles nor tanks. As an aside, calling tele-operated aircraft an automated weapon stretches the truth. Most of those I've read about have human pilots on the ground. Close-In Weapon Systems such as Goalkeeper and Phalanx better qualify as automated weapons. Humans give permission to fire, and that's all, since meat reacts too slowly to defend against anti-ship missiles. -- Jay Dugger YouTube inivitation bearing my name? I apologize. http://hellofrom.blogspot.com/2006/09/steaming-hot-plate-of-crow.html From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 13:36:55 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:36:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: <20060925100744.GA21640@leitl.org> References: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> <20060925100744.GA21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 9/25/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > a) a combination of natural substances that greatly increases lifespan > > would have been noticed by now > > No, this strikes me as unplausible. Resveratol is natural, but lacking > enrichment (ability to extract) the effect is weak. The interesting question is whether resveratrol is a complete replacement for CR or only a partial alternative. My guess would be that CR + RES > RES but CR + RES ~= CR but I might be wrong. The question is whether the longevity promotion genomic program has additional effects (biasing DNA repair strategies?) over that which would be provided by a reduction in oxygen intake (CR). Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 25 13:46:25 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:46:25 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <002001c6e0a9$121dde40$a6200751@heritagekd9czj> I too have an major interest in machining and prototyping. The sten gun is a good example, you can even download the files with the instructions for building your own from mainly stamped metal parts (just like the original). http://www.btmon.com/Other/Unsorted/Weapons_Pistols_SMG_Rifle_blueprints_and_construction_manuals.torrent.html Might be worth noting that stamping foil for christmas cards at home and stamping sheet / plate aerospace materials for 4t robot drones are two considerably different tasks. The latter is not something that's cheap and easy to tool up for at home. I believe the US (and probably Europe) already has a policy setup on exporting machine tools due precisely to the concern that they could be used for weapons manufacture, in the same way they have export policies on toxic chemical precursors. I must say here that I suspect a great deal of this is at best scare tactic weapon lab talk to justify their tax expense. Out of all of the sites I've ever visited on the net about machining, the only ones that seem particularly interested in the idea of making guns are those in the US. In fact, there's a guy in the US who was in the process of building his own cruise missle from off-the-shelf parts to demonstrate that a terrorist "could do it" - before he was stopped by the government I believe. A lot of these sites are doing it under the excuse of "demonstrating that a terrorist also could". The problem is, a terrorist "doesn't need to do it". Nore do they need to make automated drones or hand build their own guns when they have guys willing to strap bombs to themselves (eager to do so and who'll be admired by their friends) and can buy AK-47's for a minute fraction of the cost it would take to setup the machines to make their own - I think an AK47 costs about $40 in Africa, or less. In the US, you can legally pick up a guns in a matter of weeks as I'm aware of things. My brother was explaining how he'd been watching a TV show about US guys who'd formed their own armed group and where patrolling the Mexican boarder and inspecting people's Visas. Perhaps in the future some terrorist group might want to have a go at building a cruise missle just for the fear factor. But in terms of realism, it's no where near a big enough threat to suggest banning the sale of machine tools to the public domain in my opinion. I also suspect that they'll probably just try buying a prebuilt missile of some form - maybe from a Lockheed stock clearance sale. There are newer and more advanced kinds of rapid desktop prototyping being released now, like stereolithography. That's presently limited to resins and plastics mainly. Combining it with some form of sintering process would allow for people to print metallic and ceramic items. Again, are terrorists going to bother when the machine costs $30k and the weapon $30? I doubt it. A terrorists version of a high tech bomb is one with a 555 timer and LEDs - beginner electronics stuff. Personally, I was amazed at how much complaining people did about not being able to take things into the cabin with the aeroplane problems. You're going to be sitting there for a few hours. Are you planning on doing a touch of water colouring painting along the way? Whilst on the topic of weapons, the US is currently looking at redesigning it's nuclear warheads with some form of more reliable version featuring environmentally friendly material subsitutions (no, I'm not joking). Only problem is, Bush Senior signed up for an end to nuclear weapons testing. Lets see how that stands in five years - it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to work out how the Middle East might react to such a change of heart. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 25 13:50:42 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:50:42 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> <20060925100744.GA21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20060925135042.GC21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 09:36:55AM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: > The interesting question is whether resveratrol is a complete > replacement for CR or only a partial alternative. My guess would be I don't care for resveratol very much, I must admit. I'm very interested in metformin, though. > that CR + RES > RES but CR + RES ~= CR but I might be wrong. > The question is whether the longevity promotion genomic program has > additional effects (biasing DNA repair strategies?) over that which > would be provided by a reduction in oxygen intake (CR). What do you think about metformin? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Mon Sep 25 14:00:22 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:00:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jay Dugger > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more > likely > > Monday, 25 September 2006 > > [snip] > > If governments allow this, (Can they stop it?), I see life > > Having worked in machine tools not too long ago, let me point out that > the ability to crank out firearms in basement workshops exists > nowadays and has for some time. The British Sten Gun and Bill Holmes' > books come to mind, but I Am Not A Gunsmith (IANAG). The scenario > exists now in some sense. AFAIK we've not seen an explosion in crime > driven by home-built guns... > Jay Dugger Ja, but of course this is not exactly comparable. There would be no point in making guns in your basement when you can buy them cheaply at the local sporting goods store. If one needs an automatic, they can be created easily (even if illegally) from existing hardware and internet-available modification devices, along with the instructions on how to do it. Humanity is facing an entirely new threat with the rapid prototyping. spike From kevin.osborne at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 14:17:31 2006 From: kevin.osborne at gmail.com (kevin.osborne) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:17:31 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Experts believe the future will be like Sci-Fi movies" Message-ID: <3642969c0609250717mf2da6dcn5a8322d12d7f5a0c@mail.gmail.com> [pdf] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/22_09_2006pewsummary.pdf "In the latest study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, over 700 technology experts were asked to evaluate an assortment of scenarios in an attempt to determine potential trends for the year 2020. With responses from representatives of the World Wide Web Consortium, ICANN, the Association of Internet Researchers, and major corporations like Google and IBM, the report reflects the perceptions of 'Internet pioneers,' more than half of whom 'were online before 1993.' " via http://slashdot.org/articles/06/09/25/0653222.shtml and http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060924-7816.html From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 14:36:57 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:36:57 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0609250736t2e956fd4td4f74619aca9f24a@mail.gmail.com> Monday, 25 September 2006 John Heritage wrote: "In fact, there's a guy in the US who was in the process of building his own cruise missle [sic] from off-the-shelf parts to demonstrate that a terrorist "could do it" - before he was stopped by the government I believe." You think of Bruce Simpson, who did this in New Zealand. http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/ [snip] > Ja, but of course this is not exactly comparable. There would be no point > in making guns in your basement when you can buy them cheaply at the local > sporting goods store. If one needs an automatic, they can be created easily > (even if illegally) from existing hardware and internet-available > modification devices, along with the instructions on how to do it. > So if you can't economically make a firearm with rapid prototyping, how could one economically make cameras, diseases, or aircraft with rapid prototyping? Why not just buy them instead? You can buy miniature surveillance gear and personal aircraft for cash today. Diseases and the like, well...let's hope not. I suspect economies of scale, specialized equipment, and professional logisitics, finance, and design will trump amateurs in forseeable ways for a long time yet. Common criminals probably won't prove likely to take the time to build a firearm from their rapid prototyper. If he or she (probably he) had that much skill and concentration, I doubt he or she (probably he) would end up a criminal. I am not a criminiologist. > Humanity is facing an entirely new threat with the rapid prototyping. > I agree, but not because I expect to see backyard cruise missiles or firearms or armored fighting vehicles. I don't even expect to see easily forseeable things such as souped-up remote controlled cars or boats with explosives, or high-power model rockets with phosgene warheads, or remote controlled planes dusting crops with E. Coli or herbicide or plant diseases. Rapid prototyping might make possible purely novel and unexpected abilites, threats and benefits both. Imagine something like the disruptive effects of Napster, but based on rapid prototyping instead of rapid file transfer. Even that is probably too predictable. What really surprising positive and negative effects await? Damon Knight's "A for Anything" offers some ideas, but I don't think it helps much. -- Jay Dugger YouTube inivitation bearing my name? I apologize. http://hellofrom.blogspot.com/2006/09/steaming-hot-plate-of-crow.html From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 25 14:31:52 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:31:52 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely References: <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <00e801c6e0b0$3100f4d0$a6200751@heritagekd9czj> > Humanity is facing an entirely new threat with the rapid prototyping. > > spike Indeed, printing birdy sized drones and things from your desktop could be possible in a decade or two. The problem there would be the number of different, probably specialised, materials that would need printing and fitting together to produce something that can fly, for example (motors need light conductors like copper, wings need to be light but strong etc). That would drive up the cost and complexity of the process. Of coarse, there's scope for inventive ideas to limit those requirements - like finding a material that works for the body as well as the wings. But I still suspect their use as weapons probably won't come about until the technology begins to trickle down. You, of coarse, need to offset the cost and complexity of buying the stereolithograph equipment and running it against the end effect. For most terrorists, I think a gun and bomb is going to remain the standard weapon of choice for decades to come. And, as has already been pointed out, by the time the terrorist has hold of a 3D multimaterial stereolithograph machine, the people who build things to protect people from the possible malevolent creations will have already produced something better. However, I personally prefer the line of thinking that desktop prototyping will allow us to build more things to help people out and prevent them ever wanting to go along with that line of thought to begin with. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 25 14:57:10 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:57:10 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060925145710.GE21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 07:00:22AM -0700, spike wrote: > Humanity is facing an entirely new threat with the rapid prototyping. I don't see how. Ability to build weapons hinges on availability of knowledge. I might be able to fab a rocket (but propellant and explosive is still not an unregulated commodity), but this doesn't mean I can write the guidance software. As to improvising UAVs from off-shelf components (remote compressed video and control via 3G is the last part of the puzzle that fell in place recently), we could do that a decade or two ago. Nobody killed one with an improvised UAV yet. In contrast to that Predator/Hellfire combo has been quite popular with the blackbag job crowd lately. While some very few hobbyists can produce quite advanced designs, statistically they're overwhelmingly improbable to overlap with killers. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 25 15:18:19 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:18:19 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com><200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <5366105b0609250736t2e956fd4td4f74619aca9f24a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <012001c6e0b5$e2cb3b30$a6200751@heritagekd9czj> > You think of Bruce Simpson, who did this in New Zealand. > > http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/ Sorry, you're right yes. He was on scrapheap challenge with the engines at one point. >So if you can't economically make a firearm with rapid prototyping, >how could one economically make cameras, diseases, or aircraft with >rapid prototyping? I forgot to mention that aspect. That even though you could use a printer to make a bird sized drone, you can get some pretty small model aeroplanes complete with a video camera for next to nothing now anyway. The problem may get greater when people start releasing things they've designed for fun, drones for instance, that can very easily translate across to a desktop printer in a terrorist's house - in the same way that posting up the G-Code for milling a receiver isn't likely to help slow the process now. However, like the receiver example, the end result will likely have to require next to know intelligence or effort to finish and operate for terrorists to even bother thinking about it. It might be worth also considering how much demand we can expect for stereolithography from the public domain. Will it, for example, follow the standard paper printer development in that we'll rapidly end up with printers in Tescos for 29.99 - thereby allowing terrorists to have access to one as a regular household item (that they perhaps initially bought for some other reason) by aggresively forcing the price down. My guess is, perhaps not. How many people actually want to be able to print 3D things? There are options to 'print' (mill) things on your desktop already that are quite cheap and only a very small number of people ever bother. Stereolithography, like milling, has somewhat limiting factors on just how cheap and clean you can make it due to the inherent means by which the process is performed. Mills generate swarf and mess, stereolithographs need baths of clean resin and lasers for even basic work. Sintering metals and ceramics would only be harder again. A multimaterial, all in one system may even be unnecessarily expensive for the people who actually need them, compared to using standard methods - like winding coils and stamping parts. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 16:14:28 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:14:28 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <20060925145710.GE21640@leitl.org> References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20060925145710.GE21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 9/25/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 07:00:22AM -0700, spike wrote: > > > Humanity is facing an entirely new threat with the rapid prototyping. > > I don't see how. Ability to build weapons hinges on availability > of knowledge. I might be able to fab a rocket (but propellant and > explosive is still not an unregulated commodity), but this doesn't mean > I can write the guidance software. > > As to improvising UAVs from off-shelf components (remote compressed > video and control via 3G is the last part of the puzzle that fell in > place recently), we could do that a decade or two ago. Nobody killed > one with an improvised UAV yet. In contrast to that Predator/Hellfire > combo has been quite popular with the blackbag job crowd lately. > > While some very few hobbyists can produce quite advanced designs, > statistically they're overwhelmingly improbable to overlap with > killers. > This is not a problem for next week. Obviously, nobody is going to buy a 50,000 euro fab to build a 500 euro readily available gadget. But when the price of fabs come down to hobbyist prices, then..... Ten years ago, who would have thought that 12 year old kids with a small amount of coding knowledge would be able to copy plans created by experts and make viruses that bring down computers all around the world? Or run botnets of thousands of controlled computers provided by ordinary users? Knowledge wants to be free remember. In a few years time, anyone interested enough will be able to buy a cheap fab, get plans off the web, get patches from user groups, and build pretty much whatever they want. No improvising required, just basic reading skills. You are correct that plastic explosive is unlikely to be sold in Walmart. But last I heard, fertilizer was pretty useful. And there are other alternatives, and poisons, e-coli, etc. Tinkering with disease strains won't be too difficult either, in the near future. Remember that if you want to cause trouble, you don't need to know much about what you are doing. (Just avoid killing yourself during the tinkering phase). If the new stuff lives and spreads, that's good enough to cause a lot of disruption, even if the actual death toll is not enormous. You don't run Windows so you probably don't really appreciate the daily workload of updates, scans, backups, rebuilds, and so on necessary to keep systems running (mostly) safely. It is a big overhead for the IT department. Once cheap fabs are available everyone will probably have to get one to build their own protection devices. Or buy security devices from multi-nationals. I'm really not looking forward to having to implement and maintain a similar, always online, protect, detect, destroy, environment in the real world. It's my life and health at stake, not just a virus on my pc. BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 16:32:12 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:32:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: <20060925135042.GC21640@leitl.org> References: <20060924191239.GO21640@leitl.org> <20060925100744.GA21640@leitl.org> <20060925135042.GC21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 9/25/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > What do you think about metformin? It has merit but I haven't studied exactly how it works. If it is acting by limiting cellular glucose uptake then I would wonder the extent to which cells will switch to fat metabolism. That isn't going to help if the goal is to reduce oxygen consumption. It is worth noting the recent papers where it is revealed that the CLK gene is involved in a critical aspect of ubiquinone (CoQ10) synthesis. While no-CoQ10 seems to be fatal during development, hemizygous mice for the CLK gene do have an extended lifespan. That would argue that if there are supplements (drugs?) which inhibit CoQ10 synthesis they should have lifespan extending effects. It might also imply that CoQ10 supplements (and meat consumption) are in general a bad idea (which should send shivers through the people supplementing with CoQ10). It is the delivery of the free electron from CoQ10 to O2 which creates the superoxide which in turn becomes the hydrogen peroxide which can diffuse to the nucleus where it becomes a trouble maker. Remove either of the two upstream actors (CoQ10 or O2) and you remove the source of the problem. That sounds much better than the downstream band aids involving free radical quenchers. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 16:42:41 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:42:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Sanity-Stealing Penguins? In-Reply-To: References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060924164911.02393058@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 9/24/06, BillK wrote: > As you have discovered, the quote is now part of pop culture. > > I think the origin lies in HP Lovecraft's story "At the Mountains of > Madness". > Full text here: > Shucks, and here I thought those nasty penguins were associated with people trying to get their Linux configurations "just right" [1]. There is an argument that the nice thing about "closed source" software is that it is very very difficult to look under the hood "too" much. Robert 1. The latest adventure involved trying to get Xgl+Compiz working under Gentoo on Intel 915 graphics hardware... :-( After ~4 weeks of off and on effort I'm close but not quite "there" yet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Mon Sep 25 16:35:45 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:35:45 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in3Hours" References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com><000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> <638d4e150609250528g9514100ufdda8db05ccf2c8a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <000301c6e0c0$a6fa4500$25941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> There are many papers on Heim 'hyperdrive' here http://www.hpcc-space.com/publications/index.html and perhaps also here http://www.heim-theory.com As far as I remember R. Chiao is working, since long time, on e.m. <-> gravity transducers. That it to say a 'medium' (like a quantum Hall fluid, or any other medium with a collective Berry phase, or the like) which may transform e.m. radiation in gravitational radiation and viceversa (btw, such a device would reveal the supposed gravitational cosmic background radiation due to the Big Bang). This is, of course, different from a _direct_ interaction between photons and gravitons. From george at betterhumans.com Mon Sep 25 14:17:53 2006 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:17:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fighting back against mind hacks Message-ID: <4517E511.8040409@betterhumans.com> I normally don't make it a habit of plugging my blog posts, but I recently wrote an article with the help of Anders Sandberg that may be of interest to this group. Fighting back against mind hacks http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2006/09/fighting-back-against-mind-hacks.html I'd be curious to hear opinions re: privacy issues as they pertain to a) freedom from state monitoring and b) freedom from state intervention (ie could the state ever demand the right to debilitate individuals). Cheers, George From user at dhp.com Mon Sep 25 17:46:04 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:46:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm going to abandon, somewhat, my original thread/question as I am interested in where this is going... On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > What do you think about metformin? > > It has merit but I haven't studied exactly how it works. If it is acting by > limiting cellular glucose uptake then I would wonder the extent to which > cells will switch to fat metabolism. That isn't going to help if the goal > is to reduce oxygen consumption. Is that the goal ? Is the goal an absolute reduction in oxygen consumption ? Or is it a reduction in oxygen consumption relative to supply ? Scientists dealing with longevity and the antioxidant theory of aging, etc., speak of an "athlete paradox" wherein high levels of fitness and athletic output seem to prolong longevity, and yet it is clear that there is a quite marked increase in oxygen use. The book I mentioned speaks of oxygen traveling through the respiratory chains of mitochondria, and becoming "backed up" (for lack of a better term, and for lack of a deeper understaning on my part) because no further ATP (or heat) is needed, and it is there, in the mitochondria that the free radicals "leak". Further, it is there, in unprotected (relative to nucleic) mitochondrial DNA that the free radicals do their damage. The nucleus, it would seem, has a fair amount of protection against both free radical damage and copy errors (again, relative to mito DNA) ... > It is the delivery of the free electron from CoQ10 to O2 which creates the > superoxide which in turn becomes the hydrogen peroxide which can diffuse to > the nucleus where it becomes a trouble maker. Remove either of the two > upstream actors (CoQ10 or O2) and you remove the source of the problem. ... and so perhaps this line of thought will not be as benefical as you think, because if this new wrinkle in the antiox theory of aging bears any fruit, it is not nucleic DNA that you need to worry about as much as mito DNA. Which kind of goes back to my original question: if you are abreast of these developments (which may in fact be completely wrong/broken/etc./dontshootthemessenger), are they causing you to rethink the entire "supplement anti-ox to prevent nucleic free-rad damage" ? It would seem not. From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Sep 25 18:33:40 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:33:40 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com><200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com><20060925145710.GE21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <005101c6e0d2$03829000$96090751@heritagekd9czj> > This is not a problem for next week. > Obviously, nobody is going to buy a 50,000 euro fab to build a 500 > euro readily available gadget. But when the price of fabs come down to > hobbyist prices, then..... You should consider my point about whether or not this will actually happen within the next few decades. For a few hundred, you can already buy desktop CNC machines and still very few people own them. Most of them are old guys making model steam engines or younger guys making parts for their model helicopters. Most people just don't want to be bothered with any kind of finishing on a product. Unless it can emerge from the desktop machine entirely ready to go, or just needing the batteries, I don't think there'll be anywhere near the market demand needed to make them cheaply. And kids toy producing versions wouldn't be particularly useful for making weapons. The only way I can picture desktop fabricators based on things like stereolithography becoming popular is when a user can go online, choose something like an iPod and print it out. Without a vastly expensive setup, it obviously won't include any of the processors etc. So the user will either have to manually fit them (which almost none of their market won't do) or the machine it's self will have to do it (more cost and complexity). Also, the IC's would have to get to the machine somehow. Post, or pick them up from somewhere? The only way to get round that would be for the machine to include it's own silicon production line or be capable of nano-assembly. People are ultra-lazy, but even still I think they'll probably just go to Tescos and pick it up on their next shopping trip - precisely because they're lazy. > Ten years ago, who would have thought that 12 year old kids with a > small amount of coding knowledge would be able to copy plans created > by experts and make viruses that bring down computers all around the > world? Or run botnets of thousands of controlled computers provided by > ordinary users? And yet terrorists have yet to utilise this, preferring the fertiliser bomb and AK47. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From bret at bonfireproductions.com Mon Sep 25 19:08:35 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:08:35 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3 Hours" , as a bowl of soup. There. Fixed that for you. =) My personal favorite in the Heim/Tesla/QEV mash-up is the Neutralino. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralino If you could shear it from its virtual pair, at ~2500 GeV throwing these things overboard in an organized manner would certainly get you moving. This other one reared it's head recently: I have to say the "diagram" on NewScientist a few days ago wasn't very inspiring. Not sure if anyone linked it yet: http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/ mg19125681.400;jsessionid=NMGHKBGMCGMM http://www.newscientisttech.com/data/images/archive/2568/25681401.jpg This seems to indicate either a) you are doing that high-voltage moves-air thing, or b) every feedhorn on the planet should be wizzing around through the air. Thanks, but I hope the US continues to develop its positronium production infrastructure. On Sep 24, 2006, at 9:03 PM, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Can anyone make sense out of this? > > http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7241 > > -- > Michael Anissimov > Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com > http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 23:03:48 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:03:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a post-Nick-Lane world ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9/25/06, Ensel Sharon wrote: > > Is that the goal ? Is the goal an absolute reduction in oxygen > consumption ? Or is it a reduction in oxygen consumption relative to > supply? There is "plenty" of supply (if there isn't your body will force you to breathe faster). Scientists dealing with longevity and the antioxidant theory of > aging, etc., speak of an "athlete paradox" wherein high levels of fitness > and athletic output seem to prolong longevity, and yet it is clear that > there is a quite marked increase in oxygen use. Much of the O2 consumption in athletes goes to the muscles which should be considered "special" tissues as they were designed to be able to support high O2 consumption (muscle cells, unlike almost all other cells in the body, can be considered to an extent "multi-nuclear" and therefore "multi-genomic" -- so damage to individual genomes in muscles (from free radicals) are less likely to result in cell death (at least that is my current thinking). Athletes channeling O2 and glucose to the muscles are probably saving their other tissues from being "aged" by them. The only exception to this would be the few athletes which must maintain very high caloric intakes (4000+ calories/day) for decades -- I don't know whether this has been shown to increase longevity -- I would strongly doubt it due to the excess work load placed on the digestive tract. But as far as I'm aware this is relatively unstudied. The book I mentioned speaks of oxygen traveling through the respiratory > chains of mitochondria, and becoming "backed up" (for lack of a better > term, and for lack of a deeper understaning on my part) because no further > ATP (or heat) is needed, and it is there, in the mitochondria that the > free radicals "leak". This is relatively accurate (though simplified). The problem is the relative ratio of CoQ10 to downstream electron acceptors (which are unoccupied) in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. The longer CoQ10 is sitting around with extra electrons the greater the probability that it will transfer electrons to oxygen producing superoxide. Further, it is there, in unprotected (relative to nucleic) mitochondrial > DNA that the free radicals do their damage. The nucleus, it would seem, > has a fair amount of protection against both free radical damage and copy > errors (again, relative to mito DNA) ... This is an open question. You have to bear in mind genome redundancy. You have hundreds of copies of each mitochondrial genome in a cell -- damaging one doesn't do much harm. You only have 2 (or 1 in the case of X|Y) copies of your nuclear genome -- damage those and you have much larger problems. So mitochondrial genomes could (and probably do) sustain much higher levels of accumulated damage. But nature has probably "balanced" the investment in defenses and repair such that nuclear and mitochondrial DNA go bad at relatively the same rate. (Studies have proven that mitochondrial DNA damage accumulates with age just as cancer demonstrates that horribly pathogenic mutations are occurring in the nuclear DNA.) ... and so perhaps this line of thought will not be as benefical as you > think, because if this new wrinkle in the antiox theory of aging bears any > fruit, it is not nucleic DNA that you need to worry about as much as mito > DNA. I'm well aware of both theories (they are formally known as the somatic mutation theory of aging and the mitochondrial DNA damage theory of aging). I'm currently of the opinion that the somatic (nuclear) DNA mutation problem is of greater consequence than the mitochondrial DNA mutation problem. Which kind of goes back to my original question: if you are abreast of > these developments (which may in fact be completely > wrong/broken/etc./dontshootthemessenger) Oh, on the ExI list we don't shoot the messenger... We just keel haul them. Then if they survive that we dismantle their body (the atoms from poorly informed messengers can clearly be used for something better) being sure we have extracted the information content from their brain so we can make a million or so copies of said messenger and run them in basement simulations (i.e. simulations running in simulations running in simulations). But unlike in The Matrix, where most people don't know they are running in a simulation, *we* make sure poorly informed messengers *know* they are running in a basement simulation *and* that there is no way out (if you happened to find a way to "die", we'd just restart the simulation). But I digress... are they causing you to rethink the entire "supplement anti-ox to prevent > nucleic free-rad damage" ? > > It would seem not. > I think there are some things which may be of limited benefit and am reasonably sure we don't fully understand things well enough to know what they are (resveratrol and metformin consideration are products of the last 3-5 years of research and a much better understanding of what is really going on). But I am completely convinced that the best solutions will involve engineering the genome so aging happens extremely slowly or not at all. I think we are relatively close to having both the technology and engineering capabilities to do this. So I'd *much* prefer to see people who are investing their money in supplements [1] instead investing it in companies that would be engineering non-aging genomes. Robert 1. The amount of money spent on supplements which for the most part only provide marginal benefits could fund thousands of researchers focused on really fixing the genome. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Tue Sep 26 00:26:43 2006 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:26:43 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] where to go with supplementation in a Message-ID: <61c8738e0609251726g6c823b0cre2556fefe85fba3b@mail.gmail.com> I also consume the above but I add about 10-50 grams of hemp bud per day consumed as a piece of cake. I add 250 g hemp 9X12 pan and have between 1/20 and 1/4 a flat per day. The oilseed is 50% and the terpene/cannabinoid bract/leaf is 50%. CBD is a systemic antioxidant worth adding and almost pathologically avoided by people who ought to know better.... nutraceutical product developers, Natural Health Product manufacturers, and drug and pharma guys.... A Pity isn't it? Well, I gues the main problem is that you can't grow hemp in USA and only as a farmer can you find the raw material as I do. I'm currently baking and freezing my 2006-07 supply to tide me over till next harvest. However, there is no academic or commercial clammer to change this situation to my knowledge. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 26 00:14:47 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:14:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <5366105b0609250736t2e956fd4td4f74619aca9f24a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609260033.k8Q0XZkd019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > John Heritage wrote: > > "In fact, there's a guy in the US who was in the process of > building his own cruise missle [sic] from off-the-shelf parts to > demonstrate that a terrorist "could do it" This is something that keeps me awake nights. Building a cruise missile would not be at all difficult technically. A Cessna 152 has a high wing, so the center of lift is above the CG, and the thrust center is forward of the center of pressure, so the craft is inherently stable. So the up-down control is just throttle, and the left right control can be done stick-only, forget the rudder, so only two actuators are required, and a simple GPS system could be used for guidance, and there you have a cruise missile (of sorts) with a payload of over 200 kg, a range of over 400 km, it is as cheap as a mid-sized car and is nearly indistinguishable from Ma and Pa Kettle out for a Sunday ride. Oy vey. We need PAC3s in place everywhere, soon. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 26 00:24:20 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:24:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609260033.k8Q0XZke019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Clear evidence that Weird Al Yankovic is perhaps the greatest musical genius of modern times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw This guy speaks to my innermost soul. {8^D spike From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Tue Sep 26 00:50:08 2006 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:50:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <91130F45-9453-45C1-9481-1CEA43069C68@ceruleansystems.com> On Sep 22, 2006, at 1:16 PM, Ensel Sharon wrote: > But again, meat is expensive to produce and keep - even > if the 10/1 ratio of feed input to meat output is not exactly > right, there > is still a negative ratio at work ... so why have people, > historically, > wanted it ? What short term benefits does it provide, and why was it > worth the cost ? This argument is theoretical rather than practical, as most meat does not compete with plant-based foods for resources in the market. There was a discussion on this list a long time ago about this very thing. There are two points that are worth re-bringing up: - While there may be a 10:1 feed ratio in theory, a very significant percentage of the cattle are raised on lands with no other agricultural value other than the fact that cattle can thrive there. In the US I remember the figure being 40% of the total cattle herd, but I could be off by a bit. No feed is being expended on cattle that can feed themselves on otherwise marginally arable land, and in fact this use gives the land utility where it would otherwise have none. If we really wanted to, all cattle raising could be done on land with no other agricultural value so that this calculus would be moot. The same could be done with pigs, chickens, and many other animals, as evidenced by significant feral populations for many of these in marginal lands. - The amount of agricultural land in use is shrinking due to improvements in agricultural efficiency. Even when otherwise useful agricultural land is used to feed cattle, it is not taking away from some other type of plant-based food production as there are vast tracts of arable land that still remain fallow for lack of necessity. In the broader real-world scene, raising meat is an economically productive activity that can significantly expand the total food supply. J. Andrew Rogers From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Sep 26 03:31:25 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 23:31:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times Book Review -- The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery Message-ID: <28633397.353321159241484088.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Sep 26 04:55:59 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:55:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <200609260033.k8Q0XZke019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw Fellow physics geeksters, what (if anything) is that equation before which Weird Al is dancing? It looks kinda familiar, but several things about it suggest it is just a gag. I don't recall del squared in any of the famous equations, and if h is Planck's constant, does that thing show up squared in any of the big theories? The del suggests a quantum energy density (as a function of radius?) or a wave equation but then what is the mu? Also there are two negative signs inside the square brackets (odd but not impossible) and psi(r) is on both sides of the equation. Help me Obi Wan Scerir, you are my only hope. Too bad Weird Al didn't put up one or all of Maxwell's equations. {8^D spike From neomorphy at gmail.com Tue Sep 26 06:55:25 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:55:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] what is the upside / advantage of meat ? In-Reply-To: References: <20060922212152.56709.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: It's not the source, it's the nutrients! Elaboration... In pre-industrial societies, there are far more occasions for which having higher protein components in the diet would be advantageous. However, for a good number of pre-industrial people, having more of ANY nutrient, particularly starch and fat (the Big Health Problems with the Standard American Diet), would be good. Protien helps with a number of things: healing injuries, quick energy release. Useful for social climbers and, funnily enough, hunters. Because protien is pretty good for social climbers, there would be advantages in wanting its most potent sources. These desires would get passed on. However, worldwide, only a small number of crops have protein yields comparable with meat. Furthermore, almost all of these crops originated around the area now called the Middle East. It's hardly surprising, then, that the vast majority of traditionally vegetarian societies were located around Southern Asia. When the Buddhist meme hit the high altitudes of Tibet, it quickly got modified to take the Vegetarian bit out... Yaks are definitely the most practical means of obtaining protiens and fats at Tibettan altitudes. So, considering On 9/23/06, Ensel Sharon wrote: > On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, The Avantguardian wrote: > > > Since by the time eating red meat kills you, you will > > probably have had whatever children you are going to > > have, natural selection does not penalize this > > behavior. Instead it rewards it with greater > > reproductive success since eating meat in your youth, > > makes you strong enough to escape predators, beat up > > your banana-eating rivals, and mate at an earlier age > > than otherwise. > > > Great - this is the idea I was getting at. You say "(eating meat) rewards > it with greater reproductive success since eating meat in your youth makes > you strong enough to escape predators, Eating decent protein sources rewards you with greater reproductive success, due to those factors. This doesn't just go back as far as hunter-gatherers. This goes back hundreds of millions of years. It's not that eating meat has lead to "increased meat consumption in the developing world has led to greater average heights, body masses and physical robustness", it's full access to the nutrients found in animal products. Meat just happens to be one of the most readily available sources of some nutrients, and dairy for others. In New Guinnea, the protien content of most plants is so low, and the availability of megafauna for hunting so limited, that eating bugs and spiders has become somewhat culturally ingrained, where it is absent in many societies. Bug eating is pretty normal to a lot of other partial carnivores - wild cats eat a lot of them. Cats raises another parallel: while rhenal failure is a much bigger issue for old cats than for just about any other animal (what with cats having such an unusually high protein diet), it only affects them when they're old. Young, they're still (amongst) the most effective solitary hunters around. Stepping back a bit, the same is applicable to fats, starch, salt... most humans were raised in environments deficient in these essential nutrients. So they developed a preference for them. Now, their progeny love foods high in these nutrients a little too much, to the detriment of their health. (As an interesting parallel, if you let many seed-eating birds have access to a teaspoon of salt, they will devour it... and die. They have such a strong, genetically cultivated desire for salt, and have never had sufficient access to it that there would be an advantage in developing a sense of "when!") Although a number of studies have concluded that a high-proportion-meat diet has a distinct deleterious effect on long-term health, these studies are typically looking at consumption levels far higher than what would be available to your typical hunter-gatherer. When they had access to all-they-could-eat, like Henry VIII, our ancestors still got fat and died younger than necessary. -- Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 26 07:04:54 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:04:54 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609260033.k8Q0XZke019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060926070454.GH21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 09:55:59PM -0700, spike wrote: > > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw > > > Fellow physics geeksters, what (if anything) is that equation before which > Weird Al is dancing? It looks kinda familiar, but several things about it > suggest it is just a gag. I don't recall del squared in any of the famous > equations, and if h is Planck's constant, does that thing show up squared in It's just a Schroedinger equation for the 3-dimensional case. The h is missing a bar, the mu is supposed to be an m. Which Hamiltonian is supposed to contain e^2/r beats me, however. Don't have time to look it up. But, yeah, it's not nonsense at all. > any of the big theories? The del suggests a quantum energy density (as a > function of radius?) or a wave equation but then what is the mu? Also there > are two negative signs inside the square brackets (odd but not impossible) > and psi(r) is on both sides of the equation. Help me Obi Wan Scerir, you > are my only hope. > > Too bad Weird Al didn't put up one or all of Maxwell's equations. {8^D -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 26 10:39:53 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:39:53 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <200609260033.k8Q0XZkd019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5366105b0609250736t2e956fd4td4f74619aca9f24a@mail.gmail.com> <200609260033.k8Q0XZkd019310@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060926103953.GQ21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 05:14:47PM -0700, spike wrote: > This is something that keeps me awake nights. Building a cruise missile > would not be at all difficult technically. A Cessna 152 has a high wing, so > the center of lift is above the CG, and the thrust center is forward of the > center of pressure, so the craft is inherently stable. So the up-down > control is just throttle, and the left right control can be done stick-only, > forget the rudder, so only two actuators are required, and a simple GPS > system could be used for guidance, and there you have a cruise missile (of You arguably don't even need GPS: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/remote-flying-with-vr-goggles-and-a-camera-202964.php Again, this has been possible a whole while ago, yet nobody has been killed that way yet. > sorts) with a payload of over 200 kg, a range of over 400 km, it is as cheap 200 kg is not very much. > as a mid-sized car and is nearly indistinguishable from Ma and Pa Kettle out > for a Sunday ride. Oy vey. We need PAC3s in place everywhere, soon. I'm so looking forward to the friendly fire incidents. Wheee! -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 26 12:52:54 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:52:54 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: References: <5366105b0609250600v13fda301r8909acbb0e931796@mail.gmail.com> <200609251411.k8PEBabc006299@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20060925145710.GE21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20060926125254.GT21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 05:14:28PM +0100, BillK wrote: > This is not a problem for next week. > Obviously, nobody is going to buy a 50,000 euro fab to build a 500 > euro readily available gadget. But when the price of fabs come down to > hobbyist prices, then..... If we're still talking about rapid prototyping, you will still not able to produce explosive or toxin or bioagent, or even fuel. RC planes or civilian aircraft are cheap. Why has nobody ever doused a crowd with a liter of VX dispersed from a model helicopter, whether GPS-guided or on remote control? (And even if they did, what's the worst you can do with a little of VX other than ruin a WEF meeting?). > Ten years ago, who would have thought that 12 year old kids with a Ten years ago, that's 1996. The first and only virus I ever had was around 1987 on the Amiga. The first virus to appear in the wild was 1982 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus IIRC network worms were written shortly after Ethernet was invented, as a proof of concept. As Jeremy Weinberg once said "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization". > small amount of coding knowledge would be able to copy plans created > by experts and make viruses that bring down computers all around the > world? Or run botnets of thousands of controlled computers provided by > ordinary users? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider > Knowledge wants to be free remember. Knowledge wants to be a banana daiquiri. First, knowledge is not atoms. Duplicating bits will never give you a critical mass of plutonium, or a thimbleful of ricin. Secondly, some knowledge (like the details of geometry and timing of a fission weapon) has managed to stay away from public knowledge quite a while. Thirdly, in a massively surveiled environment (the current global networks are getting there) you will not share dangerous knowledge for long without attracting some scrutiny. The moment a remotely controlled Cessna UAV manages to blow up President Bush on his lawn, you will notice that those tax dollars hard at work in Ft. Meade are there for a purpose. > In a few years time, anyone interested enough will be able to buy a > cheap fab, get plans off the web, get patches from user groups, and > build pretty much whatever they want. No improvising required, just No, whatever they can design, or get the designs for. > basic reading skills. You are correct that plastic explosive is Dumb people never build much. > unlikely to be sold in Walmart. But last I heard, fertilizer was Do you know which kind of fertilizer you need? Have you tried purchasing large amounts of ammonium nitrate, while not being a farmer? Try it. You might get surprised. Do you know how much diesel you need, how long the life time of the mix is, and that it won't do a thing without a detonator? > pretty useful. And there are other alternatives, and poisons, e-coli, I'm quite interested in your list of alternatives. Also, which kinds of poison you expect to be able to buy at Walmart. And just why do you think E. coli, even pathogenic strains of E. coli, are going to cause anything more than a case of roaring dysentery? > etc. > > Tinkering with disease strains won't be too difficult either, in the In theory, this hasn't been too difficult in the last twenty years. Try it. Obtain a pathogenic strain (exhibit A) and enhance it (exhibit B). Then, manage to do harm with it (exhibit C). > near future. Remember that if you want to cause trouble, you don't > need to know much about what you are doing. (Just avoid killing On the contrary. You need to know exactly what you're doing, and right now there aren't too many people who are capable of that. The overlap with those who're willing to use that knowledge to kill is almost zero. > yourself during the tinkering phase). If the new stuff lives and > spreads, that's good enough to cause a lot of disruption, even if the > actual death toll is not enormous. If it's so easy, do it. > You don't run Windows so you probably don't really appreciate the > daily workload of updates, scans, backups, rebuilds, and so on > necessary to keep systems running (mostly) safely. It is a big > overhead for the IT department. I run many things, and most of them take a gigabyte worth of downloads every few weeks (a bleeding edge Linux distro is your worst case). > Once cheap fabs are available everyone will probably have to get one > to build their own protection devices. Or buy security devices from > multi-nationals. I'm looking forward to the precedent of a government surveillance UAV inviding someone's private space, and being shot down. "I just thought it was a wasp, Your Honor!" > I'm really not looking forward to having to implement and maintain a > similar, always online, protect, detect, destroy, environment in the > real world. It's my life and health at stake, not just a virus on my > pc. I don't think this is going to happen. Our cypherpunk dreams never materialized. Anything involving threats at the physical layer will cause societies to go into armadillo mode. Kiss your residual freedoms good-bye then. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Sep 26 13:18:39 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:18:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times Book Review -- The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery In-Reply-To: <28633397.353321159241484088.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <28633397.353321159241484088.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia OMIM: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/dispomim.cgi?id=600072 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bret at bonfireproductions.com Tue Sep 26 13:53:27 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:53:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anousheh is blogging from orbit. Message-ID: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> I have been sending this to the standard interested parties to get the word out. Here is my copy from my site, that I also submitted to boingboing: Anousheh Ansari is a successful Iranian-born American entrepreneur whose family provided the backing for the Ansari X-Prize. Anousheh is currently on-orbit in the International Space Station, and maintaining a blog with a slogan that states ?Imagine. Inspire. Be The Change. What a great opportunity to share between communities of interest in this person?s adventure, while bringing together politically diverse people. --- I am going to get the HAM data if anyone is interested and get it posted on my site as well if anyone is interested. From bret at bonfireproductions.com Tue Sep 26 13:59:30 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:59:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anousheh is blogging from orbit. In-Reply-To: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> Aaaand the HTML didn't go through. Here are the links: http://spaceblog.xprize.org/ http://www.anoushehansari.com/ I feel that this person is really putting their neck out there to make a point. Could we inspire a little more coverage somehow? Aren't we seeing some of our Transhuman ideals reflected in the activity here? I mean, her family backed the X-prize. Where is the media? On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:53 AM, Bret Kulakovich wrote: > > I have been sending this to the standard interested parties to get > the word out. > > Here is my copy from my site, that I also submitted to boingboing: > > Anousheh Ansari is a successful Iranian-born American entrepreneur > whose family provided the backing for the Ansari X-Prize. Anousheh > is currently on-orbit in the International Space Station, and > maintaining a blog with a slogan that states ?Imagine. Inspire. Be > The Change. What a great opportunity to share between communities > of interest in this person?s adventure, while bringing together > politically diverse people. > > --- > > I am going to get the HAM data if anyone is interested and get it > posted on my site as well if anyone is interested. > From jonkc at att.net Tue Sep 26 14:52:35 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:52:35 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Mars in 3Hours" References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <028701c6e17b$8c3d9170$9f0a4e0c@MyComputer> I don't know about 3 hours but five years ago I wrote a post to this list about a way to get to Mars in 2 weeks. Unlike most such proposals this would require no new physics, just dangerous expensive and heroic engineering. ========== The efficiency of a rocket depends on its exhaust velocity, the faster the better. The space shuttle's oxygen hydrogen engine has a exhaust velocity of about 4500 meters per second and that's pretty good for a chemical rocket, the nuclear heated rocket called NERVA tested in the 1960's had a exhaust velocity of 8000 meters per second, and ion engines are about 80,000. Is there any way to do better, much better, say around 200,000,000 meters per second? Perhaps. The primary products of a fission reaction are about that fast, but if you use Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239 the large bulk of the material will absorb the primary fission products and just heat up the material, that slows things way down. However the critical mass for the little used element Americium-242 (half life about a century) is less than 1% that of Plutonium. This would be great stuff to make a nuclear bomb you could put in your pocket, but it may have other uses. In the January 2001 issue of Nuclear Instruments and Methods Physics Research A Yigal Ronen and Eugene Shwagerous calculate that a metallic film of Americium 242 less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick would undergo fission. This is so thin that rather than heat the bulk material the energy of the process would go almost entirely into the speed of the primary fission products, they would go free. They figure a Americium-242 rocket could get to Mars in two weeks not two years as with a chemical rocket. There are problems of course, engineering the rocket would be tricky and I'm not sure I'd want to be on the same continent as a Americium 242 production facility, but it's an interesting idea. John K Clark jonkc at att.net From amara at amara.com Tue Sep 26 15:51:01 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:51:01 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Monty Python's International Philosophy Football Match Message-ID: Monty Python's International Philosophy Football Match: Greeks vs. the Germans http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xpNj9nhoH4&eurl= This is supposed to be a classic, but I have never heard about it or seen it before. Hilarious!! Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Sep 26 16:34:46 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:34:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anousheh is blogging from orbit. In-Reply-To: <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <34361.72.236.103.217.1159288486.squirrel@main.nc.us> > Here are the links: > > http://spaceblog.xprize.org/ > http://www.anoushehansari.com/ > > > I feel that this person is really putting their neck out there to > make a point. Could we inspire a little more coverage somehow? Aren't > we seeing some of our Transhuman ideals reflected in the activity > here? I mean, her family backed the X-prize. Where is the media? > > Thanks for this, I've shared it with a few folks. Regards, MB From jay.dugger at gmail.com Tue Sep 26 18:43:49 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 18:43:49 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cypherpunk Dreams, was Re: Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely Message-ID: <5366105b0609261143x35dae838g6fe2f6fa9111ee18@mail.gmail.com> On 9/26/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: [snip] > I don't think this is going to happen. Our cypherpunk dreams never > materialized. Anything involving threats at the physical layer will > cause societies to go into armadillo mode. Kiss your residual freedoms > good-bye then. [snip] Why do you suppose our "cypherpunk dreams never materialized," and exactly what hopes does that phrase express? I have my own answers for this, but yours interest me. I also think they'd generally interest the list. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From bret at bonfireproductions.com Tue Sep 26 19:53:38 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:53:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anousheh is blogging from orbit. In-Reply-To: <34361.72.236.103.217.1159288486.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <34361.72.236.103.217.1159288486.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <03961A6B-414F-4A57-BE3C-EDBA093BB06A@bonfireproductions.com> I would be curious to know if she is still an Iranian national as well? What a great example for those who would be considered a bit more - Earthbound right now? I mean how else can you garner as much attention toward your cause? Demonstrate cooperation? It's rather smart I think. On Sep 26, 2006, at 12:34 PM, MB wrote: > >> Here are the links: >> >> http://spaceblog.xprize.org/ >> http://www.anoushehansari.com/ >> >> >> I feel that this person is really putting their neck out there to >> make a point. Could we inspire a little more coverage somehow? Aren't >> we seeing some of our Transhuman ideals reflected in the activity >> here? I mean, her family backed the X-prize. Where is the media? >> >> > > Thanks for this, I've shared it with a few folks. > > Regards, > MB > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From bret at bonfireproductions.com Tue Sep 26 20:06:24 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:06:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Freqs. Re: Anousheh is blogging from orbit. In-Reply-To: <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: Hi again, here are the frequencies for Anousheh on the International Space Station: The downlink is 145.800 Mhz, and her call sign is RS0ISS The uplink is 437.800 Mhz More info is available at: ARRL website "Success Tips for Using the ISS Voice Repeater http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2004/10/06/1/?nc=1 http://www.rac.ca/ariss/oindex.htm http://www.issfanclub.com/node/5440 A sound file on her pass over Iran is also available: http://home.twin.at/swl-chmy/Downloads/Frau_Ansari_via_RS0ISS.wav Cheers, Bret Kulakovich www.bretorium.com On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:59 AM, Bret Kulakovich wrote: > > > Aaaand the HTML didn't go through. > > > Here are the links: > > http://spaceblog.xprize.org/ > http://www.anoushehansari.com/ > > > I feel that this person is really putting their neck out there to > make a point. Could we inspire a little more coverage somehow? Aren't > we seeing some of our Transhuman ideals reflected in the activity > here? I mean, her family backed the X-prize. Where is the media? > > > > On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:53 AM, Bret Kulakovich wrote: > >> >> I have been sending this to the standard interested parties to get >> the word out. >> >> Here is my copy from my site, that I also submitted to boingboing: >> >> Anousheh Ansari is a successful Iranian-born American entrepreneur >> whose family provided the backing for the Ansari X-Prize. Anousheh >> is currently on-orbit in the International Space Station, and >> maintaining a blog with a slogan that states ?Imagine. Inspire. Be >> The Change. What a great opportunity to share between communities >> of interest in this person?s adventure, while bringing together >> politically diverse people. >> >> --- >> >> I am going to get the HAM data if anyone is interested and get it >> posted on my site as well if anyone is interested. >> > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Sep 26 21:08:28 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:08:28 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1077.163.1.72.91.1159304908.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw > > Fellow physics geeksters, what (if anything) is that equation before which > Weird Al is dancing? It is the Schr?dinger equation for an electron in a hydrogen atom, leaving out the 1/4piepsilon_0 factor in front of the e^2/r potential. I just realised how totally nerdy I am, since I got all the references at first try. Except possibly the binary, it doesn't look like ascii. > Too bad Weird Al didn't put up one or all of Maxwell's equations. {8^D Too easy. Vacuum's video for "I Breathe" http://youtube.com/watch?v=GPjqynQzuC0&mode=related&search= includes the equations used by the Swedish National Bank to set the interest rate. Now that is esoteric! (the video was BTW recorded at ABB Power Technologies lightning research lab in Ludvika, Sweden) Any other good equations in music videos? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From amara at amara.com Tue Sep 26 22:35:34 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:35:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap Message-ID: Anders: >Any other good equations in music videos? Seems difficult to satisfy both. Not music but equations: A video demonstrating the Nash Equilibrium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-_Ul1rgl7g The Physics of Superheroes 1: The Death of Gwen Stacy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuVpwjYgvgg Physics of Superheroes 2 - Electro & Magneto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOg1JjyhGI0&mode=related&search= Physics of Superheroes 3 - Superman's Blooper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzrdgl7CUmQ&mode=related&search= Other Physics Videos http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2006/07/even-more-physics-videos-and-video.html Music but equations 'hidden' New York Dolls: Dance Like a Monkey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjVtJzTSuPw Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2657697036715872139 Amara From amara at amara.com Tue Sep 26 22:52:20 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:52:20 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Dawn mission status Message-ID: The Dawn mission instrument payload is now fully integrated and functional: science data is sent completely from instrument through the spacecraft, the ground data system, the Dawn Science Center and to the instrument providers' institutions. So onwards towards launch (June 2006). (I updated the Wikipedia Dawn mission page.) Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Sep 26 23:39:49 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 19:39:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <1077.163.1.72.91.1159304908.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1077.163.1.72.91.1159304908.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4519BA45.50104@goldenfuture.net> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVSXEu0bqI Tom Lehrer on calculus... Not just showing the equation in the background, but several songs about various equations. Brilliant. Synchronization is a tad off, but it's a minor annoyance. Joseph Anders Sandberg wrote: >Any other good equations in music videos? > > > From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Sep 27 00:28:07 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:28:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <4519BA45.50104@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1077.163.1.72.91.1159304908.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4519BA45.50104@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <34493.72.236.103.138.1159316887.squirrel@main.nc.us> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVSXEu0bqI > > Tom Lehrer on calculus... Not just showing the equation in the > background, but several songs about various equations. Brilliant. > > Tom Lehrer is wonderful and brilliant on most any subject he chooses! :))) Regards, MB From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Sep 27 03:09:02 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:09:02 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Monty Python's International Philosophy FootballMatch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609270319.k8R3Jgtu004047@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps > > Monty Python's International Philosophy Football Match: > Greeks vs. the Germans > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xpNj9nhoH4&eurl= > > > This is supposed to be a classic, but I have never heard about it > or seen it before. > > Hilarious!! > > Amara Cool thanks Amara! I hadn't seen this one either. I am always puzzled by British humor, why it is exactly that it has such universal appeal to us geeksters. Why does it stay so funny to us after all this time, but non-geeksters fail to see the humor? Weird Al made a reference to MP in his White & Nerdy video. I had to admit to being able to recite most of Python's Holy Grail and much of Life of Brian. This went along with Yankovic's other references to being white and nerdy: had no girl but had braces (check), Monte Python (check), chess team (check), debate team (check), had both guns and a solder gun (half a check), knew pi to about 30 places (half a check), carried more than one pen, hey you never know when one might fail (check), pocket protector, altho on that one I admit we did it on purpose to heighten the geek effect (check), D and D (check), MC Escher is my favorite MC (definite check), Stephen Hawking's in my library (check), whiz at minesweeper (check). So why do these characteristics go together so well? The MP routines have a lot of subtle insider humor, the philosophy references and such. Same I suppose with Weird Al. I really miss Far Side cartoons and those terrific Calvin and Hobbes even more. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Sep 27 04:23:38 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:23:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <1077.163.1.72.91.1159304908.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <200609270423.k8R4Nkml015357@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap > > > spike wrote: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw > > > > Fellow physics geeksters, what (if anything) is that equation before > > which Weird Al is dancing? > > It is the Schr?dinger equation for an electron in a hydrogen atom, leaving > out the 1/4piepsilon_0 factor in front of the e^2/r potential... Way to go Anders! {8^D > > Too bad Weird Al didn't put up one or all of Maxwell's equations. {8^D > > Too easy... Ja we would have recognized them instantly. > Vacuum's video for "I Breathe" > http://youtube.com/watch?v=GPjqynQzuC0&mode=related&search= > > Any other good equations in music videos?... Anders Sandberg, The other video on that YouTube site called Pride in My Religion has some great equationage. That group Vacuum has a great sound with terrific concept. Best thing since Abba. {8^D spike From jonkc at att.net Wed Sep 27 05:19:21 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 01:19:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com><05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> The leading opera house in Germany just canceled the Mozart opera ?Idomeneo?, they did this because they feared religious pinheads would literally disembowel them if they put it on. In this 1781 opera the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool, the king of Crete then sings ?The gods are dead!? Sounds like a good start to me. There was no major difficulty cutting off the heads of Poseidon, Buddha or even Jesus; but Muhammad was another matter. All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others. John K Clark jonkc at att.net From scerir at libero.it Wed Sep 27 06:18:43 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:18:43 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap References: <200609260456.k8Q4u7ar015501@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <001f01c6e1fc$c9321a70$a1b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw > Fellow physics geeksters, what (if anything) is > that equation before which Weird Al is dancing? [...] > Help me Obi Wan Scerir, you are my only hope. > spike Obi Wan cannot see any equation from here (with the old modem, it is possible to download only 40 seconds of videomusic). But I can provide another musical reference http://musicofthequantum.rutgers.edu/ (... which might be a bit boring though). From alex at ramonsky.com Wed Sep 27 09:55:20 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:55:20 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Monty Python's International Philosophy FootballMatch References: <200609270319.k8R3Jgtu004047@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <451A4A88.6060001@ramonsky.com> If you get yourself an MRI scanner or even an EEG for Xmas, you can see why : ). Different bits of your brain light up when appreciating different kinds of humor. Geeks notoriously use frontal lobes a lot, and due to plasticity almost certainly have denser networks in the areas that appreciate puns, verbal humor, and what neuro geeks call 'N400 jokes' [precisely because they cause a graph readout called an N400 on an EEG machine]. Monty Python specializes in N400 jokes where part of a sentence is semantically out of context -they make people think "Eh?" for just a second or so before falling about laughing. Phrases like "Raspberry jelly-coated fighter jets" or "I was ironing the hippopotamus" are examples of N400s. Sentences where the difficulty is syntactic provoke two kinds of EEG deviation over the left frontal lobe [Brocas area] but where there's a semantic difficulty we just get one. It's the right frontal lobe though that helps us 'get' the emotional content of jokes. And we need a bit of posterior activity when confronted with stuff like "Man eating fish in restaurant" that is ambiguous in meaning. 'Non-geeks' -persons with denser networks in other parts of the brain- appreciate alternative humor accordingly , notoriously about farting , sex, food, and other sensory-motor activities. But they find it much harder to get jokes like "A dyslexic man walked into a bra". Best, AR ********* spike wrote: >I am always puzzled by British humor, why it is exactly that it has such >universal appeal to us geeksters. Why does it stay so funny to us after all >this time, but non-geeksters fail to see the humor? > > From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 27 10:45:52 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:45:52 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Monty Python's International Philosophy FootballMatch In-Reply-To: <451A4A88.6060001@ramonsky.com> References: <200609270319.k8R3Jgtu004047@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451A4A88.6060001@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: On 9/27/06, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > 'Non-geeks' -persons with denser networks in other parts of the brain- > appreciate alternative humor accordingly , notoriously about farting , > sex, food, and other sensory-motor activities. But they find it much > harder to get jokes like "A dyslexic man walked into a bra". Speaking of penguins.................. Have you heard about the penguin who walked into a bar and asked the barman 'Has my brother been in today?' The barman looked quizzically at him then replied, "Don't know. What's he look like?". BillK From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Sep 27 17:02:47 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:02:47 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] ARTS: Microscopic Art by Willard Wigen Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20060927115737.049d4de8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> "To see a world in a Grain of Salt" Willard Wigan was born in Birmingham, England in 1957 and is the creator of the smallest works of art on earth. From being a traumatized and unrecognized dyslexic child, he is now emerging as the most globally celebrated micro-miniaturist of all time and is literally capable of turning a speck of dust into a vision of true beauty. http://www.willard-wigan.com/index.html Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Sep 27 17:05:15 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:05:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] ARTS: Microscopic Art by Willard Wigen Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20060927120506.046e8e40@pop-server.austin.rr.com> "To see a world in a Grain of Salt" Willard Wigan was born in Birmingham, England in 1957 and is the creator of the smallest works of art on earth. From being a traumatized and unrecognized dyslexic child, he is now emerging as the most globally celebrated micro-miniaturist of all time and is literally capable of turning a speck of dust into a vision of true beauty. http://www.willard-wigan.com/index.html Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Sep 27 21:45:37 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:45:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> On 9/27/06, John K Clark wrote: > > All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others. > Absolute statements are stupid. Some more so than others. If you're just trolling for comments, then I'm sorry I responded. If you really are too close-minded to realize that your anti-religious beliefs are approaching religious zeal, then I am sorry for you. If neither of these are true, then disregard this email. :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From matus at matus1976.com Wed Sep 27 22:31:26 2006 From: matus at matus1976.com (matus at matus1976.com) Date: 27 Sep 2006 22:31:26 -0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) Message-ID: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> "Absolute statements are stupid. " Of course that is an absolute statement, so is it stupid as well? ----- Original Message ----- On 9/27/06, John K Clark wrote: > > All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others. > Absolute statements are stupid. Some more so than others. If you're just trolling for comments, then I'm sorry I responded. If you really are too close-minded to realize that your anti-religious beliefs are approaching religious zeal, then I am sorry for you. If neither of these are true, then disregard this email. :) From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 02:03:10 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:03:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609271903x74b9597fn849fd259528c36e1@mail.gmail.com> Absolutely. . . only no more so than the original to be sure :) It was meant as self-referential humor, as in: "This statement is false" On 27 Sep 2006 22:31:26 -0000, matus at matus1976.com wrote: > > > "Absolute statements are stupid. " > > Of course that is an absolute statement, so is it stupid as well? > > ----- Original Message ----- > On 9/27/06, John K Clark wrote: > > > > All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than > others. > > > > Absolute statements are stupid. Some more so than others. > > If you're just trolling for comments, then I'm sorry I responded. If > you > really are too close-minded to realize that your anti-religious beliefs > are > approaching religious zeal, then I am sorry for you. If neither of these > are true, then disregard this email. :) > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Sep 28 02:59:13 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:59:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] hey brain cells! line up guys, you're gonna die In-Reply-To: <200609270319.k8R3Jgtu004047@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <200609280309.k8S39gs6025046@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Well guys, it's bad news, but it sure explains a lotta things: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/27/testosterone.kills.reut/index.html The ladies have been telling us this for as long as there have been ladies, now the scientists are verifying it. Deep down in our hearts, we knew it all along. {8-[ {8^D spike From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Sep 28 02:37:01 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:37:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:19 AM 9/27/2006 -0400, you wrote: snip >There was no major difficulty cutting off the heads of Poseidon, Buddha or >even Jesus; but Muhammad was another matter. > >All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others. There is a far more paranoid approach to religions. The capacity to have religions (that is the parasitic to symbiotic memes that infest human populations) is a function (like everything else) of some feature of human brains that either was directly selected or is a side effect of some feature that was selected in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA). I have come to see religious memes as _seed xenophobic memes_. When a population anticipates bad times a-coming, the gain on xenophobic memes gets turned up. This is an evolved trait, i.e., the genes of people who did it replicated better than the genes of people who did not in the EEA. In the EEA, bad times a-coming usually affected all the tribes or bands in a considerable area. I propose that there is a selective advantage in such circumstances to attacking first and that it takes time for xenophobic memes to build up to the point warriors go on the attack. In such circumstances, seed xenophobic would shorten the time from detection of ecological conditions to attack. Thus the psychological trait of carrying such memes (religions) between times when they were needed would be favored. This explains an awful lot of the history of religions. Islamic society today generally faces a particularly bleak future. So it should be expected that xenophobic memes in that society will be on the rise. Unless something like nanotechnology intervenes to massively improve the economic outlook of Islamic populations, they will attack. The western choice will be between killing them as a religious (Christian) duty or killing them dispassionately. Not much of a choice from my viewpoint. :-( Keith Henson From brian at posthuman.com Thu Sep 28 03:26:14 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:26:14 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <451B40D6.6080400@posthuman.com> Would it be correct to say that under your idea Keith, if we all switch to electric or hydrogen or whatever vehicles in order to stop buying oil and "supporting the bad guys", this could further the economic issues you talk about and ironically cause more attacks and terrorism? -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From jonkc at att.net Thu Sep 28 04:58:43 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:58:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com><05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com><007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> Mike Dougherty Wrote: > Absolute statements are stupid. Rather like the one you just wrote. And if you can't call a spade a spade on the Extropian list where the hell can you? Religion is stupid. Absolutely! > If you're just trolling I'm flattered. As I've been on this list for over a decade so you must think I deserve to be in the Guinness Book of world records as the longest living troll in internet history. > If you really are too close-minded One should always be open minded, but not so open minded that all your brains fall out. >to realize that your anti-religious beliefs are approaching religious zeal Standard attack. You know your opponent hates religion so you accuse your opponent of being religious. Boring. Been there done that. > then I am sorry for you. Bullshit. You are lying through your teeth. Whenever somebody uses the clich? "I am sorry for you" they are never, EVER, expressing genuine sympathy, rather they are trying to express contempt. However this form of attack has proven to be somewhat less than brilliantly effective with me. Whenever a religious nincompoop says he doesn't like what I say I am proud. PROUD! John K Clark jonkc at att.net From scerir at libero.it Thu Sep 28 06:16:17 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:16:17 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Hyperdrive Engine Could Let Us Reach Marsin3Hours" References: <51ce64f10609241803t1f49bf63g33efb01127e70427@mail.gmail.com><000501c6e06a$b5546500$b5be1f97@nomedxgm1aalex><638d4e150609250528g9514100ufdda8db05ccf2c8a@mail.gmail.com> <000301c6e0c0$a6fa4500$25941f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <001501c6e2c5$9c535720$2cb91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Version 9.3 of R.Shawyer 'radiation pressure drive' is at http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shawyertheory.pdf (I did not read it. People who did, say there are several logical and physical inconsistencies). From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 09:44:45 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:44:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 9/27/06, Keith Henson wrote: > > In the EEA, bad times a-coming usually affected all the tribes or bands in > a considerable area. > > I propose that there is a selective advantage in such circumstances to > attacking first and that it takes time for xenophobic memes to build up to > the point warriors go on the attack. Keith, a recent show on either the History or Discovery channel may be relevant to the discussion. The focus was on the Sahara and the significant (and massive) climate change it has undergone over the last ten thousand years. From lush garden to harsh desert would about sum it up. This is thought to have been due to shifts in the Earth's orbit (according to the show). It is thought that the rise of Egypt and subsequently the spread of Islam and the creation of the African slave trade were intertwined with this process. This is a long enough period for there to have been a significant selection effect going on for those willing to see the bad times coming and develop genes & memes involved in promoting tribal (religious) mindsets and to drive acquisition of resources (wars) based on those. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 10:06:46 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 06:06:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <451B40D6.6080400@posthuman.com> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <451B40D6.6080400@posthuman.com> Message-ID: On 9/27/06, Brian Atkins wrote: > > Would it be correct to say that under your idea Keith, if we all switch to > electric or hydrogen or whatever vehicles in order to stop buying oil and > "supporting the bad guys", this could further the economic issues you talk > about > and ironically cause more attacks and terrorism? I'm of the opinion that the simple rise in population (and wealth) in India and China will consume any oil that the U.S., Europe or Japan choose not to consume. So it seems unlikely that there will be a significant decline in revenues for OPEC (given that they set the price using production quotas already). You will not change the mindset of people brainwashed to believe that the U.S. is fundamentally "evil" quickly (whether we consume their oil or not). Even if the U.S. is *completely* out of the Middle East you *still* have the problem that a Western manufactured state (Israel) populated by a different tribe (Jews) is stuck in the middle of a region where dominant tribe view that land as *theirs*. If the U.S. had no economic interests in the region at all (which we could get to in perhaps 10 years if we pushed on it) you would still have the problem of the political interest in and alliances with Israel. Keith understands the problem correctly. Until you bring wealth to the masses (so there is more to lose by going to war) and educate them regarding things like genetic predispositions for aggression, relgious memes, etc. and disempower those who gain power by promoting tribal distinctions the tension and its side effects isn't going to diminish. Nanotechnology clearly solves the wealth problem. Bionanotechnology through engineered genomes can be made available and solve it much sooner as the Middle East is not lacking in the two essential resources (solar power and (salt) water) required to utilize it on a massive scale. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fortean1 at mindspring.com Thu Sep 28 02:57:56 2006 From: fortean1 at mindspring.com (Terry Colvin) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:57:56 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [extropy-chat] FWD [Skeptic] Re: weird al takes on rap Message-ID: <4557240.1159412276673.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> -----Forwarded Message----- > >On 9/27/06, Graeme Kennedy wrote: >> >> Trying to remain on topic: has Yankovic done other skeptical-ish covers? > > Not a cover (so far as I know), but there's his song "Your Horoscope >For Today": > > There's a fan video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=tdmZA64homs where >you can hear it. > >Aquarius >There's travel in your future when your tongue freezes to the back of a >speeding bus >Fill that void in your pathetic life by playing Whack-A-Mole seventeen hours a >day > >Pisces >Try to avoid any Virgos or Leos with the Ebola virus >You are the true Lord of the Dance, no matter what those idiots at work say > >Aries >The look on your face will be priceless when you find that forty pound >watermelon in your colon >Trade toothbrushes with an albino dwarf, then give a hickey to Meryl Streep > >Taurus >You will never find true happiness - what you gonna do, cry about it? >The stars predict tomorrow you'll wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go >back to sleep > >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today > >Gemini >Your birthday party will be ruined once again by your explosive flatulence >Your love life will run into trouble when your fianc??? hurls a javelin through >your chest > >Cancer >The position of Jupiter says you should spend the rest of the week face down in >the mud >Try not to shove a roll of duct tape up your nose while taking your driver's >test > >Leo >Now is not a good time to photocopy your butt and staple it to your boss's >face, oh no >Eat a bucket of tuna-flavored pudding, then wash it down with a gallon of >strawberry Quik > >Virgo >All Virgos are extremely friendly and intelligent - except for you >Expect a big surprise today when you wind up with your head impaled upon a stick > >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today > >Now you may find it inconceivable or at the very least a bit unlikely that the >relative position of the planets and the stars could have a special deep >significance or meaning that exclusively applies to only you, but let me give >you my assurance that these forecasts and predictions are all based on solid, >scientific, documented evidence, so you would have to be some kind of moron not >to realize that every single one of them is absolutely true. > >Where was I? > >Libra >A big promotion is just around the corner for someone much more talented than >you >Laughter is the very best medicine, remember that when your appendix bursts > >next week > >Scorpio >Get ready for an unexpected trip when you fall screaming from an open window >Work a little bit harder on improving your low self-esteem, you stupid freak > >Sagittarius >All your friends are laughing behind your back (kill them) >Take down all those naked pictures of Ernest Borgnine you've got hanging in >your den > >Capricorn >The stars say that you're an exciting and wonderful person, but you know >they're lying >If I were you, I'd lock my doors and windows and never never never never never >leave my house again > >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today > >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today >That's your horoscope for today-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay >That's your horoscope for today From joshuatfox at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 09:42:49 2006 From: joshuatfox at gmail.com (Joshua Fox) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:42:49 +0300 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading Message-ID: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> Hi folks. This is my first post to extropy-chat. I hope it's worthy. Does anyone know what's up with wireheading? Various articles say that there have been experiments since the 1950s -- the technology has apparently been figured out. So why is this not in more common use? I can understand the desire to restrict the general use -- there might be risks with corrosion of the implants, overloading of brain functions, etc. But there are people with depression so deep that it destroys their ability to function and threatens their lives, and in some cases no other treatment works. (Indeed, there was an article on this in the New York Times a few months ago.) Still -- as far as I can tell wireheading is very rarely used for mental illness treatment. Why? And given the intense desire that humans have to get stoned, why is there not at least a little experimentation with recreational wireheading? (Yes, I know that a surgeon is needed, but on this world of 6.5 billion people, there is usually _someone_ with the adventurous spirit and the resources to try any given crazy experiment.) Joshua From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Thu Sep 28 10:18:09 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:18:09 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com><05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <005f01c6e2e7$6fadc620$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> I like that idea. Although, I've been working on my own, and it's to do with how religion effects the efficiency of your life. The entire point of most religions is for your to remain stupid and not think too much. If you sin or do wrong (including murdering and raping), you can always say sorry to god about it and you're sorted. Being agnostic, that got me to comparing that with my own life. I don't have a god to say sorry to. If I'm nasty to someone, or hurt their feelings (even online), that's my fault alone and I have to stress about it personally. I compare myself to my neighbor a lot, an Irish woman who is a regular church goer. Yet for the entire time I've lived next door to her (22 years now) all I've ever had from her is insulting remarks or her inviting herself into my personal life - she has, more than once, accused me face to face of lying to her about things as simple as cutting her plants. Neither does she remember my name, whilst I remember hers & her past job, her husband's & his jobs (past and present), her son's, her two dogs (who have been dead for years), a medical condition her son has and that they like going on walking holidays with a caravan. It made me wonder if perhaps this was easier for her to do because she new she had god on her side, or at least could say sorry to him about not being a very nice person. Next up came mind time. I spend every single day reading pages of stuff like this and journals. It's very difficult for me to find spare time to do other things and get on with less complex hobbies - like sitting around getting high watching Springer. Being agnostic is basically stressful. And stress is an important factor in lifespan. Being truly agnostic (not an atheist wanting to disguise your biases) uses up a lot of your spare time, in which others are out raising families. I would also guess that 'nerds' where around a long time ago, the kind of monkeys who stressed about working out the latest stick collecting technique for ants. Now, for a short period, that monkey will have an increased chance of reproducing with it's new trick (like internet heroes of today). But it won't take very long for another monkey to steal the idea or bully it's way into taking that advantage - exactly the same thing is still happening now in corporations (your patent is our patent). Religious people (including atheists) are, in general, working on the short term. They need someone to excuse their mistakes and the promise of some super reward when they're done with the short term. Agnostics and scientists in general don't have that so much. So that's my line of thought, that religion makes life easier for you by massively minimising the need for long term predictions (which require vast knowledge bases to make - an 'escape velocity', to use Aubrey's term, of knowledge). This also gets me on to an important question, I think. Is it fair to take religion away from some people? Say you work in a factory packing boxes 12 hours a day. You don't really have anywhere near enough free time to form a knowledge base large enough to make long term predictions. In these examples, perhaps it's not so bad that these people do have something like religion to keep them smiling. I believe the annoyance comes when we find people who most definitely do have the spare time to form more knowledgeable opinions, it's just that they can't be bothered. Remember that the church, ironically, used to be one of the driving forces of science and simply took money off it's crowd to fund it's work, all the time knowing they were proles who didn't understand it, now we have government issued tax and a kind of role reversal almost. John > There is a far more paranoid approach to religions. > > The capacity to have religions (that is the parasitic to symbiotic memes > that infest human populations) is a function (like everything else) of > some > feature of human brains that either was directly selected or is a side > effect of some feature that was selected in the environment of > evolutionary > adaptiveness (EEA). > > I have come to see religious memes as _seed xenophobic memes_. When a > population anticipates bad times a-coming, the gain on xenophobic memes > gets turned up. This is an evolved trait, i.e., the genes of people who > did it replicated better than the genes of people who did not in the EEA. > > In the EEA, bad times a-coming usually affected all the tribes or bands in > a considerable area. > > I propose that there is a selective advantage in such circumstances to > attacking first and that it takes time for xenophobic memes to build up to > the point warriors go on the attack. > > In such circumstances, seed xenophobic would shorten the time from > detection of ecological conditions to attack. Thus the psychological > trait > of carrying such memes (religions) between times when they were needed > would be favored. > > This explains an awful lot of the history of religions. > > Islamic society today generally faces a particularly bleak future. So it > should be expected that xenophobic memes in that society will be on the > rise. > > Unless something like nanotechnology intervenes to massively improve the > economic outlook of Islamic populations, they will attack. > > The western choice will be between killing them as a religious (Christian) > duty or killing them dispassionately. > > Not much of a choice from my viewpoint. :-( > > Keith Henson > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Thu Sep 28 10:43:30 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:43:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> > Does anyone know what's up with wireheading? I had to google that to check precisely what you actually meant. > Still -- as far as I can tell wireheading is very rarely used for > mental illness treatment. Why? It's possible for implants to wear down, cause irritation and require maintenance. That, combined with the implant and removal cost, means that drugs are probably seen as the more cost effective method. Suggestions of cutting into someone's head to cure a mental condition is knee jerkingly close to the idea of lobotomy, I know I'd associate the two at some level. > And given the intense desire that humans have to get stoned, why is > there not at least a little experimentation with recreational > wireheading? (Yes, I know that a surgeon is needed, but on this world > of 6.5 billion people, there is usually _someone_ with the adventurous > spirit and the resources to try any given crazy experiment.) I know there's at least one doctor attempting to help women with self-satisfying partners reach orgasm by implanting electrodes right up against their spinal cord. So far, he hasn't had many volunteers and less than 100% success with those who did. Humans have a natural wish to protect their nervous system, they don't like turning their back to things because they can't see it and it exposes their spine. They brain and twitch when things come close to their eyes and muscles contract in their ears to protect their ear drums from piercing noises. People can't see THC and it doesn't need parts of their body, near their most delicate and precious bits of tissue, to be cut open and manipulated. The THC washes out over time without any further effort. I am aware of a number of people, however, drilling holes in their heads. According to them, the hole releases pressure in the cavity and allows their brain to function in an enhanced state. Unfortunately for one of the two guys recently arrested for supplying almost the entire Western Hemisphere with LSD, two of their character witnesses happened to also believe in this process. I suppose you also have to take into account that most people simply don't understand electricity at all and don't want any form of it passing through them. To suggest you're going to do it directly to their brain is only worse. Then you have the whole thing of "maybe they're trying to control me", which -will- be a serious thought for the kind of people who'd initially justify this level of treatment. I, personally, dislike the idea of routinely stimulating macro areas of brain tissue unless it's absolutely necessary. It seems like trying to paint a photo realistic picture by splashing an A4 canvas with tins of paint. Saying all this, I don't think it'll be too long before we start seeing this kind of thing happening. Porno will be one of the primary drives behind public participation in neural interfaces. As soon as enough people start having such implants made, that function without any further maintenance, I expect you will see a good degree of growth in people having 'happy implants' made. Going cross topic for a second... perhaps they may also help with the decline of religion, when people no longer need god to be there for them because they're happy doing complex work anyway. John > Joshua > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 28 15:53:57 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:53:57 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Do the laws of nature last forever? Message-ID: <20060928155356.GU21640@leitl.org> From: Jef Allbright Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:25:40 -0700 To: Extropy-Chat List Subject: [Philosophy of Science] Do the laws of nature last forever? An item by Lee Smolin in the September issue of New Scientist caught my attention, both for the good points that it makes, and some bad assumptions that it harbors. I apologize for the long inclusions, necessary since this essay is not entirely available online. [1]http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125701.100-do-the-laws-of-nature-last-forever.html Do the laws of nature last forever? * 21 September 2006 * Lee Smolin In science we aim for a picture of nature as it really is, unencumbered by any philosophical or theological prejudice. Some see the search for scientific truth as a search for an unchanging reality behind the ever-changing spectacle we observe with our senses. The ultimate prize in that search would be to grasp a law of nature - a part of a transcendent reality that governs all change, but itself never changes. The idea of eternally true laws of nature is a beautiful vision, but is it really an escape from philosophy and theology? For, as philosophers have argued, we can test the predictions of a law of nature and see if they are verified or contradicted, but we can never prove a law must always be true. So if we believe a law of nature is eternally true, we are believing in something that logic and evidence cannot establish. Of course, laws of nature are very useful, and we have in fact been able to discover good candidates for them. But to believe a law is useful and reliable is not the same thing as to believe it is eternally true. We could just as easily believe there is nothing but an infinite succession of approximate laws. Or that laws are generalisations about nature that are not unchanging, but change so slowly that until now we have imagined them as eternal. These are disturbing thoughts for a theoretical physicist like myself. I chose to go into science because the search for eternal, transcendent laws of nature seemed a lofty goal. However, the possibility that laws evolve in time is one that recent developments in theoretical and experimental physics have forced me, and others, to consider. The biggest reason to consider that the laws of nature might evolve is the discovery that the universe itself is evolving. When we believed that the universe was eternal it made more sense to believe that the laws that governed it were also eternal. But the evidence we have now is that the universe - or at least the part of it we observe - has been around for only a few billion years. We know that the universe has been expanding for about 14 billion years and that as we go back in time it gets hotter and denser. We have good evidence that there was a moment when the cosmos was as hot as the centre of a star. If we use the laws that we know apply to space-time and matter today, we can deduce that a few minutes earlier the universe must have been infinitely dense and hot. Many cosmologists take this moment as the birth of the universe and indeed as the birth of space and time. Before this big bang there was nothing, not even time. Why these laws? So what could it mean to say that a universe only 14 billion years old is governed by laws that are eternally true? What were the laws doing before time and space? How did the universe know, at that moment of beginning, what laws to follow? Perhaps the solution to this is that the big bang was not the first instant of time. However, this raises a new question, which has been championed by the great theoretical physicist John Wheeler. Even if we believe the universe evolved from something that existed before the big bang, we have no reason to believe the laws of that previous universe were the same as those we observe in our universe. Might the laws have changed when our universe, or region of the universe, was created? This question came to the fore in 1973, when physicists first developed a theory of elementary particle physics called the standard model. This theory has successfully accounted for every experiment in particle physics before and since that time, apart from those that involve gravity. It only required a small modification to incorporate the later discovery that neutrinos have mass. As for gravity, all experiments support the general theory of relativity, which Einstein published in 1915. There may be further laws to discover, to do with the unification of gravity with quantum theory and with the other forces of nature. But in a certain sense, we have for the first time in history a set of laws sufficient to explain the result of every experiment that has ever been done. As a result, in the past three decades the attention of physicists has shifted from seeking to know the laws of nature to a new question: why these laws? Why do these laws, and not others, hold in our universe? Confronting this question while working on string theory in the 1980s, a few of us began to wonder whether the laws might have changed at the big bang, just as Wheeler had suggested. It was obvious that we could make a connection to biology. I wondered whether there might be an evolutionary mechanism that would allow us to answer the question of "why these laws?" in the same way that biology answers questions like "why these species?". Perhaps the mechanism that makes laws evolve also picks out certain laws and makes them more probable than others. I found such a mechanism, modelled on natural selection, which I called cosmological natural selection. This is possible because string theory is actually a collection of theories: it has a vast number of distinct versions, each of which gives rise to different collections of elementary particles and forces. We can think of the different versions of string theory as analogous to the different phases of water - ice, liquid and steam. When the universe is squeezed down to such tremendous densities and temperatures that the quantum properties of space-time become important, a phase transition can take place - like water turning to steam - leading from one version of the theory to another. The many different phases of string theory can also be seen as analogous to a variety of species governed by different DNA sequences. They can be imagined as making up a vast space, which I called the "landscape", to bring out the analogy to a "fitness landscape" in biology that represents all possible ways genes can be arranged. Cosmological natural selection makes a few predictions that could easily be falsified, and while it is too soon to claim strong evidence for it, those predictions have held up (New Scientist, 24 May 1997, p 38). At the very least, it opened my eyes to the possibility that a theory in which the laws changed in time could still make testable predictions. It turns out that I had been beaten to the punch: some philosophers had confronted these issues over a century ago. In 1891 the philosopher Charles Pierce wrote that it was hardly justifiable to suppose that universal laws of nature have no reason for their special form. "The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution," he added. Pierce went much further than I have done, asserting that the question "Why these laws?" has to be answered by a cosmological scenario analogous to evolution. But was he right? Let us start with an obvious objection: if laws evolve, what governs how they evolve? Does there not have to be some deeper law that guides the evolution of the laws? For example, when water turns into ice, more general laws continue to hold and govern how this phase transition happens - the laws of atomic physics. So perhaps, even if a law turns out to evolve in time, there is always a deeper, unchanging law behind that evolution. As Smolin says, "perhaps", but why must there be "deeper, unchanging law"? Granted, we are left with the mystery of the ultimate substrate of the universe, but isn't it simpler and reasonable to think in terms of an open-ended algorithmic process from which emerges increasing complexity that "works" within the preceding context but not within any absolute context? We tend to imagine processes playing out within a stable computational substrate, like a simulation within one of our computers, but this is an unnecessary assumption -- our impression of stability instead due to our being the result of a long chain of evolutionary processes that "worked" given their preceding context. Shapes of things to come Another example concerns the geometry of space. We used to think that space always followed the perfectly flat Euclidean geometry that we all learn in high school. This was considered one of the laws of nature, but Einstein's general theory of relativity asserts that this is wrong. The geometry of space can be anything it wants to be: any of an infinite number of curved geometries is possible. So what picks out the geometry we see? General relativity asserts that the geometry of space evolves in the course of time according to some deeper law. Today's geometry is what it is because it evolved from a different geometry in the past, following that definite law. However, there is a big problem with this kind of explanation, which has to do with the fact that the laws that govern the evolution of geometry are deterministic. They share this feature with most laws studied in physics, including Newton's laws and quantum mechanics. Consider Newton's law of motion for an object. If we know where the object is now and how it is moving, and we know the laws that govern the forces it encounters, we can predict where it will be and has been for all time, past as well as future. General relativity is the same. If we know the geometry of space at a particular time, and how it is changing, we can predict the whole history of space-time. To apply these deterministic laws, however, we have to give a description of the system at one point in time. This is called the initial condition. If we do not specify an initial condition, the laws cannot describe anything. This is why Einstein's equations do not fully explain why the geometry of space is what it is. They require an initial condition -the geometry at an earlier time. This brings us back to the dilemma about the big bang. Either the universe had no beginning, in which case the chain of causes goes further into the past, before the big bang; or the big bang was the beginning, and we require some explanation as to why it started and with what geometry. So we have arrived at a conundrum. It appears that if laws evolve, other laws are required to guide their evolution. But then, the evolution of a law is just like the evolution of any other system under a deterministic law. We cannot explain why something is true in the present without knowing its initial state. Applied to laws, this means we cannot explain what the laws are now if we do not specify what the laws were in the past. So the idea of laws evolving by following a deeper rule does not seem to lead to an explanation of "why these laws?". To avoid this we need an evolutionary mechanism that will allow us to deduce features of the present without having to know the past in detail. This is where Pierce's statement, which appears to invoke biological evolution, comes into its own. In biology, many features of living organisms can be explained by natural selection, even if one doesn't know details about the past. As the process is partly random, we cannot predict exactly what mix of species will evolve in a given ecosystem, but we can predict that the species that survive will be fitter than those that don't. This is, I believe, why Pierce insisted that any explanation of "why these laws?" involves evolution. And using this kind of logic, cosmological natural selection makes some predictions without detailed information about previous stages of the universe. But even this is unsatisfactory: it doesn't address the question of how a law that guides the evolution of matter in time could also change in time. For that, we have to examine the way we think about time. There are big problems with time, even before we start thinking about the evolution of laws of nature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of quantum gravity, which attempts to pull quantum theory and general relativity together into one consistent framework. This is because the two theories each use a different notion of time. In quantum theory, time is defined by a clock sitting outside the system being modelled. In general relativity, time is measured by a clock that is part of the universe that the theory describes. Many of the successes and failures of different approaches to quantum gravity rest on how they reconcile this conflict between time as an external parameter versus time as a physical property of the universe. However these questions are eventually resolved, there are still deeper issues with time. These arise in any theory in which the laws are taken as being eternal. To illustrate this, we can take a simple example, such as Newton's description of a system of particles. To formulate the theory we invent a mathematical space, consisting of all the positions that all the particles might have. Each point in the space is a possible configuration of the system of particles, so the whole space is called the configuration space. As the system evolves over time, it traces out a curve in configuration space called a history. The laws of physics then pick out which histories are possible and which are not. The problem with this description is that time has disappeared. The system is represented not by its state at a moment of time but by a history taking it through all time. This description of reality seems timeless. What has disappeared from it is any sense of the present moment, which divides our experience of the flow of time into past, present and future. This problem became particularly acute when it emerged in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Solving the theory gives a four-dimensional space-time history and no indication of "now". Why centralize the notion of a subjective sense of "now" when describing processes within a much larger -- indeed, cosmological -- context? I understand that importance of the role of the observer in any description, but it perpetuates paradoxical thinking to misplace the subjective point of view. The sense of "now" is a result -- an output -- of systems operating with the larger context; not something intrinsic to reality. Otherwise, one is forced to impute consciousness existing since the big bang and long before any self-aware biology, a notion with some appealing romantic connotations, but requiring expensive scaffolding for its support. Some, looking at this picture, have been tempted to say that reality is the whole timeless history and that any sense we have of a present moment is some kind of illusion. Shades of David Chalmers! We seem to have here a presumption of humans as privileged observers of the universe. Not that that isn't strongly reinforced by individual perception and cultural reinforcement, but again, such conceptual scaffolding is expensive in the longer term. Even if we don't believe this, the fact that one could believe it means that there is nothing in this description of nature that corresponds to our common-sense experience of past, present and future. This is called the problem of transience. Ah, I suppose my Buddhist training is helpful to appreciate such things. ;-) The sense of the universe unfolding or becoming in time, of "now", has no representation in general relativity. But in truth the problem was always there in Newton's physics and it is there in any theory in which some part of nature is described by a state that evolves deterministically in time, governed by a law that dictates change, but never changes. The illusion of now The philosopher Roberto Unger of Harvard University calls this the "poisoned gift of mathematics to physics". Many believe that mathematics represents truth in terms of timeless relationships, based on logic. It allows us to formulate physical laws precisely: this is the gift. By doing so, however, mathematics represents paths in configuration space unfolding in time by logic, and this logic exists outside of time. The poison in the gift is the disappearance of any notion of the present or of becoming. Poison to cherished concepts that don't stand well without scaffolding... Physicists and their predecessors have been eliminating time like this since the days of Descartes and Galileo at least. But is it the wrong thing to do? Is there a way to represent change through time in a way that represents our sense of becoming, or of time unfolding? I don't know the answer, but I suspect this question is connected to that of whether laws can evolve in time. One can only draw the curve representing a history in time by assuming that the laws which govern how the history evolves never change. Without a fixed, unchanging law, one could not draw the curve. Here is the question that keeps me awake these days: is there a way to represent the laws of physics mathematically that retains the notions of the present moment and the continual unfolding of time? And would this allow us - or even require us - to formulate laws that also evolve in time? Again, I don't know the answer, but I know of a few hints. One comes from theoretical biology. The configuration space for an evolutionary theorist is vast, consisting of all the possible sequences of DNA. At present, there is a particular collection representing all the species that exist. Evolution will produce new ones, while others will disappear. The interesting thing is that natural selection operates in such a way that biologists have little use for the entire configuration space. Instead, they need study only a much smaller space, which is those collections of genes that could be reached from the present one by a few evolutionary steps. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, calls this the "adjacent possible". This scheme allows laws to change. Consider the laws that govern sexual selection. They do not make sense for any old biosphere, as they only come into play when there are creatures with two sexes. So in evolutionary theory there is no need for eternal laws, and it makes sense to speak of a law coming into existence at some time to govern possibilities that did not exist before. Furthermore, there is such a vast array of possible mechanisms of natural selection that it would not make any sense to list them all and treat them as timeless. Better to think of laws coming into existence as the new creatures that evolve in each step require. Of course, one might reply that natural selection itself never changes. But natural selection is a fact of logic, not a contingent law of nature. Every real law in biology depends on some aspect of the creatures that exist at a given time, which means the laws are also time-bound. It is not impossible to achieve time-bound laws in physics. There are logicians who have proposed alternative systems of logic that incorporate a notion of time unfolding. In these logics, what is true and false is assigned for a particular moment, not for all time. For a given moment some propositions are true, others false, but there remains an infinite list of propositions that are yet to become either true or false. Once a proposition is true or false, it remains so, but at each moment new propositions become decided. These are called intuitionalist logics and they underlie a branch of mathematics called topos theory. Some of my colleagues have studied these logics as a model for physics. Fotini Markopoulou of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has shown that aspects of space-time geometry can be described in terms of these logics. Chris Isham of Imperial College London and others propose to reformulate physics completely in terms of them. It is interesting that some physicists now propose that the universe is some kind of computer, because similar questions are being asked in computer science. In the standard architecture all computers now use, invented by the mathematician John von Neumann, the operating system never changes. It governs the flow of information through a computer just as an eternal law of nature is thought to guide physics. But some visionary computer scientists such as Jaron Lanier wonder whether there could be other kinds of architectures and operating systems that themselves evolve in time. Biologically inspired computational architectures certainly have promise, but one shouldn't imply that Jaron Lanier has been central to this thinking. [2]http://www.google.com/search?q=biological+computing+architecture&st art=0 Looking at biology, it seems there are advantages to what are, essentially, time-bound laws. Evolving laws might make computer systems similarly robust and less likely to do what the laws of natural selection, it seems, never do: crash. The universe, too, seems to function rather well, operating without glitches and fatal errors. Again confusing the varying levels of context. Of course, from the ultimate objective point of view the universe never crashes -- it just is -- but there can be no observer at that context. Within any actual observer context, there will be unpredictable events -- crashes -- despite everything working quite deterministically. Perhaps that's because natural selection is hard at work in the laws of nature. Yes, thanks for this and a few other valuable insights, glimpsed through the scaffolding. From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 21 September 2006, page 30-35 References Visible links 1. BLOCKED::http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125701.100-do-the-laws-of-nature-last-forever.html 2. BLOCKED::http://www.google.com/search?q=biological+computing+architecture&start=0 Hidden links: 3. BLOCKED::http://www.newscientist.com/podcast.ns#paholder ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 16:08:46 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:08:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments [was Re: Islamic morons win yet again] Message-ID: On 9/28/06, John wrote: > > This also gets me on to an important question, I think. Is it fair to take > religion away from some people? One of those "ah-ha" moments that I had 25+ years ago involved someone wise (I'm unsure of the precise individual now) saying, "Never take away someones belief system unless you are willing to replace it with an alternative." I still think that is a wise observation after many many years. It is also true that one could view one of the problems with "transhumanism" is that it lacks a unified set of beliefs (principles) that could be substituted into a belief framework once one dismantles those which are problematic. That may be one reason I've always been fond of extropianism -- from a central belief valuing "information" (or complexity) one can derive many functional principles (commandments). It would be interesting to compare commandments from the branches of transhumanism with those of extropianism (which I would tend to think are more narrowly constrained). For example (from an extropic framework): 1) Information of greater complexity has greater value than information of lesser complexity. 2) Information in agreement with the natural laws and history of the universe has greater value than information in disagreement with the natural laws and history of the universe. 3) Thou shalt seek to maximize the amount of information and its complexity in existence. 4) Thou shalt seek to make such information available to the greatest number of computational units to derive more information from it. So for example "Thou shalt not kill" derives from #3 while "Thou shalt not lie" derives from #2. But a number of other "classical" commandments have no place or are contraindicated under such guidelines. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 28 16:29:54 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:29:54 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: <200609270423.k8R4Nkml015357@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609270423.k8R4Nkml015357@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1693.163.1.72.81.1159460994.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: >> Vacuum's video for "I Breathe" >> http://youtube.com/watch?v=GPjqynQzuC0&mode=related&search= >> >> Any other good equations in music videos?... Anders Sandberg, > > The other video on that YouTube site called Pride in My Religion has some > great equationage. That group Vacuum has a great sound with terrific > concept. Best thing since Abba. {8^D And cool flying cardinals in the lab. The song "Science of the Sacred" has a little saintly girl with a pi medallion around her neck. Some of the members went on to create the band Bodies Without Organs, which has a nice video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=pws5OsDWRvM&mode=related&search= The song includes the lines: You will have to change your notion Bodies in motion Joining the transhuman race We should be the first transforming Sweet global warming Marvel at the beauty of space Never shed a tear to cry time goes by Playing a game with your mind Fall into a deep organic sleeping titanic Frozen to wake up in time -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 28 16:48:09 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:48:09 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> John wrote: >> Still -- as far as I can tell wireheading is very rarely used for >> mental illness treatment. Why? > > It's possible for implants to wear down, cause irritation and require > maintenance. That, combined with the implant and removal cost, means that > drugs are probably seen as the more cost effective method. Yes. Expensive, risky and not permanent enough. But deep brain stimulation, as the method is called in medicine, is actually used in some conditions. Here in Oxford there is a team working on intractable pain using DBS, for example. And people are using various anti-Parkinson treatments along the same lines. While none of these targets (periaqueductal grey matter and the basal ganglia) actually produce pleasure reactions, cerebellum stimulation for palsy appears to be enjoyable: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9711743&dopt=Abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=3314373&query_hl=5&itool=pubmed_docsum >> And given the intense desire that humans have to get stoned, why is >> there not at least a little experimentation with recreational >> wireheading? (Yes, I know that a surgeon is needed, but on this world >> of 6.5 billion people, there is usually _someone_ with the adventurous >> spirit and the resources to try any given crazy experiment.) > > I know there's at least one doctor attempting to help women with > self-satisfying partners reach orgasm by implanting electrodes right up > against their spinal cord. So far, he hasn't had many volunteers and less > than 100% success with those who did. I guess this shows that we humans are not quite as pleasure seeking as we think. I think one could probably whip up an amateur TMS system and stimulate the brain. But none of the pleasure systems are close to the surface, so it would be better for just creating weird sensations, some cognitive enhancement and accidentally priming epilepsy. > I am aware of a number of people, however, drilling holes in their heads. > According to them, the hole releases pressure in the cavity and allows > their > brain to function in an enhanced state. Unfortunately for one of the two > guys recently arrested for supplying almost the entire Western Hemisphere > with LSD, two of their character witnesses happened to also believe in > this > process. Well, the trepanation movement has no convincing evidence that they get an enhaning effect. I would bet on a massive placebo effect. Imagine that you had done something as drastic as getting a hole in your cranium - wouldn't that convince you that you must be feeling better now? Why use surgery when there are so good drugs around? Actually, one could combine them: inserting a cannula into the basal forebrain and releasing microdoses of cocaine would probably be a great kick, and I think that one could get around some of the systemic bad effects of cocaine this way. And the placebo factor would be a real kicker. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 28 16:50:40 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:50:40 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cypherpunk Dreams, was Re: Rapid prototyping makes police state more likely In-Reply-To: <5366105b0609261143x35dae838g6fe2f6fa9111ee18@mail.gmail.com> References: <5366105b0609261143x35dae838g6fe2f6fa9111ee18@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060928165039.GX21640@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 06:43:49PM +0000, Jay Dugger wrote: > > I don't think this is going to happen. Our cypherpunk dreams never > > materialized. Anything involving threats at the physical layer will > > cause societies to go into armadillo mode. Kiss your residual freedoms > > good-bye then. > > Why do you suppose our "cypherpunk dreams never materialized," and There are many reasons, some more important than the others. It takes a critical mass for interoperability, and most users never cared (in fact, most even never knew and are still naive). Alternatively, the activists never realized how weird they really were. The infrastructure itself was never developed. Some designs appeared close (MojoNation, MNet, a few others) but nothing with all the required facets emerged. On the political side the IP lobby and professional manipulators managed to pass a number of laws and influence the public opinion using the usual apocalyptic riders (in some cases, such as the AP crackdown, even statuated harsh examples for deterrence). Also, anonymity (reasonably simple to implement) invites abuse. I was on the phone with a police officer just today actually, who was investigating a case of online fraud involving Tor, and you might or might not have heard about the recent Tor server seizure in Germany (mine was spared), and actually abuse and borderline illegal acitivities dominate the current network. I'm hoping the current privacy witch hunt will encourage more people to protect themselves, but of course the situation could result just as well with activists ending up impaled on the stake themselves. CCC claimed we lost the war, but not quite yet. It will be certainly not worthwhile to stay on fascist networks legally, that's for certain. Otoh, intelligence is not corellated with risk-taking, so the new networks won't be anything like the old. A really disruptive approach would be a completely unregulated low-cost Iridium launched by a rogue billionaire, but of course you can still penalize end-user devices, unless fabbing is low-threshold that black market is impossible to eradicate. See, we're weird. Never going to happen. > exactly what hopes does that phrase express? I have my own answers for The original idea involved a lightweight digital currency infrastructure, which was supposed to obsolete national currencies, the network becoming the global, unregulated, realtime marketplace. Another facet was a distributed cryptographic filestore allowing uncensorable communication and publishing, allowing both one-time and persistent nyms and supporting prestige accounting. This has turned out far more challenging than anticipated, even ignoring the issues of user base criticality (bootstrap). I'm still hoping we'll be getting a case of severe abuse and subsequent backlash, but these chances are arguably thin. The metal chutes of the slaughterhouse are steep, and slickened in blood. The hope was that the network would become the last unregulated frontier (lacking access to space), which humanity so desperately needs in order to progress. It was so highly frustrating to talk to scientific publishing professionals in mid-90s about the fundamental change in scientific publishing that cheap computers and networks where about to unleash. Of course it was precisely the establishment that had the least interest in novelty, and the most to lose from the lumpenscientist threat. As budgets plummet, and the old fogeys (literally) die out, this is slowly starting to change. At least open source still has got a reasonably good press, for time being, so we're not completely screwed. But, this is a fight for somebody else. > this, but yours interest me. I also think they'd generally interest > the list. I'm not sure. Tim May is just a troll on the Usenet. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 28 17:01:50 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:01:50 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <1873.163.1.72.81.1159462910.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Anders Sandberg wrote: > I think one could probably whip up an amateur TMS system and stimulate the > brain. But none of the pleasure systems are close to the surface, so it > would be better for just creating weird sensations, some cognitive > enhancement and accidentally priming epilepsy. People are working on an opensource TMS: http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki-index.php Whether it ever gets anywhere is of course also open. But in principle making a TMS coil ought to be very easy, and then one would just need to connect it to a low frequency signal generator. Making something safe and serious like this project seems to aim at is much harder. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Sep 28 17:10:56 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:10:56 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928120914.023880d8@satx.rr.com> At 06:48 PM 9/28/2006 +0200, Anders wrote: >I think one could probably whip up an amateur TMS system and stimulate the >brain. But none of the pleasure systems are close to the surface, so it >would be better for just creating weird sensations, some cognitive >enhancement and accidentally priming epilepsy. Everyone forgotten Alex Ramonsky ? He was here just yesterday with a post. Alex has been doing DIY TMS for years, and has written a book about it. Damien Broderick From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Sep 28 17:21:22 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:21:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> Message-ID: <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> matus at matus1976.com wrote: > "Absolute statements are stupid. " > > Of course that is an absolute statement, so is it stupid as well? > > ----- Original Message ----- > On 9/27/06, John K Clark wrote: > >> All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others. >> >> > > Absolute statements are stupid. Some more so than others. > > If you're just trolling for comments, then I'm sorry I responded. If you > really are too close-minded to realize that your anti-religious beliefs are > approaching religious zeal, then I am sorry for you. If neither of these > are true, then disregard this email. :) > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > As many of you know I am no stranger to religion and religious sentiments. I fully understand its attraction and power. Because I understand and have "been there" I consider religion the most dangerous meme complex on the planet. I thus believe that opposing it and denouncing it is extremely important to the health and wellbeing of humanity. - samantha From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 28 17:22:08 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:22:08 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments [was Re: Islamic morons win yet again] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1896.163.1.72.81.1159464128.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> I like the commandments list, but it has the usual problem of leaving what complexity (or extropy) is undefined. [ Right now one of our ethicists is actually wrestling with that issue, and is somewhat interested in an ethics like the one suggested by the commandments. I'll see if we can get him to build some academic quality philosophy around it :-) ] Even if we agree on what complexity is we still have to decide whether these commandments are ethical or aesthetic statements. One could see them as merely desires, but I expect they are to be interpreted as moral commands. I guess another set of commandments would be based on the humanist roots of transhumanism (stealing a bit from the transhumanist principles 1.0): 1) The goal is the flourishing of minds. 2) Diversity is good because it gives new content to the minds and allows finding alternative solutions. To achieve this we must: 2) Remove the evolved limits of our biological and intellectual inheritance, the physical limits of our environment, and the cultural and historical limits of society that constrain individual and collective progress. 3) Since we want to actually achieve the goal we must use efficient and error-correcting means, which implies rational and empirical means and thinking. 4) Given the uncertainty in our information and the results of our actions, as well as the diversity of opinions, we should tolerate people of all schools of thought that do not seek to limit the extent or variety of our achievement. Discourage any attempts to impose will or ideas through coercion. The left-wing transhumanists would of course expand 2 in a very different way than the libertarian ones, but I think this would be a core most would agree on. But there are lots of devils in the details... Robert Bradbury wrote: > For example (from an extropic framework): > > 1) Information of greater complexity has greater value than information of > lesser complexity. > 2) Information in agreement with the natural laws and history of the > universe has greater value than information in disagreement with the > natural > laws and history of the universe. > 3) Thou shalt seek to maximize the amount of information and its > complexity > in existence. > 4) Thou shalt seek to make such information available to the greatest > number > of computational units to derive more information from it. > > So for example "Thou shalt not kill" derives from #3 while "Thou shalt not > lie" derives from #2. But a number of other "classical" commandments have > no place or are contraindicated under such guidelines. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Sep 28 17:27:11 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:27:11 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928120914.023880d8@satx.rr.com> References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com> <00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928120914.023880d8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <1925.163.1.72.81.1159464431.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Damien Broderick wrote: > Everyone forgotten Alex Ramonsky ? He was here > just yesterday with a post. Alex has been doing DIY TMS for years, > and has written a book about it. Paf! Of course, I even got it in my bookshelf (and at http://home.ramonsky.com/stuff/icmm/index.html ). Hey! Who's been tinkering with my hippocampus?! -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Sep 28 18:51:41 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:51:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <1896.163.1.72.81.1159464128.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1896.163.1.72.81.1159464128.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928134830.023889e0@satx.rr.com> At 07:22 PM 9/28/2006 +0200, Anders wrote: >I like the commandments list, but it has the usual problem of leaving what >complexity (or extropy) is undefined. [ Right now one of our ethicists is >actually wrestling with that issue, and is somewhat interested in an >ethics like the one suggested by the commandments. I'll see if we can get >him to build some academic quality philosophy around it :-) ] Rather than "complexity" (too... complex... a term) or "extropy" (which now has a partisan ring to it, inevitably), perhaps: Syntropy From Wikipedia Syntropy is a term popularized by Buckminster Fuller but also developed by others to refer to an "anti-entropy" or "negentropy". The following definition, referencing Fuller, can be found on a web site on "Whole Systems": "A tendency towards order and symmetrical combinations, designs of ever more advantageous and orderly patterns. Evolutionary cooperation. Anti-entropy."[1] Fuller's use dates to 1956. Just a thought. Damien Broderick From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Thu Sep 28 18:59:20 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:59:20 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <8760b3f20609280242l567c0fdbjac448b37afecd110@mail.gmail.com><00b301c6e2ea$fa524c80$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> <1777.163.1.72.81.1159462089.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <003801c6e330$474a39e0$1d160751@heritagekd9czj> > inserting a cannula into the basal forebrain and releasing > microdoses of cocaine would probably be a great kick, and I think that one > could get around some of the systemic bad effects of cocaine this way. And > the placebo factor would be a real kicker. Reminds me of the bodyswap episode of Red Dwarf; "LISTER: (upon seeing a large needle that KRYTEN just removed the air from and looking worried) Kryten, what's that for? KRYTEN: It's a mental emetic. LISTER: A what? KRYTEN: A mind enema -- so we can flush out your brain. LISTER: Nobody's flush'n out my brain. KRYTEN: We'll transfer it back afterwards. LISTER: You are not sticking that thing in my head KRYTEN: Keep that safe -- it's Lister's mind. He hands the small cassette to CAT. As they are all looking at it CAT drops it into a mug of coffee. RIMMER recoils very quickly. CAT, looking most apologetic, but not quite managing to hide an evil smirk, removes the cassette from his coffee and slinks off." John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Thu Sep 28 20:05:22 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:05:22 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments [was Re: Islamic morons winyet again] References: Message-ID: <009001c6e339$786ce000$1d160751@heritagekd9czj> >One of those "ah-ha" moments that I had 25+ years ago involved someone wise (I'm unsure of >the precise individual now) saying, "Never take away someones belief system unless you are >willing to replace it with an alternative." > >I still think that is a wise observation after many many years. I started to come to this conclusion on my own when I was 20 or 21 - genuinely, which so few agnostics are I suspect. I would alter it perhaps to "Never take away someone's belief system unless they're willing to accept yours" Science is not only not accepted by the people being forced away from religion, it openly admits it's flawed in what it can offer them. Now that last bit needs clarification. It's flawed in regards to not offering immediate and ultimate salvation, not it's short term. And that's a point I was going to make about the commandments. I don't think it's so much the commandments of religion that attracts people to it. It's the element of passing blame and responsibility, getting rid of death and having to feel personally responsible, all things that really drag at the heels of an idiot like me. The idea of buying, trading, bartering, whatever you want to call it, is fixed hard into our minds. The commandments of regular religion act almost like 'buying credits' for people to trade their way towards the more positive elements. In the same way that some people will pay for an object and others will just steal it, people will do the same with religion. Most Westerns steal it, in that they're religious but don't go to church or pray, or really obey the commandments. Then they feel embarassed and make token gestures towards it just in case. Fundamentalists are the other extreme and will pray a multiple of times per day perhaps. But even still, the price they pay for the item they receive is still cheap. It also helps that the commandments are things that, particularly back when they were invented for christians, were and still are almost universally accepted as positive for the group's welfare - no killing each other or lying, etc. Science on the other hand, offers no promise of salvation or excuses from responsibility. Further, every step you take along the very long path it takes to get to be a 'believer' in it's potential to offer some form of salvation (as we are) seems to have little immediate gain to the majority. It's complex stuff that needs interweaving and memory space, formulas and ideas that don't seem to mean anything on their own - you need to know about a whole load of other empirical findings for it to start clicking into place in the web that will allow you to form long term predictions. None of which is necessary for standard religion, you just choose it and you're done. Then you have science that routinely sets deadlines for when to expect things to happen, that don't emerge on time. So when the next scientist says "we'll have hover cars by then", they get laughed at by the people who are waiting to ride the golden elevator to heaven, who've heard the same thing over and over and not seen it happen. The bible is very careful of setting specific dates to hold events to, it's all on the promise of someday. There also seems to be some form of disconnect that occurs in standard religion, whereby the events and promises are so extreme and so desired, that people can more easily disconnect the need to actually make predictions on their likelyhood - it's too complex (like people don't enjoy thinking about the combinations on lottery balls). You can say something similar with science, that one day decades from now we might have life extension techniques that can keep us alive for centuries. But to the people who are approaching death now, that, combined with the factor of promises not being kept to (and probably other's that I've forgotten to mention), is no help. And they'll go on to teach their kids what they religiously believe almost to reassure themselves of it's worth. I'm growing increasingly concerned with precisely what kind of effect people like Dawkins are having on kids as well in their attempt to create media shocks in regards to religion. I think we're bringing up a dangerous level of kids with the attitude that any question outside of numbers on a piece of paper is of no worth. That they'll deny the possibility before even looking at it. However, lab rats who do practical lab work day in day out need to believe in something, and if outright denial that some religious questions are worth consideration is their way of reassuring themselves that their 9-5 job is worth it, perhaps they deserve that as well. On one hand you have the physical labourer, on the other the intellectual. Each may deserve their own hit of opium a day to keep them going. With people like us in the middle, hoping that we'll have life extension tanks online before we finally switch off. There are (almost :) unquestionably positive gains to being religious in terms of what it does to your own personal outlook on life. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Thu Sep 28 19:30:58 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:30:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments Message-ID: <380-220069428193058562@M2W025.mail2web.com> From: Damien Broderick >Rather than "complexity" (too... complex... a term) or "extropy" >(which now has a >partisan ring to it, inevitably), Extropy, by its very nature, cannot have a partisan ring to it. It is perpetually expanding exponentially, growing outward inevitably in a meaningful and postive direction. Natasha Natasha Vita-More http://www.natasha.cc -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Sep 28 20:37:10 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:37:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928134830.023889e0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: Damien Broderick wrote: > > Rather than "complexity" (too... complex... a term) or "extropy" > (which now has a partisan ring to it, inevitably), perhaps: > > Syntropy > From Wikipedia > Syntropy is a term popularized by Buckminster Fuller but also > developed by others to refer to an "anti-entropy" or "negentropy". > The following definition, referencing Fuller, can be found on > a web site on "Whole Systems": "A tendency towards order and > symmetrical combinations, designs of ever more advantageous > and orderly patterns. > Evolutionary cooperation. Anti-entropy."[1] Fuller's use > dates to 1956. Wow, thanks Damien! Somehow I missed this term from Bucky's lexicon and for 25 years or so I've been mistakenly disappointed that synergetics was as far as this terminology went with him. His definition does highlight a problem with useful definitions of complexity however, as increasing symmetry becomes increasingly dull and useless near the limit. Think one huge crystal. [Oh, pretty!] Not much can be done with it. What's interesting happens at the edges, the "adjacent possible" in Stuart Kauffman's words. Of course, "ever more advantageous" is the key phrase, and it highlights the essential element of subjectivity that scientifically-minded people have tended to turn their backs on. And thanks to the work of Shannon, G?del, Chaitan, the Santa Fe Institute and many others, we're becoming more sophisticated in our understanding of complexity, or at least in our understanding that the more we learn the more questions open up. Back to Robert's list of extropian commandments: 1) Information of greater complexity has greater value than information of lesser complexity. 2) Information in agreement with the natural laws and history of the universe has greater value than information in disagreement with the natural laws and history of the universe. 3) Thou shalt seek to maximize the amount of information and its complexity in existence. 4) Thou shalt seek to make such information available to the greatest number of computational units to derive more information from it. I share his fondness for an abstract idea of "extropy" as fundamental to a workable system of morality. And if Robert would agree with me that his items 1 and 2 must be combined to form a single value statement, then we'd be most of the way there. Statement #1 The problem with #1 is not only that it lacks a precise definition of, but that it lacks the element of agency necessary for any statement about value. The way it is worded, it asserts an objective value statement, obvious to anyone possessing the necessary context to understand it. However, there exists no objective agent, and the ultimate objective viewpoint holds no values -- things simply are as they are. More to the point of #1, increasing information is of no use whatsoever unless it meets some purpose. We could quite easily go about analyzing and cataloging sand on a seashore and compile great masses of complex structured information, but it's easy to see that this would be of little value relative to other possible activities. As it stands by itself, #1 may appear elegant, but it's incomplete. Statement #2 This assertion hits a key element (knowledge) on-target, but like #1, lacks the same factor of subjectivity (or limited context). Put them together and we would have something useful. The problem with #2 (and this may be only Robert's choice of semantics) is that all of our information is incomplete and contingent. We can never say that something is objectively true, but only that it appears true within a context. [And no, I am most definitely not a post-modernist.] Therefore a better approach to this might be to say that our knowledge is increasingly valuable as it is increasingly assessed as working over increasing scope. [Yes, I'm aware of the multiple use of "increasingly" and have not found a good way to avoid this without mathematical notation. For those of us who think in pictures, imagine an expanding sphere of effectivity becoming increasingly visible.] So, if one were to combine #1 and #2 into a statement about (increasingly structured knowledge (that works over increasing scope (as assessed by some agent)))then I think we'd be off to a good start in defining knowledge of "good". Take one more step (change "some agent" to "an increasing population of interacting agents") and I think we'd be off to a good start in defining knowledge of what's considered "moral." I also agree that (partially and in general), humankind's moral codes, such as the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, The Buddhist Precepts, verses from the Quran, even the Wiccan Threefold Law, can be derived from the above, because they are reflections (at a cultural level) of behaviors that have been tested in a competitive environment and persisted because they worked. At an even lower level of contextual awareness, human feelings of disgust, pride, envy, and so on serve as instinctive indicators of good and bad. In such derivations, key factors include recognition of self, other, and synergetic growth (requiring diversity, conflict and cooperation.) When considering metaethics, it's interesting to note that while it's not possible to get agreement (even in principle) on what is ultimately "good", it is most certainly possible to get agreement in principle on moving from "good" to "better". Therein lies the Arrow of Morality. I've exceeded my five-paragraph rule, so I'm going to leave it at that, but with a hint to think where this could lead if we imagine the progression of human ethical decision-making progressing from instinctual -> self-conscious individual -> cultural -> augmented cultural... - Jef From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 00:27:36 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:27:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> Message-ID: <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> "religion" is a dangerous meme? Not a particular religion, just "religion" in general? Why denounce religion? I can understand your personal decision to not partake of religion, but how is it productive to actively campaign against it? Let's say you could 'wipe out' the religion meme, what would you go after next? Prevailing public opinion? That would be a good way to ensure that everyone is forced to think for themselves too. Maybe once you accomplish that, you can denounce general consensus just for the fun of it. sorry about the sarcasm. I'm aware of it, but rarely turn it off. Honestly though, I am curious what you think about the value of even attempting to 'fight' a religion meme. On 9/28/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > matus at matus1976.com wrote: > > "Absolute statements are stupid. " > > > > Of course that is an absolute statement, so is it stupid as well? > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > On 9/27/06, John K Clark wrote: > > > >> All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than > others. > >> > >> > > > > Absolute statements are stupid. Some more so than others. > > > > If you're just trolling for comments, then I'm sorry I responded. If > you > > really are too close-minded to realize that your anti-religious beliefs > are > > approaching religious zeal, then I am sorry for you. If neither of > these > > are true, then disregard this email. :) > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > As many of you know I am no stranger to religion and religious > sentiments. I fully understand its attraction and power. Because I > understand and have "been there" I consider religion the most dangerous > meme complex on the planet. I thus believe that opposing it and > denouncing it is extremely important to the health and wellbeing of > humanity. > > - samantha > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bret at bonfireproductions.com Fri Sep 29 01:21:03 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:21:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" Re: Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6E423681-26D3-4B74-BD4D-6B7645D5E5B5@bonfireproductions.com> I am enjoying this thread, I think it is a great idea. I'd like to offer some points. In using the word "Commandments" you are seeking to engage, consciously or not, a group of people whose defense of this term will range from casual through deadly serious. I offer that we come up with a term that is non-competitive. Even this thread being archived will offer fodder for someone, somewhere. Of course for the purpose of this intellectual exercise everyone understands what we are saying, where we are going with this and that the word chosen is best for the context. Helping people to understand our point begins with opening their minds, not closing them. I see that what we are aiming for in this conversation is different from the Extropian Principles, something new. In its new-ness, to give the idea a fair shot, it should be allowed to stand and develop on its own, free of the stigma (no pun intended) of pre-existing work. Just a thought. Freeing us from religious context removes us from a fight we do not need. Let rationality prevail through acceptance, not competition. Many east/west religious blending happens at the philosophical level without challenging theistic preferences. We should come in at that level, not at that of replacement or challenge per se. /humble opinion. Bret K. From bret at bonfireproductions.com Fri Sep 29 01:37:02 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:37:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <009001c6e339$786ce000$1d160751@heritagekd9czj> References: <009001c6e339$786ce000$1d160751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <274E3AAB-47EF-4B90-9C40-C669C6B4676B@bonfireproductions.com> On Sep 28, 2006, at 4:05 PM, John wrote: > Then you have science that routinely sets deadlines for when to > expect things to happen, that don't emerge on time. So when the > next scientist says "we'll have hover cars by then", they get > laughed at by the people who are waiting to ride the golden > elevator to heaven, who've heard the same thing over and over and > not seen it happen. The bible is very careful of setting specific > dates to hold events to, it's all on the promise of someday Ah, but science does not do this. Science says that there will be a lunar eclipse next Thursday, at exactly this time, viewed exactly from this range of locations. And these things always take place as advertised when the math is done properly. That is what people need to be taught - the hover-car salesman is not a scientist. > I'm growing increasingly concerned with precisely what kind of > effect people like Dawkins are having on kids as well in their > attempt to create media shocks in regards to religion. I think > we're bringing up a dangerous level of kids with the attitude that > any question outside of numbers on a piece of paper is of no worth. > That they'll deny the possibility before even looking at it. I'm not sure I follow you here - what exactly is wrong with denying the possibility before even looking at it? Don't you think it is more harmful to indoctrinate that there has to be something? The majority of religious people are the religions of their parent (s). What choice did they have? This is part of why I made my earlier remark about steering us away from the use of the word "commandments" - Religion isn't about making choices for yourself. Let's not sully our work here with it. /imho. Bret K. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Fri Sep 29 01:14:43 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:14:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com><451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00c201c6e364$a5ff3b00$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: Mike Dougherty Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 5:27 PM >> "religion" is a dangerous meme? Not a particular religion, just "religion" in general? > Why denounce religion? I can understand your personal decision to not partake of religion, but how is it productive to actively campaign against it? Why not? Religion - as long is it contains superstitious nonsense - legitimizes thinking of the irrational kind, and thereby supports all the "religious extremists" (whom the moderates like to say they do not support). And as long as the superstitious factor is alive and kicking in whatever particular religion one may espouse, I can't understand how one can be a "religious liberal" and look down on the "religious fundamentalists and jihadists" ... because while the religious may play for different teams - they inhabit the same island, and all play for the same parochial Camp Woo Woo Mucka (and follow many of the same religious rituals like praying, believing in weird things, etc. - albeit the weird things may differ from team to team). Having said that, however, I must admit I know atheists who believe in weird things, as well (astrology, alternative medicine, and the like) - so it's not enough simply not to believe in a god/goddess or gods. There's no (rational v. irrational) two ways about it. One would do well to develop good habits of skeptical thought and stop being intellectually compromised. One small step away from [insert god or political ideology of choice] ... could be one giant leap for humankind. That is to say, dealing with the REAL world would be a good start. Olga -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Fri Sep 29 01:19:09 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:19:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) Message-ID: <000d01c6e365$4471f980$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: Olga Bourlin Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 6:14 PM > ... One would do well to develop good habits of skeptical thought and stop being intellectually compromised. One small step away from [insert god or political ideology of choice] ... Sorry - I meant to say "unquestioning" political ideology ... Olga -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 29 02:15:07 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:15:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com > References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> I like "(no subject)" being the subject line on the topic of religion. Apt! Damien Broderick From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 03:05:08 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:05:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> Well, since you went with a point by point critique... You might have missed my earlier clarification - I was making a joke about absolute statements. I have not been on this list for very long. Perhaps I used 'trolling' incorrectly. I meant "generally attempting to get a reaction" - which was not intended to judge the total of your contribution to date as much your mood at that moment. "been there done that" - that's a great way to follow a criticism about how banally standard my own comment was. Again, I failed to express myself in a way that you would appreciate my point. Attacking "religion" as a broad category of worldview without allowing for the possibility that it has value for those who 'believe' is a one-side approach. This strikes me as being similarly effective as a devout worshipper trying to convince you to give up your rationality to embrace their belief. "You're wrong, change your thinking to my view" is rarely an effective way to influence someone. I would suggest that if you really wanted to disinfect a particular strain of religious belief that you would have to understand the behavior of the meme in much the same way the biological viral activity is studied before it can be effectively countered with drugs. Ok then, I am not sorry for you. I also do not have contempt either. To be honest I really don't care much beyond reading any particular email. I will say that I do actually recognize your name now that I look - I'm not sure why, perhaps you wrote something in the past that (at that moment) struck me as particularly relevant or well stated. "this form of attack" is an interesting way to express this thought - I meant no offense. If you took my tone as such... (I can't say I'm sorry, you've already expressed how that is a damned lie) ... too bad, get over it. :) BTW, I do not consider myself a "religious nincompoop" - I was mostly just playing devil's advocate. Perhaps it was *I* who was 'trolling' at the time. Thanks for playing along. This may be one of the longest threads I have participated in for a while. On 9/28/06, John K Clark wrote: > > Mike Dougherty Wrote: > > > Absolute statements are stupid. > > Rather like the one you just wrote. And if you can't call a spade a spade > on > the Extropian list where the hell can you? Religion is stupid. Absolutely! > > > If you're just trolling > > I'm flattered. As I've been on this list for over a decade so you must > think > I deserve to be in the Guinness Book of world records as the longest > living > troll in internet history. > > > If you really are too close-minded > > One should always be open minded, but not so open minded that all your > brains fall out. > > >to realize that your anti-religious beliefs are approaching religious > zeal > > Standard attack. You know your opponent hates religion so you accuse your > opponent of being religious. Boring. Been there done that. > > > then I am sorry for you. > > Bullshit. You are lying through your teeth. Whenever somebody uses the > clich? "I am sorry for you" they are never, EVER, expressing genuine > sympathy, rather they are trying to express contempt. However this form of > attack has proven to be somewhat less than brilliantly effective with me. > Whenever a religious nincompoop says he doesn't like what I say I am > proud. > PROUD! > > John K Clark jonkc at att.net > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 03:10:43 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:10:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <005f01c6e2e7$6fadc620$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060927220237.043bada0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <005f01c6e2e7$6fadc620$332e0751@heritagekd9czj> Message-ID: <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> On 9/28/06, John wrote: > > Religious people (including atheists) are, in general, working on the > short > term. They need someone to excuse their mistakes and the promise of some > super reward when they're done with the short term. ... Remember that the church, ironically, used to be one of the driving forces > of science and simply took money off it's crowd to fund it's work, all the > time knowing they were proles who didn't understand it, now we have > government issued tax and a kind of role reversal almost. > Thanks John for providing the kind of rational and insightful approach to this "religion" argument that I was hoping to read on a list for smart people. (Ok, maybe that's not the list charter, but it's an impression I continue to hold) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Fri Sep 29 03:08:47 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:08:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com><451C0492.3010109@mac.com><62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "Damien Broderick" Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 7:15 PM >I like "(no subject)" being the subject line on the topic of religion. Apt! And, yes ... what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! :) Olga From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 29 03:52:27 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:52:27 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> At 08:08 PM 9/28/2006 -0700, Olga wrote: > >I like "(no subject)" being the subject line on the topic of religion. Apt! > >And, yes ... what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! :) Well, have to disagree. It surely serves a number of functions, as does the instilled conviction that women and other lesser breeds are stupider than men, etc. The fact that the alleged subject matter of religion (one or more supposed deities) is an empty class doesn't prevent the activity from having clear benefits, as sorcery used to, and not just to the priestly and administrative bosses. Not that I think Olga and I *really* disagree on any of this. :) Damien Broderick From neomorphy at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 04:07:26 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:07:26 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments [was Re: Islamic morons win yet again] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Firstly, I think you're approaching the "unified set of beliefs" thing the wrong way by trying to create a set of commandments first. Secondly, the ones you've got suck: On 9/29/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > > 1) Information of greater complexity has greater value than information of > lesser complexity. > This would seem to work directly against Occam's Razor. 2) Information in agreement with the natural laws and history of the > universe has greater value than information in disagreement with the natural > laws and history of the universe. > Well, this is good and well... 3) Thou shalt seek to maximize the amount of information and its complexity > in existence. > I see this as (1) completely unsupported (2) a great way to promote waste. I don't see anything good about complexity. There's nothing artful about complexity. There's nothing mystical about complexity. It's just complex. I respect the difference between complication and complexity; but just because one is garbage doesn't imply the other is laudable. There's many schools of thought that hold that if goal can be achieved by simpler methods, this is better/more beautiful than if that same goal can be achieved in a more complex manner. This leads to the theoretical basis of "gracefulness" in most physical art. After all: via arduior est - there is /always/ a more difficult way. 4) Thou shalt seek to make such information available to the greatest number > of computational units to derive more information from it. > Heh. You just advocated (computational) spam. -- Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 29 04:29:32 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:29:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609290448.k8T4mZNr019801@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury ...? The focus was on the Sahara and the significant (and massive) climate change it has undergone over the last ten thousand years.? From lush garden to harsh desert would about sum it up.? This is thought to have been due to shifts in the Earth's orbit (according to the show). ...Robert The existence of deserts is a mere engineering problem. We could eliminate them all if we made a modicum of effort, using technology that already exists. I don't know why humankind has not done much to turn the Sahara into a forest, or farmland, or something useful. Such a waste of otherwise good real estate, oy. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 29 04:52:19 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:52:19 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928120914.023880d8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick ... > > Everyone forgotten Alex Ramonsky ? He was here > just yesterday with a post. Alex has been doing DIY TMS for years, > and has written a book about it. > > Damien Broderick No one has forgotten Alex Ramonsky. Alex, glad to see you posting bud, always interesting stuff. {8-] spike From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Sep 29 05:08:18 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:08:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" Re: Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <6E423681-26D3-4B74-BD4D-6B7645D5E5B5@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bret Kulakovich ... > > In using the word "Commandments" you are seeking to engage, > consciously or not, a group of people whose defense of this term will > range from casual through deadly serious. I offer that we come up > with a term that is non-competitive... > Bret K. Ja I see your point. The ten suggestments? Somehow that just lacks the punch of the original. {8^D spike From transcend at extropica.com Fri Sep 29 04:37:24 2006 From: transcend at extropica.com (Brandon Reinhart) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:37:24 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> "The leading opera house in Germany just canceled the Mozart opera "Idomeneo", they did this because they feared religious pinheads would literally disembowel them if they put it on. In this 1781 opera the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool, the king of Crete then sings "The gods are dead!" Sounds like a good start to me. There was no major difficulty cutting off the heads of Poseidon, Buddha or even Jesus; but Muhammad was another matter." This is probably an exaggerated reaction on the part of the opera house after the Danish Mohammad cartoons incident. In that situation extremists manipulated foreign reaction with false material (including cartoons that weren't part of what was originally published) to drum up anti-Western and anti-Danish sentiment. The resulting rioting led to a few deaths. I could see something similar happening with this opera or any number of other like things. Just imagine the extremist Imam, telling his flock that the Germans have shown an opera where an actor marches about with the severed head of the prophet! (Carefully not mentioning the fact that the dismember bits of other religions' leaders are also on display.) But for that scenario to play out, there has to be someone there intending to use the opera's presence as a political/ideological weapon. (There was in the case of the cartoons.) The more businesses stand up to that kind of manipulation, the less effective it will be. If we're afraid that foreign cultures will riot over an expression of our own culture (a literary one at that!) we're playing exactly into the hands of the extremists. > You're wrong, change your thinking to my view" is rarely an effective way to influence someone. Challenging someone's beliefs whether directly or with subtlety can be a very effective way to influence someone. Even insulting someone's beliefs can be effective. (The UK punk movement was based on that!) That being said, I read John K Clark's comment as a "this is fucked up!" kind of frustration thing, not an insult to the religious believers on this list. * I would suggest that if you really wanted to disinfect a particular strain of religious belief that you would have to understand the behavior of the meme in much the same way the biological viral activity is studied before it can be effectively countered with drugs. I would think that trying to cure religion with some engineering-like method (drugs, surgery, bullet in the head) would be morally dangerous (whether voluntary or not). You'd just end up with a variation on a thought-control society. Maybe one intending to be benevolent, but you're still belief-redacting. I'd argue that trying to change someone's belief through horribly offensive insults is more moral than providing them with a truth pill. Although, with the bullet in the head approach I guess you don't need to know so much about how the meme, or the biology of belief works, which is a plus. Maybe the best way to address the problem of conflicting beliefs and their effects on society is good old fashioned rational debate. Brandon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 29 05:44:07 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:44:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" In-Reply-To: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <6E423681-26D3-4B74-BD4D-6B7645D5E5B5@bonfireproductions.com> <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060929003623.0222c358@satx.rr.com> At 10:08 PM 9/28/2006 -0700, spike jests >The ten suggestments? Somehow that just lacks the >punch of the original. Yes. Getting rid of punches is a great idea. Getting rid of moral commands from above is a great idea. Getting rid of the far too definite *the* and the far too limited *ten* are great ideas. Getting rid of *Way* would be good, too, although that seems a touch less pernicious. "Some suggestions," yes indeed. "A few recommendations." "A mixed bunch of hints, clues and possible shortcuts, offered IMHO; check my credentials with people who know me." Like that? Damien Broderick From fauxever at sprynet.com Fri Sep 29 05:46:51 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:46:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" Re: Extropic Commandments References: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <001001c6e38a$aa642680$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "spike" Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:08 PM >> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bret Kulakovich >> In using the word "Commandments" you are seeking to engage, consciously >> or not, a group of people whose defense of this term will range from >> casual through deadly serious. I offer that we come up with a term that >> is non-competitive... > Ja I see your point. The ten suggestments? Somehow that just lacks the > punch of the original. Simply for the effect and sometimes for inviting discussion, I like the idea of pirating commonly used terms (e.g., lately, I've been saying I think the real Founding Fathers - and Mothers - were the pioneers of the civil rights struggles of the 20th century). I remember reading Bertrand Russell's Decalogue a long time ago: http://www.math.uh.edu/~clarson/decalogue.htm LIBERAL DECALOGUE By Bertrand Russell Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: 1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. 3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. 4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. 5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. 6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. 7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. 8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. 9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. 10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A Liberal Decalogue" is from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 3: 1944-1969, pp. 71-2. From sentience at pobox.com Fri Sep 29 06:07:10 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:07:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" Re: Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <451CB80E.9020600@pobox.com> spike wrote: >>bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bret Kulakovich > >>In using the word "Commandments" you are seeking to engage, >>consciously or not, a group of people whose defense of this term will >>range from casual through deadly serious. I offer that we come up >>with a term that is non-competitive... >>Bret K. > > Ja I see your point. The ten suggestments? Somehow that just lacks the > punch of the original. The Twelve Virtues of Rationality? Wait, it's been done. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 29 06:40:45 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 01:40:45 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928120914.023880d8@satx.rr.com> <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060929014030.0220c530@satx.rr.com> Could be worth a look, I dunno: http://www.innerworlds.50megs.com/ From sentience at pobox.com Fri Sep 29 07:30:34 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:30:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <451CCB9A.2090209@pobox.com> Apropos: http://armsofmorpheus.blogspot.com/2006/01/millitant-atheist-declaration.html -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 29 07:44:13 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:44:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <20060929074413.294.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> --- Olga Bourlin wrote: > From: "Damien Broderick" > Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 7:15 PM > > > >I like "(no subject)" being the subject line on the > topic of religion. Apt! Indeed, especially for a Zen Buddhist Ascensionist. :) > And, yes ... what is it good for? Absolutely > nothing! :) That, like the physics of all else, depends on your point of view. To quote Seneca the Younger, "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Christianity proved useful to both Constantine and Bush. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 09:48:02 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:48:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <200609290448.k8T4mZNr019801@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609290448.k8T4mZNr019801@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, spike wrote: > > The existence of deserts is a mere engineering problem. We could > eliminate > them all if we made a modicum of effort, using technology that already > exists. I don't know why humankind has not done much to turn the Sahara > into a forest, or farmland, or something useful. Such a waste of > otherwise > good real estate, oy. You don't see it in the U.S. but some are doing just that. I believe it is Dubai which has the largest indoor skiiing facilities in the world. The program I believe pointed out that Libya is building a massive pipeline to move underground water from far inland to the coasts where the people are (presumably for the purposes you mention -- farmland, etc.) The concern is that due to the lack of rainfall it is using an unsustainable resource (like our oil pipelines). The program also suggested that the decline in rainfall over the Sahara was due to a cooling of the Earth -- so if we get global warming we may get a wet N. Africa as well. A wetter N. Africa, more farmable/livable land in Canada and Sibera, a navigable N.W. passage, free carbon available to anyone for building nanostuff ... Jeepers -- it sure seems like people are getting all bent out of shape about something which on balance would have lots of good consequences. Lets put all the polar bears in climate controlled zoo habitats and find a nice arctic island (soon to be non "arctic") where we can send all the nonprogressites so they can live with their own "kind" :-|. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amara at amara.com Fri Sep 29 10:00:29 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:00:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap Message-ID: This music video is brilliant! Each time I saw another detail I missed previously; Weird Al Yankovitch is a genius. First I couldn't get the song out of my head, and I had to play it a few dozen times. Then I had an uncontrollable urge to play some Oingo Boingo music. That 80s has a feeling, after all, you know? He said here: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1541761/20060926/yankovic_weird_al.jhtml?headlines=true "This is the song that I was born to write, basically. I've been doing research on this song my entire life, so it's basically the culmination of a lifetime of work. It's also my first big-budget, live-action video in seven years, and it was a lot of fun to do. " Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 29 10:22:01 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:22:01 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20060929102201.GH21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 08:27:36PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > "religion" is a dangerous meme? Not a particular religion, just > "religion" in general? Right you are, Sherlock. > Why denounce religion? I can understand your personal decision to not Because in the modern world it's a major source of problems. You haven't heard? > partake of religion, but how is it productive to actively campaign > against it? Let's say you could 'wipe out' the religion meme, what It would remove a major source of problems. > would you go after next? Prevailing public opinion? That would be a Now that's a strawman. You sound somewhat miffed. Say, are you religious? > good way to ensure that everyone is forced to think for themselves > too. Maybe once you accomplish that, you can denounce general > consensus just for the fun of it. Now this is a yet another bunch of strawmen. Say, where are you getting these? > sorry about the sarcasm. I'm aware of it, but rarely turn it off. > Honestly though, I am curious what you think about the value of even > attempting to 'fight' a religion meme. If mental illness was contagious, why should one use public health methods to prevent an epidemic? (It's a flawed analogy, because most mental illnesses are not dangerous to anyone else but the sufferers themselves). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 10:32:45 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:32:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments [was Re: Islamic morons win yet again] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9/29/06, Olie Lamb wrote: > > Firstly, I think you're approaching the "unified set of beliefs" thing the > wrong way by trying to create a set of commandments first. For those who dislike the term "commandments", "operating principles", "guidelines", "first laws", etc. are all fine. The idea mainly is a simple set of guidelines from which other guidelines can be derived. As Asimov showed even the "first laws" can have subtle conflicts in complex situations. Secondly, the ones you've got suck: They were quick and dirty set that were easy to write down. I presumed they would be something that might produce differences of opinion. 1) Information of greater complexity has greater value than information of > > lesser complexity. > > > > This would seem to work directly against Occam's Razor. > So? Have you looked at particle physics recently? We could have stopped with three particles and everything would have been fine IMO (I can hear several people sputtering...). Simple doesn't always work. This gets back to Anders' point about "complexity" and the problem that we may not have good definitions for it. But something can be both complex and simple or complex and elegant. I'd lean towards simple elegant complexity. > 3) Thou shalt seek to maximize the amount of information and its > > complexity in existence. > > > > I see this as (1) completely unsupported (2) a great way to promote waste. > If you aren't watching the trends in storage it isn't obvious that we *aren't* running out of atoms in which to store information (yet). Obviously when we reach the limits of what can be saved then decisions will need to be made what to throw away. One has a subset of this operating now in terms of not saving what "appears" to have no value. But value is a very relative concept. My cable bill has "value" if it is an essential component of recreating "me" for simulation purposes. (Your "value" may vary.) I don't see anything good about complexity. There's nothing artful about > complexity. There's nothing mystical about complexity. It's just complex. > See above -- simple elegant complexity. I'm also not particularly fond of "mystical" -- if it can't be explained it would seem to be "false" or involve "lies". It may be perfectly reasonable to create realities where "mystical" is the currency of choice. But then you have to come up with an explanation (incredible boredom with the basement "reality" of the apparent universe?) as to why matter and energy should be used for that purpose. Presumably there isn't any limit on the number of possible soap operas (or Harry Potter novels) that can be written. There's many schools of thought that hold that if goal can be achieved by > simpler methods, this is better/more beautiful than if that same goal can be > achieved in a more complex manner. This leads to the theoretical basis of > "gracefulness" in most physical art. > Agreed. After all: via arduior est - there is /always/ a more difficult way. > Also agreed. This is solved by the optimization of storage/computational/usefulness at the edges. When we run out of atoms in which to store simulations, theories of the universe, simulated universes, etc. then choices will have to be made. We already do this with copying knowledge. Everyone doesn't learn everything. So at some point the more difficult (complex?) or less useful knowledge, theories, etc. will have to be pruned from the knowledge set. Hopefully we develop simple ways to do this rather than develop an ever expanding body of rules (laws) to deal with the special cases of what to throw away. 4) Thou shalt seek to make such information available to the greatest number > > of computational units to derive more information from it. > > > > Heh. You just advocated (computational) spam. > It has to ultimately have value, otherwise it will get no run time or be erased. Right now we have an interesting "problem" that our resources significantly exceed our ability to use them constructively [1]. How different the world would be if Linux and Windows came with @Home projects installed as their "idle" processes. Robert 1. In a pure QaD calculation I'd guess we have ~10^16 Ops and ~50% of the world global fiber capacity doing nothing useful. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 10:38:45 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:38:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" Re: Extropic Commandments In-Reply-To: <001001c6e38a$aa642680$6600a8c0@brainiac> References: <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <001001c6e38a$aa642680$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > I remember reading Bertrand Russell's Decalogue a long time ago: > > http://www.math.uh.edu/~clarson/decalogue.htm [snip] Olga, thanks for pointing this out. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alex at ramonsky.com Fri Sep 29 11:11:54 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:11:54 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> Sorry I missed this, I was busy wireheading : ) [joke] ...I tried DBS some years ago. I spent a long time trying not to do it again, and succeeded. I've also tried microiontophoresis with a syringe driver; similar problem. There are many routes to feeling totally blissed out and getting nothing done whatsoever, as I'm sure many LSD or Heroin fans would agree...but it's not as enjoyable overall as feeling a little bit blissed out and still being able to get on with life in a competent manner. That's harder because it's a matter of balancing your own neurochemicals via minute tweaking over time. A good analogy would be that the mind resembles a very detailed picture that needs to be altered a pixel at a time, and wireheading works like Paint Shop Pro's color fill tool : ) I'm writing another book btw, but no spoilers : ) Best, AR ************ spike wrote: >>bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick >> >> >... > > >>Everyone forgotten Alex Ramonsky ? He was here >>just yesterday with a post. Alex has been doing DIY TMS for years, >>and has written a book about it. >> >>Damien Broderick >> >> > > >No one has forgotten Alex Ramonsky. Alex, glad to see you posting bud, >always interesting stuff. {8-] > >spike > > > > > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 29 11:20:08 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:20:08 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:11:54PM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > totally blissed out and getting nothing done whatsoever, as I'm sure > many LSD or Heroin fans would agree...but it's not as enjoyable From your comments, it seems that you have never tried LSD. Calling an acid experience "blissed out" (especially, the assumption that you could drop one hit after another for days and weeks) and putting hallucinogens with the opiates into the same bin doesn't strike me as informed. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Fri Sep 29 11:34:59 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:34:59 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropic Commandments References: <009001c6e339$786ce000$1d160751@heritagekd9czj> <274E3AAB-47EF-4B90-9C40-C669C6B4676B@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <00a001c6e3bb$64b87ec0$682a0751@heritagekd9czj> >Ah, but science does not do this. Science says that there will be a lunar eclipse next >Thursday, at exactly this time, viewed exactly from this range of locations. And these things >always take place as advertised when the math is done properly. That is what people need to >be taught - the hover-car salesman is not a scientist. The hover-car example was perhaps an extreme one, but scientists do regularly make predictions that don't come through on time. It's, of coarse, not helped by the media 'hyping up' any prediction made to the point of suggesting it's a near certainty. They appear to have learnt for earlier scientists, who would make predictions closer to the hover-car example, that there's a good, embarassing story to be created by turning predictions into promises. >I'm not sure I follow you here - what exactly is wrong with denying the possibility before even >looking at it? Because that is fundamentally not being scientific, fair or agnostic. To say outright "astrology is for morons" without bothering to check for any correlations it predicts puts the individual alongside the catholic alter kisser in my eyes. >Don't you think it is more harmful to indoctrinate that there has to be something? Certainly, but I have a hard time beliving it to be worse than indoctrinating people into overlooking evidence for things that conversely might be there. By creating a group of 'scientists' who deny things before even thinking about them, you're priming the religion v. science for a serious, unnecessary, war. >The majority of religious people are the religions of their parent(s). What choice did they >have? Oh man, you do not even want to get me started on circumcision - or... ritualistic surgical torture of infants, as it would otherwise be known. But on the same note, what choice do children have who are brought up by parents (and society) telling them that anything not immediately explained by science (usually at beginner level) is rubbish? For example, if you try suggesting these kinds of ideas to a lot of agnostic people, you won't leave the room without your ears hurting. Children need bringing up to appreciate that there are things they don't presently understand, and simply ruling the entirity of them to be null only slows down progress and creates the void in which new ideas can be ignored. I'm not suggesting we start distorting probability systems here in favour of religion, I'm suggesting we loose the unfounded bias that anything religious deserves a probability of 0. >This is part of why I made my earlier remark about steering us away from the use of the >word "commandments" - I made a similar post about the commandments, that people will just think we're weird. Religious people probably won't be interested due to the lack of an immediate reward from our 'religion' and the scientists will think you're some crazy religious nutter. >Religion isn't about making choices for yourself. Let's not sully our work here with it. Equally, let's not sully our work with bias either - is what I'm suggesting. I think it's always important to remember that whilst people have access to science, a lot of people trust and rely on science in the same way that people trust and rely on religion to sort things out for them - not understanding how the VCR works, let alone a particle accelerator. The tablets you're giving them could be sugar. Of coarse, scientific tablets like antibiotics usually have the better effect, but in the mind of the person taking them, they're still sharing a lot of trust with you to make them better. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 29 12:42:23 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:42:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 11:37:24PM -0500, Brandon Reinhart wrote: > This is probably an exaggerated reaction on the part of the opera > house after the Danish Mohammad cartoons incident. In that situation They followed a security recommendation. That was a good thing in the end, because it made a few people mad, and initiated a public debate. A 3% minority has no business dictating frankly medieval values to their host culture. I'm unhappy that the result was a mealy-mouthed "invitation to dialogue" and that the local culture has its own religious bias to start with. More feed on the brown mills. Don't the local folks realize that the nonvoters are a majority, and that so-called major parties are not major anymore? I'm thinking a crackdown on systems of belief with a conflicting value system to secular humanism is overdue. The barbarians are at the gates. There is no point in exercising nuance and diplomacy. > extremists manipulated foreign reaction with false material (including > cartoons that weren't part of what was originally published) to drum > up anti-Western and anti-Danish sentiment. The resulting rioting led That's not the point. The newcomers are starting to dictate their values to their hosts using scare tactics. > to a few deaths. I could see something similar happening with this If you're not willing to risk your life when fighting for your values your values are not worth very much. > opera or any number of other like things. Just imagine the extremist > Imam, telling his flock that the Germans have shown an opera where an > actor marches about with the severed head of the prophet! (Carefully > not mentioning the fact that the dismember bits of other religions' > leaders are also on display.) Who cares what some extremist somewhere might do? If you start self-censorship proactively, the terrorists *have* won a very real victory. The extremists should fear for their lives, not us. > But for that scenario to play out, there has to be someone there > intending to use the opera's presence as a political/ideological > weapon. (There was in the case of the cartoons.) The more businesses > stand up to that kind of manipulation, the less effective it will be. It's not the business, it's a case of the culture and the political society. If the political society fails to address the problem effectively, the voters will not be amused. > If we're afraid that foreign cultures will riot over an expression of > our own culture (a literary one at that!) we're playing exactly into > the hands of the extremists. Exactly. > > You're wrong, change your thinking to my view" is rarely an > effective way to influence someone. > > Challenging someone's beliefs whether directly or with subtlety can be > a very effective way to influence someone. Even insulting someone's > beliefs can be effective. (The UK punk movement was based on that!) > That being said, I read John K Clark's comment as a "this is fucked > up!" kind of frustration thing, not an insult to the religious > believers on this list. I don't care about manipulating behaviour of groups adhering to irrational cults. I don't want them to ruin my local community by their actions, period. In a democratic society a minority has to follow the rules, or get out of the game. A way to avoid such problems altogether is a selective immigration policy established early. That has been botched, however. Now the problem has moved inside the compartment, and has become much, much more difficult to treatment. > ? I would suggest that if you really wanted to disinfect a > particular strain of religious belief that you would have to There's usually no cure, if you're infected. Your only chance is prevention. Once the parasite latches upon the host, it's too late. As the Jesuits said, get them while they're still young. > understand the behavior of the meme in much the same way the > biological viral activity is studied before it can be effectively > countered with drugs. Unfortunately, there is no cure, and the rate of spontaenous remissions is negligible. > I would think that trying to cure religion with some engineering-like > method (drugs, surgery, bullet in the head) would be morally dangerous > (whether voluntary or not). You'd just end up with a variation on a > thought-control society. Maybe one intending to be benevolent, but I disagree. If a particular belief system makes people commit fratricide (a brother killing a supposedly defiled sister), then this belief system is evil, and has no place in a civilized society. I'm not singling out any particular belief system, it's just there's just one case that is egregious, and need to be eradicated. If this will not happen, it indicates that the immune system of the host is compromised. > you're still belief-redacting. I'd argue that trying to change > someone's belief through horribly offensive insults is more moral than Can you cite any references for this supposed method to work? > providing them with a truth pill. Although, with the bullet in the > head approach I guess you don't need to know so much about how the > meme, or the biology of belief works, which is a plus. I genuinely hope your bullet to the head approach is only rhetorical. > Maybe the best way to address the problem of conflicting beliefs and > their effects on society is good old fashioned rational debate. No. Rational debates don't work if the other party is not rational. It's like trying to play a game where one party can break the rules at will. The democracy has to deal with the problem while it is still linked to a minority. The only way to prevent a global pandemic is that. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Fri Sep 29 14:54:16 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:54:16 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Alex Ramonsky wrote: > There are many routes to feeling totally > blissed out and getting nothing done whatsoever, as I'm sure many LSD > or Heroin fans would agree...but it's not as enjoyable overall as > feeling a little bit blissed out and still being able to get on with > life in a competent manner. Life in dopaminergic overdrive is far more fun. I still remember the very enjoyable experience of being blissed out on opiates and some tranquilizers before going in for surgery many years ago, but it doesn't compare to the feeling of flow when you are up at 2 in the morning writing your academic masterpiece using every part of your mind. Flow/eudaimonia beats plain pleasure. Of course, we should be able to get that more if we can just stimulate the right motivation subsystems. Panksepp's SEEKING and PLAY systems look like a good place to start. http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/Panic%20Seeking%20%20play.htm http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15766890&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum And I feel fantastic And I never felt as good as how I do right now Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now. (Jonathan Coulton, I Feel Fantastic, http://www.jonathancoulton.com/lyrics/i-feel-fantastic ) -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From davidmc at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 15:11:06 2006 From: davidmc at gmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:11:06 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <00c201c6e364$a5ff3b00$6600a8c0@brainiac> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <00c201c6e364$a5ff3b00$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: On 9/28/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > From: Mike Dougherty > > Why denounce religion? I can understand your personal decision to not > partake of religion, but how is it productive to actively campaign against > it? > > Why not? Religion - as long is it contains superstitious nonsense - > legitimizes thinking of the irrational kind, and thereby supports all the > "religious extremists" (whom the moderates like to say they do not support). "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." - Voltaire From amara at amara.com Fri Sep 29 15:52:03 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:52:03 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Graps Seminar and Colloquium at USC on November 6 Message-ID: Hello, A heads-up. I'm giving a colloquium (more general) and a seminar (more technical) for the Department of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Southern California (USC) on November 6. The abstracts are below. I'll send another notice when the date gets closer. Amara ======================================================================= http://physics.usc.edu/Colloquia/ViewTalk.php?t=2294 Watering the Earth Amara L. Graps Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space (IFSI), Rome, Italy and Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson, Arizona Amara.Graps at ifsi-roma.inaf.it Abstract: Water is one of the key molecules of life, and a fundamental solvent of our own human life form. The planet that spawned our watery origins, Earth, presently carries enough surface water in vapor or liquid form to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 3 km. The fact that nearly three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by seas triggered writer Arthur C. Clarke to question why our planet is called *Earth*, when it could more aptly be called *Ocean*. Driven by our watery origins, we naturally look for other life forms in the universe at the "water hole" (wavelengths 18-21 cm). Simultaneously, we search, and find, water in planetary atmospheres, comets, asteroids, interplanetary dust, and molecular clouds. Water drives our questions about terrestrial and extraterrestrial life and we wonder how we came to exist on a planet so rich in water in the first place. So then, how _did_ our planet Earth get its water? The short answer is: 'we still don't know'. Despite our living embedded in the Earth environment, the origin of our atmosphere is one of the most puzzling enigmas in the planetary sciences. The processes and sources that contributed to its formation require knowledge of the formation of the solar nebula, Earth and its planetary neighbors, and each of their subsequent interactions, including the smaller members of the clan: asteroids, meteorites and comets. Timing and location is everything in this story and our main tool for trying to understand the puzzle will be elemental isotopic abundance measurements. ======================================================================= Tracing our Origins: The Charging and Dynamics of (local) Cosmic Dust Amara L. Graps Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space (IFSI), Rome, Italy and Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson, Arizona Amara.Graps at ifsi-roma.inaf.it Abstract: The charging of cosmic dust as a topic of study provides nonintuitive details of the important charge parameter in the electrodynamical force, which plays a dominant role over the gravitational force for the Universe's cosmic dust particles. Cosmic dust particles are rarely electrically neutral because they are immersed in space plasmas, collecting ions, electrons, residual high-energy particles, and receiving ultraviolet radiation from nearby stars. The tiny particles electrically and dynamically respond to their environment with surface charge potentials which closely follow the surrounding plasma and magnetic field conditions. At the same time that the particle "charges up", it is responding to its environment dynamically via the Lorentz electromagnetic force. Therefore, small cosmic dust particles are ideal tracers of their astrophysical environments. A variety of charged cosmic dust populations exist within the magnetospheres of the planets in our solar system. The variable charging of the small dust particles leads to the particle's nonintuitive circumplanetary trajectories. One of the most dramatic examples of the charging of cosmic dust is the Jovian dust streams: high-speed (at least 200 km/sec) collimated streams of submicron-sized particles traveling in the same direction from a source (Io) in the Jovian system. Saturn, with a different source (unknown) and a different plasma environment joins Jupiter with a similar dust stream phenomenon. The Earth's GEO dust and spacecraft debris yields yet another class of charged particles. With time permitting, I will show examples of the charging effects on dust particles' dynamics in the magnetospheres of the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. ======================================================================= -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From jonkc at att.net Fri Sep 29 17:43:41 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:43:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com><05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com><007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer><62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com><003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Mike Dougherty Wrote: > Why denounce religion? Because it is a lie and because it has caused more human misery than anything else in history. Some think criticizing religion is impolite and it should always be given a free pass; I think religion should be denounced just like any other great evil in the world. > Attacking "religion" as a broad category of worldview without allowing > for the possibility that it has value for those who 'believe' is a > one-side approach. You're right, attacking religion is one-sided, it embraces the clear headed side of thinking without dealing with its complement, stupidity. That's not to say religion doesn't have value for some people, the leaders of Iran and TV preachers in America make a very good living off of it. > I would suggest that if you really wanted to disinfect a particular > strain of religious belief that you would have to understand the behavior > of the meme in much the same way the biological viral activity is studied > before it can be effectively countered with drugs. Religion exists for 2 reasons, one reason I understand and one I don't. Clearly religion would not exist if the fear of death did not exist, but there is another much more mysterious reason. How did preachers convince people that faith is a virtue? It's very easy to see why some human beings would want other human beings to believe this; but how on Earth did they convince them that an all powerful and all knowing being thinks the highest form of virtue is to believe in something when there is absolutely no damned reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme engineering at work to sell that load of crap. John K Clark From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 29 18:21:16 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:21:16 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20060929182116.GX21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 01:43:41PM -0400, John K Clark wrote: > reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme > engineering at work to sell that load of crap. You're giving them far too much credit. People are wired to believe, and in fact even hacks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard created cults and churches with material as weak as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From davidmc at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 18:35:16 2006 From: davidmc at gmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:35:16 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, John K Clark wrote: > people that faith is a virtue? It's very easy to see why some human beings > would want other human beings to believe this; but how on Earth did they > convince them that an all powerful and all knowing being thinks the highest > form of virtue is to believe in something when there is absolutely no damned > reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme > engineering at work to sell that load of crap. I highly recommend Dan Dennett's latest book "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon". From transcend at extropica.com Fri Sep 29 18:38:43 2006 From: transcend at extropica.com (Brandon Reinhart) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:38:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200609291838.k8TIca8V021211@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > I genuinely hope your bullet to the head approach is only rhetorical. It was sarcasm. > Rational debates don't work if the other party is not rational. I don't know if religious extremism shares root causes with other forms of political extremism (like fascism). If you purgated religion, would these people latch onto other movements as outlets for their anger? Isn't it possible that even in a world without religion, you'd still have the same trends as long as you failed to address the root causes of the irrational rage that leads to jihad? > There's usually no cure, if you're infected. Your only chance is prevention. To me that means finding and addressing the root causes of extremism. Actions like helping the third world build strong, responsive, secular governments. Helping them build infrastructure, education systems, and jobs. It won't cure religion, but it might make headway into removing the powerbase of extremist rabble rousers. From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Sep 29 19:16:07 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:16:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <200609291838.k8TIca8V021211@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> <200609291838.k8TIca8V021211@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060929140801.022d2620@satx.rr.com> At 01:38 PM 9/29/2006 -0500, Brandon Reinhart wrote: >Isn't it >possible that even in a world without religion, you'd still have the same >trends as long as you failed to address the root causes of the irrational >rage that leads to jihad? Has everyone forgotten the Red Brigade terrorists, Pol Pot and his merry men, and many other varieties of groups adopting extreme and suicidal violence not only without religion but often against religion (as representative of "the oppressors")? It's US/THEM, INSIDE/OUTSIDE bonding; religion just provides a potent and highly reality-checking-resistant form of affiliation, and seems to be based on an early childhood template for accepting "as gospel", ha, what every kid is taught about the structure of local reality, thereby allowing quick&dirty absorption of necessary cultural/memetic frameworks and much pre-installed but non-genetic content of those frameworks. Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 19:16:56 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:16:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> References: <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > you're still belief-redacting. I'd argue that trying to change > > someone's belief through horribly offensive insults is more moral > than > > Can you cite any references for this supposed method to work? > > [snip] No. Rational debates don't work if the other party is not rational. I'll cite an example I am familiar with, namely the EST training during the 1970s. It required two weekends in a fairly controlled environment where people are encouraged to come face to face with their "belief systems". I suspect a fraction of the people may have felt offended (insulted?) by some of the presentation and/or questions but since the format is such that more frequently one is allowed to see oneself in others (avoiding a positional "debate" framework) "horrible insults" may not be a requirement for dislodging belief systems in everyone. I am reasonably sure however some people are so "addicted" to their belief systems [1] that changing them may require rather severe educational methods. It is interesting (at least to me) that belief system alteration may require hard changes in the neural network [2] -- which implies that there are time limits on how rapidly, perhaps even how completely, one can change belief systems. I would be interested in whether anyone knows if there are branches of psychology or sociology (or books) which deal explicitly with belief system alteration? Robert 1. I suspect there is a strong genetic basis for this -- that there will be individuals with polymorphisms in neuron gene structure and function that it is easy for them to become strongly addicted to drugs, behaviors, memes, etc. 2. Changing the strengths of synapses probably requires protein synthesis and transport requiring at least hours perhaps days, while growing new synapses and forming complex self-reinforcing patterns (memes) might require weeks. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 19:44:24 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:44:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, John K Clark wrote: > Religion exists for 2 reasons, one reason I understand and one I don't. > Clearly religion would not exist if the fear of death did not exist, but > there is another much more mysterious reason. How did preachers convince > people that faith is a virtue? It's very easy to see why some human beings > would want other human beings to believe this; but how on Earth did they > convince them that an all powerful and all knowing being thinks the > highest > form of virtue is to believe in something when there is absolutely no > damned > reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme > engineering at work to sell that load of crap. Actually, if you read Dennett's most recent book he postulates a more complex process. It has little to do with "fear of death" and much more to do with "why?", "how?" and power. Why does it not rain? Why do the crops not grow? Why did all of the antelopes die? etc. Such questions are tied up in day to day survival long before death (which happens every in small tribes with only yearly or monthly frequencies). The people who can interpret the "signs" and provide proper explanations increase survival probabilities and therefore accumulate power. More power equals more children. Not interpreting the signs or not following those who can identify and interpret them may result in death (fewer or no children). So there is genetic selection for those who can lead (even if they are making stuff up) and those who can follow (at least the good leaders). Think of the Sahara example I cited. You are sitting in the middle of paradise, the climate is changing, you have to do something (migrate, steal, develop technology, etc.). Some people are going to come up with ideas. Others are going to ask why and how? In cases where there isn't a rational explanation the leaders make stuff up and resort to a "higher power" to justify their perspective. Those who argue (and enforce) such systems best become the chiefs, witch doctors, Pharaohs, emperors, kings, popes, mullahs, etc. As science began to explain more and more -- planetary movement, climate cycles, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteors, genetic defects, etc. the realm of the entirely synthetic explanatory systems has grown smaller and smaller. About all you can get with now is an "all-powerful" "god" and some kind of afterlife. Only the Raelians (that I'm aware of) are generally promoting a belief system operating "within" science rather than external to, or in violation of, it. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Fri Sep 29 20:34:10 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:34:10 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com><05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <005c01c6e406$9f55e0e0$3bbf1f97@nomedxgm1aalex> John K Clark: The leading opera house in Germany just canceled the Mozart opera ?Idomeneo?, they did this because they feared religious pinheads would literally disembowel them if they put it on. In Bologna [4] there is the famous church of San Petronio, with a fresco, by Giovanni da Modena, depicting Mohammed being tortured in hell [1], following the description Dante gave in his Divina Commedia, Inferno XXVIII, 19-42 [2]. As you can read [3] the fresco, the church, and even the town (full of muslims) are not so safe now. [1] http://nordish.net/mohammed_image_archive/euro_medi_ren/ [2] http://nordish.net/mohammed_image_archive/dantes_inferno/ [3] http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,742914,00.html [4] Bologna, prosperous town ... http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbarnes/71786045/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaroscape/209883473/ From amara at amara.com Fri Sep 29 21:18:48 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:18:48 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place Message-ID: Something significant happened today in the history of the United States. The Congress today vested in the President the power to order anyone -- U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national -- detained indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are -- U.S. soil or outside of the country. American detainees are cut off from any meaningful judicial review and everyone else is cut off completely. They can be subject to torture with no recourse, and all of this happens on the unchecked say-so of the administration. The following is from a lawyer who blogged the whole event, describing, who said what, when. http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/legalization-of-torture-an_115945829460324274.html It doesn't seem to be a 'Top Story' on the US version of Google News. There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! Amara From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 29 21:14:52 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:14:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> --- John K Clark wrote: > Mike Dougherty Wrote: > > > Why denounce religion? > Because it is a lie and because it has caused more > human misery than > anything else in history. Some think criticizing > religion is impolite and it > should always be given a free pass; I think religion > should be denounced > just like any other great evil in the world. Correction: religion has justified more human misery than anything else in human history. Whether it be by the divine sanction of the persecution of infidels or absolving the believer of responsibility for his own condition, actions, and fate. In any case the misery itself has other causes. Religion has always served to provide people an escape from reality in much the same way that drugs and alcohol do. Marx was on to something with his comparing it to an opiate. For this very reason, it is not surprising that so many religions forbid drugs and alcohol to eliminate "competition". > > I would suggest that if you really wanted to > disinfect a particular > > strain of religious belief that you would have to > understand the behavior > > of the meme in much the same way the biological > viral activity is studied > > before it can be effectively countered with drugs. When you live in the squalor of a ghetto beset with crime, poverty, and disease, the white fluffy clouds and houris of paradise sound pretty damned appealing. One cannot try to "cure" somebody of their irrational belief in and hope for another better life after death without increasing their stake in this one. > Religion exists for 2 reasons, one reason I > understand and one I don't. > Clearly religion would not exist if the fear of > death did not exist, but > there is another much more mysterious reason. How > did preachers convince > people that faith is a virtue? How does television convince a 10 year old to neglect his math homework? The truth is most people don't like to think and religion has all the answers to life's most puzzling questions in simple convenient sound bites. You don't want to take the time to understand how evolution works? Fine, God made little green apples. > It's very easy to see > why some human beings > would want other human beings to believe this; but > how on Earth did they > convince them that an all powerful and all knowing > being thinks the highest > form of virtue is to believe in something when there > is absolutely no damned > reason for doing so? When you have no data or don't understand the data you do have, then all possible hypotheses seem equally likely. If you have a choice between two or more equally likely hypotheses and a charismatic leader tries to convince you that hypotheses A is more likely than B, you believe him because you are genetically inclined to do so. There must have been some very > sophisticated Meme > engineering at work to sell that load of crap. It's less about engineering a perfect meme-set, than about shielding against contradictory memes. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From brian at posthuman.com Fri Sep 29 21:45:41 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:45:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <451D9405.5050508@posthuman.com> Congress shoves through so many laws (many hidden within lengthy documents) that most people pay no attention to it until it directly affects them in everyday life. In fact this is a pretty rational response I think often to most of the stuff going on in the DC reality distortion field. Then, if the new law is annoying enough the public will whinge about it until the law gets revoked, modified, struck down by the court systems through challenges, etc. If we had to go marching in DC every time they do something stupid, we'd be permanently living there. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 21:55:04 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:55:04 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8d71341e0609291455g71c19a46p9e0ac496b7911d73@mail.gmail.com> On 9/29/06, Amara Graps wrote: > > > > Something significant happened today in the history of the United > States. The Congress today vested in the President the power to order > anyone -- U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national -- detained > indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are -- U.S. > soil or outside of the country. American detainees are cut off from any > meaningful judicial review and everyone else is cut off completely. They > can be subject to torture with no recourse, and all of this happens on > the unchecked say-so of the administration. > Jesus. It's one thing to know intellectually that freedom is a rare phenomenon, historically speaking, and that there was no particular reason to suppose it would be long-lived; to imagine future dystopian scenarios, however vividly. But I didn't think something on this level would happen this soon. I suppose this must be what people felt in the 1930s listening to the news from Germany. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Sep 29 23:16:31 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:16:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: References: <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060929185008.044d5dc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:16 PM 9/29/2006 -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: snip >I'll cite an example I am familiar with, namely the EST training during >the 1970s. It required two weekends in a fairly controlled environment >where people are encouraged to come face to face with their "belief systems". I presume you are aware that EST (Landmark/Forum, Lifespring(?) etc) is a offshoot from scientology just like scientology was an offshoot of OTO. Erhard was a former scientologist and scientology considered the EST "technology" stolen. They spent millions trying to ruin Erhard and (as I remember) did force him to leave the US. >I suspect a fraction of the people may have felt offended (insulted?) by >some of the presentation and/or questions but since the format is such >that more frequently one is allowed to see oneself in others (avoiding a >positional "debate" framework) "horrible insults" may not be a requirement >for dislodging belief systems in everyone. I am reasonably sure however >some people are so "addicted" to their belief systems [1] that changing >them may require rather severe educational methods. I.e., treatment in the general category of brainwashing, or a mild activation of the capture bonding mechanism also known as Stockholm syndrome. See the Wikipedia page on Capture-bonding. >It is interesting (at least to me) that belief system alteration may >require hard changes in the neural network [2] -- which implies that there >are time limits on how rapidly, perhaps even how completely, one can >change belief systems. The Arab armies of the expansion period had it down pat. "Convert or die, infidel!" >I would be interested in whether anyone knows if there are branches of >psychology or sociology (or books) which deal explicitly with belief >system alteration? Evolutionary psychology. This happens to be the fundamental level tying psychology into the rest of biology. >Robert > >1. I suspect there is a strong genetic basis for this -- that there will >be individuals with polymorphisms in neuron gene structure and function >that it is easy for them to become strongly addicted to drugs, behaviors, >memes, etc. I think you are right on these points and said so some years ago. http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html Original Article Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects By H. Keith Henson Abstract In the aggregate, memes constitute human culture. Most are useful. But a whole class of memes (cults, ideologies, etc.) have no obvious replication drivers. Why are some humans highly susceptible to such memes? Evolutionary psychology is required to answer this question. Two major evolved psychological mechanisms emerge from the past to make us susceptible to cults. Capture-bonding exemplified by Patty Hearst and the Stockholm Syndrome is one. Attention-reward is the other. Attention is the way social primates measure status. Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins. Actions lead to Attention that releases Rewarding brain chemicals. Drugs shortcut attention in the Action-Attention-Reward (AAR) brain system and lead to the repeated behaviour we call addiction. Gambling also causes misfiring of the AAR pathway. Memes that manifest as cults hijack this brain reward system by inducing high levels of attention behaviour between cult members. People may become irresponsible on either cults or drugs sometimes resulting in severe damage to reproductive potential. Evolutionary psychology thus answers the question of why humans are susceptible to memes that do them and/or their potential for reproductive success damage. We evolved the psychological traits of capture-bonding and attention-reward that make us vulnerable for other maladaptive functions. We should be concerned about predator and pathogen memes and the mechanisms that make us vulnerable. The possibility of modeling important social factors contributing to the spread of dangerous cult memes is discussed. The history of the author's experiences that led to understanding the connection between drugs and cults is related. Keywords: evolutionary psychology, memetics, Stockholm syndrome, capture-bonding, reproductive success, dopamine, endorphins, cults, drugs and attention rewards, brainwashing, mind control, deprogramming, scientology. From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Sep 29 23:56:01 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:56:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place Message-ID: <23977156.764241159574161008.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Sep 30 00:43:41 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:43:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <33193.72.236.102.76.1159577021.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > > Something significant happened today in the history of the United > States. The Congress today vested in the President the power to order > anyone -- U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national -- detained > indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are -- U.S. > soil or outside of the country. American detainees are cut off from any > meaningful judicial review and everyone else is cut off completely. They > can be subject to torture with no recourse, and all of this happens on > the unchecked say-so of the administration. > I am sick to my stomach over this. > > The following is from a lawyer who blogged the whole event, describing, > who said what, when. > > http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/legalization-of-torture-an_115945829460324274.html > > It doesn't seem to be a 'Top Story' on the US version of Google News. > There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! > Maybe they were told they couldn't say anything about it. :( Regards, MB From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 03:23:37 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:23:37 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <33193.72.236.102.76.1159577021.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <33193.72.236.102.76.1159577021.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <5366105b0609292023m72fa941cj716b5d3ff552d291@mail.gmail.com> Friday, 29 September 2006 > > > > It doesn't seem to be a 'Top Story' on the US version of Google News. > > There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! Sinclair Lewis answered this question at length in 1935. "It Can't Happen Here." gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From pj at pj-manney.com Sat Sep 30 03:35:49 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:35:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place Message-ID: <31222505.781421159587349446.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >Jay Dugger said: >Sinclair Lewis answered this question at length in 1935. "It Can't Happen >Here." > >gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html And from the sublime to the riduculous: "Director?producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation [of It Can't Happen Here] titled Storm Warnings, in 1982. The script was presented to NBC, for production as a television mini-series, but the NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too 'cerebral' for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as anthropophagic extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm of science fiction. The new, re-cast story was the mini-series V, which premiered on May 3, 1983. The story remains a Nazi allegory, right down to the swastika-like emblem used by the Visitors." (Wikipedia) And you just thought at the time "Bitchin'! Sci-Fi on Prime Time!" PJ From transcend at extropica.com Sat Sep 30 03:21:28 2006 From: transcend at extropica.com (Brandon Reinhart) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:21:28 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <33193.72.236.102.76.1159577021.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <200609300352.k8U3q5Mu012814@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I've heard it said that a person's sarcastic jokes often reflect their private desires. Let's hope it's not the case for Mr. Bush. "You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier... So long as I'm the dictator." * Responding jokingly to the difficulties of governing Texas, "The Taming of Texas," Governing Magazine (July 1998); also cited in Is our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush (2000) by Paul Begala.) "I told all four [congressional leaders] that I felt like this election happened for a reason; that it pointed out - the delay in the outcome should make it clear to all of us - that we can come together to heal whatever wounds may exist, whatever residuals there may be. And I really look forward to the opportunity. I hope they've got my sense of optimism about the possible, and enthusiasm about the job. I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's okay. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... [Bush chuckles, audience laughs] ...just so long as I'm the dictator [more laughter]." * Online NewsHour interview, Washington, DC, (December 18, 2000)' during his first trip to Washington as President-elect. The last sentence is also included in Fahrenheit 9/11. "Dealing with Congress is a matter of give and take. The president doesn't get everything he wants, the Congress doesn't get everything they want. But we're finding good common ground. A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it." * Statement, Washington, DC, (July 26, 2001); as quoted in the Seattle Seattle Post-Intelligencer (July 27, 2001). "We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies." - Speech to United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 2004) "It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried to make it one in that instance." * Describing his executive order making faith-based groups eligible for federal subsidies, New Orleans, Louisiana, Jan. 15, 2004 "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." - May 24, 2005 [55] "On United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States reaffirms its commitment to the worldwide elimination of torture. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right, and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law.Throughout the world, there are many who have been seeking to have their voices heard, to stand up for their right to freedom, and to break the chains of tyranny. Too many of those courageous women and men are paying a terrible price for their brave acts of dissent. Many have been detained, arrested, thrown in prison, and subjected to torture by regimes that fail to understand that their habits of control will not serve them well in the long-term." - June 26 [56] -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of MB Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 7:44 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place > > > Something significant happened today in the history of the United > States. The Congress today vested in the President the power to order > anyone -- U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national -- detained > indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are -- U.S. > soil or outside of the country. American detainees are cut off from any > meaningful judicial review and everyone else is cut off completely. They > can be subject to torture with no recourse, and all of this happens on > the unchecked say-so of the administration. > I am sick to my stomach over this. > > The following is from a lawyer who blogged the whole event, describing, > who said what, when. > > http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/legalization-of-torture-an_115945 829460324274.html > > It doesn't seem to be a 'Top Story' on the US version of Google News. > There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! > Maybe they were told they couldn't say anything about it. :( Regards, MB _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 04:07:50 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 05:07:50 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <31222505.781421159587349446.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <31222505.781421159587349446.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609292107s2907549dy6810e51ca77c739f@mail.gmail.com> On 9/30/06, pjmanney wrote: > > And from the sublime to the riduculous: > > "Director?producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation [of It Can't Happen > Here] titled Storm Warnings, in 1982. The script was presented to NBC, for > production as a television mini-series, but the NBC executives rejected the > initial version, claiming it was too 'cerebral' for the average American > viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were > re-cast as anthropophagic extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm > of science fiction. The new, re-cast story was the mini-series V, which > premiered on May 3, 1983. The story remains a Nazi allegory, right down to > the swastika-like emblem used by the Visitors." (Wikipedia) > > And you just thought at the time "Bitchin'! Sci-Fi on Prime Time!" > *blinks* I remember that series, from back then. I loved it, even though I knew it was unrealistic. Of course even at that age I spotted the fascism allegory, but I never knew it was derived from something else. Interesting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 30 04:01:43 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:01:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <31222505.781421159587349446.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <20060930040143.90708.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> That is beautiful and hillarious. Irony is the key that unlocks reality. We live in ridiculous times, my dear Patricia. Truly we do. --- pjmanney wrote: > >Jay Dugger said: > >Sinclair Lewis answered this question at length in > 1935. "It Can't Happen > >Here." > > > >gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301001h.html > > And from the sublime to the riduculous: > > "Director???producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an > adaptation [of It Can't Happen Here] titled Storm > Warnings, in 1982. The script was presented to NBC, > for production as a television mini-series, but the > NBC executives rejected the initial version, > claiming it was too 'cerebral' for the average > American viewer. To make the script more marketable, > the American fascists were re-cast as anthropophagic > extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm > of science fiction. The new, re-cast story was the > mini-series V, which premiered on May 3, 1983. The > story remains a Nazi allegory, right down to the > swastika-like emblem used by the Visitors." > (Wikipedia) > > And you just thought at the time "Bitchin'! Sci-Fi > on Prime Time!" > > PJ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Sep 30 04:44:47 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:44:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <200609290448.k8T4mZNr019801@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <035501c6e44b$92428170$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike wrote > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury > > > ... The focus was on the Sahara and the significant (and massive) climate > > change it has undergone over the last ten thousand years. From lush garden > > to harsh desert would about sum it up. This is thought to have been due to > > shifts in the Earth's orbit (according to the show). ...Robert > > The existence of deserts is a mere engineering problem.... Yes, but that reminds me, as did some earlier posts to which I did not have time to reply. A *large* cause of the aridity and sterility of North Africa is directly attributable to Moslem culture. It's the difference between turning goats lose on available land and similar practices as opposed to actually trying (the way preceding cultures did) to raise crops. Continue the Western reconquista (as the West recaptured Spain) and the Sahara's problems would recede. They took by force; why can't we take it back? The Pope should have apologized all right.... apologized for having been a wimp---then he should have called for jihad against Isalm. How come their religious leaders get to call for jihad all the time, but not ours? Lee From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 04:51:01 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:51:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <85CB600E-A272-42F6-8E76-4A21C3982CD2@bonfireproductions.com> <05D87920-9F17-4976-A123-0963C142767F@bonfireproductions.com> <007001c6e1f4$a5ae2100$fa084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609271445v5f32426br994c753e4e76d1c1@mail.gmail.com> <003601c6e2ba$cab8a210$7d084e0c@MyComputer> <62c14240609282005j67d038fbq41cd1b0c1c487c7a@mail.gmail.com> <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <62c14240609292151k209e5e25h3b22d76f515f665a@mail.gmail.com> On 9/29/06, John K Clark wrote: > > > Religion exists for 2 reasons, one reason I understand and one I don't. > Clearly religion would not exist if the fear of death did not exist, but > there is another much more mysterious reason. How did preachers convince > people that faith is a virtue? It's very easy to see why some human beings > would want other human beings to believe this; but how on Earth did they > convince them that an all powerful and all knowing being thinks the > highest > form of virtue is to believe in something when there is absolutely no > damned > reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme > engineering at work to sell that load of crap. > Did you see this? http://www.christianitymeme.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Sep 30 04:33:27 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:33:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion (was Re: (no subject)) References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com><451C0492.3010109@mac.com><62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com><000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <033c01c6e449$e2f6d2d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > At 08:08 PM 9/28/2006 -0700, Olga wrote: > >> And, yes ... what is it [religion] good for? Absolutely nothing! :) > > Well, have to disagree. It surely serves a number of functions, as > does the instilled conviction that women and other lesser breeds are > stupider than men, etc. The fact that the alleged subject matter of > religion (one or more supposed deities) is an empty class doesn't > prevent the activity from having clear benefits, as sorcery used to, > and not just to the priestly and administrative bosses. But now we know the main reason that religion exists and---pace singularity or other fast tech improvements---will never leave humanity alone: Religious people have more children. So you're fighting Darwin trying to rid us of religion, (at least until people like us wise-up about eugenics, etc., and begin to suggest effective counter-action). Indeed, it's likely that supposing women to be lesser breeds, and other highly questionable doctrines, is simply one of religion's tools to achieve the same reproductive end. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Sep 30 05:54:13 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:54:13 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion In-Reply-To: <033c01c6e449$e2f6d2d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> <033c01c6e449$e2f6d2d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> At 09:33 PM 9/29/2006 -0700, Lee wrote: >Religious people have more children. But do they have more *effective* children? If the intelligent and clear-sighted have one child or two, or none but enhance the chances of those smart parents and their offspringen, while the duller, more gullible and acquiescent have many children who do little more than provide cannon fodder to low-grade employment tasks and old-fashioned war, which moiety will win Darwin's race? It's been a long time since mere fecundity gave a human gene line the prize. (This is brutally simplified, obviously; at some tipping point, the demographics doubtless shift so that bright members of underclasses will be coopted or bull their way in to the higher levels of opportunity--but I doubt that such entrists or their children and grandchildren will retain their "faith" for long, except as a sentimental affectation or manipulative tool, in a modern and postmodern economy.) Damien Broderick From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 06:26:32 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 02:26:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <20060929102201.GH21640@leitl.org> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <20060929102201.GH21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <62c14240609292326o448a6f3cw6dcc2eaad2f3dce9@mail.gmail.com> On 9/29/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 08:27:36PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > "religion" is a dangerous meme? Not a particular religion, just > "religion" in general? > Right you are, Sherlock. > Why denounce religion? I can understand your personal decision to not > Because in the modern world it's a major source of problems. You haven't > heard? > partake of religion, but how is it productive to actively campaign > > against it? Let's say you could 'wipe out' the religion meme, what > It would remove a major source of problems. I still don't understand the almost rabid counter-religion sentiment here. > would you go after next? Prevailing public opinion? That would be a > Now that's a strawman. You sound somewhat miffed. Say, are you religious? Miffed? No. mainly frustrated by my own inability to phrase the question neutrally enough that anyone understands what I am saying. I know the burden of clarity here is on me (the sender) rather than the reader(s) Me, Religious? Definitely no. I assume a high degree of probability to the utility and fitness of my own world-assessment faculties. I would imagine this to be commonly true of any rational person. Of course, believing that probability to be absolutely 1 might lead to the kind of fanaticism that "religionists" claim in the name of god. I do wonder about the purely scientific approach to chemically induced consciousness. If where we are today as individuals is solely a matter of genetic programming and environmental pressures (chemical fuel availability, the presence of memes, etc) then we're in an arguably depressing state. I know, depression can be 'fixed' by adding the right mixture of chemicals to the consciousness computing platform - but that seems like even more sinister mind control than brainwashing via memetic subjugation. To go further out the limb on which I may end up hanging myself, does the rational/scientific approach preclude the possibility that something like carbon nanotubes in the brain might be capable of (even weakly) detecting quantum states? Even if the net effect is immeasurably small, it provides me with a possible explanation for why "we" are collectively entangled in this observation of the universe. I expect that when the final probability wave collapses we will have experienced [a|The] Singularity. > good way to ensure that everyone is forced to think for themselves > > too. Maybe once you accomplish that, you can denounce general > > consensus just for the fun of it. > > Now this is a yet another bunch of strawmen. Say, where are you getting > these? Off-the-cuff. > sorry about the sarcasm. I'm aware of it, but rarely turn it off. > > Honestly though, I am curious what you think about the value of even > > attempting to 'fight' a religion meme. > > If mental illness was contagious, why should one use public health > methods to prevent an epidemic? > > (It's a flawed analogy, because most mental illnesses are not dangerous > to anyone else but the sufferers themselves). > It's not too flawed. You (collectively/plural) are essentially saying that religion is an incurable memetically transferred disease (STD of the Mind - ha!) Once infected, the host is unable to process rational thought. The widespread epidemic of "religious belief" in the mind of humanity is responsible for the majority of historical tragedy. For the sake of argument, I'll agree this a true-enough model. Suppose we engineer Artificial Intelligence using our own brains as the only available model of working intelligence. Wait, that does sound familiar... (sorry, couldn't resist) Let's start from an algorithmic bootstrap. If we do not engineer some method for hypothesis creation/testing, this AI will never be able to postulate a theory. That probably means it will never really be AI. If there is a method create and test AI ideation then, during the testing of a theory, does this algorithm assume "belief" (or at least suspend disbelief) in order to probe fitness of the model? (Ok, I am clearly not a cognitive scientist or AI researcher) I think I have made enough analogy here to support the idea that perhaps the prevalence of belief in the irrational is part of a larger process of reality testing. If humanity's different god-memes are part of a evolutionary programming algorithm, then the "strongest" will survive by best fulfilling its goal. Arguably, this goal may be counterproductive to the rationalists here. It might also provide its own environmental pressure to further motivate rational thinking. Muscle-building requires repeatedly tearing and rebuilding the fiber. Irrational religious chaos may be a catalyst for the advancement of rational thought. There certainly are plenty of examples already cited in this thread about how much destruction has been wrought in the name of religion, yet we are still here. Rationality may be the minority, but it holds considerable power. (I picture one Rancher managing thousands of heads of cattle - why? because the Rancher can think... or because of opposable thumbs) Well on that note, I think I'll end here and wait to see how miserably I failed to communicate again as evidence by the inevitable chastising responses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Sat Sep 30 06:58:22 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:58:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com><451C0492.3010109@mac.com><62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com><20060929102201.GH21640@leitl.org> <62c14240609292326o448a6f3cw6dcc2eaad2f3dce9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <004101c6e45d$d9725cc0$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: Mike Dougherty Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 11:26 PM > I still don't understand the almost rabid counter-religion sentiment here. What's not to understand? Do you think it's OK to believe in lies? Speaking for myself, I have said it before and I'll say it again - I'm ecumenical about religions - I detest them all. That's not rabidity, that's ... equanimity! :) Religion is ... I think it may have been Robert Ingersoll who defined it as: "... an aristocracy of the air." > Miffed? No. mainly frustrated by my own inability to phrase the question neutrally enough that anyone understands what I am saying. I know the burden of clarity here is on me (the sender) rather than the reader(s) Maybe you would encounter the same problem trying to make people understand what's just "a little bit pregnant." Maybe there's just no neutrality there. One is either a superstitious sort ... or a rational skeptical sort? > Me, Religious? Definitely no. I assume a high degree of probability to the utility and fitness of my own world-assessment faculties. I would imagine this to be commonly true of any rational person. Of course, believing that probability to be absolutely 1 might lead to the kind of fanaticism that "religionists" claim in the name of god. You know, you can dress up the ole' Emperor in all sorts of oblique and opaque and grandiloquent invisible vestments ... but he still ain't got no clothes. Olga -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Sat Sep 30 06:34:01 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:34:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) References: <20060929074413.294.qmail@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001f01c6e45a$8ea2a090$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "The Avantguardian" Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:44 AM > > --- Olga Bourlin wrote: >> And, yes ... what is it good for? Absolutely >> nothing! :) > > That, like the physics of all else, depends on your > point of view. To quote Seneca the Younger, "Religion > is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise > as false, and by rulers as useful." Christianity > proved useful to both Constantine and Bush. Oh, I brought those "absolutely nothing" words into the fray ... a reference to the old Bruce Springsteen song: War What is it good for Absolutely nothing ...: http://student.math.hr/~bruckler/war.txt ... not that I'm any kind of music expert or music listener. I'm very susceptible to ear worms. Even thinking about (not necessarily listening to) certain familiar popular songs gives me a bad case of ear worms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm Even avoiding music whenever I can ... the worms still manage to crawl in from time to time (as when the "absolutely nothing" words came to my mind). Olga From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Sep 29 15:18:03 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 10:18:03 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20060929101724.04b5b638@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 05:00 AM 9/29/2006, you wrote: >This music video is brilliant! Each time I saw another detail >I missed previously; Weird Al Yankovitch is a genius. > >First I couldn't get the song out of my head, and I had to play >it a few dozen times. Ditto! Natasha Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 11:49:58 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 07:49:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, The Avantguardian wrote: > It's less about engineering a perfect meme-set, than > about shielding against contradictory memes. Dennett must have felt this way as well. At the lecture about his book he gave at Harvard a few months ago, he didn't say this but did take the "extreme" position that the best solution was *required* education in and *mandatory* testing the knowledge retention about *all* major religions. He seemed to imply that this should be done at a relatively young age (junior high school or high school). It would also explain why the Bible is the most published book in the history of humanity and why so much effort went into "tuning" the Bible so it contained just the "right" set of Gospels. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 12:41:27 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 08:41:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060929185008.044d5dc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <62c14240609282010m461274a2xfe4b91eb75bbef5e@mail.gmail.com> <200609290533.k8T5X8Y0010362@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20060929124223.GN21640@leitl.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20060929185008.044d5dc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, Keith Henson wrote: > > I presume you are aware that EST (Landmark/Forum, Lifespring(?) etc) is a > offshoot from scientology just like scientology was an offshoot of OTO. The OTO link I was unaware of, but in reading the Wikipedia page I can see some similarities. It would seem that a critical differences would include that EST made a very large effort to expand the "initiated" (OTO seems to be barely surviving) and EST incorporated more from Zen Bhuddism and less from Christianity. One basic pattern with belief systems is to build upon, retarget, spin, etc. preexisting meme sets (witness Muslim incorporation of Christianity and Judaism) presumably because erasing them is much harder than reinterpreting them. Erhard was a former scientologist and scientology considered the EST > "technology" stolen. They spent millions trying to ruin Erhard and (as I > remember) did force him to leave the US. I'm reasonably sure the "Body of Knowledge" still exists (it is copyrighted as the OTO information set appears to be) and is still taught (see the Wikipedia entries on the topics). I do not believe that he left the US due to scientology involvement as much as messy legal things like sex "scandals" and property rights in divorces. But how much of this "public knowledge" was due to scientology spinning things one can only speculate. I find it interesting that the Freemasons have recently taken to advertising in a low key fashion on TV (presumably seeking new membership). But it would appear that the Christians and Muslims are the masters of distributing and requiring repetition of their meme sets (the Bible, the Koran, weekly masses, 24/7 TV channels, daily prayer, etc). Which raises the interesting question -- how can the extropic and/or transhumanist meme sets compete if they are up against such obvious organized systems of brainwashing? A mailing list or two, a few PhD theses and a handful of papers are not a system likely to breech the castle walls. If one has tribal genetics dictating few leaders and many followers and the follower meme sets are generally emplaced at young ages then getting people to switch camps will be rather nontrivial. 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URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 13:00:24 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:00:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> <033c01c6e449$e2f6d2d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 9/30/06, Damien Broderick wrote: > > (This is brutally simplified, obviously; at some tipping point, the > demographics > doubtless shift so that bright members of underclasses will be coopted or > bull their way in to the higher levels of opportunity--but I doubt that such > entrists or their children and grandchildren will retain their "faith" for > long, except as a sentimental affectation or manipulative tool, in a modern > and postmodern economy.) A better question might be to ask *when* the underclass has no means for survival? There is a tipping point which takes place when a significant fraction of what humans do, particularly the "followers" inclined to believe, can be done more efficiently by robots with low levels of human intelligence. Witness the replacement of automobile assembly line workers with robots or one can anticipate long haul truck drivers with truck driving software, etc. Robots and software don't typically require belief systems with respect to the "whys" and "hows" and they don't have to be capable of self-replication. So the question might be whether the singularity will constitute a selection filter against large scale religious meme sets because it will involve selection against survival of the children in which those meme sets are replicated. Paradoxically, I'm led to the conclusion that my incompletely thought out support for The Hunger Project (or any charity promoting human survival without education in unbiased belief systems) in previous decades may not have been good because it would likely have enabled a greater replication opportunities for faulty (irrational) meme sets. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Sep 30 14:58:57 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 07:58:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Message-ID: <03a601c6e4a0$fa068770$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> THIS WAS MY VERY FIRST MESSAGE TO EXTROPIANS IN OVER A MONTH. WHAT HAPPENED TO IT? (If you did see the first one, then I apologize for this, the second one. Sorry, --- Lee) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Corbin" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 9:44 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Spike wrote > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury > > > ... The focus was on the Sahara and the significant (and massive) climate > > change it has undergone over the last ten thousand years. From lush garden > > to harsh desert would about sum it up. This is thought to have been due to > > shifts in the Earth's orbit (according to the show). ...Robert > > The existence of deserts is a mere engineering problem.... Yes, but that reminds me, as did some earlier posts (to which I did not have time to reply): A *large* cause of the aridity and sterility of North Africa is directly attributable to Moslem culture. It's the difference between turning goats lose on available land and similar practices as opposed to actually trying (the way preceding cultures did) to raise crops. Continue the Western reconquista (as the West recaptured Spain) and the Sahara's problems would recede. They took by force; why can't we take it back? The Pope should have apologized all right.... apologized for having been a wimp---then he should have called for jihad against Isalm. How come their religious leaders get to call for jihad all the time, but not ours? Lee From pharos at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 15:06:03 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:06:03 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <03a601c6e4a0$fa068770$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <03a601c6e4a0$fa068770$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 9/30/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > THIS WAS MY VERY FIRST MESSAGE TO EXTROPIANS IN OVER A MONTH. > WHAT HAPPENED TO IT? (If you did see the first one, then I apologize for this, > the second one. Sorry, --- Lee) > Arrived here OK about ten hours ago. Also OK in the archives: BillK From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Sep 30 15:19:50 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 08:19:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer><20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert writes > On 9/29/06, The Avantguardian wrote: > > It's less about engineering a perfect meme-set, than about shielding against contradictory memes. > Dennett must have felt this way as well. At the lecture about his book he gave > at Harvard a few months ago, he didn't say this but did take the "extreme" position > that the best solution was *required* education in and *mandatory* testing the > knowledge retention about *all* major religions. He seemed to imply that this > should be done at a relatively young age (junior high school or high school). Ah, the enternal vision. We can just remake the new Soviet man and all will be well. Education is the key, ah yes. "*Required*" and "*mandatory*" are words that roll so easily off some tongues. Well, no! You can talk yourself blue (or have socialist training sessions all day long as our Russian friends tried), to all the blockhead children, and even then you don't extinquish religion. You can make the people come, but you can't make them believe you. (On the other side of the coin, it's why I don't give a rat's ass if anyone were to make my kid pray a little every day. It simply doesn't matter, except to the deluded 20th century types who persist in thinking that what is said in schools makes any difference.) Now if you want to go to Orwellian extents---as in North Korea or Cuba ---well, yes, that could be different. Speaking of Orwellian recourse, Robert earlier wrote (Friday, September 29, 2006 12:16 PM) > I am reasonably sure however some people are so "addicted" to their belief > systems [1] that changing them may require rather severe educational methods. I was surprised that no libertarians objected to this. Are you talking about changing people in a free society (us) or using such force to change the thinking of enemies in other countries who are our enemies? If the former, then you ought to have no more legal right to subject Western children to your own brainwashing techniques than their parents would have to subject Western children to religious brainwashing. EST sort of worked, but only on consenting, rather eager, adults. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Sep 30 15:40:55 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 08:40:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <20060927223126.21988.qmail@post.phpwebhosting.com> <451C0492.3010109@mac.com> <62c14240609281727q6e9b0c59sb66a5adb41e072cf@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928211356.02213600@satx.rr.com> <000b01c6e374$95322200$6600a8c0@brainiac> <7.0.1.0.2.20060928224402.023a9af0@satx.rr.com> <033c01c6e449$e2f6d2d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <03dd01c6e4a6$ded2f870$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> I had written > > But now we know the main reason that religion exists and---pace > > singularity or other fast tech improvements---will never leave humanity alone: > > Religious people have more children. By the way, surely this thought is not original with me. Anyone seen it before? Someone mentioned Dennett's new book---any mention there of this explanation for the ineradicability of religion? Damien responded > But do they have more *effective* children? If the intelligent and > clear-sighted have one child or two, or none but enhance the chances > of those smart parents and their offspringen, while the duller, more > gullible and acquiescent have many children who do little more than > provide cannon fodder to low-grade employment tasks... Good point. But the genes win in the end. As Dawkins wrote, "if contraceptives grew on trees in the EEA, by now women would recoil from them in horror" (or words to that effect). > and old-fashioned war, which moiety will win Darwin's race? Yes, the elites can simply manage to send off the non-brights to the trenches, I suppose. That would happen in Mexico, for example, where a small corrupt white elite lords it over the mestizos. The same little brown mestizos that they are so anxious to dump on the U.S. But you have to (again, as in Mexico) get rid of democracy, else the large numbers of brown people simply every so often take over again. (They they become blonder as their brighter types too select blonde women and it starts all over.) So your country ends up with a lower average IQ (by about ten points), and zillions of religious people. Again, may the Second Coming (oops, I mean singularity) save us in time. > It's been a long time since > mere fecundity gave a human gene line the prize. (This is brutally > simplified, obviously; at some tipping point, the demographics > doubtless shift so that bright members of underclasses will be > coopted or bull their way in to the higher levels of opportunity--but > I doubt that such entrists or their children and grandchildren will > retain their "faith" for long, except as a sentimental affectation or > manipulative tool, in a modern and postmodern economy.) Quite right. Lower IQ may or may not *cause* religious belief, but the correlation is undeniable. I just hope that the smarter types in the U.S. retain control (only possible, obviously, by corruption) long enough to defrost my sorry ass. Lee From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 16:19:47 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:19:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] christianity meme In-Reply-To: <62c14240609292151k209e5e25h3b22d76f515f665a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2H008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> On 9/29/06, John K Clark wrote: >Did you see this? http://www.christianitymeme.org/ The christianitymeme.org needs to reword this slightly. It is confusing. They name the organization Christianity Meme, then make the comment "This site is unabashedly against the Christianity Meme." After I read it I figured out what they meant, but it is puzzling on the surface. From the site: Christianity Meme is an organization of people who wish to expose Christianity for what it really is--a mind virus that controls human behavior to facilitate its own survival. As such, it is a living, but unconscious player in human affairs. Warning: This site is unabashedly against the Christianity Meme. We consider promoting this viewpoint as an act of philanthropy. This site is maintained by volunteers as part of our effort. If you would like to join us, please write us at webmaster at ChristianityMeme.org, spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 16:19:47 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:19:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick >... while the duller, more > gullible and acquiescent have many children who do little more than > provide cannon fodder to low-grade employment tasks and old-fashioned > war, which moiety will win Darwin's race? ... Damien Broderick The duller, gullible and acquiescent win that race by many furlongs. Reasoning: in modern times we speak almost constantly of wars. But if we actually break down the numbers of those slain, 3000 American soldiers in the past 3 years, perhaps half as many Europeans, 20 or so a day in suicide bombings and related violence in the middle east. Do allow me to ignore the continent of Africa to make this point. Our times are nearly indistinguishable from peace. The total number slain in warfare, including all terrorism and crime as warfare, is negligible in Darwin's race for genetic expression. Go to your local maternity ward to see where Darwin's race is being run. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 16:19:47 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:19:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2I008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps > Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 3:00 AM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] weird al takes on rap > > This music video is brilliant!... > > He said here: > http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1541761/20060926/yankovic_weird_al.jhtml? > headlines=true > > "This is the song that I was born to write, basically. I've been doing > research on this song my entire life, so it's basically the culmination > of a lifetime of work. It's also my first big-budget, live-action video > in seven years, and it was a lot of fun to do. " > > > Amara How could anyone not like a guy who writes songs such as this: 2. "Pancreas" "That's a style parody of Brian Wilson, an homage as it were. It's meant to sound similar to the music that he did for Smile and Pet Sounds, and it's basically a love song to my pancreas, because it came to my attention that not a lot of songs have been written about the pancreas. And I thought that it was a void in pop culture. Also because my pancreas has given so much to me over the years, I felt like I needed to give something back to it, so that's the reason for that." {8^D spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 16:19:48 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:19:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] (no subject) In-Reply-To: <451CCB9A.2090209@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2K008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eliezer S. Yudkowsky > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] (no subject) > > Apropos: > > http://armsofmorpheus.blogspot.com/2006/01/millitant-atheist- > declaration.html > > > -- > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ I like it, thanks Eli. It might be more effective however without the misspelling in the title. {8^D spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 16:19:48 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:19:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] deserts In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2J008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ________________________________________ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 2:48 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again On 9/29/06, spike wrote: The existence of deserts is a mere engineering problem... Robert Bradbury: ...Lets put all the polar bears in climate controlled zoo habitats and find a nice arctic island (soon to be non "arctic") ... Robert Wildlife experts, do polar bears really need to live on floating ice? Could they not be moved to northern Canada and northern Siberia? Couldn't they live along those shores up there? I see no reason why they should need to go extinct. spike From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 30 16:36:55 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 18:36:55 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20060930163655.GD21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:18:48PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote: > There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! Those who don't care about impeaching a criminal don't care about their country turned into a dictatorship (no hyperbole, look at Brazil's history -- but it took tanks to get that kind of legislation Congress approved apparently of their own free will). Also, look up Machtergreifung and Reichstagsbrand on Wikipedia. And those 5 kPeople-each detention camps construction Halliburton has been charged with early this year have started to have some pretty ominous overtones no longer just to the tinfoil-hatted. Choosing to not pursue permanent residentship 5 years ago turned out a smart idea, after all. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sentience at pobox.com Sat Sep 30 19:14:53 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 12:14:53 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer><20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> +1 insightful: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ "Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" frustration - ideology = staged images of chaos for media -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Sep 30 19:41:15 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 15:41:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:43 PM 9/29/2006 -0400, John K Clark wrote: >Mike Dougherty Wrote: > > > Why denounce religion? > >Because it is a lie and because it has caused more human misery than >anything else in history. It is useless to denounce religion, and it is *not* the root cause of human misery. Human reproduction in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support *is* the cause of misery. In the stone age the "wheel of war" rolled around like this. 1. Population growth (or sometimes weather) caused the population to perceive bleak times a-coming. 2. The perception turned up the average gain in xenophobic memes circulating in the population. Xenophobic memes were often of a class we would now call religious, but in modern times related memes work just as well to motivate the leaders and warriors. 3. Attack on neighbors. 4. The resultant war(s) reduced the population enough that the burden on the ecosystem was reduced to the point the population no longer perceived a bleak future. Go to one. (Cycle time of about a generation.) Easter Island was a case where war a few generations earlier would have been much better. As it was the damage to the ecosystem was so bad that it took a population reduction of perhaps 95% to stop the incessant warfare. The reason for the extreme overshoot might have been a lack of "seed xenophobic memes" I.e.,they lacked different religions to induce war sooner because of cultural homogeneity. snip >You're right, attacking religion is one-sided, it embraces the clear headed >side of thinking without dealing with its complement, stupidity. Stupidity (or becoming irrational) is a *feature* of the model in the phases leading up to bloodshed. It is truly bizarre, but I make the case that there are times when the interest of a person and the interest of their genes diverge. In this situation, the genes have built in mental modes that induce stupidity and non rational thinking. (Yah gotta admit there are enough examples.) >That's not >to say religion doesn't have value for some people, the leaders of Iran and >TV preachers in America make a very good living off of it. > > > I would suggest that if you really wanted to disinfect a particular > > strain of religious belief that you would have to understand the behavior > > of the meme in much the same way the biological viral activity is studied > > before it can be effectively countered with drugs. > >Religion exists for 2 reasons, one reason I understand and one I don't. >Clearly religion would not exist if the fear of death did not exist, but >there is another much more mysterious reason. How did preachers convince >people that faith is a virtue? Wrong questions. The real question is "what situations in the stone age made those who could be infested with religion more likely to survive (in the gene centered inclusive fitness sense) than those who were not?" >It's very easy to see why some human beings >would want other human beings to believe this; but how on Earth did they >convince them that an all powerful and all knowing being thinks the highest >form of virtue is to believe in something when there is absolutely no damned >reason for doing so? There must have been some very sophisticated Meme >engineering at work to sell that load of crap. Meme engineering was no more possible when most of the big religions came about than genetic engineering. Now Darwinian selection at two levels *is* possible. First, does the meme do well itself, second, do the people infested with it do better than neighbors. Just plain old variation and selection will shape us some very effective religious memes. Keith Henson From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Sep 30 19:41:32 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 15:41:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:38 PM 9/29/2006 -0500, Brandon Reinhart wrote: snip >I don't know if religious extremism shares root causes with other forms of >political extremism (like fascism). It does. >If you purgated religion, would these >people latch onto other movements as outlets for their anger? Isn't it >possible that even in a world without religion, you'd still have the same >trends as long as you failed to address the root causes of the irrational >rage that leads to jihad? Bingo! You got it. snip >To me that means finding and addressing the root causes of extremism. >Actions like helping the third world build strong, responsive, secular >governments. Helping them build infrastructure, education systems, and jobs. >It won't cure religion, but it might make headway into removing the >powerbase of extremist rabble rousers. And the *most important* element is to reduce the birth rate to below the growth of the economy. That's what happened in Northern Ireland and I make the case it is the reason for the IRA going out of business. Keith Henson From sjatkins at mac.com Sat Sep 30 20:43:20 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 13:43:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <451D9405.5050508@posthuman.com> References: <451D9405.5050508@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <2375F51F-D7BB-49E4-A77F-98267E216910@mac.com> This is way beyond the usual crap though. This is taking off the gloves and exposing naked tyrannical power over all of us. Bit by bit they have worn us down until now they can come out with something this over the top egregious and most of us just say that we can't be bothered to do much more than send a bit of email. This and the pending retroactive ok of the administration's utterly illegal wiretaps on anyone and everyone should wake people up if anything can still do so. Perhaps we've seen too much and now only seek to keep a low profile and eek out a decent existence as best we can. While there are things to be said for that we are in deep trouble if we all take this approach. We are basically saying that we are not free people anymore, that we recognize it and won't make a stink about it and we just hope the powers that be will leave us in peace. Is that how we are willing to live.? Is that what we are saying? - samantha On Sep 29, 2006, at 2:45 PM, Brian Atkins wrote: > Congress shoves through so many laws (many hidden within lengthy > documents) that > most people pay no attention to it until it directly affects them in > everyday > life. In fact this is a pretty rational response I think often to > most of the > stuff going on in the DC reality distortion field. Then, if the new > law is > annoying enough the public will whinge about it until the law gets > revoked, > modified, struck down by the court systems through challenges, etc. > > If we had to go marching in DC every time they do something stupid, > we'd be > permanently living there. > -- > Brian Atkins > Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence > http://www.singinst.org/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 20:48:44 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:48:44 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <2375F51F-D7BB-49E4-A77F-98267E216910@mac.com> References: <451D9405.5050508@posthuman.com> <2375F51F-D7BB-49E4-A77F-98267E216910@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0609301348t7227a83cn9e57d86f9809c8fd@mail.gmail.com> On 9/30/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > This is way beyond the usual crap though. This is taking off the > gloves and exposing naked tyrannical power over all of us. Bit by > bit they have worn us down until now they can come out with something > this over the top egregious and most of us just say that we can't be > bothered to do much more than send a bit of email. > Yeah. I was expecting small erosions like the prison for spammers law I was ranting about recently, things governments can get away with because people go "well, that only applies to [disliked group] so the rest of us are okay". I wasn't expecting something as blatant as openly overturning core principles of civil rights, not this decade at least. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Sep 30 21:26:26 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:26:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <20060930163655.GD21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place > > On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:18:48PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote: > > > There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! ... > Those who don't care about impeaching a criminal don't care > about their country turned into a dictatorship... My understanding is that it was congress that did this, not the executive branch. I would interpret it as empty electioneering: the congressmonsters do not want to appear soft on terrorism right before the election. Legislative branch grandstanding is done all the time, but it is still meaningless. What counts is if the supreme court upholds it. I predict that the court will knock it down without a second thought. Regarding massive demonstrations, we have congressional elections in a few weeks. We will see what happens there. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Sep 30 22:49:45 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:49:45 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 9/30/06, Keith Henson wrote: > And the *most important* element is to reduce the birth rate to below the > growth of the economy. That's what happened in Northern Ireland and I make > the case it is the reason for the IRA going out of business. > I think you have a general claim that has a lot of substance. I'm just a bit worried that using Northern Ireland as your main example may weaken your case, as many objections can be raised against that specific example. And if someone produces strong arguments against NI, your more general claim may be weakened. NI is one economy containing two intermingled warring groups. Not two competing economies / nations. I think your claim would be better demonstrated by using nations as examples. e.g. Germany and 'Lebensraum'. (I don't know if this is a good example. I'll leave that up to you). :) The NI birth rate peaked in the 1961-65 period at 23 / 1000, then fell fairly steadily in every 5yr period until 1996-2000 when it was 13.9 / 1000. This is roughly in line with the steadily falling birthrate for the UK as a whole. i.e. the troubles didn't cause the fall in the birth rate. The fall was caused by being part of a modern European state, as all European birth rates were falling during that period. And the fighting was only in NI, not in the UK and other European states. I could make more suggestions about why the troubles have reduced, but I doubt it really matters for the purposes of this argument. Some claim the IRA is still there. It has just switched away from bombing to more gangster-like criminal activities. And they are making a very nice living from these activities, as their armoury tends to discourage the civil police from investigating too closely. Political changes may have stopped the Catholic IRA supporters from feeling as persecuted as they used to be. It is a very complex situation, with no neat 'sound-bite' solutions. Everyone is really holding their breath and keeping their fingers crossed over there. BillK