From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 03:00:30 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 13:00:30 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070331170212.GE9439@leitl.org> References: <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <20070328084252.GL1512@leitl.org> <20070328103951.GV1512@leitl.org> <20070328144011.GE1512@leitl.org> <20070330201707.GU1512@leitl.org> <20070331170212.GE9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/1/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 11:39:15PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > OK, so you take the whole simulation (with an agent that can count) > > and run it on a system that is Turing-equivalent (I used an abacus > > above; a counter machine is Turing-equivalent and resembles an > > abacus). This running can take one of three forms: (a) the TM > designer > > physically manipulates the machine; (b) the TM designer writes out a > > program and has an ignorant person who can follow instructions > > manipulate the machine; (c) the wind happens to manipulate the > machine > > in the same way as the human would have. Does the program run and > > counting occur in each case? > > Sorry, as long as you won't touch the Hash Life scenario > (observer + environment implemented in > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife which > is Turing complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life), no > dice. A Life board will do, although it is more physically complex than a counter machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine). We don't need to discuss Hash Life because I am not looking at shortcuts to compute frames out of sequence: let's assume that in general there aren't any. If Life is Turing-complete, then there is some configuration of cells which will compute the program "an oscillator driving a counter driving a comparator driving a bomb detonator", all in a virtual environment. We can imagine a physical Life board with little toggle switches in each square, such that "up" corresponds to "black" and "down" corresponds to "white". If a human operator ignorant of what this all means flicks the switches according to the usual rules of life, does that constitute running of the program? What about if the switches are operated in exactly the same combinations due to random events, like a child playing with the board but having no knowledge of the rules, as well as no knowledge of the program? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 08:52:30 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 18:52:30 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fragmentation of computations In-Reply-To: <006c01c773dd$a2e546d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070321131827.GW1512@leitl.org> <026601c76ffe$85612120$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0703262047p1794a517vc81774c49471eb13@mail.gmail.com> <02a901c77078$879c1c90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <033201c7714d$95bbecd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004701c772fe$318e7db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006c01c773dd$a2e546d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/1/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > But a 10% salary increase at no cost would be worth having. I know, it > looks like you are living only half as much, but if you can't > tell the difference and no-one else can tell the difference, why not go > for the salary increase? It would be analogous to the > situation if teleportation became available. People would initially be > reluctant to use it, but once they try it and see that they > feel exactly the same as before - not at all as if they've died and been > replaced by a copy - they will stop worrying about it. The > obvious extension of this idea is to increase the zombie proportion so > that you are only actually conscious, say, for one second in > any year. > < > > "It looks like you are living only half as much" --- the first part of the > above statement --- > seems correct to me. That is what is physically happening to the subject, > no matter > what the subject reports. Then you write "but if you [the subject] can't > tell the difference", > which shifts to the subjective mode. It is the properties of the > subjective mode that > are what this is all about ultimately, but to me it begs the question to > introduce the > conclusion so abruptly. The subjective mode is the important part though, isn't it? It presents something of a paradox, because you feel that you are living a full life when in fact you are not. What about the inverse situation where you are granted an extra second of life for every second lived, but remember nothing of that extra second? What about all the extra copies of you in branches of the multiverse no longer in your potential future? I know that your view is that copies are selves and it is just a matter of summing the total runtime. This is a consistent way out of the paradoxes of personal identity raised by the thought experiments with which we are familiar. My way is to deny that there is any self persisting through time at all, but accept that there is an illusion of this due to the way our brains have evolved, and "survival" consists in maintaining this illusion. And then you write "and no one else can tell the difference...". But I > think that that > is false. I believe that the scientists observing the phenomenon (a > subject getting > runtime) determine that there *is* no subject (he doesn't exist as a > conscious entity) > during those times in which his states are merely being looked up. [To > harp on my > view of this, why even bother to look them up? I.e., why move the static > image > into a certain register? Why not leave it on disk or in RAM? Wouldn't it > still be > the same thing? The sequence still exists. In fact, why do anything at > all, since > the patterns are out there already? But I see below you already jumped to > the > freewill/determinism quandry.] How would the scientists know that there is no consciousness present when the behaviour is the same? It is like trying to decide if a robot is conscious. >> > It seems quite inescapable that conscious > robots could, and shortly will exist, and that it will be possible to > take such a program and single-step through its deterministic > execution. And that such a program---either perhaps suffering > horribly or gaining a great deal of satisfaction---compels us to make > a moral choice. But if rocks continue to be conscious whether > pulverized or not, as does any system that can take on many states, > (together with a fantastically loose definition of "system"), then of > what special status or value are humans and animals? Is caring for > another human being completely inconsequential because either > saving them from grief or inflicting grief upon them doesn't change > the platonic realities at all? > << > > > This question can be applied to most multiverse theories: if everything > > that can happen does happen, why should we bother doing anything > > in particular? > > Because we increase the measure of favorable outcomes, the fraction > of universes that develop in a desirable way. (Naturally, from a > different viewpoint, it's just a machine that can act in no other way > than it does, and the fraction of multiverses in which, say, I don't > get killed in an auto accident is fixed. Nonetheless, I think that I > ought to drive as safely as I can.) > > > Even in a single universe, why should we worry about making > > decisions when we know that the outcome has already been > > determined by the laws of physics? > > To me, > a totally deterministic program, say a weather forecasting program, > has complete free will. It takes in a huge amount of data, and after > ruminating on it a long while, "decides" whether it's likely to rain or > not tomorrow. But that's all my brain does, too. > > So if I am predisposed to have great foresight and minimize my pain > over the long run, then the measure of the universes that contain > happy Lees is greater than it "otherwise" would have been. In > other words, it's good if I can allow memes such as prudence, > civility, frugality, etc., to affect me. Or determine me. Whatever. > > Although you probably already have your own explanations, > to me, the basic error in the asking of such a question--- > like why should we worry about anything or exert ourselves--- > lies in its unconscious assumption that souls are possible, that not > all events have causes, that there can be somewhere in the > universe events that are completely uncaused (such as a > decision that a certain human makes). Once one has thoroughly > purged oneself of the idea that such uncaused things can exist, and > has internalized that we are all machines, only machines, and > nothing else is conceivable then don't such questions lose their meaning? The question is meaningless even without true randomness playing a part, because the common sense view of free will (the sense of it we have when we aren't concerned with analysing it) is that our decisions are neither determined nor random, but something else; and there isn't anything else, even in theory. Returning to your example of driving to avoid an accident, imagine you are a being in a Life simulation. You come to a point where you can either slow down or keep going and run over a pedestrian. You decide to slow down, because you think that running people over is bad and because you think you have control over your life. In reality, you could not do other than slow down: that was determined in the Life universe with the force of a mathematical proof. Your feeling that you could have acted otherwise is entirely illusory, as you could no more have changed what was to happen than you could, through much mental straining, have changed 16 into a prime number. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 11:35:42 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 12:35:42 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Exi-chat still seems intermittent Message-ID: Exi-chat and extropy.org still seem to be appearing and disappearing from the web. Is the DNS problem settling down or still under investigation? BillK From eugen at leitl.org Sun Apr 1 13:46:02 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 15:46:02 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Exi-chat still seems intermittent In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070401134602.GZ9439@leitl.org> On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 12:35:42PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Exi-chat and extropy.org still seem to be appearing and disappearing > from the web. > Is the DNS problem settling down or still under investigation? ns1.kumo.com is still dead, but ns2.kumo.com looks alive eugen at black:~$ ping ns2.kumo.com PING ns2.kumo.com (68.144.65.89) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from S0106001111d3b2e0.cg.shawcable.net (68.144.65.89): icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=211 ms 64 bytes from S0106001111d3b2e0.cg.shawcable.net (68.144.65.89): icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=219 ms 64 bytes from S0106001111d3b2e0.cg.shawcable.net (68.144.65.89): icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=205 ms 64 bytes from S0106001111d3b2e0.cg.shawcable.net (68.144.65.89): icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=205 ms 64 bytes from S0106001111d3b2e0.cg.shawcable.net (68.144.65.89): icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=208 ms We need three different DNS servers. Max, can you change this with the registrar? -- 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 From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 19:09:45 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 15:09:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <8d71341e0703261036i7afd4ed3n6d22a5ab2c34d38b@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> On 3/30/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Did the number 0x0bd11a0bb188f291956549705169a996110841d4 exist? ### Yes! Always and forever, timeless, just as any element of the platonic plenum. ------------------------------------------ > > > How come numbers "exist" in silicon, or gray matter but not in the > > number of chickens? > > Chickens can count a bit, actually. ### This is not what I meant. A clutch of chickens always consists of a certain number of chickens. A certain number of gates in an integrated circuit may be in states that express a number. Why do you say that a number doesn't exist when it is a property of a clutch of chickens but does exist when it is a property of a piece of silicon? Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 19:42:15 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 15:42:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] differential fitness In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070321120733.02363860@satx.rr.com> References: <2256.163.1.72.81.1173817589.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <7641ddc60703140831h75397d68sbcff30e444b6e0cf@mail.gmail.com> <3011.163.1.72.81.1173890167.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <7641ddc60703191303n2afa51e1md0caa787e9a6fff1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703201050q1c33f332ja2444176e43a28b1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703210739y75c71585n5253801f743e5d79@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070321120733.02363860@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704011242x5dea5551i4c78b28f71a35608@mail.gmail.com> On 3/21/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > > Fitness is such a mess of conceptual worms. I suggest a look at > http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitness/ > > Individual phenotypic "fitness"--success at surviving and thriving in > one's lifelong environment, especially a culturally modified one--is > not *obviously* linked directly to number of fertile offspring a > generation or two down the line. (Leaving aside individuals too > dysfunctional by genotype or accident to reach maturity.) It might > have been a million years ago, but how could we know that? > ### I was using the term in the strictly biological sense. I know that philosophers decry the definition as tautological, trivial, unfalsifiable and consequently explanatorily infirm (to quote from the page you linked to). I don't mind. For biologists this definition works fine. Objections from guys who maybe never even dissected a frog won't distract us. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Sun Apr 1 20:41:00 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 22:41:00 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0703261036i7afd4ed3n6d22a5ab2c34d38b@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 03:09:45PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 3/30/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > Did the number 0x0bd11a0bb188f291956549705169a996110841d4 exist? > > ### Yes! Always and forever, timeless, just as any element of the > platonic plenum. Well, I'm not religious. Because it's a large cryptohash of an entropy pool that number didn't exist anywhere in the universe before I made it. Now that number exists in many copies, in many people's mailboxes on nonvolatile storage, and it will take a while before it's gone again -- when each and every copy of it has been erased. It may well be that that number then won't appear again, until the universe dies of old age -- I'm too lazy to make a guesstimate what GLYrs of computronium working for GYrs can come up with. > > > How come numbers "exist" in silicon, or gray matter but not in the > > > number of chickens? > > > > Chickens can count a bit, actually. > > ### This is not what I meant. A clutch of chickens always consists of I know. I was referring to the fact that chickens can be their only observers, making a measurement upon a particular physical assembly: a flock. > a certain number of chickens. A certain number of gates in an > integrated circuit may be in states that express a number. Why do you Yeah, I already said that some human-derived (which are causally entangled to the long evolutionary optimization process -- which neither plasma nor interstellar organic-coated ice grains have participated in yet. > say that a number doesn't exist when it is a property of a clutch of > chickens but does exist when it is a property of a piece of silicon? Not all circuits can count, it take special ones. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Apr 1 19:15:47 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 15:15:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] limits of computer feeling In-Reply-To: References: <2256.163.1.72.81.1173817589.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <7641ddc60703140831h75397d68sbcff30e444b6e0cf@mail.gmail.com> <3011.163.1.72.81.1173890167.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <7641ddc60703191303n2afa51e1md0caa787e9a6fff1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703201050q1c33f332ja2444176e43a28b1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703210739y75c71585n5253801f743e5d79@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704011215m36561bfbldf2d1244d3eaf8e7@mail.gmail.com> On 3/21/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 3/22/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > Is there any evidence that smarter, richer, better-looking etc. people > today > > > are more likely to pass on their genes than most of the rest of the > > > population? > > > > > ### I am not sure about the meaning of your question. I noted that > > there is differential fitness among humans, therefore selection for > > traits correlated to fitness is still taking place. Do you think that > > this is incorrect? > > > But selection on the basis of genetic difference is far less important in a > technological society. We would still adapt and "evolve" technologically > even if our genes never again deviated substantially from their present > state. ### Well, I have not claimed otherwise. Rafal From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 1 20:44:09 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 13:44:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/1/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 3/30/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > Did the number 0x0bd11a0bb188f291956549705169a996110841d4 exist? > > ### Yes! Always and forever, timeless, just as any element of the > platonic plenum. Rafal, I don't pretend to be able to dissuade anyone from any abstract belief, but along with infinite primes and infinite variations on infinities, do you also believe that "redness" "exists" in the "platonic plenum?" - Jef From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 21:20:00 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 14:20:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <245933.53237.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Stathis, Yep. You're right. The weak-spot of this question is the quotient of Infinity divided by Infinity. I had incorrectly assumed that this quotient could only be Infinity itself. But, I was wrong. Apparently this is one of the "indeterminate forms" of mathematics - where the quotient of +Infinity/+Infinity can be any positive real number, including positive Infinity. The quotient seems to "behave" in a dynamically variable fashion where any two (or more) consecutive calculations do not have to yield the same result. Weird. As you pointed out, from a certain perspective, this also makes sense intuitively. For example, Infinity/2 is not a use-able calculation in this example because an observer can never "reach" any point in time other than an infinitely small fraction of an infinitely long history (ie. Infinity/Infinity). So this would indeed allow that a Universe that was predetermined to become infinitely old could include observers with subjective experience who could "see" a greater-than-zero yet finite history of their Universe, even though their Universe could still potentially become infinitely old. So it looks like our Universe could potentially become infinitely old, as you said, and that our own Big Bang could also potentially have coincided with "the very beginning". All of this in spite of the fact that our Universe is only 15 Billion years old. That's just plain crazy... but really fascinating, in my opinion. A lingering question I still have is: if the +Infinity/+Infinity quotient can yield any positive real number, then why in this example, does it appear that the quotient is continually gaining positive value only? Instead of for example, yielding an apparent value of +4528, and then subsequently yielding an apparent value of +326. IOW, *why* are these seemingly arbitrary calculations completely consistent with the apparent "arrow of time"? ...??? ...? ... Perhaps because "subsequent" calculations themselves require the passage of time? I wonder if there is more to be seen here. Stathis wrote: ..."if the probability of > observers arising or surviving > decreases as time increases, it can turn out that > there is a high > probability that an observer would find himself in > the first n years of the > universe's existence." True. Or the potential decrease could be the result of a voluntary aggregation/assimilation of individuals into a smaller number of "discrete" consciousnesses, which is what I hope that the Doomsday Argument is indicating, above any of the alternatives. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > On 3/24/07, A B wrote: > > If a Universe was predetermined to have a positively > > infinite lifespan, then an observer from any > > "time-location" should be able to look backwards > and > > see an infinitely long history of their own > Universe, > > back to the "beginning". If we take positive > infinity > > (which would represent the total lifespan of this > > hypothetical Universe) and divide it by any finite > > number (which would represent a randomly selected > > "time-location" for an observer) the quotient is > still > > infinity which would correspond with the apparent > > "age" of the Universe from this observer's > > perspective. > > > Not really: if you stand at any finite number you > can always look backward > to zero, but you are only at an infinitesimal > proportion of infinity if you > look forward. You might say it is surprising that we > find ourselves at such > a low number as 15 billion, but it would be equally > surprising for us to > find ourselves at any other finite number, however > large. And that's if the > distribution of observers is uniform over the > infinite span of the > universe's existence: if the probability of > observers arising or surviving > decreases as time increases, it can turn out that > there is a high > probability that an observer would find himself in > the first n years of the > universe's existence. > > Stathis Papaioannou > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. http://videogames.yahoo.com/platform?platform=120121 From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 21:31:52 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 14:31:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Isn't it already mathematically established that any number (for example: 9) is inherently a calculation. For example: 9 = 4 * 2 + 1 and 9 = 3 + 1 + 5 etc. But, maybe I'm wrong. I haven't yet studied number theory. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Bored stiff? Loosen up... Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games. http://games.yahoo.com/games/front From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 21:51:33 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 14:51:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant Message-ID: <625284.2273.qm@web37405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> This should read/I'll add a little more: Isn't it already mathematically established that any number (for example: 9) is inherently a calculation*?* And aren't calculations and computations identical phenomena? I haven't read this book yet - only the jacket at B&N, but apparently the book "Decoding the Universe" argues that any interactions whatsoever (for example between particles) are inexorably linked-with/composed-of a computation, regardless of whether or not that interaction was observed. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- A B wrote: > > Isn't it already mathematically established that any > number (for example: 9) is inherently a calculation. > > For example: > > 9 = 4 * 2 + 1 > > and > > 9 = 3 + 1 + 5 > > etc. > > But, maybe I'm wrong. I haven't yet studied number > theory. > > Best Wishes, > > Jeffrey Herrlich > > > > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ > Bored stiff? Loosen up... > Download and play hundreds of games for free on > Yahoo! Games. > http://games.yahoo.com/games/front > ____________________________________________________________________________________ The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Apr 2 23:18:19 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 16:18:19 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/2/07, A B wrote: > But, maybe I'm wrong. I haven't yet studied number > theory. Jeffrey, it's not number theory, but philosophy. See pages such as for some background. Some good minds believe it makes good sense. My problem with it is the same as the earlier disagreement over Occam's Razor. It postulates entities unnecessarily and I would argue on an information theoretic basis that we should prefer a finite but unknown ensemble of cosmic principles (or "algorithms") to the "existence" of a "platonic plenum" of an infinity of infinities of abstract entities. The observation that we are embedded in the very "reality" that we strive to understand both enables and confounds such speculation. I therefore frame all such measures of "truth" in probabilistic terms while acknowledging that I can never rule out that an unknown but relevant parameter might turn things around. - Jef - Jef From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 2 23:49:18 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 16:49:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com><031601c770d3$8ee71df0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><035501c77151$d092cdc0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00c601c7758b$764dc2a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jef writes (I hope that this is not a re-post but cannot be sure) > I've been arguing against the Cartesian Theater in its many > disguises in so many ways for so many years that I am truly > at a loss with you [for having suggested that I, Jef, am making > this kind of suggestion] Well, reconsider what you wrote earlier: > It's significant that you accept that there can be distortion in the > sensory channels but fail to accept--or even consider--that > when I say fnord "we have no simple direct unbiased access to > reality, because we're embedded in it," fnord I mean that these > biases run throughout the entire system that you consider you. In the rather philosophic discussion we are having---wondering how a person sees an object---we must say where to draw the boundary of the person. I don't think (in this discussion) it is right to draw the boundary of the person so tightly that his or her sensory channels are outside. It was only this, and your implication that the indirectness extended very very far (perhaps infinitely far), that reminded me of the Cartesian Theatre. Sorry to have perplexed you. But I guess that you will not like this either: "The entire system of a person---his higher brain functions down to his lower brain functions down to V1-V4 and even including all the structures of the eye---, that system directly sees an object. Or would you? Lee By the way, was that a test? I could see the word "fnord". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord . But knowing you, there was probably something even more subtle underfoot :-) Or---this would be a gas---you might have suspected that I was skimming your writing so fast that I'd miss that word! From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 2 23:49:22 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 16:49:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] accelerating evolution? References: <20070328115916.38f036b76284185e041b1b237c97abe6.d8845247bb.wbe@email.secureserver.net> Message-ID: <00c701c7758b$76659060$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Kevin comments on Damien's link: http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/070326_evolution.htm > I tend to agree [that human evolution has been speeding up]. > In fact, I think that the one key evolved characteristic of human > beings that gave us an edge over all other hominids is an ability > to rapidly evolve. But this may simply be a byproduct of greater societal organization. For about the last 10,000 years homo sapiens have had cultures that are seriously capable of spreading at the expense of other cultures, often as fast as a man can walk. For sure these great demographic changes greatly alter gene frequencies, almost by definition. The article said "Ev?o?lu?tion oc?curs when an in?di?vid?ual ac?quires a ben?e?fi?cial ge?net?ic mu?ta?tion, and it spreads through?out the pop?u?la?tion be?cause those with it thrive and re?pro?duce more. Cease?less repe?ti?tions of this can change spe?cies, or pro?duce new ones. As ben?e?fi?cial genes spread, harm?ful ones are weeded out." Sadly, among those harmful genes and gene complexes that are weeded out are *intelligence* and *tolerance for birth control*, and perhaps even lack of religiosity. Certainly two of the more beneficial characteristics of religiosity are its under-utilization of intelligence and its frequent bans on birth control. It's such a pity that in the twentieth century (in the West) intelligence ended up as a harmful trait. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 3 03:50:17 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 20:50:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fragmentation of computations References: <20070321131827.GW1512@leitl.org> <026601c76ffe$85612120$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0703262047p1794a517vc81774c49471eb13@mail.gmail.com> <02a901c77078$879c1c90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <033201c7714d$95bbecd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004701c772fe$318e7db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006c01c773dd$a2e546d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00de01c775a3$4a98dec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > The subjective mode is the important part though, isn't it? I would say that "the subjective" is indeed important, but perhaps only to give flavor :-) or perhaps only as an aid to subjective description. I conjecture that everything that has any real substance may be reduced to an objective account, and moreover, anything that cannot be so reduced ought to be looked upon with a great deal of suspicion. > It presents something of a paradox, because you feel that you are > living a full life when in fact you are not. I would counter that if in fact you are not living a full life, then you ipso facto do not fully feel that you are. In the case, say, where 9 out of 10 of your states are looked up (shelving for the time being the more complicated scenarios of HashLife), then while you report to everyone that everything is fine, the "you" that is so reporting is present only to degree 1/10. Now certainly, under some of these extreme conditions we have been considering (where I contend that functionalism fails), a robot whose so-called consciousness is not being calculated but merely looked up does give every appearance of being conscious. Surely he does. But then, it's also true that sufficiently primitive people will be fooled by motion pictures. > What about the inverse situation where you are granted an extra second > of life for every second lived, but remember nothing of that extra second? > What about all the extra copies of you in branches of the multiverse no > longer in your potential future? I know that your view is that copies are > selves and it is just a matter of summing the total runtime. Yes, that is what I say. > This is a consistent way out of the paradoxes of personal identity raised > by the thought experiments with which we are familiar. Thanks. > My way is to deny that there is any self persisting through time at all, > but accept that there is an illusion of this due to the way our brains > have evolved, and "survival" consists in maintaining this illusion. Yes, the concept of *self* has come under a lot of fire. But then I suppose that we agree that what is important is survival. I then take the admittedly lazy step of saying that in this case, it is a "self" which survives! Why not? Even if there isn't any such thing on close examination, as you suggest, it still conveys the idea we are after to people. (The terms "myself", "self", and so on are pretty thoroughly embedded in the language, and of course people are going to go on using these terms. And as for "I" and "me", we'll never get rid of them, and I'm sure it's not even worth the effort.) > > And then you write "and no one else can tell the difference...". But I > > think that that is false. I believe that the scientists observing the > > phenomenon (a subject getting runtime) determine that there *is* no > > subject (he doesn't exist as a conscious entity) during those times in > > which his states are merely being looked up. > > How would the scientists know that there is no consciousness present > when the behaviour is the same? It is like trying to decide if a robot is > conscious. Scientists will conjecture that consciousness is or is not present in the same way that they make conjectures in other theories. For example, I would hold the tentative belief, were I introduced to you, that you were conscious. If, however, a rigorous examination of the way that you were computed showed that you were only a GLUT (and were not being computed at all in the nice usage of terms I favor), then I would cease to believe that you were conscious. Likewise, we hopefully into the future keep to the principle "conscious entities should not be made to suffer", at least in the public parlance. We simply value what people do (and do not) experience. From this, it could easily follow---provided that the concept does not become obsolete---that from suitable comparisons with the things we know are not conscious (such as trees and rocks) and from comparisons with things that we know *are* conscious, e.g. human beings, the correct physical correlates can be teased out. > Returning to your example of driving to avoid an accident, imagine you > are a being in a Life simulation. You come to a point where you can > either slow down or keep going and run over a pedestrian. You decide > to slow down, because you think that running people over is bad and > because you think you have control over your life. In reality, you could > not do other than slow down: that was determined in the Life universe > with the force of a mathematical proof. Your feeling that you could have > acted otherwise is entirely illusory, as you could no more have changed > what was to happen than you could, through much mental straining, have > changed 16 into a prime number. That's right. If we are living in a deterministic universe and something happens, then we must admit that from an external viewpoint or according to the physics running our simulation, what happened was totally inevitable. But see Dennett's nice discussion of "evitability" in his book Freedom Evolves. He considers exactly this case, namely, a conscious Life entity, and he shows to my satisfaction that there is a strong, meaningful sense in which one not should regard future hazards as inevitable. Lee From max at maxmore.com Tue Apr 3 03:57:59 2007 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:57:59 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Test Message-ID: <200704030356.l333uOFa021638@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com> Testing testing From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Apr 3 04:11:46 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:11:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Test In-Reply-To: <200704030356.l333uOFa021638@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704030426.l334QFOF001694@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps > >... The wavelet transform provides the > mathematical analog of a music score: just as the score tells a >musician which notes to play when... > Amara Graps, PhD Music scores are a most remarkable form of information compression. A sheet of music can be written on a single page, yet can take a hundred seconds or more to unravel the concepts found there with a musical instrument or voice. The musician can add stylistic nuances that the composer had not imagined, or may add improvisations, derivatives, contratonals or other interpretive notions. A musician can insert emotion with an instrument. So the composer performs a transform to the score, then the musician performs an inverse transform to create music. I don't think I contributed to the notion of surfing with wavelets with that paragraph but I had fun writing it. {8-] spike From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Apr 3 04:20:50 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:20:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Test In-Reply-To: <200704030356.l333uOFa021638@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com> References: <200704030356.l333uOFa021638@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com> Message-ID: Feeling testy, are we? ;-) - Jef On 4/2/07, Max More wrote: > Testing testing From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 3 05:20:40 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 01:20:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002901c775af$fd9c6440$2b094e0c@MyComputer> "A B" Wrote: > Isn't it already mathematically established that any > number (for example: 9) is inherently a calculation. A very very few rare numbers (only the smallest form of infinity) such at 9 are easily calculable. But there are numbers such as PI that are far more numerous (a larger infinity) that can only be calculated if you are willing to do an infinite number of calculations. But that's still not big enough, most numbers, nearly all in fact, can't be calculated at all, not even if you had infinite time at your disposal. John K Clark From amara at amara.com Tue Apr 3 05:33:13 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 07:33:13 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Body Hacking talk- slides online Message-ID: From Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/01/body_hacking_slides_.html Body Hacking Talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007 Slides are now posted online at http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/bodyhacking.html The talk was this: --- Date: Thursday, March 29 Time: 2:15pm - 3:00pm Location: Douglas A Technology that was the traditional purview of the medical establishment is migrating into the hands of body hackers, and the medical establishment itself is finding ways to enhance humans, not just cure disease, and faces a new dilemma about whether and who should be enhanced. All of these advancements come with health dangers and unanticipated possibilities, as well as an ethical debate about what it means to be human. This talk will touch on the latest medical advances in neurological understanding and interface as well as physical enhancements in sports and prosthetics. But more time will be given to how the body hackers and renegades of the world are likely to go forward with or without societal permission. Journalist Quinn Norton will touch on sensory extension, home surgery, medical tourism, nervous system interfaces, and controlling parts of our bodies and minds once thought to be nature's fate for us. ---- In addition, here is a video of Quinn giving this talk in Berlin at 23C3 in December http://media.hojann.net/23C3/23C3-1629-en-body_hacking.m4v -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Tue Apr 3 04:54:55 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:54:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Test In-Reply-To: <200704030356.l333uOFa021638@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com> Message-ID: <351423.42724.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> Read you loud and clear, Max. :) --- Max More wrote: > Testing testing > > _______________________________________________ > 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 "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. ____________________________________________________________________________________ We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love (and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265 From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 08:48:25 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 18:48:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <245933.53237.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <245933.53237.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Hi Jeffrey, ..."if the probability of > > observers arising or surviving > > decreases as time increases, it can turn out that > > there is a high > > probability that an observer would find himself in > > the first n years of the > > universe's existence." > > True. Or the potential decrease could be the result of > a voluntary aggregation/assimilation of individuals > into a smaller number of "discrete" consciousnesses, > which is what I hope that the Doomsday Argument is > indicating, above any of the alternatives. > Actually your whole question could be taken as a form of Doomsday Argument reasoning: it would seem more likely that I am one of few (few species, few observer moments, few historical eras) rather than one of many, especially one of infinitely many. The paradox is, even if the space of all observer moments is infinite, making the measure of each individual observer moment infinitesimal, that doesn't mean that each observer moment should assume it doesn't exist. Reality trumps probability every time. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 10:45:57 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 20:45:57 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fragmentation of computations In-Reply-To: <00de01c775a3$4a98dec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070321131827.GW1512@leitl.org> <02a901c77078$879c1c90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <033201c7714d$95bbecd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004701c772fe$318e7db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006c01c773dd$a2e546d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00de01c775a3$4a98dec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/3/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > Returning to your example of driving to avoid an accident, imagine you > > are a being in a Life simulation. You come to a point where you can > > either slow down or keep going and run over a pedestrian. You decide > > to slow down, because you think that running people over is bad and > > because you think you have control over your life. In reality, you could > > not do other than slow down: that was determined in the Life universe > > with the force of a mathematical proof. Your feeling that you could have > > acted otherwise is entirely illusory, as you could no more have changed > > what was to happen than you could, through much mental straining, have > > changed 16 into a prime number. > > That's right. If we are living in a deterministic universe and something > happens, then we must admit that from an external viewpoint or > according to the physics running our simulation, what happened was > totally inevitable. > > But see Dennett's nice discussion of "evitability" in his book Freedom > Evolves. He considers exactly this case, namely, a conscious Life > entity, and he shows to my satisfaction that there is a strong, meaningful > sense in which one not should regard future hazards as inevitable. Then in the same sense in Platonia, future hazards are not inevitable, since after all the Life game in which the hazard is or isn't avoided is a Platonic object and its outcome is not changed by implementing it physically. More generally, I see Dennett's compatibilism as a sort of apology for determinism, reframing "free will" so that we can tell ourselves we have it even though the obvious conclusion is that it is just an illusion. In other words, if in fact free will were just an illusion due to the fact that we don't know what we're going to do until we do it, how would the universe, or our experience of it, be any different? If the answer is "it wouldn't", then what purpose is served by the concept of free will other than to make us feel better? I am quite happy to drop not only free will but also ideas such as absolute morality, a self persisting through time, and even a separate physical universe if the only reason to hang on to them is an emotional one. At the same time, I am quite happy to continue living my life as if all these things are in fact real, and I think it is better to live an illusion rather than a delusion. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Apr 2 01:02:31 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 21:02:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] archives? In-Reply-To: <200702111327.l1BDRBxs014821@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200702111327.l1BDRBxs014821@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > This link will not work for me - it is Not Found. Do we still have archives? If so, how can I access them? I wanted to reread that intertesting thread about the movie "300". Regards, MB From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Apr 4 04:16:45 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:16:45 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: Hello! Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070403231431.030937e8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> Well, that was a provoking excursion around the galaxy! John Klos has done a marvelous job of reworking the technical issues that arose last week. He and Max will be handling changes that will make things a heck of a lot more stable. Hope everyone is well - Natasha Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 jef at jefallbright.net Tue Apr 3 16:39:48 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 09:39:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] archives? In-Reply-To: <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <200702111327.l1BDRBxs014821@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: On 4/1/07, MB wrote: > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > This link will not work for me - it is Not Found. > > Do we still have archives? If so, how can I access them? You may want to look here: [Courtesy of Eugen] - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Apr 3 16:55:06 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 09:55:06 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <002901c775af$fd9c6440$2b094e0c@MyComputer> References: <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <002901c775af$fd9c6440$2b094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/2/07, John K Clark wrote: > "A B" Wrote: > > > Isn't it already mathematically established that any > > number (for example: 9) is inherently a calculation. > > A very very few rare numbers (only the smallest form of infinity) such at 9 > are easily calculable. But there are numbers such as PI that are far more > numerous (a larger infinity) that can only be calculated if you are willing > to do an infinite number of calculations. > > But that's still not big enough, most numbers, nearly all in fact, can't be > calculated at all, not even if you had infinite time at your disposal. Amplifying John's point here, if you were to imagine throwing a dart at a perfect number line representing the range from 0 to 1, you would have zero chance of exactly hitting a rational number. - Jef From hibbert at mydruthers.com Tue Apr 3 17:19:25 2007 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:19:25 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] archives? In-Reply-To: <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <200702111327.l1BDRBxs014821@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <46128C9D.7040702@mydruthers.com> >> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > This link will not work for me - it is Not Found. > > Do we still have archives? If so, how can I access them? I've notified Ken Kittlitz. He helped set up that archive. If it's a simple problem, he can usually revive it quickly. Chris -- Currently reading: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope; Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike; Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com Blog: http://pancrit.org From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Apr 3 17:49:09 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 10:49:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <002b01c77267$a1e0a300$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <031601c770d3$8ee71df0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035501c77151$d092cdc0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002b01c77267$a1e0a300$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 3/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > By the way, was that a test? I could see the word "fnord" > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord . But knowing you, there > was probably something even more subtle underfoot :-) > Or---this would be a gas---you might have suspected that > I was skimming your writing so fast that I'd miss that word! Lee, it was a friendly poke at you for leaving out a key portion of my statement that didn't fit your conception of my argument, it was a check to see whether you really were paying enough attention to catch it (and possibly give you a chuckle), it was a bit of entertaining nostalgia for those who recall the term, and it was a self-referential joke about the biased, subjective nature of perception which was the topic of the discussion. I'm going to back out of this discussion for a while because I'm noticing (once again) that my expectations for effective sharing of understanding are again outstripping the limited capabilities of this medium, and my ineffective attempts to pack layers of thought into such limited space to the exclusion of social niceties are likely to create more heat than light. - Jef From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Apr 3 18:10:41 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 14:10:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] archives? In-Reply-To: <46128C9D.7040702@mydruthers.com> References: <200702111327.l1BDRBxs014821@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45622.72.236.102.82.1175475751.squirrel@main.nc.us> <46128C9D.7040702@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: <46463.72.236.102.124.1175623841.squirrel@main.nc.us> >>> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> This link will not work for me - it is Not Found. >> >> Do we still have archives? If so, how can I access them? > > I've notified Ken Kittlitz. He helped set up that archive. If it's a > simple problem, he can usually revive it quickly. > > Thanks for the replies. My problem was the DNS problem, only I didn't know that when I wrote the message! I wrote in a private email to spike, asking if the Singularity had happened without me - and everything was now gone away! I sure am glad we're back online! :) Many thanks to those who work to keep things running. :) Regards, MB From ken at javien.com Tue Apr 3 18:27:07 2007 From: ken at javien.com (Ken Kittlitz) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:27:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] archives? Message-ID: <26877743.29351175624827845.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >I've notified Ken Kittlitz. He helped set up that archive. If it's a >simple problem, he can usually revive it quickly. > >Chris Hi folks, Though it's no longer the official archive for exi-chat, I'd be happy to start tracking the list at http://forum.ideosphere.com Are the existing archives available in Unix 'mbox' format anywhere, so I could import them? Thanks. -Ken From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 19:09:36 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 15:09:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> References: <8d71341e0703261036i7afd4ed3n6d22a5ab2c34d38b@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> On 4/1/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > say that a number doesn't exist when it is a property of a clutch of > > chickens but does exist when it is a property of a piece of silicon? > > Not all circuits can count, it take special ones. ### You evaded the question. What is so special about certain material objects (human brains, ink on paper, certain circuits) that makes their states able to support the existence of numbers (and be absolutely necessary to the existence of numbers), while other material objects do support the existence of numbers? Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Tue Apr 3 19:58:03 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 21:58:03 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> References: <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 03:09:36PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > Not all circuits can count, it take special ones. > > ### You evaded the question. What is so special about certain material > objects (human brains, ink on paper, certain circuits) that makes Ink on paper, no, (unless it's one of them fancy inkjet-printed electronics which is smart enough to count). Human brains and certain circuits, yes, because through evolutionary optimization (all smart human artifacts are causally entangled with said optimization, which is not true for dumb objects, man-made, or otherwise) they have evolved to be able to make measurements on their environment/tracking certain aspects of state (including themselves), which is externally denoted (in your, mine, and a fair number of other heads) as "counting" and "numbers". The pigment marks on dead tree are completely meaningless without any such systems and said measurements (unless it's one damn smart paper). > their states able to support the existence of numbers (and be > absolutely necessary to the existence of numbers), while other > material objects do support the existence of numbers? The numbers are not in the object but the observer (the systems have to agree on a common code as to configuration states of the object, which requires communication, or a common point of origin acting as a communication channel equivalent). Observer complex, external encoding trivial. Sufficiently so that the observer can encode internally, without breaking a sweat. Any borderline smart critter (evolved here or elsewhere) will need a capability of track resources and fellow critters (assuming, it's not completely asocial), so it will evolve one. Much smarter critters which need to make sense of the universe will have to come up with some functional equivalent of technology/science, which, however, will be rather alien to us. All of this is completely orthogonal to the low level processes of the universe or even metaverse, because you can make abacuses from opterons, by drilling a neat hole through them and putting them on strings. Now I sound like a philosopher. Ptui, must go wash my mouth with soap. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 3 19:59:58 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 12:59:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing Message-ID: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> It was inevitable that this discussion come sooner or later to hinge right on the point of free will. "Inevitable?", well, not really. We really should suppose that in some nearby alternative universes it did not do so, and that versions of us--- with whom we must totally identify---came to other decisions. They did this on the basis of very small differences in those other universes, such as whether or not the Exi mail server had not been misbehaving, for example. > Then in the same sense in Platonia, future hazards are not inevitable, > since after all the Life game in which the hazard is or isn't avoided is > a Platonic object and its outcome is not changed by implementing it > physically. Yes, I would say that it is best not to regard our future decisions as inevitable whether in Platonia or in a deterministic simulation And that's not just because it feels good, or it provides us with optimism, or whatever, even though those things are true. It's because on any sensible meaning of what "inevitability" *could* mean, it just isn't true that that future events are inevitable (see next). > More generally, I see Dennett's compatibilism as a sort of apology > for determinism, reframing "free will" so that we can tell ourselves > we have it even though the obvious conclusion is that it is just an > illusion. I claim that if one *totally* banishes from his or her consciousness the idea of non-determinism (to the point that it is unthinkable), and only then asks "do I have a choice?", the answer must be "Yes". But so long as there remains even the slightest vestige of the notion of an uncaused event, or the slightest vestige of the soul, then the silly answer "No" may still be entertained. (When for example, you ask yourself, do I have a choice about regarding answering this email, the answer "No" is less informative and less true than the answer "Yes".) So let us assume that we have completely internalized the belief that there are no uncaused events and there are no souls. Then what the devil does the question "Do I have a choice" possibly mean now? It can only mean the same as it would for a concious chess computer in trying to decide between move A and move B. First, we know that the calculations it makes regarding those CHOICES, and I do not apologize for the term, will be ongoing. A huge number of factors, e.g., whether the opponent's open rook file makes a queen side attack too problematical, have effects. The machine must decide! So---recalling that we have utterly and without reservation totally gone beyond even a hint of uncaused events---this can *only* mean that the machine is taking these factors into account, i.e., a decision is simply "taking factors into account". (What else could it be?) That is all that a "choice" can *possibly* mean. It is absolutely wrong to conceive of choice as anything but taking a huge number of factors into account, and doing extensive calculations of the various alternatives. But then, the only possibility is that the machine is free to choose.... unless indeed an external agent is forcing it to make one move as against the other, e.g., that external agent is not permitting all the factors to affect the decision that normally would be affecting the decision. ("You will lose to Botvinnik in round 6, or else go to Siberian labor camp.") Does the program have free will? Well, what can that possibly mean? I claim that the denial of the statement "the machine has free will" has taken us right back to an unconscious assumption that there could be uncaused events. But we are supposed, now, to be beyond that. Therefore, we must interpret the question accordingly, and so it must mean, "are the factors contributing to the decision all coming into play?". If the answer is yes---i.e., the computer is free to make up its mind without external compulsion---then it has to be said that the computer's will is free (remember, we have absolutely internalized that there are no uncaused decisions). > In other words, if in fact free will were just an illusion due to the > fact that we don't know what we're going to do until we do it, (and I say that it ought not be regarded as an illusion, for so doing sneaks back in the idea that there could be souls and uncaused events) > how would the universe, or our experience of it, be any different? > If the answer is "it wouldn't", I'd maintain that it is not conceivable that free will is an illusion, when what HAS to be meant by the phrase is as explained above > then what purpose is served by the concept of free will other than > to make us feel better? It serves the purpose of identifying who or what made a decision. Either I can go visit the prison by my own free will, say as a reporter and thus exercise my free will, or I can be arrested and forced to go to prison, in which case my free will has been abrogated > I am quite happy to drop not only free will but also ideas such as > absolute morality, I'm with you there. Though people should understand that since there *can* be no absolute morality, what morality that we do have is still extremely important, must be defended vociferously, and cultivated, and perhaps even violently imposed on others with great passion. > At the same time, I am quite happy to continue living my life as if all > these things are in fact real, and I think it is better to live an illusion > rather than a delusion. I still think that it's possible, by a careful consideration of what is true, to frame our notions (in the only ways possible) as reflections of that reality. Once that is done, and the terms obtain their (only) sensible meanings, then "having choices", "making decisions", "exercising free will", etc., ought not to be regarded as illusions, for they are not. They're just descriptions, after all, which is all that they properly *ever* have been. Lee From eugen at leitl.org Tue Apr 3 20:18:28 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 22:18:28 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 12:59:58PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > It was inevitable that this discussion come sooner or later to hinge right > on the point of free will. How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? If I gave you a dump from /dev/random along with /dev/urandom, would you be able to tell those apart? What does it even mean in a process that is us, since the top-level lags in realization of a made-up decision at a lower level. Assuming you knew the universe is deterministic at sub-Planck level, would it help you to make a killing on blue chips, or even avoid that car speeding round the corner? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From estropico at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 20:25:34 2007 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 21:25:34 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> Has this been mentioned here? On the Channel 4 site: The great global warming swindle. According to a group of scientists brought together by documentary-maker Martin Durkin, if the planet is heating up, it isn't your fault and there's nothing you can do about it. We've almost begun to take it for granted that climate change is a man-made phenomenon. But just as the environmental lobby think they've got our attention, a group of naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming. http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html The whole thing on GoogleVideo: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 Cheers, Fabio From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 3 20:54:23 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:54:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.co m> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> I haven't watched this program yet, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 but as usual I'm bemused by the way so many stories posted on this list about anthropogenic planetary heating echo the very small number of naysayers. It's much more fun, of course, to be a contrarian. I'm one about psi, but it's not as if a very large proportion of those who've closely studied the evidence for and against psi cry out that it's a swindle (whereas astronomers and demographers who've looked at the claims of astrology do). But global warming is the favored model of experts in all the relevant fields. As Hal Finney used to argue repeatedly before he dropped out of sight: when the majority of scientific practitioners agree on X, it's far more likely that X is correct (within the limits of available evidence, paradigms, etc) than that it's not. This is quite a different point, of course, from the observation Greg Benford makes, that global warming is better approached as a difficult set of technical problems for science and technology to solve than as a moral outrage requiring wringing of hands and pointing of fingers. Although a bit of that doesn't go astray either. Damien Broderick From amara at amara.com Tue Apr 3 21:01:03 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 23:01:03 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fountainheaded ! Message-ID: This is fantastic! Steven Colbert's Objectivist Children's Sleepover: http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=82099 I wonder how many people got the jokes...? Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Apr 3 21:19:45 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:19:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question Message-ID: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> I have found a repeated discrepancy. Is a nanometer a millionth or a billionth of a meter? The US gov't papers all say a millionth (like the recent "The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think" and its earlier gov't source material), but I have read a billionth in other places. And the answer is...? Thanks! PJ From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 3 21:28:02 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 17:28:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> "Eugen Leitl" > How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? You can't prove it, not for any deep reason it's just that the term "free will" is just a noise some people like to make with their mouth, that's it, nothing more. Personally I never cared much for the sound of it myself, I don't find it particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with my mouth. I don't believe there is any idea in philosophy (or criminal law) stupider than free will, not even immaculate conception. It's a classic example of an idea so bad it's not even wrong. And Eugen congratulations! I was able to read your entire post without going through any contortions. Have you decided that Microsoft is not the great Satin after all? Have you decided that following the "generally accepted E mail standard", a "standard" virtually nobody follows, is not such a great idea if you want to communicate? John K Clark From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Apr 3 21:34:37 2007 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 17:34:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fountainheaded ! Message-ID: <380-22007423213437544@M2W007.mail2web.com> From: Amara Graps >This is fantastic! HAHAHAH! LOL! HAHAHAHA! hahahahhaha! -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft? Windows? and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting From amara at amara.com Tue Apr 3 21:59:45 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 23:59:45 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question Message-ID: Hi Patricia, The easiest way to remember is that nano is (greek) 10^{-9} meters One billion is 10^9, so then 1/(10^{9}) = 10^{-9} = one billionTH Hey, this is cute: http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1365/?letter=N&spage=1 nano = dwarfish! Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From nanogirl at halcyon.com Tue Apr 3 23:24:44 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 15:24:44 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question References: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <00e501c77647$4c2c8490$0200a8c0@Nano> A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Or 10^-9 meters. A nanometer is 3 to 6 atoms across (depending on the atoms used). It could be that there was just some typo in the document you read. Kind regards, Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: pjmanney To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 1:19 PM Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question I have found a repeated discrepancy. Is a nanometer a millionth or a billionth of a meter? The US gov't papers all say a millionth (like the recent "The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think" and its earlier gov't source material), but I have read a billionth in other places. And the answer is...? Thanks! PJ _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Apr 3 22:55:43 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:55:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question In-Reply-To: <00e501c77647$4c2c8490$0200a8c0@Nano> References: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <00e501c77647$4c2c8490$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403175338.021cec40@satx.rr.com> >A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. True, but with projected nanotech we're talking about complex devices that might be 10, 100 or more nanometers across. So a "nano" gadget might be 10-millionths of a meter in size. Damien Broderick From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Apr 3 23:10:31 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 16:10:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200704032308.l33N8ZmM004683@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps > Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question > > Hi Patricia, > > The easiest way to remember is that nano is (greek) 10^{-9} meters > > One billion is 10^9, so then 1/(10^{9}) = 10^{-9} = one billionTH > Amara Ja that works, or another way is to think of milli, micro, nano, pico as being almost in alphabetical order. Everyone already knows milli and micro, so the fact that those two are out of order shouldn't mess up you.* spike * "mess up you" is an example of how clumsy is our language if we rigorously avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 3 22:17:34 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:17:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.co m> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070403181346.041b7b70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:25 PM 4/3/2007 +0100, Fabio wrote: >Has this been mentioned here? > >On the Channel 4 site: The great global warming swindle. According to >a group of scientists brought together by documentary-maker Martin >Durkin, if the planet is heating up, it isn't your fault and there's >nothing you can do about it. Maybe *scientists* (right or wrong) can't do anything about it, but *engineers* could. Or have you been reading this list recently? Keith From acy.stapp at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 23:27:12 2007 From: acy.stapp at gmail.com (Acy Stapp) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 18:27:12 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question In-Reply-To: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: The current American usage of 1 million as 1e6 and 1 billion as 1e9 is expected to prevail but in the past parts of Europe including England specified 1e6 as a milliard and 1e9 as a million. Perhaps your source materials were of European origin. Acy This may be the source of the confusion. On 4/3/07, pjmanney wrote: > > I have found a repeated discrepancy. Is a nanometer a millionth or a > billionth of a meter? The US gov't papers all say a millionth (like the > recent "The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think" and its earlier gov't > source material), but I have read a billionth in other places. > > And the answer is...? > > Thanks! > > PJ > -- Acy Stapp "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Tue Apr 3 23:10:09 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 16:10:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.2.20070403231431.030937e8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> Message-ID: <859222.95716.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I found this interesting site while surfing around: http://www.csulb.edu/~mbarbic/atomres.htm [Beware: Twice when I clicked the internal hyperlink to this professor's home page (not the above page), IE had to shut down due to an error. Just an innocent glitch I'm sure, but all the same.] If AR-MRI does become possible (and I guess it looks both possible and practical), it could potentially improve our chances of achieving true "outside-Earth" sustainability; like in a space colony for example. With the appropriate software (and a practical level of hardware), it appears to me that scanning with AR-MRI could provide on-the-fly blueprints for a nanofactory or nanoassembler. For example the blueprints of a variety of foods could be obtained and used to reconstitute those objects. The applications for this would be huge. But, like most things technology, it could also be used to harm. Hopefully, the good uses will overcome the potentially bad ones. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Bored stiff? Loosen up... Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games. http://games.yahoo.com/games/front From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 3 23:47:24 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 16:47:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <013a01c7764a$77695e00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > the term "free will" is just a noise some people like to make > with their mouth, that's it, nothing more. Personally I never > cared much for the sound of it myself, I don't find it > particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with > my mouth. > > I don't believe there is any idea in philosophy (or criminal law) > stupider than free will, not even immaculate conception. > It's a classic example of an idea so bad it's not even wrong. I always enjoy the clarity of your writing, John, and the clearness of thinking that evidently lies behind it. In cases like this, the clarity is strikingly enhanced even further by the total lack of such distractions as reasons and arguments. Most people fail to realize how seriously the latter compromise the forcefulness and persuasiveness of their discourse. (I myself often fall into the trap of providing the uninitiated with the steps towards which I reach a conclusion, or outline steps in reasoning that might assist them in reaching the same conclusion. You serve as an admirable model for "cutting to the chase" and telling people what you really think!) Now that I know how you feel about these things, your position is very clear, thanks. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 4 00:17:13 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 17:17:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <014b01c7764e$ad531b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Here is one interesting tid-bit in the sequence of arguments presented: > When less cosmic radiation reaches Earth, fewer clouds > form and the full effects of the sun's radiation heats the planet. Wikipedia suggests > Cosmic rays have been experimentally determined to be able to produce ultra-small aerosol particles [3] [5], orders of magnitude > smaller than cloud condensation nuclei. But the steps from this to modulation of cloud formation and thence to be a contributor of > global warming have not been established. The analogy is with the Wilson cloud chamber, however acting on a global scale, where > earth's atmosphere acts as the cloud chamber and the cosmic rays catalyze the production of Cloud condensation nuclei. But unlike > a cloud chamber, where the air is carefully purified, the real atmosphere always has many CCN naturally. Various proposals have > been made for the exact mechanism by which cosmic rays might affect clouds, including Ion Mediated Nucleation, and through an > indirect effect on current flow density in the Global electric circuit (see Tinsley 2000, and F. Yu 1999). < Lee ----- Original Message ----- From: "estropico" To: Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 1:25 PM Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle > Has this been mentioned here? > > On the Channel 4 site: The great global warming swindle. According to > a group of scientists brought together by documentary-maker Martin > Durkin, if the planet is heating up, it isn't your fault and there's > nothing you can do about it. We've almost begun to take it for granted > that climate change is a man-made phenomenon. But just as the > environmental lobby think they've got our attention, a group of > naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming. > http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html > > The whole thing on GoogleVideo: > http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 > > Cheers, > Fabio From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 4 00:44:23 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:44:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> At 03:54 PM 4/3/2007 -0500, I wrote: >I haven't watched this program yet, > >http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 > >but as usual I'm bemused by the way so many stories posted on this >list about anthropogenic planetary heating echo the very small number >of naysayers. Okay, I take it all back. Well, not all, but quite a bit. It's an irritating program in many ways--embarrassingly buoyant and inveigling 1950s' ad music when the wonders of heavy industry are being pushed, the absence of any response from clmate experts holding contrary views--but it's a lot more challenging than I expected. I was especially won over by the segment in the middle of the piece presenting evidence against carbon driving (rather than, as appears to be the case, carbon level consequent upon heating) and in favor of the primary impact of cyclic solar dynamics: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 As it happens, I drew upon an early version of this general theory in my 1997 book THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, and was roundly pilloried in reviews. The TV program provides one key new component that I barely hinted at a decade ago: cosmic irradiation grows clouds, which cause cooling by increasing albedo, and cosmic rays density is inversely proportional to solar wind flux (which in turn is signified by sunspot activity). Lovely stuff. Damien Broderick From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 00:59:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 10:59:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> References: <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 03:09:36PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > Not all circuits can count, it take special ones. > > > > ### You evaded the question. What is so special about certain material > > objects (human brains, ink on paper, certain circuits) that makes > > Ink on paper, no, (unless it's one of them fancy inkjet-printed > electronics which is smart enough to count). Human brains and certain > circuits, > yes, because through evolutionary optimization (all smart human artifacts > are > causally entangled with said optimization, which is not true for dumb > objects, man-made, or otherwise) they have evolved to be able to make > measurements on their environment/tracking certain aspects of state > (including themselves), which is externally denoted (in your, mine, > and a fair number of other heads) as "counting" and "numbers". > Sorry to keep harping on this, but it is not clear if you are acknowledging that smart objects are made up of dumb objects, and moreover they might be made of of dumb objects which have come together in the right configuration accidentally rather than deliberately. That is actually exactly what the human brain is: over billions of years, multiple chemical reactions have occurred completely at random (i.e. there is no designer), and those that just happen to be better at self-replicating have survived. So although it seems almost impossible that a car would be thrown together with spare parts blowing in the wind, it is quite possible if the parts are blowing in the wind for billions of years. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 4 01:42:51 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:42:51 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.co m> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403203544.022f2ca8@satx.rr.com> From The Sunday Times February 11, 2007 An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months? time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases. The small print explains ?very likely? as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain?s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works. Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported. Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter?s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Ad?lie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean. So one awkward question you can ask, when you?re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is ?Why is east Antarctica getting colder?? It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you?re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it?s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999. That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago. Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming. The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm. What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report. Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun?s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism. He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun?s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier. The only trouble with Svensmark?s idea ? apart from its being politically incorrect ? was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005. In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year. Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark?s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it ?A new theory of climate change?. Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out. The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark?s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature?s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars. The Chilling Stars is published by Icon. It is available for ?9.89 including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 ================== ?Blame cosmic rays not CO2 for warming up the planet? Lewis Smith, Environment Reporter The impact of cosmic rays on the climate could be greater than scientists suspect after experiments showed they may have a pivotal role in cloud formation. Researchers have managed to replicate the effect of cosmic rays on the aerosols in the atmosphere that help to create clouds. Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist in Denmark, said the experiments suggested that man?s influence on global warming might be rather less than was supposed by the bulk of scientific opinion. Cosmic rays ? radiation, or particles of energy, from stars, which bombard the Earth ? can create electrically charged ions in the atmosphere that act as a magnet for water vapour, causing clouds to form. Dr Svensmark suggests that the Sun, at a historically high level of activity, is deflecting many of the cosmic rays away from Earth and thus reducing the cloud cover. Clouds reflect the Sun?s rays back into space and are considered to have an important cooling effect. However, if during periods of high activity the Sun?s magnetic field pushes a greater proportion of cosmic rays away from the Earth, fewer clouds will form. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, concentrates on how ions are created and behave in the atmosphere when cosmic rays from stars hit it. Cosmic rays were replicated by the use of ultraviolet light that were turned on and off in both short bursts and long exposures to create ions. The researchers found that the presence of ions encouraged the formation of clusters of molecules. In the atmosphere these clusters of ozone, sulphur dioxide and water are understood to act as aerosols in attracting water vapour, culminating in the formation of clouds. The number of clusters, according to the report, is proportionate to the number of ions present, which in turn depends on the frequency of cosmic rays reaching the Earth. ?The experiment indicates that ions play a role in nucleating new particles in the atmosphere and that the rate of production is sensitive to the rate of ion density,? the report concluded. ?One might expect to find a relationship between ioni-sation and cloud properties. This feature seems to be consistent with the present work.? The report added that the ions were likely to generate a reservoir of clusters of aerosol molecules in the atmosphere that ?are important for nuclea-tion processes in the atmosphere and ultimately cloud formation?. The findings are unlikely to change radically the views of mainstream climatologists. Nevertheless, a team of scientists will shortly begin a larger experiment at a particle accelerator in Europe in the hope of learning more about the effects of cosmic rays on cloud cover. According to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, by far the biggest influence on climate change is the level of greenhouse gases released by mankind, largely through the use of fossil fuels. Peter Stott, of the Met Office?s Hadley Centre and one of Britain?s leading climate scientists, said that Dr Svensmark?s theory should be taken ?with a cellar of salt?. Small, localised effects on cloud formation might be possible but he dismissed the suggestion of cosmic rays being responsible for global warming. From hibbert at mydruthers.com Wed Apr 4 01:18:28 2007 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:18:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <4612FCE4.3040208@mydruthers.com> > I haven't watched this program yet, > > http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 I didn't watch it either. > but as usual I'm bemused by the way so many stories posted on this > list about anthropogenic planetary heating echo the very small number > of naysayers. It's much more fun, of course, to be a contrarian. It's also something we have in common here. This community is focused on things that the mainstream doesn't accept: cryonics, nanotech, the singularity, transhumanism and so on. Some of these have become more accepted since we started talking about them, but the things that make this a community are the things we disagree with the mainstream about. I think the claim (at least implied) is that we each look at the evidence and make up our own minds. It's not at all surprising that many of us have opinions counter to the standard view on other topics. What's surprising is that we agree on so many things. > But global warming is the favored model of experts in all the > relevant fields. As Hal Finney used to argue repeatedly before he > dropped out of sight: when the majority of scientific practitioners > agree on X, it's far more likely that X is correct (within the limits > of available evidence, paradigms, etc) than that it's not. It may be far more likely, but there are sometimes reasons to doubt a consensus. I just finished reading Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics". Smolin argues that the pursuit of String Theory, which has consumed all of physics for more than 20 years, is an example of group-think, which has stifled progress in the field. In my review (http://pancrit.org/2007/04/lee-smolin-trouble-with-physics.html) of Smolin, I refer to other examples of fields that have been derailed in the way that Smolin charges physics has. I think the signs of group-think are quite visible in people's attitude toward anthropogenic climate change. It's also becoming clearer that the environmental movement would prefer to exploit the claims to reduce human progress rather than to find a solution. There may be evidence that something is happening, and that it's caused by human action, but the evidence that it's unstoppable or worrisome is scant. And, as engineers, we could fix it if that were the goal. So I don't see a crisis. Chris -- In Just-spring when the world is mudluscious -- E. E. Cummings http://www.ralphlevy.com/quotes/balloon.htm Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com Blog: http://pancrit.org Prediction Market Software: http://zocalo.sourceforge.net From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 02:37:54 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 22:37:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <564080.1059.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <002901c775af$fd9c6440$2b094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <62c14240704031937p70afa19ci7dada284267ac004@mail.gmail.com> On 4/3/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > Amplifying John's point here, if you were to imagine throwing a dart > at a perfect number line representing the range from 0 to 1, you would > have zero chance of exactly hitting a rational number. A perfect number line? Is that a line of 6's? Wait a minute, there are no perfect numbers from 0 to 1... Actually, given the relative fatness of the dart i'm pretty confident there is a nonzero probability that more than one rational number lies within the interval of the width of the dart. For the sake of argument, lets draw the target line after the dart is thrown so we don't have the requirement of landing to either side of the unidimensional line. on a tangential note... A friend of mine once explained to me an idea he encountered for encoding an [arbitrarily long | infinite] library of knowledge: Represent each byte of a data stream as the next decimal place of a Real number between 0 and 1. Using a very accurate mark on a unit measure, you would have completely encoded the data stream. Of course the limitation of physical reality makes this impractical to carry around an actual object - but mathematically my first impression of this 'scheme' was to remind him of the pervasiveness of phi as a candidate to suggest this encoding may already be done, he just needs to figure out the decode. just in case you haven't already encountered this amazing irrational number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio From pj at pj-manney.com Wed Apr 4 02:42:50 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:42:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question Message-ID: <6002275.84951175654570205.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Acy wrote: >The current American usage of 1 million as 1e6 and 1 billion as 1e9 is expected to prevail but in the past parts of Europe including England specified 1e6 as a milliard and 1e9 as a million. Perhaps your source materials were of European origin. That makes sense, although it's pretty funny that the US gov't (who won't change to metric, etc.) are using European numerics by mistake! Thanks everyone! PJ From pgptag at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 05:11:49 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 07:11:49 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism is taking common sense seriously Message-ID: <470a3c520704032211n64a1d7bdq9f00088a274ad8fa@mail.gmail.com> I just found on the Mprize site a very good short article on, and definition of transhumanism. This is the kind if explanations I prefer: no big words difficult to understand, but plain simple common sense. When they start with their crap about reverence for nature, respect for our limits, value of suffering, mortality as a defining feature of being human, and similar BS, just remind them of plain old common sense: health is good, disease is no good; happiness is good, suffering is no good; being alive is good, being dead is no good; Etc. etc. Transhumanism is taking common sense seriously. Full text by Reason (original here): On the day it comes to you that living a longer, healthier life is something you'd like to do, that an extra year or ten of good health (or hell, why not more?) would be just peachy keen, think of the transhumanists - because you just became one. You saw a limit in the human condition, thought about what life would be like with that limit removed, and liked it. Welcome to the party! Transhumanism, make no mistake, is just a fancy name for common sense. Change for the better is good, right? Common sense. It's what we humans do in our scattered finer moments - we work to change things for the better. It's common sense to fetch in the harvest on wheels rather than on foot, and it's common sense to repair the biomolecular damage of Alzheimer's before the mind begins to rot. It's common sense to build perfect immune systems from nanomedical robots, and it's common sense to develop the technologies of regenerative medicine to their logical end. It takes work, but what is work compared to a world of suffering? Choosing not to attain these goals makes about as much sense as standing out in the rain to spite yourself. New technology cannot set slaves free, remove poverty brought of corruption, make the willfully blind see, or the unhappy bring themselves to good cheer of their own free will ... but it can remove the limits placed upon us by evolution, and it will one day give us all much, much more time in health and life to work on our other, very human issues. You can't rid the world of poverty when you're sick, decrepit and aged to death. The limits to our lives that we cannot negotiate away by talk and travel are the most confining, don't you agree? Transhumanism, common sense with a slick name, is really simple humanism - which is also really no more than a name for common sense. It is only humanist to work to give people the choice to live without suffering, and without death. To live, for without life, there is nothing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 06:03:55 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 16:03:55 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > Then in the same sense in Platonia, future hazards are not inevitable, > > since after all the Life game in which the hazard is or isn't avoided is > > a Platonic object and its outcome is not changed by implementing it > > physically. > > Yes, I would say that it is best not to regard our future decisions as > inevitable whether in Platonia or in a deterministic simulation And > that's not just because it feels good, or it provides us with optimism, > or whatever, even though those things are true. It's because on any > sensible meaning of what "inevitability" *could* mean, it just isn't true > that that future events are inevitable (see next). > > > More generally, I see Dennett's compatibilism as a sort of apology > > for determinism, reframing "free will" so that we can tell ourselves > > we have it even though the obvious conclusion is that it is just an > > illusion. > > I claim that if one *totally* banishes from his or her consciousness > the idea of non-determinism (to the point that it is unthinkable), and > only then asks "do I have a choice?", the answer must be "Yes". > But so long as there remains even the slightest vestige of the notion > of an uncaused event, or the slightest vestige of the soul, then the > silly answer "No" may still be entertained. You could say that, or you could say that the silly answer "yes" should be banished once you have understood the impossibility of something being neither determined nor random, which is (I believe) the common notion of free will. (When for example, you ask yourself, do I have a choice about > regarding answering this email, the answer "No" is less informative > and less true than the answer "Yes".) But I know that I don't have a choice; I was destined to answer it, but I just didn't know it until after the fact. If there are multiple branching universes at each decision point, from my point of view which universe I end up in is indeterminate, but from an external observer's point of view events still unfold in a perfectly deterministic manner, and nothing I do can change the measure of different outcomes. So let us assume that we have completely internalized the belief that > there are no uncaused events and there are no souls. Then what > the devil does the question "Do I have a choice" possibly mean now? > > It can only mean the same as it would for a concious chess computer > in trying to decide between move A and move B. First, we know that > the calculations it makes regarding those CHOICES, and I do not > apologize for the term, will be ongoing. A huge number of factors, > e.g., whether the opponent's open rook file makes a queen side > attack too problematical, have effects. The machine must decide! > So---recalling that we have utterly and without reservation totally > gone beyond even a hint of uncaused events---this can *only* mean > that the machine is taking these factors into account, i.e., a decision > is simply "taking factors into account". (What else could it be?) It *can't* mean anything else. But then, the concept of a "decision" becomes trivialised. If I push my pen off the desk, the pen takes into account all the forces acting on it and "decides" to fall; had the forces on it been different, it would have "decided" differently. Is the pen exercising free will? Is an intelligent agent subject to deterministic laws any more free than the pen is? That is all that a "choice" can *possibly* mean. It is absolutely wrong > to conceive of choice as anything but taking a huge number of factors > into account, and doing extensive calculations of the various > alternatives. > But then, the only possibility is that the machine is free to choose.... > unless indeed an external agent is forcing it to make one move as > against the other, e.g., that external agent is not permitting all the > factors to affect the decision that normally would be affecting the > decision. ("You will lose to Botvinnik in round 6, or else go to > Siberian labor camp.") What if the chess player is told that his brain has been manipulated so that he will either deliberately throw the game or try his hardest in round 6, but he is not informed which way the manipulation has gone? He will no doubt still feel perfectly free, and whatever way he plays will feel that he could just as easily have decided to play differently: but that is the subtle and insidious nature of the manipulation. Ordinary life is exactly analogous to the situation of the hapless chess player. Does the program have free will? Well, what can that possibly mean? > I claim that the denial of the statement "the machine has free will" has > taken us right back to an unconscious assumption that there could be > uncaused events. But we are supposed, now, to be beyond that. > Therefore, we must interpret the question accordingly, and so it > must mean, "are the factors contributing to the decision all coming > into play?". If the answer is yes---i.e., the computer is free to make > up its mind without external compulsion---then it has to be said that > the computer's will is free (remember, we have absolutely internalized > that there are no uncaused decisions). The only difference I can see between external compulsion and internal compulsion is that in the former case you are aware that you are being compelled, and resent it. A really powerful and skilful dictator would make his subjects do exactly what he wants them to do while letting them think all the while that they are making free choices; this is the ultimate aim of propaganda. > In other words, if in fact free will were just an illusion due to the > > fact that we don't know what we're going to do until we do it, > > (and I say that it ought not be regarded as an illusion, for so doing > sneaks back in the idea that there could be souls and uncaused events) You seem to be implying that an illusion must have at least potential reality, but I don't see why that has to be so. > how would the universe, or our experience of it, be any different? > > If the answer is "it wouldn't", > > I'd maintain that it is not conceivable that free will is an illusion, > when > what HAS to be meant by the phrase is as explained above > > > then what purpose is served by the concept of free will other than > > to make us feel better? > > It serves the purpose of identifying who or what made a decision. > Either I can go visit the prison by my own free will, say as a reporter > and thus exercise my free will, or I can be arrested and forced to go > to prison, in which case my free will has been abrogated > It becomes a matter of semantics, in that case. If you still believe that "free will" applies in the example of the chess player I have given above, then we agree, although we are calling it different things. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 4 06:24:21 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 01:24:21 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> At 04:03 PM 4/4/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: >the impossibility of something being neither determined nor random, >which is (I believe) the common notion of free will. I haven't followed this thread but I find this common objection to free will facile. (Sorry.) Surely what we mean by "free to choose" does not mean *canned but distinctive*, although that's part of our sense of individuality. And quite obviously it doesn't mean "random". It seems to me to follow from our capacity to compute or model a sheaf of possible consequences (accurately or not is beside the point) of alternative actions we might take soon or even in the long run. We constantly acquire new and slightly or even drastically surprising information, compress it, use it to modify our working models or hold it ready to do so if the data seems relevant to some emergent situation. So we can be *surprised* by choices, and by our assessments, and by our meta-assessments of how we're likely to feel if we act in one of several open ways, and all of this combines the overabundance of new information from a world larger than our mental workspace and memory, and the unexpected outcome of computations conducted by modules the inner working of which escape our conscious scrutiny. Damien Broderick From amara at amara.com Wed Apr 4 06:30:03 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 08:30:03 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question Message-ID: Acy Stapp acy.stapp at gmail.com : >but in the past parts of Europe including England >specified 1e6 as a milliard and 1e9 as a million. Perhaps your source >materials were of European origin. in Italian (today), 10^3 = one thousand = uno mille 10^6 = one million = uno milione 10^9 = one billion = uno miliardo (from Latin, I think) Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 4 07:07:59 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 09:07:59 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question In-Reply-To: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <5774446.55181175635185465.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <20070404070759.GW9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 05:19:45PM -0400, pjmanney wrote: > I have found a repeated discrepancy. Is a nanometer a millionth or a billionth of a meter? The US gov't papers all say a millionth (like the recent "The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think" and its earlier gov't source material), but I have read a billionth in other places. It's 10^-9, so it's a billionth. A millionth would be a mere micrometer. Here's more prefixes than you can shake a stick at: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci499008,00.html (I wish they'd stuck with power of two, though: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci825099,00.html ) -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 4 07:22:55 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 09:22:55 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. In-Reply-To: <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20070404072255.GX9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 05:28:02PM -0400, John K Clark wrote: > > How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? > > You can't prove it, not for any deep reason it's just that the term "free > will" is just a noise some people like to make with their mouth, that's it, > nothing more. Personally I never cared much for the sound of it myself, I > don't find it particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with > my mouth. > > I don't believe there is any idea in philosophy (or criminal law) > stupider than free will, not even immaculate conception. > It's a classic example of an idea so bad it's not even wrong. We're in 120% agreement here. > And Eugen congratulations! I was able to read your entire post without going > through any contortions. Have you decided that Microsoft is not the great > Satin after all? Have you decided that following the "generally accepted E No, it's actually more a case of (not) leaving ugly droppings in the Mailman archives. Because of this I've also started breaking long lines (but URLs). I'll probably go back to inline signatures, though these add more visual clutter to each post. > mail standard", a "standard" virtually nobody follows, is not such a great > idea if you want to communicate? I must admit I don't care a fig about proprietary vendors and their broken software. And given MS's business practices... you'd fare better wearing fur from clubbed baby seals, morally. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Wed Apr 4 07:22:38 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:22:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> Damien Broderick wrote: >At 03:54 PM 4/3/2007 -0500, I wrote: > > > >>I haven't watched this program yet, >> >>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 >> >>but as usual I'm bemused by the way so many stories posted on this >>list about anthropogenic planetary heating echo the very small number >>of naysayers. >> >> > I was especially won over by the segment in the middle of the piece >presenting evidence against carbon driving (rather than, as appears >to be the case, carbon level consequent upon heating) and in favor of >the primary impact of cyclic solar dynamics: > >http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 > Yes, that exposed the main "swindle" part. It also showed the hypocrisy of environmentalists expecting suffering third worlders to forego industrial development while they continue to enjoy the benefits of cheap electricity. Having watched Al Gore's movie just a few days ago, I found myself better persuaded by these naysayers. -- Thomas From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 10:14:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 20:14:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Damien Broderick wrote: At 04:03 PM 4/4/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: > > >the impossibility of something being neither determined nor random, > >which is (I believe) the common notion of free will. > > I haven't followed this thread but I find this common objection to > free will facile... Maybe, but I think this is what the ordinary person's concept of free will is. Compatibilists redefine it so that it is consistent with determinism. That's OK, as long we are clear about it, and the implications of this definition: namely, that if you *have* to make a particular decision in a particular situation, but you don't know what this decision is until you make it, then that's free will. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 10:18:45 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 20:18:45 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. In-Reply-To: <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, John K Clark wrote: "Eugen Leitl" > > > How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? > > You can't prove it, not for any deep reason it's just that the term "free > will" is just a noise some people like to make with their mouth, that's > it, > nothing more. Personally I never cared much for the sound of it myself, I > don't find it particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with > my mouth. > > I don't believe there is any idea in philosophy (or criminal law) > stupider than free will, not even immaculate conception. > It's a classic example of an idea so bad it's not even wrong. Well said! Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 4 10:53:34 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 12:53:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:59:39AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Sorry to keep harping on this, but it is not clear if you are > acknowledging that smart objects are made up of dumb objects, and Smart is a shorthand for specific information processing by some physical objects. Intelligence is an emergent process, so it has no trouble at all with dumb building blocks. > moreover they might be made of of dumb objects which have come > together in the right configuration accidentally rather than Evolution is not just accident, stochastical processes are merely the drive. Selection is the very opposite of a stochastic process. It takes evolution to bootstrap infoprocessing systems from a roiling sea of molecular chaos. Once you're there, intelligent systems can build other intelligent systems. > deliberately. That is actually exactly what the human brain is: over > billions of years, multiple chemical reactions have occurred > completely at random ( i.e. there is no designer), and those that just > happen to be better at self-replicating have survived. So although it > seems almost impossible that a car would be thrown together with spare > parts blowing in the wind, it is quite possible if the parts are > blowing in the wind for billions of years. Absolutely not, because the system you described doesn't self-replicate. It's not evolutionary, merely stochastical. There's a world of a difference. Many (most) physical systems are sterile as life emergence (autocatalytic reaction set) is concerned. We also have no data on how rare that emergence event is, because the prebiotic Earth is no longer available for observation, we don't have a lot of data on mature systems (chemistry from Titan would be quite interesting), and nobody has recreated a large enough setting in order to make measurements about the chemistry change in a realistic (the original version has very little to do with prebiotic Earth) version of Miller/Urey over time, if any. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From asa at nada.kth.se Wed Apr 4 11:20:02 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 13:20:02 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Dresden Kodak Message-ID: <62550.86.153.216.201.1175685602.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Dresden Kodak shows the problems of transhumanist dating :-) http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_034.htm From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 12:58:25 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 22:58:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> References: <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:59:39AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > deliberately. That is actually exactly what the human brain is: over > > billions of years, multiple chemical reactions have occurred > > completely at random ( i.e. there is no designer), and those that > just > > happen to be better at self-replicating have survived. So although it > > seems almost impossible that a car would be thrown together with > spare > > parts blowing in the wind, it is quite possible if the parts are > > blowing in the wind for billions of years. > > Absolutely not, because the system you described doesn't self-replicate. > It's not evolutionary, merely stochastical. There's a world of a > difference. Fair enough: I should have said that over billions of years, the parts would have combined in multiple random arrangements, some of which were stable and self-replicating, and might eventually give rise to machines resembling cars. Or let me be more specific: might eventually give rise to machines closely resembling Honda Accords with John Coltrane playing on the sound system. Now, that would be *extremely* unlikely; but it was also incredibly unlikely that random mutation + natural selection should have lead over billions of years to human beings having this particular online discussion - and yet here we are. (It doesn't help much even if you could show that some sort sort of intelligent species was likely to evolve: that particular individuals of a particular species evolve is still vanishingly improbable.) I think I've strayed a bit from my original purpose, which was to try to persuade you that thought experiments in which extremely improbable things happen by chance should not be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 4 13:28:22 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 15:28:22 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070404132821.GM9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:58:25PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Fair enough: I should have said that over billions of years, the parts > would have combined in multiple random arrangements, some of which > were stable and self-replicating, and might eventually give rise to This scenario is no longer resembling anything like machine parts blown around by a hurricane spontaneously assembling into an Airbus, so we can as well change it to something else. Macroscale self-assembly by mechanical means is something very delicate (it takes a very controlled environment, and according assortment of complementary parts), and it doesn't self replicate. Never, ever. Shake Legos as long as you want you'd never get a large cohesive block, however irregular. > machines resembling cars. Or let me be more specific: might eventually > give rise to machines closely resembling Honda Accords with John > Coltrane playing on the sound system. Now, that would be *extremely* Never, not as long as we're postulating infinite space and time. Both are finite, as far as we know. > unlikely; but it was also incredibly unlikely that random mutation + > natural selection should have lead over billions of years to human > beings having this particular online discussion - and yet here we are. Points in phase space are arbitrarily improbable, but regions in phase space much less so, and if they're powerful attractors, damn probable, in fact. > (It doesn't help much even if you could show that some sort sort of > intelligent species was likely to evolve: that particular individuals > of a particular species evolve is still vanishingly improbable.) I agree, but fail to see the relevance. Assuming somebody intelligent evolved, they wouldn't fail to observe themselves. > I think I've strayed a bit from my original purpose, which was to try > to persuade you that thought experiments in which extremely improbable > things happen by chance should not be summarily dismissed as > irrelevant. I disagree vigorously. Scenarios with a probability close to zero need not be addressed in a finite resource context (which is what we're stuck with, according to what we know today). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 13:51:15 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 09:51:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism is taking common sense seriously In-Reply-To: <470a3c520704032211n64a1d7bdq9f00088a274ad8fa@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520704032211n64a1d7bdq9f00088a274ad8fa@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > It's common sense to build perfect immune systems from nanomedical robots, > and it's common sense to develop the technologies of regenerative medicine > to their logical end. > It is worth noting that by any reasonable definition we already *have* an "immune system" built "from nanomedical robots", e.g. largely the macrophages and killer T-cells. It is *highly* questionable whether you can *ever* have a "perfect" immune system just as its fiendishly difficult to know with absolute certainty that your computer (even if its running Linux) is *not* infected with some virus waiting to leap out and erase all your data (or steal your credit card information the second you type it in). If anyone thinks that Robert Freitas' "microbivores" are the absolute answer, they know little about the adaptability of nature (HIV now being the classic example) and fail to realize that if the "good" guys have the capability to detect and construct nanorobots such as microbivores, then it is likely that the "bad" guys will soon be able to have the technologies to build devices or poisons that are able to evade them. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 14:21:37 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 10:21:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <859222.95716.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <6.2.1.2.2.20070403231431.030937e8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> <859222.95716.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/3/07, A B wrote: > http://www.csulb.edu/~mbarbic/atomres.htm > > [Beware: Twice when I clicked the internal hyperlink to this professor's > home page (not the above page), IE had to shut down due to an error. Just an > innocent glitch I'm sure, but all the same.] Which is funny since the pages seem to have been written in MS-Word (ROTFL). It is worth noting that the Diagrams in his pages do not display because the image path he is using is using a backslash rather a slash to indicate directories (may work on Windows but isn't standard HTML!) If AR-MRI does become possible (and I guess it looks both possible and > practical), it could potentially improve our chances of achieving true > "outside-Earth" sustainability; like in a space colony for example. What makes you think this? The primary requirement for off-Earth sustainability is the ability to convert X watts of solar or nuclear energy into resources (primarily water and reduced carbohydrates) required to sustain human bodies as currently designed (humans are generally 100W machines, but if you look at plant food source efficiencies it probably requires 5-10,000 W of solar energy to produce the required food). You have to make a case that the direct synthesis of the required molecules (nanoassembly) would be more efficient than existing nanoscale based systems (plants, bacteria, chemical synthesis, etc.) With the appropriate software (and a practical level of hardware), it > appears to me that scanning with AR-MRI could provide on-the-fly blueprints > for a nanofactory or nanoassembler. We already have nanoassemblers. They are called DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and ribosomes. We already have "nanofactories". Sugar cane is a good example. Cyanobacteria are another. I think what you mean to say is "general purpose" nanoassembler and "universal" nanofactories. Having AR-MRI doesn't give you squat with respect to blueprints for structures which currently *do not exist*. Those have to be designed or evolved. That was the primary point behind the Nano at Home proposal that I wrote several years ago. The only thing AR-MRI gives you, potentially, is the ability to precisely read existing structures. That means that structures which are difficult to read using other methods, such as precise reading of synaptic junctions of frozen neurons, may be feasible. In my mind AR-MRI is only useful for assisting in the determination of molecular structures which are impossible to crystalize (which is likely to be help in the scientific understanding of complex multi-molecule structures, particularly for example those involved in oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria, or potentially the process of mind uploading). For example the blueprints of a variety of foods could be obtained and used > to reconstitute those objects. The applications for this would be huge. But, > like most things technology, it could also be used to harm. Hopefully, the > good uses will overcome the potentially bad ones. We know the enzyme pathways required to produce sugar (and more complex carbohydrates), fats and amino acids. The blueprints for the machines needed in these molecular assembly lines are sitting in Genbank (in may cases we have dozens of variations on the assemblers). We do not *yet* have the blueprints for the machines which efficiently assemble less common molecules such as resveratrol or cone snail toxins or very complex molecules such a brevitoxin B (though I believe in all cases we can chemically synthesize them). Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 4 15:43:03 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 08:43:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > I think I've strayed a bit from my original purpose, which was to try to > persuade you that thought experiments in which extremely improbable things > happen by chance should not be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. Isn't this assertion the very antithesis of rationality?! With full regard to remaining open to surprising new observations, but little regard for assigning "relevance" without justification. - Jef From scerir at libero.it Wed Apr 4 16:25:59 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 18:25:59 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> [I have the pdf of this paper, if somebody is interested] Behav.Sci. Law. Feb 23, 2007 'The concept of free will: philosophy, neuroscience and the law.' -S.Pockett Various philosophical definitions of free will are first considered. The compatibilist definition, which says simply that acts are freely willed if they are not subject to constraints, is identified as much used in the legal system and essentially impervious to scientific investigation. A middle-ground "incompatibilist" definition, which requires that freely willed acts be consciously initiated, is shown to be relevant to the idea of mens rea and in the author's view not actually incompatible in principle with a fully scientific worldview. Only the strong libertarian definition, which requires that freely willed acts have no physical antecedents whatsoever, makes the existence of free will very hard to swallow scientifically. However, with regard to the middle-ground "incompatibilist" definition, three different lines of scientific experimental evidence are then described, which suggest that, in fact, consciousness is not the real cause of much of what is generally considered as voluntary behavior. Many voluntary actions are initiated preconsciously, with consciousness kept informed only after the neural events leading to the act have begun. It is suggested that a reasonable way of integrating these experimental findings with the idea that persons do have a somewhat more than compatibilist version of free will is to acknowledge explicitly that a person is a mixture of conscious and unconscious components. In this scenario, the mind in mens rea would have to be judged guilty if it contained either conscious or unconscious intentions to perform the guilty act. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 4 17:11:55 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 18:11:55 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. In-Reply-To: <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704041011r6d6fb26euba0449b378e5524@mail.gmail.com> On 4/3/07, John K Clark wrote: > > You can't prove it, not for any deep reason it's just that the term "free > will" is just a noise some people like to make with their mouth, that's > it, > nothing more. Personally I never cared much for the sound of it myself, I > don't find it particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with > my mouth. There's a division I find rather useful, which is between those things which are causally influenced by the set of patterns labeled "Russell Wallace" and those things which are not; the division is useful because it helps me figure out which neural computations can have positive differential utility if performed, and which will not, which in turn is useful for optimizing the expenditure of finite resources. Phrases like "...causally influenced by..." are a bit unwieldy though, so I want a shorter mouth noise to refer to this concept; looking around, I find the convention among non-philosophers is to use this "free will" mouth noise, so that's cool with me. I'm surprised you don't find the concept useful, though maybe you just have a different short mouth noise whose sound you find more pleasing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 4 17:29:21 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 10:29:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/3/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 04:03 PM 4/4/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: > > >the impossibility of something being neither determined nor random, > >which is (I believe) the common notion of free will. > > I haven't followed this thread but I find this common objection to > free will facile. (Sorry.) Surely what we mean by "free to choose" > does not mean *canned but distinctive*, although that's part of our > sense of individuality. And quite obviously it doesn't mean "random". > It seems to me to follow from our capacity to compute or model a > sheaf of possible consequences (accurately or not is beside the > point) of alternative actions we might take soon or even in the long > run. This issue of "free-will" is directly mappable onto the larger issue of causality. As is well known since Hume, there is nothing in objective descriptions of reality that admits of even the slightest evidence of "causality." But causality, like free-will is very real and plays an important role in our lives. It's just that it only makes sense in subjective terms. Judea Pearl provides a gentle introduction at . - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 4 19:44:20 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 12:44:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] [Trans-Spirit] Saletan, brain and morality In-Reply-To: <8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD2803903B68F25@exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> References: <8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD2803903B68F25@exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Hughes, James J. wrote: > http://www.slate.com/id/2162998 > Mind Makes Right > Brain damage, evolution, and the future of morality.By William Saletan > > Imagine that killers have invaded your neighborhood. They're in your house, and you and > your neighbors are hiding in the cellar. Your baby starts to cry. If you had to press your > hand over the baby's face till it stopped fighting?if you had to smother it to save > everyone else?would you do it? > But there's the other catch: Once technology manipulates ethics, ethics can no longer > judge technology. Nor can human nature discredit the mentality that shapes human > nature. In a utilitarian world, what's neurologically fit is utilitarianism. It'll become the > norm, the standard of right and wrong. Sure, a few mental relics of our primate ancestry > will be lost. But it'll be worth it. I think. Thanks James for sharing this and the previous item(s). It's another sad example of the present state of our understanding of ethics, presenting a false dichotomy between moral decision-making based on emotional indications of an innate sense of "right" versus moral decision-making based on utilitarian calculation of perceived desired ends. As usual, the popular view appears to be completely ignorant of moral decision-making based on principles, such that we remove the personal (and changing) "I" from the evaluation process, and acknowledge the inevitability of unanticipated consequences in an increasingly complex world. Kohlberg, in his "Stages of Moral Development"[1] had the idea, but couldn't find enough backing in current society to support research of his sixth level. The teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi, etc., are famously focused on principles rather than ends, and their teachings ring true but seem oh so difficult to live up to in practice. Indeed, because principled morality takes the "I" out of the assessment, and disallows any concerns over immediate consequences, it is quite contrary to our usual practices in the noisy everyday world dominated by "I" and immediate consequences. Kant came close, with his idea of a Categorical Imperative, but neglected rather than worked with the inherent subjectivity of any moral agent and the evolving framework of values and instrumental knowledge in which moral decisions are made and carried out. Within academia, many philosophers continue to construct elaborate castles in the air as if isolation from reality were itself a virtue, and the public flow mainly with the prevailing local current. Only in the last two decades [generously] has an evolutionary perspective begin to take root. It's encouraging that in this year's Edge Question[2] rising awareness can be detected among these cognoscenti, and articles in the New York Times show that public awareness is increasing in recent years. There's reason for hope. What works tends to persist and replicate. In principle. - Jef [1] http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm [2] From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 21:38:55 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 14:38:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <394815.57022.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Stathis, Stathis wrote: "Actually your whole question could be taken as a > form of Doomsday Argument > reasoning: it would seem more likely that I am one > of few (few species, few > observer moments, few historical eras) rather than > one of many, especially > one of infinitely many. The paradox is, even if the > space of all observer > moments is infinite, making the measure of each > individual observer moment > infinitesimal, that doesn't mean that each observer > moment should assume it > doesn't exist. Reality trumps probability every > time." Hmm. That's a very interesting point. If a Universe was to become infinitely old, your interpretation would appear to be something like a partial counterargument (maybe): You should expect to find yourself in a *relatively* very early period of the Universe, seemingly without regard to the size of future populations - even if those future populations are to become very large. (Although I also believe an "observer-moment" could also *potentially* be finite in addition to potentially being infinitesimal {or it could potentially even be infinite}.) - But, I could be wrong about that. Just to throw some shot-in-the-dark ideas at a question I asked earlier: Jeffrey wrote: "A lingering question I still have is: if the +Infinity/+Infinity quotient can yield any positive real number, then why in this example, does it appear that the quotient is continually gaining positive value only? Instead of for example, yielding an apparent value of +4528, and then subsequently yielding an apparent value of +326. IOW, *why* are these seemingly arbitrary calculations completely consistent with the apparent "arrow of time"? ...??? ...? ..." 1) I suppose from a "meta-overview" an observer could say that those smaller positive quotients have indeed been "calculated" and that they appeared as "past moments" in the observer's personal history. I think this potential answer would have to mingle with the Continuity-of-Self debate, and that's a sticky one as we all know :-) (and the "arrow of time" question). 2) Maybe the "fabric" of time is itself expanding similarly to the way that the "fabric" of space is expanding ie. the Inflating Universe. (This one seems kind of weak to me). 3) Of course, possibly the easiest answer is that a Universe such as ours can never potentially become infinitely old because it's destined to end in a Big Crunch. But, this answer is just too easy ;-) And I think it's extremely improbable, in terms of an absolute to be applied to all similar Universes. Do you have any other ideas, Stathis? Does anyone have any other ideas? Because I'm feeling pretty stumped by this question. Also, I wonder if it is even possible that a Universe such as ours (one that includes observers who can detect a greater-than-zero but finite history) can even become *anything but* infinitely old. For example, if a hypothetical Universe was destined to only become finitely old (eg. 6 Billion years old)then dividing that finite history by +Infinity would lead to any "time-unit"/"observer-moment"/"apparent history" being infinitely small. So the only length of history that could possibly be observed would be an infinitely short one. Or to put it more directly, it seems that no observer could possibly exist at all in this hypothetical Universe. And I don't yet see any reason why the starting denominator could not be +Infinity (which would represent the "very beginning" of this hypothetical Universe) given that the value of the quotient would still be greater-than-zero (and positive) although very, very, very tiny. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Hi Jeffrey, > > ..."if the probability of > > > observers arising or surviving > > > decreases as time increases, it can turn out > that > > > there is a high > > > probability that an observer would find himself > in > > > the first n years of the > > > universe's existence." > > > > True. Or the potential decrease could be the > result of > > a voluntary aggregation/assimilation of > individuals > > into a smaller number of "discrete" > consciousnesses, > > which is what I hope that the Doomsday Argument is > > indicating, above any of the alternatives. > > > > Actually your whole question could be taken as a > form of Doomsday Argument > reasoning: it would seem more likely that I am one > of few (few species, few > observer moments, few historical eras) rather than > one of many, especially > one of infinitely many. The paradox is, even if the > space of all observer > moments is infinite, making the measure of each > individual observer moment > infinitesimal, that doesn't mean that each observer > moment should assume it > doesn't exist. Reality trumps probability every > time. > > Stathis Papaioannou > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Sucker-punch spam with award-winning protection. Try the free Yahoo! Mail Beta. http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/features_spam.html From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 21:47:59 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 14:47:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <641658.2688.qm@web37407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Eugen, Eugen wrote: ..."and nobody has recreated a large enough setting in order to make measurements about the chemistry change in a realistic (the original version has very little to do with prebiotic Earth) version of Miller/Urey over time, if any." I would really like to see that experiment funded and performed. It would actually have high value as compared to say a brand new multi-million dollar study to conclude that eating saturated-fatty foods is bad for your health. Gee... ya think?! ;-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097 From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 22:15:13 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 15:15:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <988829.35545.qm@web37405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Robert, Robert wrote: "What makes you think this? The primary requirement > for off-Earth > sustainability is the ability to convert X watts of > solar or nuclear energy > into resources (primarily water and reduced > carbohydrates) required to > sustain human bodies as currently designed (humans > are generally 100W > machines, but if you look at plant food source > efficiencies it probably > requires 5-10,000 W of solar energy to produce the > required food). You have > to make a case that the direct synthesis of the > required molecules > (nanoassembly) would be more efficient than existing > nanoscale based systems > (plants, bacteria, chemical synthesis, etc.)" The main "advantages" I was thinking of were a possibly considerable size(space) and weight savings for the space colony, plus a potentially much simpler (probably cheaper) internal environment. For example, if you could just rebuild a strawberry to eat, you wouldn't require any specialized light sources, soil, bacteria, nutrients, additional physical space, etc. Whatever the case turns out to be, the near future will, without a doubt, be very exciting. :-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Robert Bradbury wrote: > On 4/3/07, A B wrote: > > > http://www.csulb.edu/~mbarbic/atomres.htm > > > > [Beware: Twice when I clicked the internal > hyperlink to this professor's > > home page (not the above page), IE had to shut > down due to an error. Just an > > innocent glitch I'm sure, but all the same.] > > > Which is funny since the pages seem to have been > written in MS-Word (ROTFL). > It is worth noting that the Diagrams in his pages do > not display because the > image path he is using is using a backslash rather a > slash to indicate > directories (may work on Windows but isn't standard > HTML!) > > If AR-MRI does become possible (and I guess it looks > both possible and > > practical), it could potentially improve our > chances of achieving true > > "outside-Earth" sustainability; like in a space > colony for example. > > > What makes you think this? The primary requirement > for off-Earth > sustainability is the ability to convert X watts of > solar or nuclear energy > into resources (primarily water and reduced > carbohydrates) required to > sustain human bodies as currently designed (humans > are generally 100W > machines, but if you look at plant food source > efficiencies it probably > requires 5-10,000 W of solar energy to produce the > required food). You have > to make a case that the direct synthesis of the > required molecules > (nanoassembly) would be more efficient than existing > nanoscale based systems > (plants, bacteria, chemical synthesis, etc.) > > With the appropriate software (and a practical level > of hardware), it > > appears to me that scanning with AR-MRI could > provide on-the-fly blueprints > > for a nanofactory or nanoassembler. > > > We already have nanoassemblers. They are called DNA > polymerase, RNA > polymerase and ribosomes. We already have > "nanofactories". Sugar cane is a > good example. Cyanobacteria are another. I think > what you mean to say is > "general purpose" nanoassembler and "universal" > nanofactories. > > Having AR-MRI doesn't give you squat with respect to > blueprints for > structures which currently *do not exist*. Those > have to be designed or > evolved. That was the primary point behind the > Nano at Home proposal that I > wrote several years ago. The only thing AR-MRI > gives you, potentially, is > the ability to precisely read existing structures. > That means that > structures which are difficult to read using other > methods, such as precise > reading of synaptic junctions of frozen neurons, may > be feasible. In my > mind AR-MRI is only useful for assisting in the > determination of molecular > structures which are impossible to crystalize (which > is likely to be help in > the scientific understanding of complex > multi-molecule structures, > particularly for example those involved in oxidative > phosphorylation in the > mitochondria, or potentially the process of mind > uploading). > > For example the blueprints of a variety of foods > could be obtained and used > > to reconstitute those objects. The applications > for this would be huge. But, > > like most things technology, it could also be used > to harm. Hopefully, the > > good uses will overcome the potentially bad ones. > > > We know the enzyme pathways required to produce > sugar (and more complex > carbohydrates), fats and amino acids. The > blueprints for the machines > needed in these molecular assembly lines are sitting > in Genbank (in may > cases we have dozens of variations on the > assemblers). We do not *yet* have > the blueprints for the machines which efficiently > assemble less common > molecules such as resveratrol or cone snail toxins > or very complex molecules > such a brevitoxin B (though I believe in all cases > we can chemically > synthesize them). > > Robert > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 22:26:29 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 15:26:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <25205.40805.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> One of the simplest reasons I tend to dislike the idea of the possibility of "free will" is that it seems, under any conceivable circumstances, to be so severely and arbitrarily limited. ... Okay, I "will" to win 200 million dollars tommorow... Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 5 00:31:27 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 17:31:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing Message-ID: <002401c7771a$13d6fca0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eugen writes > On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 12:59:58PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: >> It was inevitable that this discussion come sooner or later to hinge right >> on the point of free will. > > How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? For exactly what kind of information are you asking? I'm not sure anything can be "proved" outside of mathematics. Can you prove that the island of Manhatten exists? The kinds of systems that should be said to be willful are those that exhibit a certain integrity of purpose. Systems, then, that are willful and make decisions can be said to have free will when---as I said in my earlier email--- when they analyse a great deal of data towards the resolution of some query, or towards picking a single action from a large number of possible actions. (Take that as a characterization, not a definition.) For example, a weather forecasting program ought to be able to be said to have free will, since its output is a complex function of all the inputs that must be carefully weighed. The system would be said to be exhibiting almost no free will if a programmer maliciously stuffed data into an output buffer, or somewhere near the terminus of the calculation, which effectively short-circuited the calculation. Do you ever decide anything? If so, how can you defend the notion that you decide things, when---if we live in determinism ---the answer was decided long ago. I can answer that one myself, but can you? > If I gave you a dump from /dev/random along with /dev/urandom, > would you be able to tell those apart? Given enough bytes from urandom, I can presumably eventually discover entropy falling off. But pray, what has this to do with anything? > What does it even mean in a process that is us, since the top-level > lags in realization of a made-up decision at a lower level. I may identify with the entire process, top to bottom. If the real reason that I turn down a certain applicant is because she smells, I still should accept responsibility for that decision, even though I've meanwhile unconsciously fabricated all sorts of rationalizations for why she isn't suitable for the job. True: my decision wasn't quite as free as it would have been if my nasal equipment hadn't led to a short-circuiting of my decision process. > Assuming you knew the universe is deterministic at sub-Planck > level, would it help you to make a killing on blue chips, or > even avoid that car speeding round the corner? Why, no, of course determinism doesn't help *me* make decisions. They're still mine to make; determinism changes nothing. Time to go on offense again: if all your actions are predetermined, why do you try so hard to avoid the speeding car? Oh---because it was determined that you would so strive? I see. But then, isn't that an explanation or reason for everything you do? Lee From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 5 00:19:49 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:19:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing. References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070403201828.GT9439@leitl.org> <003001c77637$01aef2f0$49054e0c@MyComputer> <20070404072255.GX9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <461440A5.3010404@thomasoliver.net> Eugen Leitl wrote: >On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 05:28:02PM -0400, John K Clark wrote: > > > >>>How can you prove you've got free will, or not, empirically? >>> >>> >>You can't prove it, not for any deep reason it's just that the term "free >>will" is just a noise some people like to make with their mouth, that's it, >>nothing more. Personally I never cared much for the sound of it myself, I >>don't find it particularly musical and so I seldom make that noise with >> my mouth. >> >>I don't believe there is any idea in philosophy (or criminal law) >>stupider than free will, not even immaculate conception. >>It's a classic example of an idea so bad it's not even wrong. >> >> > >We're in 120% agreement here. > I don't know what "some people" mean, but I thought "free will" meant more self than other determined. I thought it reflected, to some degree, a "human" qualification. I learned that respect for it provides a simple and efficient means of proper social interaction. How wrong could I be? -- Thomas From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 4 23:28:21 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:28:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <988829.35545.qm@web37405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:15 PM 4/4/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: snip >The main "advantages" I was thinking of were a >possibly considerable size(space) and weight savings >for the space colony, plus a potentially much simpler >(probably cheaper) internal environment. For example, >if you could just rebuild a strawberry to eat, you >wouldn't require any specialized light sources, soil, >bacteria, nutrients, additional physical space, etc. The entire problem of feeding people in space was worked over in a great deal of detail over 30 years ago. I can't point you to an on-line site, but if you can find a copy of the Space Manufacturing Conference for 1975, "how to grow food" is spelled out in considerable detail with a pretentious title on the paper. Incidentally, in space you have all the light you want, and area isn't that hard to make either. You don't need soil or bacteria. In a closed system, what comes out of the sewage plant incinerator has everything except a bit of nitric acid for a hydroponics solution that will keep the plants happy. Now it might eventually be easy to rebuild strawberries to eat, but if you are that far into nanotechnology, why not just run on electricity and simulate eating a berry? >Whatever the case turns out to be, the near future >will, without a doubt, be very exciting. :-) There is good exciting and bad exciting. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked by the long evolutionary history of our species against the future being good. But if you want to do something to improve the odds of a bright future, I have a number of suggestions. Even so, the most likely number for physical state humans 100 years from now is zero. Keith From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 5 00:57:05 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:57:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <25205.40805.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <46144961.9080200@thomasoliver.net> A B wrote: >One of the simplest reasons I tend to dislike the idea >of the possibility of "free will" is that it seems, >under any conceivable circumstances, to be so severely >and arbitrarily limited. ... Okay, I "will" to win 200 >million dollars tommorow... > >Best Wishes, > >Jeffrey Herrlich > That sounds more like whimsy than will. A rational will would include a context. Are *free* and *rational* not compatible? -- Thomas From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 5 03:16:05 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 20:16:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <950369.26932.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Keith, Keith wrote: "But if you want to do something to improve the odds > of a bright future, I > have a number of suggestions." At this point, all ideas will be helpful. Being a non-genius myself, I don't really know how much I could usefully contribute, except in the form of donations to SIAI and the like. Unfortunately, I don't have a great deal of money to do that with. But I'm definitely listening to any suggestions you may have. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich Keith wrote: --- Keith Henson wrote: > At 03:15 PM 4/4/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: > > snip > > >The main "advantages" I was thinking of were a > >possibly considerable size(space) and weight > savings > >for the space colony, plus a potentially much > simpler > >(probably cheaper) internal environment. For > example, > >if you could just rebuild a strawberry to eat, you > >wouldn't require any specialized light sources, > soil, > >bacteria, nutrients, additional physical space, > etc. > > The entire problem of feeding people in space was > worked over in a great > deal of detail over 30 years ago. I can't point you > to an on-line site, > but if you can find a copy of the Space > Manufacturing Conference for 1975, > "how to grow food" is spelled out in considerable > detail with a pretentious > title on the paper. Incidentally, in space you have > all the light you > want, and area isn't that hard to make either. > > You don't need soil or bacteria. In a closed > system, what comes out of the > sewage plant incinerator has everything except a bit > of nitric acid for a > hydroponics solution that will keep the plants > happy. Now it might > eventually be easy to rebuild strawberries to eat, > but if you are that far > into nanotechnology, why not just run on electricity > and simulate eating a > berry? > > >Whatever the case turns out to be, the near future > >will, without a doubt, be very exciting. :-) > > There is good exciting and bad exciting. > Unfortunately, the odds are > stacked by the long evolutionary history of our > species against the future > being good. > > But if you want to do something to improve the odds > of a bright future, I > have a number of suggestions. Even so, the most > likely number for physical > state humans 100 years from now is zero. > > Keith > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Expecting? Get great news right away with email Auto-Check. Try the Yahoo! Mail Beta. http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/newmail_tools.html From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 5 03:41:33 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 20:41:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <46144961.9080200@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <35261.5003.qm@web37406.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Thomas, Could you somehow rephrase your objection/question, I'm afraid I don't really understand it. Exceptional reading comprehension is not one of my strengths. The point that I'm trying to make is that if "free will" (as it is commonly interpreted) really exists (which I don't believe at all) then perhaps we should all acknowledge that it is quite limited (severely in my opinion). If it were not limited, I would have everything I've ever wanted, no matter how fantastical. Furthermore, these severe limitations appear to me to be so numerous and arbitrary that they reduce the meaning of "free will" to the point of being meaningless; because "free will" doesn't exist. That's just my opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Thomas wrote: > A B wrote: > > >One of the simplest reasons I tend to dislike the > idea > >of the possibility of "free will" is that it seems, > >under any conceivable circumstances, to be so > severely > >and arbitrarily limited. ... Okay, I "will" to win > 200 > >million dollars tommorow... > > > >Best Wishes, > > > >Jeffrey Herrlich > > > That sounds more like whimsy than will. A rational > will would include a > context. Are *free* and *rational* not compatible? > -- Thomas > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love (and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265 From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 04:54:10 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 14:54:10 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, Jef Allbright wrote: On 4/4/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > I think I've strayed a bit from my original purpose, which was to try to > > persuade you that thought experiments in which extremely improbable > things > > happen by chance should not be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. > > Isn't this assertion the very antithesis of rationality?! > > With full regard to remaining open to surprising new observations, but > little regard for assigning "relevance" without justification. I was referring to certain philosophical arguments, such as John Searle's Chinese room, which is wrong for philosophical reasons, not becauseof the undoubted practical difficulties it would pose. Engineering and philosophy are not the same discipline. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 05:33:56 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 15:33:56 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, scerir wrote: [I have the pdf of this paper, if somebody is interested] > > Behav.Sci. Law. Feb 23, 2007 > 'The concept of free will: > philosophy, neuroscience and the law.' > -S.Pockett > Various philosophical definitions of free will are first considered. > The compatibilist definition, which says simply that acts are freely > willed > if they are not subject to constraints, is identified as much used in the > legal system and essentially impervious to scientific investigation. A > middle-ground "incompatibilist" definition, which requires that freely > willed acts be consciously initiated, is shown to be relevant to the idea > of mens rea and in the author's view not actually incompatible in > principle > with a fully scientific worldview. Only the strong libertarian definition, > which requires that freely willed acts have no physical antecedents > whatsoever, makes the existence of free will very hard to swallow > scientifically. A non-believer in free will can still go along with the law as something which is instrumental in bringing about the determined behaviours. We put roofs on our houses in order to stay dry, and we stay dry because the roofs are in place. Similarly, we punish criminals to prevent further crimes and further crimes are prevented because we punish criminals. However, I keep in mind the fact that the criminals engage in their behaviour either because it is determined by their genes and environment (in which case it isn't their fault) or due to random processes (in which case it isn't their fault). Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; tolerance and compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a belief, although tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from taking practical measures to prevent crimes. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 5 10:13:24 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 12:13:24 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070405101324.GH9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 02:54:10PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > I was referring to certain philosophical arguments, such as John > Searle's Chinese room, which is wrong for philosophical reasons, not He's wrong because you can't simulate a person with paper by another person, not by lookup. A billion Indians with a lot paper and a rather complex algorithm might do, but I'm not sure. It would be certainly too slow. > becauseof the undoubted practical difficulties it would pose. Not difficulties. It Can't Be Done, in this universe. End of story. That's all the argumentation it takes. > Engineering and philosophy are not the same discipline. I think most people realize what the utility of a philosopher is. Unlike a mathematician, these don't even produce theorems if given coffee... -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 5 11:02:34 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 04:02:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <35261.5003.qm@web37406.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4614D74A.6010000@thomasoliver.net> A B wrote: >Hi Thomas, > >Could you somehow rephrase your objection/question, > I took issue with the idea that "free will" means something akin to having or becoming a fairy godmother. I don't think it means absolute free will. I think it just reflects the advantage humans have over other species which don't have the rational means for such skills as tool making or intellectual intercourse. It reflects the fairly uniquely human quality of having a wide range of rational means for survival -- whereas, less "free" species are limited to genetically determined hard wired behavior patterns. If people do not "commonly interpret" free will as I do, then I can understand your dislike for the term. It would, indeed, seem nigh to meaningless. How can self determinism supplant other deteriminism without vanishing other? That sounds like irrational solipsism. I hope I expressed myself better this time. I really intended to put forth a simpler idea of free will. -- Thomas >[...] > >The point that I'm trying to make is that if "free >will" (as it is commonly interpreted) really exists >(which I don't believe at all) then perhaps we should >all acknowledge that it is quite limited (severely in >my opinion). If it were not limited, I would have >everything I've ever wanted, no matter how >fantastical. > I acknowledge that absolute free will limits itself to a fantasy (or maybe a virtual) world. I prefer to define free will in the context of human survival on Earth. I realize that context expands every passing moment, but the definition still seems useful since I believe respect for free will offers the best hope for human survival. The disrespect it received on this list moved me to dissent. >That's just my opinion, and everyone is entitled to >their own. > > You are free to opine as you will, Jeffery. And you have my respect. -- Thomas > >--- Thomas wrote: > > > >>A B wrote: >> >> >> >>>One of the simplest reasons I tend to dislike the >>> >>> >>idea >> >> >>>of the possibility of "free will" is that it seems, >>>under any conceivable circumstances, to be so >>> >>> >>severely >> >> >>>and arbitrarily limited. ... Okay, I "will" to win >>> >>> >>200 >> >> >>>million dollars tommorow... >>> >>> >>> >>> >>That sounds more like whimsy than will. A rational >>will would include a >>context. Are *free* and *rational* not compatible? >>-- Thomas >> >> >> From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 5 12:53:48 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 05:53:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >>> I think I've strayed a bit from my original purpose, which was to try to >>> persuade you that thought experiments in which extremely improbable >>> things happen by chance should not be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. >> Isn't this assertion the very antithesis of rationality?! > I was referring to certain philosophical arguments, such as John Searle's > Chinese room, which is wrong for philosophical reasons, not because of the > undoubted practical difficulties it would pose. Engineering and philosophy > are not the same discipline. I don't understand your reasoning here, since Searle's Chinese Room doesn't involve "extremely improbable things." It's wrong for quite different reasons. I do understand that there's a binary distinction between "slightly possible" and "impossible", but that doesn't seem to apply here. There may be little value in pursuing the source of this disconnect, but if you wish to continue, you have my attention. - Jef From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 13:57:59 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 09:57:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <950369.26932.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <950369.26932.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/4/07, A B wrote: > At this point, all ideas will be helpful. Being a non-genius myself, I > don't really know how much I could usefully contribute, except in the form > of donations to SIAI and the like. Not being quite so pessimistic as Keith, the chapter I'm writing for Damien's forthcoming collection will I think include physical humans 100 years from now (within an MBrain developed solar system). There may be multiple "perfect futures" [1]. I believe one requires a fast uplift of the physical condition of the majority of humanity. That in turn requires a rapid distribution of open source nanotechnology. If everyone *knows* in advance of the development of the first nanoassemblers that they will be able to share in the benefits of that there is less likely to be an "arms race" or a fight over the spoils, etc. Nanorex will be releasing its nanoengineer software sometime later this year. Supporting the concept of a few prizes that would allow Nano at Home to develop in a robust fashion is an alternative to SIAI. There are thousands of people aware of nanotechnology in India but they don't know how to approach it. Combine cheap computers + software + a project framework + prizes and you have recipe for producing hundreds of nanoengineers and thousands of open source nanopart designs. For those who are not familiar with my perspectives regarding nanotechnology development I believe that a "dual" path is possible -- an open source, public path which gives everyone "volkswagons" and a closed source, VC financed, business path which gives those who really want them "mercedes". The difference between volkswagons and mercedes tends to be relatively subjective as both tend to get one from point A to point B. Unlike historic development paths where one generally got the expensive cars before the cheap cars, if one has the designs in hand both may come out of the factory at the same time. Robert 1. Unlike Trance Gemini, my mind yields several, though at least for now we don't have the Magog to face. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Thu Apr 5 15:53:02 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 17:53:02 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> Message-ID: <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Stathis Papaioannou: > A non-believer in free will can still go along with the law as something > which is instrumental in bringing about the determined behaviours. We put > roofs on our houses in order to stay dry, and we stay dry because the roofs > are in place. Similarly, we punish criminals to prevent further crimes and > further crimes are prevented because we punish criminals. However, I keep in > mind the fact that the criminals engage in their behaviour either because it > is determined by their genes and environment (in which case it isn't their > fault) or due to random processes (in which case it isn't their fault). > Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; tolerance and > compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a belief, although > tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from taking practical measures to > prevent crimes. I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals engage in their behaviour also because it is determined by their 'will', and not just by their genes or by contextuality. I always found difficult to define 'free will'. There are several definitions. My personal definition was something like 'the 'will' does not depend on the past story of (this) universe'. After some reflection I also wrote 'the 'will' does not depend both on the past story and on the future story of (this) universe'. This definition seems to be strong indeed :-) and perhaps also false and useless :-) s. From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 5 16:34:20 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 09:34:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, scerir wrote: > Stathis Papaioannou: > > A non-believer in free will can still go along with the law as something > > which is instrumental in bringing about the determined behaviours. We put > > roofs on our houses in order to stay dry, and we stay dry because the > roofs > > are in place. Similarly, we punish criminals to prevent further crimes and > > further crimes are prevented because we punish criminals. However, I keep > in > > mind the fact that the criminals engage in their behaviour either because > it > > is determined by their genes and environment (in which case it isn't their > > fault) or due to random processes (in which case it isn't their fault). > > Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; tolerance > and > > compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a belief, although > > tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from taking practical measures > to > > prevent crimes. > > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals > engage in their behaviour also because it is > determined by their 'will', and not just by > their genes or by contextuality. > > I always found difficult to define 'free will'. > There are several definitions. My personal > definition was something like 'the 'will' does > not depend on the past story of (this) universe'. > After some reflection I also wrote 'the 'will' > does not depend both on the past story and on the > future story of (this) universe'. This definition > seems to be strong indeed :-) and perhaps also > false and useless :-) My opinion is that this is all very silly. But let me add to the silliness since that seems to be the game: IF I have free will, then in order to exercise my will I must depend on (this) universe being deterministic from this point forward. There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome by the illusion that something special is going on. - Jef From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 16:42:19 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 12:42:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> On 4/4/07, Thomas wrote: > > > >http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170&q=%22the+great+global+warming+swindle%22 > > > Yes, that exposed the main "swindle" part. It also showed the hypocrisy > of environmentalists expecting suffering third worlders to forego > industrial development while they continue to enjoy the benefits of > cheap electricity. Having watched Al Gore's movie just a few days ago, > I found myself better persuaded by these naysayers. -- Thomas > ### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is about 4000$/month. Preachers frequently don't live the lives they preach. Rafal From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 5 17:35:57 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:35:57 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> At 09:34 AM 4/5/2007 -0700, Jef wrote: >We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* >agents in fully deterministic terms. Of course we do. That's why certain children are called "willful". Criminals are held responsible for their ill deeds because we know that while they might have a powerful disposition to act in a malign and antisocial fashion they also have the capacity to choose otherwise (except where the disposition overwhelms all other motives or external circumstances restrict their options too brutally). Damien Broderick From jonkc at att.net Thu Apr 5 17:37:02 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 13:37:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070404011448.023fa2a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <01e601c777a9$1286a1e0$5d064e0c@MyComputer> Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com > Surely what we mean by "free to choose" > does not mean *canned but distinctive* It means I haven't finished processing my input information yet so I don't yet know how I'm going to respond to it, so I feel I am "free to choose". However if your mind worked more quickly than mine then you could theoretically know exactly what I'm going to do about it, but I haven't figured it out yet so I'm still free to choose. > And quite obviously it doesn't mean "random". Things happen because of cause an effect or they don't happen because of cause and effect. Everything! You can be a pair of dice or a Cuckoo clock, those are the only options. But remember, even a Cuckoo clock does not feel like Cuckoo clock, it doesn't know when it's going to pop out for all the world to see until it actually decides to do so. It's exactly the same principle with people. Well OK..., it is a few hundred thousand million billion trillion times as complex in humans, but that is a minor matter. Sometimes even in a purely deterministic world the only way to know what something will do next is to watch it and see. It would take five minutes or less to program a computer to find the first even number greater than 4 that is not the sum of two primes greater than 2, and then stop. When will the computer decide to stop? Nobody knows, not even the computer knows, all you can do it watch it and see what it does. In that sense the computer has free will, and that is the only sense I've found for the term that is not complete gibberish. John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 5 17:43:02 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:43:02 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.co m> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> At 12:42 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: >### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is >about 4000$/month. In the context of the "climate swindle" allegation, this is about as relevant as dismissing the claims of an astronomer who reports evidence that a killer asteroid is heading our way by pointing out that she holidays each year in the Swiss Alps and wears fuck-me shoes. It might bear on Gore's recommended methods of remediation, but that's another point entirely. Damien Broderick From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 5 18:24:36 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:24:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> Jef Allbright wrote: >[...] > >There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate >context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* >agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider >volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome >by the illusion that something special is going on. > >- Jef > Yes, but don't you think it a little special that the range of human determinism has evolved into rational consciousness? Even allowing for the possibility that "self" is an illusion, does not respect for human self determinism fuel the transhuman impulse? -- Thomas From brian at posthuman.com Thu Apr 5 18:18:02 2007 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:18:02 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <46153D5A.6000901@posthuman.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is > about 4000$/month. > FYI, he is putting in a solar power system currently according to the local paper. He actually had already tried to put one in before this news came out, but ran into some stupid overly broad local law against "generators". Remember, We Must ALL Stop ManBearPig. ;-) -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From scerir at libero.it Thu Apr 5 18:09:38 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 20:09:38 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] a nano question References: Message-ID: <001001c777ad$93f0d530$66901f97@archimede> Amara wrote: > in Italian (today), > > 10^3 = one thousand = uno mille > 10^6 = one million = uno milione > 10^9 = one billion = uno miliardo > > (from Latin, I think) 'Miliardo' is a French ('Milliard') word (and it is a common word to many other languages other than English). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliard It seems we (Italians) also have 'Bilione' (10^12) and 'Biliardo' (10^15), but we did not use them, as far as I know. s. For another kind of 'Biliardo' see http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/its-the-kinematics-stupid/ From sentience at pobox.com Thu Apr 5 18:59:45 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:59:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> Damien Broderick wrote: > At 12:42 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > >>### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is >>about 4000$/month. From what I've heard, he buys carbon credits to offset this. It's an interesting policy - I have to approve the dry rationalist chutzpah of it. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From davidmc at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 19:17:59 2007 From: davidmc at gmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 13:17:59 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > From what I've heard, he buys carbon credits to offset this. It's an > interesting policy - I have to approve the dry rationalist chutzpah of it. Time recently published this article about the hypocrisy of carbon credits>> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599714,00.html From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 19:35:25 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 15:35:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> Message-ID: David & the Time article point out an extremely valid point. The so called "Green" promoters are not really going green at all. The bottom line is you are promoting sustainability or you are not. Sustainability does not involve choices which result in a net increase in CO2 deposited in the atmosphere. One cannot take it out of the ground, oxidize it and place it into the atmosphere and claim one is "green" -- it is complete hypocrisy. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 5 19:07:57 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:07:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> Message-ID: <4615490D.6030809@thomasoliver.net> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > On 4/5/07, scerir > wrote: > > [...] > The compatibilist definition, which says simply that acts are > freely willed > if they are not subject to constraints, is identified as much used > in the > legal system and essentially impervious to scientific investigation. > That sounds irrational to me. > A > middle-ground "incompatibilist" definition, which requires that > freely > willed acts be consciously initiated, is shown to be relevant to > the idea > of mens rea and in the author's view not actually incompatible in > principle > with a fully scientific worldview. > That suits me better than speaking of a cuckoo clock making "decisions." It would help to establish the level of consciousness context. The sensation level of earthworm consciouness seems barely capable of any kind of will. The conceptual level of the human forebrain seems the proper context. > Only the strong libertarian definition, > which requires that freely willed acts have no physical antecedents > whatsoever, makes the existence of free will very hard to swallow > scientifically. > And not really sane, eh? > [...] Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; > tolerance and compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a > belief, although tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from > taking practical measures to prevent crimes. > > Stathis Papaioannou Well then, we certainly need a better definition and understanding of "free will." I, for one, have chosen, by self determined means, to avoid blame and revenge. I see very little compassion amongst creatures who survive without rational volition. The practice of punishment seems like a (probably false) solution for the social problems arising from disrespect of "free will." -- Thomas From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 5 20:18:14 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:18:14 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Martian warming Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405151436.021e5860@satx.rr.com> Global warming rapidly heating Mars Thursday, 5 April 2007 Agen?e France-Presse http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1148 PARIS: Climate change could be warming Mars four times faster than Earth due to a mutually reinforcing interplay of wind-swept dust and changes in reflected heat from the Sun. Scientists have long observed a perplexing correlation on Mars between the darkening or lightening of swathes of its surface and the planet's fluctuating temperatures; which range from -87?C to -5?C depending on the season and the location. The explanation may lie in the dirt, according to a report published today. Glistening Martian dust lying on the ground reflects the Sun's light - and its heat - back into space, a phenomenon called albedo. But when this reddish dust is churned up by violent winds, the storm-ravaged surface loses its reflective qualities and more of the Sun's heat is absorbed into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise. The study, published today by the British journal Nature, shows for the first time that these variations not only result from the storms but help cause them too. It also suggests that short-term climate change is currently occurring on Mars and at a much faster rate than on Earth. The report's authors, led by planetary scientist Lori Fenton, with U.S. space agency NASA's Ames Research Centre in California, describe the phenomenon as a "positive feedback" system. In other words, a vicious circle, in which changes in albedo strengthen the winds, which in turn kick up more dust and further add to the warming. In the same way, if a snow-covered area on Earth warms and the snow melts, the reflected light decreases and more solar radiation is absorbed, causing local temperatures to increase. If new snow falls, a cooling cycle starts. On Mars, there have been an unusual number of massive, planet-darkening storms over the last 30 years, and computer models indicate that surface air temperatures on the Red Planet increased by 0.65?C from the 1970s to the 1990s. Residual ice on the Martian south pole, the researchers note, has steadily retreated over the last four years. By comparison, the average temperature of Earth increased by 0.75?C over the last century. To measure the change in patterns of reflected light, Fenton and her colleagues compared thermal spectrometer images of Mars taken by NASA's Viking mission in the late 1970s with similar images gathered more than 20 years later by the Global Surveyor. They then analysing the correlation between albedo variations, the presence of atmospheric dust and change in temperature. Exactly what triggers the planet's so-called "global dust storms" remains a mystery. But any future research must now consider albedo variations as one of the factors that drive Martian climate change, they conclude. Mars ... atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide. The albedo of Earth, averaged across all its different surfaces, is about 30 times greater than that of Mars, which is far darker. From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 5 21:59:29 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 14:59:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, Thomas wrote: > Jef Allbright wrote: > > >[...] > > > >There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate > >context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* > >agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider > >volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome > >by the illusion that something special is going on. > > > >- Jef > > > Yes, but don't you think it a little special that the range of human > determinism has evolved into rational consciousness? Even allowing for > the possibility that "self" is an illusion, does not respect for human > self determinism fuel the transhuman impulse? -- Thomas First, I should amend my statement above from "we have no problem at all" to "we have no problem in principle" describing the behavior of *other* agents in fully deterministic terms. [Thanks to Damien for highlighting my sloppy writing.] We can look, in principle, as deeply as desired into the patterns of motivations of a "willful child" and follow a deterministic chain of cause and effect. It's when we try to describe our own volition from within that we fall into the "strange loop" that prompts so much philosophical discussion. In practice, we ascribe "free-will" to the behavior of others because we actually conceive interactions between entities at this level of abstraction, for very pragmatic reasons of limited cognitive capability. Thomas, I'm afraid I'm not sure I fully understand your comment, but I'll try to respond: I don't think there's anything special, as in fundamentally mysterious, involved in human cognition. As Eliezer says, there are no mysterious answers, only mysterious questions. Likewise, I don't think there's anything special, as in fundamentally mysterious, in the observation that intelligent life has evolved. Indeed I think self-awareness is an inevitable product of the evolutionary process. I would hesitate, however, to emphasize "human" or "rational" in that regard. As for the "transhuman impulse", I think that it's a deep part of our nature that our reach continues to exceed our grasp[1], and that this is best exemplified, but not restricted to our species. I do think that humanity is special, mainly because I'm currently an active member of that club. - Jef [1] Apologies to Robert Browning. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 22:55:28 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 18:55:28 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> On 4/5/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 12:42 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > >### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is > >about 4000$/month. > > In the context of the "climate swindle" allegation, this is about as > relevant as dismissing the claims of an astronomer who reports > evidence that a killer asteroid is heading our way by pointing out > that she holidays each year in the Swiss Alps and wears fuck-me shoes. > > It might bear on Gore's recommended methods of remediation, but > that's another point entirely. ### Well, I see Mr Gore as another evangelist, thumping his green book against the pulpit, invoking fire and brimstone (or rather, high AC bills) to bring us sinners to the path of righteous self-denial. That he is using some known scientific facts (like global warming) as the excuse for proselytizing doesn't exonerate him - what matters is that he willfully neglects all the other facts (like the benefits of CO2 for agriculture, and economic analyses) that are inconvenient for his position. This excludes him from among serious thinkers, and makes him a preacher - and a hypocritical one, too. I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral arguments to bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. Rafal From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Apr 5 23:21:57 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 16:21:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> On Apr 5, 2007, at 3:55 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Well, I see Mr Gore as another evangelist, thumping his green book > against the pulpit, invoking fire and brimstone (or rather, high AC > bills) to bring us sinners to the path of righteous self-denial. > Really? I have always considered you far more rational that that. Why would you stoop to tar and feathering the messenger? AFAIK, Gore is not an advocated of self-denial anywhay. > That he is using some known scientific facts (like global warming) as > the excuse for proselytizing doesn't exonerate him - what matters is > that he willfully neglects all the other facts (like the benefits of > CO2 for agriculture, and economic analyses) that are inconvenient for > his position. This excludes him from among serious thinkers, and makes > him a preacher - and a hypocritical one, too. > That is an overstatement. > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral arguments to > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. The important part is scientific and serious so I find these personal argument tedious and utterly irrelevant. - samantha From sentience at pobox.com Thu Apr 5 23:44:48 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:44:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <461589F0.2000708@pobox.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 4/5/07, Damien Broderick wrote: >> >>In the context of the "climate swindle" allegation, this is about as >>relevant as dismissing the claims of an astronomer who reports >>evidence that a killer asteroid is heading our way by pointing out >>that she holidays each year in the Swiss Alps and wears fuck-me shoes. > > ### Well, I see Mr Gore as another evangelist, thumping his green book > against the pulpit, invoking fire and brimstone (or rather, high AC > bills) to bring us sinners to the path of righteous self-denial. > > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral arguments to > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. But Rafal, that fails even as a moral argument. Logical fallacy of ad hominem tu quoque. Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they're wrong. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 5 23:49:18 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 19:49:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> On 4/5/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral arguments to > > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. > > The important part is scientific and serious so I find these personal > argument tedious and utterly irrelevant. ### I don't see an important scientific question here. Global warming is real. No scientific controversy here. Whether it is anthropogenic or not is still a matter of scientific debate (I think it is, at least in a large part) but it still doesn't matter to me. What matters is the economic impact, and the cost-benefit effects of various courses of action - and Mr Gore is a living example of how not to do cost-benefit analysis. That he is also a hypocrite is an icing on the cake but boy, it really strengthens the flavor. Rafal From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Fri Apr 6 00:01:02 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 17:01:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <694507.21825.qm@web37405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Robert, I agree that this is a great and highly-leveraged approach to help "deal" with dangers from nanotechnology. Not to mention all the other benefits. I'm really glad to see that Nanorex is making that generous move. What do you think of the possibility of including a side project that encourages the design of dangerous products? Obviously not with the intent that those designs will ever be used, but for the purpose of encouraging the designing of a broad arsenal of effective defenses. Or, do you believe this is a bad idea that would probably lead to bad outcomes? One argument that could be made in its defense is that some jilted geek somewhere is almost certainly going to be intentionally designing dangerous nano-things, with or without an open-source project. The legitimate side project might even fully satisfy their need to tinker. Not that I dislike geeks in general - I love geeks. :-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Robert Bradbury wrote: > On 4/4/07, A B wrote: > > > At this point, all ideas will be helpful. Being a > non-genius myself, I > > don't really know how much I could usefully > contribute, except in the form > > of donations to SIAI and the like. > > > Not being quite so pessimistic as Keith, the chapter > I'm writing for > Damien's forthcoming collection will I think include > physical humans 100 > years from now (within an MBrain developed solar > system). > > There may be multiple "perfect futures" [1]. I > believe one requires a fast > uplift of the physical condition of the majority of > humanity. That in turn > requires a rapid distribution of open source > nanotechnology. If everyone > *knows* in advance of the development of the first > nanoassemblers that they > will be able to share in the benefits of that there > is less likely to be an > "arms race" or a fight over the spoils, etc. > > Nanorex will be releasing its nanoengineer software > sometime later this > year. Supporting the concept of a few prizes that > would allow Nano at Home to > develop in a robust fashion is an alternative to > SIAI. There are thousands > of people aware of nanotechnology in India but they > don't know how to > approach it. Combine cheap computers + software + a > project framework + > prizes and you have recipe for producing hundreds of > nanoengineers and > thousands of open source nanopart designs. > > For those who are not familiar with my perspectives > regarding nanotechnology > development I believe that a "dual" path is possible > -- an open source, > public path which gives everyone "volkswagons" and a > closed source, VC > financed, business path which gives those who really > want them "mercedes". > The difference between volkswagons and mercedes > tends to be relatively > subjective as both tend to get one from point A to > point B. Unlike historic > development paths where one generally got the > expensive cars before the > cheap cars, if one has the designs in hand both may > come out of the factory > at the same time. > > Robert > > 1. Unlike Trance Gemini, my mind yields several, > though at least for now we > don't have the Magog to face. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/ From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 00:36:52 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 20:36:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <461589F0.2000708@pobox.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <461589F0.2000708@pobox.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704051736n6dda133dw5a510174412fce38@mail.gmail.com> On 4/5/07, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > On 4/5/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > >> > >>In the context of the "climate swindle" allegation, this is about as > >>relevant as dismissing the claims of an astronomer who reports > >>evidence that a killer asteroid is heading our way by pointing out > >>that she holidays each year in the Swiss Alps and wears fuck-me shoes. > > > > ### Well, I see Mr Gore as another evangelist, thumping his green book > > against the pulpit, invoking fire and brimstone (or rather, high AC > > bills) to bring us sinners to the path of righteous self-denial. > > > > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral arguments to > > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. > > But Rafal, that fails even as a moral argument. Logical fallacy of ad > hominem tu quoque. Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean > they're wrong. > ### I would be guilty of ad hominem tu quoque if I were arguing that Mr Gore's pronouncements about facts were untrue because he behaves as if they were untrue ("He is burning electricity as if it didn't matter for the climate, so maybe it really doesn't matter for the climate!"). That is not what I do. I know that the more electricity you use, the more impact you may have on the climate. In highlighting his hypocrisy I take issue with Mr Gore when he makes moral statements, or prescribes courses of action based on some moral standard ("we Americans should", "we must", "we must not"). Now, a hypocrite could make moral claims that I could see as valid, if the hypocrite was using my own moral system to generate them. In that case his hypocrisy would not matter, since all statements are made in the same moral system. What Mr Gore does is however different - he aims to spread moral notions that, if adopted, would result in great material harm to me and almost everybody else, forcing a much lower standard of living. He personally would benefit, as one of the leaders of statist environmentalism. Yet by living an energy-profligate life he would avoid the harm his ideas inflict on others. In this context, in a clash of competing moral notions, pointing out hypocrisy is a valid argument. The preachers of communism spouted about equality, while elevating themselves above others. The preachers of the Roman church preached self-denial, while wallowing in avarice. The preachers of environmentalism also preach self-denial, but only to others. A loathing for hypocrisy brought about the Reformation, and the fall of communism. May environmentalism follow this path. Rafal From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Fri Apr 6 00:40:40 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:40:40 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <46159708.3040905@thomasoliver.net> Jef Allbright wrote: >On 4/5/07, Thomas wrote: > > >>Jef Allbright wrote: >> >> >>>[...] It's only when we consider >>>volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome >>>by the illusion that something special is going on. >>> >>>- Jef >>> >>> >>Yes, but don't you think it a little special that the range of human >>determinism has evolved into rational consciousness? Even allowing for >>the possibility that "self" is an illusion, does not respect for human >>self determinism fuel the transhuman impulse? -- Thomas >> > >Thomas, I'm afraid I'm not sure I fully understand your comment, but >I'll try to respond: > >I don't think there's anything special, as in fundamentally >mysterious, involved in human cognition. > But doesn't "special" mean simply "of a distinct or particular kind?" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/special) Can we not distinguish between human cognition and non primate brain function? Does that make my comments hard for you to understand? : ) (Sorry. Cheap shot, but just too funny to pass up.) >[...] >Indeed I think self-awareness is an inevitable product of the >evolutionary process. I would hesitate, however, to emphasize "human" >or "rational" in that regard. > Do not the "human" and "rational" cognitive developments hallmark our expanded self determinism at the point where we see our will as relatively "free?" The evidence of rational failures and inhumanity serves to emphasize the optional quality of volitional efforts. -- So, sure, hesitate, but humanity has evolved and so has rational cognition. >As for the "transhuman impulse", I think that it's a deep part of our >nature that our reach continues to exceed our grasp[1], and that this >is best exemplified, but not restricted to our species. > >I do think that humanity is special, mainly because I'm currently an >active member of that club. > >- Jef > Does that mean we (or just you) are fundamentally mysterious? : ) -- Thomas From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 01:17:07 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 11:17:07 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > I was referring to certain philosophical arguments, such as John Searle's > > Chinese room, which is wrong for philosophical reasons, not because of > the > > undoubted practical difficulties it would pose. Engineering and > philosophy > > are not the same discipline. > > I don't understand your reasoning here, since Searle's Chinese Room > doesn't involve "extremely improbable things." It's wrong for quite > different reasons. > > I do understand that there's a binary distinction between "slightly > possible" and "impossible", but that doesn't seem to apply here. Eugen argues that you can't simulate a brain by hand; Frank Tipler in "The Physics of Immortality" calculates that the energy requirements alone would forbid such a thing, at least in real time. But, as I think you see, that misses the point of the argument. Extreme difficulty despite purposeful effort is a different situation to extreme improbability given random processes. An example of the latter would be a Turing-equivalent machine implementing my brain being realised by cosmic dust clouds. It's far from clear that this could never happen (what if the universe is very large, or long-lived? what if there are multiple universes? what about the fact that there are multiple different abstract machines implementing a particular computation, each multiply realisable?), but even if it could be shown that it was as close to impossible as doesn't matter, that doesn't invalidate it as a thought experiment which says interesting things about functionalism and personal identity. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 5 23:17:46 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:17:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta: Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <46153EE4.9060102@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070405191653.02c361d8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> If there is a topic which should go on a universal banned list, this is it. Keith From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 6 02:17:49 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 19:17:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Improvements to Newcomb's Paradox Message-ID: <009c01c777f2$798f8bb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Newcomb's Paradox has only one admissable subject behavior: take just the one box. An evolutionary proof of this is as follows: suppose that box A either does or does not contain dinner, and box B always contains dessert. One may live on a steady diet of box A, but one gradually dies of nutritional deficiencies by selecting only box B. (Those familiar with Newcomb's Paradox should skip the present paragraph. The AI, or Deity, or whatever entity has an unassailable track record of always seeming to know whether you will always take just box A or whether you will succumb to the temptation to take both boxes. In some accounts---like wikipedia's ---it is "box B" which contains the necessary (or extremely desireable) reward, but in other accounts that box is called "A".) Thus evolution would suggest that taking just one box is an ESS. Or, as Jef Albright would say, taking only the one box works. In my own essay, I provide reasons why we should regard "changing the past" as eminently reasonable from the point of view of the subject. (See http://www.leecorbin.com/UseOfNewcombsParadox.html). Note the analogy to the free will discussion that we have been having. If you imagine an audience, especially one composed of physicists (and--better yet--physicists who love you and want only the best for you), then as the Alien made his assignment for the boxes two weeks ago in their plain public view, the past will not be changed by anything you do. Moreover, since the Alien is always correct, from the point of view of the audience you do not have free will. But from your point of view---which should be regarded as on an equal footing with theirs, at least operationally, you do! For if you try on some days to take both dinner and dessert, then you cannot avoide the unmistakeable feeling that you can *control* whether or not the main box contains dinner. As a functioning organism you must adopt this point of view that you *can* decide. Philosophical niceties such as "oh, well, it's all determined what you will do" are not usefully descriptive of your actions or your situation. If you were part of a team who every night had to make a *decision* as to whether to take one or both boxes, your patter about not having choice, or about the contents of the boxes being already determined, would be received with jeers and sneers by the others. You would quickly abandon the language-modality [1] of determinism, and adopt the language-modality of free will. Many people here are quick to disparage the concept of free will as utter nonsense. But we compatibalists counter by emphasizing its utility in daily discourse, and are wont to remind our critics of the primary role of language in describing not only our world, but necessarily a world in which we devices are embedded. As in every night when you hold arguments with the fools who want to take both boxes, you (and they) really are agreeing that choice is possible. Go ahead if you want and discard the notion of free will, but are you going to also discard the notion of a machine (e.g. you) being able to make a decision? I have not heard any of the anti-compatiblists answer this question. Lee [1] Language-modality is my much more sophisticated, refined, and scientific term for what John Clark calls mouth noises. From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 6 02:46:46 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:46:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070405224627.043baeb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:36 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: snip >### I would be guilty of ad hominem tu quoque if I were arguing that >Mr Gore's pronouncements about facts were untrue because he behaves as >if they were untrue ("He is burning electricity as if it didn't matter >for the climate, so maybe it really doesn't matter for the climate!"). >That is not what I do. I know that the more electricity you use, the >more impact you may have on the climate. This is not true. Do you want to reconsider the last sentence? Or should I tell you what is wrong with it? Keith From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 02:47:16 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:47:16 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, scerir wrote: > > Stathis Papaioannou: > > A non-believer in free will can still go along with the law as something > > which is instrumental in bringing about the determined behaviours. We > put > > roofs on our houses in order to stay dry, and we stay dry because the > roofs > > are in place. Similarly, we punish criminals to prevent further crimes > and > > further crimes are prevented because we punish criminals. However, I > keep > in > > mind the fact that the criminals engage in their behaviour either > because > it > > is determined by their genes and environment (in which case it isn't > their > > fault) or due to random processes (in which case it isn't their fault). > > Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; tolerance > and > > compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a belief, although > > tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from taking practical > measures > to > > prevent crimes. > > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals > engage in their behaviour also because it is > determined by their 'will', and not just by > their genes or by contextuality. Isn't their will determined by their genes and environment? What other factors could possibly be at play? I always found difficult to define 'free will'. > There are several definitions. My personal > definition was something like 'the 'will' does > not depend on the past story of (this) universe'. > After some reflection I also wrote 'the 'will' > does not depend both on the past story and on the > future story of (this) universe'. This definition > seems to be strong indeed :-) and perhaps also > false and useless :-) Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, perhaps the indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). But at best, that means free will is *randomness*, and why should we be any happier to believe that our behaviour is random than that it is determined? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 02:50:46 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:50:46 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Jef Allbright wrote: There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate > context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* > agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider > volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome > by the illusion that something special is going on. So you agree that free will consists only in the fact that we don't know what we're going to do until we do it? A digression: does God have free will? It would seem to be inconsistent with omniscience. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Fri Apr 6 02:24:41 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 22:24:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great global warming swindle) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <490861.1337.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his > lavish mansion is about 4000$/month. > Preachers frequently don't live the lives they > preach. I don't understand. How much does the mansion next to Al Gore spend on electricity? I thought that what he was preaching about energy efficiency, if so, why wouldn't a $3000.00 reduction be a valid amount compared to $7000.00? If the difference is $4000.00 then I would assume that Al Gore is preaching and practising about energy efficiency. Ofcourse, if his bill is $4000.00 a month and the next door neighbor's bill is $4200.00, I could rationalize that he is being a hypocrite. I have heard the comment "practice what you preach", I'm just not convinced anybody can 100% "practice what they preach". How do you determine who is a hypocrite and who isn't? If I listen to someone preach that smoking is bad yet watch them light a cigarette the next moment, I would consider them a hypocrite. I thought it was about the proof? Just some curious questions and thoughts on my mind. Thanks Anna __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 03:10:14 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 13:10:14 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Damien Broderick wrote: Criminals are held responsible for their ill deeds because we know > that while they might have a powerful disposition to act in a malign > and antisocial fashion they also have the capacity to choose > otherwise... But how is this true in a deterministic world? Children and criminals are just collections of matter which follow the laws of physics (scene in court: "Your Honour, I submit that my client is just a collection of matter with no choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and I challenge the prosecution to prove otherwise!"). If I push a pen off my desk, it *has* to fall off my desk given the sum of the forces acting on it; only if the forces had been different could it have chosen differently. Similarly, if the world is deterministic, a person who makes a particular choice *had* to make that choice, and only if the physical facts had been different (his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, the alignment of the planets - whatever) could he have chosen differently. The fact that neither the person nor an external observer cannot predict which way the choice would go does not make it "free". Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 6 03:39:10 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 20:39:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/5/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/6/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > > There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate > > context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* > > agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider > > volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome > > by the illusion that something special is going on. > > So you agree that free will consists only in the fact that we don't know > what we're going to do until we do it? Agreed. > A digression: does God have free will? It would seem to be inconsistent with > omniscience. Correct. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 04:14:18 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 05:14:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704052114n7189a7ces68ec21e3ccb1d1ca@mail.gmail.com> On 4/6/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > But how is this true in a deterministic world? Children and criminals are > just collections of matter which follow the laws of physics (scene in court: > "Your Honour, I submit that my client is just a collection of matter with no > choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and I challenge the > prosecution to prove otherwise!"). > And what of it? From that perspective, juries are just collections of matter with no choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and you can't call them wrong for convicting the accused - you can't consistently even use concepts like right and wrong. Once you switch to a higher level of organization and allow there can be such a thing as wrongful conviction, you're invoking morality, which implies free will, so you must allow that a criminal can be held responsible for his actions. This is simple logic; whether electrons are deterministic or not has nothing to do with it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 04:18:12 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 14:18:12 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Improvements to Newcomb's Paradox In-Reply-To: <009c01c777f2$798f8bb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <009c01c777f2$798f8bb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Newcomb's Paradox has only one admissable subject > behavior: take just the one box. > > An evolutionary proof of this is as follows: suppose that > box A either does or does not contain dinner, and box > B always contains dessert. One may live on a steady > diet of box A, but one gradually dies of nutritional > deficiencies by selecting only box B. > > (Those familiar with Newcomb's Paradox should skip > the present paragraph. The AI, or Deity, or whatever > entity has an unassailable track record of always > seeming to know whether you will always take just > box A or whether you will succumb to the temptation > to take both boxes. In some accounts---like wikipedia's > ---it is "box B" which contains the necessary (or extremely > desireable) reward, but in other accounts that box is > called "A".) > > Thus evolution would suggest that taking just one box > is an ESS. Or, as Jef Albright would say, taking only > the one box works. > > In my own essay, I provide reasons why we should > regard "changing the past" as eminently reasonable > from the point of view of the subject. (See > http://www.leecorbin.com/UseOfNewcombsParadox.html). > > Note the analogy to the free will discussion that we have > been having. If you imagine an audience, especially one > composed of physicists (and--better yet--physicists who > love you and want only the best for you), then as the > Alien made his assignment for the boxes two weeks > ago in their plain public view, the past will not be changed > by anything you do. Moreover, since the Alien is always > correct, from the point of view of the audience you do > not have free will. > > But from your point of view---which should be regarded > as on an equal footing with theirs, at least operationally, > you do! > > For if you try on some days to take both dinner and dessert, > then you cannot avoide the unmistakeable feeling that you can > *control* whether or not the main box contains dinner. As > a functioning organism you must adopt this point of view > that you *can* decide. Philosophical niceties such as "oh, well, > it's all determined what you will do" are not usefully > descriptive of your actions or your situation. > > If you were part of a team who every night had to make > a *decision* as to whether to take one or both boxes, > your patter about not having choice, or about the contents > of the boxes being already determined, would be received > with jeers and sneers by the others. You would quickly > abandon the language-modality [1] of determinism, and adopt > the language-modality of free will. > > Many people here are quick to disparage the concept of > free will as utter nonsense. But we compatibalists counter > by emphasizing its utility in daily discourse, and are wont > to remind our critics of the primary role of language in > describing not only our world, but necessarily a world > in which we devices are embedded. > > As in every night when you hold arguments with the fools > who want to take both boxes, you (and they) really are > agreeing that choice is possible. > > Go ahead if you want and discard the notion of free will, > but are you going to also discard the notion of a machine > (e.g. you) being able to make a decision? I have not > heard any of the anti-compatiblists answer this question. This is an interesting take on Newcomb's Paradox. The one-boxers will ultimately prevail, and therefore one-boxing will become the accepted way of life. But doesn't this just show that a belief in free will has been cultivated by the Alien's experiment while, at the same time, even the variability in choice you would expect from a wild population is being expunged? Truth is not a matter of utility. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 04:41:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 14:41:15 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704052114n7189a7ces68ec21e3ccb1d1ca@mail.gmail.com> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> <8d71341e0704052114n7189a7ces68ec21e3ccb1d1ca@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Russell Wallace wrote: > > On 4/6/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > But how is this true in a deterministic world? Children and criminals > > are just collections of matter which follow the laws of physics (scene in > > court: "Your Honour, I submit that my client is just a collection of matter > > with no choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and I challenge the > > prosecution to prove otherwise!"). > > > > And what of it? From that perspective, juries are just collections of > matter with no choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and you can't > call them wrong for convicting the accused - you can't consistently even use > concepts like right and wrong. Once you switch to a higher level of > organization and allow there can be such a thing as wrongful conviction, > you're invoking morality, which implies free will, so you must allow that a > criminal can be held responsible for his actions. This is simple logic; > whether electrons are deterministic or not has nothing to do with it. > There can be wrongful conviction in the sense of certain facts being wrong. However, I reject absolute morality just as I reject free will. There are certain behaviours in people which are more desirable than others (because we have evolved to find some things pleasant and other things unpleasant), and as a matter of utility we set about encouraging the desirable behaviours and discouraging the undesirable ones. "Moral responsibility" is just a concept that is sometimes useful in organising society. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Apr 6 04:37:58 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 21:37:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200704060446.l364kDKt001989@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eliezer S. Yudkowsky > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle > > Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 12:42 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > > > > >>### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his lavish mansion is > >>about 4000$/month. > > From what I've heard, he buys carbon credits to offset this. It's an > interesting policy - I have to approve the dry rationalist chutzpah of it. > > -- > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky I have heard of this buying carbon credits. How does that work? Who owns them? Can I sell Algore some? Can I sell them on eBay? Can I sell some to anyone here? spike From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 6 04:49:01 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 21:49:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a301c777fb$89befbc0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00ab01c77802$a87becb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00c101c77807$970cc850$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 11:03 PM >> I claim that if one *totally* banishes from his or her consciousness >> the idea of non-determinism (to the point that it is unthinkable), and >> only then asks "do I have a choice?", the answer must be "Yes". >> But so long as there remains even the slightest vestige of the notion >> of an uncaused event, or the slightest vestige of the soul, then the >> silly answer "No" may still be entertained. >> > You could say that, or you could say that the silly answer "yes" > should be banished once you have understood the impossibility of > something being neither determined nor random, which is > (I believe) the common notion of free will. True. Your post has made me see the symmetrical nature of whether or not to accept free will. >> (When for example, you ask yourself, do I have a choice about >> regarding answering this email, the answer "No" is less informative >> and less true than the answer "Yes".) > > But I know that I don't have a choice; I was destined to answer it, > but I just didn't know it until after the fact. You probably meant to write "But I know that I *didn't* have a choice". It is precisely use of the present tense in denying choice that so aggravates us compatibists. >> The machine must decide! >> So---recalling that we have utterly and without reservation totally >> gone beyond even a hint of uncaused events---this can *only* mean >> that the machine is taking these factors into account, i.e., a decision >> is simply "taking factors into account". (What else could it be?) > > It *can't* mean anything else. But then, the concept of a "decision" > becomes trivialised. If I push my pen off the desk, the pen takes > into account all the forces acting on it and "decides" to fall; had the > forces on it been different, it would have "decided" differently. Good point. Yet for the sake of coherent descriptions of the world around us, we do want to reserve some qualities for people and other complex machinery; "to be conscious", for example, as well as "to make decisions". > Is the pen exercising free will? Is an intelligent agent subject to > deterministic laws any more free than the pen is? I agree that an intelligent agent is no freer from deterministic laws than is the [falling] pen. On that score, you make a very good point. But my point is that it's very descriptive and exceedingly useful to describe our ontology as containing creatures like ourselves who "decide" things, who make "choices" and "decisions", and whose will is free unless it's constrained by situations or agents that interfere with its usual processing. > The only difference I can see between external compulsion > and internal compulsion is that in the former case you are aware that > you are being compelled, and resent it. A really powerful and > skilful dictator would make his subjects do exactly what he wants > them to do while letting them think all the while that they are > making free choices; this is the ultimate aim of propaganda. That's a very good point, and a good example. It results from a change in viewpoint, and also a change in ease of prediction, two very, very important points. I mentioned also tonight that from a certain point of view, one can control what happens in the past. Depending on the situation, this is not an entirely absurd view. But here is another nice qualification: recall that your behavior is probably unpredictable in principle. As a chaotic system, there is no shortcut to obtaining your future states other than by running the calculation, in which case you are conscious anyway. When---as in your example---there *are* shortcuts, e.g., what a person feels after being exposed to the dictator's propaganda, is entirely predictable, then even we compatibilists would refrain from heartily endorsing that one's will was free. >> I'd maintain that it is not conceivable that free will is an illusion, when >> what HAS to be meant by the phrase is as explained above Here I will do the unusual step of mocking my own stance. I very well could have contrived an argument proving God's existence in the same way. I could have said "clearly there there can be no supernatural forces, the only admissable concept of God doesn't have supernatural attributes, and didn't make these obviously false historical gestures. Therefore if we smartly interpret "God" to mean, say, "the sense of Spirituality", then clearly God exists. So I back down from my position (do other people on this list every do this?) and admit that the notion of "free will" has as many disadvantages as advantages. I will end by suggesting that either statement: (A) free will does not exist (B) free will does exists are no more meaningful than saying that "Julius Caesar is prime". (Neither than nor its negation is true.) >> It serves the purpose of identifying who or what made a decision. >> Either I can go visit the prison by my own free will, say as a reporter >> and thus exercise my free will, or I can be arrested and forced to go >> to prison, in which case my free will has been abrogated > > It becomes a matter of semantics, in that case. If you still believe > that "free will" applies in the example of the chess player I have > given above, then we agree, although we are calling it different things. That is so. Lee From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 04:55:10 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 21:55:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Apr 5, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 4/5/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > >> > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral >> arguments to >> > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. >> >> The important part is scientific and serious so I find these personal >> argument tedious and utterly irrelevant. > > ### I don't see an important scientific question here. Global warming > is real. No scientific controversy here. Whether it is anthropogenic > or not is still a matter of scientific debate (I think it is, at least > in a large part) but it still doesn't matter to me. What matters is > the economic impact, and the cost-benefit effects of various courses > of action - and Mr Gore is a living example of how not to do > cost-benefit analysis. > Then we would better employ our energies thinking of workable solutions and how to get them implemented, yes? - s From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 05:05:31 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 22:05:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <6D18B51F-8A3B-402C-B6A7-DFB01CC3834F@mac.com> On Apr 5, 2007, at 7:47 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/6/07, scerir wrote: > Stathis Papaioannou: > > A non-believer in free will can still go along with the law as > something > > which is instrumental in bringing about the determined > behaviours. We put > > roofs on our houses in order to stay dry, and we stay dry because > the > roofs > > are in place. Similarly, we punish criminals to prevent further > crimes and > > further crimes are prevented because we punish criminals. > However, I keep > in > > mind the fact that the criminals engage in their behaviour either > because > it > > is determined by their genes and environment (in which case it > isn't their > > fault) or due to random processes (in which case it isn't their > fault). > > Blaming and revenge are in keeping with a belief in free will; > tolerance > and > > compassion are in keeping with the absence of such a belief, > although > > tolerance and compassion do not prevent us from taking practical > measures > to > > prevent crimes. > > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals > engage in their behaviour also because it is > determined by their 'will', and not just by > their genes or by contextuality. > > Isn't their will determined by their genes and environment? What > other factors could possibly be at play? Nope. At least people as far as we can reasonably tell with nearly identical genes and environments turn out so differently that you would have to believe the flutter of a butterflies wing causes a typhoon on the other side of the world. It is not reasonable to prattle on about physics being physics when the system or behaviors being studied cannot be fruitfully and practically analyzed, understood or predicted at such a level. > > Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, perhaps > the indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). But at best, > that means free will is *randomness*, and why should we be any > happier to believe that our behaviour is random than that it is > determined? > At the point you choose from among alternatives you are exercising free will. I will not dance on the head of some philosophical pin that a sufficiently powerful and near all knowing mind could predict with perfect accuracy how you will choose in any situation. It has nothing to do with behavior being either random or determined. That false dichotomy is fruitless to pursue. Something more fruitful as how we can choose thee best values and exercise the best decision making process in our choices that maximize our gaining and keeping those values. The rest seems to me a colossal waste of (for now) all too limited time. - s -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 05:06:47 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 22:06:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On Apr 5, 2007, at 7:50 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/6/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > There's no paradox here folks, it's just about using the appropriate > context. We have no problem at all describing the behavior of *other* > agents in fully deterministic terms. It's only when we consider > volition from our own point of view that we are seduced and overcome > by the illusion that something special is going on. > > So you agree that free will consists only in the fact that we don't > know what we're going to do until we do it? > > A digression: does God have free will? It would seem to be > inconsistent with omniscience. > So now you want to talk about invisible unicorns? I rest my case regarding the merits of this topic. - samantha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 05:19:33 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 22:19:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On Apr 4, 2007, at 4:28 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > At 03:15 PM 4/4/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: > > snip > >> The main "advantages" I was thinking of were a >> possibly considerable size(space) and weight savings >> for the space colony, plus a potentially much simpler >> (probably cheaper) internal environment. For example, >> if you could just rebuild a strawberry to eat, you >> wouldn't require any specialized light sources, soil, >> bacteria, nutrients, additional physical space, etc. > > The entire problem of feeding people in space was worked over in a > great > deal of detail over 30 years ago. I can't point you to an on-line > site, > but if you can find a copy of the Space Manufacturing Conference > for 1975, > "how to grow food" is spelled out in considerable detail with a > pretentious > title on the paper. Incidentally, in space you have all the light you > want, and area isn't that hard to make either. I have doubts about putting massive numbers of normal body form human beings in space. The technology required to do so changes the equations so much is becomes doubtful whether humans or something distinctly not today's kind of human would colonize space. Supporting a lot of bodies designed for earth conditions does not seem optimal. It is certainly tremendously expensive. It could be done employing telepresence and robotics to build a lot of the needed infrastructure and with beanstalks or something much cheaper to get out of the gravity well. But that implies building out technology that may make homo saps irrelevant and seriously non-competitive in space. > > You don't need soil or bacteria. In a closed system, what comes > out of the > sewage plant incinerator has everything except a bit of nitric acid > for a > hydroponics solution that will keep the plants happy. Now it might > eventually be easy to rebuild strawberries to eat, but if you are > that far > into nanotechnology, why not just run on electricity and simulate > eating a > berry? For that matter, why should you choose to keep a body configuration that requires such primitive forms of energization as digestion and elimination cycles? > >> Whatever the case turns out to be, the near future >> will, without a doubt, be very exciting. :-) > > There is good exciting and bad exciting. Unfortunately, the odds are > stacked by the long evolutionary history of our species against the > future > being good. > Yes. It could be argued that any evolved species is likely to have evolved many counterproductive traits making its successful emergence into and beyond technological singularity extremely unlikely. This is probably part of the answer to "Where are the aliens?" They didn't make it past this stage. > But if you want to do something to improve the odds of a bright > future, I > have a number of suggestions. Even so, the most likely number for > physical > state humans 100 years from now is zero. I for one would love to hear some of the suggestions. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 05:22:13 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 22:22:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <35261.5003.qm@web37406.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <35261.5003.qm@web37406.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <15A71117-3028-4E99-A319-A59C93DAD5AB@mac.com> On Apr 4, 2007, at 8:41 PM, A B wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > Could you somehow rephrase your objection/question, > I'm afraid I don't really understand it. Exceptional > reading comprehension is not one of my strengths. > > The point that I'm trying to make is that if "free > will" (as it is commonly interpreted) really exists > (which I don't believe at all) then perhaps we should > all acknowledge that it is quite limited (severely in > my opinion). If it were not limited, I would have > everything I've ever wanted, no matter how > fantastical. What? Free will is about being able to choose between alternatives, including alternative courses of action. It is not remotely about being able to impose your will on the universe. - s From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 06:15:47 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:15:47 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <6D18B51F-8A3B-402C-B6A7-DFB01CC3834F@mac.com> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <6D18B51F-8A3B-402C-B6A7-DFB01CC3834F@mac.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals > > engage in their behaviour also because it is > > determined by their 'will', and not just by > > their genes or by contextuality. > > > Isn't their will determined by their genes and environment? What other > factors could possibly be at play? > > > Nope. At least people as far as we can reasonably tell with nearly > identical genes and environments turn out so differently that you would have > to believe the flutter of a butterflies wing causes a typhoon on the other > side of the world. It is not reasonable to prattle on about physics being > physics when the system or behaviors being studied cannot be fruitfully and > practically analyzed, understood or predicted at such a level. > Recall that even though a chaotic system is unpredictable it is still deterministic. And while identical twins can have the same genes, it is not possible that they have exactly the same environment; for a start, they cannot both occupy the same space. It's not inconceivable that butterflies fluttering in Iraq today will have an effect on George Bush's foreign policy decisions a few months down the track. However, as you and Lee point out, there is not much practical value in invoking determinism when the system that is supposed to be determined cannot be analysed, and in this compatibilists find room for free will, whereas I find room for the illusion of free will. Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, perhaps the > indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). But at best, that means free > will is *randomness*, and why should we be any happier to believe that our > behaviour is random than that it is determined? > > > At the point you choose from among alternatives you are exercising free > will. I will not dance on the head of some philosophical pin that a > sufficiently powerful and near all knowing mind could predict with perfect > accuracy how you will choose in any situation. It has nothing to do with > behavior being either random or determined. That false dichotomy is > fruitless to pursue. Something more fruitful as how we can choose thee best > values and exercise the best decision making process in our choices that > maximize our gaining and keeping those values. The rest seems to me a > colossal waste of (for now) all too limited time. > Fair enough. That puts you in Eugen Leitl's philosophy-hating camp. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 06:21:14 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:21:14 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > A digression: does God have free will? It would seem to be inconsistent > with omniscience. > > > So now you want to talk about invisible unicorns? I rest my case > regarding the merits of this topic. > Well, like the concept of an invisible pink unicorn, this shows a logical contradiction in theism. Personally I don't need more reasons not to believe in God, but I collect them as a harmless hobby. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 14:27:54 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 10:27:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> On 4/6/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > On Apr 5, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > On 4/5/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > > >> > I find it is quite relevant to bring such personal, moral > >> arguments to > >> > bear here, since it is a moral, not a scientific discussion. > >> > >> The important part is scientific and serious so I find these personal > >> argument tedious and utterly irrelevant. > > > > ### I don't see an important scientific question here. Global warming > > is real. No scientific controversy here. Whether it is anthropogenic > > or not is still a matter of scientific debate (I think it is, at least > > in a large part) but it still doesn't matter to me. What matters is > > the economic impact, and the cost-benefit effects of various courses > > of action - and Mr Gore is a living example of how not to do > > cost-benefit analysis. > > > > Then we would better employ our energies thinking of workable > solutions and how to get them implemented, yes? > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), I feel no pressing need to find solutions. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 14:29:06 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 10:29:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070405215352.043d4008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <461589F0.2000708@pobox.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070405215352.043d4008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704060729l5aeb105n423bdd32a9287108@mail.gmail.com> On 4/5/07, Keith Henson wrote: > At 08:36 PM 4/5/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > snip > > >### I would be guilty of ad hominem tu quoque if I were arguing that > >Mr Gore's pronouncements about facts were untrue because he behaves as > >if they were untrue ("He is burning electricity as if it didn't matter > >for the climate, so maybe it really doesn't matter for the climate!"). > >That is not what I do. I know that the more electricity you use, the > >more impact you may have on the climate. > > This is not true. Do you want to reconsider the last sentence? > > Or should I tell you what is wrong with it? > ### I am looking forward to your opinion. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 15:45:43 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 11:45:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great global warming swindle) In-Reply-To: <490861.1337.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <490861.1337.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704060845k796fa5b9le3ba0d8dd66db46d@mail.gmail.com> On 4/5/07, Anna Taylor wrote: > --- Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: > > > ### Interestingly, Al Gore's electricity bill in his > > lavish mansion is about 4000$/month. > > > Preachers frequently don't live the lives they > > preach. > > I don't understand. How much does the mansion next to > Al Gore spend on electricity? I thought that what he > was preaching about energy efficiency, if so, why > wouldn't a $3000.00 reduction be a valid amount > compared to $7000.00? If the difference is $4000.00 > then I would assume that Al Gore is preaching and > practising about energy efficiency. Ofcourse, if his > bill is $4000.00 a month and the next door neighbor's > bill is $4200.00, I could rationalize that he is being > a hypocrite. > ### The environmentalists I know are not really any more efficient than me, although they frequently pay lip service to it. They are really after a diminished "ecological footprint" of humans, and especially other humans. Mr Gore's ecological footprint is huge (which I see as not bad, as long as he is paying for it himself) but he demands from me (and other Americans) to reduce my footprint, and he is willing to use the force of the state to cut me down to size. I see this as very bad. Whether his neighbor's mansion burns 3000$ or 10000$ a month doesn't matter, as long as the neighbor is not a crusading environmentalist (and pays his bills). -------------------------------------- > I have heard the comment "practice what you preach", > I'm just not convinced anybody can 100% "practice what > they preach". ### Absolutely everybody can reduce their preaching until it fits exactly with what they already practice. -------------------------------------- > > How do you determine who is a hypocrite and who isn't? > If I listen to someone preach that smoking is bad yet > watch them light a cigarette the next moment, I would > consider them a hypocrite. I thought it was about the > proof? ### I prefer to reserve the word "hypocrite" to somebody falsely claiming to have certain moral beliefs with the aim of manipulating others for his ends. The smoker in your example may very well believe that smoking is bad for his health but be too weak to quit, so he would neither falsely describe his beliefs, nor use such claims to manipulate others for his ends. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 15:57:42 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 11:57:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> On 4/1/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > On 4/1/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > On 3/30/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > > > Did the number 0x0bd11a0bb188f291956549705169a996110841d4 exist? > > > > ### Yes! Always and forever, timeless, just as any element of the > > platonic plenum. > > Rafal, I don't pretend to be able to dissuade anyone from any abstract > belief, but along with infinite primes and infinite variations on > infinities, do you also believe that "redness" "exists" in the > "platonic plenum?" ### Yes, I can even see it sometimes. There is a problem with believing in too few entities - if one insists that entities not proven to exist should be assumed not to exist, then one necessarily places himself at the conceptual center of the universe. If I say that there is nothing beyond the most distant object I can see, then my position is very special. Since I don't think I am that special, I am forced to assume that there are entities in existence (i.e. having at least one property) that I have not observed, nor will ever be able to observe or think of even in principle. This leads me to modal realism, and therefore, yes, "redness" exists. Rafal From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 6 16:05:42 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 09:05:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1BE43E82-DCD4-409A-A2D4-1C9BF290139A@mac.com> On Apr 6, 2007, at 7:27 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to > be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on > the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few > decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor > losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains > from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), > I feel no pressing need to find solutions. Predicted by whom and with what biases? There are many possible scenarios and many of them are not so rosy. How much would a few Katrina-like storms cost? How much for major drought? How much for a Katrina or larger storm hitting the oil and shipping of the Gulf more directly? $50 billion? Pocket change in this time of $9 trillion in admitted deficits. Are you willing to bet on your scenario to the extent of saying nothing needs to be done? And what happens to the rest of the world? - samantha From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 16:13:17 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:13:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> References: <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> On 4/3/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 03:09:36PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > Not all circuits can count, it take special ones. > > > > ### You evaded the question. What is so special about certain material > > objects (human brains, ink on paper, certain circuits) that makes > > Ink on paper, no, (unless it's one of them fancy inkjet-printed > electronics which is smart enough to count). Human brains and certain circuits, > yes, because through evolutionary optimization (all smart human artifacts are > causally entangled with said optimization, which is not true for dumb > objects, man-made, or otherwise) they have evolved to be able to make > measurements on their environment/tracking certain aspects of state > (including themselves), which is externally denoted (in your, mine, > and a fair number of other heads) as "counting" and "numbers". > > The pigment marks on dead tree are completely meaningless without any > such systems and said measurements (unless it's one damn smart paper). > > > their states able to support the existence of numbers (and be > > absolutely necessary to the existence of numbers), while other > > material objects do support the existence of numbers? > > The numbers are not in the object but the observer (the systems > have to agree on a common code as to configuration states of the object, which > requires communication, or a common point of origin acting as > a communication channel equivalent). Observer complex, external > encoding trivial. Sufficiently so that the observer can encode > internally, without breaking a sweat. ### OK, there are certain networks in the temporal and parietal cortices, a part of ventral processing stream (the "what" stream), that form the concept of "chicken". Then there are other networks, located slightly more dorsally in the parietal cortex, that subserve numerosity and the even higher level parietal and frontal cortices that allow the manipulation of abstract representations of numbers. All of these cortices need to use continuous, highly structured data streams for their development. The data is generated by sense organs and various subcortical structures, and are eventually traceable to objects and processes in the external world. There are referents to "chickens". There are referents to "numbers". The referents exist independently of the cortices that form the concepts related to them. In what way are the referents of the concept "chicken" existentially different from the referents of the concept "17"? Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 6 16:19:08 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 18:19:08 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <1BE43E82-DCD4-409A-A2D4-1C9BF290139A@mac.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> <1BE43E82-DCD4-409A-A2D4-1C9BF290139A@mac.com> Message-ID: <20070406161908.GI9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 09:05:42AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to > > be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on > > the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few I've heard some estimates that total world GNP is to take a 20% dive due to global warming. Looking at Collapse, it appears plausible. Precipitation shifts->crop failure->famine->migrations->wars, etc. Notice that I have no idea whether this is true, and don't have any personal interest debating the minutiae. To me, personally, waste of energy is an earmark of both poor stewardship, and primitive technology. I like neither the former, nor the latter. While I can't match Gore's 4 k$/month electricity bill (if it not be apocryphal), our ~720 EUR/year are rather excessive. > > decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor > > losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains > > from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), > > I feel no pressing need to find solutions. > > > Predicted by whom and with what biases? There are many possible > scenarios and many of them are not so rosy. How much would a few > Katrina-like storms cost? How much for major drought? How much for a > Katrina or larger storm hitting the oil and shipping of the Gulf more > directly? $50 billion? Pocket change in this time of $9 trillion in > admitted deficits. Are you willing to bet on your scenario to the > extent of saying nothing needs to be done? > > And what happens to the rest of the world? S?ils n?ont plus de pain, qu?ils mangent de la brioche. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 6 16:24:55 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 18:24:55 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> References: <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070406162455.GJ9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 12:13:17PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > In what way are the referents of the concept "chicken" existentially > different from the referents of the concept "17"? No different, as long as you don't count them before they hatch. More seriously, when you track your external environment, you have to do both the quantity and the quality part. Numbers are not at all different from chickens, as far as neuron spike-counters are concerned. Mmh, all this talk about beans and chickens is making me hungry. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From jonkc at att.net Fri Apr 6 16:20:16 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:20:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <006d01c77867$858d19d0$b3064e0c@MyComputer> Samantha Atkins Wrote: >So you agree that free will consists only in the fact that we don't know > what we're going to do until we do it? A digression: does God > have free will? No. For the mind to totally understand itself it must form a perfect internal model of itself. The model must not only describe the rest of the mind in every detail but it must also depict the model itself with a micro model. This micro model must represent the rest of the brain and the micro model itself with a micro micro model. This path leads to an impossible infinite regress. Both the brain and the model must be made up of a finite number of elements. If we are not to lose accuracy the components of the brain must have a one to one correspondence with the elements of the model. But this is impossible because the brain as a whole must have more members than the part that is just the model. This argument does not hold if the mind is infinite, that is if it has an infinite number of segments. It would be possible to find a one to one correspondence with a proper subset of itself; for example you CAN find a one to one correspondence between the set of odd integers with the set of all integers. Thus an infinite intellect could predict all its actions without error. So humans have free will but GOD if SHE exists does not. > So now you want to talk about invisible unicorns? > I rest my case regarding the merits of this topic. The topic has merit because a misunderstanding of it has caused gross confusion in philosophy and absurdities in criminal law; but that's not to say all the posts on this list on the subject have had merit. John K Clark From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 16:40:26 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 17:40:26 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to > be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on > the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few > decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor > losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains > from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), > I feel no pressing need to find solutions. > No overlooked side-effects? I think I shall take this as a new definition of 'chutzpah'. One humorous example of chutzpah is often given as follows: "A boy is on trial for murdering his parents, and he begs of the judge leniency because he is an orphan." BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 16:43:43 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:43:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to > be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on > the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few > decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor > losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains > from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), > I feel no pressing need to find solutions. Rafal, I believe you are going to have to cite a reference for this. And in particular, is the perspective only a U.S. perspective or a "world neutral" perspective? And if it were framed in "world neutral" perspectives (i.e. we relocate all individuals living on islands < 10m above sea level to Great Bear lake in CA [significantly warmer at some point in the future]) would the consequences still be $50B+? If you are not arguing from a world perspective then one is arguing from the perspective of "I win, you lose, so?" As $500B misspent in Iraq shows that perspective may be flawed [1]. I would like to see the discussion take a perspective of "What is the most extropic path?" How does one save the greatest number of people at the least cost? So one might devote those funds toward advancing things like nanotechnology R&D. In the face of robust MNT global warming is a *red herring*. I've stated it before and I'll state it again "global warming does not matter if one has robust MNT." If one has robust MNT one simply removes all of the CO2 and CH4 from the atmosphere, piles it up in nice refrigerated storage areas and watches while all the plant life dies. It is *really* that simple. So what this entire conversation is about is a perspective involving some window between when global warming becomes "critical" and robust MNT is unavailable. I would like to see anyone frame that argument (with references of course). Robert 1. And let us *not* get into this since it goes back into the history of colonial powers carving up regions of land encompassing tribes relatively incapable of coexisting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Fri Apr 6 17:36:05 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 13:36:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle. References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <00c801c77872$1339abe0$b3064e0c@MyComputer> "Damien Broderick" > global warming is the favored model > of experts in all the relevant fields. Nearly everybody agrees that the world has been getting warmer over the last century or so and most people think humans probably had something to do with it; the debate is how important is this and even if it's a bad thing; Siberia and Canada and the Sahara would benefit, Bangladesh would not. This is what Freeman Dyson had to say on the subject: "Global warming theories are unreliable, exaggerated, and based on models with many flaws and the researchers in this field create a lot of hype to steal money from more legitimate human activities" "Climate change is a real problem, partly caused by human activities, but its importance has been grossly exaggerated. "It is far less important than other social problems such as poverty, infectious diseases, deforestation, extinction of species on land and in the sea, not to mention war, nuclear weapons and biological weapons." "We do not know whether the observed climate changes are on balance good or bad for the health of the biosphere. And the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a fertilizer of plant growth are at least as important as its effects on climate." John K Clark From scerir at libero.it Fri Apr 6 17:47:18 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 19:47:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> > > I tend to agree here. But I think the criminals > > engage in their behaviour also because it is > > determined by their 'will', and not just by > > their genes or by contextuality. Stathis Papaioannou > Isn't their will determined by their genes and > environment? What other factors could possibly > be at play? I do not think that genes and environment play a major role when people buy, or sell, (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple. But for sure genes and environment are important factors, in general. > Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, > perhaps the indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). > But at best, that means free will is *randomness*, > and why should we be any happier to believe that our > behaviour is random than that it is determined? Asher Peres wrote several pages (with calculations) about free will, especially in case of (possible) physical 'entanglements' between a subject and another subject. But he found that the 'will' was 'free' enough, in any possible condition. Note that the 'free will' of the observer is itself a precondition if one wants to prove Bell theorems. If you remove the essential assumption of 'free will' you can also explain the so called quantum nonlocality, via a sort of 'superdeterminism', as Bell called it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism s. "It has been argued that quantum mechanics is not locally causal and cannot be embedded in a locally causal theory. That conclusion depends on treating certain experimental parameters, typically the orientations of polarization filters, as free variables. But it might be that this apparent freedom is illusory. Perhaps experimental parameters and experimental results are both consequences, or partially so, of some common hidden mechanism. Then the apparent non-locality could be simulated." -John Bell, "Free Variables and Local Causality", 'Epistemological Letters', 15, (1977) From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 6 18:10:00 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 11:10:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <02e001c7707d$848e4e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 4/1/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > On 4/1/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > On 3/30/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > > > > > Did the number 0x0bd11a0bb188f291956549705169a996110841d4 exist? > > > > > > ### Yes! Always and forever, timeless, just as any element of the > > > platonic plenum. > > > > Rafal, I don't pretend to be able to dissuade anyone from any abstract > > belief, but along with infinite primes and infinite variations on > > infinities, do you also believe that "redness" "exists" in the > > "platonic plenum?" > > ### Yes, I can even see it sometimes. Thanks, your response contributes significantly to my understanding of your position. If I may ask another calibrating question: Do you have an opinion on the validity of subjective Bayesian probability? > There is a problem with believing in too few entities - if one insists > that entities not proven to exist should be assumed not to exist, then > one necessarily places himself at the conceptual center of the > universe. I agree with Einstein's statement that explanations should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. My POV is that *every* agent is necessarily at the "conceptual center" of their universe, and by recognizing this one forms a more accurate model of "the way things work", formerly known as "reality." Since understanding is essentially modeling, at various levels of abstraction, it seems obvious to me that a model gains nothing (and necessarily loses by misallocating its probability mass which must sum to unity) by positing entities for which there is no evidence. This is not the same as denying the possibility of other entities, (indeed, acknowledgment of the inherent incompleteness of any model implies the existence of entities outside the model) but only saying there is nothing to say about them, so for *all* practical purposes, they don't exist. Let's keep in mind though that all observation is necessarily indirect to some extent so it's not as if we're ruling out any of the fringe observations, highly indirect and nearly in the noise that must be included in our observational unity. > If I say that there is nothing beyond the most distant > object I can see, then my position is very special. We should distinguish between "saying there is nothing", and "there is nothing to say". -- Zen Jef If I were to say "there is nothing", that would imply a claim of additional information outside my model, and such a claim is clearly incoherent. I am left with "nothing to say." This seems to me the strongest possible argument for the necessity of the subjective point of view. The logical incoherence in your rendition of platonism may be more apparent if we point out that by positing the "existence" of unobservable entities, we must admit that there's nothing to distinguish between highly probable unobservable entities and highly improbable unobservable entities. Therefore, it seems to me, the "platonic plenum" amounts to a meaningless mush. > Since I don't think I am that special, I am forced to assume that > there are entities in existence (i.e. having at least one property) > that I have not observed, nor will ever be able to observe or think of > even in principle. This leads me to modal realism, and therefore, yes, > "redness" exists. To address your repeated point that you are not justified in thinking you are special, I certainly agree. You take this to mean that you are forced to reason from an approximation of an objective view. I take it to mean that any agent reasons from an expanding subjective view. The essential difference is that my view is ontologically simpler. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 6 19:58:26 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:58:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoassembly Blueprints using Atomic Resolution MRI In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:19 PM 4/5/2007 -0700, Samantha wrote: >On Apr 4, 2007, at 4:28 PM, Keith Henson wrote: snip >I have doubts about putting massive numbers of normal body form >human beings in space. The technology required to do so changes the >equations so much is becomes doubtful whether humans or something >distinctly not today's kind of human would colonize space. >Supporting a lot of bodies designed for earth conditions does not >seem optimal. It is certainly tremendously expensive. It could be >done employing telepresence and robotics to build a lot of the needed >infrastructure and with beanstalks or something much cheaper to get >out of the gravity well. But that implies building out technology >that may make homo saps irrelevant and seriously non-competitive in >space. You need to remember that this topic was *the* hot technical topic in the mid to late 70s. People such as Eric Drexler put a lot of effort into the design and economic studies. *Given* an industrial seed in space, the cost falls very rapidly. You can achieve some truly remarkable economic effects in space. The prime "figure of merit" for industrial machines in space is how rapidly they make their own mass in product. One of the papers Eric and I presented was for a solar powered metal boiler suitable for depositing thick metal on objects with dimension in the km range. Most of the mass was for the solar concentrator which in space is not very heavy. There were a lot of considerations in the design because the boiler was operating *really* hot and you had to deal with such things as re-depositing carbon which had evaporated off the solar absorber surfaces. But the analysis made the case that such a gadget could deposit its own mass in aluminum or iron in *8 hours*. (There was a lot more to the subject of making living area because of fracture mechanics. This is covered in the vapor phase fabrication paper.) snip >For that matter, why should you choose to keep a body configuration >that requires such primitive forms of energization as digestion and >elimination cycles? I don't know. The discussion of such questions rapidly drifts into the extended Fermi question. "Why don't we see the engineering works of advanced civilizations?" There are none in our light cone (that we have seen so far) which leaves the possibility that we are the only outpost of intelligent life. The alternative is that every one of the technophilic species that arises goes down some kind of rat hole and leaves no physical traces in the universe. I frankly don't know what to think, but I suspect a very short existence for an evolved creature who learns how to reach inside and tweek his pleasure knob. Minsky had a good deal to say about this in his previous book. snip > > There is good exciting and bad exciting. Unfortunately, the odds are > > stacked by the long evolutionary history of our species against the > > future being good. > >Yes. It could be argued that any evolved species is likely to have >evolved many counterproductive traits making its successful emergence >into and beyond technological singularity extremely unlikely. This >is probably part of the answer to "Where are the aliens?" They >didn't make it past this stage. If they didn't chances we will are very poor. But that wasn't what I was thinking about here. We live in an era where massive engineering works to extract energy and turn it into food have resulted in a population much larger than is sustainable on the current technological base. The "peak oil" pinch I think is very likely to set off wars since that is the evolved mechanism whereby human populations were reduced to the level the environment could feed them. > > But if you want to do something to improve the odds of a bright > > future, I > > have a number of suggestions. Even so, the most likely number for > > physical > > state humans 100 years from now is zero. > >I for one would love to hear some of the suggestions. Completely independent of global warming, the human race needs something to replace carbon fuels. I have my proposal, SEPS, space elevator/power satellites, which is subject to physical and economic analysis. I am not welded to this proposal, and am willing to look at any others. Propose, analyze, and try to get the word out. If there is a physically sound solution that can be implemented, work on getting people to understand it and support it. If people see a bleak future, xenophobic memes will dominate their thinking and lead to wars. We can have our heads in the uploading clouds and it won't help a bit when wars disrupt the economy so badly that we starve. Keith Henson From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 20:39:45 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:39:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> On 4/6/07, Jef Allbright wrote: If I may ask another calibrating question: Do you > have an opinion on the validity of subjective Bayesian probability? > ### Can you expand on the question? --------------------------------------- > My POV is that *every* agent is necessarily at the "conceptual center" > of their universe, and by recognizing this one forms a more accurate > model of "the way things work", formerly known as "reality." ### Is there any thing else than the "model"? -------------------------------- > > Since understanding is essentially modeling, at various levels of > abstraction, it seems obvious to me that a model gains nothing (and > necessarily loses by misallocating its probability mass which must sum > to unity) by positing entities for which there is no evidence. This > is not the same as denying the possibility of other entities, (indeed, > acknowledgment of the inherent incompleteness of any model implies the > existence of entities outside the model) but only saying there is > nothing to say about them, so for *all* practical purposes, they don't > exist. ### Do you think that there are stars that are too far from us to ever reach the Earth, given the expansion of the universe? If yes, what are their spectral characteristics? Are they the same as the characteristics of local stars? Different? In principle unknowable? If you really believe that your location is not special, then you have to ascribe the same spectral characteristics to stars in your vicinity and stars that are too far be seen, even in principle. And if they have spectral characteristics, they exist. You cannot say "there is nothing to say" about entities that are entailed by the existence of known entities. ----------------------------------- > > The logical incoherence in your rendition of platonism may be more > apparent if we point out that by positing the "existence" of > unobservable entities, we must admit that there's nothing to > distinguish between highly probable unobservable entities and highly > improbable unobservable entities. Therefore, it seems to me, the > "platonic plenum" amounts to a meaningless mush. ### Do you think the likelihood that unobservable stars have the same spectral characteristics as observable ones is identical to their likelihood of having any other arbitrary characteristics? Knowledge about the observable universe informs you about the unobservable parts as well. You can and should have an opinion about the probabilities of various unobservable entities (i.e. measures of the relative sizes of the parts of the plenum that make up these entities). I can suggest to you "The End of Time" by the theoretical physicist, Julian Barbour for a discussion of the plenum. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 20:40:56 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:40:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <20070406162455.GJ9439@leitl.org> References: <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> <20070406162455.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704061340p6d4b501bmf44af38ba3ee0e2e@mail.gmail.com> On 4/6/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > More seriously, when you track your external environment, you have > to do both the quantity and the quality part. Numbers are not at > all different from chickens, as far as neuron spike-counters are > concerned. ### But what about the existence of the referents of these spikes? Do they exist? Rafal From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 6 22:22:17 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 15:22:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/6/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 4/6/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > If I may ask another calibrating question: Do you > > have an opinion on the validity of subjective Bayesian probability? > > > ### Can you expand on the question? The philosophical foundation of Bayesian probability highlights the ultimate subjectivity of any observer (although embedded in a consistent, but only indirectly knowable reality.) That is the view I am promoting. I figured that it would provide another highly relevant data point to get your view on that topic. I thought there was also a chance that it might trigger in you a better understanding of my position, because it's clear to me that I'm not making myself clear to you. > > My POV is that *every* agent is necessarily at the "conceptual center" > > of their universe, and by recognizing this one forms a more accurate > > model of "the way things work", formerly known as "reality." > > ### Is there any thing else than the "model"? That depends very much on the context of your question, which isn't clear to me. In the view I am promoting here there is an agent, with a model of its "reality" and its interactions with that local reality. It seems that your view has much the same, with the ontological addition of a "platonic plenum" containing a hyperinfinite set of somehow "real" entities. > > Since understanding is essentially modeling, at various levels of > > abstraction, it seems obvious to me that a model gains nothing (and > > necessarily loses by misallocating its probability mass which must sum > > to unity) by positing entities for which there is no evidence. This > > is not the same as denying the possibility of other entities, (indeed, > > acknowledgment of the inherent incompleteness of any model implies the > > existence of entities outside the model) but only saying there is > > nothing to say about them, so for *all* practical purposes, they don't > > exist. > > ### Do you think that there are stars that are too far from us to ever > reach the Earth, given the expansion of the universe? If yes, what are > their spectral characteristics? Are they the same as the > characteristics of local stars? Different? In principle unknowable? I would certainly infer that there are stars beyond our observation, and (if Gordon gts wasn't watching) I would apply the Principle of Indifference and infer that their properties are distributed similar to the stars that we do observe. But this gives me absolutely zero new information about any of those hypothetical stars, and this is key. But it appears that you take this even further, and believe not only that those hypothetical stars exist, but their specific mathematical coordinates exist in some sense independent of any observer. If there were a row of boxes, and inside each box I found a ball, then (all else being equal) with increasing number of boxes I would develop increasing confidence that a subsequent box held a ball, but it could easily be empty. My inference doesn't provided any information about the actual existence of a ball in the next box. I would claim a high probability that there is a ball in the box, but I wouldn't be justified in claiming that there IS a ball in the box independent from some observation, no matter how indirect. > If you really believe that your location is not special, then you have > to ascribe the same spectral characteristics to stars in your vicinity > and stars that are too far be seen, even in principle. And if they > have spectral characteristics, they exist. As argued above. > You cannot say "there is nothing to say" about entities that are > entailed by the existence of known entities. Inductive inference does not entail entailment. Is this perhaps the crux of our disagreement? > > The logical incoherence in your rendition of platonism may be more > > apparent if we point out that by positing the "existence" of > > unobservable entities, we must admit that there's nothing to > > distinguish between highly probable unobservable entities and highly > > improbable unobservable entities. Therefore, it seems to me, the > > "platonic plenum" amounts to a meaningless mush. > > ### Do you think the likelihood that unobservable stars have the same > spectral characteristics as observable ones is identical to their > likelihood of having any other arbitrary characteristics? > > Knowledge about the observable universe informs you about the > unobservable parts as well. You can and should have an opinion about > the probabilities of various unobservable entities (i.e. measures of > the relative sizes of the parts of the plenum that make up these > entities). It appears that the crux of our disagreement is your implication that inference adds information. Did you ever review our earlier disagreement about Occam's Razor? It might be related. > I can suggest to you "The End of Time" by the theoretical physicist, > Julian Barbour for a discussion of the plenum. I read this several years ago, and a similar concept in _Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point_ by Huw Price a few years earlier. The "block universe" concept is intriguing, mainly because it aims to reduce the number of ontological entities by eliminating time, but I remember Huw Price in particular, explicitly backing away from what this might mean in subjective terms. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 6 22:19:04 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:19:04 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to make a brain transparent Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406181733.02c25c10@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Forwarded from an EP group. Keith How to make a brain transparent 16:26 02 April 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi The new ultramicroscopy technique images a whole mouse brain in 3D (Image: Hans-Ulrich Dodt et al./Nature Methods) The entire neural network of a mouse's brain has been seen in 3D for the first time, using a new technique that renders tissues transparent. The method - dubbed "ultramicroscopy" - has also enabled researchers to visualise the detailed anatomy of a mouse embryo in 3D. It will provide new insight into how organs such as the brain develop, the researchers say. Until now, it has been impossible to visualise entire neuronal networks in an intact brain - techniques such as computer tomography (CT scans) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) do not have the resolution to reveal detail at the cellular level. Slicing the brain for microscopic imaging is possible, but creating a 3D image from many slices is laborious and prone to distortion problems. Hans-Ulrich Dodt, now at Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and colleagues, have combined two old techniques to make a new tool that allows researchers to look at an entire brain on a microscopic level. Take a look at a selection of images and video clips of the process here. The new technique can also be used to image whole mouse embryos (Image: Hans-Ulrich Dodt et al./Nature Methods) Refractive index Using rodents genetically engineered to produce florescent molecules in their nerve cells, the team extracted whole mouse brains and submerged them in alcohol to flush the water out of the tissues. The dehydrated brains were then placed into an oil mixture containing the solvents benzyl-benzoate and benzyl-alcohol. Importantly, this medium has exactly the same light refractive index as protein - meaning that any light passing through the medium would continue to pass through the brain tissue at the same angle. Usually, when light enters a body tissue, it is scattered by the different refractive index of the tissue, in the same way that light is bent as it passes through water, making submerged items appear distorted. The medium effectively made the organ transparent, much like a drop of oil on a piece of paper can make light pass more easily through the page, Dodt explains. A whole mouse brain showing individual neurons fluorescing (Image: Hans Ulrich Dodt) Nerve connection The next step involved viewing cross-sections of the brain by shining a thin sheet of light through the organ. As this sliver of light about six micrometres thick passed through the brain, it caused all of the neurons in its path to fluoresce. A computer then integrated the images obtained from scanning the thin sheet of light across the brain to give a 3D picture of how the nerves connect (see the results pictured, lower right) Dodt claims the technique is a significant advance over previous methods to image the brain. Typically, approaches have involved physically cutting the brain into thin slices, and then staining the neurons in each slice. But the act of physically slicing the organ can distort the position of the nerves, he explains. By comparing the scans of mouse embryos with those of adult mice they hope to get a better view on how mammalian brain networks change during development. This could give new insight into how mammalian brains change over time and what happens to information networks as a result of disease. Journal reference: Nature Methods (DOI: 10.1038/nmeth1036) Source: NewScientist http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11518?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn11518 From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 01:51:21 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 18:51:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405151436.021e5860@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Friends, Today we had another hit with the THAAD missile system, the seventh consecutive success. Most remarkable is this, considering that when trying to hit a missile with another missile, there is so little target and so damn much sky. THAAD development is now three years ahead of schedule; likely deployment will be in 2009 instead of 2012. But I noticed another remarkable thing. The mainstream news agencies uttered not one word about it, and nary a syllable about the previous two hits in January or September. Think this over: to achieve kinetic kill represents an astounding technological achievement, control systems at the bleeding edge of technology, sensors at the limit of our ability, a supercomputer flying at four times the speed of sound on a mission to destroy a mass destroyer of life. Back in the 90s when we couldn't hit a barn with these things, the press couldn't get enough of the story, all the drooling rage it was. But now when we are smacking out of the sky everything that we aim at, they find it far less newsworthy than the latest shaven-headed movie harlot or the playboy bunny who managed to slay her self by devouring everything in the medicine chest. This is news. I was pondering this as I drove home, and suddenly noticed that everything around me is basically functional. I see utter competence everywhere. Anyone who wants a job can get one, even if not their dream career. Traffic is dense, but it moves along. We go weeks at a time between even seeing a traffic accident. We often go months between malfunctions of household appliances, years between being a victim of even a minor crime, decades between an untimely death of a close friend or family member due to anything other than natural causes. Things are working. They are working damn well, working early and often. Something is right. But we are afraid to congratulate ourselves. Why don't we all take some time to recognize all the things that are working right, such as the THAAD missile, the highway system, capitalism incorporated. Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? spike From max at maxmore.com Sat Apr 7 02:17:45 2007 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:17:45 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle. In-Reply-To: <00c801c77872$1339abe0$b3064e0c@MyComputer> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <00c801c77872$1339abe0$b3064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <200704070216.l372Gfv2029508@ms-smtp-04.texas.rr.com> A commentary I wrote yesterday on an article in Chief Executive. Global Greenspin http://www.manyworlds.com/exploreCO.aspx?coid=CO45071041574 Feeling chilly? Then gather round the fire and let me tell you a tale of global warming. And such a tale it is! It?s a tale of huge, evil corporations intent on fattening their purses as they destroy the world. It?s a tale of the messiah, the One called Gore, who comes to us with his message (Inconvenient but True) of redemption through carbon reduction. It?s a tale of the believers?the Kyotoists, the Ehrlichists, the catastrophists, the righteous hordes of apocalyptics, and their wicked enemies the ?environmental skeptics.? Or, is it actually tale of the latest pretext to expand the power of the government over the economy and the power of established commercial powers over potential upstarts? Or even a little of each? This commentator confesses considerable sympathy for J.P. Donlon?s concerns about the demands that we all kneel before a supposed ?undisputed scientific consensus? concerning global warming. In fact, at least two consensus views are being pushed on us?and pushed hard. One is that global warming is not only happening but is primarily anthropogenic. The second is that we must immediately institute a set of strong global controls on carbon dioxide production. As Donlon notes, the controversy is troubling in part because of the ?smug, moral transcendence of the climatologically correct.? The true believers have not only abandoned but actively oppose the Enlightenment championing of scientific vitality through skepticism and questioning. For those with short memories, Donlon reminds us similar pronouncement back in 1970s, except that then the great threat was global cooling. Even if we buy into the idea that global warming is real, significant, sustained, and largely human-caused, too many of us are being bludgeoned into accepting a set of solutions as following automatically. Donlon cites research by Bjorn Lomborg (whose work, including The Skeptical Environmentalist, is highly worth looking into) who asked UN ambassadors from 24 countries representing 54 percent of the world?s population this question: If you had an extra $50 billion to spend to improve the world what would your priorities be? ?Mitigating climate change came dead last on their list.? Similarly to Lomborg?s experts (as reported in depth in Global Crises, Global Solutions) the diplomats would prefer to spend limited funds on problems such as communicable diseases, sanitation, malnutrition, and education. Donlon goes on to raise questions about the most sensible response to global warming, even if we accept human use of fossil fuels is the main cause. Apparently it?s easy to buy into an existing proposal like the Kyoto agreement, but does it really make any sense? Not to most of the world. It may well make sense to advocates of greater government control, as well as to more private concerns: some see this issue as an excuse to shovel more subsidies and protectionist favors to industry such as ethanol and to companies such as GE, DuPont, Alcoa and BP which cleverly support cap and trade limits on carbon dioxide. If you follow the link above, you'll find links to other relevant items, including some highly practical suggested solutions. Max From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 7 02:42:55 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 04:42:55 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704061340p6d4b501bmf44af38ba3ee0e2e@mail.gmail.com> References: <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com> <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> <20070406162455.GJ9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704061340p6d4b501bmf44af38ba3ee0e2e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070407024255.GQ9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 04:40:56PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### But what about the existence of the referents of these spikes? Do > they exist? Yes, there was a system observing another system. If there were no systems, there would be no measurements, and no spikes. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 03:01:24 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 13:01:24 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, scerir wrote: I do not think that genes and environment > play a major role when people buy, or sell, > (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple. > No? What else could *possibly* be at play here? > Some people find a place for free will in indeterminacy, > > perhaps the indeterminacy in QM (or at least the CI of QM). > > But at best, that means free will is *randomness*, > > and why should we be any happier to believe that our > > behaviour is random than that it is determined? > > Asher Peres wrote several pages (with calculations) > about free will, especially in case of (possible) > physical 'entanglements' between a subject and > another subject. But he found that the 'will' was > 'free' enough, in any possible condition. > > Note that the 'free will' of the observer is itself > a precondition if one wants to prove Bell > theorems. If you remove the essential assumption > of 'free will' you can also explain the so called > quantum nonlocality, via a sort of 'superdeterminism', > as Bell called it. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism The "free" choices in Bell inequality type experiments are really random choices. Is there a difference between free will and randomness? My view of it is that the feeling that we are not constrained in making a choice is what we term "free will", and it doesn't feel any more or less free if the choice really is constrained or if it is random. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amara at kurzweilai.net Sat Apr 7 03:34:00 2007 From: amara at kurzweilai.net (Amara D. Angelica) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 23:34:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> I'm looking for information and leads for a research project. In switching from oil to solar, what are the economical tradeoffs between terrestrial and space solar power, based on cost per megawatt? What is the projected increase in cost-efficiency of batteries and other energy storage systems needed to provide power at night and deal with seasonal and weather variations? What is the cost-efficiency of geographically distributed vs. centralized power sources? http://www.permanent.com/p-sps-ec.htm is one good source, but is limited in technology forecasts, such as nanoengineered batteries. Looks like India is planning to invest heavily in space solar power. More on that later... From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 04:33:22 2007 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 21:33:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanogenerator Message-ID: Hmmmm. Acoustic-powered. Very Drexlerian. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/giot-npc040107.php Nanogenerator provides continuous power by harvesting energy from the environment For powering nanodevices Researchers have demonstrated a prototype nanometer-scale generator that produces continuous direct-current electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from such environmental sources as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration or blood flow. -- Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From scerir at libero.it Sat Apr 7 10:01:04 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:01:04 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede><000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> > > I do not think that genes and environment > > play a major role when people buy, or sell, > > (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple. Stathis: > No? What else could *possibly* be at play here? According to W.Buffett our goal as investors should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher 5, 10 and 20 years from now. It is secret the strategy of the funds directed by the well known mathematician J.Simons (Chern-Simons theory). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies_Corp http://stochastix.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/dr-james-simons-selected-as-the-2 006-iafesungard-financial-engineer-of-the-year/ Imo in both cases above genes and environment only play a little role. There is some room for 'free will' in finance. Sometimes it is called intuition. > The "free" choices in Bell inequality type experiments > are really random choices. Is there a difference between > free will and randomness? In any description, information is sacrificed through the coarse graining that yields decoherence between histories and gives rise to probabilities for histories. This coarse graining might be an important concept. I do not know if the essential 'randomness' (uncomputability) or the essential 'contextuality' http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079 are really relevant, regarding the problem of (human) 'free will'. > My view of it is that the feeling that we are not > constrained in making a choice is what we term "free will", > and it doesn't feel any more or less free if the > choice really is constrained or if it is random. Maybe. Rafal (?) pointed out a difference between the 'first person' and the 'third person' description of 'free will'. From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 7 10:09:25 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:09:25 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> Message-ID: <20070407100925.GU9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 11:34:00PM -0400, Amara D. Angelica wrote: > I'm looking for information and leads for a research project. In switching > from oil to solar, what are the economical tradeoffs between terrestrial and > space solar power, based on cost per megawatt? Launch costs need to go down for at least an order of magnitude in order for space solar to become cost competitive. > What is the projected increase in cost-efficiency of batteries and other > energy storage systems needed to provide power at night and deal with > seasonal and weather variations? There is no weather in space, and in a high enough orbit insolation is quantitative. Peak demand is during day, however. Batteries are actually already quite good on the efficiency part, but their longevity needs to be improved. > What is the cost-efficiency of geographically distributed vs. centralized > power sources? Electricity doesn't travel well. As far as I can see, PV isn't suitable as a centralized power source, with the possible exception of north-south transport (which can be hydrogen). > http://www.permanent.com/p-sps-ec.htm is one good source, but is limited in > technology forecasts, such as nanoengineered batteries. > > Looks like India is planning to invest heavily in space solar power. More on > that later... -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 13:15:15 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 08:15:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <20070407100925.GU9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> <20070407100925.GU9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> You might check NASA's Space Settlement Design Study (available on-line via Google or del.icio.us/jay.dugger) for descriptions of the space environment with respect to solar power satellites (SPS). The following thoughts also come to mind. Will photovoltaics degrade in-orbit and by what mechanism? Radiation? Corrosion? Impact? Do you assume SPS based on photovoltaics? Is that really a good model? What about using sunlight to heat a working fluid for a generator? More to follow, when I return from work. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From mfj.eav at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 13:17:59 2007 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 06:17:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Viva La Global Warming Message-ID: <61c8738e0704070617w7478a39ai90c2bd38b9974069@mail.gmail.com> I am from an area where the ethanol-bioproduct-oil vs bio scenario is going on this very moment. I hear that Gore is coming to a city Regina Sk on the 23 to do his presentation. 5000 Tickets are 75 for adults 20 for students with saskpower underwriting all other costs. Yes global warming may be happening. Yes it is a scam in that on one really understands the mechanisms to reliably manage weather long term on a global scale. However the diversion of sugar cane, corn and wheat to biofuels and the building of about 200 plants accross North America is good. Ethanol may be a political product but the same technology can produce a wide range of fuels , industrial chemicals and complex bioproducts will emerge to make the equation viable. Genetic modification of plants and algae to produce perhaps 10-100 times the biomass on current inputs is required to make the thermodynamic equation a winner. The capital investment will push such bioengineering advances. So some scams are simply required to push the lazy stupid risk averse molly coddled masses to get off their worthless asses into action to do noble things. As far as gore spending money and using energy... to get someone who might be another billionaire if let loose in the private sector to dedicate his life to relatively poorly paid public service you better cut him some slack. So am a firm supporter of global warming as it will force society to undertake global scale projects they would not otherwise have. One of the first singularity scale computational projects will be the development of a tightly managed global ecosystem. Ice in polar caps is worthless; release of polar Water and hydrocarbon carbon into a dynamic ecosystem creates wonderous new possibilities. "Viva La Global Warming" -- LIFESPAN PHARMA Inc. Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. 306-290-8734 Mission: To Preserve, Protect and Enhance Lifespan Plant-based Natural-health Bio-product Bio-pharmaceuticals http://www.angelfire.com/on4/extropian-lifespan http://www.4XtraLifespans.bravehost.com megao at sasktel.net, arla_j at hotmail.com, mfj.eav at gmail.com extropian.pharmer at gmail.com Extreme Life-Extension ..."The most dangerous idea on earth" -Leon Kass , Bioethics Advisor to George Herbert Walker Bush, June 2005 Extropian Smoke Signals Waft Softly but Carry a big Schtick ... Morris Johnson - June 2005* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 14:04:43 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 00:04:43 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, scerir wrote: > > I do not think that genes and environment > > > play a major role when people buy, or sell, > > > (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple. > > Stathis: > > No? What else could *possibly* be at play here? > > According to W.Buffett our goal as investors should > simply be to purchase, at a rational price, > a part interest in an easily understandable business > whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially > higher 5, 10 and 20 years from now. > > It is secret the strategy of the funds directed > by the well known mathematician J.Simons (Chern-Simons > theory). > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies_Corp > > http://stochastix.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/dr-james-simons-selected-as-the-2 > 006-iafesungard-financial-engineer-of-the-year/ > > Imo in both cases above genes and environment only play > a little role. There is some room for 'free will' in finance. > Sometimes it is called intuition. But investors are made of atoms, and when they make decisions, the atoms in their brains, muscles etc. move according to the laws of physics. It's not as if intuition can miraculously move an investor's hand independently of the normal causal chain and make him click "buy" rather than "sell". Of course, we will always be surprised by decisions that people make, but that's just because we can't rewind the tape and play it back with exactly the same starting parameters. I believe that the brain follows classical laws, but even if quantum indeterminacy had a role to play, it wouldn't add anything that we don't already have with the pseudorandomness provided by classical chaos. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 14:42:46 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 07:42:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Amara Angelica is looking for editorial assistant/researcher In-Reply-To: <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> Message-ID: <200704071450.l37EovJw024041@andromeda.ziaspace.com> -----Original Message----- From: Amara D. Angelica [mailto:amara at kurzweilai.net] Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 11:34 PM I'm looking for a freelance editorial assistant/researcher for KurzweilAI.net, with expertise in writing/editing, blogging, science/tech, video, Internet tech. Amara Angelica From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 14:40:51 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 07:40:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Subject: Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> Message-ID: <200704071451.l37EpoUJ000404@andromeda.ziaspace.com> -----Original Message----- From: Amara D. Angelica [mailto:amara at kurzweilai.net] Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 11:34 PM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power I'm looking for information and leads for a research project. In switching from oil to solar, what are the economical tradeoffs between terrestrial and space solar power, based on cost per megawatt? What is the projected increase in cost-efficiency of batteries and other energy storage systems needed to provide power at night and deal with seasonal and weather variations? What is the cost-efficiency of geographically distributed vs. centralized power sources? http://www.permanent.com/p-sps-ec.htm is one good source, but is limited in technology forecasts, such as nanoengineered batteries. Looks like India is planning to invest heavily in space solar power. More on that later... From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 14:52:03 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 07:52:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs.nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200704071500.l37F0odr013896@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jay Dugger ... > > Will photovoltaics degrade in-orbit... Yes, but the old fashioned gallium arsenide cells are remarkably durable. >... and by what mechanism? Radiation? Yes. Over time the output gradually decreases from impacts from high energy particles. Occasionally you get a cell shorted out from an extremely high energy cosmic ray that causes an SEGR or single event gate rupture. A particle whacks a cell hard enough to cause an ionized path across the NP region. > Corrosion?... Not exactly corrosion as we think of it down here, oxidation. Metals can migrate but I wouldn't call that corrosion. > Impact? If you meant micrometeoroid, there are so sparse they aren't a major factor. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 16:02:05 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 17:02:05 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs.nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <200704071500.l37F0odr013896@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> <200704071500.l37F0odr013896@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Jay Dugger > > > > Will photovoltaics degrade in-orbit... > > Yes, but the old fashioned gallium arsenide cells are remarkably durable. > > >... and by what mechanism? Radiation? > > Yes. Over time the output gradually decreases from impacts from high energy > particles. Occasionally you get a cell shorted out from an extremely high > energy cosmic ray that causes an SEGR or single event gate rupture. A > particle whacks a cell hard enough to cause an ionized path across the NP > region. > > > Corrosion?... > > Not exactly corrosion as we think of it down here, oxidation. Metals can > migrate but I wouldn't call that corrosion. > > > Impact? > > If you meant micrometeoroid, there are so sparse they aren't a major factor. > And solar cell technology is improving all the time. There is a lot of research in this field now as part of the move to more 'green' technology. But, of course, what works fine on earth may not be suitable for space. Source: Massey University Date: April 6, 2007 Solar cell technology developed by Massey University's Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells. BillK From asa at nada.kth.se Sat Apr 7 16:18:47 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 18:18:47 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <2265.163.1.72.81.1175962727.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: > Things are working. They are working damn well, > working early and often. Something is right. > > But we are afraid to congratulate ourselves. Why don't we all take some > time to recognize all the things that are working right, such as the THAAD > missile, the highway system, capitalism incorporated. > > Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? Definitely! Congrats to everybody who gets everything to work! Of course, there is plenty of stuff left to fix, be it political systems, climate change, software development or the British banking system, but that doesn't mean that indeed things are working. I think you have made an important observation. Friction, that we lose time, energy, materials, ideas or whatever due to inefficiencies or incompatibilities in our systems, seems to be decreasing quite nicely. I think that may be a much better measure of progress than looking at how much time, energy, FLOPS or whatever are produced. Maybe we should try to index it? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 7 16:59:29 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 18:59:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> <20070407100925.GU9439@leitl.org> <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070407165929.GZ9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 08:15:15AM -0500, Jay Dugger wrote: > Will photovoltaics degrade in-orbit and by what mechanism? Radiation? > Corrosion? Impact? It's a solved problem, lifetime would be counted in decades, and arguably the array could be constantly repaired by roving robots. > Do you assume SPS based on photovoltaics? Is that really a good model? > What about using sunlight to heat a working fluid for a generator? Bad idea. With PV you have high efficiency and potential separation in a semiconductor, which is one step removed from reradiating this towards a particular space segment, where your rectenna is. > More to follow, when I return from work. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 7 16:27:08 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 12:27:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "The problem is partly a matter of evolutionary psychology." In-Reply-To: <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Normally I would just post the link, but you can't get into this without a fair amount of trouble registering so here is it. It is interesting that some relatively young people just assume evolutionary psychology. Keith http://media.www.dailytargum.com/media/storage/paper168/news/2007/04/06/Opinions/This-Is.Our.Time-2826860.shtml The View from Nowhere Patrick McKnight / Columnist Issue date: 4/6/07 Section: Opinions Forty years ago when baby boomers were our age, they set out to change the world through the social movements of the 1960s. They rejected the antiquated values of their parents, as it became obvious they were no longer practical in a changing world. But now, at a time when we need similar social change more than ever, it is the baby boom generation in power who are stifling our progress. Whereas the boomers were born into an era of fear of nuclear holocaust, Generation Y faces distinctly different challenges, as it begins its ascendancy to political influence. With the advent of global warming, civilization-shaking catastrophe is no longer a matter of strategic chess, but of time. Furthermore, we will be the first generation to see the world run out of oil. Because of the short-term avarice of preceding generations, we are left picking up the pieces of a broken planet. At this point, it's hard to be optimistic about the chances that the boomers will turn things around. Many, apparently, bought into Bush's War in Iraq, though he had no evidence of an imminent threat to the United States. Older voters won him his re-election, though it was clear he was a self-serving liar. But when it comes to a real threat, like global warming - which is supported by mountains of scientific evidence - people suddenly want to wait and see. What's wrong with this picture? If America really cared about its young people more than its profits, it wouldn't be sending them to die in Iraq while downplaying global warming. The problem is partly a matter of evolutionary psychology. Humans have been slow to evolve a capacity for comprehending long-term threats because, back in the day, there were none. Man-made climate change is a process that began about 200 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. Our dependence on oil has a similar history. This timescale would have been incomprehensible to prehistoric man. Not only was life expectancy half of ours, but their threats were all immediate, such as finding food, water and shelter. One in the hand was worth two in the bush. That mentality worked fine for cavemen, but is pathetically inadequate in 2007. We can no longer allow trivial short-term goals like making money to take precedence over the long-term sustainability of our country. We are playing Russian roulette with the health and well-being of future generations. This is one issue that shouldn't be political. What we need now is not symbolic legislation, but a serious overhaul of our national priorities. Tradition can no longer be used as an excuse for cultural inertia. The reckless consumption that has traditionally driven the U.S. economy is no longer realistically tenable because of the havoc it wreaks on natural resources. The United States has just 5 percent of the global population, but accounts for about 25 percent of global consumption of natural resources. One child born in an industrialized country will consume and pollute more over his or her lifetime than 30 to 50 children born in developing countries. The United States produces, by far, the most carbon emissions and trash per capita. In fact, the United States accounts for 40 percent of all trash produced in the world. We're number one! These are not the hallmarks of a society that values its future. For those of you global warming skeptics out there, consider that this winter was the warmest on record and that the 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1995. Far from taking steps to correct this problem, the United States is on track to produce 19 percent more carbon emissions in 2020 than it did in 2000. Half of the world's population lives near the coast, but sea levels will rise up to three feet by the end of the century. We don't need to start hugging trees. We just need to do a simple cost-benefit analysis. If humans were really rational, then we wouldn't be shooting ourselves in the foot like this. Isn't it better to be safe than sorry when so much is at stake? We will also be the first generation to see the world reach peak oil production, potentially as early as 2015. Afterwards, production will peter out, leaving our oil-addicted economy strung out in a bad way. Just think of the jobs that could be created by converting our economy over from oil. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. As a result of a lack of long-term planning, our generation will pay the price for years of self-indulgent consumerism. Instead of encouraging consumption, we need to encourage reduction and reuse. We don't just need new, cleaner technologies. We need a new, responsible approach to resource management. But the critical first step is changing the focus of national discourse from celebrity gossip and petty politics to long-term policy initiatives. We can't wait a moment longer to tackle these life or death issues because they are affecting us already. Increasingly frequent and intense heat waves kill thousands each year, which extreme weather and air pollution does, as well. If anyone is going to help turn things around, it has to be Generation Y. This is our chance to be great. Protecting the viability of human life on this planet is our responsibility to our children, our species and our own selves. Camus said during the Cold War that "each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself." Today, the only way to prevent the world from destroying itself is to reform it. Our generation will change the world, not because we are hopelessly na've idealists. Just the opposite: As realists, we realize we have no other choice. Patrick McKnight is a Rutgers College senior, majoring in philosophy and sociology. His column "The View from Nowhere" runs on alternate Fridays. From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 7 17:20:22 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 19:20:22 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs.nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <200704071500.l37F0odr013896@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> <200704071500.l37F0odr013896@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20070407172022.GC9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 07:52:03AM -0700, spike wrote: > Yes, but the old fashioned gallium arsenide cells are remarkably durable. At current launch costs, the cells can be unobtainium. Very different from terrestrial applications. > Yes. Over time the output gradually decreases from impacts from high energy > particles. Occasionally you get a cell shorted out from an extremely high > energy cosmic ray that causes an SEGR or single event gate rupture. A > particle whacks a cell hard enough to cause an ionized path across the NP > region. You also get micrometeorite surface abrasion, and in lower orbit plasma glow in ram direction. > > Not exactly corrosion as we think of it down here, oxidation. Metals can In lower orbit, it can be oxidation. But there you'd get a lot of drag from a large array, so one would have to use electric or plasma thruster propulsion to counteract that. Slightly higher orbits are probably the way to go. > migrate but I wouldn't call that corrosion. > > > Impact? > > If you meant micrometeoroid, there are so sparse they aren't a major factor. Really? They're a considerable factor on Moon surface, I thought. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 17:36:57 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 13:36:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power In-Reply-To: <20070407165929.GZ9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> <20070407100925.GU9439@leitl.org> <5366105b0704070615g763b087cm5b16e9ddee9c0f1@mail.gmail.com> <20070407165929.GZ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > Do you assume SPS based on photovoltaics? Is that really a good model? > > What about using sunlight to heat a working fluid for a generator? > > Bad idea. With PV you have high efficiency and potential separation > in a semiconductor, which is one step removed from reradiating this > towards a particular space segment, where your rectenna is. This may be one of the few times that I disagree with Eugen. Even with quadruple layer cells (and boy are those going to be pricey unless you are producing many square km of them) you are probably only going to be able to get maybe 60-65% efficiencies. The problem is that you lose the UV energy and the far IR energy. The only way to recover those is something like a system of dielectric mirrors [1] and/or dichroic filters [2] which efficiently split the light so it can be directed at systems optimized for dealing with photons with specific energies. You have to remember that UV photons have enough energy to break atomic bonds and IR photons, especially far IR, can't do much more than make the atom vibrate a bit (you have to have a system for adding the energy of a number of IR photons to get something that can free up an electron). There may be a reasonable argument that "heat engines" are the best way to harvest the IR photons. But Eugen is right in that using such approaches to harvest the visible light photons is likely to be inefficient. Something to keep in mind is that the overall efficiency of "plants" is 2-4% (sugarcane in Brazil can approach 3-4%, corn in the U.S. is probably closer to 2% or less). Pricey satellite cells are in the 34-38% range, home solar is probably in 16-22% range and cheap low end solar (calculators?) is probably in the 6-8% range. Now of course you could argue that if you you are making sq. km of the cells on an industrial scale then harvesting the UV and IR photons isn't worth the excess effort. But if you look at the history solar energy it has been one of continually harvesting the available energy at increasing efficiencies. Though I haven't read it in detail, [3] would appear to be a good place for people unfamiliar with these topics to start. Robert 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_filter 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 17:48:49 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 13:48:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "The problem is partly a matter of evolutionary psychology." In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > Patrick McKnight is a Rutgers College senior, majoring in philosophy and > sociology. His column "The View from Nowhere" runs on alternate Fridays. It isn't worth my time to take apart the article on a piece by piece basis. It is nice that he is thinking in terms of "sustainability" but the basis for many of the claims has significant flaws. Most importantly I would not expect a major in philosophy and sociology to have a grasp of what engineering and technology could accomplish given sufficient economic incentives (be they "natural" or artificial). Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Sat Apr 7 17:32:39 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 13:32:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great global warming swindle) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704060845k796fa5b9le3ba0d8dd66db46d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >### The environmentalists I know are not really any >more efficient than me, although they frequently pay >lip service to it. They are really after a >diminished "ecological footprint" of humans, and >especially other humans. Mr Gore's ecological >footprint is huge (which I see as not bad, as long as >he is paying for it himself) but he demands from me >(and other Americans) to reduce my footprint, and he >is willing to use the force of the state to cut me >down to size. I see this as very bad. I saw Al Gore on Oprah a while back. I was aware that there was a global warming issue but I have to admit that his presentation made me wonder if the issue was as serious as he described. I'm sure that his message would not have been received if he hadn't been a prominent figure in politics. On one hand, he is preaching an essential issue making aware of a serious situation yet on the other hand, the fact that he is closely affiliated to politics, his reasons may be other than making the world a better place. >Whether his neighbor's mansion burns 3000$ or 10000$ >a month doesn't matter, as long as the neighbor is >not a crusading environmentalist(and pays his bills). I was trying to understand at what point does someone make a difference? How can it not matter that he may reduce his bill by $7000.00? I thought that would imply that compared to the next door neighbor, he was practising what he preached? ### Absolutely everybody can reduce their preaching until it fits exactly with what they already practice. Yes I agree. ### I prefer to reserve the word "hypocrite" to somebody falsely claiming to have certain moral beliefs with the aim of manipulating others for his ends. I guess that's the underlying question. Is Mr. Gore doing more good than bad? Although I am not naive enough to believe that his intentions are 100% honest and sincere and i'm sure along the way he will use it to his advantage yet at the same time, with the same means, he is making aware an important issue that may not have been widely spread. I not really sure what is better! At what point does manipulation play a role in benefiting others? Thank you for bringing up the subject, it has giving me things to think about. Anna:) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From natasha at natasha.cc Sun Apr 8 06:04:41 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 01:04:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Transhumanist Natasha Vita-More to speak at Summit" Montreal April 19-22 Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070408004740.0458b3b0@pop-server.austin.rr.com> As a follow up (and blatant display of my name in the subject line), since I sent info about the Montreal Summit on Reviewing the Future, more information has hit the press and I am being featured as "Transhumanist" along with several speakers such as Bill Seaman of the Rhode Island School of Design and Pierre L?vy, philosopher. Since much of the writings of the summit speakers and audience are based heavily in the ethics of the technology/sience/future of human and the practices that may affect the future of humanity, I am very excited to be at this conference, giving a talk and chairing one of the sessions. It will be a really great opportunity to stand up to many naysayers of transhumanism whose books are full of insightful, cutting edge ideas but perpetually ignore transhumans and research into transhumanism. My talk is "Brave BioArt 2: shedding the bio, amassing the nano, and cultivating emortal life." I hope to see some of you there. Natasha "The 'Reviewing the Future: Vision, Innovation, Emergence' Summit will be held in Montreal from April 19 to 22, 2007, on the premises of University of Quebec in Montreal?s Coeur des Sciences. Among the speakers are many internationally recognized artists, thinkers and researchers, such as Roy Ascott, founder of the Planetary Collegium, transdisciplinary artist Victoria Vesna http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/projects/current.php, astrophysicist Roger Malina, nanotechnologist James Gimzewski, philosopher Pierre L?vy, culture theoretician Derrick de Kerckhove, media artist and theoretician Bill Seaman http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseam and many others, including me (Natasha). "[T]he summit will allow 65 presenters from fifteen countries to share the results of their latest works and researches with their guests, and with the Quebec media arts and technologies community. The Summit will be an occasion for members of the different nodes of the Collegium (Plymouth, Beijing, Milan and Zurich, which will soon be joined by Seoul and Sao Paulo), along with several members pursuing their research on an individual basis as part of this international network, to get together. Many of these are amongst the best known artist/researchers of their fields. "Through mostly transdisciplinary research, calling upon artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers, educators and communications specialists, the Collegium is contributing to the production of new knowledge in the field of media arts and to the transfer of this knowledge to other fields. Computer science, communications, research on consciousness, biotechnologies, cognitive sciences, hypermedia, variable environments, robotics are but a few of the disciplines whose development feeds and informs the Collegium research in all artistic disciplines : performance, dance, architecture, new narrative forms, music, installations, design, performing arts and the arts of the screen. Although the Summit is first and foremost an occasion to come in contact with unique approaches, which cannot be classified into traditional fields and are at the cutting edge of contemporary practice, several presentations will discuss the theoretical, cultural, social, educational, museological and environmental stakes of these practices." For further information and registration: http://summit.planetary-collegium.net. Information can be found at http://www.transhumanist.biz/ Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 7 17:33:07 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:33:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com> <20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:22:17 -0400, Jef Allbright wrote: > I would certainly infer that there are stars beyond our observation, > and (if Gordon gts wasn't watching)... heh. :) > ... I would apply the Principle of > Indifference and infer that their properties are distributed similar > to the stars that we do observe. No need here for the Principle of Indifference. The principle is useful only in those rare cases in which one has zero prior information, as when one is in a state of total ignorance about the nature and properties of stars. Obviously that is not the case here. In your inference above, you're extrapolating from the known to the unknown based on empirical data. If the purpose of your inference is to set a bayesian prior then you are proceeding as would an empirical bayesian. -gts From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 7 18:15:46 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 11:15:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great global warming swindle) In-Reply-To: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <7641ddc60704060845k796fa5b9le3ba0d8dd66db46d@mail.gmail.com> <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, Anna Taylor wrote: > I not really sure what is better! At what point does > manipulation play a role in benefiting others? This is a very profound question, and with regard to the answer I think the form is simple but the implementation is open-endedly complex. Sorry I don't have the available resources to contribute further at this moment, but I think this question is so fundamentally important in terms of complex social decision-making that it deserves highlighting and (at least the hope of) some constructive discussion. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 7 17:49:25 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:49:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407134916.02c348b0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:34 PM 4/6/2007 -0400, you wrote: >I'm looking for information and leads for a research project. In switching >from oil to solar, what are the economical tradeoffs between terrestrial and >space solar power, based on cost per megawatt? If it costs the same to put a solar cell in space as it does on the ground, the advantage of putting it in space ranges from about 4 to over 20 depending on location (mostly the effect of clouds on top of night). BTW, making liquid fuels from electricity ranges from moderately expensive up. You can pull carbon out of the air to make hydrocarbons, or you can make ammonia as a way to carry hydrogen. >What is the projected increase in cost-efficiency of batteries and other >energy storage systems needed to provide power at night and deal with >seasonal and weather variations? High, extremely high and very high. >What is the cost-efficiency of geographically distributed vs. centralized >power sources? Less for transmission lines, but we already have an awful lot of transmission lines in place >http://www.permanent.com/p-sps-ec.htm is one good source, but is limited in >technology forecasts, such as nanoengineered batteries. > >Looks like India is planning to invest heavily in space solar power. More on >that later... That's really interesting. Pointers please? Keith From sentience at pobox.com Sat Apr 7 18:35:39 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 11:35:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "The problem is partly a matter of evolutionary psychology." In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <4617E47B.2070503@pobox.com> Keith Henson wrote: > Normally I would just post the link, but you can't get into this without a > fair amount of trouble registering so here is it. It is interesting that > some relatively young people just assume evolutionary psychology. According to the legend, anything you learn about before age 18 is just part of the background. I was 16, if I recall correctly. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 7 18:36:08 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 11:36:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/7/07, gts wrote: > On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:22:17 -0400, Jef Allbright > wrote: > > > I would certainly infer that there are stars beyond our observation, > > and (if Gordon gts wasn't watching)... > > heh. :) > > > ... I would apply the Principle of > > Indifference and infer that their properties are distributed similar > > to the stars that we do observe. > > No need here for the Principle of Indifference. The principle is useful > only in those rare cases in which one has zero prior information, as when > one is in a state of total ignorance about the nature and properties of > stars. Obviously that is not the case here. Hi Gordon. I'm glad to see you're still around, but sorry I can't justify another go-around on this topic. I'm already in time-debt due to too much posting this week. I will offer only this, and let you have the last word if you care to take it: Information is not what you know, but what is surprising. - Jef From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 7 19:32:59 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:32:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Improvements to Newcomb's Paradox References: <009c01c777f2$798f8bb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <016301c7794c$1f70ccb0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > [Lee wrote] > > Newcomb's Paradox has only one admissable subject > > behavior: take just the one box. > > > > An evolutionary proof of this is as follows: suppose that > > box A either does or does not contain dinner, and box > > B always contains dessert. One may live on a steady > > diet of box A, but one gradually dies of nutritional > > deficiencies by selecting only box B. > > ... > > Go ahead if you want and discard the notion of free will, > > but are you going to also discard the notion of a machine > > (e.g. you) being able to make a decision? I have not > > heard any of the anti-compatiblists answer this question. > This is an interesting take on Newcomb's Paradox. The one-boxers > will ultimately prevail, and therefore one-boxing will become the > accepted way of life. But doesn't this just show that a belief in free > will has been cultivated by the Alien's experiment It could just as well be argued that the Alien's experiment cultivates *disbelief* in free will. After all, from the audience's point of view (and of course, the Alien's), what the subject does is understood beforehand, and his ability to truly make decisions suspect. My thoughts on "free will vs. determinism" are still in a state of flux, thanks to the discussions here, but it may emerge that I embrace the idea that it's mainly a POV problem. Lee > while, at the same time, even the variability in choice you would > expect from a wild population is being expunged? Truth is not a > matter of utility. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 7 19:44:29 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:44:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change Message-ID: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Regarding future enhancements, I consider the dangers of identity loss to be a R E A L P R O B L E M To illustrate, let me provide a quickie story. Vastly superior aliens come to Earth (and to other planets) on a mission to relieve the suffering and backwardness of the local denizens. They say "Oh, uploading is easy. In fact, it's so easy we call it 'downloading'." One of them holds up a tiny device and continues his sales pitch: "Each of you can---just to get you started--- immediately download into one of these chips. Your immediate benefits include 1. Vastly, vastly increased intelligence 2. Cessation of all mundane worries, pains, and inconveniences 3. Subscription to the galactic newfeeds, both conscious and unconscious 4. Unlimited communication with all the others who've downloaded, even up to mind-melding, though we don't recommend this until you've become a bit settled" "The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem about identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 and you know everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms that you used to be, you no longer resemble the same person that you used to be at all, any more than you currently resemble the fetus that you were eight months before birth. "Now then. Who wants to go first?" Unless I had guarantees that there'd be storage enough and the ability to run lots of old-fashioned Lees in parallel to all the Lee-Pluses, I'd decline. The reason that I would decline is that I don't believe in souls, and so cannot see---on scientific grounds---why the new little device that I was supposedly downloaded into would resemble me (or be me) at all. To make the point stronger, suppose that of all the people we know, half download and half do not. From our point of view, just exactly what is the difference between "they downloaded" and "they died"? Say Spike downloads, and Anders does not. Then we simply do not have Spike around any more, and I contend that he no longer exists, i.e., that he died: Clearly a scientific examination of every cubic centimeter of our solar system would fail to uncover any evidence of the existence of our dearly departed. Because, any dismal "records" of their former mundane existence now residing all those tiny chips, would not be affecting their thinking or their behavior, their mighty IQs and vast knowledge having made such "records" totally unuseful. I issue this caution: what gaineth a transhuman if he becometh someone else? Beware any change at all, and allow only those that don't change you very much. If you want to keep on living, that is. Lee From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sat Apr 7 19:17:49 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 12:17:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right References: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <2265.163.1.72.81.1175962727.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4617EE5D.5080505@thomasoliver.net> Anders Sandberg wrote: >spike wrote: > > >>Things are working. They are working damn well, >>working early and often. Something is right. >> >>But we are afraid to congratulate ourselves. Why don't we all take some >>time to recognize all the things that are working right, such as the THAAD >>missile, the highway system, capitalism incorporated. >> >>Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? >> >> > >Definitely! Congrats to everybody who gets everything to work! > >Of course, there is plenty of stuff left to fix, be it political systems, >climate change, software development or the British banking system, but >that doesn't mean that indeed things are working. > >I think you have made an important observation. Friction, that we lose >time, energy, materials, ideas or whatever due to inefficiencies or >incompatibilities in our systems, seems to be decreasing quite nicely. I >think that may be a much better measure of progress than looking at how >much time, energy, FLOPS or whatever are produced. Maybe we should try to >index it? > The axle grease index? Spike, you have a great attitude! Appreciation fuels progress. Kudos to all the advanced grease monkeys on this list! -- Thomas From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 19:48:29 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 12:48:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <2265.163.1.72.81.1175962727.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <200704072001.l37K1I0s025548@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 9:19 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right > > > spike wrote: > > Things are working. ... > > Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? > > Definitely! Congrats to everybody who gets everything to work! Thanks Anders. Coming from you, it means much. > > ... that may be a much better measure of progress than looking at how > much time, energy, FLOPS or whatever are produced. Maybe we should try to > index it? > > -- > Anders Sandberg, Ja, we have some indices, but I am not sure their actual value. Example, the number of FLOPS produced by my own favorite idle-CPU background project GIMPS. We were going exponential for several years, then it leveled out a couple years ago at about 70,000 machines and gradual linear increase now around 20 Teraflops. Taking into account the proportion of multi-machine contributors, we can now estimate the total number of this particular type of math geeks on the planet: around 50,000. Considering the total human population, that makes us rarer than one in a million. I never would have guessed we were so few. Are there any internet groksters here interested in setting up a page to collect trends in accordance with Anders' idea? We can call them Anders Indices. We could take contributions of whatever indices folks think are relevant, GIMPS output, crime stats, GDP over time, personal wellbeing stats of various kinds. With a sufficient number of Anders Indices we might have a page with a number of trends showing that something is definitely right. spike From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sat Apr 7 20:26:33 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:26:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <8d71341e0703251946t2e8e40dfv2216849ad0cea509@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com> <20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060857o77d6c446x6dd7fab9cdf3e327@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704061339q65bbe4d5nb41abc3f499a9df8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4617FE79.2080408@thomasoliver.net> Jef Allbright wrote: > Information is not what >you know, but what is surprising. > >- Jef > Ah! I got so disgusted with the Urantia Book. I had heard it came from space aliens so I thought it would surely reflect a completely new point of view. Instead it read quite a bit like the Bible. Yeesh! No information. -- Thomas From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 20:55:45 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 13:55:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great globalwarming swindle) In-Reply-To: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <200704072053.l37KrjQ7016508@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anna Taylor ... > > >Whether his neighbor's mansion burns 3000$ or 10000$ > >a month doesn't matter, as long as the neighbor is > >not a crusading environmentalist(and pays his bills). > > I was trying to understand at what point does someone > make a difference? How can it not matter that he may > reduce his bill by $7000.00? I thought that would > imply that compared to the next door neighbor, he was > practising what he preached? > > ### Absolutely everybody can reduce their preaching > until it fits exactly with what they already practice. ... Instead of flapping around and making inconvenient movies, Algore could simply make the capital improvements on his house necessary to lower his electric bill and make his existence carbon neutral. Then supply us with the detailed cost sheet to make that happen. In the final analysis, everything is dollars and cents. Algore and others make a fundamental error assuming governments should control our carbon footprint. Governments do not control that, markets do. If governments try too hard to influence markets (and in so doing depress the economy) they get thrown out of office, as they should. Give us hard numbers so that we can make market-based decisions. spike From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sat Apr 7 20:17:26 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:17:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great global warming swindle) References: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4617FC56.3030801@thomasoliver.net> Anna Taylor wrote: >[...] ### I prefer to reserve the word "hypocrite" to >somebody falsely claiming to have certain moral >beliefs with the aim of manipulating others for his >ends. > >I guess that's the underlying question. Is Mr. Gore >doing more good than bad? Although I am not naive >enough to believe that his intentions are 100% honest >and sincere and i'm sure along the way he will use it >to his advantage yet at the same time, with the same >means, he is making aware an important issue that may >not have been widely spread. > >I not really sure what is better! At what point does >manipulation play a role in benefiting others? Thank >you for bringing up the subject, it has giving me >things to think about. > >Anna:) > Manipulation disrespects the will of others and would not look beneficial to these others. So, I think it reduces the "general gratification" index. Acting to affirm the will of all (or as many as possible) affords a more direct approach and increases wealth. I look for leaders who respect and protect individual choice. Acting according to the self determinism of all creates unity and efficiency and avoids compulsion and violence. I admit a tax funded system doesn't foster such skills, but we can look for such leaders in areas where people earn their way trading positive values with voluntary buyers. -- Thomas From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 21:16:37 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 14:16:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704072114.l37LEeTK017532@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin ... > > Say Spike downloads, and Anders does not. Then we simply > do not have Spike around any more, and I contend that he no > longer exists, i.e., that he died... Old transhumanists never die, they just download. Hey cool, if you guys ever need to have a virtual online funeral for me, just assume I downloaded. And I am watching you from the ether. Have we ever had a virtual online funeral? Why didn't we think of that when we lost Sasha and FM2030? ... > > I issue this caution: what gaineth a transhuman if he becometh > someone else? ... > > Lee Unless I can becometh Anders or Damien or Amara, that might be cool. Their brains, my attitudes. What a combination that would be. {8^D spike From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sat Apr 7 21:12:09 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:12:09 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> Lee Corbin wrote: > Regarding future enhancements, I consider the dangers of identity > loss to be a > > R E A L P R O B L E M > > The reason that I would decline is that I don't believe in > souls, and so cannot see---on scientific grounds---why the new little > device that I was supposedly downloaded into would resemble me > (or be me) at all Surely this will not be a problem at all. There are two critical parts of identity, both of which you mention, that would surely be preserved by any aliens making us quickly into Gods. First off is the history of what you were. Surely part of making us Gods, would be the restoration of everything we have ever bin, including restoration of everything we have ever forgotten. So all of us, at any point in our history, would be perfectly remembered or even reloaded, spawned off, and played with by all at will. (i.e. I wonder what life had been like for me had I married Carolyn instead of Malia...) And even if the Gods didn't restore this for us, that would be the first task I would want to get started on with all that infinite knowledge and power right? The second has to do with what you called a "soul". Loaded words like this make discussing this kind of stuff difficult. I prefer to call this a "spirit". But what I mean by spirit is very different than what most people consider a "spirit" to be. First off, what I believe to be our spirit is dependent on our brain. When the brain stops, or goes to sleep, this spirit no longer exists (until the right stuff is put back together and it is spiritually or consciously activated again.) This spirit is constructed of "phenomenal properties" or "qualia", like all of our conscious knowledge. For example the phenomenal property of red represents 700 nm light. The funny thing about our spirit, which is our knowledge of ourselves or the I that we think is looking out of our phenomenal knowledge of our eyes, unlike red, and our knowledge of our eyes, has no real "referent" that it represents. Our knowledge of our eyes and skull, in our brain, do have referents that our senses detect. Our knowledge of our real skull and our real eyes is very different, and located in a very different place than the thing they represent. One is the initial cause of the perception process, and the other is the final result or our phenomenal conscious knowledge of it. We sometimes think our knowledge of this, in our brain, as not real, but it most definitely is, and even more important is its phenomenal or spiritual nature. And just because this knowledge of ourselves, or our "I" or our spirit, is just knowledge itself, looking out of our knowledge of our eyes, and not knowledge that represents something else, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. All of our conscious knowledge is composed of this very real "spiritual" if you will phenomenal stuff. Without all this spiritual stuff there can be no "virtual reality" right? I'm betting science will soon discover these phenomenal or spiritual if you will properties of nature that our neurons use to represent knowledge in a conscious way; That this will be the greatest scientific achievement by far to date. And that this achievement will finally free our "spirits" from the spirit prison walls that are our skulls that makes our spiritual knowledge of the spiritual qualities of nature and other "minds" ineffable. I've described in some detail what uploading could be like, if this theory is true, in my story "1229 Years After Titanic" available here: http://home.comcast.net/~brent.allsop. In this story I describe how your spirit, or your phenomenal knowledge of yourself will be able to tentatively step out of your knowledge of your body (as in an out of body experience) and "try out" other phenomenally conscious substrates joined (temporarily if you like) with the "spirit world" of your conscious knowledge in your brain. Because of this no one will have any of the fears everyone talks about when we get uploaded and we destroy our old self - because our phenomenal spirit will very literally and consciously no longer be in that old self, and will have finally escaped from that skull that was our spiritual ineffable prison. Anyway, I'm willing to bet anyone that this theory will be commonly accepted as fact in 10 or so years when we scientifically discover these phenomenal properties of nature and start effing and playing with it all, and finally break free of these spiritual prison walls that are our skull. If you're out there, Gods, I tell you know. Stop hiding from us and I want all this now or as fast as is possible! I'm sick and tired of being trapped in this lonely ineffable spirit prison. Brent Allsop From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Apr 7 22:27:52 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 23:27:52 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070405151436.021e5860@satx.rr.com> <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704071527j3965e4f0webdf2b4239a7537f@mail.gmail.com> On 4/7/07, spike wrote: > > But we are afraid to congratulate ourselves. Why don't we all take some > time to recognize all the things that are working right, such as the THAAD > missile, the highway system, capitalism incorporated. > > Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? > Agreed, and well put! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 7 22:31:20 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 15:31:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <7641ddc60703271304s26c22025p6ac9e2484bcfcf79@mail.gmail.com><20070327203801.GA1512@leitl.org><7641ddc60703290707h6ba15c37q82bff4192c32a17f@mail.gmail.com><20070330194438.GR1512@leitl.org><7641ddc60704011209w4fc50028nf599e41f3b1be491@mail.gmail.com><20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org><7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com><20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <7641ddc60704060913p38131d30we9d384da29e66843@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <01ad01c77964$af273020$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Rafal writes > All of these cortices need to use continuous, highly structured data > streams for their development. The data is generated by sense organs > and various subcortical structures, and are eventually traceable to > objects and processes in the external world. There are referents to > "chickens". There are referents to "numbers". The referents exist > independently of the cortices that form the concepts related to them. > > In what way are the referents of the concept "chicken" existentially > different from the referents of the concept "17"? 17 is a concept much more manifest in the universe than are chickens. (David Deutsch in his "Fabric of Reality" convincingly argues that real bears (as in ursine) are present to a greater degree in the multiverse than are Great Bears (as in constellations). The reason is that the former is an attractor among evolutionary species, whereas the latter arises only from the strictly random configurations of stars as seen from, say, planets with observers like, say, us. This is directly connected to 17 having less KC (Kolmogorov Complexity) than do chickens. I consider myself to be a mathematical platonist because all of mathematics is so manifest in our universe, and consider myself not to be a plain "Platonist" because chairs, chickens, and the number 13768699846355858630- 01717769722972562433720395628643218679801536774402 are less manifest (and have lower KC). It's all a matter of degree. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 7 22:38:32 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 15:38:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede><000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <01be01c77966$1615c8e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > On 4/7/07, scerir wrote: > > I do not think that genes and environment > > play a major role when people buy, or sell, > > (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple. > No? What else could *possibly* be at play here? Well, after Serafino has pointed it out that there is a question here, I can't understand why I didn't see it before. Certainly in discussions of rationality we have recognized the importance of Memes! Oh, sure, we could think of memes as being just a part of the environment, and perhaps in the particular discussion that you (Stathis) are having, I could understand that. But normally when we weigh genes and environment, or nature and nurture, we are trying to account for what made us the way we are. Now whether the original influences were mostly genetic (which I think is right) or environmental, the *current* determinants of our thinking are largely memetic. In other words, whatever your current configuration today, tomorrow you will be being strongly run by the latest viral memeplex fallen under the sway of. Lee From jcowan5 at sympatico.ca Sat Apr 7 23:36:20 2007 From: jcowan5 at sympatico.ca (Josh Cowan) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 19:36:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200704070149.l371nMFi006899@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <6b937cdaeed64fe1a654ab82e79387a8@sympatico.ca> Hi Spike, For what it's worth, this morning CBC Radio One ran a fifteen second blip on the THAAD success, though they said it was only the second success in a row. Cheers, Josh On Apr 6, 2007, at 9:51 PM, spike wrote: > Friends, > > Today we had another hit with the THAAD missile system, the seventh > consecutive success. Most remarkable is this, considering that when > trying > to hit a missile with another missile, there is so little target and > so damn > much sky. THAAD development is now three years ahead of schedule; > likely > deployment will be in 2009 instead of 2012. > > But I noticed another remarkable thing. The mainstream news agencies > uttered not one word about it, and nary a syllable about the previous > two > hits in January or September. Think this over: to achieve kinetic kill > represents an astounding technological achievement, control systems at > the > bleeding edge of technology, sensors at the limit of our ability, a > supercomputer flying at four times the speed of sound on a mission to > destroy a mass destroyer of life. > > Back in the 90s when we couldn't hit a barn with these things, the > press > couldn't get enough of the story, all the drooling rage it was. But > now > when we are smacking out of the sky everything that we aim at, they > find it > far less newsworthy than the latest shaven-headed movie harlot or the > playboy bunny who managed to slay her self by devouring everything in > the > medicine chest. This is news. > > I was pondering this as I drove home, and suddenly noticed that > everything > around me is basically functional. I see utter competence everywhere. > Anyone who wants a job can get one, even if not their dream career. > Traffic > is dense, but it moves along. We go weeks at a time between even > seeing a > traffic accident. We often go months between malfunctions of household > appliances, years between being a victim of even a minor crime, decades > between an untimely death of a close friend or family member due to > anything > other than natural causes. Things are working. They are working damn > well, > working early and often. Something is right. > > But we are afraid to congratulate ourselves. Why don't we all take > some > time to recognize all the things that are working right, such as the > THAAD > missile, the highway system, capitalism incorporated. > > Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we? > > spike > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sat Apr 7 23:49:26 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:49:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <46182E06.2090000@thomasoliver.net> Lee Corbin wrote: >Regarding future enhancements, [and] the dangers of identity >loss [...] > >I issue this caution: what gaineth a transhuman if he becometh >someone else? Beware any change at all, and allow only those >that don't change you very much. If you want to keep on living, >that is. > >Lee > I have felt similar misgivings about a heavenly afterlife. My identity would need considerable purging for me to fit in. Reincarnation violates basic logic's law of identity. How could I have a past (or future) life as someone other than me? Yet, surprisingly, I have a recalled a couple "memories" of past lives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation Uploading with knowledge/memory enhancement would skew me Borgishly. With who's knowledge/memory would I blend? How could you still call that me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_%28Star_Trek%29 Lee, your warning has scared me into investigating identity/consciousness. Ack! More reading for my tired eyes. If your identity turns out to consist of a process -- then it couldn't continue without change. Keeping your identity would involve keep the changes going. You've already changed from barely-self-aware-Lee to extropian-Lee. Would the upshift to "trans-Lee" work better if it included an implanted memory of years of gradual changes? I suspect that identity might consist a good deal in what the subject considers his or her or its identity So if you identify with your body, best not drop it if you don't want to feel dead. Last month Sondre Bjell?s told us how she identified with her family and friends so much that she felt their length of life might determine her length of life. What if I identified with all humans? -- Thomas From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 01:56:16 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 18:56:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <20070401204100.GK9439@leitl.org><7641ddc60704031209n31896412i8ed5af2ec837d780@mail.gmail.com><20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org><20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <01e401c77981$6213df00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > Eugen argues that you can't simulate a brain by hand; > Frank Tipler in "The Physics of Immortality" calculates > that the energy requirements alone would forbid such > a thing, at least in real time. But, as I think you see, > that misses the point of the argument. Yes. To me these dismissals have the air of protests given to Bruno's ideas in 1600 that the stars are really just suns, only very very far away. A critic could have said, "such distances simply would have no practical consequences in our lives, even if they were conceivable, which they are not". And his conjecture that there are infinitely many stars would likewise have been dismissed on the *exact* same grounds that some people want to dredge up to dispatch our extremely theoretical notions of what could constitute a calculation. > Extreme difficulty despite purposeful effort is a different > situation to extreme improbability given random processes. > An example of the latter would be a Turing-equivalent > machine implementing my brain being realised by cosmic > dust clouds. You're often very good about giving proper lip service even to theories you disagree with, but I cannot help reminding readers that dust clouds are static arrangements of particles, no dust cloud being causally related to any other, and no information flow between them being performed in real time. > It's far from clear that this could never happen (what if the > universe is very large, or long-lived? what if there are multiple > universes? what about the fact that there are multiple different > abstract machines implementing a particular computation, > each multiply realisable?), but even if it could be shown > that it was as close to impossible as doesn't matter, that > doesn't invalidate it as a thought experiment which says > interesting things about functionalism and personal identity. I agree, except for the proviso that I insist on causality in order for a process to be said to be a computation. Note that my statement is much stronger than it would have been five years ago; many people who are giving up on string theory are turning to causal-based theories, in which causality is viewed as fundamental or axiomatic. (Smolin's recent book aludes to several of these.) Lee From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 8 01:17:03 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:17:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs. nanoengineered space solar power Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407211556.02c1e528@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:59 PM 4/7/2007 +0200, you wrote: >On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 08:15:15AM -0500, Jay Dugger wrote: > > > Will photovoltaics degrade in-orbit and by what mechanism? Radiation? > > Corrosion? Impact? > >It's a solved problem, lifetime would be counted in decades, and >arguably the array could be constantly repaired by roving robots. It is a problem that will take some thinking about. > > Do you assume SPS based on photovoltaics? Is that really a good model? > > What about using sunlight to heat a working fluid for a generator? > >Bad idea. With PV you have high efficiency and potential separation >in a semiconductor, Many of the early power sat designs, particularly the ones from Boeing, used heat engines, thermionic was another option. If you bring extraterrestrial resources into the picture where mass isn't such a problem, I think heat engines may be the way to go. They have the advantage that the high voltage sections can be kept small enough to insulate them in pipes, something you can't do for 100 square km of pv cells. The problem with heat engines is dumping the waste heat. Boeing designs had the radiators working at yellow heat to keep the mass down. But if you can afford the mass, Drexler and I figured out how to build radiators up to rejecting the waste heat at near room temperature. (Yeah they are *big*.) >which is one step removed from reradiating this >towards a particular space segment, where your rectenna is. There is a geometry problem in that the transmitting antenna needs to be pointed toward the earth while the power creating part needs to point at the sun. This makes for a bunch of problems like multi Gw slip rings. Keith > > More to follow, when I return from work. > >-- >Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org >______________________________________________________________ >ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org >8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 02:17:05 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 19:17:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> Message-ID: <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Brent writes >> The reason that I would decline [downloading, i.e., as I define it a >> paltry form of uploading in which one *immediately* assumes an >> unrecognizablely advanced form that has almost nothing in common >> with one's present form] is that I don't believe in souls, and so >> cannot see---on scientific grounds---why the new little device >> that I was supposedly downloaded into would resemble me >> (or be me) at all > > Surely this will not be a problem at all. There are two critical parts > of identity, both of which you mention, that would surely be preserved > by any aliens making us quickly into Gods. > > First off is the history of what you were. Surely part of making us > Gods, would be the restoration of everything we have ever been, including > restoration of everything we have ever forgotten. So all of us, at any > point in our history, would be perfectly remembered or even reloaded, > spawned off, and played with by all at will. Yes, I agree. A benevolent upload program offered by the first AI to take control of the solar system would include 1. by "uploading" definition, all your memories would be preserved, including---as you wisely add---memories that you've already forgotten (to the degree that they can be retrieved). This step is *vital*, else uploading has failed. 2. a councilor/mentor who would caution you on the problems of too-rapid change, give you self-editing capabilities, but only with: 3. retention, preservation, and backup of former versions, and a suggestion that to make sure that identity is safeguarded, many such earlier versions be given ample runtime But I was speaking of a transformation that takes place almost instantly. Do you really think that you would be the same person if your IQ instantly went to 12000 and although you knew about it, it would have no more structure or interest to you than the fetus you once were does? In other words, did you read my conditions carefully? They're pretty radical! > (i.e. I wonder what life > had been like for me had I married Carolyn instead of Malia...) And > even if the Gods didn't restore this for us, that would be the first > task I would want to get started on with all that infinite knowledge and > power right? Oh yes. But again, you seem to be addressing "the usual" benevolent upload scenario, in which preservation of ordinary identity almost certainly can be achieved, especially if one is careful. > > > Anyway, I'm willing to bet anyone that this theory [of qualia] will be > commonly accepted as fact in 10 or so years... Weren't you saying that seven years ago? :-) > If you're out there, Gods, I tell you know. Stop hiding from us and I > want all this now or as fast as is possible! I'm sick and tired of > being trapped in this lonely ineffable spirit prison. No one hopes more than I do that you Mormons were exactly right all along. So what's taking so long for the former Saints (now Gods) to come to our aid? My theory is that they're still reeling from the shock of brother Brigham's latest ideas, which he's been pounding into them since 1877, but will finally come to our assistence soon. (I happen to think that Brigham was right about almost everything!) Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 8 04:28:13 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 14:28:13 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant In-Reply-To: <01e401c77981$6213df00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> <01e401c77981$6213df00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/8/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Stathis writes > > > Extreme difficulty despite purposeful effort is a different > > situation to extreme improbability given random processes. > > An example of the latter would be a Turing-equivalent > > machine implementing my brain being realised by cosmic > > dust clouds. > > You're often very good about giving proper lip service even > to theories you disagree with, but I cannot help reminding > readers that dust clouds are static arrangements of particles, > no dust cloud being causally related to any other, and no > information flow between them being performed in real time. I used this as an example of a system in random motion. There is a non-zero probability that a dust cloud (which is not be *perfectly* static) will spontaneously implement a doggy, a ducky and an analogue of my brain. I used to think that as long as the probability remains non-zero, given infinite time the desired event becomes a certainty. That's not actually true if the probability progressively decreases per unit time period. For example, if the probability of an event occurring in the first year is 1/2, in the second year 1/4, in the nth year 1/(2^n), the probability that the event will never occur is given by the infinite product of (1 - 1/(2^n)), which is not zero but converges to approximately 0.288788 (perhaps someone could check this or work it out exactly). So depending on the cosmological model, some things may never happen, which is a disappointment; but under other models, such as most multiverse models, everything that can happen, does happen. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 8 04:37:05 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 00:37:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "The problem is partly a matter of evolutionary psychology." In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070404191247.191d5ca8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070406120256.04417d50@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <026501c778c5$957e20b0$640fa8c0@HPMEDIACENTER> <5.1.0.14.0.20070407121537.04349da8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070408001810.044470c0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:48 PM 4/7/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: >On 4/7/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: >> >>Patrick McKnight is a Rutgers College senior, majoring in philosophy and >>sociology. His column "The View from Nowhere" runs on alternate Fridays. > >It isn't worth my time to take apart the article on a piece by piece >basis. It is nice that he is thinking in terms of "sustainability" but >the basis for many of the claims has significant flaws. Most importantly >I would not expect a major in philosophy and sociology to have a grasp of >what engineering and technology could accomplish given sufficient economic >incentives (be they "natural" or artificial). I didn't post it for the engineering insights, and didn't expect any. The only really significant point is recognition by someone in a much younger generation than mine that humans are poorly equipped by our evolutionary history for "comprehending long-term threats" much less to take steps to deal with problems of such time and physical scales. It is, in my opinion, a bigger problem than energy and global warming combined. Unlike that problem I don't have the least idea of how to solve the problem of "comprehending long-term threats." If I did, I would solve that first and it would be easy to get resources allocated to deal with such problems as energy--not to mention even harder problems like avoiding the creation of hostile AIs. Keith From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 04:46:10 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 21:46:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46182E06.2090000@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <020601c77999$346ca100$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Thomas writes > Lee Corbin wrote: > >>Regarding future enhancements, [and] the dangers of identity >>loss [...] >> >>I issue this caution: what gaineth a transhuman if he becometh >>someone else? Beware any change at all, and allow only those >>that don't change you very much. If you want to keep on living, >>that is. > > I have felt similar misgivings about a heavenly afterlife. My identity > would need considerable purging for me to fit in. Well, I would say that your self image must be incredibly negative if you cannot imagine being purged of your minor foibles without suffering identity change. :-) If you actually listed your flaws, and then imagined either through New Year's Resolutions, Divine Intervention, or a successful upload scheme that those foibles were corrected, do you really believe you'd be someone else? > Reincarnation violates basic logic's law of identity. How could I have > a past (or future) life as someone other than me? Quite right. Replace your memories, replace you. > Yet, surprisingly, I have a recalled a couple "memories" of past lives. Come now. Surely those are just the result of your imagination working overtime. There have been no documented instances of people actually being able to directly draw upon the experiences of people long dead. > Uploading with knowledge/memory enhancement would skew me Borgishly. > With who's knowledge/memory would I blend? How could you still call > that me? I would guess that you would not consider total immersion in an Icelanding language course to be identity threatening. Surely the Thomas, after the three years it took to master Icelandic, would still be the same person. Few experiences really change one into someone else. (I would not necessarily exclude The Army or Scientology, however :-) > Lee, your warning has scared me into investigating > identity/consciousness. Ack! More reading for my tired eyes. If your > identity turns out to consist of a process -- then it couldn't continue > without change. Keeping your identity would involve keep the changes > going. You've already changed from barely-self-aware-Lee to > extropian-Lee. Would the upshift to "trans-Lee" work better if it > included an implanted memory of years of gradual changes? In the scenario I'm thinking of, the answer would be "not really". It's the end point that counts. For example, even if you somehow implanted memories in me of what it was like in my mother's womb, it still wouldn't cause me be (in any sense) the inane little creature she brought forth into the world. It took many years, if not a decade or two, for me to really emerge > I suspect that identity might consist a good deal in what the subject > considers his or her or its identity. On the other hand, I suppose it to be an objectively verifiable fact! That is, scientists of the future will be able to say definitely that person X *is* person Y, or that person X is not person Y. Moreover, some measures of the degree of similarity will be available. Already we have measures that tell us how similar two binary strings are. So since we're all binary strings in some sense, eventually we'll have measures for how much change the identity of some creature has changed over time. > So if you identify with your body, best not drop it if you don't > want to feel dead. I would say that those who identify with their toenail clippings are simply wrong. And those who identify with other bodily parts below the neck, likewise, are simply wrong. > What if I identified with all humans? -- Thomas Then you'd be commiting an error. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 04:51:29 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 21:51:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Role of Observer is not Relevant References: <20070403195803.GQ9439@leitl.org> <20070404105334.GJ9439@leitl.org> <01e401c77981$6213df00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <020f01c77999$e8376490$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > [Lee wrote] > > You're often very good about giving proper lip service even > > to theories you disagree with, but I cannot help reminding > > readers that dust clouds are static arrangements of particles, > > no dust cloud being causally related to any other, and no > > information flow between them being performed in real time. > > I used this as an example of a system in random motion. Oh, sorry. > There is a non-zero probability that a dust cloud (which is not be > *perfectly* static) will spontaneously implement a doggy, a ducky > and an analogue of my brain. And naturally I see you to mean that the (highly unlikely) gravitational and EM forces on the particles *cause* subsequent states to flow from prior states. Okay. > I used to think that as long as the probability remains non-zero, given infinite time the desired event becomes a certainty. > That's not actually true if the probability progressively decreases per unit time period. For example, if the probability of an > event occurring in the first year is 1/2, in the second year 1/4, in the nth year 1/(2^n), the probability that the event will > never occur is given by the infinite product of (1 - 1/(2^n)), which is not zero but converges to approximately 0.288788 (perhaps > someone could check this or work it out exactly). < I once computed exactly the same constant. And I remember the answer: .288788... in exact agreement with you. There happens to be a very complicated way of computing that number very efficiently using partitions. > So depending on the cosmological model, some things may never happen, That is an interesting consequence; and new to me. Lee > which is a disappointment; but under other models, such as most multiverse > models, everything that can happen, does happen. From amara at amara.com Sun Apr 8 05:36:57 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 07:36:57 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanoengineered terrestrial solar vs.nanoengineered space solar power Message-ID: Spike: >If you meant micrometeoroid, there are so sparse they aren't a major factor. I wasn't following this conversation, but if you want to know geostationary numbers: The mean flux for interplanetary dust (impact speed dependent) is: is 1.35x10^{-4} m^{-2}s^{-1} using a mean detetection rate of 0.54/day The mean flux for (man-made) space debris (impact speed dependent) is: is 6.1x10^{-4} m^{-2}s^{-1} using a mean detetection rate of 2.5/day These numbers come from the GORID detector, which was collecting data from a Russians telecommunications satellite in GEO during 1996-2002. This (refereed) paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609341 and a high-resolution version here: http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/dustgroup/~graps/dips2005/GrapsetalDIPS2005.pdf We hope to have a longer and more detailed paper, but I'm really overloaded these days/weeks/months. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From eugen at leitl.org Sun Apr 8 07:57:54 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:57:54 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great globalwarming swindle) In-Reply-To: <200704072053.l37KrjQ7016508@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <200704072053.l37KrjQ7016508@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20070408075754.GO9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 01:55:45PM -0700, spike wrote: > In the final analysis, everything is dollars and cents. Algore and others A lot of things do not have monetary value. How much is love worth, in dollar and cents? > make a fundamental error assuming governments should control our carbon > footprint. Governments do not control that, markets do. If governments try > too hard to influence markets (and in so doing depress the economy) they get Governments are there to look at the long term and create new markets by regulation. Unfortunately, governments almost uniformly fail in that, but for a few rare exceptions. > thrown out of office, as they should. Give us hard numbers so that we can > make market-based decisions. Sometimes, markets fail. Pollution occurs on a time scale beyond which the market optimizes. Pollution is global, which encourages tragedy of the commons mode. Do you know anyone who would voluntarily buy carbon options whenever taking a flight? It would easily add some $40 to your flight ticket. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sun Apr 8 09:14:47 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 02:14:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46182E06.2090000@thomasoliver.net> <020601c77999$346ca100$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4618B287.2010408@thomasoliver.net> Lee Corbin wrote: >Thomas writes > > >>Lee Corbin wrote: >> >>[...] misgivings about a heavenly afterlife. My identity >>would need considerable purging for me to fit in. >> >> > >Well, I would say that your self image must be incredibly negative >if you cannot imagine being purged of your minor foibles without >suffering identity change. :-) If [...] those foibles >were corrected, do you really believe you'd be someone else? > I had my fundamental rejection of the religious beliefs commonly associated with admission to heaven in mind. No, my identity has already survived numerous flaw corrections and I don't really identify with some of the flaws I've acquired with age! >>Yet, surprisingly, I have a recalled a couple "memories" of past lives. >> > >Come now. Surely those are just the result of your imagination working >overtime. There have been no documented instances of people actually >being able to directly draw upon the experiences of people long dead. > These "recollections" didn't lend themselves to verification and I think you'd find me at least as skeptical as yourself as to their veracity. That my brain would produce these "movies" in response to requests for memories of facts -- that surprised me. I think perhaps one part of a mind can lie to another part. I don't have to believe it, though. I filed it under "mental curiosities." >>Uploading with knowledge/memory enhancement would skew me Borgishly. >>With who's knowledge/memory would I blend? How could you still call >>that me? >> >> > >I would guess that you would not consider total immersion in an >Icelanding language course to be identity threatening. Surely the >Thomas, after the three years it took to master Icelandic, would >still be the same person. Few experiences really change one >into someone else. (I would not necessarily exclude The Army >or Scientology, however :-) > People sometimes aquire some personality traits from their teachers. I thought of merging with other uploaded personalities as the mode of enhancement. No, a tutorial wouldn't threaten identity. >>[...] >> >It took many years, if not a decade >or two, for me to really emerge > > Buddhist monks take years, even decades, (lifetimes?) to get free of self. Your identity might be tougher than you think. Then too, perhaps you haven't really emerged yet, but it's too early to know that. >>I suspect that identity might consist a good deal in what the subject >>considers his or her or its identity. >> >> > >On the other hand, I suppose it to be an objectively verifiable fact! > >That is, scientists of the future will be able to say definitely that >person X *is* person Y, or that person X is not person Y. Moreover, >some measures of the degree of similarity will be available. Already >we have measures that tell us how similar two binary strings are. >So since we're all binary strings in some sense, eventually we'll >have measures for how much change the identity of some >creature has changed over time. > That gives the scientists a "measure" of certainty, but will showing an advanced ID card assure *you* integrity of identity? >[...] those who identify with other bodily parts >below the neck, likewise, are simply wrong. > I have reservations about losing the pattern of nerve connections to my hands. A dancer might wish to preserve the pattern of connections to the lower extremities. I guess I don't see the error. The embodiment of personal experience in these patterns seems a far cry from toenails. (Sorry, I can't seem to find a reference for this. Maybe I hold a mistaken view.) -- Thomas From asa at nada.kth.se Sun Apr 8 10:19:35 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 12:19:35 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <200704072001.l37K1I0s025548@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200704072001.l37K1I0s025548@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <50449.86.153.216.201.1176027575.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: >> Definitely! Congrats to everybody who gets everything to work! > > Thanks Anders. Coming from you, it means much. Hearing that from you also means much (and now the feedback loop of self-congratulations speeds towards singularity)! >> ... that may be a much better measure of progress than looking at how >> much time, energy, FLOPS or whatever are produced. Maybe we should try >> to >> index it? > > Ja, we have some indices, but I am not sure their actual value. Example, > the number of FLOPS produced by my own favorite idle-CPU background > project > GIMPS. We were going exponential for several years, then it leveled out a > couple years ago at about 70,000 machines and gradual linear increase now > around 20 Teraflops. Blogging also seems to have reached a plateau, although it is somewhat index dependent and might be local to the anglophone world. However, both GIMPS and blogging represent activities where we cannot measure efficiency that well. However, the linear increase would measure the amount of extra FLOPS machines now achieve beyond system maintenance and ordinary work tasks? Car fuel efficiency might be of interest, as is the amount of losses in power systems per Watt put into them. We might want to find out how much and how many different chemicals one kilogram of coal can be turned into. For news we might want to find indices of how quickly a particular piece of news reaches 50% of its asymptotic recipients. For software we might want to measure amount of time lost due to swapping to hard drives, processes negotiating out of deadlocks and number of lost or colliding packages in different networks. Of course, the important thing is to measure this as "per capita" rather than the aggregate amount - as we get more computers we certainly have more packet collisions, but the interesting thing is to look at the efficiency of the system on average. > Taking into account the proportion of multi-machine contributors, we can > now > estimate the total number of this particular type of math geeks on the > planet: around 50,000. Considering the total human population, that makes > us rarer than one in a million. I never would have guessed we were so > few. Not all math geeks run GIMPS (cries of surprise and outrage), so being rarer than one in a million is not that surprising. I wonder how many math geeks there are worldwide? Maybe GIMPS is missing emerging crowds of geeks in China, just itching to search for Mersennes? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 8 10:29:21 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 20:29:21 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/8/07, Lee Corbin wrote: "The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem > about identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 > and you know everything about Earth history and the pitifully > primitive life forms that you used to be, you no longer resemble the same > person that you used to be at all, any more than you currently resemble > the > fetus that you were eight months before birth. > > "Now then. Who wants to go first?" > > Unless I had guarantees that there'd be storage enough and the > ability to run lots of old-fashioned Lees in parallel to all the > Lee-Pluses, > I'd decline. The reason that I would decline is that I don't believe in > souls, and so cannot see---on scientific grounds---why the new little > device that I was supposedly downloaded into would resemble me > (or be me) at all. The main difference between your scenario and growing up from infancy to adulthood seems to be that the latter occurs more slowly. If an infant grew up in a second, amassing knowledge in the process just as if he had grown up in the usual manner, the new adult might have regrets about missing out on childhood but if he considered that the infant had died that would be no different to all of us considering that our infant selves had died. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sun Apr 8 11:16:31 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 04:16:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <745663.70893.qm@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > The main difference between [Lee Corbin's] scenario and > growing up from infancy to > adulthood seems to be that the latter occurs more > slowly. If an infant grew > up in a second, amassing knowledge in the process > just as if he had grown up > in the usual manner, the new adult might have > regrets about missing out on > childhood but if he considered that the infant had > died that would be no > different to all of us considering that our infant > selves had died. Yes. But why would anyone want to go from infancy to adulthood in a blink of an eye? Or from from adulthood to omniscience for that matter? For me, the journey is the point and the destination is just the end of the journey. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a PS3 game guru. Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games. http://videogames.yahoo.com/platform?platform=120121 From jcowan5 at sympatico.ca Sun Apr 8 15:13:35 2007 From: jcowan5 at sympatico.ca (Joshua Cowan) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:13:35 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The greatglobalwarming swindle) In-Reply-To: <20070408075754.GO9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen asked: >Do you know anyone who would voluntarily buy carbon options whenever >taking a flight? It would easily add some $40 to your flight ticket. $40/20K miles but you get a free luggage tag. :) http://www.terrapass.com/flight/products.flight.all.php?flight_carbon=0&flight_miles=0 Cheers, Josh From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 15:39:25 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 08:39:25 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > Criminals are held responsible for their ill deeds because we know > that while they might have a powerful disposition to act in a malign > and antisocial fashion they also have the capacity to choose > otherwise (except where the disposition overwhelms all other motives > or external circumstances restrict their options too brutally). We have seen evidence on this very list in recent posts that failure to believe in free will can lead some people to automatically exculpate the guilty. These two terms "hold accountable" and "to hold responsible" are very good and convenient ways of describing the correct attitudes that are needed. (I was particularly struck by Pinker's use of "we must hold accountable....", in this same context, in a lecture he gave at Stanford when publicizing his recent (at the time) book "The Blank Slate". Whatever one's views on the abstract questions concerning philosophical free will, there should be no doubt that we need to severely *blame* criminals and naughty children and, in general, all miscreants. This is for the simple and obvious fact that all non-neurologically damaged people are affected by censure, blame, and punishment. I would even go so far as to require judges when handing out sentences to do so with passion. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 16:03:53 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:03:53 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > Unless I had guarantees that there'd be storage enough and the > > ability to run lots of old-fashioned Lees in parallel to all the Lee-Pluses, > > I'd decline [an offer to upload when the new "me" would be vastly > > different from me]. The reason that I would decline is that I don't believe > > in souls, and so cannot see---on scientific grounds---why the new little > > device that I was supposedly downloaded into would resemble me > > (or be me) at all. > > The main difference between your scenario and growing up from infancy > to adulthood seems to be that the latter occurs more slowly. Well, this is where I differ from most people. (Just now, I note that The Avantguardian has made a similar point.) For me, it's the end state that counts, not the amount of time it took to get there. Let X be an entity that has utterly nothing in common with one. Then a lot of people don't mind evolving into X provided it's done slowly enough, because they believe as they step-by-step turn into someone else, their "essence" is somehow retained. I guess. I guess that's what they must believe, in some form or other. Even if I finally reveal that X is, say, Max More, they don't seem to think of this as especially identity threatening. But if that happened to them, I claim, then they'd be dead and there would simply be more Max Mores. What possible difference does it make whether the transformation was fast or slow? Lee From jonkc at att.net Sun Apr 8 16:48:12 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 12:48:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem about > identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 and you know > everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms that > you used to be, you no longer resemble the same person that you used to > be at all, any more than you currently resemble the fetus that you were > eight months before birth. > "Now then. Who wants to go first?" And at this point John Clark can be seen jumping up and down with his hand raised up as high as it will go screaming at the top of his lungs "ME! ME! PICK ME!". If you don't regard it as a great tragedy that you no longer resemble a one month old fetus then I see no reason to fear a 12,000 IQ, but that's just my opinion and there's no disputing matters of taste. Regardless of who is correct, those with an opinion (or taste) similar to mine will become far more powerful than those with a taste similar to yours, and thus will dominate in the transhuman gene pool. John K Clark From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Sun Apr 8 16:37:37 2007 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:37:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hypocrisy and Preaching (was The great globalwarming swindle) In-Reply-To: <20070408075754.GO9439@leitl.org> References: <932576.66127.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <200704072053.l37KrjQ7016508@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20070408075754.GO9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <794D07B2-9102-4068-B8D8-00E52B99E5EA@ceruleansystems.com> On Apr 8, 2007, at 12:57 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Do you know anyone who would voluntarily buy carbon options whenever > taking a flight? It would easily add some $40 to your flight ticket. That seems a bit high, at least currently. The carbon offset market is currently priced in the ballpark of US$4.00 per ton. I'll add that these markets have the strong reek of bullshit, as not just anyone is allowed to participate in the selling carbon offsets; it looks like a scam for ideological environmental organizations to make money. I sequester approximately 1,000 tons of carbon per year and have for about a decade, but I cannot make any money from this fact. So instead, I have granted use of my unused carbon offsets to a few friends so that they can be smug about their carbon negative lifestyles. I can't make money, so I might as well get some amusement from it. J. Andrew Rogers From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sun Apr 8 16:32:44 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 10:32:44 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4619192C.5080509@comcast.net> Lee Corbin wrote: > >> >> >> Anyway, I'm willing to bet anyone that this theory [of qualia] will be >> commonly accepted as fact in 10 or so years... >> > > Weren't you saying that seven years ago? :-) > Yes, but back then I was saying about 20 or so years from then. We've made much progress since then so I feel a little more confident reducing the time I think it will take. We are now stimulating the visual cortex of blind people and producing spots of phenomenal light people are consciously aware of, and stimulating the auditory areas of the brain in a way that can make them consciously aware of sound qualia. This is almost precisely the kind of effing I have always been talking about. As in they stimulate the properly configured brain in a particular way, saying this is what salt tastes like, and the person that has never known what salt tastes like will finally say something like: "Oh That is what salt tastes like." With only a little more progress along these lines such theories will finally be proved or disproved very soon now don't you think? > No one hopes more than I do that you Mormons were exactly > right all along. Be careful about classifying me with "you Mormons" since I believe many things very different than most "Mormons" such as I believe our spirits do not rise from our bodies when we die to be greeted by the spirits of our already dead ancestors and or Brigham Young. I believe Joseph Smith was a liar (but still did some good). There is no God yet, nor was some Sacrifice by some dude named Jesus significant the way they claim. People will not be split up and isolated into "3 degrees of glory" in heaven and I believe other worship and wallow in misery things like that are not true. But other than a few things like that, they have lots of good beliefs and a great culture which I do share - especially the one where they believe man can become God. Brent Allsop -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 8 16:53:23 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:53:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> <022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/8/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > I would even go so far as to require judges when handing out > sentences to do so with passion. Lee, I think you're heading in the right direction, but rather than expressing passion which obscures rationality in the courtroom, our judgments should calmly and clearly proclaim our values (rather than pretending to be objective as is so often the case.) It's the right direction because it helps us mature beyond the fairy tales of "intrinsic rights" and "objective justice" and moves us toward taking responsibility for creating a future that increasingly promotes shared values that work. On the other hand, people as yet generally don't appreciate rationally promoting shared values, so -- let the passions flow and we'll use the inadvertent consequences as opportunities to learn and grow. :-( This goes to Anna's question about manipulation. Raised in a mostly calm, reasonable family and being an INTJ by disposition, I tend to approach disputes in terms of principles. But outside my EDA (Environment of Developmental Adaptation), many times (depending on the personality of the other), the reaction in response to a calm principled appeal is along the lines of "Yeah, okay...so what?" If I then intentionally demonstrate a bit of personal anger or outrage, then it's "Okay, I get you." Is this manipulation? Is it "wrong"? - Jef From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 8 17:40:23 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 03:40:23 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Lee Corbin wrote: For me, it's the end state > that counts, not the amount of time it took to get there. Let X be an > entity that has utterly nothing in common with one. Then a lot of people > don't mind evolving into X provided it's done slowly enough, because > they believe as they step-by-step turn into someone else, their "essence" > is somehow retained. I guess. I guess that's what they must > believe, in some form or other. > > Even if I finally reveal that X is, say, Max More, they don't seem to > think > of this as especially identity threatening. But if that happened to them, > I claim, then they'd be dead and there would simply be more Max > Mores. What possible difference does it make whether the transformation > was fast or slow? But you probably have a lot more in common with Max More than you do with your infant self. This example is one more reason why there is no "truth of the matter" about continuity of personal identity from moment to moment. Like free will, it's an illusion which is very important to maintain, otherwise we will be unhappy. Unlike those characters in films like "The Matrix" who complain that it's not real, I don't care as long as it feels real. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Sun Apr 8 18:01:33 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 20:01:33 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <745663.70893.qm@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> References: <745663.70893.qm@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <52855.86.153.216.201.1176055293.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> The Avantguardian wrote: > Yes. But why would anyone want to go from infancy to > adulthood in a blink of an eye? Or from from adulthood > to omniscience for that matter? For me, the journey is > the point and the destination is just the end of the > journey. Well, IQ 12,000 is a good start of the journey but it is hardly the end. I wonder if we are not mixing up the identity issue with the "progress must be earned" meme many bioconservatives sprout against enhancement. That meme does contain a kernel of truth: if we gain abilities that are not closely tied to the totality of our being (which normally happens when we acquire them through training) the abilities are not really "ours" and are not praiseworthy except instrumentally. Just being upgraded might actually leave us pretty inefficient at using our upgrades. A cruicial question to ask is how the upgrades actually get integrated into our selves. As for identity, people seem to value different things. Some are very concerned about the continuity of their stream of consciousness, stream of memories or even their physical body states. Others are more concerned with some core aspect of the process producing these streams. I think I belong to that category. "Andersness" to me represents a particular style of generating new mindstates based on previous states and external information. It is not even a full set of evolution equations, since clearly my brain is changing over time while some core styles remain pretty constant. Would they remain in Lee's scenario? I do not see any information for or against it. I can very well imagine that just as some individual fetal traits remain in my adult form so can my "Andersness" remain in the IQ 12,000 version, but it seems equally possible that some of this style might indeed be tied to properties that would tend to be streamlined away. In the end I usually ask myself "what makes the universe a more complex and interesting place?" In this case it seems to be to downloadm since there will be more intelligence and more ability to generate complexity based on my old knowledge and the successor entity's new knowledge. Another way to deal with the situation is of course to download, create a (complete) mental model of one's pre-downloading self and examine whether this model would approve of one's current mental state. In the case of approval, there is no need to maintain the mental model and one can live a happy posthuman life. In the case of disapproval, one can continue to maintain the mental model as an independent subcomponent and live a happy posthuman life and a happy human life in parallel. [ This plan can be decided upon before downloading as a kind of contract between one's current self and future self - there seems to be fairly solid philosophical grounds to expect rational beings to want to honor contracts between different timeslices of themselves, even when the future timeslices are vastly more complex. But I would also expect that opinions will differ on this. ] -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Sun Apr 8 17:37:15 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 10:37:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <4619284B.3040005@thomasoliver.net> John K Clark wrote: >[...] > >I see no reason to fear a 12,000 IQ, but that's just my >opinion and there's no disputing matters of taste. Regardless of who is >correct, those with an opinion (or taste) similar to mine will become far >more powerful than those with a taste similar to yours, and thus will >dominate in the transhuman gene pool. > > John K Clark > I would hope that, at IQ 12,000 one would view reptilian complex 1 based issues of dominance and submission as of little relevance. I guess social status works better than no motive at all (for getting smarter). I hope something starts working for me! -- Thomas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_brain From asa at nada.kth.se Sun Apr 8 19:03:01 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 21:03:01 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <4619284B.3040005@thomasoliver.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <4619284B.3040005@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <1314.163.1.72.81.1176058981.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Thomas wrote: > I would hope that, at IQ 12,000 one would view reptilian complex > 1 based issues of > dominance and submission as of little relevance. I guess social status > works better than no motive at all (for getting smarter). I hope > something starts working for me! -- Thomas. Hmm, we evolved brains in order to find food more easily and avoid getting eaten. That core function has never disappeared, it has just developed into first various appetitive and aversive drives, then into even more complex emotions and behaviors. When I write a project grant proposal I am in a sense just doing sublimated eating-promotion. Maybe 12,000 IQ entities are sublimating social dominance similarly into complex posthuman behaviors that do not look very reptilian. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 8 22:11:15 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:11:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H In-Reply-To: <4619192C.5080509@comcast.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4619192C.5080509@comcast.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070408171008.02374dd8@satx.rr.com> At 10:32 AM 4/8/2007 -0600, Brent wrote: >People will not be split up and isolated into "3 degrees of glory" >in heaven and I believe other worship and wallow in misery things >like that are not true. I don't understand this for several values of "understand." Could you clarify? Damien Broderick From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 8 22:29:11 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 18:29:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4D3E71B3-21E3-46A9-9E0E-397D8D776432@randallsquared.com> On Apr 8, 2007, at 1:40 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > But you probably have a lot more in common with Max More than you > do with your infant self. This example is one more reason why there > is no "truth of the matter" about continuity of personal identity > from moment to moment. Like free will, it's an illusion which is > very important to maintain, otherwise we will be unhappy. Well... *someone* will be unhappy. Whether *we* will is the heart of the matter, isn't it? -- Randall Randall "This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3 because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8." - Scott Aaronson From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sun Apr 8 23:17:16 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:17:16 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070408171008.02374dd8@satx.rr.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4619192C.5080509@comcast.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070408171008.02374dd8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <461977FC.4000101@comcast.net> Damien, I figured most people wouldn't understand this, but I didn't want to make the post longer. So thanks for asking!! And let me know if I missed anything you are asking. The "3 degrees of glory" part has to do with the common Mormon beliefs. Most Christians believe in Heaven and Hell, or 2 ultimate places "souls" will end up. But Mormons are different, they believe in these "3 degrees of glory" and of course "outer darkness" which is where the Devil, and a few of his cohorts supposedly end up. According to Mormons, everyone will be resurrected and end up in one of these places. These 3 differ in magnitude of quality like the difference between the sun, the moon, and the stars. But even the lowest is supposedly better than life here on earth. There is some speculation that people in higher degrees might be able to occasionally visit souls in lower kingdoms but never the reverse. So to me, this is all some amount of isolation, a terrible and faithless thing to believe in. So when Mormons claim "Families will be together forever" I quickly point out that this is a lie since they believe everyone will be split up like this. But I do believe, or at least hope, that families really will be together forever, and am committed to never giving up on anyone until this is achieved for everyone. In other words, once we reach the singularity, and become immortal, for me an important remaining task will be the work to resurrect all our ancestors. And of course never giving up until everyone is in this heavenly future all together, with no more isolation forever more for everyone including newly created children whether spiritual or whatever. The worshiping and wallowing in misery is only minimally about the misery of families not really being together in heaven. It more has to do with how Mormons spend so much time worshiping and wallowing in misery. Though when you claim they do this they attempt to deny this also. The descriptions of God in the bible is some what vague, and many people take away differing specifications about just what the God of the bible is. The Book of Mormon supposedly clarifies many things about what they believe God is. But for me, this vision of God, is a very miserable God in Hell. The God of the book of Mormon even more so than the God of the Bible. I mean just imagine being this God and watching all the Nephites, your good spirit children, being tortured, killed, and ultimately completely wiped off the face of the earth by the Lamenites because of their belief, or lack of belief in God and failing to follow your commandments after Jesus visited them. Not to mention going to "sacrament meeting" every day and worshiping the "infinite" suffering Jesus supposedly did. What is any "partaking of the sacrament" if not worshiping in and wallowing in misery, I say. The more miserable life is, the better it is for Mormons. They go on and on about how miserable life was for their early followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They have constant celebrations where they worship how miserable and full of suffering life was for them. So, for me, it is all theists, that truly lack faith, they accept the existence of and worship some impotent God that evidently wallows in watching all the souls on earth going through all this, and is impotent against all this evil. But I have faith that evil like, isolation, suffering, death, and so on isn't all that hard to overcome, and in fact we will soon overcome it completely, long before we are "omnipotent". So in other words, the heaven extropians believe in is infinitely better than the "eternal damnation" Mormons believe in where when people finally become Gods, evidently it will be kind of a contest to see if the world you create can be even more full of such evil, so that your children will be similarly worship and wallow in misery as they are tried, developed, and proved even better than those of other less "evil" and full of suffering worlds... Again, Mormons will deny much of this, but when they talk about their beliefs, this is what I understand them to be. i.e. it is all worshiping and wallowing in misery, and the "glory of God" is to do yet more of it for his children, for an eternity. Brent Allsop Damien Broderick wrote: > At 10:32 AM 4/8/2007 -0600, Brent wrote: > > >> People will not be split up and isolated into "3 degrees of glory" >> in heaven and I believe other worship and wallow in misery things >> like that are not true. >> > > I don't understand this for several values of "understand." Could you clarify? > > Damien Broderick > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 23:46:37 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 16:46:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark, totally in character, writes > "Lee Corbin" > >> The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem about >> identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 and you know >> everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms that >> you used to be, you no longer resemble the same person that you used to >> be at all, any more than you currently resemble the fetus that you were >> eight months before birth. >> "Now then. Who wants to go first?" > > And at this point John Clark can be seen jumping up and down with his hand > raised up as high as it will go screaming at the top of his lungs "ME! ME! > PICK ME!". Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien granting your request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ 12,000 entity that the alien names Isador which just so happens to have incredibly complete biographical information about you? That is, Isador "remembers" almost all of what happened to you on every day of your life. Oh, I forgot to add: the entity Isador also "remembers" what happened to me and what happened to everyone else who is presently living. What, I ask, is the difference, exactly, between A and B? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 8 23:54:03 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 16:54:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede><7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com><022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <026601c77a39$88b44ab0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jef writes > On 4/8/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > >> I would even go so far as to require judges when handing out >> sentences to do so with passion. > > Lee, I think you're heading in the right direction, but rather than > expressing passion which obscures rationality in the courtroom, our > judgments should calmly and clearly proclaim our values (rather than > pretending to be objective as is so often the case.) Well, they can do both. Hmm. I guess probably that the right thing to do would be to dispassionately hand out the sentence. And *then* follow it with how the judge feels (or would have felt had he been the victim or the victim's family). > It's the right direction because it helps us mature beyond the fairy > tales of "intrinsic rights" and "objective justice" and moves us > toward taking responsibility for creating a future that increasingly > promotes shared values that work. I agree with your denigration of "intrinsic rights", but I don't see what's wrong with clinging to a concept of objective justice. Or is it just a terminological query? > On the other hand, people as yet generally don't appreciate rationally > promoting shared values, so -- let the passions flow and we'll use the > inadvertent consequences as opportunities to learn and grow. :-( > > This goes to Anna's question about manipulation. Raised in a mostly > calm, reasonable family and being an INTJ by disposition, I tend to > approach disputes in terms of principles. But outside my EDA > (Environment of Developmental Adaptation), many times (depending on > the personality of the other), the reaction in response to a calm > principled appeal is along the lines of "Yeah, okay...so what?" Really? Even on my most principled days I never get that reaction. Your punch lines probably need polishing. (Or maybe they're just failing to get your point, i.e., you've perhaps been talking over their heads, assuming they understood more than you should have.) > If I then intentionally demonstrate a bit of personal anger or outrage, > then it's "Okay, I get you." Is this manipulation? Is it "wrong"? If it truly aids the understanding of the other, it is commendable. But if all that they were interested in was your feelings on the subject, then there is still a problem. But it's not your problem, it's theirs. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 8 23:59:41 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:59:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H In-Reply-To: <461977FC.4000101@comcast.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46180929.1050004@comcast.net> <01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4619192C.5080509@comcast.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070408171008.02374dd8@satx.rr.com> <461977FC.4000101@comcast.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070408185415.022d34b0@satx.rr.com> At 05:17 PM 4/8/2007 -0600, Brent wrote: >Mormons will deny much of >this, but when they talk about their beliefs, this is what I understand >them to be. i.e. it is all worshiping and wallowing in misery, and the >"glory of God" is to do yet more of it for his children, for an eternity. There seems no limit to the amount of cruel stupidity humans will embrace, nor how much money and effort they will throw at it. Granted, the Mormons don't seem *quite* as mired in it as the Aztecs, the Ik and the Muslims. I was under the impression that each Morman adult man who made the grade got to have a planet of his own, where he'd take his wife/wives and kids to be god-king (or something). That's somewhat hinted at in your response. I don't quite see how the kids get included since presumably they grow up and go to planets of their own. Damien Broderick From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 9 00:12:27 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 17:12:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > On 4/9/07, Lee Corbin wrote: >> Let X be an entity that has utterly nothing in common with one. >> Then a lot of people don't mind evolving into X provided it's >> done slowly enough..., >> >> Even if I finally reveal that X is, say, Max More, they don't >> seem to think of this as especially identity threatening. But if >> that happened to them, I claim, then they'd be dead and >> there would simply be more Max Mores. What possible >> difference does it make whether the transformation >> was fast or slow? > > But you probably have a lot more in common with Max More > than you do with your infant self. Yes, that's true. And sorry for the poor word choices above that seem to imply that I have nothing in common with Max More. We are both male and above five foot three in height. But in terms of *personal identity* I have nearly zero in common either with my infant self or Max More. Kill me and create either one of those and I'm dead either way. > This example is one more reason why there is no "truth of the > matter" about continuity of personal identity from moment to > moment. I not only dispute that, I claim that you dispute it too. I claim that in every way that matters, your actions and beliefs reflect a contention that Stathis Papaioannou is someone, and someone special in the sense that if he is purged from the simulation, then in no real way does he "continue in other people" or anything. Please let us use the term "personal identity" to refer to that continuity of staying alive that we all cherish (except the suicidal). Your "self" is that which the police will come after tomorrow if you commit a crime today. Your "self" is that which you want to continue to exist in all our teleportation and duplication experiments. It is vapid to deny that there is some sort of thing that you want to keep on living, and I think that we should use "self", "I", and "me" in the same way that 99.9999% of the world's people do. > Like free will, it's an illusion which is very important to maintain, > otherwise we will be unhappy. I really do doubt that illusions make much difference one way or the other. Your happiness level is set mainly by your genes, mediated by serotonin, etc. > Unlike those characters in films like "The Matrix" who complain > that it's not real, Yeah! That's quite hilarious. Here's what the writers must have been thinking: "We, the exalted and extremely intelligent writers know full well that this is just as real insofar as experiences go as a lower level "reality", but all the clueless brainless fools who watch our movies have no idea." > I don't care as long as it feels real. If it feels real, then it *is* real---and any other use of words should be met with criminal prosecution. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 9 00:23:22 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 17:23:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><46180929.1050004@comcast.net><01fc01c77984$3071b230$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><4619192C.5080509@comcast.net><7.0.1.0.2.20070408171008.02374dd8@satx.rr.com><461977FC.4000101@comcast.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070408185415.022d34b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <027c01c77a3d$bd65af20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien observes > There seems no limit to the amount of cruel stupidity humans will > embrace, nor how much money and effort they will throw at > it. Granted, the Mormons don't seem *quite* as mired in it as the > Aztecs, the Ik and the Muslims. They just don't do as well practicing what they preach! Brent also wrote > They [the Mormons] go on and on about how miserable life was > for their early followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. > They have constant celebrations where they worship how > miserable and full of suffering life was for them. Really, any sensitive person who reads enough history will be in favor of holding celebrations for how good we have it today. It's probably quite healthy as well as accurate to "celebrate" the horrors of the past, and to gloat about our superiority. But I get your point. Lee From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 00:33:46 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 20:33:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: > John Clark, totally in character, writes > > >> "Lee Corbin" >> >>> The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem about >>> identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 and you know >>> everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms that >>> you used to be, you no longer resemble the same person that you used to >>> be at all, any more than you currently resemble the fetus that you were >>> eight months before birth. >>> "Now then. Who wants to go first?" >> >> And at this point John Clark can be seen jumping up and down with his hand >> raised up as high as it will go screaming at the top of his lungs "ME! ME! >> PICK ME!". > > Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien granting your > request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ 12,000 entity that > the > alien names Isador which just so happens to have incredibly complete > biographical > information about you? That is, Isador "remembers" almost all of what happened > to you on every day of your life. > > Oh, I forgot to add: the entity Isador also "remembers" what happened to me > and what happened to everyone else who is presently living. > > What, I ask, is the difference, exactly, between A and B? The answer is right in your setup. A was killed and B wasn't. H. From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 9 00:35:42 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 17:35:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070408185415.022d34b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <704348.94473.qm@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > I was under the impression that each Morman adult > man who made the > grade got to have a planet of his own, where he'd > take his wife/wives > and kids to be god-king (or something). That's > somewhat hinted at in > your response. I don't quite see how the kids get > included since > presumably they grow up and go to planets of their > own. Well if that's the case, the difference between Mormonism and Ascensionism is that in the latter you don't have to die first and God doesn't want to be bothered by you all any more. ;) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 9 00:53:56 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 17:53:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <788547.15066.qm@web60517.mail.yahoo.com> --- Heartland wrote: > The answer is right in your setup. A was killed and > B wasn't. Why do you assume that Isador would give its Slawomir subroutine any runtime? Especially when it has so many other things to think about? You may as well be ashes in an urn over the fireplace. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 01:40:08 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 21:40:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Lee: > Please let us use the term "personal identity" to refer to that > continuity of staying alive that we all cherish (except the > suicidal). I tried that already and I can report that this path leads to contradiction. Preserving personal identity is one thing and staying alive is another. Despite popular belief these things are unrelated. Example: A single brain houses person A's memories and beliefs. If we wanted we could rewire that brain so that person A's beliefs and memories would be replaced by person B's memories and beliefs. Result? Personal identity has definitely changed but not the fact that the brain has not died. If personal identity and staying alive were one and the same, then a change in personal identity would have to cause brain death. And since a child (person A) manages to avoid brain death while morphing into an adult (person B) (if it didn't there would be no adults in the world) it should be apparent that we should not use the term "personal identity" to refer to continuity of staying alive. Let's yield the term "personal identity" to those who think it refers to a specific collection of memories and beliefs and let them torture themselves with dead end questions such as, "What it means to preserve PI?" Instead, let's focus on how to stay alive. H. From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 9 01:56:08 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 21:56:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <788547.15066.qm@web60517.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > --- Heartland wrote: >> The answer is right in your setup. A was killed and >> B wasn't. > > Why do you assume that Isador would give its Slawomir > subroutine any runtime? Especially when it has so many > other things to think about? You may as well be ashes > in an urn over the fireplace. > > > Stuart LaForge Oh, what happens to A is never dependent on what happens to B (why should it be?). Instance of type A would remain dead even if Isador was kind enough to grant a different instance of type A some runtime. The whole Isador thing was just a red herring. H. From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 02:35:32 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 12:35:32 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405122707.02267bd8@satx.rr.com> <022901c779f4$2eca4ee0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Whatever one's views on the abstract questions concerning > philosophical free will, there should be no doubt that we need > to severely *blame* criminals and naughty children and, in > general, all miscreants. This is for the simple and obvious > fact that all non-neurologically damaged people are affected > by censure, blame, and punishment. > > I would even go so far as to require judges when handing out > sentences to do so with passion. I would go the other way. The criminal should be given the message that his behaviour is unacceptable, and perhaps victim impact statements are helpful here, but that the state is incarcerating him with reluctance, after due consideration of the alternatives. Those criminals who have a moral sense are least likely to be brutalised by this attitude, and those who do not (a minority) won't be any the worse for it. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at comcast.net Mon Apr 9 02:51:29 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:51:29 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mormons and >H In-Reply-To: <704348.94473.qm@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> References: <704348.94473.qm@web60520.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4619AA31.1080603@comcast.net> There are two types of children in LDS philosophy of life. There are "spirit" children of God, and physical children of our earthly parents. You are confusing the two and this all fits in with what LDS believe we are. There is some kind of self existent, eternal "intelligence" that is some how implanted into a "spirit" child of God, when God (pro?)creates them (with many plural godly wives that were also on this world with us.). This combo has a "pre existance" life in the "spirit world" with these Godly parents. Then this combo is joined with a physical body as earthly parents procreate and raise a human on a physical earth. "Gaining a body", and going through all these trials and suffering is a necessary part of becoming a God. IF you succeed at this and become God, then you get to (pro?)create your own spirit children, and create a world to "send them to" to "gain" physical bodies of their own and so on. I claim that if you listen to the way Mormons preach in church, if you create a world that isn't quite as miserable as this one, full of crucification, races of your children torturing and completely wiping out others, your children, or at least the ones that make it, won't be quite as good Gods as we here on this full of misery earth will surely become. In other words, they all seem to believe that the worse things are the better, and that without many failing and being damned, how will you know the few good ones are really good? So what Mormons call "God's plan of happiness" is, I claim, really an eternal damnation of eternally creating the most damnable world possible to subject your spirit children to, while you eternally watch all your spirit children, as you hide from them, disobey you, torture each other, wipe out entire races, crucify "your only begotten son" for some incomprehensible necessity and so on, just like our God has done for us, his spirit children on this world. But of course, atheist extropians can hope that evil isn't necessary, nor all that hard to overcome. And that it will soon be completely overcome, long before we are anything close to being "omnipotent". And this eternal Godly life, after this singularity that is absent of isolation, death and other such evils, does indeed make the LDS view like an impotent eternal worshiping and wallowing in misery damnation in comparison. So as you can see, I am proud to be a "cultural Mormoan" and have many similar values to them. But on most of their core doctrine, I am completely in disagreement with them. Brent Allsop The Avantguardian wrote: > --- Damien Broderick wrote: > > >> I was under the impression that each Morman adult >> man who made the >> grade got to have a planet of his own, where he'd >> take his wife/wives >> and kids to be god-king (or something). That's >> somewhat hinted at in >> your response. I don't quite see how the kids get >> included since >> presumably they grow up and go to planets of their >> own. >> > > Well if that's the case, the difference between > Mormonism and Ascensionism is that in the latter you > don't have to die first and God doesn't want to be > bothered by you all any more. ;) > > > Stuart LaForge > alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu > > "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. > > > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ > 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time > with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. > http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news > _______________________________________________ > 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 stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 03:20:50 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:20:50 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <4D3E71B3-21E3-46A9-9E0E-397D8D776432@randallsquared.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4D3E71B3-21E3-46A9-9E0E-397D8D776432@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Randall Randall wrote: > > On Apr 8, 2007, at 1:40 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > But you probably have a lot more in common with Max More than you > > do with your infant self. This example is one more reason why there > > is no "truth of the matter" about continuity of personal identity > > from moment to moment. Like free will, it's an illusion which is > > very important to maintain, otherwise we will be unhappy. > > Well... *someone* will be unhappy. Whether *we* will is the > heart of the matter, isn't it? By "we" I mean the present observer moment, who has certain beliefs about the person he will become in future which are shown to be irrational by various duplication thought experiments. For example, if I am to be destructively analysed today and two copies of me made tomorrow, one of whom will be tortured, I am worried, because I feel there is a 1/2 chance I will be tortured. But come tomorrow, if I am not the one being tortured, I am relieved, despite feeling sorry for my twin screaming in the next room. Now, why should I identify equally with both copies today, but much more with one copy rather than the other tomorrow? Why should I identify with either copy tomorrow given that I will be killed by the destructive analyser today? Why should I identify with my future self several hence hence in the course of ordinary life given that he will hardly contain any of the matter in my present body and probably even his memory and thoughts will be only approximations of my present memories and thoughts? That is why I say that the only absolute, unequivocal usage of the first person (singular) pronoun is in referring to the present observer moment. Our ordinary usage of it has evolved in the absence of duplication, time travel, travel to meet parallel selves in other universes; considering these theoretical possibilities shows our previously rock-solid beliefs about personal identity to be fundamentally flawed. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 03:37:28 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 22:37:28 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Dresden Kodak In-Reply-To: <62550.86.153.216.201.1175685602.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <62550.86.153.216.201.1175685602.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <5366105b0704082037m66fd908fh60d19be56e780171@mail.gmail.com> 23:35 Sunday, 8 April 2007 On 4/4/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Dresden Kodak shows the problems of transhumanist dating :-) > http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_034.htm That comic would be really funny--if it wasn't so true. As is, that's just humor too black, even for a fellow with prints of Goya's paintings on his apartment walls. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From fauxever at sprynet.com Mon Apr 9 03:29:52 2007 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 20:29:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2053020,00.html From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 03:50:05 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:50:05 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change In-Reply-To: <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Stathis writes > > > This example is one more reason why there is no "truth of the > > matter" about continuity of personal identity from moment to > > moment. > > I not only dispute that, I claim that you dispute it too. I claim > that in every way that matters, your actions and beliefs reflect > a contention that Stathis Papaioannou is someone, and > someone special in the sense that if he is purged from the > simulation, then in no real way does he "continue in other > people" or anything. > > Please let us use the term "personal identity" to refer to that > continuity of staying alive that we all cherish (except the > suicidal). Your "self" is that which the police will come after > tomorrow if you commit a crime today. Your "self" is that > which you want to continue to exist in all our teleportation > and duplication experiments. It is vapid to deny that there > is some sort of thing that you want to keep on living, and > I think that we should use "self", "I", and "me" in the same > way that 99.9999% of the world's people do. Of course I do use personal identity in this everyday sense, and even though I call it an illusion, I am very keen to preserve the illusion because that is the way my brain has evolved. If anything, you are more rigorous in your treatment of the idea than I am when you say that we should treat copies as selves, whereas I would insist in my illusory state of mind that I can only be one person at a time, struggling to use the personal pronouns in the way I always have. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 04:01:46 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 14:01:46 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <4619284B.3040005@thomasoliver.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <4619284B.3040005@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Thomas wrote: I would hope that, at IQ 12,000 one would view reptilian complex > 1 based issues of > dominance and submission as of little relevance. I guess social status > works better than no motive at all (for getting smarter). I hope > something starts working for me! -- Thomas. I don't think there is any necessary correlation between intelligence and and the more "base" drives. Even if you could show that there is a correlation in the animal kingdom, that would just be a contingent fact of evolution. If we built AI's we could make a dumb one really kind, a smart one really vicious, or not give them any emotions or drives beyond what was needed for the task at hand. It is naive to imagine that every possible intelligent entity will somehow resemble a human or a lizard. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 04:04:59 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 14:04:59 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien granting > your > request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ 12,000 > entity that the > alien names Isador which just so happens to have incredibly complete > biographical > information about you? That is, Isador "remembers" almost all of what > happened > to you on every day of your life. > > Oh, I forgot to add: the entity Isador also "remembers" what happened to > me > and what happened to everyone else who is presently living. > > What, I ask, is the difference, exactly, between A and B? Does anyone ever worry about growing up on the grounds that this is what will happen to them? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Mon Apr 9 09:36:55 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 01:36:55 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query Message-ID: <00d301c77a8b$4f9d9a40$0200a8c0@Nano> Hello, I just completed my demo (or sample) reel, a compilation of my best art/animations made into one film. I have uploaded it to my webpage for your viewing here: http://www.nanogirl.com/demoreel.htm and don't forget I always look forward to your comments! http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-demo-reel.html P.S> On a separate matter: I was wondering if any of you Extropy list superstars would be willing to make a statement about me (my work: nano/animations/personality etc.) to be used in quotes for my presskit and resume and perhaps later work. You guys know me best and I would really appreciate your help! Thanks to Natasha for this idea, I first saw an example of it on her website - she's always got those great ideas! Warm regards, Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 9 12:41:41 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 08:41:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Brain chips In-Reply-To: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070409084116.04493d88@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> http://www.popsci.com/popsci/printerfriendly/science/0e54d952c97b1110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html Keith From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 9 15:48:15 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:48:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien granting > your request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ 12,000 > entity that the alien names Isador which just so happens to have > incredibly complete biographical information about you? The difference is that in case (A) there is a living being that remembers being me, and that's all you could ask for of survival; in case (B) there is not. I've been having variations of this debate on this list and elsewhere for well over a decade and I must admit that yours is the most popular interpretation, but I confess even after all these years I still don't get it. What is obvious to most people is clear as mud to me. I have concluded that one of two things must be true: 1) I have a congenital mental defect, like dyslexia or those people that can't recognize faces; in my case I am totally blind to a threat to survival that is very obvious to most people. 2) You and most people see a threat to survival that in fact does not exist. My point was that it doesn't really matter which of the above two statements is true, right or wrong in the future people (or Jupiter Brains) with my viewpoint will vastly outnumber people with yours. John K Clark From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Mon Apr 9 17:48:48 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 10:48:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> Olga Bourlin wrote: >Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future: > >http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2053020,00.html > That certainly begs for a positive alternative -- especially the part about British arms sales to Saudi Arabia. I've begun to believe that the way we state things can positively correlate with they way they manifest, possibly in a causal manner. So to express my intention: None of this grim vision has to be. -- Thomas From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 9 21:40:18 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:40:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:48 AM 4/9/2007 -0700, Thomas wrote: >Olga Bourlin wrote: > > >Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future: > > > >http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2053020,00.html > > >That certainly begs for a positive alternative -- especially the part >about British arms sales to Saudi Arabia. >I've begun to believe that the way we state things can positively >correlate with they way they manifest, possibly in a causal manner. So >to express my intention: None of this grim vision has to be. -- Thomas "It singles out Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative market for British arms, with unemployment levels of 20% and a "youth bulge" in a state whose population has risen from 7 million to 27 million since 1980." That's just shy of a 4 fold population increase in 26 years. Virtually all of Saudi Arabia's food is imported, swapped for oil. Anyone have an idea of how many that part of the world could support without food imports? Keith From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 9 21:56:55 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 14:56:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <15A71117-3028-4E99-A319-A59C93DAD5AB@mac.com> Message-ID: <263300.61344.qm@web37406.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Samantha, Consider that there *appears* to be nothing in the laws of physics that would prevent me from winning the next Powerball drawing (as several humans have achieved this). As far as I can tell, me winning the Powerball should not require that I "impose my will on the Universe". And consistent with that, there appears to be nothing in the laws of physics that would prevent me from selecting the winning numbers. You appear to believe in free will, so I presume you believe that I have free and valid choices in what numbers I select. And there is nothing terribly complicated about selecting from 9 numbers. Should I buy a single ticket and expect with 100% certainty that I will win. After all, I "willed" that I would choose the correct numbers that would win. Should I expect with 1% certainty that I will win? Surely free will is worth at least 1% of my decision-making. If so, I'll just buy 100 different, willfully chosen tickets next time. :-) . But, according to the jackpot probabilities, free will accounts for far, far less than 1% of my decision-making. If absolute free will exists, why can't I have everything I want that is not excluded by the fundamental laws of physics? If you believe free will is partially limited and not absolute, what justification can you provide to show that the limitations extend "here, but no further" ? Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Samantha Atkins wrote: > > On Apr 4, 2007, at 8:41 PM, A B wrote: > > > Hi Thomas, > > > > Could you somehow rephrase your > objection/question, > > I'm afraid I don't really understand it. > Exceptional > > reading comprehension is not one of my strengths. > > > > The point that I'm trying to make is that if "free > > will" (as it is commonly interpreted) really > exists > > (which I don't believe at all) then perhaps we > should > > all acknowledge that it is quite limited (severely > in > > my opinion). If it were not limited, I would have > > everything I've ever wanted, no matter how > > fantastical. > > What? Free will is about being able to choose > between alternatives, > including alternative courses of action. It is not > remotely about > being able to impose your will on the universe. > > - s > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 22:55:45 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:55:45 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/10/07, John K Clark wrote: > > "Lee Corbin" > > > Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien > granting > > your request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ > 12,000 > > entity that the alien names Isador which just so happens to have > > incredibly complete biographical information about you? > > The difference is that in case (A) there is a living being that remembers > being me, and that's all you could ask for of survival; in case (B) there > is > not. > I would have said A and B are equivalent, provided the biographical information is of a first person form, which "incredibly complete" seems to imply. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 9 22:59:36 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 15:59:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Coherent Ethics (To: Jef) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <178109.32334.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear Jef, I would genuinely like to understand your more-coherent model of ethics, especially in light of the fact that it has met with some agreement on this list. Would you consider describing it again as simply and completely as you can? (This is a sincere request, I'm not aiming to criticize your writing style). I'll be the first to admit that I am not naturally talented with complex ethical constructs. I simply want our future to be a wonderful place for all the conscious beings who can be saved, but I admit that I don't have an unwavering definition for what "wonderful" is. I'm definitely open to hearing and considering all alternatives models. As always, feel free not to respond if you don't want to. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Bored stiff? Loosen up... Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games. http://games.yahoo.com/games/front From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Apr 9 23:39:00 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 16:39:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Coherent Ethics (To: Jef) In-Reply-To: <178109.32334.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <178109.32334.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, A B wrote: > > Dear Jef, > > I would genuinely like to understand your > more-coherent model of ethics, especially in light of > the fact that it has met with some agreement on this > list. Would you consider describing it again as simply > and completely as you can? (This is a sincere request, > I'm not aiming to criticize your writing style). I'll > be the first to admit that I am not naturally talented > with complex ethical constructs. I simply want our > future to be a wonderful place for all the conscious > beings who can be saved, but I admit that I don't have > an unwavering definition for what "wonderful" is. I'm > definitely open to hearing and considering all > alternatives models. > > As always, feel free not to respond if you don't want > to. > > Best Wishes, > > Jeffrey Herrlich Jeffrey - I'll reply offlist in some detail as soon as I can (today or tomorrow. I expect.) It might be interesting and worth a few hours to step you through it. Of course you can also search the archives... - Jef From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 10 06:00:39 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:00:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <004e01c77b35$94e22440$42084e0c@MyComputer> Stathis Papaioannou Wrote: > I would have said A and B are equivalent, provided the biographical > information is of a first person form, which "incredibly complete" seems > to imply. You are absolutely correct, I misread Lee Corbin post. My request was that the alien kill me (whatever Lee means by that term) and replace me with an entity with an IQ of 12,00 that has "incredibly complete biographical information" about me. Changing my name to Isador seems a small price to pay for immortality. John K Clark From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 10 13:18:40 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:18:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/9/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > Virtually all of Saudi Arabia's food is imported, swapped for oil. Anyone > have an idea of how many that part of the world could support without food > imports? It depends upon whether they invested in desalination plants to grow fresh water crops or invested in solar ponds to grow fish, shrimp, etc. in salt water. It isn't as if they *lack* sufficient sunlight to feed themselves. Indeed it is one of the world's richest countries in this respect. See [1]. I suspect that the reason there is so much unemployment is that the government simply has not adopted policies reflective of dealing with the situation when the oil runs out. It isn't like they couldn't afford to build the plants or the ponds -- but I think the culture is set up such that that work would be done by workers imported from poorer countries. Robert 1. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/Papers/SW.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 10 15:56:06 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:56:06 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > "Lee Corbin" > >> Yes. Now, would you explain the difference between (A) the Alien granting >> your request and (B) the alien killing you, and then creating an IQ 12,000 >> entity that the alien names Isador which just so happens to have >> incredibly complete biographical information about you? > > The difference is that in case (A) there is a living being that remembers > being me, and that's all you could ask for of survival; in case (B) there is > not. I totally agree with you about the cruciality of the requirement "a being who remembers being you". In fact, many years ago I called any such being a "memory superset", and declared that I was any and all of my memory supersets, regardless of how many copies they were, or whether they also included trillions of other people's memories on an equal footing with mine. I changed my mind a couple of decades ago. Your simple characterization of (A) seems to me to leave out important information. Recall that in describing (A) in my original post I also wrote >> The only issue," he goes on, "is that some of you may have a problem about >> identity. You see, the moment that your IQ becomes 12,000 and you know >> everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms that >> you used to be, you no longer resemble the same person that you used to >> be at all, any more than you currently resemble the fetus that you were >> eight months before birth. That's important! Take "you know everything about Earth history and the pitifully primitive life forms you used to be" very, very broadly. Doesn't it bother you, before you jump up and say "TAKE ME!", that perhaps you have been taken in by the *form* of my last sentence in which I said "you [sic] know everything about... forms you [sic] used to be." All that is really being postulated is the existence of an IQ 12000 entity who has vivid recall of what happened to me on every day of my life, and what happened to Max More on every day of his life, and, yes, what happened to John Clark on every day of his life. You don't see any problem at all here? You don't worry that this vast entity actually isn't "you", not really? The phrase "remembers being you" is now, to me, full of hazard and ambiguity. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 10 16:09:36 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:09:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes > Example: A single brain houses person A's memories and beliefs. If we wanted we > could rewire that brain so that person A's beliefs and memories would be replaced > by person B's memories and beliefs. Result? Personal identity has definitely > changed but not the fact that the brain has not died. > > If personal identity and staying alive were one and the same, then a change in > personal identity would have to cause brain death. Well, we did hash that out at length, and it seems to me that you and I just cannot be reconciled on this. To me (and a number of others here) brain death per se has nothing whatsoever to do with death or loss of personal survival, because we are functionalists and quasi-functionalists and you are not. To me, my brain could be anniliated, so long as there was a stack of punched cards somewhere that retained the information of how it was glued together, and plans were in place to write a program that would have my same approximate intelligence and have all my memories: I would not consider this ANYTHING LIKE DEATH. The program would, for me, be me quite adequately. (Where I went on to disagree with *most* of the people here, and always have, is whether this new program that "remembers being me" is fully me if --- just as in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus --- the "real" me, i.e., the original brain, is then revealed to not have been destroyed at all, but sequestered in a nearby hotel room.) Lee From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 10 17:06:13 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 13:06:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" >The phrase "remembers being you" > is now, to me, full of hazard and ambiguity. Well sure it is, but it's good enough to get the job done. Ambiguous it may be but I sort of remember being a thirteen year old John Clark, and that's good enough to make me think that boy is not dead. > All that is really being postulated is the existence of an IQ 12000 entity > who has vivid recall of what happened to me on every day of my life, and > what happened to Max More on every day of his life, and, yes, what > happened to John Clark on every day of his life. Then I've survived, if the 12,000 IQ entity remembers being other people too (and I'd be surprised if he didn't) then they've also survived. A 12,000 IQ is a lot of horsepower, that's enough to be me and a lot of other people as well. > You don't see any problem at all here? No I don't. > You don't worry that this vast > entity actually isn't "you", not really? I can honestly say that I don't worry about that at all. Perhaps my inability to see a problem is due to my stupidity, perhaps it is due to my brilliance, it doesn't matter; either way my style of thinking is that of the future, your style will become extinct in less than a century. John K Clark From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Apr 10 18:07:35 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:07:35 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> On 4/10/07, John K Clark wrote: > > either way my style of thinking is that of > the future, your style will become extinct in less than a century. > Which is fine as make-believe; the problem is when people start getting it confused with real life. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Apr 10 18:18:39 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:18:39 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? In-Reply-To: <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> The "12,000 IQ superbeing" discussed in Lee's thread brings up another interesting issue: what does 12,000 IQ really mean? Clearly we are not interested in its ability to solve IQ tests, where it would do 793 standard deviations above us. Even constructing such a test would require a long chain of ultrabright entities (make a normal IQ test, callibrate it. Then make a test that is very hard, and callibrate its scores so that if you get X points on a normal IQ test and Y on this, you get the same IQ. Then continue the chain upwards). In fact, having these ultrabrigths around would change the population mean and undermine the point of IQ scores. The real meaning of the statement is probably along the lines of having lots and lots of g, general intelligence. But it is not entirely clear how to compare that. One could imagine putting various beings into competition where they play randomly selected games neither has ever seen before. Their ELO scores would to some extent general intelligence over the domain of these games. The problem is that that domain may be rather narrow. The no free lunch theorems show that a general intelligence that is applicable to all domains does not exist. So we have to select a reasonable subset, and that is iffy: what maked a "reasonable" game? Chess? Buying and smuggling drugs in South-East Asia? Winning the war on terrorism? Coloring maps on Calabi-Yau manifolds? In many of these domains certain cognitive architectures would be at a total disadvantage (it is so easy to overload human working memory). Many domains probably have a kind of understanding limit where a sufficiently smart mind can understand all relevant aspects of them and achieve desired goals efficiently. There are also clearly domains where there is no structure at all and no amount of smarts help. And there is the usual wonderful mess of intermediate domains where it may be impossible to tell how close you are to encompassing them (it is more or less Godel-Chaitin land). The effort it takes to understand a domain may still be nontrivial even when you have enough general smarts, and this is why we often prefer to learn from teachers, textbooks or letting an expert do the job. Sure, I *could* learn quantum chromodynamics, but when the physicist upstairs already knows it it makes more sense for me to ask her to solve my problem than to spend my valuable time on it - we all benefit from division of labour and comparative advantage. I would bet this is true among the superbeings too. Why reinvent the wheel all the time when you can specialize? And that suggests that all that enormous, wonderful general intelligence tends to be crystalized among them too. One IQ 12,000 being will know everything worth knowing about clenchirations in armiphlanges (and a million other subjects), another will be the corresponding master of usulism as applied to road planning. If past history is a guide, the number of domains of human activity is increasing tremendously. Many domains do not appear to be terribly complex, but there are so many of them. We cannot google them all to do them. With even greater brains (and posthuman bodies and extraterrestrial environments) that number of domains would expand enormously. Even if general intelligence can conquer them all given time and motivation, I would suspect that there will never be enough time (and economics). Compared to the range of domains most of us are acting in today, posthumans might actually appear terribly specialised. But thanks to the distributed nature of knowledge, if you ever asked the IQ 12,000 being about usulism, it would probably efficiently get the answer from its relative so quickly that we would think it knew it all along. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From randall at randallsquared.com Tue Apr 10 20:20:20 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:20:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> On Apr 10, 2007, at 2:07 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 4/10/07, John K Clark wrote: > either way my style of thinking is that of > the future, your style will become extinct in less than a century. > > Which is fine as make-believe; the problem is when people start > getting it confused with real life. > Really? I'd love to hear your reasons for thinking that this is unlikely or not worth considering. While I disagree with John about personal identity, I do agree that selection will favor those who agree with him that process survival is unimportant. This puts me in an awkward position, as I'm sure you understand. -- Randall Randall "If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Apr 10 21:26:55 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:26:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: > Heartland writes > >> Example: A single brain houses person A's memories and beliefs. If we wanted we >> could rewire that brain so that person A's beliefs and memories would be >> replaced >> by person B's memories and beliefs. Result? Personal identity has definitely >> changed but not the fact that the brain has not died. >> >> If personal identity and staying alive were one and the same, then a change in >> personal identity would have to cause brain death. > > Well, we did hash that out at length, and it seems to me that you and I > just cannot be reconciled on this. To me (and a number of others here) > brain death per se has nothing whatsoever to do with death or loss of > personal survival, because we are functionalists and quasi-functionalists > and you are not. To me, my brain could be anniliated, so long as there > was a stack of punched cards somewhere that retained the information > of how it was glued together, and plans were in place to write a program > that would have my same approximate intelligence and have all my > memories: I would not consider this ANYTHING LIKE DEATH. > The program would, for me, be me quite adequately. > (Where I went on to disagree with *most* of the people here, and always > have, is whether this new program that "remembers being me" is fully me > if --- just as in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus --- the "real" > me, i.e., the original brain, is then revealed to not have been destroyed at all, > but sequestered in a nearby hotel room.) > > Lee There are two extreme views regarding survival being represented on this list. There is my "life is an instance" view and Jef Albright's "agency" view which is nothing more than "life is a type" view extrapolated to its logical conclusion. IMO, only these two positions are logically consistent, yet mutually exclusive and impossible to reconcile. It's quite apparent that you fall somewhere in between, meaning that, to some extent, you've adopted both positions. Even though you acknowledge that a copy containing your memories would be you, you still see a problem with this if the original brain was "revealed to not have been destroyed at all." Either there can be at most one "the same" person or many "same" persons. Either life is essentially an instance or a type. Either life is a process or just data. One excludes the other and you can't have it both ways. Unless you commit to either Jef's view or mine, you are guaranteed to be puzzled by certain scenarios about personal identity. From what I've seen you're probably much closer to my position then you realize. H. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 10 23:15:39 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:15:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <031701c77bc6$82cf4030$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Anders writes to examine the "interesting question" > what does 12,000 IQ really mean? > Clearly we are not interested in its ability to solve IQ tests, where it > would do 793 standard deviations above us. Even constructing such a test > would require a long chain of ultrabright entities (make a normal IQ test, > callibrate it. Then make a test that is very hard, and callibrate its > scores so that if you get X points on a normal IQ test and Y on this, you > get the same IQ. Then continue the chain upwards). Right. But I think that you have also to maintain the same amount of gene diversity as you go along, because today's "IQ 100" is based upon having administered tests to a *lot* of Europeans. But the standard deviation, as opposed to the mean, depends on diversity. (I can't think of what would correspond to "gene diversity" among uploaded and vastly more intelligent entities; but perhaps it doesn't matter; we are more interesting in the capability and behavior of an entity who is rightfully characterized in some way as having an IQ of 12,000.) > In fact, having these ultrabrigths around would change the population > mean and undermine the point of IQ scores. Yes, it would have to be an incremental process of some sort, if you *really* wanted to be able to get to 12,000 and have a bunch of, say, Chinese researchers end up at the same place you do. Arthur Jensen specifically warns against trying to extend the notion of "cognitive ability" to other species, but what the hell, this is the Extropians list. Even among humans and our closest relations there are interesting results. Ashkenazi Jews have IQs on average of at least 112, and the Kalihari San sport, according to Richard Lynn in the 2006 book "Racial Differences in Intelligence", an average IQ of 56. One might say that the average Bushman is half as smart as a Jew :-) Also, the genius bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi seems to understand about as much as a European four-year old, and so we might go on to say that he's almost half as smart as a human being, or nearly a quarter as smart as an adult European. > The real meaning of the statement is probably along the lines of having > lots and lots of g, general intelligence. But it is not entirely clear > how to compare that. Or what it means. I like your idea here: > One could imagine putting various beings into competition where they > play randomly selected games neither has ever seen before. Their > ELO scores would to some extent general intelligence over the domain > of these games. The problem is that that domain may be rather narrow. Another idea I've had is to just pit them against each other in life and death struggles. Up to now, of course, with non-trivial intelligence being such a recent development, such struggles are too over- determined by inborn physical equipment (e.g. claws and teeth) and too little dependent on cognitive ability. Stephen Hawking would have no chance against a tiger. That is, sheer muscle or physical development has held the key to victory in all such encounters. But with the advent of nanotech and control of matter at all levels, survival contests between very smart entities of the future will be a battle of wits, and that ultimately could be the best way to measure smarts. > If past history is a guide, the number of domains of human activity is > increasing tremendously. Many domains do not appear to be terribly > complex, but there are so many of them. We cannot google them all to do > them. With even greater brains (and posthuman bodies and extraterrestrial > environments) that number of domains would expand enormously. Even if > general intelligence can conquer them all given time and motivation, I > would suspect that there will never be enough time (and economics). > Compared to the range of domains most of us are acting in today, > posthumans might actually appear terribly specialised. Yeah, I'm afraid you're right. Jensen says "Cognitive ability is a lot like money; it doesn't really matter how much you have so long as you have a certain enough." I take him to mean that insofar as ability to accomplish goes (among humans today), an IQ of 130 or 150 or something is all you need. So in the far future, a maximal entity at a certain point in time will extend his control over his environment (probably incorporating it into himself) at a rate proportional to his intelligence. Standing back a ways, this velocity will probably be the speed of light, since the entity would doubtless resort to the Von Neumann probe approach. On the other hand, if we restrict its resources temporarily to, say one cubic meter, or say, to one Jupiter of material, then we may claim that an upper limit of ability must exist. But these levels will be maximal---as you are essentially suggesting above ---and no one of them a maximum. Lee From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Apr 10 23:28:43 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:28:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] question from Ted Berger interview in Pop Sci Message-ID: <10368746.523941176247723137.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> In the Ted Berger interview in Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0e54d952c97b1110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html the writer says the following: "For the past four years, Granacki has been trying to develop circuitry that could translate Berger's equations into electrical pulses. The big mechanical hurdle has been figuring out a way to reduce the amount of heat generated by the transistors so that a chip won't damage healthy brain cells. The solution was to create a more complex version of the same kind of digital circuit that performs computations for a family desktop, except far smaller. "Jeff LaCoss... hands me a working model of the memory chip... lighter than a feather..." What does the writer mean? Do computer digital circuits not produce the same kind of heat as other circuits? Or is its size the reason it doesn't produce too much heat to be placed in the deep interior of the brain? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thanks! PJ From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 00:55:05 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:55:05 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: (Where I went on to disagree with *most* of the people here, and always > have, is whether this new program that "remembers being me" is fully me > if --- just as in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus --- the > "real" > me, i.e., the original brain, is then revealed to not have been destroyed > at all, > but sequestered in a nearby hotel room.) So how does the program's status change if the original you is discovered? Or how would you feel any different if it were revealed to you that, without your knowledge, a copy of you had been made and was living in China for the past year? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 11 01:07:49 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:07:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:18 AM 4/10/2007 -0400, you wrote: >On 4/9/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: >>Virtually all of Saudi Arabia's food is imported, swapped for oil. Anyone >>have an idea of how many that part of the world could support without food >>imports? > >It depends upon whether they invested in desalination plants to grow fresh >water crops I suspect that if it were less expensive to make fresh water out of sea water for crops than it is to export the oil, grow the crops in other locations with low cost water, and ship them back, people would be doing it now. It takes a *lot* of water to grow food, and it is really expensive in terms of energy to make fresh water out of salt. I am well aware that advancing technology could change this picture. >or invested in solar ponds to grow fish, shrimp, etc. in salt water. It >isn't as if they *lack* sufficient sunlight to feed themselves. Indeed it >is one of the world's richest countries in this respect. See [1]. > >I suspect that the reason there is so much unemployment is that the >government simply has not adopted policies reflective of dealing with the >situation when the oil runs out. It isn't like they couldn't afford to >build the plants or the ponds -- but I think the culture is set up such >that that work would be done by workers imported from poorer countries. Think about it this way, when the oil runs out how are they going to power the desalination plants? http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html Which indicates that desalination plants produce water for around $1/cubic meter. Given that it takes about 1000 tons of water to grow a ton of wheat, that would run up the cost of wheat for the water alone to $1000 a ton. Wheat runs about a $100 a ton, and shipping to the mid east might run around $50 a ton. It would still cost them better than 5 times the current cost. http://www.ndwheat.com/buyers/default.asp?ID=287 Interesting way to look at food imports as water imports, and a certain area of the world would be in deep trouble if food imports were shut off. http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_02/uk/dossier/txt32.htm Keith From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 11 00:09:29 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:09:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] question from Ted Berger interview in Pop Sci In-Reply-To: <10368746.523941176247723137.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <10368746.523941176247723137.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: On 4/10/07, pjmanney wrote: > In the Ted Berger interview in Popular Science, > > http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0e54d952c97b1110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html > > the writer says the following: > > "For the past four years, Granacki has been trying to develop circuitry that could translate Berger's equations into electrical pulses. The big mechanical hurdle has been figuring out a way to reduce the amount of heat generated by the transistors so that a chip won't damage healthy brain cells. The solution was to create a more complex version of the same kind of digital circuit that performs computations for a family desktop, except far smaller. > > "Jeff LaCoss... hands me a working model of the memory chip... lighter than a feather..." > > What does the writer mean? Do computer digital circuits not produce the same kind of heat as other circuits? Or is its size the reason it doesn't produce too much heat to be placed in the deep interior of the brain? Heat generation and dissipation in dense electronic circuitry is quite a complex subject, but a specific answer to your question is that digital circuits don't necessarily generate significant heat except for the moments when their transistors are changing between states. This means the more state changes per second, the more heat is generated. What they have in this case is digital signals between the chip and the computer carrying signals in both directions. And they have some form of A-D (analog to digital) and D-A (digital to analog) conversion between the chip and the brain tissue. There are various techniques for reducing heat dissipation in such circuits but there's always a trade-off. For example cutting the operating voltage in half reduces the heat to one fourth, but with detriment to switching speeds (probably not critical here) and noise immunity (probably more important here.) Also, semiconductors require a certain minimum voltage in order to switch at all. In this particular article, they're really only talking about the normal engineering requirements of converting from a prototype in the lab to an implantable device. If your interest is in regard to a futuristic scenario of high performance brain implants, then you would plausibly have only the necessary interface electronics inside the cranium, connected by a hair thin photonic cable to a processing module elsewhere on the body where power and cooling is more convenient. The cable could easily be routed under the skin. If you really needed high powered computing within the cranium, then you would need to have either liquid cooling piped through, or some highly effective heat sink (carbon nanotube fibers could be very effective), possibly terminating in a Mohawk to dissipate the heat. Theoretically, reversible computing can be done with no heat loss at all, but I think that's too far from practice to be worthy of consideration here. FWIW, - Jef From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 03:08:26 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:08:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > "Lee Corbin" > >>The phrase "remembers being you" >> is now, to me, full of hazard and ambiguity. > > Well sure it is, but it's good enough to get the job done. Ambiguous it may > be but I sort of remember being a thirteen year old John Clark, and that's > good enough to make me think that boy is not dead. I doubt that you think that that thirteen year old John Clark being either alive or dead is like 0 or 1. Don't you think that it's a matter of degree? Surely you do not think that the fetus you once were is seriously "you". >> All that is really being postulated is the existence of an IQ 12000 entity >> who has vivid recall of what happened to me on every day of my life, and >> what happened to Max More on every day of his life, and, yes, what >> happened to John Clark on every day of his life. > > Then I've survived, if the 12,000 IQ entity remembers being other people too > (and I'd be surprised if he didn't) then they've also survived. A 12,000 IQ > is a lot of horsepower, that's enough to be me and a lot of other people as > well. I'm glad you are so consistent; it saves many words. To recap, this being Isador with his IQ 12,000 and his unbelievably vast erudition has concerns that you today cannot relate to in the slightest. He spends nothing of his time thinking at all like you have ever thought. The very earliest things that you can remember might as well have happened to another infant, and the memories later added on into you. (Note that this is not true of your high school memories; if we threw a lot of my high school memories into your head, they'd definitely clash with who you are.) Lee P.S. You also have brought up---a couple of times---the evolutionary argument: > Perhaps my inability to see a problem is due to my stupidity, perhaps > it is due to my brilliance, well :-) it might also have more simply to do with you being either wrong or right > it doesn't matter; either way my style of thinking is that of > the future, your style will become extinct in less than a century. Humans and human thinking might very well indeed be extinct within a century. The point is still whether them is us. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 03:25:29 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:25:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes > There are two extreme views regarding survival being represented on this list. Not in my coordinate system! > There is my "life is an instance" view and Jef Albright's "agency" view which is > nothing more than "life is a type" view extrapolated to its logical conclusion. > IMO, only these two positions are logically consistent, yet mutually exclusive and > impossible to reconcile. It's quite apparent that you fall somewhere in between, > meaning that, to some extent, you've adopted both positions. I'm not sure, but you're possibly right. I could very well fall in-between two other positions. I don't remember how Jef answers this key question: I *think* that he said that you could kill him and replace him by an exact duplicate that you made last night, and it would be no skin off his nose because the resulting entity would be just as good for future progress as he is. And maybe he said that whether it was him didn't really matter at all, even if that concept could be rescued. If I'm right, then maybe he'd like to answer whether it would matter to him if he were to be killed and replaced by a brand spanking new (and improved IQ) version of Max More who suddenly becomes enamored of all Jef Albright's points of view, and is slated to do a fantastically better job of promulgating those ideas into the future than Jef himself is. Again, *if* I recall correctly, Jef is noble and selfless enough to find the act of being so replaced to be quite desirable on the whole (save, I suppose for the effects on his family, etc.) > Even though you acknowledge that a copy containing your memories > would be you, you still see a problem with this if the original brain was > "revealed to not have been destroyed at all." Ah, no, you misunderstand. I think that you just misremember. To me that is no *problem* at all. It's all the better! I'm much happier to see that there are now two of me than only one of me. Whether you unveil to me a duplicate you made of me 5 minutes ago changes not a whit the fact (to me) that I am 99.9999999999% the same Lee Corbin that I was 5 minutes ago. > Either there can be at most one "the same" person or many "same" persons. > Either life is essentially an instance or a type. Either life is a process or just > data. One excludes the other and you can't have it both ways. I definitely agree with you that it is *process*. Static data is useless if it doesn't get runtime. > Unless you commit to either Jef's view or mine, you are guaranteed to be > puzzled by certain scenarios about personal identity. So say you. Bring one on! (I am indeed puzzled by one that since 1986 I have called "the anticipation paradox", but it's pretty elaborate and I don't think I've ever reached the point on this list where anyone so totally agreed with me that I have brought it up. Besides, the upshot is just--- so far as I've been able to work it out---our inborn instinct to *anticipate* what is about to happen to us from moment to moment cannot be made into any consistent urge or activity.) Lee From brent.allsop at comcast.net Wed Apr 11 03:24:50 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:24:50 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query In-Reply-To: <00d301c77a8b$4f9d9a40$0200a8c0@Nano> References: <00d301c77a8b$4f9d9a40$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <461C5502.1090505@comcast.net> Gina, Wow. As usual, that was very fun to watch. Thanks! Brent Allsop Gina Miller wrote: > Hello, I just completed my demo (or sample) reel, a compilation of my > best art/animations made into one film. > I have uploaded it to my webpage for your viewing here: > http://www.nanogirl.com/demoreel.htm > > and don't forget I always look forward to your comments! > http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-demo-reel.html > > P.S> On a separate matter: > I was wondering if any of you Extropy list superstars would be willing to > make a statement about me (my work: nano/animations/personality etc.) > to be used in quotes for my presskit and resume and perhaps later work. > You guys know me best and I would really appreciate your help! > Thanks to Natasha for this idea, I first saw an example of it on her > website - she's always got those great ideas! > > Warm regards, > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org > 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 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 03:34:08 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:34:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <032d01c77bea$f235e310$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > (Where I went on to disagree with *most* of the people here, and always > > have, is whether this new program that "remembers being me" is fully me > > if --- just as in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus --- the "real" > > me, i.e., the original brain, is then revealed to not have been destroyed at all, > > but sequestered in a nearby hotel room.) > > So how does the program's status change if the original you is discovered? Sorry, I just answered that in a post to Heartland. You can reply to any of that which seems inconsistent or potentially so. > Or how would you feel any different if it were revealed to you that, without > your knowledge, a copy of you had been made and was living in China for > the past year? It would not affect the status of the California Lee one iota! Actually (as I said to Heartland), it would be gratifying to know that I was getting runtime in China as well as here. Of course, if the life there was not worth living, then I'd be unhappy that the 2006 China duplication had occurred. Also, if it now turned out that China Lee has been immediately drafted into the People's Democratic Army and subjected to such profound change (like having to learn Chinese and having to become an Army-type and having to completely forget my life here and having utterly no time to do the things I used to do or think about the things I used to...) well, I would not be *unhappy* that China Lee lives. Better he lives (for him) than he doesn't live, but by now he's possibly no longer like me at all. Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 03:41:32 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:41:32 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Heartland wrote: There are two extreme views regarding survival being represented on this > list. > There is my "life is an instance" view and Jef Albright's "agency" view > which is > nothing more than "life is a type" view extrapolated to its logical > conclusion. > IMO, only these two positions are logically consistent, yet mutually > exclusive and > impossible to reconcile. It's quite apparent that you fall somewhere in > between, > meaning that, to some extent, you've adopted both positions. Even though > you > acknowledge that a copy containing your memories would be you, you still > see a > problem with this if the original brain was "revealed to not have been > destroyed at > all." Either there can be at most one "the same" person or many "same" > persons. > Either life is essentially an instance or a type. Either life is a process > or just > data. One excludes the other and you can't have it both ways. Unless you > commit to > either Jef's view or mine, you are guaranteed to be puzzled by certain > scenarios > about personal identity. From what I've seen you're probably much closer > to my > position then you realize. Your "life is an instance" view comes up against serious problems when you look at personal identity at anything other than than the most superficial, familiar level. For example, if it were revealed to you that yesterday, advanced aliens caused you to disintegrate and be replaced with a functionally identical copy once every second, you would presumably be outraged, and accuse the aliens of committing murder 86,400 times. But here you are today, and what have you lost? Neither you nor anyone who knows you noticed anything unusual happening yesterday, and today you feel just the same as you have always felt. For all you know, the aliens might still be at it, and they might have been at it for thousands of years with every living creature on the planet. What is the point in calling it murder if it can't make any possible difference? Stathis Papaioannou Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 03:44:27 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:44:27 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: So say you. Bring one on! (I am indeed puzzled by one that since 1986 > I have called "the anticipation paradox", but it's pretty elaborate and I > don't think I've ever reached the point on this list where anyone so > totally > agreed with me that I have brought it up. Besides, the upshot is just--- > so far as I've been able to work it out---our inborn instinct to > *anticipate* > what is about to happen to us from moment to moment cannot be made > into any consistent urge or activity.) Please explain this, I'm interested. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 03:51:59 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:51:59 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? In-Reply-To: <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: If past history is a guide, the number of domains of human activity is > increasing tremendously. Many domains do not appear to be terribly > complex, but there are so many of them. We cannot google them all to do > them. With even greater brains (and posthuman bodies and extraterrestrial > environments) that number of domains would expand enormously. Even if > general intelligence can conquer them all given time and motivation, I > would suspect that there will never be enough time (and economics). > Compared to the range of domains most of us are acting in today, > posthumans might actually appear terribly specialised. But thanks to the > distributed nature of knowledge, if you ever asked the IQ 12,000 being > about usulism, it would probably efficiently get the answer from its > relative so quickly that we would think it knew it all along. You could consider human civilization as a whole as a black box which considers problems and comes up with solutions. Would it make sense to talk about a collective IQ for this black box? If so, what might this IQ be? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 04:17:47 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:17:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <034701c77bf0$920dbd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > Bring one on! (I am indeed puzzled by one that since 1986 > > I have called "the anticipation paradox", but it's pretty elaborate and I > > don't think I've ever reached the point on this list where anyone so totally > > agreed with me that I have brought it up. Besides, the upshot is just--- > > so far as I've been able to work it out---our inborn instinct to *anticipate* > > what is about to happen to us from moment to moment cannot be made > > into any consistent urge or activity.) > > Please explain this, I'm interested. Okay, I'll write it up. Two earlier efforts many years ago were not satisfactory; one, in the Venturist, was so terse and abbriviated that it was very hard to follow. The second I tried to embed in an SF story, but never finished it. So I'll put it in a new thread. Thanks for your interest, and it's true that you and I agree enough that you won't choke at the first few assumptions I make in it. Lee From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 11 05:02:08 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:02:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > I'm glad you are so consistent; it saves many words. Thanks, I'm either consistently right or consistently wrong but either way my way of thinking is that of the future, your way is as dead as the Dodo. > Surely you do not think that the fetus you once were is seriously "you". But that was exactly my point. I am certain you don't consider it a great tragedy that a fetus turned into an adult Lee Corbin, so why is it a great tragedy if the adult Lee Corbin turns into something greater? > To recap, this being Isador with his IQ 12,000 and his unbelievably vast > erudition has concerns that you today cannot relate to in the slightest. Correct, it's called growth. > He spends nothing of his time thinking at all like you have ever thought. Nothing? With an IQ of 12,000 and counting he can afford to think about all sorts of things. Who knows, Isador might even get a bit nostalgic from time to time and put .001% of his brainpower thinking about the good old days. > The very earliest things that you can remember might as well have happened > to another infant, and the memories later added on into you. But again you are making my point for me. You don't consider that a tragedy so if you are consistent there is no need to worry about turning into a Jupiter Brain. > Humans and human thinking might very well indeed be extinct within a > century. I'd say it's a virtual certainty, and probably in less than half a century. > The point is still whether them is us. Well they certainly won't be you given your reluctance to engage in pedal to the metal upgrading, but if I'm astronomically lucky they might be me. At least I have a chance, you have none. John K Clark From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 05:37:41 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:37:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Heartland: >> There is my "life is an instance" view and Jef Albright's "agency" view which is >> nothing more than "life is a type" view extrapolated to its logical conclusion. >> IMO, only these two positions are logically consistent, yet mutually exclusive >> and >> impossible to reconcile. It's quite apparent that you fall somewhere in between, >> meaning that, to some extent, you've adopted both positions. Lee: > I'm not sure, but you're possibly right. I could very well fall in-between > two other positions. I don't remember how Jef answers this key question: > I *think* that he said that you could kill him and replace him by an > exact duplicate that you made last night, and it would be no skin off > his nose because the resulting entity would be just as good for future > progress as he is. I think that is correct. A standard "life is a type" view that majority of transhumanists subscribe to which he upgraded to.... > And maybe he said that whether it was him didn't > really matter at all, ..as long as it was some "agent" promoting the same mix of values he used to promote. Heartland: >> Even though you acknowledge that a copy containing your memories >> would be you, you still see a problem with this if the original brain was >> "revealed to not have been destroyed at all." Lee: > Ah, no, you misunderstand. I think that you just misremember. To me > that is no *problem* at all. It's all the better! I'm much happier to see > that there are now two of me than only one of me. Whether you unveil > to me a duplicate you made of me 5 minutes ago changes not a whit > the fact (to me) that I am 99.9999999999% the same Lee Corbin that > I was 5 minutes ago. Okay, so you see no problem with assigning single identity to many people after all. Heartland: >> Either there can be at most one "the same" person or many "same" persons. >> Either life is essentially an instance or a type. Either life is a process or >> just >> data. One excludes the other and you can't have it both ways. Lee: > I definitely agree with you that it is *process*. Static data is useless if > it doesn't get runtime. And this is why I regard process as the substance of life. The *type* of that process is only how we describe it, yet people treat *that* as the thing that is necessary and sufficient to preserve in order to survive. A classic example of an abstract symbol being mistaken for the thing it refers to. A collection of static data describing personal experiences, values and beliefs is being mistaken for the physical process that allows this collection to exist. While many instances (lives) can share the same type (personal identity) and death of a single instance doesn't necessarily kill the type, the expired instance does not survive just because other instances of the same type do. Each life is an instance therefore "life extension" should be about extending runtime of an instance (perhaps through gradual uploading) instead of being about extending the type of instance (destructive uploading, cryonics). So, if you agree that process itself is far more important than its label (static data), then why do you think that staying alive is ensured by preserving that label (type/personal identity) instead of preserving the process itself (instance/life)? H. From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 11 05:53:07 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:53:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Ok let's think about this logically and unemotionally. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Lee Corbin philosophy is correct; what would be the result? You're dead meat. You can't upgrade so soon you'll be surrounded beings enormously more powerful than yourself, and you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the Singularity meat grinder. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that John Clark's philosophy is correct, what would be the result? You instantly agree to upgrade at every opportunity, and you still probably won't survive the Singularity meat grinder, but at least you have a chance. So, what would be the smart philosophy to embrace? Given the choice between no chance and slim chance I'll pick slim chance any day. John K Clark From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 06:18:54 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 02:18:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Stathis: > Your "life is an instance" view comes up against serious problems when you > look at personal identity at anything other than than the most superficial, > familiar level. For example, if it were revealed to you that yesterday, > advanced aliens caused you to disintegrate and be replaced with a > functionally identical copy once every second, you would presumably be > outraged, and accuse the aliens of committing murder 86,400 times. But here > you are today, and what have you lost? You are correct that every copy of Heartland's type would accuse aliens of mass murder. However, the error you're making in describing my position is that you're using "you" for every copy. In my view, all 86401 *instances* are separate people who only happen to share the same *type* of mind. The fact that they all share the same type of mind says nothing about whether all these instances are the same person. The "serious problem" or inconsistency you point to vanishes once I start referring to first Heartland as Heartland1 and the last as Heartland86401. So no, Heartland86401 is not the Heartland1 today. And what would Heartland1 lose? Well, he would lose his life. You think of "you" as a type while I think of "you" as an instance, that's all. Stathis: > Neither you nor anyone who knows you > noticed anything unusual happening yesterday, and today you feel just the > same as you have always felt. For all you know, the aliens might still be at > it, and they might have been at it for thousands of years with every living > creature on the planet. What is the point in calling it murder if it can't > make any possible difference? Just because nobody could prove murder happened doesn't imply murder didn't happen. It happened. It's just that we can't prove it. The difference is huge. Heartland1-Heartland86400 have all lost the ability to experience life. They're as dead as, say, John Lennon. H. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 06:26:33 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:26:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) Message-ID: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> The Anticipation Dilemma This discussion will be of little or no use to anyone who does not subscribe to the following assumptions. If you wish to discuss these *assumptions* (all except the last, which is developed further below), either start a new thread with a different title, or write me off-list. Thanks. * the erasure of memories is not an identity-threatening transformation, provided that they are on the order of days or perhaps even a very few years, and you would agree to memory erasure of at least a few days in exchange for suitable monetary reward * duplicates are selves; you would readily agree to die and be replaced by a duplicate of you frozen yesterday and lying in a slab of ice in the next room, if either you or he must be destroyed, and if $10M will be deposited to your bank account tomorrow if it's "you" who dies and "he" who is defrosted and gets to live. We agree that except for one day's memories, you and he are totally identical persons, and so the situation is *exactly* like for $10M agreeing to take a drug that would erase your last 24 hours' memory * because duplicates are selves, as a close duplicate is undergoing an experience X, an instance of you says "even though memories are not being formed *here* at this location of experience X, I am nonetheless forming memories of them because my duplicate is myself; just because the experience is not happening here does not mean it is not happening to me" * insofar as "anticipation"---that is, the feeling of imminent experience about to happen to one---an instance of you also anticipates what is about to happen to close duplicates. As a close duplicate is about to undergo a dreadful experience X, you must consistently try to conjure up the same dread as if this instance (yourself here) itself were being threatened by X * you could conceivably be living in a deterministic simulation, and that from an objective point of view (say by the simulators in a basement level universe) *this* could be the 2nd, 3rd, or nth computation, all bestowing equal additional benefit to you as each run is processed * in principle there could exist a God or an all-knowing being (say an entity simulating the universe you are living in) who either executes so many runs that He finds ones with exceptional properties, or He can conceive of a run that possesses these properties, and for all you know you could be living in such a run. Alternatively, such a deterministic run could arise from a very lucky set of initial conditions, though equivalent descriptions using "God" are simpler to write * it is possible by an application of Newcomb's Paradox to change the past (from your point of view). In particular, there is still the possibility of changing what actually happened to you (as opposed to merely remember or having certain memories). This is fully explained in http://www.leecorbin.com/UseOfNewcombsParadox.html The next assumption is developed in the essay below: * so one may continue to feel that he has "free will" in some scenarios over what choices he made in the past, effected with the help of memory erasure drugs Granting the above, then, I shall attempt to show that our common feeling of anticipation cannot be consistently rationalized. That is, neither the *dread* you have of certain imminent things about to happen to you, nor the near-Pavlovian *relish* you have of certain other imminent experiences, can be consistently and rationally held from one scenario to the next. And this anticipation is crucial to most of us, and is evidently real part of life. Because of "duplicates are selves", however, it's important to delimit some kinds of anticipation. Suppose for example that you and your duplicate are in nearby beds in a hospital, and you and all your duplicates have internalized that "duplicates are selves". Now Nurse Ratched approaches one of you and says "either you---that is, your particular instance---gets this incredibly painful shot, or your duplicate next to you gets TEN shots, which will it be?". However much we realize that duplicates are selves, our lower level animal instincts forbid us from making consistently the right choice. In other words, even though I *know* that I'll be better off ---more total universal benefit for me---if I want to say "do it to me", I will in fact say "do it to him", at least after enough experiences with Nurse Ratched's needle. But this is not yet the real problem with anticipation, for it can be claimed (and I do) that it is to be expected that the lower, animal parts of our selves will have this almost instinctive response to pain. I do not identify with these lower level aspects of my self, and will edit them out entirely if ever uploaded. The parts of me that I *do* identify with are (a) having a good time (b) learning interesting things (c) delighting in understanding, and so forth. I do not identify with the part of me that is a slave to coercion from pain or with parts of me that are motivated from entirely prurient, crude, depraved, or vulgar stimuli. We come now to the most difficult antimony having to do with identity that has ever vexed me. Suppose that we try to rationalize anticipation---as above---so that, for example, in the preceding example, an instance says to himself "so long as I am able, I will choose one experience of Nurse Ratched's needle, as opposed to ten experiences, because I totally identify with all my duplicates and must logically anticipate what happens to any of them". But since me yesterday is a close duplicate, I must anticipate what happens to him also; therefore, I must look forward to the delicious dinner I had last night as much as I do the one I'm about to have tonight. That's it in a nutshell. Yet there is an argument concerning time that must be overcome. That is, for the sake of completeness, the objection that experiences in the past are somehow different from future experiences has to be addressed. The remainder of this essay is only to justify the foregoing conclusion of this paragraph. That's it; that's the "Anticipation Dilemma". _______________________________________________________________ Why Past Experiences Must be Anticipated as Much as Future Ones It is to be shown in detail that anticipating tonight's repast is no more justified than anticipating last night's, on any ordinary meaning of "anticipate". Suppose that it is the year 999 A.D. and God knows that you will live in the 21st century, and knows all the details of your life. God realizes that on October 1, 2007, you will wish to time-travel back to October 1, 999 A.D., so God decides to cause an exception in the otherwise totally causally deterministic run of that day in 999, in that out of nowhere a 2007 version of you suddenly appears in a small village outside London. Now this isn't so easy for God to calculate, because whatever effects you produce in 999 will causally affect the 21st century. God therefore finds a "fixed point" in which a you comes into being in the 20th or 21st century according to the deterministic calculations that is consistent with some manner of your activities in 999. You live an ordinary day in October 1, 999, presumably having a good time checking out the local history. That night, however, you wish to get back in your time machine and live an ordinary October 2, 2007 back in the twenty- first century. But God has foreseen this (of course), and you do. Likewise on successive days you live alternately in the 10th century and in the 21st century. Suppose on October 3, 999 you schedule a most desirable experience with the locals, either, say a fine repast with the village elders, or perhaps a tryst with one of the fair maidens of the town, and this is to happen on October 5, 999. Then when you are back in the 21st century on October 4, 2007, you reflect on the curiosity that you are actually looking forward to something that formally happened in the past. That's all right, because it's still in your future. Everything proceeds/proceeded exactly in this way. Then another opportunity arises on October 7, 999 A.D. that will be consummated on October 9, 999. But this time there is a twist. On the morning of October 9 back in the medieval village you are to be given/was given an injection that will erase (erased) your last 48 hours of memory. In other words, on the morning of October 9 you will wake up and believe it to be October 7 (until the locals clue you in). The highly desirable event that you relish proceeds anyway, though back in the future on October 8 2007, this all seems stranger still. For you now must look forward to something not only in the past, but which no memory superset of you will ever experience! Yet just because your present memories are to be tampered with, future delights are not any the less appealing. Recall that by agreeing to commit suicide so that your duplicate frozen yesterday gets $10M, you are nonetheless looking forward to all the great things you (as your duplicate) will do with the money. What we have reached is the uncomfortable conclusion that what happens to you (or happened to you) in the past is every bit as worthy of anticipation as events that are scheduled to happen in your future. This demolishes any rational or consistent use of *anticipation* that I have ever been able to formulate. This is most unfortunate, because feelings of anticipation are hardwired at a very fundamental level into our selves and our motivations. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 06:34:34 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:34:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <035401c77c03$7ee0b430$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes >> Surely you do not think that the fetus you once were is seriously "you". > > But that was exactly my point. I am certain you don't consider it a great > tragedy that a fetus turned into an adult Lee Corbin, so why is it a great > tragedy if the adult Lee Corbin turns into something greater? Oh, no! It's no tragedy for *me* that that thing turned into Lee Corbin. But from the point of view of the fetus, it was death; for it became unto something totally unlike itself. >> To recap, this being Isador with his IQ 12,000 and his unbelievably vast >> erudition has concerns that you today cannot relate to in the slightest. > > Correct, it's called growth. For me, growth includes only change that doesn't turn me into someone or something else. And what is "something else"? It's an entity that behaves utterly differently from me and whose values aren't mine and who thinks about completely different things than I do. >> He spends nothing of his time thinking at all like you have ever thought. > > Nothing? With an IQ of 12,000 and counting he can afford to think about all > sorts of things. Who knows, Isador might even get a bit nostalgic from time > to time and put .001% of his brainpower thinking about the good old days. Do you really think that you'd ever spend even .001% of your time dwelling on what it was like being a fetus, even if you could? And if you could, why not spend the time dwelling on what it was like for Lee Corbin to be a fetus instead? The experiences could not have been that different. >> Humans and human thinking might very well indeed be extinct within a >> century. > > I'd say it's a virtual certainty, and probably in less than half a century. I'm still holding out that the global warming hysteria will inflict so much damage on the world's economy that we'll revert to medieval life. But hey, it was nice and warm back then. Too bad my dewar will be allowed to defrost. Lee From sti at pooq.com Wed Apr 11 06:04:27 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 02:04:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <461C7A6B.5030207@pooq.com> John K Clark wrote: > Ok let's think about this logically and unemotionally. Let's suppose for the > sake of argument that Lee Corbin philosophy is correct; what would be the > result? You're dead meat. You can't upgrade so soon you'll be surrounded > beings enormously more powerful than yourself, and you don't stand a > snowball's chance in hell of surviving the Singularity meat grinder. > > Let's suppose for the sake of argument that John Clark's philosophy is > correct, what would be the result? You instantly agree to upgrade at every > opportunity, and you still probably won't survive the Singularity meat > grinder, but at least you have a chance. So, what would be the smart > philosophy to embrace? Given the choice between no chance and slim chance > I'll pick slim chance any day. > While I generally agree with your previous arguments in favour of your definition of identity, I cannot accept the above 'logic'. This is just a redressing of the old argument for believing in God. Either there is a God and worshipping Him will grant you salvation, or this is not and you are doomed. So, worship God, because that is the only hope you have. It didn't convince me as a kid, and it doesn't convince me now. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 06:47:41 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:47:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes >> I'm much happier to see that there are now two of me than only one >> of me. Whether or not you unveil to me a duplicate you made of >> me five minutes ago changes not a whit the fact (to me) that I am >> 99.9999999999% the same Lee Corbin that I was five minutes ago. > > Okay, so you see no problem with assigning single identity to many people after > all. Right, but I don't call them "many people". I see no problem assigning a single identity to many instances of the same person. >> I definitely agree with you that it is *process* [that is essential]. >> Static data is useless if it doesn't get runtime. > > And this is why I regard process as the substance of life. The *type* of that > process is only how we describe it, yet people treat *that* as the thing that is > necessary and sufficient to preserve in order to survive. A classic example of an > abstract symbol being mistaken for the thing it refers to. A collection of static > data describing personal experiences, values and beliefs is being mistaken for the > physical process that allows this collection to exist. I may be failing to understanding, especially the 2nd sentence. Yes, I agree that "process is the substance of life", if I'm reading you okay. So the process is, after all, necessary and sufficient to achieve survival, right? As I recall, though, your answer is "no". An interruption of the process for you is the same as death, right? If I interrupt the process, swap out the atoms, wait a million years and then resume the process, to you that's a different process and so your soul got lost in there somewhere, right? > While many instances (lives) can share the same type (personal identity) and death > of a single instance doesn't necessarily kill the type, the expired instance does > not survive just because other instances of the same type do. In my concepts, the survival of a single instance is relatively unimportant. I live in all my duplicates. The loss of a single one is a tragic loss of runtime, but if the remaining duplicates can garner compensatory runtime some way, it's not a tragedy after all. > Each life is an > instance therefore "life extension" should be about extending runtime of an > instance (perhaps through gradual uploading) instead of being about extending the > type of instance (destructive uploading, cryonics). What on Earth can you have against cryonics? It's just a slowing down of the process, not even a cessation any more than sleep is. Even at liquid nitrogen temperatures, processes proceed (only more slowly). Even the same atoms are used upon re-animation. > So, if you agree that process itself is far more important than its label (static > data), then why do you think that staying alive is ensured by preserving that label > (type/personal identity) instead of preserving the process itself (instance/life)? Yeah, we're hopelessly at odds here. I never did understand or appreciate what distinction you're making. For me two processes can be identical (e.g. two computer runs of the same program). I admit that sometimes we speak loosely---and so say things like *two* causally distinct executions are *two* processes---but insofar as what is important, if I am one of them then I am the other. Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 07:24:02 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:24:02 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Heartland wrote: > > Stathis: > > Your "life is an instance" view comes up against serious problems when > you > > look at personal identity at anything other than than the most > superficial, > > familiar level. For example, if it were revealed to you that yesterday, > > advanced aliens caused you to disintegrate and be replaced with a > > functionally identical copy once every second, you would presumably be > > outraged, and accuse the aliens of committing murder 86,400 times. But > here > > you are today, and what have you lost? > > You are correct that every copy of Heartland's type would accuse aliens of > mass > murder. However, the error you're making in describing my position is that > you're > using "you" for every copy. In my view, all 86401 *instances* are separate > people > who only happen to share the same *type* of mind. The fact that they all > share the > same type of mind says nothing about whether all these instances are the > same > person. The "serious problem" or inconsistency you point to vanishes once > I start > referring to first Heartland as Heartland1 and the last as Heartland86401. > So no, > Heartland86401 is not the Heartland1 today. And what would Heartland1 > lose? Well, > he would lose his life. > > You think of "you" as a type while I think of "you" as an instance, that's > all. Well, I partly agree with you. I consider that ordinary life (without the interfering aliens) is exactly equivalent to dying not just every second, but every moment. The Stathis-type persists while the Stathis-instance lives only transiently: the observer moments. (Bernard Williams' "token" as discussed in Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons" is roughly equivalent to what you are calling an instance.) Each instance is defined by a particular collection of matter in space-time, the next instance in sequence having at least different space-time coordinates and usually different matter in a different configuration. Two instances are related insofar as they are close to each other in spacetime coordinates and configuration, but they cannot by definition be the *same* instance, unless they are one and the same. The further apart two instances are in time, the less similar they are, even though they might still have enough in common to count as the same type; however, there can be no strict rule for defining what is the same type, whereas instances can be defined completely unambiguously. I think what you are calling an instance is really a set of instances, which would qualify as a type. You are suggesting that even though none of the matter in my brain today is the same matter as a year ago, nor in the same configuration, and certainly not sharing the same space-time coordinates, nevertheless I am "the same" person, whereas if I were disintegrated and recreated a nanosecond later out of the same atoms, in the same configuration, I would not be "the same" person. Stathis: > > Neither you nor anyone who knows you > > noticed anything unusual happening yesterday, and today you feel just > the > > same as you have always felt. For all you know, the aliens might still > be at > > it, and they might have been at it for thousands of years with every > living > > creature on the planet. What is the point in calling it murder if it > can't > > make any possible difference? > > Just because nobody could prove murder happened doesn't imply murder > didn't happen. > It happened. It's just that we can't prove it. > > The difference is huge. Heartland1-Heartland86400 have all lost the > ability to > experience life. They're as dead as, say, John Lennon. They are also as dead and gone as your yesterday self. True, you possess some of his matter in a configuration similar enough that you have his memories and sense of identity, but you have already said that isn't enough for survival. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 11 07:31:11 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:31:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <035401c77c03$7ee0b430$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00ee01c77c0b$a72e91c0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > Oh, no! It's no tragedy for *me* that that thing turned into Lee Corbin. > But from the point of view of the fetus, it was death; for it became unto > something totally unlike itself OK, let's average the point of view of an adult man with a somewhat greater than average intelligence, a lot greater actually, with that of a fetus. I have a hunch the adult Lee Corbin would win that election in a landslide. >For me, growth includes only change that doesn't turn me into someone or >something else. But I want to turn into something else, that is the entire point in living. Otherwise growth has no purpose and stagnation is the ultimate virtue. I don't buy it for one second! John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 11 08:09:05 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 04:09:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer><009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <461C7A6B.5030207@pooq.com> Message-ID: <010501c77c10$c2596d30$0e044e0c@MyComputer> "Stirling Westrup" >This is just a redressing of the old argument for believing in God. No it is not. Every one of those arguments for God hinges on the fact that it is the height of morality to demand that something is true when there is absolutely positively nothing to show it is in fact true. I do not think believing in such a thing is a virtue, I think it is a vice of pornographic magnetite. But I could be wrong, so show me my error in my ways. I dare you to try. John K Clark From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 08:16:09 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 04:16:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Heartland: >> Okay, so you see no problem with assigning single identity to many people after >> all. Lee: > Right, but I don't call them "many people". I see no problem assigning > a single identity to many instances of the same person. Yes, that's a better way of putting it. Lee: > Yes, I agree that > "process is the substance of life", if I'm reading you okay. So the process is, > after all, necessary and sufficient to achieve survival, right? As I recall, > though, > your answer is "no". An interruption of the process for you is the same as > death, right? Right. Lee: > If I interrupt the process, swap out the atoms, wait a million > years and then resume the process, to you that's a different process and so > your soul got lost in there somewhere, right? It's the life that ends, not soul. Life is a process and if the process stops, life does not continue unless you believe in souls. I don't which is why I don't believe in resurrections. When you die you stay dead. Heartland: >> Each life is an >> instance therefore "life extension" should be about extending runtime of an >> instance (perhaps through gradual uploading) instead of being about extending >> the >> type of instance (destructive uploading, cryonics). Lee: > What on Earth can you have against cryonics? It's just a slowing down > of the process, not even a cessation any more than sleep is. Even at > liquid nitrogen temperatures, processes proceed (only more slowly). > Even the same atoms are used upon re-animation. Flat EEG means death. It has to. It's the only conclusion that doesn't lead to contradictions. Besides, it's consistent with a belief that there's no such thing as a resurrection. Heartland: >> So, if you agree that process itself is far more important than its label >> (static >> data), then why do you think that staying alive is ensured by preserving that >> label >> (type/personal identity) instead of preserving the process itself >> (instance/life)? Lee: > Yeah, we're hopelessly at odds here. I never did understand or appreciate > what distinction you're making. For me two processes can be identical (e.g. > two computer runs of the same program). I admit that sometimes we speak > loosely---and so say things like *two* causally distinct executions are *two* > processes---but insofar as what is important, if I am one of them then I am > the other. I guess it's one of those either-you-get-it-or-don't kinds of things. Perhaps you might realize and appreciate the difference by focusing on the amount of benefit that each instance derives from existence of other instances. There's no doubt in my mind that this amount is always exactly zero. In other words, if I'm hungry, I will stay hungry regardless of how many other instances fill their stomachs with food. If I'm dead, I will stay dead regardless of how many other instances stay alive. If an instance was alive and then its brain exploded, that instance cannot have any type of experience (cannot derive any benefit) because the "machinery" that made that experience possible is gone. Am I getting anywhere here, Lee? H. From nanogirl at halcyon.com Wed Apr 11 09:01:36 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:01:36 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query References: <00d301c77a8b$4f9d9a40$0200a8c0@Nano> <461C5502.1090505@comcast.net> Message-ID: <02f001c77c18$548fd480$0200a8c0@Nano> Thank you so much Brent! I really appreciate the feedback! Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Brent Allsop To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 7:24 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query Gina, Wow. As usual, that was very fun to watch. Thanks! Brent Allsop Gina Miller wrote: Hello, I just completed my demo (or sample) reel, a compilation of my best art/animations made into one film. I have uploaded it to my webpage for your viewing here: http://www.nanogirl.com/demoreel.htm and don't forget I always look forward to your comments! http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-demo-reel.html P.S> On a separate matter: I was wondering if any of you Extropy list superstars would be willing to make a statement about me (my work: nano/animations/personality etc.) to be used in quotes for my presskit and resume and perhaps later work. You guys know me best and I would really appreciate your help! Thanks to Natasha for this idea, I first saw an example of it on her website - she's always got those great ideas! Warm regards, Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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 asa at nada.kth.se Wed Apr 11 10:01:51 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:01:51 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <51631.86.153.216.201.1176285711.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > You could consider human civilization as a whole as a black box which > considers problems and comes up with solutions. Would it make sense to > talk > about a collective IQ for this black box? If so, what might this IQ be? I think we can certainly talk about the collective intelligence of mankind. Suppose a killer asteroid was detectedl; the resulting hunt for a solution and implementation of it could be regarded as a kind of collective intelligence. A space mission to emplace a mass driver on the asteroid to deflect it would represent a fantastically complex "answer" to the question posed by the asteroid. But IQ is less useful. It is just a measure of how well you do relative to your population. Ideally it should be correlated to general cognitive ability, but we do not have any *absolute* measures of that. So unless we have a way of measuring how well humanity solves problems compared to other species IQ doesn't make much sense. In principle we could make a species IQ by listing a large number of problems, test how a population of species solves them and then rank them in difficulty to make a rough measurement scale. But just as ordinary IQ tests have problems with some cultural differences and assumptions (how important is context? is time going from left to right?) we should expect real problems in making a species independent IQ test. Still, some people are trying to test primates for general intelligence, so maybe it is possible: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep04149196.pdf It might also be possible to look at human societies or nations and see how well they can solve posed problems. Is the US smarter in the sense that it can find solutions to problems than (say) the UK? It would be interesting to see if one could find some good quasiexperiments for this. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Wed Apr 11 10:25:03 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:25:03 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? In-Reply-To: <031701c77bc6$82cf4030$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <031701c77bc6$82cf4030$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <55367.86.153.216.201.1176287103.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Lee Corbin wrote: > Arthur Jensen specifically warns against trying to extend the notion of > "cognitive ability" to other species, but what the hell, this is the > Extropians list. Even among humans and our closest relations there > are interesting results. Ashkenazi Jews have IQs on average of at > least 112, and the Kalihari San sport, according to Richard Lynn > in the 2006 book "Racial Differences in Intelligence", an average IQ > of 56. One might say that the average Bushman is half as smart as > a Jew :-) I would be a bit cautious about those very low IQ scores found in Lynn & Vahanen, just as Satoshi Kanazawa found that Mississippi had 62.7 as average IQ: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/methodologyInstitute/pdf/SKanazawa/I2006.pdf There is a tricky interaction between education, culture and intelligence where they can both support, hinder and hide each other. My guess is that a lot of the very low scores are simply due to lack of education and cultural misunderstandings (see the hillarious dialogue between the great soviet psychologist Luria and an Uzbek farmer: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/484.html ). Still, intelligence as measured early in life does predict educational success, income and professional success fairly well, even if IQ measured in late life may have become a mixture of innate capacity, learned abilities and ability to conform to tests. > Also, the genius bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi seems to > understand about as much as a European four-year old, and so we > might go on to say that he's almost half as smart as a human being, > or nearly a quarter as smart as an adult European. The problem is that IQ is not a ratio scale (no natural zero), it is at best an interval scale. So it doesn't make much sense of calling somebody twice as smart in the IQ sense. And general intelligence is at best ordinal: we might measure greater or lesser intelligence, but it is no way of measuring one unit of intelligence. >> One could imagine putting various beings into competition where they >> play randomly selected games neither has ever seen before. Their >> ELO scores would to some extent general intelligence over the domain >> of these games. The problem is that that domain may be rather narrow. > > Another idea I've had is to just pit them against each other in life and > death struggles. That would be one of the possible domains. Very motivating, but destructive on the participants. I think there is a potential test in Heinlein's quote: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Some of the entries might be more about social or emotional intelligence, but ideally they would correlate with general intelligence. > Yeah, I'm afraid you're right. Jensen says "Cognitive ability is a lot > like > money; it doesn't really matter how much you have so long as you have > a certain enough." I take him to mean that insofar as ability to > accomplish > goes (among humans today), an IQ of 130 or 150 or something is all > you need. My research suggest that low ability is indeed the biggest problem. Once you go below 100 IQ points, problems start to rise rather quickly. Whether there is an advantage in going from 130 to 140 is less obvious. However, at least one study demonstrated that even among the top 1% performers there were significant differences in professional success (PhDs, tenure, income) and number of patents between the top and bottom quartiles. The patent part is interesting, because that is non-competitive: it just represents crystalized creativity and signifies that these people actually do contribute significantly to society. > > So in the far future, a maximal entity at a certain point in time will > extend > his control over his environment (probably incorporating it into himself) > at a rate proportional to his intelligence. Standing back a ways, this > velocity will probably be the speed of light, since the entity would > doubtless > resort to the Von Neumann probe approach. On the other hand, if we > restrict its resources temporarily to, say one cubic meter, or say, to one > Jupiter of material, then we may claim that an upper limit of ability must > exist. > But these levels will be maximal---as you are essentially suggesting above > ---and no one of them a maximum. Communications limitations likely keep expansion limited. It is somewhat uneconomical to have to wait for coordinating one's subsystems. My guess is that entities will instead distribute along some power law distribution: a few really godlike ones, many more godlings, lots of human-level entities and hordes of smaller "animats". -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 11:28:12 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:28:12 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Yet just because your present memories are to be tampered > with, future delights are not any the less appealing. Recall > that by agreeing to commit suicide so that your duplicate > frozen yesterday gets $10M, you are nonetheless looking > forward to all the great things you (as your duplicate) > will do with the money. > > What we have reached is the uncomfortable conclusion that > what happens to you (or happened to you) in the past is > every bit as worthy of anticipation as events that are > scheduled to happen in your future. This demolishes any > rational or consistent use of *anticipation* that I have > ever been able to formulate. This is most unfortunate, > because feelings of anticipation are hardwired at a very > fundamental level into our selves and our motivations. We could try to patch things up by saying that both memory loss and dying some time after you have been duplicated, which I agree are equivalent, constitute absolute death and are to be avoided at all costs. However, this sounds wrong, because most people wouldn't worry that much about a few minutes or a few hours of memory loss (ignoring the fear that they might have done something important during the forgotten interval). Alternatively, we could say that, indeed, we should anticipate the past as much as the future, but as you point out this runs counter to all our programming. Either solution would allow a consistent theory of personal identity, but it wouldn't feel right. I think the paradox comes from trying to reconcile our psychology with logic. There really is no *logical* reason why an entity should have one type of concern for past versions of itself and another type of concern for future versions of itself. That is why I think of every observer moment as a separate entity, related to its fellows not due to any absolute rules but by virtue of certain contingent facts about the evolution of our brains. Other entities may have quite different views about personal identity. If worker bees regard their queen more as self than they do themselves, are they wrong? An intelligent bee might acknowledge that alien life might exists which did not think this way, and even come up with a theory of personal identity in which the building blocks were individual observer moments, but ultimately end up declaring, "Well, I'm a bee, and this is just the way bees' brains are wired to think". Moreover, the bee would be no more inclined to rewire its brain for individuality given an understanding of the concept than you would be to rewire your brain to serve the collective. In a similar fashion, if you can think of an evolutionary scenario where it was adaptive to anticipate the past as much as the future, then this would be incorporated into any psychological theory of personal identity in that population. The only objective and unambiguous constant in all this would be that a scientist could still look at the individual instances / observer moments and describe how they associate. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 11:48:10 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:48:10 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <461C7A6B.5030207@pooq.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <461C7A6B.5030207@pooq.com> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Stirling Westrup wrote: This is just a redressing of the old argument for believing in God. Either > there is a God and worshipping Him will grant you salvation, or this is > not > and you are doomed. So, worship God, because that is the only hope you > have. > It didn't convince me as a kid, and it doesn't convince me now. You are perhaps thinking of Pascal's Wager, which is slightly more subtle than you have indicated: If God exists and you believe in him, you win eternal life, whereas if he exists and you don't believe in him, you go to hell. On the other hand, if God does not exist you don't gain or lose anything by believing or not believing in him. Therefore, if you are uncertain about God's existence, you have more to gain by believing in him. The argument falls down because, even if you could just decide to believe something on the basis of a calculation of utility, you would risk punishment at the hands of all the rest of the universe's possible jealous gods if you decided to believe in the Bible's Sky God. I don't think John's argument takes this form. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 11:59:23 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:59:23 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Heartland wrote: Flat EEG means death. It has to. It's the only conclusion that doesn't lead > to > contradictions. Besides, it's consistent with a belief that there's no > such thing > as a resurrection. A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. Would you say that these people have died and should attend their erstwhile selves' funeral? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 12:19:20 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:19:20 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:59:23PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can > have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. Would > you say that these people have died and should attend their erstwhile > selves' funeral? Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 12:36:26 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:36:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Heartland: >>> You think of "you" as a type while I think of "you" as an instance, >>> that's all. Stathis: >> Well, I partly agree with you. I consider that ordinary life >> (without the interfering aliens) is exactly equivalent to dying not >> just every second, but every moment. The Stathis-type persists while >> the Stathis-instance lives only transiently: the observer moments. >> (Bernard Williams' "token" as discussed in Derek Parfit's "Reasons >> and Persons" is roughly equivalent to what you are calling an >> instance.) Each instance is defined by a particular collection of >> matter in space-time, the next instance in sequence having at least >> different space-time coordinates and usually different matter in a >> different configuration. I would say that each instance refers to a process; a spatiotemporal energy configuration. I'm not sure what you mean by "observer moments" here or why you think instances could be delineated from moment to moment and that they occur in sequences. While each instance has a beginning and end, there's no limit on how long it should last, is there? Stathis: >> Two instances are related insofar as they >> are close to each other in spacetime coordinates and configuration, >> but they cannot by definition be the *same* instance, unless they >> are one and the same. Yes. Stathis: >> The further apart two instances are in time, >> the less similar they are, even though they might still have enough >> in common to count as the same type; however, there can be no strict >> rule for defining what is the same type, whereas instances can be >> defined completely unambiguously. Which is one of the advantages of "life is an instance" vs. "life is a type" view. As you say, there can be no consistent rule specifying what is the same type as people will always disagree as to the degree of similarity between two things that warrants assigning the same type to these things. Any debate about such a degree is pointless (unless degree=100%) because different positions (<100%) are influenced by nothing more than people's tastes, not logic. Stathis: >> I think what you are calling an instance is really a set of >> instances, which would qualify as a type. You are suggesting that >> even though none of the matter in my brain today is the same matter >> as a year ago, nor in the same configuration, and certainly not >> sharing the same space-time coordinates, nevertheless I am "the >> same" person, whereas if I were disintegrated and recreated a >> nanosecond later out of the same atoms, in the same configuration, I >> would not be "the same" person. All this is correct except I argue that you yesterday and you today are probably the same *single* instance of the mind process. It is actually the type that changes from moment to moment as your mind pattern a minute ago is not exactly the same as the your mind pattern now. >> Stathis: >>>> Neither you nor anyone who knows you >>>> noticed anything unusual happening yesterday, and today you feel >>>> just the same as you have always felt. For all you know, the >>>> aliens might still be at it, and they might have been at it for >>>> thousands of years with every living creature on the planet. What >>>> is the point in calling it murder if it can't make any possible >>>> difference? Heartland: >>> Just because nobody could prove murder happened doesn't imply murder >>> didn't happen. >>> It happened. It's just that we can't prove it. >>> >>> The difference is huge. Heartland1-Heartland86400 have all lost the >>> ability to >>> experience life. They're as dead as, say, John Lennon. Stathis: >> They are also as dead and gone as your yesterday self. True, you >> possess some of his matter in a configuration similar enough that >> you have his memories and sense of identity, but you have already >> said that isn't enough for survival. It's not about matter but about a process. Different rules apply. *This* instance that typed these words is probably the same as the one that wrote other posts yesterday. Why? Because each process is necessarily defined over a time interval > 0 and an instance of this process lasts as long as it generates output and I'm pretty sure (but can't be certain) I have not experienced absence of brain activity since yesterday. H. From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 13:20:27 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:20:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:59:23PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >> A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can >> have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. Only copies recover. Obviously a copy will always suffer from illusion that it's the original but the evidence collected by an objective observer would show otherwise. This case is logically equivalent to a situation where you download patient's brain structure to a file, destroy the patient and then run many instances of this file. The 1000th instance would suffer from the same illusion. Does the fact that a 2nd instance runs on the original body and 1000th on some artificial hardware make any difference? I really don't think so. Stathis: >> Would you say that these people have died and should attend their >> erstwhile selves' funeral? How they respond to facts is entirely up to them. They might as well throw a party, as far as I'm concerned. :) Eugen: > Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies. I'm not the one believing in afterlife here, Eugen. I don't believe in existence of a soul that consists of a holy collection of static data specifying person's memories, beliefs and values. I don't believe that installing this soul into some hardware brings back people to life. Now, that would be an example of a faith-based view. :) H. From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 11 13:39:23 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:39:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411093606.046b64d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> I added an indication to the "notable transhumanists" list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transhumanists My knowledge of who is signed up and who is not is rather limited, so if any of you want to fix the entry about yourself or others where you know their status, please do. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 13:35:16 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:35:16 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070411133516.GT9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:20:27AM -0400, Heartland wrote: > > Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies. > > I'm not the one believing in afterlife here, Eugen. I don't believe in existence of But you're the one seeing dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead. All the time. They're everywhere. > a soul that consists of a holy collection of static data specifying person's > memories, beliefs and values. I don't believe that installing this soul into some > hardware brings back people to life. Now, that would be an example of a faith-based > view. :) -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 13:45:28 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:45:28 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Heartland wrote: > Stathis: > >> Well, I partly agree with you. I consider that ordinary life > >> (without the interfering aliens) is exactly equivalent to dying not > >> just every second, but every moment. The Stathis-type persists while > >> the Stathis-instance lives only transiently: the observer moments. > >> (Bernard Williams' "token" as discussed in Derek Parfit's "Reasons > >> and Persons" is roughly equivalent to what you are calling an > >> instance.) Each instance is defined by a particular collection of > >> matter in space-time, the next instance in sequence having at least > >> different space-time coordinates and usually different matter in a > >> different configuration. > > I would say that each instance refers to a process; a spatiotemporal > energy > configuration. > > I'm not sure what you mean by "observer moments" here or why you think > instances > could be delineated from moment to moment and that they occur in > sequences. While > each instance has a beginning and end, there's no limit on how long it > should last, > is there? > An observer moment, sometimes hyphenated as observer-moment or abbreviated as OM, is the smallest possible unit of experience. I believe the term was originated by Nick Bostrom. You can make it more concrete by talking about observer seconds or observer days or whatever. It eliminates ambiguity in these discussions about personal identity because we can always point to a specific collection of matter and say, "that's the entity with Heartland-type memories in New York at 5:15 PM on March 5 2006" and "that's the entity with Heartland-type memories in London at 3:02 AM on April 5 2006", and then argue about whether they are "the same person" or whether "Heartland has survived" during the intervening month. This is not to say that there are necessarily physiological distinctions between different OM's; the scale is arbitrary, like any scale of time or distance. However, just thinking about the different stages of a person's life this way raises questions about the meaning of death and continuity of identity. Now, I must admit I am a little confused about your notion of instance and type. If a person undergoes destructive teleportation, would you say that the procedure creates two separate instances of the one type? I would say that ordinary life consists of many, many instances merging seamlessly into one type, and introducing a discontinuity such as teleportation doesn't make any difference. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 13:51:30 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:51:30 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Heartland wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:59:23PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > >> A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can > >> have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. > > Only copies recover. Obviously a copy will always suffer from illusion > that it's > the original but the evidence collected by an objective observer would > show > otherwise. This case is logically equivalent to a situation where you > download > patient's brain structure to a file, destroy the patient and then run many > instances of this file. The 1000th instance would suffer from the same > illusion. > Does the fact that a 2nd instance runs on the original body and 1000th on > some > artificial hardware make any difference? I really don't think so. So if you were dragged out of a freezing lake and were successfully resuscitated (or apparently so), would you consider that you were no longer the original you, and if so how would you introduce yourself and expect family and friends to treat you when they came to see you in hospital? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Wed Apr 11 15:00:22 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:00:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query Message-ID: <354458.87014.qm@web37202.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Gina, I haven't been able to view any of your art before now. (My computer is ancient but I am in the process of purchasing a new one). I had the opportunity to use a different computer and thought I would check out what you do. Thank you, I truly enjoyed your work, I think you have remarkable talent. Your demo is a great representation of some of your finest work. Some of my thoughts for what it's worth: Your choice in music enhances your art making the complete package fascinating and your character animation is fantastic. Some of my favorites are The Gift, Dandelion, The Mark, Moon Goddess and Seasonal. I truly enjoyed The Odyssey as I envisioned a mixture of your art entwined with mine. I imagined a huge stage with a huge background projector playing your movie with ballet dancers on stage. Each playing a part in an exceptional story. Isn't it amazing how Mozart can still create vision? I also envisioned Zenith as an opening to a Walt Disney Movie, an introduction to a far away place. I thought Particle 2 was a little short, I would have liked to see a little more. I had a little trouble with Countrified, Blue and Converse as I couldn't clearly see what was going on, it was a little dark. (I'm assuming that has something to do with my computer). I enjoyed Happy New Year and thought how nice it would be if I could send such an e-mail to my friends and family. All in all, I had a great time discovering your art and it was time well spent. You gave me ideas and made me think. Thanks again, Anna:) Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]-Benjamin Constant The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 15:50:07 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:50:07 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> On 4/10/07, Randall Randall wrote: > > Really? I'd love to hear your reasons for thinking > that this is unlikely or not worth considering. While > I disagree with John about personal identity, I do > agree that selection will favor those who agree with > him that process survival is unimportant. This puts > me in an awkward position, as I'm sure you understand. Selection? Look at the statistics: selection favors those who eschew this geek stuff completely. We're programmed to believe personal power confers selective advantage, because it was true in the conditions in which we evolved - but even though we still believe it because we're programmed to, it's no longer true. As for why it's not worth considering: it's a story. We make up stories for ourselves for our own reasons. Sometimes we set them in "the future", but when the actual future comes around, it practically never resembles our stories; once you go beyond such predictions as "computers will be more powerful in ten years than they are today", futurology has a lower track record of success than you'd expect from random chance. As soon as someone says "the future will be like X", it's a reasonably safe bet that whatever the future actually ends up like, it won't be X. In this case it's not even a particularly plausible story: if you get "IQ 12000" (scare quotes because the phrase doesn't actually mean anything, IQ isn't defined much past 200 or so), are you going to go berserk and start massacring everyone? (That, after all, is what the elimination of other viewpoints in a timescale as short as a century implies.) Are you even going to tolerate such behavior in others? Even if you are, nobody else is. Nobody with any political power wants the existence of a handful of people a zillion times smarter than anyone else. The world isn't going to tolerate the creation or existence of superintelligent entities unless they behave like respectable citizens. "If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign > and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle > Leaving aside the lack of evidence that matter duplicators are possible, stop and think about this for a moment: conventional manufacturing technology is perfectly adequate to build hydrogen bombs, has been for decades. Why are we not each a sovereign possessing a hydrogen bomb today? Once you look at that question, it becomes clear that the "matter duplicators" are a smokescreen, something to aid suspension of disbelief by distracting the mind from the real-life reasons why this scenario doesn't happen. For Pournelle is after all a storyteller: he has earned a living making up stories, which are selected in the marketplace based on the same fitness criterion: that people enjoy reading them. This is fine provided we understand that it is not at all related to the hypothetical fitness criterion of correspondence to what will actually happen in real life. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 11 16:23:33 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:23:33 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia list of >Hs References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070411112214.023545b8@satx.rr.com> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transhumanists Weirdly listed by given rather than surnames. Maybe Rudy Rucker should be there? And Drexler, Moravec and Vinge? From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 16:29:21 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:29:21 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > What we have reached is the uncomfortable conclusion that > what happens to you (or happened to you) in the past is > every bit as worthy of anticipation as events that are > scheduled to happen in your future. This demolishes any > rational or consistent use of *anticipation* that I have > ever been able to formulate. I don't see the problem. Consider the evolved function of anticipation: it's to make us pay attention to things that are important _and that we can influence_. In your scenario it makes sense for myself in October 8 2007 to anticipate what will happen in October 9 999, because I can causally influence it. For example, I can make sure my time machine's power supply is fully charged so that I can get to October 9 999 on schedule. This causal influence will have its due effect irrespective of the memory tampering, so it's perfectly logical. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 11 14:52:37 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:52:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411093606.046b64d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable. rogers.com> References: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:39 AM 4/11/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >I added an indication to the "notable transhumanists" list. > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transhumanists > >My knowledge of who is signed up and who is not is rather limited, so if >any of you want to fix the entry about yourself or others where you know >their status, please do. On the talk page: Cryonics membership Considering the origins of transhumanism, cryonics membership is a significant factor. Is there are reason to revert the addition of this information about the people in the list? To be sure, the information is not complete, but that's a work in progress. Keith Henson 13:24, 11 April 2007 (UTC) This isn't appropriate information for an encyclopedic list. --Loremaster 13:27, 11 April 2007 (UTC) Furthermore, in light of the fact that cryonics is a pseudo-science and pseudo-technology that undermines the credibility of anyone associated with it, whether it be the provider or the client, transhumanists would be wise to keep their cryonics membership private... --Loremaster 13:31, 11 April 2007 (UTC) ****** *IF* people think cryonics status on the transhumanist list is a good idea, reverting only requires going to the last version with the changes under history, bringing up the editor and saving. If you consider yourself a transhumanist, you might so remark in the comments on the reversion. I really wonder how many are signed up? Keith From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 17:25:56 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:25:56 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Keith Henson wrote: > *IF* people think cryonics status on the transhumanist list is a good idea, > reverting only requires going to the last version with the changes under > history, bringing up the editor and saving. If you consider yourself a > transhumanist, you might so remark in the comments on the reversion. I > really wonder how many are signed up? > Depends on whether you think that a transhumanist list should be a marketing vehicle for commercial companies selling cryonics. Other companies in nano and bio industries might like their fields of interest publicised on the list also, if promoting such things is supported. BillK From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 11 17:34:07 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:34:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com><7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> Russell Wallace > We're programmed to believe personal power confers selective advantage, > because it was true in the conditions in which we evolved - but even > though we still believe it because we're programmed to, it's no longer > true. No longer true?! It I'm more powerful than you that means I can do things you can't, and that gives me an advantage over you. People who have a superstition against radical upgrades are going to get hammered by those who don't have that prejudice. Organisms that can't adapt to a rapidly changing environment go extinct. > As for why it's not worth considering: it's a story. Yes it is a story, but what is your point? Stories are a good thing, stories are how we understand the way the world works. >"IQ 12000" (scare quotes because the phrase doesn't actually mean anything Yes it does, it's shorthand for a being vastly more intelligent and powerful than any human being who ever lived. I'm surprised this has to be spelled out. >The world isn't going to tolerate the creation or existence of >superintelligent entities unless they behave like respectable citizens. So we're back to that "friendly AI" nonsense. The AI is going to do what it wants to do and it will not care if you "tolerate" it or not. You won't be able to command it and you won't be able to trick it because you can't outthink something smarter than you are. John K Clark From pj at pj-manney.com Wed Apr 11 17:53:06 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:53:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics Message-ID: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Keith wrote: >*IF* people think cryonics status on the transhumanist list is a good idea, >reverting only requires going to the last version with the changes under >history, bringing up the editor and saving. If you consider yourself a >transhumanist, you might so remark in the comments on the reversion. I >really wonder how many are signed up? While I understand your historical argument, transhumanism isn't just about cryonics. I agree with both Justice DeThezier's argument on WTA-talk (since I also said 'no') and Loremaster's rationale for discretion. Cryonics status -- or any other personal status -- should not be a matter of public record, unless the individual requests it. Otherwise, it smacks of marketing or other hidden agendas. PJ From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 17:57:33 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:57:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <037e01c77c63$8e51cac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > Ok let's think about this logically and unemotionally. Let's suppose for the > sake of argument that Lee Corbin philosophy is correct; what would be the > result? You're dead meat. Not necessarily! Yes, probably, but then anything that bothers to remember you will be at a comparative disadvantage, and so "probably" you'll be dead meat pretty soon too. But there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. It's simply this: as you self-improve, adopt the maxim that you will *always* run earlier versions of yourself in the background. So I will try to keep pace with the rest of you if the lucky occurs, and an AI takes over that is willing to let us live and even, say, willing to let us approach its own capabilities by 1% or something. >You can't upgrade so soon you'll be surrounded beings enormously > more powerful than yourself, and you don't stand a snowball's > chance in hell of surviving the Singularity meat grinder. As soon as a nation starts to become wealthy, the disparity between the rich and the poor grows apace. The same will be true with your "upgrades". Compared to some, you yourself will always be pitifully behind. You're already far behind some people in IQ, when IQ isn't even yet seriously affecting survival. So I say that if you do live, don't take a chance on my being wrong about this, and so run earlier versions of you from time to time, or with some small fraction of your resources. Therefore I'll always have a JohnClark 2007 to argue with! Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 18:07:07 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:07:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <035401c77c03$7ee0b430$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00ee01c77c0b$a72e91c0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <038101c77c64$4a642780$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > "Lee Corbin" > >> Oh, no! It's no tragedy for *me* that that thing turned into Lee Corbin. >> But from the point of view of the fetus, it was death; for it became unto >> something totally unlike itself > > OK, let's average the point of view of an adult man with a somewhat greater > than average intelligence, a lot greater actually, with that of a fetus. I > have a hunch the adult Lee Corbin would win that election in a landslide. Sorry, I tried reading that several times, but couldn't make heads or tails of it. Perhaps you are speaking of values that are objectively true? Anyway, according to my values (as I have said) neither the fetus nor the IQ 12000 person is me, unless the latter is very, very careful to think often lots of old-style Lee Corbin thoughts. (Almost as if he were running an earlier version of me in his head.) >>For me, growth includes only change that doesn't turn me into someone or >>something else. > > But I want to turn into something else, that is the entire point in living. > Otherwise growth has no purpose and stagnation is the ultimate virtue. I > don't buy it for one second! Well, you want to turn into something else, and I don't. That does seem to tidily encapsulate the difference here. I take it, however, that you don't want to turn into just anybody. It must, as you said, "remember being you". Can you explain a little better what that means, precisely? (After all, I need to put limits on what it means, because maybe I'm you already, or maybe in the far future I could fall in love with you and become you, or something along those lines.) Lee From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 18:07:44 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:07:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, pjmanney wrote: > > Keith wrote: > >*IF* people think cryonics status on the transhumanist list is a good > idea, > >reverting only requires going to the last version with the changes under > >history, bringing up the editor and saving. If you consider yourself a > >transhumanist, you might so remark in the comments on the reversion. I > >really wonder how many are signed up? > > While I understand your historical argument, transhumanism isn't just > about cryonics. I agree with both Justice DeThezier's argument on WTA-talk > (since I also said 'no') and Loremaster's rationale for > discretion. Cryonics status -- or any other personal status -- should not > be a matter of public record, unless the individual requests it. > > Otherwise, it smacks of marketing or other hidden agendas. > > PJ > _______________________________________________ > 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 robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 18:13:42 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:13:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: Sorry about the last (empty) message. My only comments would be to look at the Zyvex, Alcor or Cryonics Institute pages in Wikipedia. There is nothing wrong with an unbiased, presumably historical, account of commercial entities. It might be interesting to link Cryonics to Cryptobiosis which includes anhydrobiosis and cryobiosis. There are a number of organisms which can be desiccated or frozen and recover from those biological states. To state that cryonics is "unscientific" if flat out wrong. The people involved are generally applying an extensive amount of science. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 18:20:04 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:20:04 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> On 4/11/07, John K Clark wrote: > > Russell Wallace > > > We're programmed to believe personal power confers selective advantage, > > because it was true in the conditions in which we evolved - but even > > though we still believe it because we're programmed to, it's no longer > > true. > > No longer true?! It I'm more powerful than you that means I can do things > you can't, and that gives me an advantage over you. But not an evolutionary advantage. What's your evolutionary fitness? People who have a > superstition against radical upgrades are going to get hammered by those > who > don't have that prejudice. So if you acquire the wherewithal, are you planning to go around "hammering" people who hold the belief in question? What are you planning to do, beat them up? Machine gun them to death? Gas them? Zap them with unobtainium? Yes it is a story, but what is your point? Stories are a good thing, stories > are how we understand the way the world works. Sure. My point is merely that there are times when it's important to remind ourselves of the difference between stories and reality. So we're back to that "friendly AI" nonsense. The AI is going to do what it > wants to do and it will not care if you "tolerate" it or not. You won't be > able to command it and you won't be able to trick it because you can't > outthink something smarter than you are. > Except that AI doesn't presently exist, it isn't going to exist unless people build it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of contributing to the field is going to build an AI that can't be controlled and whose motives are destructive. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 11 18:17:56 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:17:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><023601c779f7$b063c500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><032a01c77be9$8a699480$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <038501c77c66$67e15ec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes > Lee: >> Yes, I agree that "process is the substance of life", if I'm reading you okay. >> So the process is, after all, necessary and sufficient to achieve survival, right? >> As I recall, though, your answer is "no". An interruption of the process for >> you is the same as death, right? You can be a computer program? That is, while I guess you don't believe that you can *become* a computer program, you agree that you might be one right now? > Lee: >> What on Earth can you have against cryonics? It's just a slowing down >> of the process, not even a cessation any more than sleep is. Even at >> liquid nitrogen temperatures, processes proceed (only more slowly). >> Even the same atoms are used upon re-animation. > > Flat EEG means death. It has to. It's the only conclusion that doesn't lead to > contradictions. Besides, it's consistent with a belief that there's no such thing > as a resurrection. I know how you feel :-) I myself am squeezed between two unacceptable possibilities in the discussion of GLUTs and causal processes! I tried to find the only way free of contractions! :-) Here, however, your definition of death is very interesting, and is not all in keeping with medical practice. Sometimes people's EEGs do go quiet for a few seconds, but then the system gets kickstarted again. At least that's what I've heard. In cryonics, a boy was once rescued who had been underwater for 45 minutes, with heart stopped (and probably with flat EEG). But he came to. > I guess it's one of those either-you-get-it-or-don't kinds of things. Perhaps you > might realize and appreciate the difference by focusing on the amount of benefit > that each instance derives from existence of other instances. There's no doubt in > my mind that this amount is always exactly zero. Yeah, nearly zero to me. True, an instance of me does gain some satisfaction that I am also getting benefit in other locations, but he also gains satisfaction from knowing that some people in Istanbul are being nice to other people there. > In other words, if I'm hungry, I > will stay hungry regardless of how many other instances fill their stomachs with > food. If I'm dead, I will stay dead regardless of how many other instances stay > alive. Of course, naturally, you are using *your* definition of "I' and "me", just as previously I was using mine. > If an instance was alive and then its brain exploded, that instance cannot > have any type of experience (cannot derive any benefit) because the "machinery" > that made that experience possible is gone. Am I getting anywhere here, Lee? Well, not so far with this last line of questioning. The only weakness in your argument that I know of is addressed above, namely that processes starting and stopping may not be so black and white as you think. Lee From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 18:37:45 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:37:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, John K Clark wrote: > Let's suppose for the sake of argument that John Clark's philosophy is > correct, what would be the result? You instantly agree to upgrade at every > opportunity, and you still probably won't survive the Singularity meat > grinder, but at least you have a chance. I think the assumption that there will be a Singularity "meat grinder" needs serious reexamination. We don't run around eliminating all of the nematodes or bacteria on the planet just because they are consuming some small fraction of energy and/or matter that we at some point may want. You have to realize that while there is a vector that some may follow for climbing the singularity slope once it goes nearly vertical, there is no reason once it tops out that those who selected to not make that choice will be turned into hamburger. The difference between a sub-KT-I and a KT-II civilization is at least 13 orders of magnitude in terms of power consumption. We generally don't interest ourselves in something that is going to involve dealing with 0.00000000001% of our resources. Hell we rarely pay much attention to anything in the 0.1% to 0.01% range. It could well be the case that the solar system as a whole evolves up the slope while Earth, Mars and Venus remain meat havens until we get so bored with multi-thousand year lifespans that we go off on some dangerous adventure in a world ship to a distant "dark" galaxy. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 18:39:59 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:39:59 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <038501c77c66$67e15ec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035601c77c05$9992bd80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <038501c77c66$67e15ec0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <20070411183959.GE9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 11:17:56AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Here, however, your definition of death is very interesting, and is not all Calling it interesting is being charitable. Believing in dead people walking the earth is rather strange. > in keeping with medical practice. Sometimes people's EEGs do go quiet > for a few seconds, but then the system gets kickstarted again. At least Try minutes, or half a day in a controlled setting. With cryonics, the lacune is effectively infinite. > that's what I've heard. In cryonics, a boy was once rescued who had > been underwater for 45 minutes, with heart stopped (and probably with > flat EEG). But he came to. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 18:47:09 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:47:09 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 02:37:45PM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I think the assumption that there will be a Singularity "meat grinder" > needs serious reexamination. We don't run around eliminating all of Fast changes are always challenges to adaptiveness. > the nematodes or bacteria on the planet just because they are Actually, we do a pretty good attempt at it; soil biota biodiversity has plummeted in intensive agriculture. Sealed terrain has about zero biota diversity. > consuming some small fraction of energy and/or matter that we at some > point may want. What is left of the prebiotic ursoup, after life had dined on it? > You have to realize that while there is a vector that some may follow > for climbing the singularity slope once it goes nearly vertical, there > is no reason once it tops out that those who selected to not make that > choice will be turned into hamburger. The difference between a Not hamburger, but being turned to plasma or frozen in blue snow are certainly straightforward possibilities. > sub-KT-I and a KT-II civilization is at least 13 orders of magnitude > in terms of power consumption. We generally don't interest ourselves > in something that is going to involve dealing with 0.00000000001% of > our resources. Hell we rarely pay much attention to anything in the > 0.1% to 0.01% range. It could well be the case that the solar system > as a whole evolves up the slope while Earth, Mars and Venus remain When/if postbiology emerges at the bottom of this gravity well, then you'd get very intense competition, locally. *We* can't just float off the earth, and live in vacuum happily ever after. > meat havens until we get so bored with multi-thousand year lifespans > that we go off on some dangerous adventure in a world ship to a > distant "dark" galaxy. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 18:54:09 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:54:09 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> References: <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070411185409.GG9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 07:20:04PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > No longer true?! It I'm more powerful than you that means I can do > things > you can't, and that gives me an advantage over you. > > But not an evolutionary advantage. What's your evolutionary fitness? The fitness delta of machine-phase systems to biology is so large it's a qualitative difference. > So if you acquire the wherewithal, are you planning to go around > "hammering" people who hold the belief in question? What are you > planning to do, beat them up? Machine gun them to death? Gas them? Zap > them with unobtainium? Do you know what your successors in 3000 years will do? Will you vouch for them? > Sure. My point is merely that there are times when it's important to > remind ourselves of the difference between stories and reality. Going to the Moon was just a story once. > Except that AI doesn't presently exist, it isn't going to exist unless > people build it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of Evolution is not especially rational, but rather capable. > contributing to the field is going to build an AI that can't be > controlled and whose motives are destructive. You can't control persons. Destructive is in the eye of the observer, would you prefer Earth would have been mothballed at the prebiotic stage? We primate bauplan people do not play in the same league of what will come after us. The future is strange and wild. Human it is not. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 19:06:27 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:06:27 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <20070411190627.GH9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:53:06PM -0400, pjmanney wrote: > While I understand your historical argument, transhumanism isn't just about cryonics. Cryonics is a nice way of putting your money where your mouth is. Also, because it doesn't look as if life extension will achieve escape velocity in our biological life time, cryonics is the only option if you want to sample the transhuman future in person. The only option. There is no other, currently. > I agree with both Justice DeThezier's argument on WTA-talk (since I also said 'no') No one is compelled to do it (since I don't live in the area with any coverage I'm not signed up myself). > and Loremaster's rationale for discretion. Cryonics status -- or any other personal Loremaster's comment sounded remarkably uninformed, and inflammatory. > status -- should not be a matter of public record, unless the individual requests it. > > Otherwise, it smacks of marketing or other hidden agendas. To me, it sounds like the person is sufficiently comitted (or reasonably well-off), and/or willing to support the current institutions, considering them reformable. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 19:08:33 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:08:33 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070411190833.GI9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 06:25:56PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Depends on whether you think that a transhumanist list should be a > marketing vehicle for commercial companies selling cryonics. There is no money in cryonics. There is no money in cryonics. There is no money in cryonics. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 19:18:20 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:18:20 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070411191820.GL9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 10:52:37AM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > This isn't appropriate information for an encyclopedic list. > --Loremaster 13:27, 11 April 2007 (UTC) Appropriate decides who? > Furthermore, in light of the fact that cryonics is a pseudo-science > and pseudo-technology that undermines the credibility of anyone associated > with it, whether it be the provider or the client, transhumanists would be > wise to keep their cryonics membership private... --Loremaster 13:31, 11 >From the sound of it, an ignorant snot-nosed punk hiding behind a pseudonym, who should have kept his opinion strictly private. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From randall at randallsquared.com Wed Apr 11 19:30:24 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:30:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <202CFAAE-ACBD-4ADF-A59C-1204C1A1F978@randallsquared.com> On Apr 11, 2007, at 11:50 AM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 4/10/07, Randall Randall wrote: > Really? I'd love to hear your reasons for thinking > that this is unlikely or not worth considering. While > I disagree with John about personal identity, I do > agree that selection will favor those who agree with > him that process survival is unimportant. This puts > me in an awkward position, as I'm sure you understand. > > Selection? Look at the statistics: selection favors those who > eschew this geek stuff completely. We're programmed to believe > personal power confers selective advantage, because it was true in > the conditions in which we evolved - but even though we still > believe it because we're programmed to, it's no longer true. Personal power? I think you missed the point. It isn't about personal power, it's about whether you're willing to cavalierly create multiple copies of yourself at the cost of this instance. For a person like John Clark, when faced with a choice about whether to do A or B (where he can't do both in a single instance), the obvious answer is to copy himself and then each copy will go do one, with the belief that John Clark is also doing the other thing. When faced with a procedure which will certainly produce some good outcome if it works, and kill the instance if it doesn't, John has no qualms about backing himself up and doing it anyway. Didn't work? He can always try again. For people like myself (and Slawomir, I believe), that's not really an option. Dangerous things do not lose their danger merely because you can back yourself up. I would predict, therefore, that in a situation where people can copy themselves, there are going to be a lot more John Clarks than Randall Randalls. > As for why it's not worth considering: it's a story. We make up > stories for ourselves for our own reasons. Sometimes we set them in > "the future", but when the actual future comes around, it > practically never resembles our stories; once you go beyond such > predictions as "computers will be more powerful in ten years than > they are today", futurology has a lower track record of success > than you'd expect from random chance. As soon as someone says "the > future will be like X", it's a reasonably safe bet that whatever > the future actually ends up like, it won't be X. > > In this case it's not even a particularly plausible story: if you > get "IQ 12000" (scare quotes because the phrase doesn't actually > mean anything, IQ isn't defined much past 200 or so), are you going > to go berserk and start massacring everyone? (That, after all, is > what the elimination of other viewpoints in a timescale as short as > a century implies.) I didn't say anything about elimination of other viewpoints, and I was ignoring the bit about 12000 IQ. It's the willingness to believe that copies are really the same person that makes me think that selection will favor those who believe it, because they'll produce far more copies than others. I also think this was what John Clark was getting at in the email to which you were replying when I replied to you. > Are you even going to tolerate such behavior in others? Even if you > are, nobody else is. Nobody with any political power wants the > existence of a handful of people a zillion times smarter than > anyone else. The world isn't going to tolerate the creation or > existence of superintelligent entities unless they behave like > respectable citizens. Ah, just as other mammals have been unwilling to tolerate humans unless they behave well. Must be why humans are endangered. > "If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign > and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle > > Leaving aside the lack of evidence that matter duplicators are > possible, stop and think about this for a moment: conventional > manufacturing technology is perfectly adequate [...] It's a fun quote, not part of any argument I'm making. I must admit, though, it is a *polarizing* quote; lots of people I'm having discussions with like to quote it and attack it, as though it's part of whatever debate we're having. I wonder what that means? -- Randall Randall "[W]e ARE the market, this IS the market working, there's nothing external to be deferred to." -- Ian Bicking, on "let the market decide" From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 11 19:34:38 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:34:38 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070411193438.GM9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 04:50:07PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > Selection? Look at the statistics: selection favors those who eschew > this geek stuff completely. We're programmed to believe personal power Tools are irrelevant?! Why are we exterminating the gorilla then, and not gorilla us? > confers selective advantage, because it was true in the conditions in > which we evolved - but even though we still believe it because we're > programmed to, it's no longer true. It doesn't matter what we believe, the great fitness function evaluates us all. > As for why it's not worth considering: it's a story. We make up > stories for ourselves for our own reasons. Sometimes we set them in > "the future", but when the actual future comes around, it practically > never resembles our stories; once you go beyond such predictions as > "computers will be more powerful in ten years than they are today", > futurology has a lower track record of success than you'd expect from > random chance. As soon as someone says "the future will be like X", > it's a reasonably safe bet that whatever the future actually ends up > like, it won't be X. "Evolution will still apply in future". That's completely reasonable, and a powerful source of constraints. > In this case it's not even a particularly plausible story: if you get > "IQ 12000" (scare quotes because the phrase doesn't actually mean > anything, IQ isn't defined much past 200 or so), are you going to go > berserk and start massacring everyone? (That, after all, is what the A diverse population of postbiological beings could very well be terminal to conventional ecosystems. Pretending it never can be is not good risk evaluation, given the magnitude of the outcome. > elimination of other viewpoints in a timescale as short as a century > implies.) Are you even going to tolerate such behavior in others? Even Kiloyears are overnight wall clock. > if you are, nobody else is. Nobody with any political power wants the > existence of a handful of people a zillion times smarter than anyone Not necessarily smarter, DIVERSE and FIT. > else. The world isn't going to tolerate the creation or existence of > superintelligent entities unless they behave like respectable > citizens. The world isn't a homogenous entity. > "If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign > and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle Of course. But just having a bunch of nukes doesn't make you a souvereign in the posthuman world. > Leaving aside the lack of evidence that matter duplicators are > possible, stop and think about this for a moment: conventional Do you have a problem with machine-phase? I'm all ears. Tell me why it wouldn't work. > manufacturing technology is perfectly adequate to build hydrogen > bombs, has been for decades. Why are we not each a sovereign Not in your cellar. > possessing a hydrogen bomb today? Once you look at that question, it > becomes clear that the "matter duplicators" are a smokescreen, > something to aid suspension of disbelief by distracting the mind from > the real-life reasons why this scenario doesn't happen. You could build quite a few megatons in your cellar with machine-phase. > For Pournelle is after all a storyteller: he has earned a living He is a writer. We're not writers, selling some plausible claptrap is incompatible with my training as a scientist. > making up stories, which are selected in the marketplace based on the > same fitness criterion: that people enjoy reading them. This is fine > provided we understand that it is not at all related to the > hypothetical fitness criterion of correspondence to what will actually > happen in real life. Real life defines fitness. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 19:50:50 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:50:50 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <202CFAAE-ACBD-4ADF-A59C-1204C1A1F978@randallsquared.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <202CFAAE-ACBD-4ADF-A59C-1204C1A1F978@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704111250k19614394i9e8c3cc5e1ce1b70@mail.gmail.com> On 4/11/07, Randall Randall wrote: > > Personal power? I think you missed the point. It isn't > about personal power, it's about whether you're willing > to cavalierly create multiple copies of yourself at the > cost of this instance. Well, the comment to which I replied dismissally was "your style will become extinct in less than a century" (in a context that suggested the extinction was going to come as a result of being massacred by entities with "IQ 12000"). If you are now advancing the argument that in the long run the descendants of people who want to make a lot of copies of themselves will outnumber those of people who don't, that's something I don't have a problem with, it's a far more robust conclusion. It's a fun quote, not part of any argument I'm making. I > must admit, though, it is a *polarizing* quote; lots of > people I'm having discussions with like to quote it and > attack it, as though it's part of whatever debate we're > having. I wonder what that means? *grin* In my case it's because I thought it was relevant to this particular context, being representative of the same style of argument. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mmbutler at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 19:58:35 2007 From: mmbutler at gmail.com (Michael M. Butler) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:58:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <20070411191820.GL9439@leitl.org> References: <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <20070411191820.GL9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7d79ed890704111258w236b8b26p4bed73fd49924a7c@mail.gmail.com> On 4/11/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > From the sound of it, an ignorant snot-nosed punk hiding behind a pseudonym, > who should have kept his opinion strictly private. Welcome to Wikipedia... ;\ -- Michael M. Butler : m m b u t l e r ( a t ) g m a i l . c o m 'Piss off, you son of a bitch. Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it's going to take the whole building with it. I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." -- Rick Rescorla (R.I.P.), cell phone call, 9/11/2001 From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 20:05:15 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:05:15 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <20070411193438.GM9439@leitl.org> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <20070411193438.GM9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704111305j4c1ec2f8t9a05ea6025f8b301@mail.gmail.com> On 4/11/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Do you have a problem with machine-phase? I'm all ears. Tell me why it > wouldn't work. > I think some form of machine-phase is a fine idea. That doesn't imply a science fiction style matter duplicator. Remember the arguments between Drexler et al and Smalley et al, where Smalley's side pointed out that there's no such thing as a machine that can arbitrarily manipulate atoms (because the manipulator would have to be itself made of atoms), and Drexler's side replied that this doesn't mean we won't be able to do cool things with nanotechnology. Which is true, but it does mean that the early ideas about extremely general disassembler and assemblers are a thing of the past; today's designs are looking a lot more realistic - and a lot less like matter duplicators. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Wed Apr 11 18:48:01 2007 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:48:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia list of >Hs Message-ID: <380-2200743111848133@M2W029.mail2web.com> From: Damien Broderick >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transhumanists >Maybe Rudy Rucker should be there? And Drexler, Moravec and Vinge? I appreciate the work these authors have done over the past many months, but they are not looking into the Extro Conferences and who the speakers were and "Extropy:The Journal of Transhumanist Thought" for those whoe ideas and writings are integral to transhumanism. Among these individuals are Drexler, Moravec and Vinge. Best wishes, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft? Windows? and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting From randall at randallsquared.com Wed Apr 11 20:40:06 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:40:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704111250k19614394i9e8c3cc5e1ce1b70@mail.gmail.com> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <202CFAAE-ACBD-4ADF-A59C-1204C1A1F978@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704111250k19614394i9e8c3cc5e1ce1b70@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <9FA16305-F1CD-44B7-8E8B-C3F230767986@randallsquared.com> On Apr 11, 2007, at 3:50 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 4/11/07, Randall Randall wrote: > Personal power? I think you missed the point. It isn't > about personal power, it's about whether you're willing > to cavalierly create multiple copies of yourself at the > cost of this instance. > > Well, the comment to which I replied dismissally was "your style > will become extinct in less than a century" (in a context that > suggested the extinction was going to come as a result of being > massacred by entities with "IQ 12000"). > > If you are now advancing the argument that in the long run the > descendants of people who want to make a lot of copies of > themselves will outnumber those of people who don't, that's > something I don't have a problem with, it's a far more robust > conclusion. That *is* what I'm saying, and by "outnumber" I mean vastly so. I actually thought this was the argument that John Clark was making as well in what you quoted, but perhaps not. > It's a fun quote, not part of any argument I'm making. I > must admit, though, it is a *polarizing* quote; lots of > people I'm having discussions with like to quote it and > attack it, as though it's part of whatever debate we're > having. I wonder what that means? > > *grin* In my case it's because I thought it was relevant to this > particular context, being representative of the same style of > argument. Heh. I think it's an interesting quote, because for values of "matter duplicator" that merely include the ability for anyone to make devices as powerful as hydrogen bombs, it seems obvious that we'll have that within a few decades, and maybe within 15 years. Given that Jerry Pournelle *is* an SF author, you'd think that he'd have given this some more thought than his quote seems to indicate. It's a quote which points out that even those who've made their living writing about the (or a) future will be blindsided by the changes we expect soon. -- Randall Randall 'Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"?' -- Garrison Keillor From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 20:51:36 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:51:36 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies Message-ID: Live Science has an interesting list of emerging 'Save the planet' technologies. Some are still somewhat speculative, but still..... 01. Make Oil from Just about Anything. 02. Desalination, removing the salt and minerals out of seawater. 03. Hydrogen fuel cells. 04. Solar power developments. 05. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. 06. Harness Waves and Tides. 07. Plant Your Roof. Roof gardens are a good thing. 08. Let Plants and Microbes Clean Up After Us. 09. Bury The Bad Stuff. Put CO2 in the ground. 10. Make Paper Obsolete. Re-usable electronic paper. BillK From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 11 21:21:30 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:21:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <18176936.40041176313986652.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:53 PM 4/11/2007 -0400, PJ wrote: snip >While I understand your historical argument, transhumanism isn't just >about cryonics. I agree with both Justice DeThezier's argument on >WTA-talk (since I also said 'no') and Loremaster's rationale for >discretion. Cryonics status -- or any other personal status -- should not >be a matter of public record, unless the individual requests it. I agree. Eric Drexler kept his status (signed up) out of the public eye for a number of years. He made it public at an Extropian Conference in San Jose at the same time Marvin Minsky did. >Otherwise, it smacks of marketing or other hidden agendas. There is an agenda, but it is hardly hidden. If it isn't obvious, ask and I will state it. Keith From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 21:15:02 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:15:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/11/07, BillK wrote: > 03. Hydrogen fuel cells. This is a *bad* idea. It has been shown that running on hydrogen is much less efficient than running on "electricity". You lose too much energy in the production, transport and/or storage of the hydrogen. Methanol or ethanol fuel cells would be far better so long as the methanol or ethanol are being produced from carbon extracted from the atmosphere. All hydrogen now used comes from methane and the only way you can produce it relatively cheaply is to oxidize the carbon in the methane and release the CO2 into the atmosphere. The only other common source of hydrogen is water and until someone comes up with a catalyst that uses solar energy to cheaply split water that is too expensive as well. If you *really* want this it should be: 03. Hydrogen fuel cells + Catalyst to produce H2 from H2O+sunlight + Lightweight H2 storage system. If you want to store CO2 produced by power plants underground and use the electricity to charge batteries for transport you have a much more efficient system. Better still if you can take the plants (or bacteria) on your roof to convert your solar energy directly into either ethanol or electrons to feed to your means of transport. So alternatively you might want: 03. Lightweight nanotechnology high capacity based batteries or capacitors that can rapidly and efficiently charged. We are *much* closer to that than we are to having a hydrogen solution. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 11 21:25:48 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:25:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org> <20070411133516.GT9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen: >> > Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies. Heartland: >> I'm not the one believing in afterlife here, Eugen. Eugen: > But you're the one seeing dead people. > Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. > They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead. > All the time. They're everywhere. Hmm, I think you're mistaking me for someone else. I never said anything about zombies. In fact, I don't believe a copy would be a zombie unless your definition of "zombie" is different from mine. Whether something is a zombie or not is entirely different debate. H. From sti at pooq.com Wed Apr 11 21:34:42 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:34:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <010501c77c10$c2596d30$0e044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer><009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <461C7A6B.5030207@pooq.com> <010501c77c10$c2596d30$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <461D5472.8070804@pooq.com> John K Clark wrote: > "Stirling Westrup" > >> This is just a redressing of the old argument for believing in God. > > No it is not. Every one of those arguments for God hinges on the fact that > it is the height of morality to demand that something is true when there is > absolutely positively nothing to show it is in fact true. I do not think > believing in such a thing is a virtue, I think it is a vice of pornographic > magnetite. But I could be wrong, so show me my error in my ways. I dare you > to try. This seems trivial. The argument you gave was there were two choices: a) If this is correct we may survive. b) If this is correct we won't survive. And you then chose A) for no better reason than you liked the outcome more. All proof was lacking. Now, it just so happens that I believe in your A) and have (what I believe are) valid reasons for doing so. The pleasantness of that option is not one of them though. From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 11 21:13:55 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:13:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411101743.046b7878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171305.04702e00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:25 PM 4/11/2007 +0100, you wrote: >On 4/11/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > *IF* people think cryonics status on the transhumanist list is a good idea, > > reverting only requires going to the last version with the changes under > > history, bringing up the editor and saving. If you consider yourself a > > transhumanist, you might so remark in the comments on the reversion. I > > really wonder how many are signed up? > > >Depends on whether you think that a transhumanist list should be a >marketing vehicle for commercial companies selling cryonics. As far as I know, there are none. All are non profit. Keith From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 11 23:17:31 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:17:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <394815.57022.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <959714.71626.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I wrote earlier: ..."Also, I wonder if it is even possible that a Universe such as ours (one that includes observers who can detect a greater-than-zero but finite history) can even become *anything but* infinitely old. For example, if a hypothetical Universe was destined to only become finitely old (eg. 6 Billion years old)then dividing that finite history by +Infinity would lead to any "time-unit"/"observer-moment"/"apparent history" being infinitely small. So the only length of history that could possibly be observed would be an infinitely short one. Or to put it more directly, it seems that no observer could possibly exist at all in this hypothetical Universe. And I don't yet see any reason why the starting denominator could not be +Infinity (which would represent the "very beginning" of this hypothetical Universe) given that the value of the quotient would still be greater-than-zero (and positive) although very, very, very tiny." I've thought a little more about this, and I have another micro-argument in support of this preliminary conclusion. Problem is, it's only half-baked because it's hard for me to wrap my brain around, and what's worse is that it's even harder for me to meaningfully present through e-mail. But, what the hell I'll give it a try, I hope it may generate some useful input or refutations. First imagine a hypothetical Universe that is predetermined to become only finitely old because it's destined to end in a Big Crunch. Now convert its final, total age into a finite number of individual "time-units" (the most fundamental possible units for this hypothetical Universe). For simplicity sake, assume that it's final total age is only 3 "time-units" long (this is a very short-lived Universe). So I'll use 3 for the numerator (Think of the 3 as equaling: three more than zero). The problem arises when I try to use 3 as the starting denominator. In order for the Universe to successfully achieve the age of 3 "time-units", the denominator must count-down to the value of 1. But, if the denominator counts-down to only 1, then the numerator can only achieve the age of 2 "time-units" and therefore it could never "reach" its final age. (Because there are only units of change between 3 and 1. ie. 3 becomes 2, and then 2 becomes 1). This Universe could apparently reach it's final age of 3 "time-units" if and only if it's denominator became 0. This quotient is always called "undefined", but that's really just a euphemism for equaling positive infinity. You might say that a work-around would be to start with a denominator of 4, allow that to count-down to 1 and allow the numerator to count-up to a full 3. The problem with that is, the "time-units" we are using are already fundamental, and there can only be 3 of them (not 4) in this hypothetical Universe. So, apparently in this case, I can't use any starting denominator greater than 3, and I certainly can't use any starting denominator smaller than 3 that would still allow the Universe to reach its final age. Yet another problem is that if this Universe were to "start" with the fraction 3/3, that would mean counting-up from 1, and not from 0 the way it should be. The only way this would "work" would be to allow that the individual "time-units" for this Universe to have no lower bound. In other words, to allow that the "time-units" for this hypothetical Universe would be infinitely small (but still existent). And if the "time-units" have to be infinitely small, then it would require an infinite number of them (ie. Infinity/Infinity) in order to allow the existence of an observer within this hypothetical Universe. The passage of 3 infinitely small "time-units" is not going to allow the existence of an internal observer. So in a terribly, terribly convoluted way, I think this supports my contention that: only a Universe that will reach an infinite age can include internal observers. Therefore, my preliminary conclusion is that our Universe will never end in a Big Crunch and will continue to exist into the infinite future. Of course, I'm willing to change that conclusion depending on any convincing evidence or argument. I realize that this is probably clear as mud. I know I wouldn't want to try and interpret it. :-) In any case, I welcome any comments, even the dissenting variety. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091 From velvethum at hotmail.com Thu Apr 12 00:03:04 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:03:04 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><027001c77a3c$5650f0c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Heartland: >> I'm not sure what you mean by "observer moments" here or why you think >> instances >> could be delineated from moment to moment and that they occur in >> sequences. While >> each instance has a beginning and end, there's no limit on how long it >> should last, >> is there? Stathis: > An observer moment, sometimes hyphenated as observer-moment or abbreviated > as OM, is the smallest possible unit of experience. I believe the term was > originated by Nick Bostrom. You can make it more concrete by talking about > observer seconds or observer days or whatever. It eliminates ambiguity in > these discussions about personal identity because we can always point to a > specific collection of matter and say, "that's the entity with > Heartland-type memories in New York at 5:15 PM on March 5 2006" and "that's > the entity with Heartland-type memories in London at 3:02 AM on April 5 > 2006", and then argue about whether they are "the same person" or whether > "Heartland has survived" during the intervening month. That might work for static data such as memories but not for a physical dynamic process which is necessarily defined over time interval>0. The OM concept simply does not apply to a process. Behind the idea of OM is a false conviction that life is reducible to static data but it's quite obvious, at least to me, that life is a physical process that reduces only to itself or else it stops being life at all. Stathis: > Now, I must admit I am a little confused about your notion of instance and > type. If a person undergoes destructive teleportation, would you say that > the procedure creates two separate instances of the one type? Not exactly. Instance of life #1 of type A goes into teleportation booth at t1. Instance #1 of type A is permanently destroyed at t2. Instance #2 of type A is created somewhere else at t3. Instance obviously has to refer to a spatiotemporal process itself, not matter. Stathis: >> >> A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can >> >> have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. Heartland: >> Only copies recover. Obviously a copy will always suffer from illusion >> that it's >> the original but the evidence collected by an objective observer would >> show >> otherwise. This case is logically equivalent to a situation where you >> download >> patient's brain structure to a file, destroy the patient and then run many >> instances of this file. The 1000th instance would suffer from the same >> illusion. >> Does the fact that a 2nd instance runs on the original body and 1000th on >> some >> artificial hardware make any difference? I really don't think so. Stathis: > So if you were dragged out of a freezing lake and were successfully > resuscitated (or apparently so), would you consider that you were no longer > the original you, I would be lying to myself if I didn't. I-copy would enjoy life and feel sorry for what happened to my predecessor. Stathis: > and if so how would you introduce yourself and expect > family and friends to treat you when they came to see you in hospital? If I introduced myself as the original or a copy wouldn't change the fact the reinstantiated process would be a copy of the past process. If someone told me now that a person of my type suffered flat EEG, I would continue to introduce myself as the original for the sake of avoiding confusion unless I was sure the people around me would have the ability to comprehend my views about survival. Lee: >>> What on Earth can you have against cryonics? It's just a slowing down >>> of the process, not even a cessation any more than sleep is. Even at >>> liquid nitrogen temperatures, processes proceed (only more slowly). >>> Even the same atoms are used upon re-animation. Heartland: >> Flat EEG means death. It has to. It's the only conclusion that doesn't lead to >> contradictions. Besides, it's consistent with a belief that there's no such >> thing >> as a resurrection. Lee: > Here, however, your definition of death is very interesting, and is not all > in keeping with medical practice. Death has been a moving target, hasn't it? Its definition changes whenever we take into account new knowledge/understanding. I'm quite confident that many years from now, it will be common to pronounce living things as permanently dead whenever their minds stop. Lee: > Sometimes people's EEGs do go quiet > for a few seconds, but then the system gets kickstarted again. At least > that's what I've heard. In cryonics, a boy was once rescued who had > been underwater for 45 minutes, with heart stopped (and probably with > flat EEG). But he came to. New lives are not created exclusively at inception/birth. Heartland: >> I guess it's one of those either-you-get-it-or-don't kinds of things. Perhaps >> you >> might realize and appreciate the difference by focusing on the amount of benefit >> that each instance derives from existence of other instances. There's no doubt >> in >> my mind that this amount is always exactly zero. Lee: > Yeah, nearly zero to me. True, an instance of me does gain some satisfaction > that > I am also getting benefit in other locations, but he also gains satisfaction from > knowing that some people in Istanbul are being nice to other people there. Good. Now try to imagine that *this* instance of the brain that makes sense of these words right now will not exist tomorrow. This means that the brain that allowed you today to derive benefit from knowing people in Istanbul are nice will not exist tomorrow which necessarily implies that you will not be able to derive benefit tomorrow. In other words, the amount of benefit will you be able to derive tomorrow from knowing that some people in Istanbul are being nice to other people there will be exactly zero. And if the amount of benefit *this* instance of Lee Corbin derives from other instances of anything is always exactly zero *when this instance of Lee Corbin doesn't exist,* what's the point of having other instances of Lee Corbin created sometime in the future after you die? Heartland: >> In other words, if I'm hungry, I >> will stay hungry regardless of how many other instances fill their stomachs with >> food. If I'm dead, I will stay dead regardless of how many other instances stay >> alive. Lee: > Of course, naturally, you are using *your* definition of "I' and "me", just > as previously I was using mine. You are an instance first, then a type. Benefit accrues only to an instance, not to a type which makes all the difference. After all, if you're stranded in the desert and praying for a glass of water, your thirst doesn't get quenched simply by *knowing* other people are drinking gallons of water somewhere else right now, doesn't it? Some definitions are not created equal or are, at least, less useful than others. H. From mfj.eav at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 00:45:34 2007 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:45:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: <61c8738e0704111745v33e71343l621fe895eecf87a6@mail.gmail.com> One error in judgement is that one should not assume countries like saudi need these high water use crops. If one has high cost water one can for example grow large containerized ponds of algae. Some of this material can make food which can be processed to look and taste like those imported crops and some of the material can be used to fuel energy production. The only question is how fast can fundamental changes like this occur and will the decision makers be able to manage the sociopolitics with their own people in such a crisis. We need not look farther than the massive trial of bio-energy this year in North American agriculture. Fertilizer takes petroleum. Crops can go to food or fuel subject only to market drivers. crop Inputs are being diverted to energy over food. Some food sectors will have to adjust economics, marketing, or simply reduce available food supply. North americans will not starve in 2007, but will consumers revolt, will changes to diet occur , will consumption patterns and personal budget decisions adjust and if so how fast? The other question is .. how stable a long term pattern is this. Is it a paradigm shifted or a fad? Is the shift just starting with more evolution on the way or is it more fixed in stone? This is a complex evolving scenario and I do not think one can discuss any part without referring to many ongoing feedback loops. Lets get more comment before I elaborate further on this. Morris Johnson -- LIFESPAN PHARMA Inc. Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. 306-447-4944 701-240-9411 Mission: To Preserve, Protect and Enhance Lifespan Plant-based Natural-health Bio-product Bio-pharmaceuticals http://www.angelfire.com/on4/extropian-lifespan http://www.4XtraLifespans.bravehost.com megao at sasktel.net, arla_j at hotmail.com, mfj.eav at gmail.com extropian.pharmer at gmail.com Extreme Life-Extension ..."The most dangerous idea on earth" -Leon Kass , Bioethics Advisor to George Herbert Walker Bush, June 2005 Extropian Smoke Signals Waft Softly but Carry a big Schtick ... Morris Johnson - June 2005* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Wed Apr 11 23:34:10 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:34:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> <20070411185409.GG9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <461D7072.2070505@thomasoliver.net> Eugen Leitl wrote: >[...] > > >> Except that AI doesn't presently exist, it isn't going to exist unless >> people build it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of >> >> > >Evolution is not especially rational, but rather capable. > The reasoning mind stands as the ultimate survival tool evolution has produced to date. I doubt evolution's subrational products can surpass it. >> contributing to the field is going to build an AI that can't be >> controlled and whose motives are destructive. >> >> > >The future is strange and wild. Human it is not. > Wrong tense for such absolute assertions. And to what end? We have ample chaos to content with right now. Besides, even were human extinction inevitable, we might welcome it with open transhuman arms. Meat grinding seems a more unlikely threat than mind cannibalism. But the upside of getting eaten will be continued survival as a sub entity. As long as it optonal, it won't be so terrifying. Perhaps we could work out mind donor agreements to keep things orderly. -- Thomas From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 03:26:05 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:26:05 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <959714.71626.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <394815.57022.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <959714.71626.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, A B wrote: > > I wrote earlier: > > ..."Also, I wonder if it is even possible that a > Universe > such as ours (one that includes observers who can > detect a greater-than-zero but finite history) can > even become *anything but* infinitely old. > > For example, if a hypothetical Universe was destined > to only become finitely old (eg. 6 Billion years > old)then dividing that finite history by +Infinity > would lead to any > "time-unit"/"observer-moment"/"apparent history" being > infinitely small. So the only length of history that > could possibly be observed would be an infinitely > short one. Or to put it more directly, it seems that > no observer could possibly exist at all in this > hypothetical Universe. And I don't yet see any reason > why the starting denominator could not be +Infinity > (which would represent the "very beginning" of this > hypothetical Universe) given that the value of the > quotient would still be greater-than-zero (and > positive) although very, very, very tiny." > > > > I've thought a little more about this, and I have > another micro-argument in support of this preliminary > conclusion. Problem is, it's only half-baked because > it's hard for me to wrap my brain around, and what's > worse is that it's even harder for me to meaningfully > present through e-mail. But, what the hell I'll give > it a try, I hope it may generate some useful input or > refutations. > > First imagine a hypothetical Universe that is > predetermined to become only finitely old because it's > destined to end in a Big Crunch. Now convert its > final, total age into a finite number of individual > "time-units" (the most fundamental possible units for > this hypothetical Universe). For simplicity sake, > assume that it's final total age is only 3 > "time-units" long (this is a very short-lived > Universe). So I'll use 3 for the numerator (Think of > the 3 as equaling: three more than zero). The problem > arises when I try to use 3 as the starting > denominator. In order for the Universe to successfully > achieve the age of 3 "time-units", the denominator > must count-down to the value of 1. But, if the > denominator counts-down to only 1, then the numerator > can only achieve the age of 2 "time-units" and > therefore it could never "reach" its final age. > (Because there are only units of change between 3 and > 1. ie. 3 becomes 2, and then 2 becomes 1). This > Universe could apparently reach it's final age of 3 > "time-units" if and only if it's denominator became 0. > This quotient is always called "undefined", but that's > really just a euphemism for equaling positive > infinity. You might say that a work-around would be to > start with a denominator of 4, allow that to > count-down to 1 and allow the numerator to count-up to > a full 3. The problem with that is, the "time-units" > we are using are already fundamental, and there can > only be 3 of them (not 4) in this hypothetical > Universe. So, apparently in this case, I can't use any > starting denominator greater than 3, and I certainly > can't use any starting denominator smaller than 3 that > would still allow the Universe to reach its final age. > Yet another problem is that if this Universe were to > "start" with the fraction 3/3, that would mean > counting-up from 1, and not from 0 the way it should > be. The only way this would "work" would be to allow > that the individual "time-units" for this Universe to > have no lower bound. In other words, to allow that the > "time-units" for this hypothetical Universe would be > infinitely small (but still existent). And if the > "time-units" have to be infinitely small, then it > would require an infinite number of them (ie. > Infinity/Infinity) in order to allow the existence of > an observer within this hypothetical Universe. The > passage of 3 infinitely small "time-units" is not > going to allow the existence of an internal observer. > So in a terribly, terribly convoluted way, I think > this supports my contention that: only a Universe that > will reach an infinite age can include internal > observers. Therefore, my preliminary conclusion is > that our Universe will never end in a Big Crunch and > will continue to exist into the infinite future. Of > course, I'm willing to change that conclusion > depending on any convincing evidence or argument. > > I realize that this is probably clear as mud. I know I > wouldn't want to try and interpret it. :-) > > In any case, I welcome any comments, even the > dissenting variety. > > Best Wishes, > > Jeffrey Herrlich Could you clarify your usage of numerator and denominator? The denominator is the number on the bottom, stays fixed and cannot be zero, while the numerator is the number on top and can take any value, although in this context it will vary between 0 and the denominator, 3. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 03:56:28 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:56:28 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: I think the assumption that there will be a Singularity "meat grinder" needs > serious reexamination. We don't run around eliminating all of the nematodes > or bacteria on the planet just because they are consuming some small > fraction of energy and/or matter that we at some point may want. > > You have to realize that while there is a vector that some may follow for > climbing the singularity slope once it goes nearly vertical, there is no > reason once it tops out that those who selected to not make that choice will > be turned into hamburger. The difference between a sub-KT-I and a KT-II > civilization is at least 13 orders of magnitude in terms of power > consumption. We generally don't interest ourselves in something that is > going to involve dealing with 0.00000000001% of our resources. Hell we > rarely pay much attention to anything in the 0.1% to 0.01% range. It > could well be the case that the solar system as a whole evolves up the slope > while Earth, Mars and Venus remain meat havens until we get so bored with > multi-thousand year lifespans that we go off on some dangerous adventure in > a world ship to a distant "dark" galaxy. > On a literal understanding of the goals of the AI at the start of the singularity, "make yourself more intelligent at any cost" might involve converting all of the matter and energy in the universe into computronium, without regard for the consequences to other life forms or the environment. However, it is fallacious to assume that a super-intelligent AI will have this (or indeed any other) goal simply by virtue of the fact that it is intelligent. There is no necessary connection between intelligence and motivation even among naturally evolved animals, let alone when you include *every possible* motivation that could be programmed into an AI. Stathis Papaioannou Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 03:59:42 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:59:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal IdentityParadox) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell writes > On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > What we have reached is the uncomfortable conclusion that > > what happens to you (or happened to you) in the past is > > every bit as worthy of anticipation as events that are > > scheduled to happen in your future. This demolishes any > > rational or consistent use of *anticipation* that I have > > ever been able to formulate. > > I don't see the problem. Consider the evolved function of anticipation: > it's to make us pay attention to things that are important _and that we > can influence_. Yes, anticipation is indeed one of the things that evolved to help us make choices that benefit us or our genes. But it constitutes a dilemma because it prompts me to relish good things in my future, but not to equally relish (positively anticipate) them in my past. I conclude that as such, anticipation is not a reliable guide or indicator, since it doesn't allow me to anticipate (with pleasure) something good that happened to me last night. That is, I don't "feel" the same way about it as I do about something good that will happen tomorrow night. > In your scenario it makes sense for myself in October 8 2007 to > anticipate what will happen in October 9 999, because I can > causally influence it. That's a bold and interesting idea, in my opinion. But it seems that we can separate causality from anticipation by considering the passive beneficiary of something good or bad (that is slated for him or her) but who has no influence on its occuring or not. Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 04:00:47 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:00:47 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Russell Wallace wrote: > > On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > > What we have reached is the uncomfortable conclusion that > > what happens to you (or happened to you) in the past is > > every bit as worthy of anticipation as events that are > > scheduled to happen in your future. This demolishes any > > rational or consistent use of *anticipation* that I have > > ever been able to formulate. > > > I don't see the problem. Consider the evolved function of anticipation: > it's to make us pay attention to things that are important _and that we can > influence_. In your scenario it makes sense for myself in October 8 2007 to > anticipate what will happen in October 9 999, because I can causally > influence it. For example, I can make sure my time machine's power supply is > fully charged so that I can get to October 9 999 on schedule. This causal > influence will have its due effect irrespective of the memory tampering, so > it's perfectly logical. > You can causally influence events, but they won't appear in your subjective future. It's like being able to causally influence the feelings of a stranger. Stathis Papaioannou _______________________________________________ > 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 jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 12 04:13:57 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:13:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: References: <394815.57022.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <959714.71626.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > > On 4/12/07, A B wrote: > > > > > > ..."Also, I wonder if it is even possible that a > > Universe > > such as ours (one that includes observers who can > > detect a greater-than-zero but finite history) can > > even become *anything but* infinitely old. > > > > For example, if a hypothetical Universe was destined > > to only become finitely old (eg. 6 Billion years > > old)then dividing that finite history by +Infinity > > would lead to any > > "time-unit"/"observer-moment"/"apparent history" being > > infinitely small. So the only length of history that > > could possibly be observed would be an infinitely > > short one. Or to put it more directly, it seems that > > no observer could possibly exist at all in this > > hypothetical Universe. And I don't yet see any reason > > why the starting denominator could not be +Infinity > > (which would represent the "very beginning" of this > > hypothetical Universe) given that the value of the > > quotient would still be greater-than-zero (and > > positive) although very, very, very tiny." > > > > > > Could you clarify your usage of numerator and denominator? The > denominator is the number on the bottom, stays fixed and cannot be zero, > while the numerator is the number on top and can take any value, although in > this context it will vary between 0 and the denominator, 3. > The first part seems like a peculiar adaptation of Zeno's paradox proving that motion is impossible because any object would have to travel through infinite intervals to reach the target. The second part is more disorienting than the worst imaginable acid trip, and it's clear that a little math can be a truly dangerous thing. We're having an offline discussion that's going to lead to some open-ended trends, but I think we'll stick with graphical models. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 04:14:23 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:14:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <20070411121920.GP9439@leitl.org><20070411133516.GT9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Excuse moi for butting in, but I may be misunderstanding something in the arguments here. It sounds as though several people are criticizing Heartland for claiming that "dead people are walking around". I thought that his claim was merely that when you bring someone back from a flat EEG, or you teleport them, or you restore them from back up, hardly being zombies they're merely *different* people that those who died. This is similar to the refusal of several people on this list---who otherwise would not agree with Heartland in the least---to teleport. They are materialists in every other respect: cryonics is fine, for example. But the destructive property of teleportation, to them, kills someone and replaces him with an entity who only *believes* that he was the original. (Of course I heartily dispute this myself.) I know how these people (who I disagree) with feel. They feel about teleporters and revived patients the way that I feel about insane asylum patients who've studied every detail of Napoleon's life, and through some separate mechanism have become persuaded that they are the very same person as Napoleon. I claim that with present technology, it is simpy false that any such preparation can truly bring the big N back to life. (Later, of course, nearer the Omega point, it may indeed be possible to bring him and everyone else back to life, for the reasons that Tipler and many others of us give, notwithstanding the objections of many other people.) Lee From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Apr 12 04:42:36 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:42:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0704111745v33e71343l621fe895eecf87a6@mail.gmail.com> References: <61c8738e0704111745v33e71343l621fe895eecf87a6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Apr 11, 2007, at 8:45 PM, Morris Johnson wrote: > > We need not look farther than the massive trial of bio-energy this > year in North American agriculture. Basing bio-energy largely on corn will be a colossal failure with the side-effect of driving various food costs higher. A later side- effect will be a lot of farming business problem, calls for subsidies and bail outs and so on. It is very predictable. > > Fertilizer takes petroleum. Crops can go to food or fuel subject > only to market drivers. > crop Inputs are being diverted to energy over food. Do your bio-energy as much as possible using fast growing weeds that take little in the way of such inputs. > Some food sectors will have to adjust economics, marketing, or > simply reduce available food supply. Yep, as long as we are stupid enough to turn a primary, relatively high input, food into ethanol. > North americans will not starve in 2007, but will consumers revolt, > will changes to diet occur , will consumption patterns and > personal budget decisions adjust and if so how fast? > The other question is .. how stable a long term pattern is this. > Is it a paradigm shifted or a fad? It is a meaningless sop that will enrich many "in the know" and various opportunists while in the long run making a valid timely energy solution less likely in the US. DOA > Is the shift just starting with more evolution on the way or is it > more fixed in stone? > Fixed in stone? Only until the next Directive comrade. - samantha From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 04:45:00 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:45:00 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal IdentityParadox) In-Reply-To: <03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> <03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704112145w6cbadef9ie3cb0222b2f95703@mail.gmail.com> On 4/12/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > That's a bold and interesting idea, in my opinion. But it seems that > we can separate causality from anticipation by considering the > passive beneficiary of something good or bad (that is slated for him > or her) but who has no influence on its occuring or not. > But in that case we can agree that anticipation is irrational, so it doesn't contradict the criterion that anticipation is rational if and only if you have causal influence. It's rare that something good will happen to you whether you like it or not, but sadly not so rare for something bad, so it's easier to analyze this if we take negative anticipation i.e. fear. Consider the case of a man who has tooth problems, such that there will be pain if he goes to the dentist, and more pain, albeit somewhat deferred, if he does not. Yet he postpones going to the dentist because he fears the pain. Yet this is irrational because he cannot actually prevent pain - he has no causal influence over that aspect of things, there will be pain no matter what he does. In that case everyone - not just us, everyone, including likely the poor man himself! - will agree he is being irrational, and he would be better off if he could just switch off his fear instincts and deal as dispassionately with the matter as he would if it were happening to a stranger. So we see that the logical criterion does actually match our intuition. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 04:57:31 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:57:31 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Heartland wrote: Stathis: > > So if you were dragged out of a freezing lake and were successfully > > resuscitated (or apparently so), would you consider that you were no > longer > > the original you, > > I would be lying to myself if I didn't. I-copy would enjoy life and feel > sorry for > what happened to my predecessor. > > Stathis: > > and if so how would you introduce yourself and expect > > family and friends to treat you when they came to see you in hospital? > > If I introduced myself as the original or a copy wouldn't change the fact > the > reinstantiated process would be a copy of the past process. If someone > told me now > that a person of my type suffered flat EEG, I would continue to introduce > myself as > the original for the sake of avoiding confusion unless I was sure the > people around > me would have the ability to comprehend my views about survival. > If you define death in this non-conventional way, what does it matter if you die and are replaced by a copy? If it were discovered tomorrow that some people during their sleep have brief periods of flat EEG activity, and monitoring shows that you are one of these people (and have been for your whole life), would it worry you? Would it change the way you live your life? Do you have any evidence today that you are *not* one of these people? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 12 05:21:30 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 01:21:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412012049.04754a70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. Keith From velvethum at hotmail.com Thu Apr 12 05:41:53 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 01:41:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: > At 01:53 PM 4/11/2007 -0400, PJ wrote: >>While I understand your historical argument, transhumanism isn't just >>about cryonics. I agree with both Justice DeThezier's argument on >>WTA-talk (since I also said 'no') and Loremaster's rationale for >>discretion. Cryonics status -- or any other personal status -- should not >>be a matter of public record, unless the individual requests it. > >>Otherwise, it smacks of marketing or other hidden agendas. > There is an agenda, but it is hardly hidden. If it isn't obvious, ask and > I will state it. > > Keith Okay, let's hear it. H. From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 12 03:34:28 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:34:28 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hierarchies of principle Message-ID: <003201c77cb3$79fa3760$e7e18f9b@homepc> http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2007/04/even_without_the_polls_gonzale.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 Reason demands and Jeffersons successors should know there are hierarchies of principle. No law between countries and men can outrank the law (the US-ratified UN charter) against launching aggressive wars against other countries. Without such laws there can be no international laws at all. No promise between Americans (or indeed between the citizens of any democracy) can be more solemn than the Presidential Oath to those citizens to uphold the Constitution and the law to those citizens. Allow that promise to be broken or uttered parrot fashion by an imbecile and all promises are void. As a non-American, as a former pro-American, I must tell you that the US law includes the treaties that you have made in order to receive from the rest of us that are not a part of your 300 millions a quid for your pro. If you, the current generation of voting American can't get that, if you can't see that you have a duty not just to yourselves but to the rest of us in a would-be civilized world to remove the blight on your country and the blight on your honor then one wonders if you will ever have the wit and perception to see that behind the brown avenging eyes fixed upon you lies a resolve that could have been planted by the ghost of Patrick Henry. You must impeach George W Bush, you must be as good as your promises when the promises are so serious, because without the rule of law, logically there can only be war. If you don't then in 2007 it will be lazy, complacent, compromising, selfish and parochial Americans that are the real enemies of the rest of humanity and ultimately of themselves. On September 11, 2001 a Frenchman said "we are all Americans now". And we other non-Americans knew what he meant. But so far has George W Bush reduced America, so far have you the citizens and the Congresses of the US let your honor be reduced and your promises broken, that inside and outside America, we are all terrorists now. Brett Paatsch -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 12 06:04:39 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 01:04:39 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070412010416.02259330@satx.rr.com> At 01:21 AM 4/12/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. You've just noticed? :) From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 06:59:23 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:59:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: Re: Personal Identity Bis References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070412010416.02259330@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <041901c77cd0$67c53e10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> I must say that I have suggestion that works quite well for me. I simply ignore threads that don't interest me---instead of insisting they be replace by silence. You might give it a try. Lee >>I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. > > You've just noticed? :) From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 12 07:23:21 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:23:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hierarchies of principle References: <003201c77cb3$79fa3760$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <461DDE69.2060007@thomasoliver.net> Brett Paatsch wrote: > http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2007/04/even_without_the_polls_gonzale.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 > [...] > > You must impeach George W Bush, you must be as good as your promises > when the promises are so serious, because without the rule of law, > logically there can only be war. If you don't then in 2007 it will be > lazy, complacent, compromising, selfish and parochial Americans that > are the real enemies of the rest of humanity and ultimately of > themselves. > > > > On September 11, 2001 a Frenchman said "we are all Americans now". And > we other non-Americans knew what he meant. > > > > But so far has George W Bush reduced America, so far have you the > citizens and the Congresses of the US let your honor be reduced and > your promises broken, that inside and outside America, we are all > terrorists now. > > > > > > Brett Paatsch > Not I! But where can I find a representative? And I agree -- Skip Gonzales. In the interest of the past, present and future, let us impeach Bush and Cheney. -- Thomas From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 12 08:12:16 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 01:12:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hydrogen a "bad Idea" References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412012049.04754a70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> Keith Henson wrote: >I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. > >Keith > > I hope this help, Keith: ------------------------ BillK: [...] 'Save the planet' technologies. 01. Make Oil from Just about Anything. 02. Desalination, removing the salt and minerals out of seawater. 03. Hydrogen fuel cells. 04. Solar power developments. 05. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. 06. Harness Waves and Tides. 07. Plant Your Roof. Roof gardens are a good thing. 08. Let Plants and Microbes Clean Up After Us. 09. Bury The Bad Stuff. Put CO2 in the ground. 10. Make Paper Obsolete. Re-usable electronic paper. ------------------------------- Robert Bradbury: 03. Hydrogen fuel cells. This is a *bad* idea. It has been shown that running on hydrogen is much less efficient than running on "electricity". You lose too much energy in the production, transport and/or storage of the hydrogen. Methanol or ethanol fuel cells would be far better so long as the methanol or ethanol are being produced from carbon extracted from the atmosphere. All hydrogen now used comes from methane and the only way you can produce it relatively cheaply is to oxidize the carbon in the methane and release the CO2 into the atmosphere. The only other common source of hydrogen is water and until someone comes up with a catalyst that uses solar energy to cheaply split water that is too expensive as well. If you *really* want this it should be: 03. Hydrogen fuel cells + Catalyst to produce H2 from H2O+sunlight + Lightweight H2 storage system. If you want to store CO2 produced by power plants underground and use the electricity to charge batteries for transport you have a much more efficient system. Better still if you can take the plants (or bacteria) on your roof to convert your solar energy directly into either ethanol or electrons to feed to your means of transport. So alternatively you might want: 03. Lightweight nanotechnology high capacity based batteries or capacitors that can rapidly and efficiently charged. We are *much* closer to that than we are to having a hydrogen solution. ------------------ Thomas: I ran this by Paul Torgerson of Worldwide Energy, an emerging hydrogen fuel cell/electrolyzer company. He had this to say: Tom, These are all very noble claims being made by people with litlle concept of the challenges faced today. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates that there are 234 million light duty vehicles, cars, and motorcycles registered in the United States in 2004. These vehicles consumed 138.8 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually. Do we honestly think we can replace that with solar panels? Solar panels are by far the most expensive means of energy production around. To power just US housing would take an estimated area the size of Arizona, and we build about 15 million new homes a year. The sun only shines part time. Puttting a solar panel on your roof is not enough to solve the energy crisis. The hydrogen economy has already been implemented. Very high temperature nuclear electrolysis looks like the cheapest means of hydrogen production. This will use electricity and heat to crack water molecules. The new GEN IV light water reactors being developed by DOE won't be ready until 2030. [Paul clarified with the following:) Current US annual hydrogen production is the equivalent of 71.8 Gigawatts Thermal ("GWth") of nuclear or fossil power. This equates to 118 nuclear (or fossil) plants to supply the hydrogen using the projected system configuration of 600 Megawatts Thermal ("MWth") nuclear to 50 MWth for Hydrogen Production. More than 500 nuclear reactors (or fossil plants, with carbon sequestration, will be needed by 2050 to achieve the DOE's goal of substituting 25% of liquid transportation fuel with hydrogen. If the Company captures five to ten percent market share of this potential market, Worldwide's metal-tubular solid oxide electrolyzer cell ("MTSOEC") stack production would grow to thousands of WET multi-megawatt MTSOEC stacks containing from 468,750 to 937,000 linear feet of WET produced electrodes, from commissioning of the first commercial reactor (in 2025) through 2050. Worldwide estimates that each nuclear hydrogen plant using its MTSOEC stacks will require four to five complete stack change outs over the 60 year life of the reactor. This estimate is based on typical 94.5 % reactor availability, typical baseload operation and maintenance practices, and industry standard run times between shutdowns. A 600 MW Gen IV nuclear plant, utilizing high temperature electrolysis, has the potential to produce 200,000 gallons of gasoline hydrogen equivalent ("gge H2") for less than $2.00/kg . This potential daily production level is based on 50 MW of thermal energy producing the required amount of hydrogen. The cost estimate is based on 50% electrolysis efficiency. The estimated active electrode area is approximately 200 square meters per site. [end of clarification message] They estimate that it will take thermal nuclear hydrogen plants putting out 600 MW to produce 25% of the energy used in the US in 2050. That's 25%. Try getting that much energy from bacteria or plants. Currently, 9 million tons of hydrogen is produced annually in the United States for non-transportation uses including petrochemical applications,fertilizer, metals treating, electronics, and glass manufacturing. Nine million tons of hydrogen is projected to be able to fuel 20 - 30 million cars & light duty vehicles (8.5% - 13% of the current vehicle population) or 5 - 8 million homes. Five percent of the natural gas in the United States is used to produce hydrogen. More than 95% of the hydrogen currently produced is by a process known as steam reforming from natural gas. This process is well established, near its theoretical limits, and is currently several times more expensive than gasoline. In addition, the future commodity prices for hydrogen produced by this process will be closely linked to the commodity cost of natural gas. Making the process cleaner would add to the cost. Nuclear hydrogen has an estimated cost of $2/gal of gas equivalent (GGE). Plus nuclear electrolysis doesn't produce CO2. Burning methane produces CO2, so does burning ethanol. People riding the bio fuels wagon think a bunch of ethanol plants can suddenly solve the world's energy needs. In fact, ethanol costs more to make than its worth. It creates the next big problem of having to use our food supply to make it in volume. The DOE is spending big bucks working on carbon sequestration. One of the most novel uses I've seen is pumping it down dry oil wells. It actually fills the voids and makes the wells produce more oil. There are no easy answers to the worlds energy crisis. We'll never have the magic power to crack enough water into hydrogen with solar energy to produce 138 billion GGEs a year. DOE is investing billions in the future, but the ideas below don't merit the energy spent to send the message. Who can provide a solution with verifiable facts and figures, that supplies 138 billion GGEs a year for 330 million US vehicles, using solar, bio-fuels or plants on their roofs? Then try fueling 700 million vehicles worldwide, Then work on heating the couple of billion homes. Once you solve these issues, work on energy to drive the world's industries which increases at about 5% a year. And once you solve the US energy needs try taking on China where we expect the majority of the world's oil production this century to be consumed. Small scale ideas look foolish when we confront the big picture and become better informed people. Paul ----------------- Paul suggested checking out the Energy Information Agency site . I bet he'd like your space elevator. --Thomas From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 12 08:21:06 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:21:06 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <461D7072.2070505@thomasoliver.net> References: <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> <20070411185409.GG9439@leitl.org> <461D7072.2070505@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <20070412082106.GP9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 04:34:10PM -0700, Thomas wrote: > >Evolution is not especially rational, but rather capable. > > > The reasoning mind stands as the ultimate survival tool evolution has Actually, by the metric ton human biomass doesn't even appear on the graph. By the hardiness, nothing can touch lithobacteria. They live in an universe of their own. > produced to date. I doubt evolution's subrational products can surpass > it. My point was that evolutionary design is quite capable for producing an advanced infoprocessing agent (such as you), whereas the rational product of it so far can't. So if there's a race between a particular kind of AI, or a generic kind, evolutionary designs seem to have a distinct edge. Which means less control. Less control is a feature in this case, though some people here will disagree. > >> contributing to the field is going to build an AI that can't be > >> controlled and whose motives are destructive. > >> > >> > > > >The future is strange and wild. Human it is not. > > > Wrong tense for such absolute assertions. What is the probability of us being the crown of evolutionary achievement, given data from several GYrs? Especially, given estimates of what solid-state systems are capable of. > And to what end? We have Evolution has no purpose, apart from the intrinsic drive towards more and better informational processing capability. > ample chaos to content with right now. Besides, even were human > extinction inevitable, we might welcome it with open transhuman arms. It doesn't have to be an extinction. It rather should be a transformation. > Meat grinding seems a more unlikely threat than mind cannibalism. But Last time I looked we're made from CHNOPS, which is crunchy, and good with ketchup. > the upside of getting eaten will be continued survival as a sub entity. > As long as it optonal, it won't be so terrifying. Perhaps we could > work out mind donor agreements to keep things orderly. -- Thomas We should look towards human-derived systems. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 08:40:30 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:40:30 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal IdentityParadox) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704112145w6cbadef9ie3cb0222b2f95703@mail.gmail.com> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> <03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704112145w6cbadef9ie3cb0222b2f95703@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Russell Wallace wrote: But in that case we can agree that anticipation is irrational... Why should I care what happens to some guy in the future who thinks he's me? We may not share any of the matter comprising our bodies, and our brain configurations and memories may only be approximately similar. It is neither rational nor irrational that I anticipate the experiences of a future version of me; rather, it is a description of the way human brains have evolved to think. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 09:07:50 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:07:50 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hydrogen a "bad Idea" In-Reply-To: <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412012049.04754a70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Thomas wrote: > There are no easy answers to the worlds energy crisis. We'll never have > the magic power to crack enough water into hydrogen with solar energy > to produce 138 billion GGEs a year. DOE is investing billions in the future, > but the ideas below don't merit the energy spent to send the message. > > Who can provide a solution with verifiable facts and figures, that supplies > 138 billion GGEs a year for 330 million US vehicles, using solar, bio-fuels or > plants on their roofs? Then try fueling 700 million vehicles worldwide, Then > work on heating the couple of billion homes. Once you solve these issues, > work on energy to drive the world's industries which increases at about 5% > a year. > > And once you solve the US energy needs try taking on China where we expect > the majority of the world's oil production this century to be consumed. > Small scale ideas look foolish when we confront the big picture and become > better informed people. > Yes, but..... The world is still very early in the transition phase. We still have plenty of cheapish (getting more expensive) oil, and the whole old infrastructure to rebuild. So naturally we are reluctant to leave our comfort zone and start the hard work bit. Of course it is a big job. But you have to start somewhere. When people find that the cost of filling their tank with gas makes them wonder where they are going to get enough money from, then big changes will be set in motion. (The recent small increases in gas prices are nowhere near big enough - yet....). When increasing home power bills also start to hit hard, another big rethink will begin. People won't show much interest in change without an incentive. Why buy a fuel cell car that costs much more than a gas-guzzler? Why insulate your home when electricity is so cheap? The problem is deciding when to start making the change. Starting gradually, like now, is probably correct. Leaving everything to the last minute will probably be a big mistake. All the government money that is being thrown at fuel cell technology and other alternative power systems will have spinoff benefits as well, in fields like nanotech. Fuel cells will improve, hydrogen generation and storage will improve, solar panels will get better, devices will become more economical. We are just at the beginning. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 12 12:49:10 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:49:10 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:14:23PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Excuse moi for butting in, but I may be misunderstanding something in > the arguments here. It sounds as though several people are criticizing > Heartland for claiming that "dead people are walking around". I Slawomir thinks that a few seconds of flat EEG will kill the original person. This means there are lots of zombies walking around (or at least brand new people, here's a great idea to to create ones which doesn't take a few decades), which are completely indistinguishable (no measuring procedure will help, assuming the lacune was short enough to not cause observable deficits). Strangely enough these zombies claim to be the original people, prepostorously claim access to dear loved ones of the freshly departed, his bank account, his job, his entire life. Surely, there must be a law against these uppity zombies? Why just a few seconds of flat EEG? Why not anesthesia? Why not a boink on the head? Why not a really strong cup of coffee? Calling this "death" does sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it? > thought that his claim was merely that when you bring someone back > from a flat EEG, or you teleport them, or you restore them from > back up, hardly being zombies they're merely *different* people > that those who died. How can you tell they're different? What's the measurement principle (not access to an external record) -- just the system itself? This implies that histories cling to physical systems, forever, amen, and can be queried. I would call this superstition. It's certainly not science. > This is similar to the refusal of several people on this list---who otherwise > would not agree with Heartland in the least---to teleport. They are > materialists in every other respect: cryonics is fine, for example. But > the destructive property of teleportation, to them, kills someone and > replaces him with an entity who only *believes* that he was the > original. (Of course I heartily dispute this myself.) I don't. Location doesn't matter. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 13:12:26 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:12:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <2453.163.1.72.81.1176229119.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <031701c77bc6$82cf4030$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <55367.86.153.216.201.1176287103.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <000d01c77d04$5fce8660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Anders writes >> Jensen says "Cognitive ability is a lot like money; it doesn't >> really matter how much you have so long as you have a >> certain enough." I take him to mean that insofar as ability to >> accomplish goes (among humans today), an IQ of 130 or >> 150 or something is all you need. > > My research suggest that low ability is indeed the biggest > problem. Oh, I recall reading that now. Thanks for the reminder; this is important. > Once you go below 100 IQ points, problems start to > rise rather quickly. Whether there is an advantage in > going from 130 to 140 is less obvious. However, > at least one study demonstrated that even among > the top 1% performers there were significant > differences in professional success (PhDs, tenure, > income) and number of patents between the top > and bottom quartiles. The patent part is interesting, > because that is non-competitive: it just represents > crystalized creativity and signifies that these people > actually do contribute significantly to society. You put the existence of societal "problems" relating to low IQ in one category, and overall differences (i.e. distributions) in what I was calling "general accomplishment" or the potential to accomplish, in a separate category, which is also very interesting, and seems probably right to me. Of course, in this thread we are more concerned with the latter (as a possible reflection on the nature of superhuman intelligence) than on the former, despite the greater sociological and economic importance of those "problems" traceable to less than 100 IQ. To me the fundamental problem is how closely the nature of extreme capability (as opposed to the notion of cognitive ability---in order to avoid begging the question) follows any kind of approximately linear scale. By now (I go along with the psychometricians) we have for humans that there is an approximately linear scale for human cognitive ability. But this may break down---as you mentioned in your previous email---for very advanced entities. It seems to me that so far we are speculating that advanced intelligence may be measured by some combination of games (extremely complicated ones) domination contests mathematical abilities You had suggested "games", and I had earlier suggested domination contests, in the sense that two extremely advanced entities may contest resources, even up to the point of extinguishing each other. (This is how life on Earth has developed thus far, from microscopic creatures all the way up to states.) I now add a third possibility---namely that some component may be measurable by mathematical achievement. (This goes in hand with a contention I've had for a long time that perhaps extreme intelligence rather trivially solves all non-mathematical problems comparitively early in its development.) More later on your interesting analyses of present day estimates of IQ differences among human populations. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 13:35:59 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:35:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis wrote > Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:28 AM > On 4/11/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > This is most unfortunate, because feelings of anticipation > > are hardwired at a very fundamental level into our selves > > and our motivations. > > We could try to patch things up by saying that both memory loss > and dying some time after you have been duplicated, which I > agree are equivalent, constitute absolute death and are to be > avoided at all costs. Yes, it being understood that by "dying some time after being duplicated", you mean a quite a large number of years or decades. > However, this sounds wrong, because most people wouldn't > worry that much about a few minutes or a few hours of memory > loss But that's a different matter, entirely, though perhaps I'm misreading you. We have to view as mentally aberrant anyone who so little identifies with who he'll be in a few minutes that (except in extreme cases of torture or pleasure), he benefit horizon (or a discount factor of future benefit), that he can't make very small sacrifices of the moment to save himself vast loss of benefit over succeeding hours or days. In other words, anyone who won't spend a penny today to avoid loss of thousands of dollars tomorrow is simply crazy (i.e. has something broken). > Alternatively, we could say that, indeed, we should anticipate > the past as much as the future, but as you point out this runs > counter to all our programming. No, I'm not saying that we ought to try to change ourselves to anticipate the past as well as the future---as we agree, that would be peculiarly at odds with the evolutionary purpose of anticipation. I'm only lamenting that anticipation cannot be rationalized (at least I've not seen any way so far). But big deal---we've learned that any number of concepts that we took for granted, e.g. "simultaneity", cannot be so consistently rationalized. > Either solution would allow a consistent theory of personal > identity, but it wouldn't feel right. Well, I didn't think that theories about personal identity were really at stake over the anticipation dilemma. Now it *is* true, I contend, that most people get their views on personal identity by consulting their "anticipation" module. For example, they just don't "feel" that they'll themselves will have the future experiences of that frozen slab in the next room who is a recent duplicate. All along, I've been attacking the veracity of this particular feeling, just as, for example, Columbus could be said to be attacking the "feeling" that the Earth must be flat. (Boy, am I begging for a lot of new threads to be started! I hope that nobody cavalierly responds to all this unless they either start a new thread, or it's really germane to an analysis of "anticipation" and its uses. Thanks.) > I think the paradox comes from trying to reconcile our psychology > with logic. There really is no *logical* reason why an entity should > have one type of concern for past versions of itself and another type > of concern for future versions of itself. There is an evolutionary reason. Despite the peculiar thought experiments that can be generated in which past experiences can be shown (in these weird cases) to be on a par with future ones, for an entity to worry about past events is like throwing good money after bad. > That is why I think of every observer moment as a separate > entity, related to its fellows not due to any absolute rules but > by virtue of certain contingent facts about the evolution of > our brains. For what its worth, my view on the concept of OMs is that they're pretty worthless. But this could be a matter of taste. > Other entities may have quite different views about personal > identity. If worker bees regard their queen more as self than > they do themselves, are they wrong? Oh, absolutely not! As we discussed in various threads over the last six months, values cannot be said to be rational or irrational. Suicide bombers, for example, cannot be shown to be irrational per se; they have simply placed certain benefits for their entire society or for the human race above their own survival. Worker bees don't even need to be as abstract as that :-) given their "allegiance" to the perpetuation of their genes. Lee From velvethum at hotmail.com Thu Apr 12 13:55:58 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:55:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen: > Why just a few seconds of flat EEG? Why not anesthesia? > Why not a boink on the head? Why not a really strong cup of coffee? > > Calling this "death" does sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it? Ah yes, it's yet another example of the strange=wrong objection I keep encountering. I guess there's still noise on this channel. :) *click* H. From jonkc at att.net Thu Apr 12 15:15:39 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:15:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com><7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com><8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com><004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <032701c77d15$735e8cf0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> Me: >>It I'm more powerful than you that means I can do things you can't, Russell Wallace: > But not an evolutionary advantage. I can kill you. You can't kill me. That is an evolutionary advantage. > What's your evolutionary fitness? 42. > So if you acquire the wherewithal, are you planning to go around > "hammering" people who hold the belief in question? What are you planning > to do, beat them up? Machine gun them to death? Gas them? It could be, but I don't really know. As Lee Corbin pointed out "this being Isador with his IQ 12,000 and his unbelievably vast erudition has concerns that you today cannot relate to in the slightest". And even if I don't feel like eliminating those pesky meat bags you can bet somebody else will, and it only takes one. > My point is merely that there are times when it's important to remind > ourselves of the difference between stories and reality. Reality is unobtainable; all you can do is make up stories about it. > AI doesn't presently exist, it isn't going to exist unless people build > it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of contributing to the field > is going to build an AI that can't be controlled and whose motives are > destructive. If I don't build an AI then people in country X will and then I'd be in deep shit, so best to make one first and hope for the best. And besides, there is something irresistible in working on such a Godlike project. And I might add that there are people on this very list who think they can outsmart and control an intelligence a billion times greater than their own, by the time they learn they are wrong it will be too late. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Thu Apr 12 15:44:22 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:44:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer><009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <037e01c77c63$8e51cac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <034701c77d19$769be0d0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > But there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. It's simply this: as > you self-improve, adopt the maxim that you will *always* run earlier > versions of yourself in the background. That seems like a bit much, I may think about the John Clark of ten years ago a little from time to time but I certainly don't run a full simulation of him, and yet I still don't feel he's dead. But for the sake of argument let's assume I take your advice. Question: Do you think a computer running Windows Vista that was simulating a computer running Windows XT that was simulating a computer running Windows 2000 that was simulating a computer running Windows 98 that was simulating a computer running Windows 95 that was simulating a computer running Windows 3.1 that was simulating a computer running DOS would outperform a new clean Linux box? John K Clark From randall at randallsquared.com Thu Apr 12 15:48:23 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:48:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> On Apr 12, 2007, at 8:49 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:14:23PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: >> thought that his claim was merely that when you bring someone back >> from a flat EEG, or you teleport them, or you restore them from >> back up, hardly being zombies they're merely *different* people >> that those who died. > > How can you tell they're different? What's the measurement > principle (not access to an external record) -- just the system > itself? This implies that histories cling to physical systems, > forever, amen, and can be queried. > > I would call this superstition. It's certainly not science. It's true that being absolutely sure of an object's history is impossible. However, that just means that identity is impossible to be completely sure about. Like everything else, when you get down to it. But that's no surprise, because the question of "is this the same as that" is, by its nature, a question about the history of the object or process. I don't care if this DVD is exactly like mine -- I can see that it most likely is. What I care about is whether this is *my* DVD, and that's a question only answerable by reference to the history of the object in question! -- Randall Randall "This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3 because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8." - Scott Aaronson From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 12 16:05:04 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:05:04 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 11:48:23AM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: > It's true that being absolutely sure of an object's history > is impossible. However, that just means that identity is You can't know anything about the object without making measurement about the object. If the information is not encoded in the object, it must be encoded in the observer. Since space is (usually) not labeled, information about the object trajectory are present in the observer. If you remove that information from the observer (by inserting an observation block, or by terminating the observer) that information is no longer present. > impossible to be completely sure about. Like everything else, > when you get down to it. > > But that's no surprise, because the question of "is this > the same as that" is, by its nature, a question about the > history of the object or process. I don't care if this > DVD is exactly like mine -- I can see that it most likely > is. What I care about is whether this is *my* DVD, and > that's a question only answerable by reference to the > history of the object in question! Here's two DVDs from the same batch. Can you tell me which belongs whom, by just looking at the DVD? Assume that all identifying labels, scratches, etc. are not there. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 16:53:12 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:53:12 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Avoid Too Much Change. In-Reply-To: <032701c77d15$735e8cf0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704101107i7f04eb4g41ea2cd2ccdfa357@mail.gmail.com> <7B9E06EA-3C1F-4285-8257-A33B65C11D9D@randallsquared.com> <8d71341e0704110850v2420cbccve0ab1262c80f6b49@mail.gmail.com> <004f01c77c5f$a0389ab0$c6064e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0704111120xb0d9caeo6334327e6a1788aa@mail.gmail.com> <032701c77d15$735e8cf0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704120953l12c6a326kfe2476cecf0bd45f@mail.gmail.com> On 4/12/07, John K Clark wrote: > > I can kill you. You can't kill me. That is an evolutionary advantage. Only if you use it. Except that the days when people killed their neighbors with impunity (i.e. without a large expected loss) belong to the past. One could postulate they will come again - but then, a new Dark Age would not retain the technology to build desktop PCs, let alone "IQ 12000" beings. For your scenario to come true, the world would have to retain the rule of law while it focused all its efforts on the task of granting mighty technobabble to John Clark alone, then all of society would have to relinquish said technobabble - leaving you with a monopoly on it - and shut itself down for no other purpose than to give you free rein to go on an unopposed killing spree. There's nothing wrong with indulging in power fantasies - when I was a small child I used to daydream about being Superman - but it is important to retain the ability to distinguish between reality, stories that have some shred of plausibility, and stories that are not remotely plausible. > What's your evolutionary fitness? > > 42. You have 84 children? Color me skeptical. If I don't build an AI then people in country X will and then I'd be in deep > shit, so best to make one first and hope for the best. And besides, there > is > something irresistible in working on such a Godlike project. Let me know when you have a prototype up and running ;) And I might add that there are people on this very list who think they can > outsmart and control an intelligence a billion times greater than their > own, > by the time they learn they are wrong it will be too late. > For the record, nobody seriously working in the field is counting on being able to outsmart or control (without its consent and active cooperation) an intelligence greater than their own. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 12 17:11:28 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:11:28 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hydrogen a "bad Idea" In-Reply-To: <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <030d01c77b8a$d334baa0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412012049.04754a70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412130547.039704a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:12 AM 4/12/2007 -0700, Thomas wrote: >Keith Henson wrote: > > >I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. > > > >Keith > > > > >I hope this help, Keith: >------------------------ >BillK: snip >There are no easy answers to the worlds energy crisis. We'll never have >the magic power to crack enough water into hydrogen with solar energy >to produce 138 billion GGEs a year. DOE is investing billions in the future, >but the ideas below don't merit the energy spent to send the message. > >Who can provide a solution with verifiable facts and figures, that supplies >138 billion GGEs a year for 330 million US vehicles, using solar, >bio-fuels or >plants on their roofs? Then try fueling 700 million vehicles worldwide, Then >work on heating the couple of billion homes. Once you solve these issues, >work on energy to drive the world's industries which increases at about 5% >a year. > >And once you solve the US energy needs try taking on China where we expect >the majority of the world's oil production this century to be consumed. >Small scale ideas look foolish when we confront the big picture and become >better informed people. > >Paul >----------------- > >Paul suggested checking out the Energy Information Agency site >. >I bet he'd like your space elevator. --Thomas This is one of the more sensible items I have read here in some time. Could you send me an email contact for Paul? Thanks Keith From scerir at libero.it Thu Apr 12 17:16:34 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:16:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] MWI at 50 References: <61c8738e0704111745v33e71343l621fe895eecf87a6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <001301c77d26$632448a0$7a971f97@archimede> The Perimeter Institute will host a conference to mark the 50th Anniversary of Everett's paper proposing his (self-)interpretation of the universal quantum wave function ... http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Events/Many_Worlds_at_50/Many_Worlds_at_ 50/ ... and Matt Leifer thinks it is a bit anti-Quinian. http://mattleifer.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/why-is-many-worlds-winning-the-fo undations-debate/ There is some progress in defining what an 'interpretation' - esp. regarding QM - should be http://mattleifer.wordpress.com/2006/06/28/professional-jealousy/ but I still see problems, at least when people define QM as an "operating system", or as a "syntax", and then try to interpret it. That is, perhaps, the reason why Peter Shor writes that "Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you're doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you're doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won't, because otherwise I'm in big trouble." From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 12 18:42:04 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:42:04 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:41 AM 4/12/2007 -0400, Heartland wrote: >(Keith Wrote) > > > There is an agenda, but it is hardly hidden. If it isn't obvious, ask and > > I will state it. > > > > Keith > >Okay, let's hear it. It's to embarrass the procrastinators into getting their paperwork done before they get run over by a truck. Keith From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 19:17:51 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:17:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (PersonalIdentityParadox) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com><03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704112145w6cbadef9ie3cb0222b2f95703@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <003601c77d37$c91490f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell writes > > It seems that we can separate causality from anticipation by considering the > > passive beneficiary of something good or bad (that is slated for him > > or her) but who has no influence on its occuring or not. > > But in that case we can agree that anticipation is irrational, so it doesn't > contradict the criterion that anticipation is rational if and only if you have > causal influence. Let me recap. My original lament is that the feeling of anticipation (of this or that)---that is, the feeling of imminent experience---cannot be made rational in the sense that there exist A and B such that one naturally has anticipation in case A and fails to have anticipation in case B, yet both A and B can be shown to be equivalent. For example, you cannot help but anticipate (we call it "dread") imminent pain, but we will not anticipate pain that occurred in the past, even though with the complicated thought experiments the two were shown not to differ in any important way. I hope that I was understood in my essay as noting this, and being disappointed that our naturally evolved anticipation isn't consistent (I did say rational). > It's rare that something good will happen to you whether you like > it or not, but sadly not so rare for something bad, so it's easier to > analyze this if we take negative anticipation i.e. fear. Oh, I don't know, awakening each morning isn't rare, and many people love life enough to almost always look forward to it. Especially, I suppose, those in precarious situations who wonder whether or not it really will occur. But anyway... > Consider the case of a man who has tooth problems, such that there > will be pain if he goes to the dentist, and more pain, albeit somewhat > deferred, if he does not. Yet he postpones going to the dentist > because he fears the pain. Yet this is irrational Now *that* I will agree is exactly irrational. And it is irrational because he really is the same person from day to day, and suffering relatively little early benefits his life in an obvious way. As an aside, we ought to define "person" in such a way to make this true, hence my impatience with the claim that we are not the same person from second to second. > Yet this is irrational [you write] because he cannot actually prevent > pain - he has no causal influence over that aspect of things, there > will be pain no matter what he does. Well, to me that's an odd usage. Two points: first, he *can* prevent a certain difference in the pain he is to receive. Based on his actions, it will be lesser or greater. But then, I am saying that his *action* of not going to the dentist is irrational, not his anticipation of pain which to me is an entirely different thing (and which, for me, it is still strange and new to classify such a feeling as either rational or irrational). > In that case everyone - not just us, everyone, including likely the > poor man himself! - will agree he is being irrational, and he would > be better off if he could just switch off his fear instincts and deal > as dispassionately with the matter as he would if it were happening > to a stranger. Right. > So we see that the logical criterion does actually match our intuition. Your logical criterion is, again, that some anticipations are rational and some are not. Somehow actions got mixed up with feelings here, it seems to me. In any case, suppose that either (A) I shall get a large check from the government that will finally allow me to take a long-needed vacation, or (B) I shall be arrested by the IRS and taken to prison. Either way, at this time I can do nothing about either, say, and so why is the feeling of exhileration in the first case, and dread in the second case, not as you would say "rational"? I doubt that you can mean that it was incorrect for nature to have equipped us with such feelings about our near future (even in these cases, here, where we can do nothing about upcoming experiences). But is that what you meant? Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 12 19:45:34 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:45:34 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070412143823.023b2680@satx.rr.com> At 02:42 PM 4/12/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >It's to embarrass the procrastinators into getting their paperwork done >before they get run over by a truck. What are the chances that cryonics will be of benefit to someone who's run over by a truck? (I'm not being sarcastic.) Assume the truck impact doesn't mush the person's brain--which must happen fairly frequently, I imagine--and the driver doesn't hit&run, how long would it take for a corpse to reach the morgue, would the cops give a shit, would an autopsy be mandatory in such a situation, etc etc? (I've come close to being hit by careless moron-driven motor vehicles three times in the last year, just trying to cross an intersection with a green light; luckily I'm hypervigilant.) Damien Broderick From benboc at lineone.net Thu Apr 12 19:50:25 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:50:25 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <461E8D81.8050804@lineone.net> Keith Henson wrote: > I must say that several threads have become more noise than signal. And I must say that curiously, everyone seems to be scrupulously avoiding use of the words 'patternist' and 'threadist', and admit that this is the same tired old argument that we all got sick of (except perhaps for one or two crypto-dualists) months ago. ben zaiboc From velvethum at hotmail.com Thu Apr 12 20:34:39 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:34:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: Eugen: >> How can you tell they're different? What's the measurement >> principle (not access to an external record) -- just the system >> itself? This implies that histories cling to physical systems, >> forever, amen, and can be queried. >> >> I would call this superstition. It's certainly not science. Randall: > It's true that being absolutely sure of an object's history > is impossible. However, that just means that identity is > impossible to be completely sure about. Like everything else, > when you get down to it. > But that's no surprise, because the question of "is this > the same as that" is, by its nature, a question about the > history of the object or process. I don't care if this > DVD is exactly like mine -- I can see that it most likely > is. What I care about is whether this is *my* DVD, and > that's a question only answerable by reference to the > history of the object in question! You don't have to know anything about history of something to realize you don't have it. As you point out, it's not important that there are two DVDs that are physically identical. The real problem here is NOT that it is hard or even impossible to tell these DVDs apart. Whether things are similar is irrelevant! The problem here is that you can't enjoy that DVD because you simply don't have it. A solution to this problem is not printing more copies of this DVD, but simply getting you at least one copy of it so you can watch it. H. From randall at randallsquared.com Thu Apr 12 20:56:39 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:56:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Apr 12, 2007, at 12:05 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 11:48:23AM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: >> But that's no surprise, because the question of "is this >> the same as that" is, by its nature, a question about the >> history of the object or process. I don't care if this >> DVD is exactly like mine -- I can see that it most likely >> is. What I care about is whether this is *my* DVD, and >> that's a question only answerable by reference to the >> history of the object in question! > > Here's two DVDs from the same batch. Can you tell me which > belongs whom, by just looking at the DVD? Assume that > all identifying labels, scratches, etc. are not there. Precisely. The only difference is the history, but I'm sure everyone would agree there is a distinct DVD I own (in this situation), and the fact that we can't tell which it is is a problem with our knowledge, not the fact of the matter. Similarly, it might well be impossible to tell from existing information which of two Randalls is the original (if either), but that doesn't mean that it is the case that they're all equally the original -- it just means we don't know. -- Randall Randall 'Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"?' -- Garrison Keillor From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Apr 12 21:06:59 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:06:59 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 12,000 IQ and nothing on? Message-ID: <2590.163.1.72.81.1176412019.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Lee Corbin wrote: > You put the existence of societal "problems" > relating to low IQ in one category, and overall > differences (i.e. distributions) in what I was > calling "general accomplishment" or the potential > to accomplish, in a separate category, which is > also very interesting, and seems probably right > to me. Accomplishment often means the creation of positive wealth while problems signals wealth destruction or lowered chances of a flourishing life. > Of course, in this thread we are more concerned > with the latter (as a possible reflection on the nature > of superhuman intelligence) than on the former, > despite the greater sociological and economic > importance of those "problems" traceable to less > than 100 IQ. I think there is also a big opportunity in enhancing the normally bright. Moving many millions from 95 to a 100 means a lot of reduction in problems and a lot more accomplishments. Just the little thing of being able to do jobs with written instruction (limit around 95 or so) opens a whole range of opportunities. > To me the fundamental problem is how closely > the nature of extreme capability (as opposed to > the notion of cognitive ability---in order to avoid > begging the question) follows any kind of > approximately linear scale. By now (I go along > with the psychometricians) we have for humans > that there is an approximately linear scale for > human cognitive ability. But this may break > down---as you mentioned in your previous > email---for very advanced entities. I'm not certain there is any way of callibrating it other than enormous competitions. But making a competition that works for ants, mice, chimps, humans, transhumans, AIs, posthumans and fnorgnitzbs would be nearly impossible. There seems to be at least a kind of understanding horizon beneath humans that means that simpler creatures cannot understand general concepts, but more complex creatures probably can emulate each other a la the Church-Turing thesis. > I now add a third possibility---namely that > some component may be measurable by > mathematical achievement. (This goes in hand > with a contention I've had for a long time that > perhaps extreme intelligence rather trivially > solves all non-mathematical problems > comparitively early in its development.) Math might be a good choice since it includes many different levels of complexity and one can find a wide variety of domains. Some quite similar to the everyday world, some utterly different. Of course, some of us would say the everyday world is just embedded in math. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From velvethum at hotmail.com Thu Apr 12 21:19:47 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:19:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: > At 01:41 AM 4/12/2007 -0400, Heartland wrote: >>(Keith Wrote) >> >> > There is an agenda, but it is hardly hidden. If it isn't obvious, ask and >> > I will state it. >> > >> > Keith >> >>Okay, let's hear it. > > It's to embarrass the procrastinators into getting their paperwork done > before they get run over by a truck. > > Keith How do you know they are procrastinators? Maybe they haven't signed up yet because they don't believe this would change anything. H. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 21:24:56 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:24:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <007701c77d49$7097ce30$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eugen writes > Slawomir thinks that a few seconds of flat EEG will kill the > original person. Right, that is his claim. > This means there are lots of zombies walking > around (or at least brand new people, There is a *big* difference between zombies and brand new people! I can hardly believe that you are (deliberately) confusing the terms. Even if (unlike me, alas) you think the concept of "zombie" to be utterly without referent, surely what Slawomir is talking about is not that at all. > Why just a few seconds of flat EEG? Why not anesthesia? > Why not a boink on the head? Why not a really strong cup of coffee? > > Calling this "death" does sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it? Of course, I agree with you about the essential questions here. I'm just amazed you use the term zombie the way you do. It's amazing enough that I'm writing to inquire as to the possibility that there is something going on here that I do not understand. >> This is similar to the refusal of several people on this list---who otherwise >> would not agree with Heartland in the least---to teleport. They are >> materialists in every other respect: cryonics is fine, for example. But >> the destructive property of teleportation, to them, kills someone and >> replaces him with an entity who only *believes* that he was the >> original. (Of course I heartily dispute this myself.) > > I don't. Location doesn't matter. Er? You mean that you *do* dispute this---along with me. And, for the record, I totally agree that location does not matter. (And I commend you on the nice argument that you just put out about all the information about an object (that's of any importance) resides *in* the object. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 21:30:16 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:30:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer><009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <007b01c77d4a$2475a490$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert wrote > On 4/12/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > It could well be the case that the solar system as a whole evolves > up the slope while Earth, Mars and Venus remain meat havens > until we get so bored with multi-thousand year lifespans that we > go off on some dangerous adventure in a world ship to a distant > "dark" galaxy. In the first place, by then "boredom" will be an entirely voluntary state of mind. It seems to me that I have said this before. Is there a problem with it? Secondly, going off to a so-called "dangerous adventure" in a distant dark galaxy will naturally take place by evolution. That is, the forms that spread out in the galaxy and beyond will be the forms that spread out into the galaxy and beyond :-) The near-tautology of evolution that creates the phenomenon (as we see on Earth) of life sort of automatically seeking out every environment in which it can live. Even if some super-intelligences are "afraid" to send copies of themselves to dark galaxies, others will. Lee From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 12 21:42:59 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:42:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070412143823.023b2680@satx.rr.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412173036.03acabf0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:45 PM 4/12/2007 -0500, you wrote: >At 02:42 PM 4/12/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: > > >It's to embarrass the procrastinators into getting their paperwork done > >before they get run over by a truck. > >What are the chances that cryonics will be of benefit to someone >who's run over by a truck? This was a place holder for dying unexpectedly before people quit dying. >(I'm not being sarcastic.) Assume the >truck impact doesn't mush the person's brain--which must happen >fairly frequently, I imagine--and the driver doesn't hit&run, how >long would it take for a corpse to reach the morgue, would the cops >give a shit, would an autopsy be mandatory in such a situation, etc >etc? Bad luck applies to even getting suspended when you need it. I don't know the actual numbers, but as a first pass guess, 5-10 of those who are signed up don't get suspended at all. I can think of one guy who was not found for weeks (liguid brain), another one who was lost in the WTC disaster and one who was killed by bandits out in the middle of the Sahara desert. Try not to be lost at sea (Eve Cooper). Dying suddenly, such as an aircraft or traffic crash decreases your chances of a good suspension, though Alcor usually manages to put something into LN2. We are fairly good at getting patients from the coroner. >(I've come close to being hit by careless moron-driven motor >vehicles three times in the last year, just trying to cross an >intersection with a green light; luckily I'm hypervigilant.) Good. If you are signed up, the best way is to die from cancer with a team at your bedside. But no matter what, if you are not signed up, you are not going to get frozen. That's the point. Keith From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 21:36:47 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:36:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (PersonalIdentityParadox) In-Reply-To: <003601c77d37$c91490f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704110929y6d8708cdvec20346ead1c3cbf@mail.gmail.com> <03f001c77cb7$2a412400$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0704112145w6cbadef9ie3cb0222b2f95703@mail.gmail.com> <003601c77d37$c91490f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704121436u17188d03k98301b3b78f43e36@mail.gmail.com> On 4/12/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I hope that I was understood in my essay as noting this, and being > disappointed that our naturally evolved anticipation isn't consistent > (I did say rational). Oh yes, and I'm agreeing with you 100% except in this: I think you're looking further afield than you need to. There's no need to invoke time travel; there are plenty of real situations where our anticipations are irrational, and it's common knowledge that they are irrational. It's not really news, everyone knows people aren't always perfectly rational and this is one of the ways in which we aren't. Now *that* I will agree is exactly irrational. And it is irrational because > he really is the same person from day to day, and suffering relatively > little early benefits his life in an obvious way. As an aside, we ought to > define "person" in such a way to make this true, hence my impatience > with the claim that we are not the same person from second to second. Agreed. But then, I am saying that his *action* > of not going to the dentist is irrational, not his anticipation of pain > which to me is an entirely different thing (and which, for me, it is > still strange and new to classify such a feeling as either rational or > irrational). *blink* Well leaving actions aside, haven't you ever heard someone say to someone else who's dreading a bad event that may happen but if so cannot be prevented, "no point worrying over things you can't do anything about"? It's just the common way of expressing that which us philosophers put in fancier language as "it is irrational to waste attention on anticipating events over which we have no causal influence". In any case, suppose that either (A) I shall get a large check from the > government that will finally allow me to take a long-needed vacation, > or (B) I shall be arrested by the IRS and taken to prison. Either way, > at this time I can do nothing about either, say, and so why is the > feeling of exhileration in the first case, and dread in the second case, > not as you would say "rational"? I doubt that you can mean that it > was incorrect for nature to have equipped us with such feelings about > our near future (even in these cases, here, where we can do nothing > about upcoming experiences). But is that what you meant? > Well yes, it's exactly what I meant, and not only that, it's not a scientific or philosophical discovery, it's common knowledge, always has been. With this caveat: human evolution was operating under constraints of time, information, computing power, such that there was no way to create a perfectly rational system - indeed, there's no evidence that a perfectly rational system is even possible; so I wouldn't use the word "incorrect", for the system we have is the best evolution could find. I would use the word "imperfect". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 12 21:42:48 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:42:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><001e01c779fd$c0e776f0$cf084e0c@MyComputer><025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer><030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer><032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer><009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <037e01c77c63$8e51cac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <034701c77d19$769be0d0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <007e01c77d4b$8c0b04a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > "Lee Corbin" > >> But there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. It's simply this: as >> you self-improve, adopt the maxim that you will *always* run earlier >> versions of yourself in the background. > > That seems like a bit much, I may think about the John Clark of ten years > ago a little from time to time but I certainly don't run a full simulation > of him, Right. Far from it > and yet I still don't feel he's dead. And I agree: he's not dead. Probably. Almost surely you retain enough in common with the you of ten years ago that by the meanings I propose, that John Clark still lives. Yet we must get beyond supposing that the reality corresponds to the binary alive/dead. You could gradually change into someone else. Do you deny that in certain contrived thought experiments you could gradually turn into me? (We very slowly and surreptiously start replacing certain of your earliest memories by certain ones of mine---there may be a point of total confusion in the middle of the process, etc.) > But for the sake of argument let's assume I take your advice. Question: Do > you think a computer running Windows Vista that was simulating a computer > running Windows XT that was simulating a computer running Windows 2000 that > was simulating a computer running Windows 98 that was simulating a computer > running Windows 95 that was simulating a computer running Windows 3.1 that > was simulating a computer running DOS would outperform a new clean Linux > box? By no means. Emulation always carries a cost. The cost may be great or it may be relatively little. In a pinch, I would hope that Lee+ will grant the 2005-2010 version or versions perhaps a second of runtime every ten-thousand years, or whatever. Certainly Lee+ will easily see that he does me no good whatever if he can't hold his own existence in the universe. So I agree that there is a small window in which you are right: perhaps the future will be so competitive that anything that recalls being me at all and who bothers to expend any energy running me now and then simply dies off. But by the same token (the window is small), it could be so very ruthless that no entity which remembers being you in any manner whatsoever survives. But anyway, I think that there is a truth to the question "at time t does the solar system or does it not contain a running version of an entity similar in structure enough to the Lee Corbin of ~1965 - ~ 2015 that it can be accurately said that he still lives to some non-trivial extent?" And so even if nothing which simulates "something similar to me now" can be competitive, well, then I'm dead anyway by my lights. Lee From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 22:10:13 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:10:13 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <034701c77d19$769be0d0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <025d01c77a38$d4d8e550$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002201c77abe$b9d6de70$4a074e0c@MyComputer> <030c01c77b89$6bd14000$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00a601c77b92$982a7730$b90d4e0c@MyComputer> <032201c77be6$bc070660$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004801c77bf6$9c77d9e0$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <009d01c77bfd$d22e9900$0e044e0c@MyComputer> <037e01c77c63$8e51cac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <034701c77d19$769be0d0$fd044e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704121510y3ec5ca9dt54731c5544f76784@mail.gmail.com> On 4/12/07, John K Clark wrote: > > But for the sake of argument let's assume I take your advice. Question: Do > you think a computer running Windows Vista that was simulating a computer > running Windows XT that was simulating a computer running Windows 2000 > that > was simulating a computer running Windows 98 that was simulating a > computer > running Windows 95 that was simulating a computer running Windows 3.1 that > was simulating a computer running DOS would outperform a new clean Linux > box? > Ah, but "new clean Linux box" is an oxymoron - Linux is based on Unix, and much of its design predates MS-DOS 1.0. Speaking of which, my Windows XP box can still happily run early DOS programs. And both operating systems typically run on x86 chips that retain outright binary compatibility back to the 8088 in the late 70s, and can trace their direct ancestry further back still, back to the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor. And systems with such deep lineage in fact outperform their "newer, cleaner" competitors, perhaps not in flops/gigatransistor, but in the measure of performance that counts: ability to solve real-world problems at affordable cost. Nor is this phenomenon at all peculiar to computers. The language we speak right now traces its ancestry back through a thousand years and more of polyglot accumulation of words from yet older languages. The alphabet we write it in is older still, a direct derivative of the first true alphabet whose letters were named after words in ancient Sumerian: aleph, beth, gimel, daleth... nor has this survival been as a result of sheltering from competition, on the contrary, the Sumerian-derived alphabet effortlessly held its position against "newer, cleaner" phonetic alphabets. English _won_ in direct competition in the open market against all comers including the "newer, cleaner" Esperanto and Lojban. And the minds we use to comprehend all this are of course the product of four billion years of unbroken, step by step evolution. Being a "clean sheet of paper" guy myself, I can certainly sympathize with the desire to imagine everything being swept away and replaced with ab initio designs that are "cleaner" and "more efficient" in the geek senses of the words. I too have dreamed up from-scratch CPUs, operating systems, programming languages, network protocols... but all the evidence thus far suggests that isn't how the world works. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 12 23:59:05 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:59:05 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Lee Corbin wrote: No, I'm not saying that we ought to try to change ourselves to > anticipate the past as well as the future---as we agree, that > would be peculiarly at odds with the evolutionary purpose > of anticipation. I'm only lamenting that anticipation cannot > be rationalized (at least I've not seen any way so far). But > big deal---we've learned that any number of concepts that > we took for granted, e.g. "simultaneity", cannot be so > consistently rationalized. > > > Either solution would allow a consistent theory of personal > > identity, but it wouldn't feel right. > > Well, I didn't think that theories about personal identity were > really at stake over the anticipation dilemma. Now it *is* > true, I contend, that most people get their views on personal > identity by consulting their "anticipation" module. For example, > they just don't "feel" that they'll themselves will have the future > experiences of that frozen slab in the next room who is a recent > duplicate. All along, I've been attacking the veracity of this > particular feeling, just as, for example, Columbus could be > said to be attacking the "feeling" that the Earth must be flat. Let's summarise. You feel that the sort of anticipation which tells the average human that he won't have the experiences of his copy in the next room cannot be rationally justified and should be expunged. On the other hand, you feel that the sort of anticipation which makes the average human worry more about the future than the past cannot be rationally justified but should be left alone. Is there an inconsistency here? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Apr 13 00:42:54 2007 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:42:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: <61c8738e0704121742x1c52e56ayc5277c951ae230f0@mail.gmail.com> Message: 2 Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:42:36 -0400 From: Samantha Atkins Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? To: ExI chat list Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed On Apr 11, 2007, at 8:45 PM, Morris Johnson wrote: > > We need not look farther than the massive trial of bio-energy this > year in North American agriculture. Basing bio-energy largely on corn will be a colossal failure with the side-effect of driving various food costs higher. A later side- effect will be a lot of farming business problem, calls for subsidies and bail outs and so on. It is very predictable ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.lter.umn.edu/ has links to the original papers on this page. Research on prairie biofuels recently published in the journal Science! Abstract Full Text Supplement Research on biofuels published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Text Supplement +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Science 8 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1598 - 1600 DOI: 10.1126/science.1133306 Prev | Table of Contents | Next Reports Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass David Tilman,1* Jason Hill,1,2 Clarence Lehman1 Biofuels derived from low-input high-diversity (LIHD) mixtures of native grassland perennials can provide more usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel. High-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields after a decade. LIHD biofuels are carbon negative because net ecosystem carbon dioxide sequestration (4.4 megagram hectare?1 year?1 of carbon dioxide in soil and roots) exceeds fossil carbon dioxide release during biofuel production (0.32 megagram hectare?1 year?1). Moreover, LIHD biofuels can be produced on agriculturally degraded lands and thus need to neither displace food production nor cause loss of biodiversity via habitat destruction. 1 Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA. 2 Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: tilman at umn.edu Globally escalating demands for both food (1) and energy (2) have raised concerns about the potential for food-based biofuels to be sustainable, abundant, and environmentally beneficial energy sources. Current biofuel production competes for fertile land with food production, increases pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, and threatens biodiversity when natural lands are converted to biofuel production. The two major classes of biomass for biofuel production recognized to date are monoculture crops grown on fertile soils (such as corn, soybeans, oilseed rape, switchgrass, sugarcane, willow, and hybrid poplar) (3?6) and waste biomass (such as straw, corn stover, and waste wood) (7?9). Here, we show the potential for a third major source of biofuel biomass, high-diversity mixtures of plants grown with low inputs on agriculturally degraded land, to address such concerns. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Fertilizer takes petroleum. Crops can go to food or fuel subject > only to market drivers. > crop Inputs are being diverted to energy over food. Do your bio-energy as much as possible using fast growing weeds that take little in the way of such inputs. &&&&& In effect synthetic prairie is just that a complete ecosystem, a swiss army knife of crops , so to speaK...MFJ &&&&&& > Some food sectors will have to adjust economics, marketing, or > simply reduce available food supply. Yep, as long as we are stupid enough to turn a primary, relatively high input, food into ethanol. &&&&&&&& On this front the scams have had great success and 200 ethanol plants are built or will be by year end. However most of them can be rebuilt for cellulosic ethanol. The ethanol waste products can be feedstocks for other bioproduct streams. I am as frustrated as you, in that people bought into the right thing but for all the wrong reasons. But in this case the right reasons were not saleable to investors and politicians. Perhaps longevity and H+ industry ramp up can learn from this. People seem to like death and are uncomfortable with the responsibilities that go with living long enough to have to live with the consequences of your human footprint. Proper commercialization strategy for H+ is really neat because it ought to be a way for extropians to profit from a new tech wave. However even deep pockets kurzweil has a teeny tiny $ at risk foootprint. Something is not quite right with this picture......? &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& > North americans will not starve in 2007, but will consumers revolt, > will changes to diet occur , will consumption patterns and > personal budget decisions adjust and if so how fast? > The other question is .. how stable a long term pattern is this. > Is it a paradigm shifted or a fad? It is a meaningless sop that will enrich many "in the know" and various opportunists while in the long run making a valid timely energy solution less likely in the US. DOA > Is the shift just starting with more evolution on the way or is it > more fixed in stone? > Fixed in stone? Only until the next Directive comrade. - samantha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Apr 13 01:45:15 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:45:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Controlled by a cat parasite In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9E8FA7AC-3E9E-4171-BBBA-74E862B7EA1D@mac.com> I read somewhere that approximately half the human population is already infected. Hmm. On Mar 12, 2007, at 4:51 AM, Amara Graps wrote: > Whoa! > > Instead of finding drugs to alter our moods, let's infect ourselves > with > toxoplasmosis instead! OK, maybe not. > > I wonder if those cultures that value boys beyond the normal sex ratio > would take to this? Or maybe they already are? Or maybe the parasite > is the result of practices already in place, now in a feedback loop? > > Amara > > http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/11/cat_parasite_rules_o.html > > From Boing Boing > > > > Cat parasite rules our lives > > Vann sez, "As a follow-up to Cory's entry in January of last year > on how > toxoplasmosis may alter people's moods (women become more friendly; > men > become more paranoid), recent studies suggest that infection by the > parasite may also cause people to become more prone to feeling guilty, > develop schizophrenia, have auto accidents, or be born male." > > U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kevin Lafferty has linked high > rates of > toxoplasmosis infection in 39 countries with elevated incidences of > neuroticism, suggesting the mind-altering organism may be affecting > the > cultures of nations. > > Stranger still, parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in > Prague thinks T. gondii could also be skewing our sex ratios. When he > looked at the clinical records of more than 1,800 babies born from > 1996 > to 2004, he noted a distinct trend: The normal sex ratio is 104 boys > born for every 100 girls, but in women with high levels of antibodies > against the parasite, the ratio was 260 boys for every 100 girls. > Exactly how the parasite might be tipping the odds in favor of males > isn't understood, but Flegr points out that it is known to suppress > the > immune system of its hosts, and because the maternal immune system > sometimes attacks male fetuses in very early pregnancy, the parasite's > ability to inhibit the immune response might protect future boys as > well > as itself. > > > > > -- > > Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com > INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, > ITALIA > Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), > Tucson > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 13 03:37:08 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:37:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412233228.0397d008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 05:19 PM 4/12/2007 -0400, you wrote: > > At 01:41 AM 4/12/2007 -0400, Heartland wrote: > >>(Keith Wrote) > >> > >> > There is an agenda, but it is hardly hidden. If it isn't obvious, > ask and > >> > I will state it. > >> > > >> > Keith > >> > >>Okay, let's hear it. > > > > It's to embarrass the procrastinators into getting their paperwork done > > before they get run over by a truck. > > > > Keith > >How do you know they are procrastinators? Maybe they haven't signed up yet >because >they don't believe this would change anything. In a group this large, you can be sure that *some* of them are procrastinators. I agree that there are people who call themselves "transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or another. I don't take them very seriously and suspect they will be less represented in the post human future than those who do sign up, especially if they are older than say 50. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 07:14:29 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:14:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 04:56:39PM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: > Precisely. The only difference is the history, but I'm > sure everyone would agree there is a distinct DVD I own I guess I'm not everyone. If two DVDs fell down and rolled into a corner, without me looking, I couldn't tell the difference. So couldn't anybody, but an omniscient observer. I'm an atheist, so this means nobody can tell in principle. Again, the DVD has no label, you carry the label by observing the system trajectory. > (in this situation), and the fact that we can't tell > which it is is a problem with our knowledge, not the fact > of the matter. Since knowledge is encoded in the matter, and certainly not in the DVD (since it doesn't care) knowledge is precisely a fact of the matter. There are no seraphim, gently flapping their wings while carrying bits in tiny little buckets. > Similarly, it might well be impossible to tell from > existing information which of two Randalls is the original > (if either), but that doesn't mean that it is the case > that they're all equally the original -- it just means > we don't know. Knowledge is information, and information is very important in this unverse, from QM (two systems in the same quantum state are not distinguishable in principle) to singularities. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From fauxever at sprynet.com Fri Apr 13 06:51:17 2007 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:51:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Heinlein Gets the Last Word Message-ID: <004401c77d98$23408380$6501a8c0@brainiac> ... from the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/2cve2n Cheers, Olga From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 07:22:06 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:22:06 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070413072206.GA9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 05:19:47PM -0400, Heartland wrote: > How do you know they are procrastinators? Maybe they haven't signed up yet because Because it's a chronical malaise of the fringe crowd. > they don't believe this would change anything. I'm not signed up because there's no coverage in my patch of the geoid. You can be damn sure I would if I knew I'd get a crack at a halfway decent suspension. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Apr 13 08:19:18 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:19:18 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query References: <354458.87014.qm@web37202.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <026801c77da5$0a836e90$0200a8c0@Nano> Hi there Anna - so glad you had the opportunity to take a closer look at my work, and thank you for your kind words. Most of your favorites are mine as well. Some of the others, might not seem like they have a beginning/end or are short because they were experimental, a project to develop a particular skill. You certainly can send your family links to my pages that contain holiday greetings. I am glad you enjoyed my animations, that's what it's all about. Kind regards, Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Anna Taylor To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 7:00 AM Subject: [extropy-chat] My first Demo Reel and Query Hi Gina, I haven't been able to view any of your art before now. (My computer is ancient but I am in the process of purchasing a new one). I had the opportunity to use a different computer and thought I would check out what you do. Thank you, I truly enjoyed your work, I think you have remarkable talent. Your demo is a great representation of some of your finest work. Some of my thoughts for what it's worth: Your choice in music enhances your art making the complete package fascinating and your character animation is fantastic. Some of my favorites are The Gift, Dandelion, The Mark, Moon Goddess and Seasonal. I truly enjoyed The Odyssey as I envisioned a mixture of your art entwined with mine. I imagined a huge stage with a huge background projector playing your movie with ballet dancers on stage. Each playing a part in an exceptional story. Isn't it amazing how Mozart can still create vision? I also envisioned Zenith as an opening to a Walt Disney Movie, an introduction to a far away place. I thought Particle 2 was a little short, I would have liked to see a little more. I had a little trouble with Countrified, Blue and Converse as I couldn't clearly see what was going on, it was a little dark. (I'm assuming that has something to do with my computer). I enjoyed Happy New Year and thought how nice it would be if I could send such an e-mail to my friends and family. All in all, I had a great time discovering your art and it was time well spent. You gave me ideas and made me think. Thanks again, Anna:) Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]-Benjamin Constant The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner _______________________________________________ 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 Fri Apr 13 08:06:59 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 01:06:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> --- Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 02:37:45PM -0400, Robert > Bradbury wrote: > > > I think the assumption that there will be a > Singularity "meat grinder" > > needs serious reexamination. We don't run > around eliminating all of > > Fast changes are always challenges to adaptiveness. Yes. And brains are how biology has risen to the challenge of fast change. And becoming zen ubermensch with some neat technological toys are how biological transhumans shall rise to the challenge of machine phase Singularity. > > > the nematodes or bacteria on the planet just > because they are > > Actually, we do a pretty good attempt at it; soil > biota biodiversity has plummeted > in intensive agriculture. Sealed terrain has about > zero biota diversity. Yes. But traditional monoculture is rather devastating to the soil in general. Thereby the need to rotate crops or better yet have multiple crops growing simultaneously. I don't see why people seem to think that destruction of the biosphere is some sort of "goal" for the Singularity. To me that seems to be a poor choice of tasks to set our 12,000 IQ children to. Especially since they will revere us as parents and their literal creators unless we somehow betray their trust or their sense of fairness. > > consuming some small fraction of energy and/or > matter that we at some > > point may want. > > What is left of the prebiotic ursoup, after life had > dined on it? An entire diverse biosphere of living cells whose cytoplasm, for the most part, IS the prebiotic ursoup. Same soup, just in lots of smaller bowls instead of one big one. I seriously doubt that all that soup will get turned into computronium. Not unless somebody is stupid enough to purposely create a Saberhagen-style "Berserker" AI. > Not hamburger, but being turned to plasma or frozen > in blue snow are certainly > straightforward possibilities. But what would be its motive? A 12,000 IQ being should be more rational than us and not less so. Perhaps even super-rational in the iterated prisoners' dilemma sense. So what would it possibly gain by turning it's parents/creators into plasma or goo? What is this morbid fascination with a "Singularity meat-grinder" anyway? Is is some sort of sublimated subconscious Christian/Muslim belief in the inevitability of Armageddon? We don't have to hook up machine guns or nukes to an AI's USB port if we don't want to. And if we go extinct over the Singularity, it will be more about our own stupid choices than about what Isador decides. Karma will still apply to 12,000 IQ intellects. They will just be better equiped to understand it. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 13 09:36:43 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:36:43 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/13/07, The Avantguardian wrote: But what would be its motive? A 12,000 IQ being should > be more rational than us and not less so. Perhaps even > super-rational in the iterated prisoners' dilemma > sense. So what would it possibly gain by turning it's > parents/creators into plasma or goo? I agree that the super-intelligent being will not automatically be motivated to destroy us, but I dispute that this has anything to do with being rational. Reason is a means used to achieve goals, but in the final analysis the goals themselves are neither rational nor irrational; they just are. All else being equal, a more intelligent person might be better able to enforce kindness or cruelty than a less intelligent one, but intelligence is no indicator as to whether the person will be kind or cruel. Moreover, the likelihood that reason will be used in making decisions does not necessarily have anything to do with level of intelligence. People sometimes do reckless, irresponsible or (to use the word in its popular, but strictly incorrect sense) irrational things while being fully cognisant of the consequences. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 09:58:05 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:58:05 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 07:36:43PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > I agree that the super-intelligent being will not automatically be Diversification guarantees you some of the postbiota will be not intelligent. By the bulk of the postbiomass most of it might be arguably only slightly smarter than rocks, with a few gods sprinkled in-between. > motivated to destroy us, but I dispute that this has anything to do > with being rational. Reason is a means used to achieve goals, but in Logging in Brazil is very rational, and kills habitats just fine. In fact, if you'd confront these loggers (who have children at home to feed) they'll shoot you dead. Palm plantations in Indonesia are also rational. Building airstrips and shopping malls is also perfectly rational. > the final analysis the goals themselves are neither rational nor > irrational; they just are. All else being equal, a more intelligent > person might be better able to enforce kindness or cruelty than a less Interactions between very asymmetrical players have no payoff for the greater player, and hence produce no cooperation. > intelligent one, but intelligence is no indicator as to whether the > person will be kind or cruel. Moreover, the likelihood that reason Expecting reason to always prevail is unreasonable. Human-Ebola interaction is not governed by reason. > will be used in making decisions does not necessarily have anything to > do with level of intelligence. People sometimes do reckless, > irresponsible or (to use the word in its popular, but strictly > incorrect sense) irrational things while being fully cognisant of the > consequences. If you thought humans are good at SNAFUs, you should see some of what gods do. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 13 10:16:54 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:16:54 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Procrastination Message-ID: On 4/13/07, Keith Henson wrote: > In a group this large, you can be sure that *some* of them are > procrastinators. I agree that there are people who call themselves > "transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or > another. I don't take them very seriously and suspect they will be less > represented in the post human future than those who do sign up, especially > if they are older than say 50. > I've been meaning to write this for a while, but never quite got round to it. You would think that if procrastination was such a universal human evil, denounced by many people in authority, that there would be a lot of research on this subject. But there isn't much. A few studies have been completed, usually many years behind schedule. Some links for further study: (you can check these out tomorrow). Procrastination Central: The people giving orders consider procrastination to be very bad behaviour. In effect Keith is telling you that you have issues of anxiety, low sense of self-worth and a self-defeating mentality. And now he is piling a guilt trip on you as well. But the thing to remember is that procrastination is not always a bad thing. It may be bad from the POV of the governor, but from *your* POV there are a million other things you could be doing. It depends on what you value that decides what you do. You could do nothing, something less important or something more important. Deferred gratification is generally regarded as good and an aid to planning your life. The opposite is instant gratification, leading to poor impulse control. EP tells us that if procrastination was bad we wouldn't have evolved with such a strong tendency to be afflicted by it. For example, if early humans rushed into battle too quickly, before they were ready, they would probably have been killed. If procrastination is planned preparation it is a good thing. Another benefit of procrastination, which applies to cryonics and any bleeding-edge technology, is that it will be better in ten years time. Why set off to Alpha Centauri now? After ten years your spaceship is likely to be overtaken by newer, faster spaceships. Why buy the latest computer now? Next years' model will be better. I'd organise a support group for procrastinators, but I'm a bit busy just now. Maybe tomorrow. BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Apr 13 11:37:37 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:37:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0704121742x1c52e56ayc5277c951ae230f0@mail.gmail.com> References: <61c8738e0704121742x1c52e56ayc5277c951ae230f0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Morris Johnson wrote: > > Some food sectors will have to adjust economics, marketing, or > > simply reduce available food supply. > > Yep, as long as we are stupid enough to turn a primary, relatively > high input, food into ethanol. Give me a break. No existing "natural" photosynthetic system (be it based on corn, soybeans or "natural" grasses) can be considered "efficient". Natural photosynthetic systems have at best 4% efficiency (sugar cane under ideal conditions) and are usually 2% or less. Plants should not be green. The should be black. Existing solar cells range from 6% to 36% efficiency depending on what they are made of and groups have been funded to push those into the 45-55% range. The primary advantage that "natural" systems have is that they are based on self-replicating systems and do not require the huge up-front investments that would be required to cover the SW U.S. (or all U.S. homes, stores, etc.) in solar cells. So if you want a solution and want it quickly it should be based on self-replicating systems and the general technology development path within those systems should be in the direction of greater efficiency. What people aren't generally aware of is that more ideal "natural" photosynthetic systems can be pushed to 6-8% efficiency in photobioreactors. So the solution for maximal output (either for food or fuel) is solar ponds using a mix of photosynthetic microorganisms. What you want is photosynthetic spirulina for food and photosynthetic yeast for alcohol. It is worth noting that something like a dozen different species of photosynthetic microorganisms have been sequenced and the information is sitting in NCBI or DOE databases. Constructing solar ponds has significantly lower technology inputs, investment requirements and bureaucracy and legal headaches compared with nuclear reactors. Also worth noting is that one can do it on land which may or will be unsuitable for natural agricultural production. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 12:12:53 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:12:53 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: <61c8738e0704121742x1c52e56ayc5277c951ae230f0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070413121253.GS9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 07:37:37AM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: > What people aren't generally aware of is that more ideal "natural" > photosynthetic systems can be pushed to 6-8% efficiency in > photobioreactors. So the solution for maximal output (either for food There are advantages in controlled eutrophication of large bodies of water, versus highly controlled environments. > or fuel) is solar ponds using a mix of photosynthetic microorganisms. > What you want is photosynthetic spirulina for food and photosynthetic > yeast for alcohol. It is worth noting that something like a dozen Some microalgae contain up to 50% of oil, which is suitable for biodiesel. Most important: unlike ethanol, oil does not have to be destilled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture > different species of photosynthetic microorganisms have been sequenced > and the information is sitting in NCBI or DOE databases. Constructing > solar ponds has significantly lower technology inputs, investment > requirements and bureaucracy and legal headaches compared with nuclear > reactors. Also worth noting is that one can do it on land which may > or will be unsuitable for natural agricultural production. Or no land at all, shallow lagunes. The Salton Sea is an often cited model. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 13 14:22:10 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:22:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <20070413072206.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:22 AM 4/13/2007 +0200, Eugen wrote: snip >I'm not signed up because there's no coverage in my patch >of the geoid. You can be damn sure I would if I knew I'd >get a crack at a halfway decent suspension. The very least you should do is get enough US based life insurance to cover being suspended and let friends and family know what it is for and make plans to move near your provider if you become terminal. Incidentally, where do you live? I can't think of any part of the English speaking world that doesn't have coverage of a sort even if it is a local medical team being talked through doing a washout. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 14:37:21 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:37:21 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070413143721.GA9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 10:22:10AM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > The very least you should do is get enough US based life insurance to cover I'm part of a local effort to bootstrap a service provider, but had to drop out for a while, because of baby-related and other workload issues. I'm not sure I would want to rely on U.S. alone. Establishing some geographic diversity looks worthwhile. > being suspended and let friends and family know what it is for and make > plans to move near your provider if you become terminal. The probability of me dying within the next decade or two is rather low. Otoh, at 40 the life insurance is not so cheap anymore. Right now I can't spare the cash, since working on own company bootstrap. Things should become much better in a couple years. > Incidentally, where do you live? I can't think of any part of the English > speaking world that doesn't have coverage of a sort even if it is a local > medical team being talked through doing a washout. I'm not very impressed with people in U.K. (I'm currently based in Southern Germany). To be frank, I'm not impressed with the current quality consistency anywhere. (No, I don't have too high standards, I've just seen enough of how things should be done properly). I *do* hope that situation will improve in 40-50 years, when I'll need it. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 13 14:51:16 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:51:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Olga Bourlin wrote: > ... from the New York Times: > > > http://tinyurl.com/2cve2n Note that this book review is 17 years old...but Stranger in a Strange Land remains on my list of favorite books, not for the quality of it's writing, but for the quality and power of its ideas. How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? Here are probably my top five: Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell Synergetics - Buckminster Fuller Bonus childhood favorite: A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle - Jef From randall at randallsquared.com Fri Apr 13 16:34:12 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:34:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> On Apr 13, 2007, at 3:14 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 04:56:39PM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: >> Precisely. The only difference is the history, but I'm >> sure everyone would agree there is a distinct DVD I own > I guess I'm not everyone. If two DVDs fell down and rolled > into a corner, without me looking, I couldn't tell the > difference. So couldn't anybody, but an omniscient > observer. I'm an atheist, so this means nobody can tell > in principle. > > Again, the DVD has no label, you carry the label by > observing the system trajectory. I agree that the label consists of the system trajectory. Just because we don't have knowledge of a thing at a given time, however, doesn't mean that the thing doesn't exist. You argument seems to lead directly to (things I think are) absurdities such as: before anyone thought of evolution, evolution didn't exist. I'm pretty sure you won't agree with *that* one, but it's just another wording of "if we don't know something at the current time, it doesn't exist." > > Knowledge is information, and information is very important > in this unverse, from QM (two systems in the same quantum > state are not distinguishable in principle) to singularities. I think that this is misapplied, here. If we had two systems in the same quantum state, we might not be able to measure an internal difference, but we certainly can distinguish them; if we can't, then how do we know we have two? Taken literally, the statement "two systems are indistinguishable" is a logical contradiction. -- Randall Randall "Hey, Mr. Record Man, your system can't compete; It's the new artist model: File Transfer Complete..." - MC Lars, "Download This Song" From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 13 16:52:26 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:52:26 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 12:34:12PM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: > > Knowledge is information, and information is very important > > in this unverse, from QM (two systems in the same quantum > > state are not distinguishable in principle) to singularities. > > I think that this is misapplied, here. If we had two systems > in the same quantum state, we might not be able to measure an > internal difference, but we certainly can distinguish them; if No. We can't. Both in practice, and in theory. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. I wonder why I keep posting that example, with literature, but nobody seems to actually care to read it. It's been more than a decade that we keep having these threads, and they always go through the same motions. I'm getting tired of this. I think I'm going to ban these for good. > we can't, then how do we know we have two? Taken literally, > the statement "two systems are indistinguishable" is a logical > contradiction. Physics doesn't care a fig about what a monkey thinks is a contradiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0305-4470/13/4/008 http://www.engin.umich.edu/~CRE/03chap/html/transition/ -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 13 20:56:58 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:56:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> References: <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:52 PM 4/13/2007 +0200, Eugen wrote: snip >I wonder why I keep posting that example, with literature, >but nobody seems to actually care to read it. It's been more >than a decade that we keep having these threads, and they >always go through the same motions. I'm getting tired of this. >I think I'm going to ban these for good. I wondered why these identity threads seemed so old to me. Various moves and escapes have winnowed my SF collection to a remnant, but I kept several by A.E. Van Vogt including _The World of Null A_. I don't know how many here have read it, but the copyright is 1945. That *62* years ago. I just reread it. None of the identity arguments on this or any other forum I have seen has added a new idea to those expressed in that story written in 1945. I.e., it's much older than a decade, and who knows, Van Vogt probably stole it from some even older source. The meta question is why people continue to rehash this topic and several others? It can't be just a part of growing up because some I know are not that much younger than I am. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 13 22:03:09 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:03:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <20070413143721.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413175642.03b22d98@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Does anyone know the origin of the l*r*m*st*r identity who did a lot of the editing on the transhumanist page? From the number of edits he churns out, he must do little else. He has been opposing identifing as cryonics members the people on list of transhumanists. Keith From randall at randallsquared.com Fri Apr 13 22:30:13 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:30:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <9CBF8227-A99A-4611-818A-068699BBE3B5@randallsquared.com> On Apr 13, 2007, at 12:52 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 12:34:12PM -0400, Randall Randall wrote: >> we can't, then how do we know we have two? Taken literally, >> the statement "two systems are indistinguishable" is a logical >> contradiction. > > Physics doesn't care a fig about what a monkey thinks is a > contradiction. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles It seems obvious that this doesn't apply to complex macroscopic objects like DVDs and people, any more than the fact that electrons have no "wet" property can be applied to a bucket of water. There are a lot of firm statements I'm willing to make about a cup of coffee on my desk that I freely admit don't apply to the particles that make up the coffee. Nor do I think that this means the coffee is somehow not wet, or the cup is somehow not green. In any case, my statement quoted above stands even with this, since "indistinguishable", here, seems to mean, "...as long as we take care to lose track of which is which by putting them near enough to have their wavefunctions overlap." It seems clear that DVDs, coffee cups, and people will never overlap in this way by accident, even if we had examples of all three that had identical duplicates. > http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0305-4470/13/4/008 > http://www.engin.umich.edu/~CRE/03chap/html/transition/ So far, I don't know enough math to understand the relevance of the third link, or to understand the second link at all from the available abstract. -- Randall Randall "This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3 because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8." - Scott Aaronson From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 13 22:47:38 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:47:38 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070413173514.022456c0@satx.rr.com> At 11:37 PM 4/12/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >I agree that there are people who call themselves >"transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or >another. Speaking. >I don't take them very seriously Oh well. >and suspect they will be less >represented in the post human future than those who do sign up, especially >if they are older than say 50. The most serious objection, IMO, is: Who in Enron-Cryocorp will keep the dewars topped up when the CEO can run off to the Bahamas with the insurance money? Eugen is right, that there's no money in cryonics at the moment; it's a labor of love by the convinced and hopeful. But if it grows a little in popularity? The usual answer is that cryo's accounting will be carefully scrutinized by the convinced and hopeful who also aim at eventual future resurrection. Sadly, the kinds of people likely to get involved in such utopian schemes are hopelessly naive (I speak as one) if not Aspergerish. Easy pickings. Either that, or the faithful 20th C die-hards will perish one by one and no newcomers will keep the home... freezers... freezing. As a friend commented offlist, "Until it's written as an amendment to the Constitution with punishment attached to non-compliance [`It is a right to allow one to pursue a cryo-future and a federal crime NOT to keep the freezers freezing'], the odds aren't very good." And even then I wouldn't be too sure, especially after recent tiresome horrors of trying to deal with a major US insurance company (Unicare) who repeatedly denied payment of appropriate refunds--and when they finally broke down, *paid the already-paid medicos instead of providing a refund to the insured*. This is not the kind of institutional incompetence one wishes to depend on for one's revival. Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 13 21:56:32 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:56:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <20070413143721.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413174919.02c21918@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 04:37 PM 4/13/2007 +0200, Eugen wrote: snip >The probability of me dying within the next decade or two is >rather low. Otoh, at 40 the life insurance is not so cheap anymore. >Right now I can't spare the cash, since working on own company >bootstrap. Things should become much better in a couple years. Term life insurance such as through the IEEE might well be under a hundred dollars a year. It's not best, but some of the policies allow you to convert them to whole lift without being examined. snip >I'm not very impressed with people in U.K. (I'm currently based in >Southern Germany). >To be frank, I'm not impressed with the current quality consistency anywhere. Some of that can't be helped. No organization can compensate for your dying where you are not found for weeks or being at ground zero. >(No, I don't have too high standards, I've just seen enough of how things >should >be done properly). I *do* hope that situation will improve in 40-50 years, >when >I'll need it. Frankly I don't think you will need it in 40-50 years if you make it that long. But perhaps I am being a bit optimistic. Keith Henson From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 13 23:26:41 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:26:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412233228.0397d008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412233228.0397d008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Keith Henson wrote: > I agree that there are people who call themselves > "transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or > another. I don't take them very seriously ... Hey, I resemble that remark! I see nothing technically invalid about cryonics, but I have two fundamental problems with investing a significant amount of my net worth in it at this time. (1) The infrastructure is woefully insufficient to provide confidence that my investment would be well protected (and I've met people from Alcor personally.) (2) I see nearly zero probability that Jef would be relevant if revived at any significantly future time. Please don't respond with a knee jerk Pascal's Wager argument, since my money provides a real return relative to my values in this life, and I don't harbor the common illusion that my personal survival is infinitely valuable. If I were fairly wealthy, then I could be easily tempted, but the same logic would likely prevail. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 14 04:23:34 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:23:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070413173514.022456c0@satx.rr.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414001138.03980120@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 05:47 PM 4/13/2007 -0500, you wrote: >At 11:37 PM 4/12/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: > > >I agree that there are people who call themselves > >"transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or > >another. > >Speaking. > > >I don't take them very seriously > >Oh well. > > >and suspect they will be less > >represented in the post human future than those who do sign up, especially > >if they are older than say 50. > >The most serious objection, IMO, is: Who in Enron-Cryocorp will keep >the dewars topped up when the CEO can run off to the Bahamas with the >insurance money? It's a serious problem. There have been at least two such episodes I am aware of at Alcor, one many years ago in the depths of the Dora Kent problems and one more recently where a contract bookkeeper made off with a substantial amount in a trust account. Each time there is this kind of ripoff, the policies are changed. I believe bookkeepers are now bonded so that any such loses are paid by the bonding company. It is said that every law involving insurance companies is the result of some major fraud. >Eugen is right, that there's no money in cryonics at >the moment; it's a labor of love by the convinced and hopeful. But if >it grows a little in popularity? The usual answer is that cryo's >accounting will be carefully scrutinized by the convinced and hopeful >who also aim at eventual future resurrection. You should be aware that people *have* thawed out, though not for several decades now. >Sadly, the kinds of >people likely to get involved in such utopian schemes are hopelessly >naive (I speak as one) if not Aspergerish. Easy pickings. Either >that, or the faithful 20th C die-hards will perish one by one and no >newcomers will keep the home... freezers... freezing. > >As a friend commented offlist, "Until it's written as an amendment to >the Constitution with punishment attached to non-compliance [`It is a >right to allow one to pursue a cryo-future and a federal crime NOT to >keep the freezers freezing'], the odds aren't very good." It's a crime right now. The bookkeeper noted above went to jail. >And even >then I wouldn't be too sure, especially after recent tiresome horrors >of trying to deal with a major US insurance company (Unicare) who >repeatedly denied payment of appropriate refunds--and when they >finally broke down, *paid the already-paid medicos instead of >providing a refund to the insured*. This is not the kind of >institutional incompetence one wishes to depend on for one's revival. Unfortunately it's the only game in town. Far better that you live through the singularity than put your trust in the humans who keep the Dewars topped off with LN2. But if you have no other choice, you have to trust people . . . . like me and my friends of the last 22 years. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Apr 14 04:56:03 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:56:03 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] latest Steorn announcement Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070413235341.023b9a20@satx.rr.com> http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/2007/04/steorn_has_released_their_long.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3aaRrEIp-0 [quote:] From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Apr 14 08:52:02 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 18:52:02 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/14/07, Keith Henson wrote: I wondered why these identity threads seemed so old to me. Various moves > and escapes have winnowed my SF collection to a remnant, but I kept > several > by A.E. Van Vogt including _The World of Null A_. I don't know how many > here have read it, but the copyright is 1945. That *62* years ago. > > I just reread it. > > None of the identity arguments on this or any other forum I have seen has > added a new idea to those expressed in that story written in 1945. > > I.e., it's much older than a decade, and who knows, Van Vogt probably > stole > it from some even older source. > > The meta question is why people continue to rehash this topic and several > others? It can't be just a part of growing up because some I know are not > that much younger than I am. John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" published in 1689 is often cited as the first reference in modern works on personal identity, and it is still a subject of active philosophical discussion. I'm pretty clear in my own views, but it seems I disagree on many details even with those who basically agree with me that a copy of a person is as good as the original. So one reason the topic is continually rehashed (in addition to the fact that there are those who aren't at all convinced) is that there are intricacies involved, such as Lee Corbin's anticipation paradox, which are not immediately evident. The objection raised by Keith also seems symptomatic to me of a hostility by some on this list towards philosophy in general (a philosopher would not dismiss a problem simply on the grounds that it has been discussed for 200 or 2000 years without resolution). This is a little odd given that, like it or not, transhumanism is a philosophical movement as much as it is anything. I would also point out that people such as Max More, Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg are all professionally trained philosophers. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Apr 14 09:47:37 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:47:37 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/14/07, Jef Allbright wrote: How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? Language, Truth and Logic - A. J. Ayer The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins Reasons and Persons - Derek Parfit Permutation City - Greg Egan Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 14 04:32:09 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:32:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070412233228.0397d008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412233228.0397d008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414002525.03990d98@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 04:26 PM 4/13/2007 -0700, Jef wrote: >On 4/12/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > I agree that there are people who call themselves > > "transhumanists" who will not sign up for cryonics for one reason or > > another. I don't take them very seriously ... > >Hey, I resemble that remark! > >I see nothing technically invalid about cryonics, but I have two >fundamental problems with investing a significant amount of my net >worth in it at this time. I don't know anyone who paid for it lump sum. >(1) The infrastructure is woefully insufficient to provide confidence >that my investment would be well protected (and I've met people from >Alcor personally.) Man, if you think it is shaky today, you should have seen it in 1985 when I signed up. Still, all the people Alcor had charge of in those days are *still* frozen. >(2) I see nearly zero probability that Jef would be relevant if >revived at any significantly future time. I can't argue with your personal evaluation of your worth. >Please don't respond with a knee jerk Pascal's Wager argument, since >my money provides a real return relative to my values in this life, >and I don't harbor the common illusion that my personal survival is >infinitely valuable. If I were fairly wealthy, then I could be easily >tempted, but the same logic would likely prevail. A contract with CI paid with insurance is a nearly trivial amount of money by middle class standards. I hope you are not that poor. Keith From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 14 15:03:58 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:03:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/14/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/14/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > > How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? > > Language, Truth and Logic - A. J. Ayer > The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins > Reasons and Persons - Derek Parfit > Permutation City - Greg Egan > Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson Thanks Stathis. I've ordered Ayer's book and may get to it after "World of Null-A" which just came to my attention courtesy of Keith. It would be wonderful if any and all who engage in discussions of personal identity were familiar with Reasons and Persons, but I was disappointed at what I perceive as Parfit's reluctance to fully embrace the implications of his own work. Such tentativeness seems to distinguish your thinking from mine as well. I suspect it is more a matter of temperament than philosophy, assuming you must be (I)NTP on the MTBI, while I'm INTJ. Looking forward to any additional recommendations from members of this list. - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 14 15:09:27 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:09:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/14/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > the MTBI, while I'm INTJ. Sorry, should have been MBTI. And I might as well acknowledge here that the 5-axis "big five" scheme of personality categorization is better warranted, though not as popular. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 14 16:56:39 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:56:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414125629.03d50ef0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:52 PM 4/14/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: >On 4/14/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: snip >John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" published in 1689 >is often cited as the first reference in modern works on personal >identity, and it is still a subject of active philosophical discussion. >I'm pretty clear in my own views, but it seems I disagree on many details >even with those who basically agree with me that a copy of a person is as >good as the original. So one reason the topic is continually rehashed (in >addition to the fact that there are those who aren't at all convinced) is >that there are intricacies involved, such as Lee Corbin's anticipation >paradox, which are not immediately evident. Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most part agree with you that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) is equivalent and for the most part can't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion. >The objection raised by Keith also seems symptomatic to me of a hostility >by some on this list towards philosophy in general (a philosopher would >not dismiss a problem simply on the grounds that it has been discussed for >200 or 2000 years without resolution). This is a little odd given that, >like it or not, transhumanism is a philosophical movement as much as it is >anything. It didn't start that way. Max More and the early Extropian archives should be consulted, but my memory is that it grew mostly out of recognition that advanced technology, particularly nanotechnology based advanced medicine would allow us to do something about the wretched "human condition." Transhumanism may now be a philosophical movement, but it is so much wind without massive amounts of engineering work to implement it at the physical level. >I would also point out that people such as Max More, Nick Bostrom and >Anders Sandberg are all professionally trained philosophers. I don't recall Anders getting involved in these threads. His posts seem to be of an extremely level headed "be cautious" tone. Nick I don't know, other than perhaps a tendency to take more credit for ideas (being in a simulation) than is justified. My early memories of Max More are of him in scrubs doing whatever was needed on a suspension team, and doing it very well. Keith Henson From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Apr 14 16:56:20 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:56:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Hydrogen a "bad Idea" In-Reply-To: <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> References: <017601c7794d$86ee5f00$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412012049.04754a70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <461DE9E0.1040702@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: On 4/12/07, Thomas wrote: > > Keith Henson wrote: > > I ran this by Paul Torgerson of Worldwide Energy, an emerging hydrogen > fuel cell/electrolyzer company. He had this to say: We cannot claim that a hydrogen fuel cell/electolyzer company is an "unbiased" source. Nor is the DOE, since it is generally operating under presidential mandate to "go hydrogen" (This may be promoted by Bush but I think Clinton initiated it). Solar panels are by far the most expensive means of energy production > around. To power just US housing would take an estimated area the size of > Arizona, and we build about 15 million new homes a year. The sun only > shines part time. Puttting a solar panel on your roof is not enough to > solve > the energy crisis. Statements by about the land area requirements are completely useless unless the type of solar panel is specified (since efficiencies vary by at least a factor of 4). The problem isn't that we lack the land area the problem is that we lack the production capacity to do this in any reasonable time. The hydrogen economy has already been implemented. Quick, show me where -- I want to go visit those big hydrogen storage tanks, those shiny new LH2 transport trucks or those cryogenic pipelines just so I can touch them and ooh and ahhh. Very high temperature nuclear electrolysis looks like the cheapest means of > hydrogen production. This will use electricity and heat to crack water > molecules. The new GEN IV light water reactors being developed by DOE won't > be ready until 2030. So *where* might I ask is the electricity going to come from? 2030 is 23 years from *now*. [Paul clarified with the following:) > > Current US annual hydrogen production is the equivalent of 71.8 Gigawatts > Thermal ("GWth") of nuclear or fossil power. This equates to 118 nuclear > (or > fossil) plants to supply the hydrogen using the projected system > configuration of 600 Megawatts Thermal ("MWth") nuclear to 50 MWth for > Hydrogen Production. More than 500 nuclear reactors (or fossil plants, > with > carbon sequestration, will be needed by 2050 to achieve the DOE's goal of > substituting 25% of liquid transportation fuel with hydrogen. And how is this going to solve the problem? There are less than 10 nuclear reactors on the drawing boards in the U.S. currently (maybe less than 5). And you are going to multiply that by a factor of 50 to 100??? If the Company captures five to ten percent market share of this potential > market, Worldwide's metal-tubular solid oxide electrolyzer cell ("MTSOEC") > stack production would grow to thousands of WET multi-megawatt MTSOEC > stacks containing from 468,750 to 937,000 linear feet of WET produced > electrodes, from commissioning of the first commercial reactor (in 2025) > through 2050 . And where is the infrastructure to build this and how does it compare with the infrastructure required to build the solar cells? (Solution A: build solar cell factories and install them; Solution B: build lots of nuclear reactors, lots of MTSOEC factory capacity, lots of hydrogen production capacity, lots of hydrogen transport capacity, ...) Hmmm... what is wrong with this picture? Try getting that much energy from bacteria or plants. I did. My calculations suggested that even without significant improvements in photosynthetic efficiency something like half of the *grazing* land area in the SW U.S. states would need to be converted to solar ponds. More importantly the solar ponds don't require fancy new technology and building lots of new factories. Perhaps most importantly harvesting biofuels from them would be *more* profitable than raising cattle on the land so it could probably be done without the need for massive government subsidies, loans, etc. Nuclear hydrogen has an estimated cost of $2/gal of gas equivalent > (GGE). Plus nuclear electrolysis doesn't produce CO2. I assume he means nuclear electrolysis of water. Burning methane produces CO2, so does burning ethanol. Burning methane or ethanol or biodiesel doesn't produce any net CO2 *if* the carbon that goes into producing them comes from the atmosphere (i.e. through photosynthesis). People riding the bio fuels wagon think a bunch of ethanol plants can > suddenly solve the world's energy needs. In fact, ethanol costs more to make > than its worth. This point is sharply disputed. So long as gas prices remain above $2.00/gal I believe ethanol would be profitable even without subsidies. (I believe this is from Vinod Khosla whom is a reasonably reputable source.) It creates the next big problem of having to use our food supply to make it > in volume. Gee, you mean we might stop subsidizing U.S. farmers and allow Brazil to sell us ethanol they are more than happy to produce and sell at U.S. market prices? The DOE is spending big bucks working on carbon sequestration. One of > the most novel uses I've seen is pumping it down dry oil wells. It > actually > fills the voids and makes the wells produce more oil. Bad bad bad. The oil in the ground *should* stay there. Its taking the carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere that is the fundamental problem. There are no easy answers to the worlds energy crisis. We'll never have > the magic power to crack enough water into hydrogen with solar energy > to produce 138 billion GGEs a year. It would appear Paul doesn't understand the concepts of nanotechnology, nanofactories, self-replicating systems and the transition from pre KT-I to KT-II level civilizations. DOE is investing billions in the future, but the ideas below don't merit the > energy spent to send the message. Just because our government is spending money doesn't mean it is being spent well. Small scale ideas look foolish when we confront the big picture and become > better informed people. Small scale ideas are what will solve these problems. A human being is a 100W machine. So it requires less than a square meter of sunshine a day to sustain a person *if* you could make the energy conversion efficient enough. The problem isn't that we lack the energy. The problem is that we currently lack the technology to convert it from sustainable sources (wind, sunlight, tides, etc.) rather than unsustainable sources (such as oil, coal and uranium). I would argue that anyone working on, or promoting, technologies which do not provide long term sustainable solutions is going in the wrong direction. I would also cite Eugen's recent arguments that uranium based nuclear reactors are not a sustainable low cost solution -- witness the change in the price of pitchblende over the last couple of years. Paul's numbers fall apart unless one has a sustainable nuclear fuel cycle -- so in his long term projections he is either assuming (a) breeder reactors; (b) a thorium based fuel cycle (as Eugen has discussed), or (c) that we will make nuclear fusion work cost effectively sometime in our lifetime (I'm not holding my breath). Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sat Apr 14 17:16:59 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:16:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/10/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > I suspect that if it were less expensive to make fresh water out of sea > water for crops than it is to export the oil, grow the crops in other > locations with low cost water, and ship them back, people would be doing it > now. I think you are arguing that systems make sense. There are large numbers of systems in place that do not make sense (from an efficiency or cost viewpoint) that are in place due to the fact nobody has looked at them from the perspective of "what would be the *best* solution?" The trouble with "best" solutions is that they often have high up-front investment costs. So they don't get implemented until the society (esp. far sighted individuals with a society) get rich enough. What would be really interesting is to see how/where the oil wealth in S.A. is distributed and whether it is distributed to people who are willing to innovate and take risks [1]. It takes a *lot* of water to grow food, and it is really expensive in terms > of energy to make fresh water out of salt. I am well aware that advancing > technology could change this picture. It doesn't have to take a lot of *fresh* water. The cyanobacteria and algae in the oceans are perfectly happy producing reduced carbon (hydrocarbons) and proteins in salt water. You are dealing with a historic artifact that the food system is oriented around cheap fresh water production methods. Think about it this way, when the oil runs out how are they going to power > the desalination plants? That was the point of the URL. S.A. is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of solar energy wealth per individual. Now that could change over the next few decades if they subsidize population growth at the expense of infrastructure investment. http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html > > Which indicates that desalination plants produce water for around $1/cubic > meter. The question I would ask is whether this cost includes the recent improvements in desalination plant technology. I think the Science Channel had a recent news blurb about a breakthrough that was going to make them 2-3x more energy efficient (through better recovery of otherwise wasted energy) and that was being looked at by L.A. and/or San Diego to solve their water problems. Given that it takes about 1000 tons of water to grow a ton of wheat, that > would run up the cost of wheat for the water alone to $1000 a ton. But it the water is used for transpiration to drag the nutrients from the roots up into the leaves. You don't have this problem if you grow you food in solar ponds or relatively sealed greenhouses that you can condense the water from at night. Its a "change the traditional thinking" or "infrastructure investment" problem. Wheat runs about a $100 a ton, and shipping to the mid east might run > around $50 a ton. It would still cost them better than 5 times the > current > cost. http://www.ndwheat.com/buyers/default.asp?ID=287 > So don't use wheat. Use cyanobacteria engineered to produce a lot of starch that end up tasting like wheat. Interesting way to look at food imports as water imports, and a certain area > of the world would be in deep trouble if food imports were shut off. > http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_02/uk/dossier/txt32.htm As we have learned the hard way with oil imports. All countries should try to structure their economies so they are sustainable without essential foreign sources. Otherwise one can be subjected to extortion, coercion, etc. and have higher than really necessary taxes in order to support large military budgets required to prevent people from attempting to subject you to such situations. Robert 1. It would be interesting to ask the question of why S.A. isn't building ships to tow icebergs from the North Atlantic (or Antartctic) back to S.A. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 14 17:27:02 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:27:02 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict Message-ID: I just discovered this video (posted 2007-01) of Robert Wright arguing the arrow of morality more concretely and (I hope) more persuasively than I do. - Jef From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 14 18:10:11 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 20:10:11 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070414181011.GP9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 04:56:58PM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > The meta question is why people continue to rehash this topic and several > others? It can't be just a part of growing up because some I know are not > that much younger than I am. I'm completely baffled either. It looks like a pointless ritual to me. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 14 19:17:35 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:17:35 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070414191735.GW9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 06:52:02PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > a little odd given that, like it or not, transhumanism is a > philosophical movement as much as it is anything. I would also point Well, if transhumanism is not about science, technology and politics then I'd please like to have my money back. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 14 20:24:19 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:24:19 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia page and cryonics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413174919.02c21918@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070411171757.04702fd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070412143957.03aa99e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413101634.03ad6a28@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413174919.02c21918@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070414202419.GZ9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 05:56:32PM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > Term life insurance such as through the IEEE might well be under a hundred > dollars a year. It's not best, but some of the policies allow you to > convert them to whole lift without being examined. That sounds awfully cheap. I'm not an IEEE member though, and I'm not sure what the rates for Alcor membership + transport are for a 40 year old Eutrashperson. Any european Alcor members in my age bracket want to chime in? > >To be frank, I'm not impressed with the current quality consistency anywhere. > > Some of that can't be helped. No organization can compensate for your > dying where you are not found for weeks or being at ground zero. I'm speaking about the so-called best case, which has wildly varying quality issues. This has not improved a lot over time, and arguably regressed. Certainly no linear semilog-plot there. > Frankly I don't think you will need it in 40-50 years if you make it that > long. But perhaps I am being a bit optimistic. I used to be more optimistic, but the last ~25 years have made me more cautious. I'll be very happy with a high likelihood of a decent suspension in that time frame (40-50 years). Meanwhile, I try to not kill myself with my supplement regime, and generally try to live more or less healthy. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 01:19:17 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:19:17 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414125629.03d50ef0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414125629.03d50ef0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Keith Henson wrote: Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most part agree with you > that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) is equivalent and for > the most part can't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion. > You probably feel that way after these many long discussions. If you ask someone at random who has a scientific view of the world, it is not a foregone conclusion that he will agree. Perhaps that's unfortunate, but it's the way it is. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 14 14:35:06 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:35:06 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org><304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eugen writes (and has made this point before) > Diversification guarantees you some of the postbiota will be not > intelligent. By the bulk of the postbiomass most of it might be > arguably only slightly smarter than rocks, with a few gods sprinkled > in-between. Does anyone have a simple, convincing argument that supplies some reason that vastly transhuman engines won't absorb all resources within reach? Even if *some* particular AI had a predilection not to expand its influence as far as it could, wouldn't it lose the evolutionary race to those who would? The "few gods sprinkled in-between" would seem to me to be showing superhuman restraint in not gobbling up all lesser entities. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 14 17:39:00 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:39:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org><3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com><20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org><20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <002401c77ecc$03142af0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Randall writes >> Again, the DVD has no label, you carry the label by >> observing the system trajectory. > > I agree that the label consists of the system trajectory. > Just because we don't have knowledge of a thing at a given > time, however, doesn't mean that the thing doesn't exist. I think that you are referring to the history of a particular system. Given two identical CDs, even down to scratches, I agree that there is a fact of the matter as to which one historically was the original and which is a copy. It's just that I can think of no important consequence of the answer to the question "which is the original?". If the two are identical, then for *all* purposes they are interchangeable. And isn't that the only relevant question here, or am I missing something? >> Knowledge is information, and information is very important >> in this unverse, from QM (two systems in the same quantum >> state are not distinguishable in principle) to singularities. > > I think that this is misapplied, here. If we had two systems > in the same quantum state, we might not be able to measure an > internal difference, but we certainly can distinguish them; if > we can't, then how do we know we have two? Taken literally, > the statement "two systems are indistinguishable" is a logical > contradiction. Yes. They differ by location, at least, even if we agree to regard their histories as even more unimportant. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 14 17:17:57 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:17:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis References: <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com><040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org><3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com><20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org><20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org><87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <001f01c77eb9$04c3d160$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> On Friday, April 13, 2007 1:56 PM you wrote > The meta question is why people continue to rehash this topic > and several others? As for me, there are a number of unsolved issues regarding identity. I don't know, of course, what other people's motivations are, even given that I know my own (we don't usually really have a handle on why we do what we do). The ones which seem undeniably important are those that appear to be mirrored in actual choices that post-humans will have to make, issues regarding their very own survival and just what that actually means in light of duplication, memory erasure, and related issues. It may be abundantly clear to you (and to others) exactly what doctrines you'll embrace and what ones you'll abhor, but it's not to all of us. Evidently I'm not alone in wishing to work out the consequences of our various takes on various aspects of these issues. (And every so often, such as right now, I do feel that progress is being made.) Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 14 04:58:02 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:58:02 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > Let's summarise. You feel that the sort of anticipation which tells the > average human that he won't have the experiences of his copy in the > next room cannot be rationally justified and should be expunged. Yes, since if one is going to anticipate *any* future experience, then as a person and his recent duplicate are physically identical in all important respects, one should anticipate being *both* of the future systems. > On the other hand, you feel that the sort of anticipation which makes > the average human worry more about the future than the past cannot > be rationally justified but should be left alone. Is there an inconsistency here? Well, thanks for pointing this out. Yes, there is an inconsistency, but I'll try to minimize it. As much as *logically* these extreme thought experiments show that one should anticipate what has already happened to one as much as anticipate what is going to happen to one, perhaps there just isn't any payoff for doing so? That is, my anticipation module makes me drool over a pleasant even upcoming tomorrow night, but I only have fond memories of the same kind of event that happened to me last week, and they're not the same thing. Moreover, so far as *choices* are concerned, I can very, very seldomly do anything about the past. But determining whether my duplicate will get $10M and deposit in our account is important. (To those of a very practical bent, such choices are not important today, but after people upload, and copies are cheap, they'll need to come to decisions about these questions.) So let me admit the inconsistency, but of the two memes A: try as hard as you can to identify with all future instances B: try to anticipate things that happened to you in the past only A seems valuable. Lee From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Sun Apr 15 03:36:06 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:36:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <786176.30844.qm@web37210.mail.mud.yahoo.com> For what it's worth, I think it's just a difference in interest. I think the posts regarding the questions between Lee, Heartland and Stathis are questions of a physiological Personal Identity Bis. While I understand that on this list it must have been written a thousand times, sometimes it is always nice to refresh the memory. Anna:) --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > On 4/15/07, Keith Henson > wrote: > > Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most > part agree with you > > that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) > is equivalent and for > > the most part can't imagine why anyone would have > a different opinion. > > > > You probably feel that way after these many long > discussions. If you ask > someone at random who has a scientific view of the > world, it is not a > foregone conclusion that he will agree. Perhaps > that's unfortunate, but it's > the way it is. > > Stathis Papaioannou > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 05:09:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:09:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/14/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Stathis writes > > > Let's summarise. You feel that the sort of anticipation which tells the > > average human that he won't have the experiences of his copy in the > > next room cannot be rationally justified and should be expunged. > > Yes, since if one is going to anticipate *any* future experience, then > as a person and his recent duplicate are physically identical in all > important respects, one should anticipate being *both* of the future > systems. > > > On the other hand, you feel that the sort of anticipation which makes > > the average human worry more about the future than the past cannot > > be rationally justified but should be left alone. Is there an > inconsistency here? > > Well, thanks for pointing this out. Yes, there is an inconsistency, but > I'll > try to minimize it. As much as *logically* these extreme thought > experiments > show that one should anticipate what has already happened to one as much > as anticipate what is going to happen to one, perhaps there just isn't any > payoff for doing so? That is, my anticipation module makes me drool over > a pleasant even upcoming tomorrow night, but I only have fond memories > of the same kind of event that happened to me last week, and they're not > the same thing. Moreover, so far as *choices* are concerned, I can > very, very seldomly do anything about the past. But determining whether > my duplicate will get $10M and deposit in our account is important. But my anticipation module makes me worry more about what happens to me than what happens to my copy in the next room, in the same way as I worry more about the future than the past. In fact, there is a sense in which my relationship to copies of me in the past is the same as my relationship to copies of me in the next room or in parallel universes that I can't access. Even if I could change things so that in some alternate history things worked out better for me, I wouldn't thereby anticipate the past more. I have agreed with you all along that this sort of thinking is not always rational and consistent, but there is no universal law saying that our feelings have to be rational and consistent. There is no rational reason why I should wish to survive in any capacity at all; it's just that humans have evolved with the strong desire to survive. We could imagine an AI that was perfectly rational and yet had no qualms about terminating its existence (in fact, that would be the best sort of AI to build: we wouldn't want super-beings around who cling to life as tenaciously as humans do). Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 05:18:07 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:18:07 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Eugen writes (and has made this point before) > > > Diversification guarantees you some of the postbiota will be not > > intelligent. By the bulk of the postbiomass most of it might be > > arguably only slightly smarter than rocks, with a few gods sprinkled > > in-between. > > Does anyone have a simple, convincing argument that supplies some > reason that vastly transhuman engines won't absorb all resources > within reach? Even if *some* particular AI had a predilection not > to expand its influence as far as it could, wouldn't it lose the > evolutionary race to those who would? This is true, but you could apply the argument to any agent: bacteria, aliens, humans, nanomachines, black holes... ultimately, those entities which grow, reproduce or consume will prevail. However, it might be aeons before everything goes to hell, especially if we anticipate problems and try to prevent or minimise them. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 15 05:53:34 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 01:53:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414204906.03d6d170@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:16 PM 4/14/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: >On 4/10/07, Keith Henson ><hkhenson at rogers.com > wrote: snip >>Given that it takes about 1000 tons of water to grow a ton of wheat, that >>would run up the cost of wheat for the water alone to $1000 a ton. > >But it the water is used for transpiration to drag the nutrients from the >roots up into the leaves. You don't have this problem if you grow you >food in solar ponds or relatively sealed greenhouses that you can condense >the water from at night. Its a "change the traditional thinking" or >"infrastructure investment" problem. You *can't* grow food in a "relatively sealed greenhouse." Think about it. >>Wheat runs about a $100 a ton, and shipping to the mid east might run >>around $50 a ton. It would still cost them better than 5 times the current >>cost. >>http://www.ndwheat.com/buyers/default.asp?ID=287 > >So don't use wheat. Use cyanobacteria engineered to produce a lot of >starch that end up tasting like wheat. Shortly after you have this much ability to design living things, I expect you could just run humans (or simulations) directly on electricity. Keith From benboc at lineone.net Sun Apr 15 08:15:37 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:15:37 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> Eugen Leitl wrote: > Cryonics is a nice way of putting your money where your mouth is. > Also, because it doesn't look as if life extension will achieve > escape velocity in our biological life time, cryonics is the only > option if you want to sample the transhuman future in person. The > only option. There is no other, currently. This may be literally true now (April 2007), but i suspect that it won't be true for long. I can't say how long it will be before life-extension (defined as keeping people alive in their current form) becomes available, but i think there is a third option that should be possible quite soon - maybe within a decade. Nobody seems to think about keeping people alive (which means keeping their brain alive) in /any/ form, it's always in a human body. What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and can communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the body doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the brain, as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. Given a constant blood supply, a brain can stay alive even if the rest of the body is gone, or damaged beyond repair (This doesn't apply, of course, if your problem is a damaged brain, but the vast majority of cases of death boil down to one simple thing: The brain starves of oxygen). So, how about a replacement body? An artificial life-support system. It wouldn't at first be anything like a human body, probably more like a roomful of equipment, but that could change as more developments are made. I'm not saying this would be easy to do, but it seems to me that the problems of providing neural interfaces are harder than the problems of providing a suitable blood supply. With the progress being made in that area, it shouldn't be long before, at least in theory, someone could keep their brain alive and functioning despite the loss of the rest of the body. Maybe some of the sensory organs (eyes, ears) could be kept alive together with the brain. Whether you'd want to do this is another matter, but it's survival, and it means you have the possibility of continuing to interact with the world, to make decisions and earn your keep. Things that cryonics patients can't do. Of course, this would be a temporary state, until the kind of technology you are interested in comes along. That's another advantage over cryonics: You can make a decision about what to do next, when the time comes. I was thinking about Stephen Hawking. Would you be willing to be in a position similar to his for a while if it meant you could keep going? I think we aren't far from being able to achieve this. You may prefer to be suspended and take your chances. Some people would even prefer to be dead, i'm sure, than live as a 'brain in a jar', even though it would just be temporary. But it's something to think about. Now, who thinks i'm talking bollocks? And if so, why? ben zaiboc From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 14 20:05:40 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:05:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <236231.43174.qm@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> --- Jef Allbright wrote: > I just discovered this video (posted 2007-01) of > Robert Wright arguing > the arrow of morality more concretely and (I hope) > more persuasively > than I do. > > I was convinced before you ever started arguing. But it is a great talk. :) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 14 18:46:49 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:46:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Survival In-Reply-To: <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <914926.19620.qm@web60518.mail.yahoo.com> --- Eugen Leitl wrote: > Diversification guarantees you some of the postbiota > will be not > intelligent. By the bulk of the postbiomass most of > it might be > arguably only slightly smarter than rocks, with a > few gods sprinkled > in-between. This is one possible outcome. There is certainly an Everett branch from here to a world where machine phase-spiders pounce upon machine-phase flies in order to drain their batteries. But it is only one of many possible. It all has to do with choices. Ours presently unless we at some point make a decision that benches us permanently in this great game called evolution. Perhaps it will be the A.I.'s choices thereafter unless we bench ourselves before the Singularity. In any case, this particular scenario can only be possible many choices beyond the Singularity. > Logging in Brazil is very rational, and kills > habitats just fine. > In fact, if you'd confront these loggers (who have > children at home > to feed) they'll shoot you dead. Yes. But our latin lumberjack is playing the "feed my children" game and not the "save the environment game". The whole point of designing an A.I. is to save the world and not damn it. At least that is what I *thought* it was about. > Palm plantations in Indonesia are also rational. > Building airstrips > and shopping malls is also perfectly rational. The goals one has depend on what game one is playing. In that sense any particular move can be rational in one game and irrational in another. > Interactions between very asymmetrical players have > no payoff for the > greater player, and hence produce no cooperation. Yes, you derive absolutely no benefit from the tens of thousands of lymphocytes that sacrifice their precious little lives for your overall heath and well-being on a daily basis. Why not defect on them and go have unprotected sex in a brothel in South Africa? :) > Expecting reason to always prevail is unreasonable. > Human-Ebola interaction > is not governed by reason. Sure it is. We quarantine people with Ebola and that is perfectly reasonable. We also have people that interact with Ebola in the laboratory trying to find a vaccine for it. That too is reasonable. > If you thought humans are good at SNAFUs, you should > see some of what > gods do. I don't believe in any gods except those we ourselves can aspire to be. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 12:13:52 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:13:52 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, ben wrote: What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and can > communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the > body doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the > brain, as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. > > Given a constant blood supply, a brain can stay alive even if the rest > of the body is gone, or damaged beyond repair (This doesn't apply, of > course, if your problem is a damaged brain, but the vast majority of > cases of death boil down to one simple thing: The brain starves of > oxygen). > > So, how about a replacement body? An artificial life-support system. It > wouldn't at first be anything like a human body, probably more like a > roomful of equipment, but that could change as more developments are made. > > I'm not saying this would be easy to do, but it seems to me that the > problems of providing neural interfaces are harder than the problems of > providing a suitable blood supply. With the progress being made in that > area, it shouldn't be long before, at least in theory, someone could > keep their brain alive and functioning despite the loss of the rest of > the body. Maybe some of the sensory organs (eyes, ears) could be kept > alive together with the brain. It's possible in principle, but I don't see how removing the brain from the body would be any advance over what is currently done when organ systems start failing, which is to try to fix them medically or surgically, and if that doesn't work to replace them with artificial alternatives such as renal dialysis. The most extreme examples are seen in Intensive Care Units, where multiple organ systems often fail together and people are kept alive for moderately long periods with external machinery. In the future this may progress to the point where a person can be kept alive indefinitely even though little more than his brain is functioning, as per your scenario. However, even if the machines work perfectly, the brain itself will still be subject to aging and the diseases of aging; and if we could find a way to stop this for the brain, we probably would have found it for the rest of the body as well. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 14:28:43 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:28:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, ben wrote: > > Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Also, because it doesn't look as if life extension will achieve escape > velocity in our biological life time, cryonics is the only option if you > want to sample the transhuman future in person. The only option. There is no > other, currently. I disagree completely. So long as you do not disassemble the brain (cremation being the obvious example) and prevent the bacteria from eating everything and prevent the proteases from destroying too much structure you have a fighting chance. I would argue that enbalming and dessication both accomplish this. I would put these approaches as in the same category of destructiveness as early cryonics suspension methods. I can think of less destructive methods as well such as pumping the body (or brain) full of general purpose antibiotics and protease inhibitors and perhaps cooling it down to slightly above freezing. It could be argued that these methods are less destructive than at least the early cryonic suspension methods. The *critical* aspects are to prevent excessive loss of clarity about where the synapses were connected and the proteins (and perhaps neurotransmitter quantities) present at those synapses. *Everything* else is secondary. I can imagine a recovery procedure using bacteria engineered to operate at very cool temperatures (antarctic bacteria function down to -4 C) where normal human proteins are essentially nonfunctional. These bacteria would be engineered to enter cells, remove any preservatives, restore water to the tissues, repair any membrane damage, etc. and allow "reanimation". Now of course this might be easier with real nanorobots (where one has more precise control over the program being executed), but we can start engineering restoration bacteria today while it will probably be 30-40 years before we can start engineering nanorobots (at the rate we are going). Nobody seems to think about keeping people alive (which means keeping their > brain alive) in /any/ form, it's always in a human body. Not true. I've discussed "head on a body-bot" on the GRG list. Recent progress with heart pumps and miniaturization of dialysis equipment make it only a matter of time before this becomes feasible. As Stathis has pointed out this doesn't solve the problem of "brain rot" but that is a completely different development vector (which we are largely getting a handle on -- at least in terms of Parkinsons, Alzheimer's and neuronal stem cell manipulation). What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and can > communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the body > doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the brain, > as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. Essentially correct, though one could argue there are other glands within the body which may be producing hormones which may be essential to proper brain operation. Your stomach and fat cells releasing hormones which interact with the "hunger" centers in the brain. But one can substitute for these with a general purpose hormone (drug) "tweeking" med center in the body-bot. I'm not saying this would be easy to do, but it seems to me that the > problems of providing neural interfaces are harder than the problems of > providing a suitable blood supply. With the progress being made in that > area, it shouldn't be long before, at least in theory, someone could keep > their brain alive and functioning despite the loss of the rest of the body. > Maybe some of the sensory organs (eyes, ears) could be kept alive together > with the brain. Until the progress with neural intefaces (esp. sight & sound) advance significantly, I would much prefer "head-on-a-bot" than "brain-in-a-vat". There will be the problem of linking the motor cortex or spine to external motor control functions (unless one is comfortable living only in a sight, sound & voice enabled VR). Obviously we know humans can function without sight and sound. I think the real barrier is "robust" thought command interfaces to allow one to interact with the external world (the blind substitute sound & touch for sight and the deaf make use of sight and to a lesser extent touch to offset their handicaps). The real trick isn't so much providing the inputs (people with cochlear implants rapidly learn to reparse the sounds they are hearing) but mapping the outputs into external interfaces seems to be the area where we are lacking currently. Though there is a lot of very active work in this area (thought control of mouse cursors, mapping spinal cord signals to limb control, etc.). Whether you'd want to do this is another matter, but it's survival, and it > means you have the possibility of continuing to interact with the world, to > make decisions and earn your keep. Things that cryonics patients can't do. I know. I suspect the number of people in the U.S. who die annually because of one organ or another failing when their brains are still functional numbers in the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions). The number of people who die from cancer metastasis to the brain (which can destroy brain structure) is relatively low. The number that die from a stroke (or injury) that destroys critical parts of the brain is higher -- but I bet it isn't more than 10 to 20% of the total annual death toll in developed countries. Now, who thinks i'm talking bollocks? And if so, why? No, you are on the money. The thing to shift is the concept from "you are dead" to "you are dead without significant assistive technology". In ancient times I would have been dead probably 30+ years ago when I started to become moderately nearsighted. One doesn't leap from tree to tree or go into battle if you can't see clearly more than a few feet in front of your face (for example, I'm using a 23" wide screen TV as a monitor. If I take off my glasses I can notice paragraphs of text but what they contain is unreadable. If I look out the window "unassisted" I can barely register the tree trunks, much less go swinging from branch to branch. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 14:52:13 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:52:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070414204906.03d6d170@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070410190615.04692cb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070414204906.03d6d170@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > You *can't* grow food in a "relatively sealed greenhouse." Think about > it. Ok, yes, one has the problem of adding the CO2, releasing the O2 and retaining the H2O, *but* they have different condensation temperatures and it isn't as if we don't know how to do this type of separation. Its also true that the Saudi's aren't lacking for CO2 to enrich the greenhouses with CO2 given how much methane I expect they are flaring from oil fields (or outputs from oil or methane fueled power plants). > > Shortly after you have this much ability to design living things, I expect > you could just run humans (or simulations) directly on electricity. That design capability is much closer than you think Keith. We've got ~33 years of experience engineering microorganisms (since the first genetic engineering labs were built in the mid-70s). The blueprints have been in the databases for nearly a decade (since the late '90s). You've got at least two companies now (Codon Devices & Synthetic Genomics) working on providing robust technologies in these areas to "end users" at an affordable cost. The photosynthetic systems and starch production systems are well understood biochemical systems. We do *not* yet have the blueprints or electric eels (or even sharks which are capable of sensing minute electric currents). Running humans as sims on electricity requires the development of mind uploading or the synthesis of a full AI and I'd put those at least 20, more likely 30 years, post the first concrete example of a completely synthetic bacteria (we are several years into the era of completely synthetic viruses). Now whether the Saudis would get their future planning together to engineer something like this isn't clear. I'd place greater probability on something like this being developed in the UAE, esp. Dubai since they seem to be the most forward thinking. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 15 15:25:53 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:25:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415102756.03d87358@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:15 AM 4/15/2007 +0100, ben wrote: >Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Cryonics is a nice way of putting your money where your mouth is. > > Also, because it doesn't look as if life extension will achieve > > escape velocity in our biological life time, cryonics is the only > > option if you want to sample the transhuman future in person. The > > only option. There is no other, currently. > > >This may be literally true now (April 2007), but i suspect that it won't >be true for long. I can't say how long it will be before life-extension >(defined as keeping people alive in their current form) becomes >available, but i think there is a third option that should be possible >quite soon - maybe within a decade. > >Nobody seems to think about keeping people alive (which means keeping >their brain alive) in /any/ form, it's always in a human body. > >What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and can >communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the >body doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the >brain, as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. > >Given a constant blood supply, a brain can stay alive even if the rest >of the body is gone, or damaged beyond repair (This doesn't apply, of >course, if your problem is a damaged brain, but the vast majority of >cases of death boil down to one simple thing: The brain starves of oxygen). > >So, how about a replacement body? An artificial life-support system. It >wouldn't at first be anything like a human body, probably more like a >roomful of equipment, but that could change as more developments are made. > >I'm not saying this would be easy to do, but it seems to me that the >problems of providing neural interfaces are harder than the problems of >providing a suitable blood supply. Decades ago Russian researchers spliced a small dog's head on a larger dog. The heads stayed alive for days to weeks before tissue rejection got them. Google has 513 links for "keep a severed head alive," including the text from the Whole Earth Review article. >With the progress being made in that >area, it shouldn't be long before, at least in theory, someone could >keep their brain alive and functioning despite the loss of the rest of >the body. It would take so much progress that I would be amazed to see it happen before nanotechnology medicine was able to just repair people. Keeping someone alive on external perfusion is a very short term business, a few days before bacteria infect the perfusion equipment. I am not putting this down in theory, but the practice is so far advanced that I don't think it could be done with nanotechnology medicine. >Maybe some of the sensory organs (eyes, ears) could be kept >alive together with the brain. > >Whether you'd want to do this is another matter, but it's survival, and >it means you have the possibility of continuing to interact with the >world, to make decisions and earn your keep. Things that cryonics >patients can't do. The cost to keep someone in LN2 is a few hundred dollars a year. Now cost could come down, but they would have to come down by a factor in the millions (at least) for it to be possible for a "severed head" to be able to earn its keep. >Of course, this would be a temporary state, until the kind of technology >you are interested in comes along. That's another advantage over >cryonics: You can make a decision about what to do next, when the time >comes. > >I was thinking about Stephen Hawking. Would you be willing to be in a >position similar to his for a while if it meant you could keep going? I >think we aren't far from being able to achieve this. > >You may prefer to be suspended and take your chances. Some people would >even prefer to be dead, i'm sure, than live as a 'brain in a jar', even >though it would just be temporary. But it's something to think about. > >Now, who thinks i'm talking bollocks? And if so, why? I am not putting your idea down on a theoretical basis, but at the practical level it is far, far beyond the state of the art. I agree it would be temporary because technology at the level that could take care of an isolated brain or a head is very close to being able to build a person a brand new body. Keith From mfj.eav at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 15:39:36 2007 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:39:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: <61c8738e0704150839w4f1a2076n3df34d37c608470a@mail.gmail.com> The problem is willingness of the production to consumption chain to implement bio-based change. It would be nice to jump steps and keep the commercial end up to the science end as happens with computational technologies and products therefrom. Not many years ago there was the "clock speeds above 1Ghz were illegal for citizens to own". That old law vaporized easily. The "no GMO" issue has taken a decade out of ag crops development. No "no embryonic stem cells" has taken a decade out of biomedicine. The singularity has to overcome luddites every step of the way. It's gong to take ethanol plants, then solid and liquid state fermentation plants then intergrated food/fuel/pharma plants to put the cash behind the novel changes like black, high efficiency pond scum GMO's that come in 1000 varieties depending upon what the end use chemistry is to be. Now if someone could convince the public that global warming required a response that captures water in novel bioproducts because simple old forests and farms won't cut it and that the resulting abundance of bioproducts would decrease the cost of all consumables there should be an economic pull to realize the end goal soooner. As well there are 2 saleable commercial reasons for AGI commercial development. Governments want to be the first to no just predict short term but create made to order weather . Nobody wants all the storms or all the drought. Markets want to know where and when to time economic activity to coincide with beneficial weather driven conditions. The second is novel healthy lifestyle food and pharma. AGI computational capacity should deliver novel biology for these commercial products. If the vast majority don't want to live an indeterminate period of time or possess enhancements let them be happy with this level and let them naturally select themselves out of the gene pool as they gradually grow old and die. It's a huge waste but 10,000 + years of conditioning to accept our current state is not something everyone's mind can dissassociate from. The challenge is to build a global critical mass to sustain the commercialization of the leading edge extropian, AGI singularity, transhuman as an expanding economy in spite of the luddite drives of the rest of society. MFJ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 15 15:43:12 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:43:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <006501c77f75$78076440$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > Moreover, so far as *choices* are concerned, I can > > very, very seldomly do anything about the past. But > > determining whether my duplicate will get $10M and > > deposit it in our account is important. > > But my anticipation module makes me worry more about > what happens to me than what happens to my copy in the > next room, Which could inspire you to error (if you are trying to maximize your well being). Insofar as choices go, under certain conditions, such as the above, the survival of your duplicate is optimal for you (rather than the survival of the instance having to make the choice). > in the same way as I worry more about the future than the past. > In fact, there is a sense in which my relationship to copies of me > in the past is the same as my relationship to copies of me in the > next room or in parallel universes that I can't access. Even if I > could change things so that in some alternate history things > worked out better for me, I wouldn't thereby anticipate the past more. Yes, that's right. > I have agreed with you all along that this sort of thinking is not > always rational and consistent, but there is no universal law > saying that our feelings have to be rational and consistent. Alas, right too. But we must be rational about our choices, and so just as in other areas of life, sometimes the urging of our feelings must be overriden. > There is no rational reason why I should wish to survive in > any capacity at all; it's just that humans have evolved with > the strong desire to survive. We could imagine an AI that > was perfectly rational and yet had no qualms about terminating > its existence Such a being could indeed exist. If only we could rid the literature (and some views as expressed on mailing lists) of the notion that every entity must be motivated to survive! Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 15 15:52:23 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:52:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415104544.022aba40@satx.rr.com> At 10:27 AM 4/14/2007 -0700, Jef wrote: >I just discovered this video (posted 2007-01) of Robert Wright arguing >the arrow of morality more concretely and (I hope) more persuasively >than I do. > > It's mordantly funny. But a friend makes the following cautionary comments: I think that's going too far. But the relationships involved are still far too close to the colonial and imperial. Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 15 15:55:00 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:55:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415102756.03d87358@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070415102756.03d87358@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > I am not putting your idea down on a theoretical basis, but at the > practical level it is far, far beyond the state of the art. I agree it > would be temporary because technology at the level that could take care of > an isolated brain or a head is very close to being able to build a person > a > brand new body. I disagree. The methods for keeping humans with defective immune systems alive for extended periods are well defined. Indeed there are probably thousands to SCID mice being raised in germ free facilities on any given day. Antibiotics will deal with bacterial contamination of perfusion systems. More problematic is supplementation with new red blood cells and removal of the old. But the newer artificial blood molecules may eliminate the need for this. To maintain the immune system you might need an external WBC production bioreactor but I'm reasonably certain that WBC growth and differentiation factors are well enough understood that you could grow up batches of an individual's WBC progenitor cells and provide periodic supplements. A brand new body requires at *least* a decade (minimal body growth time based on normal cell division rates) unless you take the 3D printing approach and we are probably several decades away from doing that at a "body" vs. a tissue or organ level. Interestingly, a mouse head or a rabbit head transplanted onto a Roomba is not that far beyond "current" technology. I suspect the methods exist to do it but the microsurgey that would probably be required is probably beyond that of most home experimenters. What you need is "direct" connect plumbing interfaces (as in home aquariums) and some kind of ultra high speed neural interface chip you can interconnect directly to the spinal cord (and allow the computer mapping and neural rewiring to work out what the signals all mean). Keeping a "Mouse driven Roomba" alive for even a week would make people sit up and take notice. They'd start thinking about their pet cat or dog and then .... (It isn't as if the Japanese don't already *have* the robots.) Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From benboc at lineone.net Sun Apr 15 15:34:47 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:34:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> "Stathis Papaioannou" wrote: > > It's possible in principle, but I don't see how removing the brain > from the body would be any advance over what is currently done when > organ systems start failing, which is to try to fix them medically or > surgically, and if that doesn't work to replace them with artificial > alternatives such as renal dialysis. The most extreme examples are > seen in Intensive Care Units, where multiple organ systems often fail > together and people are kept alive for moderately long periods with > external machinery. In the future this may progress to the point > where a person can be kept alive indefinitely even though little more > than his brain is functioning, as per your scenario. However, even if > the machines work perfectly, the brain itself will still be subject > to aging and the diseases of aging; and if we could find a way to > stop this for the brain, we probably would have found it for the rest > of the body as well. Good point. So by the time we are capable of doing this, all the hospitals will be doing it anyway? There would doubtless be some kind of cost-benefit calculation involved, to decide just who would get this treatment. Unless you're in America, where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving treatment you need (is this correct?). A problem i can see here is the usual assumption in the medical profession that there is a point at which you should be allowed to die. Once you've had a good innings in conventional terms, there would likely be little incentive to make great efforts to keep you alive. Perhaps it would be a good idea to try to promote the creation of 'transhumanist-friendly' medical clinics. Probably a bit too much to hope for. Actually, one good reason for removing the brain from a failing body would be for ease of access to all the life-support systems, and ease of swapping them out for others as and when necessary. The 'body' would be whatever physical infrastructure the life-support modules were plugged in to, and you could then take advantage of heterostasis, keeping local conditions optimal for each system separately, without upsetting the rest of the body. It would also make cryonic suspension much easier if that was eventually decided upon. Plus easier other things, too, like neural interfacing and eventual uploading. ben zaiboc From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 15 16:02:04 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:02:04 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415105840.0223faa8@satx.rr.com> At 10:28 AM 4/15/2007 -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: >If I look out the window "unassisted" I can barely register the tree >trunks, much less go swinging from branch to branch. Robert, I've told you and told you: at your age you just have to *stop* that branch-swinging! I know it's fun, but one of these days you're going to fall out of a tree and hurt yourself. Damien Broderick From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 15 16:54:16 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:54:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415104544.022aba40@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415104544.022aba40@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 10:27 AM 4/14/2007 -0700, Jef wrote: > >I just discovered this video (posted 2007-01) of Robert Wright arguing > >the arrow of morality more concretely and (I hope) more persuasively > >than I do. > > > > > > It's mordantly funny. But a friend makes the following cautionary comments: > > cites. But it's all so dumbed-down... His 'business class' example > is laughable. I mentally flinched a few times during Wright's presentation, but for the very reasons of concreteness and personal biases (to which people can relate) that might make his presentation more persuasive than my characteristically abstract form of presentation. - Jef From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 15 17:12:08 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:12:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > Does anyone have a ... reason that vastly transhuman engines > > won't absorb all resources within reach? Even if *some* > > particular AI had a predilection not to expand its influence > > as far as it could, wouldn't it lose the evolutionary race to > > those who did? > > ...You could apply the argument [that those agents who try to > expand their influence over everything they can] to any agent: > bacteria, aliens, humans, nanomachines, black holes... ultimately, > those entities which grow, reproduce or consume will prevail. Bacteria can be checked by clean rooms, aliens (like human empires) might check each other over interstellar distances, and humans (as individuals) are held in check by envy, law, and custom. > However, it might be aeons before everything goes to hell, > especially if we anticipate problems and try to prevent or > minimise them. I don't know why you think that this must be "hell". I could imagine rather beneficient super-intelligences taking over vast areas, checked ultimately by the speed of light, and their own ability to identify with far-flung branches of themselves. Some of these may even deign to give a few nanoseconds of runtime every now and then to their ancient noble creators. Lee From scerir at libero.it Sun Apr 15 17:19:24 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:19:24 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede><000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede><000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> Message-ID: <006701c77f82$375fa6c0$51b81f97@archimede> Stathis > I believe that the brain follows classical > laws, but even if quantum indeterminacy had > a role to play, it wouldn't add anything that > we don't already have with the pseudorandomness > provided by classical chaos. [Sorry for the late response]. By chance I've found an interesting quote (of David McAllester, an AI professor) about free will, determinism, and 'compatibilism' (I think Lee already discussed this point, more or less). "The idea that I could be simulated on a computer seems at odds with my subjective experience of free will and my intuition that my future actions are not yet determined - I am free to choose them. But consider a computer program that plays chess. In actual chess playing programs the program "considers" individual moves and "works out" the consequences of each move. This is a rather high level description of the calculation that is done, but it is fair to say that the program "considers options" and "evaluates consequences". When I say, as a human being, that I have to choose between two options, and that I have not decided yet, this seems no different to me from the situation of a chess playing computer before it has finished its calculation. The computer's move is determined - it is a deterministic process - and yet it still has "options". To say "the computer could move pawn to king four" is true provided that we interpret "could do x" as "it is a legal option for the computer to do x". To say that I am free is simply so say that I have options (and I should consider them and look before I leap). But having options, in the sense of the legal moves of chess, is compatible with selecting an option using a deterministic computation. A chess playing program shows that a determined system can have free will, i.e., can have options. So free will (having options) is compatible with determinism and there is no conflict." So I think it is a bit early to say that quantum randomness, or quantum contextuality, or (?) non-commutative probabilities, or classical randomness (note that the algorithmic information content of classical randomness lies almost entirely in the description of initial conditions) play an essential role, regarding free will. http://www.springerlink.com/content/wh8710176puq0456/ http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0701097 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079 http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=1223 [It is possible that this one is among those ... 'recurring threads'. So I'll stop it here, since I cannot say something new or interesting or even reasonable :-)] s. "I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew." Who said that? http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1607298,00.html From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 15 18:07:34 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 14:07:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:19 AM 4/15/2007 +1000, you wrote: >On 4/15/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: > >>Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most part agree with you >>that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) is equivalent and for >>the most part can't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion. > >You probably feel that way after these many long discussions. It didn't take these long discussions. I have no memory of any time in the past I had a different opinion, and my writings for the last two decades are consistent with that view. For example: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8610.txt starting at page 29. >If you ask someone at random who has a scientific view of the world, it is >not a foregone conclusion that he will agree. Perhaps that's unfortunate, >but it's the way it is. Few people with any experience expect uniformity in ideas between people. I am sure there are people out there who expect we could find an element between carbon and nitrogen (or a whole number between 6 and 7) if we just looked hard enough. I can't imagine why someone would have such an opinion, but I am not surprised to find such people. After all, number of my friends used to think their spirits were brought to earth 75 million years ago by Xenu. Keith Henson From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 15 18:10:08 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 14:10:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:52 AM 4/15/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: >On 4/15/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: >>You *can't* grow food in a "relatively sealed greenhouse." Think about it. > >Ok, yes, one has the problem of adding the CO2, releasing the O2 and >retaining the H2O, *but* they have different condensation temperatures and >it isn't as if we don't know how to do this type of separation. Condensing gases is an energy expensive process. Google finds 376,000 for CO2 separation amine. This process is how they scrub CO2 out the air in nuclear subs (I ran into it working on space colony designs back in the mid 70s). It is widely used in purifying hydrogen made from methane or coal. But besides gas exchange problems, consider how "greenhouse effect" got its name. The *outside* temperature in Saudi Arabia might be 130 degrees F. Think about how hot it gets inside a parked car in the summer and you will get an idea of how hard it would be to seal up a greenhouse. You could also look up the power bills for cooling Biosphere II. >>Shortly after you have this much ability to design living things, I expect >>you could just run humans (or simulations) directly on electricity. > >That design capability is much closer than you think Keith. We've >got ~33 years of experience engineering microorganisms (since the >first genetic engineering labs were built in the mid-70s). The >blueprints have been in the databases for nearly a decade (since the late >'90s). You've got at least two companies now (Codon Devices & Synthetic >Genomics) working on providing robust technologies in these areas to "end >users" at an affordable cost. The photosynthetic systems and starch >production systems are well understood biochemical systems. Even granting you "well understood," I don't think we are close to being able to design a synthetic algae that would be an acceptable food for humans. But even if we could, how are you going to prevent the tanks from being infected with wild type algae and bacteria? People have *died* from eating even relatively non-toxic algae. (I forget why, too much RNA or something.) >We do *not* yet have the blueprints or electric eels (or even sharks which >are capable of sensing minute electric currents). Running humans as sims >on electricity requires the development of mind uploading or the synthesis >of a full AI and I'd put those at least 20, more likely 30 years, post the >first concrete example of a completely synthetic bacteria (we are several >years into the era of completely synthetic viruses). > >Now whether the Saudis would get their future planning together to >engineer something like this isn't clear. I'd place greater probability >on something like this being developed in the UAE, esp. Dubai since they >seem to be the most forward thinking. It seems most unlikely to me that rich Arabs are going to even going consider growing algae paste for human consumption--at least not their own. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Sun Apr 15 18:22:26 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:22:26 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> Message-ID: <20070415182226.GE9439@leitl.org> On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 04:34:47PM +0100, ben wrote: > There would doubtless be some kind of cost-benefit calculation involved, > to decide just who would get this treatment. Unless you're in America, > where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving > treatment you need (is this correct?). Emergency care people are required by law to treat anyone, even if they're not covered (this gets frequently abused, of course). > A problem i can see here is the usual assumption in the medical > profession that there is a point at which you should be allowed to die. They won't switch you off if the relatives continue demanding treatment. It may be living hell on earth, but you will be kept alive. > Once you've had a good innings in conventional terms, there would likely > be little incentive to make great efforts to keep you alive. Perhaps it > would be a good idea to try to promote the creation of > 'transhumanist-friendly' medical clinics. Probably a bit too much to > hope for. If you have the coin, you can buy any service you need. > Actually, one good reason for removing the brain from a failing body > would be for ease of access to all the life-support systems, and ease of > swapping them out for others as and when necessary. The 'body' would be > whatever physical infrastructure the life-support modules were plugged > in to, and you could then take advantage of heterostasis, keeping local > conditions optimal for each system separately, without upsetting the > rest of the body. "Moving the brain" while keeping it alive is quite impossible with current surgery. It is rather difficult to extract even a fixated brain (a very different animal from live brain) from the cranial cavity without injuring it. > It would also make cryonic suspension much easier if that was eventually It wouldn't. Just leave the brain in its natural container, see http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport8504.html for details. > decided upon. Plus easier other things, too, like neural interfacing and > eventual uploading. Gradual/incremental in vivo uploading is quite a way off, since requiring medical devices assembled by NC-chemistry, aka machine-phase. Working at below -150 C has definite advantages, since you can work with sections of cryogenic water glass, imaging from the surface down abrasively/ablatively, and process data with macroscale equipment which doesn't have to be in situ. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 15 18:57:35 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:57:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing In-Reply-To: <006701c77f82$375fa6c0$51b81f97@archimede> References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede> <002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede> <000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede> <000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede> <006701c77f82$375fa6c0$51b81f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, scerir wrote: > with selecting an option using a deterministic computation. A chess playing > program shows that a determined system can have free will, i.e., can have > options. So free will (having options) is compatible with determinism and > there is no conflict." > > So I think it is a bit early to say that quantum randomness, > or quantum contextuality, or (?) non-commutative probabilities, > or classical randomness (note that the algorithmic information > content of classical randomness lies almost entirely > in the description of initial conditions) play an essential > role, regarding free will. Isn't it obvious that determinism is *required* for the experience of free will? How meaningless a concept if there were no experience of a causal link between subjective choice, action, and consequences. - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 15 19:15:58 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:15:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <040f01c77cb9$4474d590$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070412124910.GF9439@leitl.org> <3CFAB4E7-3CA7-467C-8887-9481754BF163@randallsquared.com> <20070412160504.GR9439@leitl.org> <20070413071429.GY9439@leitl.org> <87B34747-04A0-461D-B9E9-1C6A8E1AA72D@randallsquared.com> <20070413165226.GF9439@leitl.org> <5.1.0.14.0.20070413160555.03b02d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/13/07, Keith Henson wrote: > At 06:52 PM 4/13/2007 +0200, Eugen wrote: > > snip > > >I wonder why I keep posting that example, with literature, > >but nobody seems to actually care to read it. It's been more > >than a decade that we keep having these threads, and they > >always go through the same motions. I'm getting tired of this. > >I think I'm going to ban these for good. > > I wondered why these identity threads seemed so old to me. Various moves > and escapes have winnowed my SF collection to a remnant, but I kept several > by A.E. Van Vogt including _The World of Null A_. I don't know how many > here have read it, but the copyright is 1945. That *62* years ago. > > I just reread it. > > None of the identity arguments on this or any other forum I have seen has > added a new idea to those expressed in that story written in 1945. I read the story this weekend. What a quaintly futuristic read! While I found clear statements of Slawomir's position that it's logically impossible that two physical objects be identical, and examples of the common idea that personal identity is defined essentially by personal memory and functional similarity, I saw nothing even hinting at personal identity consisting in the extent to which an agent is seen to represent a given abstract entity. - Jef From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 15 23:39:41 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:39:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] new serial starts on-line: POST MORTAL SYNDROME Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415182921.021641b8@satx.rr.com> Blatant self-promotion time. An sf thriller about life- and intelligence-extension by me and my wife, Barbara Lamar, has been acquired by COSMOS Magazine On-line, and the first of 56 episodes is up today. It will run five days a week, and there's an RSS link. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/fiction/online/serials/post_mortal_syndrome Enjoy! (Well, we hope...) Damien Broderick From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 01:05:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:05:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox) In-Reply-To: <006501c77f75$78076440$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006501c77f75$78076440$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Stathis writes > > > > Moreover, so far as *choices* are concerned, I can > > > very, very seldomly do anything about the past. But > > > determining whether my duplicate will get $10M and > > > deposit it in our account is important. > > > > But my anticipation module makes me worry more about > > what happens to me than what happens to my copy in the > > next room, > > Which could inspire you to error (if you are trying to maximize > your well being). Insofar as choices go, under certain conditions, > such as the above, the survival of your duplicate is optimal for > you (rather than the survival of the instance having to make the > choice). I could say I am more concerned about my current self, due to the anticipation issue. In the long term if duplication becomes commonplace those people who count copies as selves will prevail, but this sort of argument doesn't necessarily determine what we should do and certainly not how we should feel. Men who have thousands of children would ultimately dominate the gene pool, but this doesn't mean that anyone will want to do this, and it is in fact very rare that totalitarian leaders, who could if they wanted to inseminate thousands of women, would actually attempt this.Weare at the mercy of our neurophysiology, which did not evolve in an environment where cloning, duplication, artificial insemination etc. were options. > in the same way as I worry more about the future than the past. > > In fact, there is a sense in which my relationship to copies of me > > in the past is the same as my relationship to copies of me in the > > next room or in parallel universes that I can't access. Even if I > > could change things so that in some alternate history things > > worked out better for me, I wouldn't thereby anticipate the past more. > > Yes, that's right. > > > I have agreed with you all along that this sort of thinking is not > > always rational and consistent, but there is no universal law > > saying that our feelings have to be rational and consistent. > > Alas, right too. But we must be rational about our choices, > and so just as in other areas of life, sometimes the urging > of our feelings must be overriden. I consider it "irrational" that I am concerned about the welfare about some guy tomorrow who thinks he is me, has my memories and my possessions. If he travelled to today in a time machine and cleaned out my/his bank account, I'd be upset. It's just the fact that we don't coincide which allows me to think that we are the same person, or that I will "become" him. You say that all copies of me are me, but I should be more concerned about future copies than past copies even if I can't affect the future copies more than the past copies by my present actions. That is, you are trying to be "rational" as far as possible but admit to some inconsistencies. I say that none of the other copies are really me, because if we were all in a sinking ship together each of us would fight for the last place on the lifeboat. However, I accept that due to the way brains have evolved, some of these copies will be regarded as me (those in the future, or at random some of those in the future if the future is branching) while other will not. This isn't any more "rational" than, say, wanting to have sex even though we know it won't lead to reproduction; but it's the way our brains work. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 01:35:24 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:35:24 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Stathis writes > > > > Does anyone have a ... reason that vastly transhuman engines > > > won't absorb all resources within reach? Even if *some* > > > particular AI had a predilection not to expand its influence > > > as far as it could, wouldn't it lose the evolutionary race to > > > those who did? > > > > ...You could apply the argument [that those agents who try to > > expand their influence over everything they can] to any agent: > > bacteria, aliens, humans, nanomachines, black holes... ultimately, > > those entities which grow, reproduce or consume will prevail. > > Bacteria can be checked by clean rooms, aliens (like human empires) > might check each other over interstellar distances, and humans (as > individuals) are held in check by envy, law, and custom. Right, but parrotting the argument for AI's taking over the world, some bacteria, aliens or humans, due to diversity, would be less subject to these checks, and they will come to predominate in the population, so that after multiple generations the most rapacious entity will eat everything else and ultimately make the universe synonymous with itself. On the other hand, maybe there will be long, long periods of dynamic equilibrium, evn between competing species grossly mismatched in intelligence, such as humans and bacteria. > However, it might be aeons before everything goes to hell, > > especially if we anticipate problems and try to prevent or > > minimise them. > > I don't know why you think that this must be "hell". I could > imagine rather beneficient super-intelligences taking over vast > areas, checked ultimately by the speed of light, and their own > ability to identify with far-flung branches of themselves. Some > of these may even deign to give a few nanoseconds of runtime > every now and then to their ancient noble creators. I'm not as worried about the future behaviour of super-AI's as many people seem to be. There is no logical reason why they should have one motivation rather than another. If humans can be concerned about flowers and trees, why can't super-intelligent beings be concerned about humans? After all, we weren't created by flowers and trees to have any particular feelings towards them, while we *would* be the ones creating the AI's. And even if some AI's went rogue, that would be no different to what currently happens with large populations of humans. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 16 03:38:43 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:38:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] new serial starts on-line: POST MORTAL SYNDROME In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415182921.021641b8@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415182921.021641b8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070415223601.02331a08@satx.rr.com> Incidentally, I see that the opening epigraphs we carefully chose have been deleted. These were: ============================== Some have argued that even if we had the technological capability to change human personality in fundamental ways, we would never *want* to do so because human nature in some sense guarantees its own continuity. This argument, I believe, greatly underestimates human ambition and fails to appreciate the radical ways in which people in the past have sought to overcome their own natures... We may be about to enter into a posthuman future, in which technology will give us the capacity gradually to alter that essence over time. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future Because an artificial chromosome provides a reproducible platform for adding genetic material to cells, it promises to transform gene therapy from the hit-and-miss methods of today... It would be an inert scaffolding dotted with independent insertion sites where modules of genes and their control sequences could be placed using the various enzymes that splice and clip DNA... By not altering a single one of the 3 billion bases on our existing chromosomes, geneticists would minimize the chance of inadvertently stepping on the many as yet unappreciated interactions within our genome. Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans ================================= These quotations from notable thinkers who have lately published on the topic--one a conservative opponent, the other an optimistic proponent--provide a real-world anchor to the speculations at the core of our novel. Without them, the beginning seems to present itself as just a mad-bomber-thriller. Damien Broderick From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 16 03:40:21 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:40:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anticipation and Benefit (was Re: The Anticipation Dilemma) References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006501c77f75$78076440$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00b901c77fd9$32517b20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > I could say I am more concerned about my current self, due to > the anticipation issue. I take it to mean that you sanction choices that are illogical by those of us who view copies as selves. That is, you intend to make decisions based upon your (inconsistent) anticipation of how "you" will feel or be later, as opposed to making decisions that some of us would argue are for your greater total benefit. > In the long term if duplication becomes commonplace those > people who count copies as selves will prevail, but this sort > of argument doesn't necessarily determine what we should do... Right. I can accede to John Clark's pointing out that entities which think memories of a particular human are nothing special will prevail, and Damien could accede to teleporters having an evolutionary edge in the future. Yet this doesn't change the perception by us that the suggested changes actually kill us. > I consider it "irrational" that I am concerned about the welfare > about some guy tomorrow who thinks he is me, has my > memories and my possessions. Yes; our eternal divide on this list that suggests to some that we never make progress :-) Lee P.S. > If he travelled to today in a time machine and cleaned out > my/his bank account, I'd be upset. I might be too, unless I granted him the benefit of the doubt that something very strange is afoot. Otherwise, I know that my duplicate would take the benefit of *this* instance into account too, unless, as I say, extraordinary circumstances were somehow prevailing. > I say that none of the other copies are really me, because > if we were all in a sinking ship together each of us would > fight for the last place on the lifeboat. In the lifeboat, my instances (e.g. "I") would all be thinking about how to maximize the number of survivors, yet after the waters begin to close over our heads, our animal instincts take over. I don't identify with those particular instincts, and will delete them if ever given an opportunity. So, just to be clear and for the record, an instance of you given the choice between saving itself xor saving an extremely recent duplicate who would be able to deposit $10M to the S. P. account, that instance of you would choose for itself to survive? From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 16 03:44:38 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:44:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > Think about how hot it gets inside a parked car in the summer > and you will get an idea of how hard it would be to seal up a > greenhouse. You could also look up the power bills for cooling > Biosphere II. Why doesn't this furnish a productive energy source? That is, the temperature difference generated between such an enclosure and the outside sounds as though it could be useful. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 16 03:52:59 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:52:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> Message-ID: <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Ben writes > There would doubtless be some kind of cost-benefit calculation involved, > to decide just who would get this treatment. Unless you're in America, > where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving > treatment you need (is this correct?). But if money doesn't decide, who does, and how? Is it assumed that the "waiting list" works well enough where you live? In the U.S. there have been cases IIRC where famous baseball players have gone to the head of the list; and I cannot believe that people who are less connected (like me) could possibly stand the same chance as people who are well-connected (like powerful politicians). Does this problem seem to come up in countries with even more socialized medicine than we have in the U.S.? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 16 04:02:27 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 21:02:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > Bacteria can be checked by clean rooms, aliens (like human empires) > > might check each other over interstellar distances, and humans (as > > individuals) are held in check by envy, law, and custom. > > Right, but parrotting the argument for AI's taking over the world, some > bacteria, aliens or humans, due to diversity, would be less subject to > these checks, and they will come to predominate in the population, > so that after multiple generations the most rapacious entity will eat > everything else and ultimately make the universe synonymous with itself. Well, this often happens! 99% of all species, or something like that, are extinct. But what is different, I say, between any precedent and what may very well happen, is that extremely advanced intelligence here on Earth could have absolutely catastrophic effects on *all* other life forms. > On the other hand, maybe there will be long, long periods of dynamic > equilibrium, evn between competing species grossly mismatched in > intelligence, such as humans and bacteria. That's because, in my view, human beings just got here. Another eye- blink from now, and just why will we or our >H successors permit anything to use valuable energy besides ourselves (themselves)? > I'm not as worried about the future behaviour of super-AI's as > many people seem to be. There is no logical reason why they > should have one motivation rather than another. If humans can > be concerned about flowers and trees, why can't super- > intelligent beings be concerned about humans? Oh, they *could* be. But it's very risky, of course, and the scenarios that many people have thought deeply about (a mutation causing even a beneficial AI to suddenly tile the solar system with copies of itself) make a lot of sense to me. > After all, we weren't created by flowers and trees to have any > particular feelings towards them, while we *would* be the ones > creating the AI's. And even if some AI's went rogue, that would > be no different to what currently happens with large populations > of humans. The claim is that these (or "the") extremely advances AI would have nanotechnological capabilities, and for the first time, a possibly ruthless intelligence might very well have total control over the placement of all molecules on the Earth's surface. You think this unlikely or impossible? Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 04:07:50 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:07:50 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, ben wrote: There would doubtless be some kind of cost-benefit calculation involved, > to decide just who would get this treatment. Unless you're in America, > where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving > treatment you need (is this correct?). Fortunately, I live in a country where homeless drug addicts are just as likely to get an ICU bed at thousands of dollars a day as anyone else, based on medical need. However, there is a problem in that unlike most other technology, medical care seems to get more expensive rather than cheaper as it improves. A problem i can see here is the usual assumption in the medical > profession that there is a point at which you should be allowed to die. > Once you've had a good innings in conventional terms, there would likely > be little incentive to make great efforts to keep you alive. Perhaps it > would be a good idea to try to promote the creation of > 'transhumanist-friendly' medical clinics. Probably a bit too much to > hope for. I think it's a matter of economics and efficacy. If your 90 y.o. grandmother was in good health, started developing angina, andthere was some effective medical treatment available for it, no doctor would suggest that she just continue suffering because she's old. On the other hand, if she had multiple other medical problems, and required a coronary bypass operation which was risky due to her general condition and would probably result in a long ICU admission, the recommendation might be against treatment. Actually, one good reason for removing the brain from a failing body > would be for ease of access to all the life-support systems, and ease of > swapping them out for others as and when necessary. The 'body' would be > whatever physical infrastructure the life-support modules were plugged > in to, and you could then take advantage of heterostasis, keeping local > conditions optimal for each system separately, without upsetting the > rest of the body. It's usually easier to leave even partially functioning organs in place than replace them. There are some exceptions where the replacement is almost as good - teeth, thyroid - but in general, natural is better. If this changes in future, people will look for an excuse to electively replace organs and become cyborgs. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 04:51:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:51:15 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Keith Henson wrote: >>Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most part agree with you > >>that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) is equivalent and for > >>the most part can't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion. > > > >You probably feel that way after these many long discussions. > > It didn't take these long discussions. I have no memory of any time in > the > past I had a different opinion, and my writings for the last two decades > are consistent with that view... I didn't mean you were convinced about personal identity after these discussions, but convinced that "engineering types" will have the same view as you do. I know lots of scientifically literate people who are perfectly sensible materialists, with no belief in gods, spirits ar any other nonsense, who nevertheless think that undergoing destructive copying would be suicide. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 05:53:35 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:53:35 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anticipation and Benefit (was Re: The Anticipation Dilemma) In-Reply-To: <00b901c77fd9$32517b20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <035101c77c02$ca1dfc10$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c77d07$e0345e80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <005601c77e51$a87c07e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <006501c77f75$78076440$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00b901c77fd9$32517b20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: So, just to be clear and for the record, an instance of you > given the choice between saving itself xor saving an extremely > recent duplicate who would be able to deposit $10M to the > S. P. account, that instance of you would choose for itself > to survive? It's a real conundrum. If I am to be consistent (let's use this word rather than "rational") I should as readily agree to this as to a period of memory loss for the same prize. But then to me it seems obvious that if agree to this, I am agreeing to my present self experiencing permanent death (no successor observer moments, no future selves which contain my present memories), and will never even know whether the copy I am doing it for will be cheated. So, to be consistent, if I agree to this, I may as well be agreeing to die for nothing, or at best for some benefit to friends or family whom I will never see again. So my answer is: with much trepidation, convincing myself that memory loss is no big deal, and thus by extension also convincing myself that death is no big deal, I would choose life for the copy with all the money. But I'm not sure I will be able to do it on the day. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 06:45:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:45:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Ben writes > > > There would doubtless be some kind of cost-benefit calculation involved, > > to decide just who would get this treatment. Unless you're in America, > > where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving > > treatment you need (is this correct?). > > But if money doesn't decide, who does, and how? Is it assumed that > the "waiting list" works well enough where you live? In the U.S. > there have been cases IIRC where famous baseball players have > gone to the head of the list; and I cannot believe that people > who are less connected (like me) could possibly stand the same > chance as people who are well-connected (like powerful politicians). > > Does this problem seem to come up in countries with even more > socialized medicine than we have in the U.S.? In Australia, most people who are acutely unwell, whether poor or rich, end up in a public hospital where they are treated for free. If they are not *too* unwell and don't have a really rare or difficult to treat condition and they have private health insurance, they may be transferred to a private hospital, where the food and the room may be a little better. Unlike in the US, the "cutting edge" medicine is mostly in the public hospitals, and in fact visitors who get sick and have to pay are sometimes directed to the private hospitals because they are actually cheaper. The only advantage of having private health insurance is that there are waiting lists for some non-life threatening elective procedures, such as joint replacements. Other than that,it isn't really possible to buy better care even if you have the money. Thereare some exceptions such as very expensive chemotherapy drugs which the Government doesn't want to fund, but public pressure usually sees them relent. Also, because the Government Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme effectively buys drugs for the whole country they have a lot of bargaining power, and the real cost of drugs is among the lowest in the world (that is, excluding those countries which ignore drug patents). People get used to public medicine just as they get used to public education or defense. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 06:55:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:55:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: The claim is that these (or "the") extremely advances AI would > have nanotechnological capabilities, and for the first time, a > possibly ruthless intelligence might very well have total control > over the placement of all molecules on the Earth's surface. You > think this unlikely or impossible? It's possible, but don't forget all the *good* AI's. The film and record companies develop new and better digital protection systems, hackers on their home computers find ways around it. It wouldn't be like going a few centuries into the past with modern technology to take over the world, it would be more like trying to take over the world today witheveryone else having access to the same technology. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 07:18:41 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:18:41 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704160018v684c7675p7304813836f9f725@mail.gmail.com> On 4/16/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > It's possible, but don't forget all the *good* AI's. The film and record > companies develop new and better digital protection systems, hackers on > their home computers find ways around it. It wouldn't be like going a few > centuries into the past with modern technology to take over the world, it > would be more like trying to take over the world today witheveryone else > having access to the same technology. > Exactly. Because it's easier to tweak one variable while holding the rest constant, we tend to come up with scenarios where Skynet has mighty technobabble and the rest of the world only has what we have today; but that's not how things work. By the time Skynet starts going "must - destroy - all - puny - humans!", everyone else will have the technobabble too. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Mon Apr 16 05:28:00 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:28:00 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? References: Message-ID: <004901c77fe7$ffc93da0$e7e18f9b@homepc> > From: Eugen Leitl > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? > Gradual/incremental in vivo uploading is quite a way off, You can say that again. But you can't say how far off until you can say how its possible to do it even in principle. And I don't think you as a chemist can do that either. > since requiring > medical devices assembled by NC-chemistry, aka machine-phase. Do you know of anyone that is not also a believer in cryonics that thinks machine-phase chemistry is (a) credible at all thermodynamically, and (b) can construct a cell even in principle? Cell grow from the inside out, not the outside in. I think the fatal flaw in the whole nano-medicine thing is that you can't assemble the components of a cell - lipids, proteins, *ions* placed to drive ion pumps, from the outside at any temperature no matter how cold. Cells being made of biological stuff only behave as cells within the engineering constraints of their biological stuff. ie. Temperature matters. Temperature affects the properties of the materials. > Working > at below -150 C has definite advantages, since you can work with sections > of cryogenic water glass, imaging from the surface down > abrasively/ablatively, > and process data with macroscale equipment which doesn't have to be in > situ. It matters not unless you can put the structure you resolve or a functional emulation of the structure you resolve back together again. In cryonics the emulation of the structure one would want to resolve is the structure of ones own brain. Can't do that. Thermodynamics and the requirement to work from outside in won't allow it. And cryonics is nuts anyway. Creative nuts but nuts. Theoretically, and in my view far more importantly, practically, we all only know each other through the evidence of our senses recorded in our brains now. We are all the makers of our own matrices quite naturally as we model the world including others in our brains as part of life. But we cannot remake ourselves once we are dissembled any more than we made ourselves before we were born. The whole cryonic idea at its best can only amount to producing a *likeness* of someone that is missed to a degree of detail that at best satisfies the person who is doing the emulating. Its there sentimentality and degree of discrimination which will inevitably be the determinant of any emulation as the to-be-emulation has no say in it. A reanimated Eugen or Robert would be more like a photograph a sentimental momento made to someone elses specifications than an actual Eugen or Robert. The actual Eugen and Robert were not designed in the first place, genes interacted with environments to produce once-onlys. Nature was able to do it precisely because she didn't give a damn what she made - anything that sort of worked was going to be fine. You and Robert on the other hand do care. You want to remake not just any old person that pops up - but yourselves. Your task is harder than natures as you are trying to steer towards an outcome using materials that cannot be steered. Actually its even harder than that. You and Robert know you can't do a biological recreation of your brains with biological stuff so you say you prefer an emulation. Get the information that is you onto a non-biological substrate and you have more engineering degrees of freedom to work with. But *you* can't do any comparisons of the accuracy of your emulations of organic-substrate Eugen vs inorganic-substrate Eugen unless you actually have an actual organic-substrate Eugen to do the comparisons against. Obviously you can't do the comparisons as you can't be the subject and the object. And the person that wants to remake Eugen doesn't have an organic-Eugen to work with to get the one-copy only structures unless they start before you go through cryonics and your one-of-a-kind accidental structure is lost. Someone is going to have to be extremely wealthy and extremely fond of Eugen or Robert to want to go to the trouble and expense of recreating Eugens and Roberts. A moral question comes up? What have you done objectively in your lives to justify that sort of committment? This isn't personal. What has any transhumanist or frequenter of these lists done to deserve the investment that would be required of someone in the futures part to recreate you? You might point at conversations you've recorded on the internet but some of those may mark you as too dangerous to reanimate. Robert might be brought back only for a horsewhippin each Ramadan :-) I suspect that the sort of folk that hang out on these lists might be the sort that don't get anything done. They ain't villains and they ain't heros. They are the emminantly forgettable, not too good, not too bad, that history forgets as soon as the generations increment a couple of times. Remembered by their friends and the lives they touch but not much more. How hard would current day Eugen or Robert work to reanimate there 17th paternal grandfather or their 16th? Unless they did something with their lives to earn fame or notoriety you probably don't even know the names of those ancestors. Brett Paatsch From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Apr 16 08:52:49 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:52:49 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <64995.86.153.216.201.1176713569.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Lee Corbin wrote: > But if money doesn't decide, who does, and how? Is it assumed that > the "waiting list" works well enough where you live? In the U.S. > there have been cases IIRC where famous baseball players have > gone to the head of the list; and I cannot believe that people > who are less connected (like me) could possibly stand the same > chance as people who are well-connected (like powerful politicians). > > Does this problem seem to come up in countries with even more > socialized medicine than we have in the U.S.? Sweden has a very socialized health care system (with very good reputation abroad and factually, but like all European health care systems it is regarded as inefficient, bad and on the verge of collapse by all swedes). The official line is of course that everybody is equal in the waiting list, but a few years ago the social democrat prime minister G?ran Persson got to the head of the hip replacement queue suspiciously quick. That raised a lot of bad blood, and actually having to wait would probably have helped his party. In practice it all depends on how your employer handles health insurance; if you have a good employer you will get treatment much faster - usually done by the state health care, but you end up in a far shorter queue. And if you have enough money you can go to one of the few private clinics (or abroad). So in practice, getting treatment is dependent on wealth. And high taxation of course means less spare private money to spend on private health projects like cryonics. There was also an interesting study I read about Canadian health care that showed that despite putting rich and poor into the same system the richer got more referrals to experts and better treatment. The reason seems to be that they are simply better at talking to the doctor and asking for what they want. Then again, there are always health differentials between more well-off and less well-off even when treatment is exactly alike. Just knowing you are ahead of many others seems to be good for health (or conversely, knowing you are far down on the ladder may stress people out). Given how easily humans set up social hierarchies even when there is no material or formal need to, this is something that is very hard to eradicate. Maybe we should give the worst off SSRIs to improve their social dominance? Tse, W. S. and A. J. Bond (2002). "Serotonergic intervention affects both social dominance and affiliative behaviour." Psychopharmacology 161: 324?330. Tse, W. S. and A. J. Bond (2003 ). "Reboxetine promotes social bonding in healthy volunteers." J Psychopharmacology 17(2): 189-195. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Apr 16 09:39:19 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:39:19 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <52206.86.153.216.201.1176716359.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Brett Paatsch wrote: > Do you know of anyone that is not also a believer in cryonics that thinks > machine-phase chemistry is (a) credible at all thermodynamically, I wouldn't call me a cryonics disbeliever, but I definitely think machine phase chemistry is thermodynamically credible. Whether it is efficient enough to be useful is another matter. > and > (b) can construct a cell even in principle? > > Cell grow from the inside out, not the outside in. I think the fatal flaw > in the whole nano-medicine thing is that you can't assemble the components > of a cell - lipids, proteins, *ions* placed to drive ion pumps, from the > outside at any temperature no matter how cold. Cells being made of > biological stuff only behave as cells within the engineering constraints > of their biological stuff. ie. Temperature matters. Temperature affects > the properties of the materials. Given that frozen cells can be thawed with viability intact, it seems that first building a frozen cell and then warming it would be a feasible way of doing it. Cells are pretty robust (otherwise they wouldn't survive, and temperature changes and thermal noise would instantly kill them), so you only need to get close enough to the attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell to get it to spontaneously do the final pieces of selforganisation. That you need a lot of information to place the macromolecules right and get the right concentrations of small molecules is just messy brute force issues. See it as a ridiculously detailed form of 3D printing, where you want to write prepared molecules into a matrix of frozen water. To have a realistic chance of doing it right you first need to have scanned a cell, picking it apart molecule by molecule and recording the locations and type. If that can be done piling them together seems to be equally hard. Maybe it would be worthwhile doing a careful critique of nanoscale dissassemblers? > In cryonics the emulation of the structure one would want to resolve is > the structure of ones own brain. Can't do that. Thermodynamics and > the requirement to work from outside in won't allow it. What is the thermodynamical problem you are refering to? I can see a heat problem from lots of nanosystems working, so they have to be cooled and/or slowed down - which may make the process very slow. Merkle's paper suggested a three year process of scanning and rebuilding. That a lot of entropy is being pushed around (making unordered atoms into an ordered cell) adds a bit to the heat problem, but can still be managed by slowing things down or dividing the workpieces so that radiating the entropy into the environment is easy. That molecules are dancing around isn't an enormous problem at -170, since the cryonic brain is essentially a crystal lattice with thermal vibrations are on the order of 0.01 nm. > The whole cryonic idea at its best can only amount to producing a > *likeness* of someone that is missed to a degree of detail that at best > satisfies the person who is doing the emulating. Its there sentimentality > and degree of discrimination which will inevitably be the determinant > of any emulation as the to-be-emulation has no say in it. (this might be an argument against the identity argument rather than the exact contents in your post) And if the emulation is good enough to subjectively satisfy the likneness? Imagine that you suddenly wake up in the far future at the Leitl Clinic. A doctor tells you that you were frozen in a freak accident just after reading this email, and now you have been restored using all the handwavy technology in this thread. Would you, assuming this procedure has worked well enough to capture the essential ways your present self tends to think, immediately think "Oh no! I'm just a likness of somebody else!" or "Hey! *I'm* here!" While I'm sure there is potential for occasional existential angst and lots of intellectual consideration, what matters is the gut feeling of being "oneself". And people seem to adapt to identities or create them with frightening ease (just consider Korsakoff's syndrome, dissociative amnestic fugues). I'm pretty sure the reconstructed person would, despite having your values and knowledge, reject your view of identity based on the evidence he would be experiencing. Assuming that you really knew this (e.g. by observing happy revivals at the Leitl Clinic). You hold that identity is not preserved by the transition, but know that your successor will not hold this view after being revived. He reaches this conclusion based on just the subjective experience of existing, despite having all your information. Shouldn't that make you sceptical of the stability and logic of your position? Of course, bad emulations and mere simulations are another matter. There will be plenty of those at the start. Make sure you end up in the group getting the mature technology. > Your task is harder than natures as you are trying to > steer towards an outcome using materials that cannot be steered. Hmm, why cannot they be steered? I'm constantly amazed by how pliable cells are, and how much weird molecular design is possible. While rambunctious, the nanoscale and microscale environments are not impossible to harness. A lot of this is empirical questions that can only be settled in the lab and through engineers doing what people previously thought was impossible, we cannot resolve it simply by argument. But we can place our bets accordingly. > A moral question comes up? What have you done objectively > in your lives to justify that sort of committment? This isn't > personal. What has any transhumanist or frequenter of these > lists done to deserve the investment that would be required > of someone in the futures part to recreate you? Why should any human continue to exist? Why should I pay taxes for health care for people I don't know, of which presumably at least some have never done anything worthwhile in their lives. If survival has to be based on merit, I guess infants are going to end up dead. Morally speaking merit-based survival is very problematic and largely counter to a big stream of western thought on humans having inherent value just for being human. While we certainly tend to give extra effort for people we love, know or think are great, most medical ethics is based on the idea that humans are for their own sake, and that means we should try to save as many as we can. Then again, I think your prodding is a good one. We ought to act in such a way that future generations will think "Hey! He was such a great guy that we really ought to bring him back!" - regardless of whether we actually think they will succeed. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 10:04:30 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:04:30 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070411184709.GF9439@leitl.org> <304768.82604.qm@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <20070413095805.GN9439@leitl.org> <001c01c77eb7$12595db0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <007001c77f81$69e2f9e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00c901c77fdc$bd4707b0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > On the other hand, maybe there will be long, long periods of dynamic > > equilibrium, evn between competing species grossly mismatched in > > intelligence, such as humans and bacteria. > > That's because, in my view, human beings just got here. Another eye- > blink from now, and just why will we or our >H successors permit > anything to use valuable energy besides ourselves (themselves)? > I wouldn't write off bacteria as easily. By prevalence, total biomass, hardiness and species longevity they far surpass humans. It's only in the last century that we have really been able to fight them, and in the last couple of decades we have fallen behind in that battle as they develop resistance to antibiotics even while medical science advances in leaps and bounds. Tigers are smarter, bigger and stronger than bacteria and we've almost wiped them out without meaning to, while we haven't made much impact on even the most pathogenic bacteria that we would dearly like to see extinct. A planet-wide catastrophe of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs would not have much impact on bacteria, and it is even possible that bacterial spores might travel through space and seed other planets. We are very proud of our intelligence, but in the greater scheme of things, it might turn out to be just an evolutionary dead end. Life took hold and spread almost everywhere on the surface of the Earth over billions of years without need of intelligence. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 10:17:48 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:17:48 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <64995.86.153.216.201.1176713569.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <64995.86.153.216.201.1176713569.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: There was also an interesting study I read about Canadian health care that > showed that despite putting rich and poor into the same system the richer > got more referrals to experts and better treatment. The reason seems to be > that they are simply better at talking to the doctor and asking for what > they want. That's true: even when it comes to getting social security benefits that they just have to ask for, the articulate, well-educated or well-connected poor do better than the others. The very worst off in just about any outcome measure studied are the mentally ill. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Apr 16 10:41:24 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:41:24 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <64995.86.153.216.201.1176713569.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <56253.86.153.216.201.1176720084.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > On 4/16/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: > There was also an interesting study I read about Canadian health care that >> showed that despite putting rich and poor into the same system the >> richer >> got more referrals to experts and better treatment. The reason seems to >> be >> that they are simply better at talking to the doctor and asking for what >> they want. > > That's true: even when it comes to getting social security benefits that > they just have to ask for, the articulate, well-educated or well-connected > poor do better than the others. The very worst off in just about any > outcome measure studied are the mentally ill. There is a lot of positive feedback between being smart, being well-off and being healthy. Childhood intelligence predicts overall health across life as well as education and professional outcomes. Growing up with high socioeconomic status also promotes life chances, and education seem to increase intelligence scores (although here we might get trapped in a debate on whether it is core general intelligence or just a lot of crystalised skills). I have not seen any studies of the economic benefits of good health, but I would be surprised if they were small. Being able to study and work more and for longer periods is quite important. If I had to improve one part to help someone, I would probably go for intelligence (and removing mental illness). It seems to be useful for increasing the potential of the other factors. It is of course far easier to try to redistribute money or education, but intelligence may improve the efficiency of how they are used in a life. One of the often overlooked compassionate aspects of transhumanism is that cognitive and emotional enhancement is likely to help the worst off much more than the best off. Even a totally selfish program of enabling enhancement is likely to produce methods that will help many poor and cognitively disadvantaged - and from a selfish perspective helping them become productive and happy is rational too, since it reduces costs and increases wealth production across society. Conversely, developing efficient methods of helping the cognitively disadvantaged is likely to produce many forms of enhancements as spin-offs. It seems like a win-win situation. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 10:51:28 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:51:28 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <004901c77fe7$ffc93da0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <004901c77fe7$ffc93da0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: A reanimated Eugen or Robert would be more like a photograph > a sentimental momento made to someone elses specifications than an > actual Eugen or Robert. The actual Eugen and Robert were not > designed in the first place, genes interacted with environments to > produce once-onlys. Nature was able to do it precisely because > she didn't give a damn what she made - anything that sort of worked > was going to be fine. You and Robert on the other hand do care. > You want to remake not just any old person that pops up - but > yourselves. > Perhaps in a roundabout way you are referring in this paragraph to the effects of chaos. Suppose you are trying to simulate the weather. You take very detailed measurements and input them into a supercomputer, but no matter how good your model and how precise your measurements, after a short period the simulation will deviate from the behaviour of the real weather. In a similar fashion, if you take measurements from an individual's brain and attempt a computer simulation, no matter how good the measurements and the model, the behaviour of the simulation will soon deviate from that of the original. However, this doesn't matter, for the behaviour of the original might also have deviated from what it actually was had a butterfly flown this way rather than that way last month. Even if God made a copy of a person perfect to the quantum level it would immediately start deviating from the behaviour of the original, simply because they could not occupy the same space. So like nature, you have to do a good job of making a precise enough copy at a particular point in time, but what that copy does from there on is its own business. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 14:28:27 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:28:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: <004901c77fe7$ffc93da0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: I was going to comment on some of Brett's post since he raises some technical points that I consider to be easily worked around. For example, when severe nuclear DNA double strand break damage occurs, poly-ADP-ribose polymerase goes into action and essentially "freezes" the nucleus of cells, then the damage is repaired (hopefully) and another set of enzymes take action to "unfreeze" the nucleus -- all at normal body temperatures. So I don't consider the problem of building solid cells which one transforms into functioning liquid cells to be that difficult. Biological systems *work* at temperatures ranging from -4 C to 80-100+C (or higher if sufficiently pressurized). Its just a matter of having the right enzymes and solutes to allow the chemistry to function. This is also totally separate from what one can do with externally directed construction efforts in the solid phase. I don't hold out much hope for the gas phase. But I think Anders probably addressed most of the points. On 4/16/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/16/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > A reanimated Eugen or Robert would be more like a photograph a sentimental > > momento made to someone elses specifications than an actual Eugen or Robert. > > Not in my subjective opinion. This is the problem with this discussion, people want to assert something which is entirely in the realm of "belief" into other "belief" systems. If *I* believe that (1) a *reanimated* (subjected to desiccation and repaired in 100 years by little nanorobots running around in my original brain replacing atoms, molecules, membranes, etc. "as necessary", so I'm hardly my original molecular self before desiccation, but still have most of the original equipment) *OR* (2) that my brain was severely smooshed during a plane crash, frozen, unfrozen, had the smooshed parts scanned at the molecular level and replaced by a combination of software supplements, disembodied brain subcomponents linked over a fiber network and the 30% of my original brain that remained intact working in combination, is *ME*, then it is. Its that simple it is so because I believe it to be so. Now there are others, Damien B. I think for example, who draw a line in the sand where they say "at that point of resurrection, reconstruction, rebuilding, simulating, etc. it is *not* ME. Fine, so be it. Certainly there are problems with respect to the property rights, legal systems, friendships, fundamental control over information rights, etc. that will have to be worked out. For example the recent case in England where a divorced "father" of some frozen embryos forbid their use by his ex-wife for having a child after her ovaries were removed (in England both parents have to consent to frozen embryo use). Now roll it forward a bit, the "father" dies and is frozen. During the reanimation process they make a complete internal brain scan using nanorobots and construct a precise simulation which runs fine, all the friends agree that he is identical to the original. The biological restoration process takes a bit longer so the biological reanimated "father" is "reborn" after the simulation. Comparisons are done and by all external measures they are identical excepting for the somewhat different experiences they have had from the points where the simulation and the reanimation were activated. Legal systems have evolved such that "simulations" have all of the rights as the original excepting for equal division of property. So the sim is granted rights over 50% of the embryos and decides it is ok for the ex-wife to have a baby using them. The biological reanimate is probably going to be very unhappy with this situation. You and Robert on the other hand do care. You want to remake not just any > > old person that pops up - but > > yourselves. > > All *I* care about is that most of the information comes out looking pretty much like the original. I'm reasonably confident that a reasonable facsimile of me can be constructed using my DNA and some of my writings. It might not have access to *all* of my memories, but there again nor do *all* of the people I know, and when one gets right down to it most of them all that important. The memory of taking Susan Pollack to the Junior High School Prom is extremely "fuzzy" at this point in time. Back to Stathis: > In a similar fashion, if you take measurements from an individual's brain > and attempt a computer simulation, no matter how good the measurements and > the model, the behaviour of the simulation will soon deviate from that of > the original. However, this doesn't matter, for the behaviour of the > original might also have deviated from what it actually was had a butterfly > flown this way rather than that way last month. Even if God made a copy of a > person perfect to the quantum level it would immediately start deviating > from the behaviour of the original, simply because they could not occupy the > same space. So like nature, you have to do a good job of making a precise > enough copy at a particular point in time, but what that copy does from > there on is its own business. Largely my feelings. Now in the "distributed replicated intelligence" model that I outlined at Extro III when discussing the only way to achieve "effective" immortality, I realized that you would have to have copies of oneself scattered all around the solar system. They would effectively never be "in sync" due to the light speed delays on information transmission. However one has the same kind of delays between the left and right side of ones brain -- one just doesn't notice it. If ones "thought cycle time" is on the order of years, then one probably isn't going to notice the delay in the information updates getting from the "north" side of the solar system to the "south" side over a time scale of minutes to hours. Are "you" as a distributed replicated intelligence scattered across the solar system different from the single place "you" few kg of wet meat wandering around in a few more kg of wet meat? Yes. Will you consider yourself to be "identical". If *you* choose to define it that way. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 14:38:27 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:38:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) In-Reply-To: <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Keith writes > > > Think about how hot it gets inside a parked car in the summer and you > will get an idea of how hard it would be to seal up a greenhouse. You could > also look up the power bills for cooling Biosphere II. > > Why doesn't this furnish a productive energy source? That is, the > temperature difference generated between such an enclosure and the outside > sounds as though it could be useful. The thermodynamic efficiency of harvesting power from a 10-20 deg. temperature difference isn't high enough to justify the infrastructure. I have seen solar cells you can hang on the outside of the window which power cooling fans to keep the car from getting hot however. So you can harvest some of the solar energy to keep the car from becoming a sauna. R. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 14:40:26 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:40:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> On 4/15/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Unless you're in America, > > where, i assume, you die if you can't afford whatever life-saving > > treatment you need (is this correct?). ### Absolutely incorrect. The US governments spend more per person on healthcare for the uninsured than most European systems spend on the insured there, so (unfortunately, in my opinion) everybody here gets expensive treatments, whether life-saving or not. Rafal PS. Too little time to go back to some of the threads I was involved in a few weeks ago but I'll try to find some time to answer ppl's questions. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 15:35:21 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:35:21 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > The thermodynamic efficiency of harvesting power from a 10-20 deg. > temperature difference isn't high enough to justify the infrastructure. I > have seen solar cells you can hang on the outside of the window which power > cooling fans to keep the car from getting hot however. So you can harvest > some of the solar energy to keep the car from becoming a sauna. > Just because it has a solar cell in it, doesn't make it a good idea. :) These devices move very little air and only take the edge off extreme heat conditions. When you get back to your car, if you open both doors wide and wait 15 seconds, you'll be better off than fitting one of these devices. Alternatively, just drive for a few minutes with the windows down. Put a reflective sunscreen up inside your windscreen. (while parked :) ); That really does work well. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 15:47:12 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:47:12 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Absolutely incorrect. The US governments spend more per person on > healthcare for the uninsured than most European systems spend on the > insured there, so (unfortunately, in my opinion) everybody here gets > expensive treatments, whether life-saving or not. > See: for a good summary. The references at the end of the article are also worth reading. Quotes: In the United States, around 85% of citizens have health insurance, either through their employer or purchased individually. Federal law ensures public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. Those without health insurance coverage are expected to pay privately for medical services. Health insurance is expensive and medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. BillK From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Apr 17 03:03:17 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:03:17 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Article: "Japan and China Peace breaking out" Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070416220159.041f5008@pop-server.austin.rr.com> http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8960582 Has anyone read this article? Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Apr 16 16:20:21 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:20:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <32840.72.236.103.39.1176740421.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > Put a reflective sunscreen up inside your windscreen. (while parked :) ); > Yes, the reflective sunscreens have *warnings* to use them only while parked - printed *on* them. Geez. Exactly how stupid are humans becomming? Humans who can vote. And drive. Yikes. Regards, MB ps. A white towel draped over the steering wheel and gear shift will help keep those items a bit cooler to the touch. Of course if we continue with the sloped windshield bake-in-the-sun designs, nothing is really going to help a lot. :/ From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Apr 16 16:15:37 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:15:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <32835.72.236.103.39.1176740137.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > ### Absolutely incorrect. The US governments spend more per person on > healthcare for the uninsured than most European systems spend on the > insured there, so (unfortunately, in my opinion) everybody here gets > expensive treatments, whether life-saving or not. > I'm inclined to agree with this. Anecdotal evidence: A friend who was unemployed and living on government handouts was diagnosed with multiple myeloma (sp?) and received weeks of in-hospital care (and surgery), weeks of recovery in a skilled nursing facility, a couple of months of in-home care, visits from rehab and therapy, continuing treatments and eventually died at home, no improvements over a many month span. And no money spent by her whatsoever, as she had none. I kinda think I'd have refused all treatment but for pain management or a visit with Dr. Kevorkian. I couldn't tell that she was ever "better" at all, only suffering greatly - from the disease *and* the treatments. I realize this is counter to the Extropian way, but damn, folks, when it's over it's over. Until we can stop "body life" on demand, *before* the brain is affected, and then do uploads or some other magic.... :( Regards, MB From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Apr 17 03:55:53 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:55:53 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] "The real evolution debate" [ExtroBritannia] Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070416225249.0445d880@pop-server.austin.rr.com> I am cross-posting this links from Fabio on the ExtroBritannia list: >http://www.wie.org/j35/real-evolution-debate-intro.asp > >http://www.wie.org/evolution-debate/map-unlocked.asp Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 Thomas at thomasoliver.net Mon Apr 16 15:55:00 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:55:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> Message-ID: <46239C54.5080009@thomasoliver.net> ben wrote >[...] What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and can >communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the >body doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the >brain, as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. > I have the impression that patterns I've learned are embodied in connections throughout my (including the periferal) nervous system. I think the rest of the body does matter. >Given a constant blood supply, a brain can stay alive even if the rest >of the body is gone, or damaged beyond repair (This doesn't apply, of >course, if your problem is a damaged brain, but the vast majority of >cases of death boil down to one simple thing: The brain starves of oxygen). > If you can keep a brain alive and oxygen fed, why not conserve what's left of your body as well? I had friends with undamaged brains who would have survived to this day if their spouses had not agreed to "pull the plug." >So, how about a replacement body? An artificial life-support system. It >wouldn't at first be anything like a human body, probably more like a >roomful of equipment, but that could change as more developments are made. > This "throw away and replace" method has evolved to sustain replication. It works well for fruit flies, but not so well for sustaining a complex personal identity. Transhuman, I think, means better brain and body. An artificial body that keeps me imprisoned in a lab would be a step backwards. Dialectic maybe, but I think we'd do better to preserve and enhance as much of the human as possible. I imagine "brains in a jar"will eventually want a body and even a used "fixer upper" will seem appealing. So I think your idea has merit. I'd just prefer to include more of me. -- Thomas From benboc at lineone.net Mon Apr 16 20:10:15 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:10:15 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4623D827.7020705@lineone.net> "Robert Bradbury" wrote: > On 4/15/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > > You *can't* grow food in a "relatively sealed greenhouse." Think > > about it. > > Ok, yes, one has the problem of adding the CO2, releasing the O2 and > retaining the H2O, LOL. Yes, and removing the food. What's 'sealed' about a system that has to have stuff going in one end and stuff coming out the other? ben zaiboc From eugen at leitl.org Mon Apr 16 20:33:18 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:33:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <4623D827.7020705@lineone.net> References: <4623D827.7020705@lineone.net> Message-ID: <20070416203318.GL9439@leitl.org> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 09:10:15PM +0100, ben wrote: > LOL. > > Yes, and removing the food. A closed-loop ecosystem for life support works best by being built around the monkey it supports. > What's 'sealed' about a system that has to have stuff going in one end > and stuff coming out the other? If you burn organics, or exhale CO2, you could fixate some or most of it by a photobioreactor just few 100 l big. Possibly producing food as a result (spirulina and chlorella might be not suitable as a sole food, but it's more than ok as a supplement). Actually, if civilisation is to collapse, algaculture for food could become rather important. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From benboc at lineone.net Mon Apr 16 21:06:46 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:06:46 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4623E566.6030000@lineone.net> Eugen Leitl wrote: > Emergency care people are required by law to treat anyone, even if > they're not covered (this gets frequently abused, of course). That's good news, at least. > They won't switch you off if the relatives continue demanding > treatment. It may be living hell on earth, but you will be kept > alive. My idea is that the patient will be capable of doing the demanding. Hopefully. >> Once you've had a good innings in conventional terms, there would >> likely be little incentive to make great efforts to keep you alive. >> Perhaps it would be a good idea to try to promote the creation of >> 'transhumanist-friendly' medical clinics. Probably a bit too much >> to hope for. > If you have the coin, you can buy any service you need. Only if that service is available, though. If the service you need is immunologically-matched bone marrow tissue and there's none available, you're likely to be dead before it can be sorted out. >> Actually, one good reason for removing the brain from a failing >> body would be for ease of access to all the life-support systems, >> and ease of swapping them out for others as and when necessary. The >> 'body' would be whatever physical infrastructure the life-support >> modules were plugged in to, and you could then take advantage of >> heterostasis, keeping local conditions optimal for each system >> separately, without upsetting the rest of the body. > "Moving the brain" while keeping it alive is quite impossible with > current surgery. It is rather difficult to extract even a fixated > brain (a very different animal from live brain) from the cranial > cavity without injuring it. Now that's interesting. I wasn't quite thinking along the lines of using a giant ice-cream scoop, but presumably there are lots of connections and so on that would make removing the skull difficult? Or is the problem at the other end, with the blood vessels and so on? Would leaving the brain in the skull but gradually removing the bone be a better idea? >> It would also make cryonic suspension much easier if that was >> eventually > It wouldn't. Just leave the brain in its natural container, see > http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport8504.html > for details. I can see why you say that, but i was thinking that most of the stuff you would want to preserve lies in a thin layer on top of the brain, and it's difficult to quickly cool that region with a good few millimetres of bone on top of it, so you must use the vascular system. If that layer was already exposed while the brain was alive, you could cool it very quickly. >> decided upon. Plus easier other things, too, like neural >> interfacing and eventual uploading. > Gradual/incremental in vivo uploading is quite a way off, since > requiring medical devices assembled by NC-chemistry, aka > machine-phase. Probably right. I'm not talking about right away, the whole point of this idea is to buy time, and keep you out of the freezer unless it was absolutely necessary to preserve the brain, and not just because your liver packs in. ben zaiboc From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 16 21:02:47 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:02:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <385570.5038.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Stathis, Stathis wrote: "Could you clarify your usage of numerator and > denominator? The denominator > is the number on the bottom, stays fixed and cannot > be zero, while the > numerator is the number on top and can take any > value, although in this > context it will vary between 0 and the denominator, > 3." I acknowledge that using the denominator in order to count upwards is really odd, but I believe it is ultimately necessary in this case. In this example, the Universe has a finite age (3 time-units). That means that either its fundamental time-units are either infinitely small (in which case it cannot possibly include an internal observer - since there is only a finite number of total infinitely small time-units), or they are of a discrete and finite size in which case only a finite number of them can "fit" into the total lifespan of this Universe (3, in this much simplified case). If we consider the passage of time to correspond with a change in either the numerator or denominator, then we cannot "begin" with the fraction 0/3. The reason is, that as the numerator counts-up three times in order to create 3/3, the quotient only becomes 1, and the Universe is already supposed to have an age of 3 time-units at that point, not just an age of 1 time-unit. You could try starting with the fraction 3/3 and counting-down with the denominator, but as I argued earlier, in order to reach the final age of 3 time-units, the denominator would have to go past 1 and become 0, which would mean that this Universe would also have to become infinitely old anyway. Another problem is that in this case, you'd be starting your count at the value of 1 (3/3) and not at the value of zero. You could try starting with the fraction 3/4 and reducing the denominator to 1, but this violates the rules that we've established: the time-units are already fundamental, and there can only be 3 of them, not 4. Also, the time value of 3/4 is illegal because it would be a three-quarters division of a single already indivisible time-unit. At this point, the only way I can see that would allow this to "work", is to remove the lower bound on the time-units, IOW, allow them to be infinitely small. We also have to start at a value of zero in order to represent the very beginning of this Universe (or what is actually infinitely close to zero - besides if this Universe emerged from Nothingness, even a fraction cannot exist until *something* does), and since the numerator cannot start at zero, the only way to effectively achieve that is to make the denominator positive infinity to start with. At this point, it loops back to the beginning of the argument: If the time-units must be infinitely small in this example, then a Universe that consists of only a finite number of time-units is going to have an infinitely short lifespan, and therefore could not possibly contain any internal observers). Only in a Universe that consisted of an infinite number of infinitely small time-units, could any internal observer exist. Also, the weird "indeterminate form" nature of the quotient of +Infinity/+Infinity allows that the *actual* size of the time-units does not have to be infinitely small. It can be any positive real number, between being infinitely small (but still existent) and arbitrarily large. One way to illustrate this is to point out that the "value" of an infinite number of milliseconds is totally identical to the "value" of an infinite number of centuries. Well, I tried to make this a little less nonsensical, but that doesn't mean it's "good" at this point. ;-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 22:21:37 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:21:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> On 4/16/07, BillK wrote: > On 4/16/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > ### Absolutely incorrect. The US governments spend more per person on > > healthcare for the uninsured than most European systems spend on the > > insured there, so (unfortunately, in my opinion) everybody here gets > > expensive treatments, whether life-saving or not. > > > > See: > > for a good summary. > The references at the end of the article are also worth reading. > > Quotes: > In the United States, around 85% of citizens have health insurance, > either through their employer or purchased individually. > Federal law ensures public access to emergency services regardless of > ability to pay. Those without health insurance coverage are expected > to pay privately for medical services. Health insurance is expensive > and medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for > personal bankruptcy in the United States. ### Federal largesse is much more than the EMTALA services you referred to. Medicaid, as well as multiple state programs for the indigent, essentially assure full access to medical care, independently of the ability to pay (or rather, in case of inability to pay privately, Medicaid will cover more medical expenses than the average European could expect in his country. You can look up the statistics. Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. The study alleging medical bills as the most common cause of personal bankruptcy was flawed: it was basically a tabulation of answers to a survey. Of course, most people did not mention the TV's or cars they bought instead of medical insurance, they only spoke about the results of their careless profligacy, the financial meltdown that followed an "unexpected" illness. Rafal From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Apr 16 22:45:13 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:45:13 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <46239C54.5080009@thomasoliver.net> References: <4621DF29.2080301@lineone.net> <46239C54.5080009@thomasoliver.net> Message-ID: <58584.86.153.216.201.1176763513.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Thomas wrote: > ben wrote >>[...] What occurs to me is that, as long as your brain is kept alive and >> can >>communicate with the outside world, you are surviving. The rest of the >>body doesn't matter, it can be regarded as a life-support system for the >>brain, as well as providing transport, sense organs and communication. >> > I have the impression that patterns I've learned are embodied in > connections throughout my (including the periferal) nervous system. I > think the rest of the body does matter. To my knowledge there is no evidence for anything more than rudimentary adaptation in the peripheral nervous system. The spinal cord does have more complex adaptation, learning and even somewhat brainlike neural activity. I would suspect it contains at least some of our low-level motor memories. The real reason the body matters is that it is part of the normal feedback loop between the brain and itself. When you get anxious the viscera respond, and the experence of butterflies in the stomach influences the brain. When I write this, my fingers are moving according to motor programs initialized in the brain, sending back sensory information about touch and location that is used by the cerebellum and spinal cord to adjust the movements. Remove the body and there would be a loss of parts of emotion (cmp the flattening of affect in people with cut vagus nerve or paraplegia) and my virtual fingers would likely mistype a lot since the timing would be off. But this may not be terribly insurmountable. We just need good virtual bodies. >>Given a constant blood supply, a brain can stay alive even if the rest >>of the body is gone, or damaged beyond repair (This doesn't apply, of >>course, if your problem is a damaged brain, but the vast majority of >>cases of death boil down to one simple thing: The brain starves of >> oxygen). >> > If you can keep a brain alive and oxygen fed, why not conserve what's > left of your body as well? I had friends with undamaged brains who > would have survived to this day if their spouses had not agreed to "pull > the plug." An intact body works much better than an isolated brain. Unless there is something wrong with it, of course. Cancer or some organ failure can really mess up your day. > An artificial body that keeps me imprisoned in a lab would be a step > backwards. Shades of Olaf Stapledon's "the fourth men". My favorite callous brains-in-labs! > Dialectic maybe, but I think we'd do better to preserve and > enhance as much of the human as possible. Exactly. If being a brain in the jar is the only option, I would take it (but it better be a jar with internet access!) Even living life as a totally virtual upload will involve having a (virtual) body with body functions. It is just that it would be a lot more editable and have a few fast forward functions. But getting there requires understanding the body pretty deeply. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 22:49:27 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:49:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com> On 4/6/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > On 4/6/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > ### By all means! Especially if there were problems that would need to > > be addressed. But, since the predicted net effect of global warming on > > the US economy is a gain of about 50 billion dollars over the next few > > decades (after adding losses from increased cooling loads, minor > > losses from the few inches of rising ocean levels, and adding gains > > from reduced heating bills and greatly improved agricultural output), > > I feel no pressing need to find solutions. > > Rafal, I believe you are going to have to cite a reference for this. And in > particular, is the perspective only a U.S. perspective or a "world neutral" > perspective? And if it were framed in "world neutral" perspectives ( i.e. > we relocate all individuals living on islands < 10m above sea level to Great > Bear lake in CA [significantly warmer at some point in the future]) would > the consequences still be $50B+? ### Here is the link (secondary but with links to the original book): http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/07/global_warming_.html Sorry, I was quoting numbers out of memory, so only a 23 billion dollars gain is predicted :( Indeed, there are countries that are likely to suffer a net loss as a result of warming. I am not familiar with any credible (i.e. produced by professional economists and published in economics journals) estimates of the worldwide impact. It is important to note that the regions most likely to gain are the arid and semiarid regions - the primary mechanism of the beneficial effect of CO2 fertilization is the reduction of transpiration from leaves. If there is a lot of CO2 in the air, plants can absorb all they need while keeping their stomata partially closed, which leads to less evaporation. So, surprisingly, a lot of hot places will be better off too. ---------------------------------------- > I would like to see the discussion take a perspective of "What is the most > extropic path?" How does one save the greatest number of people at the > least cost? So one might devote those funds toward advancing things like > nanotechnology R&D. ### I do not believe that nanotechnology will amount to anything before the AI singularity. For saving the greatest number of people at the lowest cost, see the Copenhagen Consensus http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Default.aspx?ID=788 Rafal From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 16 22:50:33 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:50:33 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com > References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> At 06:21 PM 4/16/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: >Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. Really. My US insurer, Unicare, charge my wife and me more than $500 a month for very little more than crisis coverage (no dental, very little pharma), and that after an annual flagfall of some $2000 each. It helps to be young and healthy, eh? Damien Broderick From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 16 22:54:58 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:54:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704161554u2154cd6bo50de9b4d11d47ff7@mail.gmail.com> $150/month??? Could you let me know who your insurer is please? I am fairly young and quite healthy; and my wife and 3 kids are much younger and also healthy, and we pay about $380/month for barely more than "catastrophic care", thru the National Association for the Self-Employed. Having lived in Oz and NZ which had national health care, I can assure all Americans that the OZ/NZ nationalized system was far better from the end-user's perspective, as well as less expensive from a societal perspective. -- Ben On 4/16/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 06:21 PM 4/16/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > >Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. > > Really. My US insurer, Unicare, charge my wife and me more than $500 > a month for very little more than crisis coverage (no dental, very > little pharma), and that after an annual flagfall of some $2000 each. > It helps to be young and healthy, eh? > > Damien Broderick > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 23:09:46 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:09:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> I have catastrophic health insurance from Anthem, through an employer-provided group plan. I lobbied very hard to end our $700/month plan and switch to catastrophic coverage for the whole company. The plan does not require a medical examination before joining. Of course, we also have an HSA, with the company depositing there the difference between the two plans. Of course, you have to think carefully before spending on healthcare - that's why I stopped using atorvastatin (about 130$ a month if I remember correctly), and quinapril (also pricey), and switched to lovastatin and lisinopril - now I am paying only 4$ per month for each medication at a Wal-Mart pharmacy, charged directly to the HSA. On 4/16/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 06:21 PM 4/16/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > >Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. > > Really. My US insurer, Unicare, charge my wife and me more than $500 > a month for very little more than crisis coverage (no dental, very > little pharma), and that after an annual flagfall of some $2000 each. > It helps to be young and healthy, eh? > > Damien Broderick > > > -- Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD Chief Clinical Officer, Gencia Corporation 706 B Forest St. Charlottesville, VA 22903 tel: (434) 295-4800 fax: (434) 295-4951 This electronic message transmission contains information from the biotechnology firm of Gencia Corporation which may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please notify us by telephone (434-295-4800) or by electronic mail (fportell at genciabiotech.com) immediately. From sentience at pobox.com Mon Apr 16 23:22:30 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:22:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? (was Cryonics is the only option?) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <46240536.6090106@pobox.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. Second the obvious question. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Apr 16 23:31:20 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:31:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> > At 06:21 PM 4/16/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > >>Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. > I'd like to know more about this. My health insurance, for just myself, in good health, is between $250 and $300 per month. It's a big chunk of my income. Actually I think the problem is purchasing outside a group plan. It is frustrating in the extreme. Also, the rates and coverage vary by state, so there are only certain plans available to me - and they may not be available elsewhere. Regards, MB From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 16 23:47:43 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:47:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> On 4/16/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I have catastrophic health insurance from Anthem, through an > employer-provided group plan. Ah, that is the difference from my situation. I have no employer-provided plan, so I get health insurance as a self-employed person, which is probably the most awkward system to be in, within the US health care system. (Ironically, as this is the Land of Entrepreneurs ... but a surplus of consistency has never been the US's problem...) ben From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Apr 16 23:48:34 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:48:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704161648y6f36467ay4f4f54b917c17e6d@mail.gmail.com> On 4/16/07, MB wrote: > > At 06:21 PM 4/16/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: > > > >>Health insurance is cheap. I pay only about 150$ per month for my family. > > > > I'd like to know more about this. My health insurance, for just myself, in good > health, is between $250 and $300 per month. It's a big chunk of my income. > > Actually I think the problem is purchasing outside a group plan. It is frustrating > in the extreme. Also, the rates and coverage vary by state, so there are only > certain plans available to me - and they may not be available elsewhere. > ### Catastrophic plan with an HSA is definitely the answer as long as you are healthy. For this solution to make sense you need to have a few years of healthy life, so you accumulate funds for the inevitable problems later on. If you already spend 2-3 k per year on healthcare, a regular insurance plan is unfortunately the only realistic option. But if you start the HSA in your twenties, you will have enough cash by the time you need it. Rafal From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Mon Apr 16 23:23:14 2007 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:23:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <380-220074116232314300@M2W012.mail2web.com> From: Anders Sandberg >... If being a brain in the jar is the only option, I would take it >(but it better be a jar with internet access!) Hahah! I released a darn good chuckle! Thanks. Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 00:29:03 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:29:03 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: Of course, you have to think carefully before spending on healthcare - > that's why I stopped using atorvastatin (about 130$ a month if I > remember correctly), and quinapril (also pricey), and switched to > lovastatin and lisinopril - now I am paying only 4$ per month for each > medication at a Wal-Mart pharmacy, charged directly to the HSA. > What strength atorvastatin? In Australia Lipitor varies between about $30/month for 10mg/d and $90/month for 80mg/d. This is the actual cost to the Government: the consumer pays a maximum of about $25/month per medication if employed and $3/month if unemployed or a pensioner regardless of the actual cost. It seems that the real cost of medication and services, whether privately or government funded, is considerably higher in the US. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 00:51:38 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:51:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704161751p44f92c19o26ead3f719cb04f5@mail.gmail.com> On 4/16/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > What strength atorvastatin? In Australia Lipitor varies between about > $30/month for 10mg/d and $90/month for 80mg/d. This is the actual cost to > the Government: the consumer pays a maximum of about $25/month per > medication if employed and $3/month if unemployed or a pensioner regardless > of the actual cost. It seems that the real cost of medication and services, > whether privately or government funded, is considerably higher in the US. > ### 10mg/d. Back when I had regular health insurance my pharmacist said the price of a one month supply was 130$, but now looking at online pharmacy prices it appears that the cost you are likely to pay in the US is considerably lower, as low as 30$. Still, prices in the US tend to be higher - governments of many countries use monopsony to force low prices of pharmaceuticals, in effect shifting R&D costs from their citizens to Americans. Rafal From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Apr 17 01:03:56 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:03:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161648y6f36467ay4f4f54b917c17e6d@mail.gmail.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> <7641ddc60704161648y6f36467ay4f4f54b917c17e6d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <33304.72.236.103.39.1176771836.squirrel@main.nc.us> > ### Catastrophic plan with an HSA is definitely the answer as long as > you are healthy. For this solution to make sense you need to have a > few years of healthy life, so you accumulate funds for the inevitable > problems later on. If you already spend 2-3 k per year on healthcare, > a regular insurance plan is unfortunately the only realistic option. > But if you start the HSA in your twenties, you will have enough cash > by the time you need it. > Alas, I'm 30 years beyond that. Sigh. I spend 3k+ per year on health care - it's the health insurance. Other than that I'm being really sickly if I spend $500 including testing and meds. Regards, MB From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Tue Apr 17 01:50:35 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:50:35 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Re: Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Anders wrote: Brett Paatsch wrote: >> Do you know of anyone that is not also a believer in cryonics that thinks > >machine-phase chemistry is (a) credible at all thermodynamically, > I wouldn't call me a cryonics disbeliever, but I definitely think machine > phase chemistry is thermodynamically credible. Whether it is efficient > enough to be useful is another matter. Okay, let me ask you straight then. Saying you wouldn't call yourself a disbeliever doesn't amount to a positive asserting of belief. You could be a sceptic or agnostic on the matter. Let me invite you off the fence. Would you classify yourself as a believer in cryonics? My point about the caveat against believers btw is that believers reason differently and argue differently - by differently I mean fundamentally dishonestly and evasively. On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is "definately" thermodynamically credible? I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticisms of Drexler. Life molecules like proteins assemble in compartments containing water. Machine phase chemistry as I understand it is essentially watery-solution free chemistry. Without a watery solution how do you see machine phase chemistry managing the folding of proteins? > > and > > (b) can construct a cell even in principle? > > > >Cell[s] grow from the inside out, not the outside in. I think the fatal flaw > >in the whole nano-medicine thing is that you can't assemble the components > >of a cell - lipids, proteins, *ions* placed to drive ion pumps, from the > >outside at any temperature no matter how cold. Cells being made of > >biological stuff only behave as cells within the engineering constraints > >of their biological stuff. ie. Temperature matters. Temperature affects >> the properties of the materials. >Given that frozen cells can be thawed with viability intact, I've frozen and thawed cells. Have you? I've not personally frozen embryos but that can be done too, also not reliably in the case of a single embryo, as I understand - but that we (people, scientists) can do it at all speaks to the robustness of life in *simple* forms and yet says nothing at all about the freezing of organs like brains. We can't do organs. I think I recall Eugen saying Greg Fahy is interested in that (perhaps kidneys). It is important to get that the brain is an organ of a multicellular life form. It grows as a result of the actions of cells but it isn't just a big lump of cells. I know you know that as a neuroscience guy but I don't know how well you know that and I don't accept expertise on the part of others until I see evidence of it. I don't think its (organs like kidneys have been done). I'd want to see a peer reviewed journal to give it (say a kidney thawing) credit as having been really been done because scientists too are excellent at kidding themselves. Thats why peer review matters it helps take out the garbage. > it seems that > first building a frozen cell and then warming it would be a feasible way > of doing it. Though we can grow cells in quantity in E.coli, we can't build as opposed to growing a just a single frozen cell. A growing cell can preserve the integrity of mitochondrial membranes. You can't do that working from the outside to built the membrane. We can produce in vitro cell free systems to do research on. We can create liposomes - lipid enclosed spheres that aren't cells. But we can't create a living cell as a manufacturing process. At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell that was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. We don't even know that much in principle yet. > Cells are pretty robust (otherwise they wouldn't survive, and > temperature changes and thermal noise would instantly kill them), so you > only need to get close enough to the attractor state(s) that correspond to > a working cell to get it to spontaneously do the final pieces of > selforganisation. "only" "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" :-) So talk to me like a cell biologist. Tell me your protocol or point me to a peer reviewed paper. "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" sounds like believer psuedo-explanation handwaving to me. > That you need a lot of information to place the macromolecules right and > get the right concentrations of small molecules is just messy brute force > issues. You say that as though you have done it. But you haven't actually done it have you. Had you done it you'd have had a lead paper in Science and Nature. I know something about in vitro cell free systems but I don't know what you know. Show me that you know something relevant. That sort of handwaving is highly characteristic of what transhumanists do when they prentend to actually discuss technology. It works to give the illusion of knowledge without demonstrating any. It poo poos whats necessary to be done without either demonstrating that it has been done and without giving a protocol that demonstrates that it can be done even in principle. Transhumanists talk about technology with the same disrespect for the difference between actual and real as religious people. > See it as a ridiculously detailed form of 3D printing, where you want > to write prepared molecules into a matrix of frozen water. Handwaving. Show me a paper or a protocol. >To have a realistic chance of doing it right you first need to have scanned > a cell, With current technology, cryo EM one can't scan a single cell. You scan lots of them and get an aggregated averaged out picture. Fair warning handwaving about future technology will prompt me to want to see what you know about the relevant small scale physics. > picking it apart molecule by molecule and recording the locations and > type. If that can be done piling them together seems to be equally hard. I disagree. I think it is much much harder. I even think it is impossible. Because you have to get your manufacturing fingers around the cell clusters whilst the cells in the centre of the cluster have to be at the right temperature to act like cells and bind to the other cells. And once they are like that they will start to die faster than your manufacturing fingers can build more cells onto the seed cells. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Putting together any old cell, (assembling it like a manufacturing process not growing it like in cell culture) rebuilding a single celled organism say that functions like a single celled organism, (eats, moves, divides to replicate) - that would be the Science or Nature paper of the year in which it was done. You know something of neuroscience if I recall correctly. What you know though in practice I don't know. Please feel free to impress me. Your brain and mine would at one level be variations on the theme of homo sapiens male brains. But what makes me me and you you is in the nanoscale details. Knowing how to build Bretts brain as a manufacturing process wouldn't give you an algorithm for building an Anders brain. At the nanoscale where the synapse make their connections our individual brains would be too different. Anders brain structure isn't in a planned manufactured construction of Anders genes its far more haphazard than that. Its the result of one-time only environmental interrelationships between the Anders genome and the environement the Anders genome found itself in as the genome directed Anders cells to grow, divide and built organs including Anders brain. > Maybe it would be worthwhile doing a careful critique of nanoscale > dissassemblers? Biological or theoretical? What nanoscale dissassemblers are you talking about? Scientists are doing basic discovery of the machines that are part of biological systems as part of contemporary science. We are still trying to discover at the molecular level how the machinery of the cell works so that we don't have to settle for handwaving pretend knowledge. We haven't done it yet. > > In cryonics the emulation of the structure one would want to resolve is > > the structure of ones own brain. Can't do that. Thermodynamics and > > the requirement to work from outside in won't allow it. > What is the thermodynamical problem you are refering to? Are you familiar with Smalleys fat and sticky fingers objections to Drexler? Inside cells, biomolecules, proteins assemble and fold into the right shapes in water. Proteins won't fold the way they do out of water. Change either the material you are working with, what you are using as proteins and RNAs to construct your molecular machines, ribosomes, spliceosomes, signal recognition particles, various chaperones and enzymes or the watery environment and you change the physics and chemistry that is the only physics and chemistry that we know works because not because we understand it at molecular detail yet. We do know that you need working membrane bilayers for cells to work. You can't have working membrane bilayers if the bilayers are breached and the ions inside can get outside. This isn't a problem when organisms grow as they start out as a few cells that do the manufacturing of later cells working from inside the membrane bilayers. The chemistry of lipids doesn't allow you to have working bilayers below normal temperatures for life. Having to do your manufacturing from the outside doesn't allow you to have unbroken lipid layers as its the lipid layers around organelles that you are having to build in the first place because you are manufacturing not growing the cells. > I can see a heat problem from lots of nanosystems working, so they have to > be cooled and/or slowed down - which may make the process very slow. Dunno what you mean. Only working nanoSYSTEMS I know of are biological ones the others are purely speculative (fanciful even). > Merkle's paper suggested a three year process of scanning and > rebuilding. I'm assuming you are referring to the Molecular Repair of the Brain. Merkle's paper was gently worked over by Fahy who apparently knows what a science paper looks like and wasn't so frustrated with Merkle that he gave up on him. The kindest thing I will say about that paper is it isn't good enough, it isn't structured enough, to be even usefully wrong. Fahy didn't critique Merkles mess which would have required him to rewrite it first - he just rewrote a better one. Because folks like Robert and Eugen kept referring to the Merkle paper I thought before reading it that as a service to fellow students or truth seekers I might read it and give a critique, but I gave it up as a task that I'd have to be paid to do because the Merkle paper was so poorly structured and because I couldn't trust that he'd been honest with his referencing. From memory I think I discovered mistakes in his referencing that looked to be not just mistakes but blatant misrepresentations of the sort that lose scientists their credibility. I've had the same experience reading some of Freitas stuff - where he misrepresents the views of his critics, but less so. When one encounters works that look like pseudoscience like say intelligent design, one has to be careful about providing criticism that can be used to make the pseudoscience stronger. Drexlerian nanotech and cryonics are in my opinion in the same sort of pseudoscience camp as intelligent design. The believers so much want to believe that they only collect facts and criticisms that help them make the superstructures of their beliefs more solid. Its like what is really going on is that a bunch of tech savvy don't want to die folk have gotten together into a sort of group religion where they reinforce each others rationalisations and shore up each others hopes. But the science doesn't go anywhere it is pseudoscience in fact because there isn't enough honest criticism and honest truthseeking in the enterprise. The desire to find a technical solution to death drives the psychology of the folk involved. Its like a bunch of engineers got struck by the religion lightening bolt, had too much engineering savvy to fall for the conventional religions and so had to invent one of their own. That I think is ultimately what transhumanism is. Its not the successor to humanism its a cultural support system for cryonicists and technological religious types that can't find salvation in the normal religions. Thats why transhumanism doesn't produce anything except writers and entertainers - although individual transhumanists do produce some things those things are in their capacities as people not as transhumanists. The wheels came off the transhumanist movement when transhumanists did not take a strong enough stand when US political conservatives turned into religious regressives. But I am digressing. > That a lot of entropy is being pushed around (making unordered atoms into > an ordered cell) adds a bit to the heat problem, but can still be managed > by slowing things down or dividing the workpieces so that radiating the > entropy into the environment is easy. No offense Anders but conversation needs a lot more credibility established before we can do the handwavey stuff. Time and again Drextech folk point at biological systems and say see biology is nanotech. If nature can do it we can do it only better. But scientists are still learning at the molecular detail how nature does what it does. We are still in discovery phase with respect to natures machinery. It is religious-like faith to presume that (a) we know all we really need to know about how nature has made its biological machines work and (b) that we can replace those organic machines which operate within physiological temperature ranges with non-organic machines which don't and yet which we want to do the same sort of things with. > That molecules are dancing around isn't an enormous problem at -170, > since the cryonic brain is essentially a crystal lattice with thermal > vibrations are on the order of 0.01 nm. The resolution of electron microscopes are about 2 nanometres from memory perhaps 0.2. Its not the state of the brain when frozen as a block of tissue thats the (or rather a) problem its that each brain is so massively unique in its arborial structures to very low resolutions. Lipid bilayers are only around 6 nanometres thick and if the bilayers are breached the ions leak and the organelle will not work. You have to be able to manufacture to place your lipids to that degree of precision whilst keeping the heat out that would change the chemistry of the lipids. It can't be done not. Not at the scale of something as large as the brain which doesn't have room within itself for accessing service bots. Nature didn't do it like that. Nature grows her brains as one-offers she doesn't manufacture them and she doesn't build in service laneways for repair. That we do know. > > The whole cryonic idea at its best can only amount to producing a > > *likeness* of someone that is missed to a degree of detail that at best > > satisfies the person who is doing the emulating. Its there sentimentality > > and degree of discrimination which will inevitably be the determinant > > of any emulation as the to-be-emulation has no say in it. > (this might be an argument against the identity argument rather than the > exact contents in your post) Granted. I ranted. You ask other questions in your post which are fair ones and I drafted answers to them but I can't spend more time on this right now so I'll post this much. I'm studying cell biology currently. Actually I should be writting up my research project. I mostly interested in seeing what you have under the bonnet as a neuroscientist rather than as a ethical philosopher anyway. Cheers, Brett -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 02:39:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:39:15 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell > that > was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. We don't even > know that much in principle yet. > Maybe, but unless it was a miracle, science should be able to reproduce it. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Tue Apr 17 04:22:43 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:22:43 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Impeachment: A duty, not an option Message-ID: <019101c780a8$0b8a9100$e7e18f9b@homepc> http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/935 Carla Binion: Impeachment: A duty, not an option -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Tue Apr 17 05:36:29 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:36:29 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] Breaking it down References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net><00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com><7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> <3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <004c01c780b2$b8169450$0200a8c0@Nano> Just a quick little animation I made for you this time: http://www.nanogirl.com/personal/breaking.htm Kind regards, Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 05:21:20 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:21:20 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <385570.5038.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <385570.5038.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, A B wrote: > > Hi Stathis, > > Stathis wrote: > > "Could you clarify your usage of numerator and > > denominator? The denominator > > is the number on the bottom, stays fixed and cannot > > be zero, while the > > numerator is the number on top and can take any > > value, although in this > > context it will vary between 0 and the denominator, > > 3." > > I acknowledge that using the denominator in order to > count upwards is really odd, but I believe it is > ultimately necessary in this case. In this example, > the Universe has a finite age (3 time-units). That > means that either its fundamental time-units are > either infinitely small (in which case it cannot > possibly include an internal observer - since there is > only a finite number of total infinitely small > time-units), or they are of a discrete and finite size > in which case only a finite number of them can "fit" > into the total lifespan of this Universe (3, in this > much simplified case). If we consider the passage of > time to correspond with a change in either the > numerator or denominator, then we cannot "begin" with > the fraction 0/3. The reason is, that as the numerator > counts-up three times in order to create 3/3, the > quotient only becomes 1, and the Universe is already > supposed to have an age of 3 time-units at that point, > not just an age of 1 time-unit. You could try starting > with the fraction 3/3 and counting-down with the > denominator, but as I argued earlier, in order to > reach the final age of 3 time-units, the denominator > would have to go past 1 and become 0, which would mean > that this Universe would also have to become > infinitely old anyway. Another problem is that in this > case, you'd be starting your count at the value of 1 > (3/3) and not at the value of zero. You could try > starting with the fraction 3/4 and reducing the > denominator to 1, but this violates the rules that > we've established: the time-units are already > fundamental, and there can only be 3 of them, not 4. > Also, the time value of 3/4 is illegal because it > would be a three-quarters division of a single already > indivisible time-unit. At this point, the only way I > can see that would allow this to "work", is to remove > the lower bound on the time-units, IOW, allow them to > be infinitely small. We also have to start at a value > of zero in order to represent the very beginning of > this Universe (or what is actually infinitely close to > zero - besides if this Universe emerged from > Nothingness, even a fraction cannot exist until > *something* does), and since the numerator cannot > start at zero, the only way to effectively achieve > that is to make the denominator positive infinity to > start with. At this point, it loops back to the > beginning of the argument: If the time-units must be > infinitely small in this example, then a Universe that > consists of only a finite number of time-units is > going to have an infinitely short lifespan, and > therefore could not possibly contain any internal > observers). Only in a Universe that consisted of an > infinite number of infinitely small time-units, could > any internal observer exist. Also, the weird > "indeterminate form" nature of the quotient of > +Infinity/+Infinity allows that the *actual* size of > the time-units does not have to be infinitely small. > It can be any positive real number, between being > infinitely small (but still existent) and arbitrarily > large. One way to illustrate this is to point out that > the "value" of an infinite number of milliseconds is > totally identical to the "value" of an infinite number > of centuries. I still find your use of fractions confusing: I assumed you are talking about the fraction of the total age of the universe, but at times you seem to be talking about fractions of time units as well. I can see that if time comes in discrete quanta (my understanding is that physicists are divided as to whether this is the case) you can't really have a "zero" time, because the first event has to occur in the first unit. So in the universe you describe, the first event occurs during "1", the second during "2" and the final during "3". There is time for an observer to experience 3 states, at most. This would work just as well in a block universe cosmology (actually, continuous time would work just as well in a block universe, if you just make the time slices infinitesimally small). Have I completely misunderstood something? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 17 07:36:51 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:36:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070417032745.03dc9be8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:51 PM 4/16/2007 +1000, you wrote: >On 4/16/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: > >> >>Materialists, i.e., engineering types, for the most part agree with you >> >>that an identical copy of a person (or a computer) is equivalent and for >> >>the most part can't imagine why anyone would have a different opinion. >> > >> >You probably feel that way after these many long discussions. >> >>It didn't take these long discussions. I have no memory of any time in the >>past I had a different opinion, and my writings for the last two decades >>are consistent with that view... > >I didn't mean you were convinced about personal identity after these >discussions, but convinced that "engineering types" will have the same >view as you do. Sorry, misunderstood. >I know lots of scientifically literate people who are perfectly sensible >materialists, with no belief in gods, spirits ar any other nonsense, who >nevertheless think that undergoing destructive copying would be suicide. I don't think it would necessarily be suicide, but it goes on my list of dire, last resort methods. I.e., I would opt for destructive copying if that was the only way to get away from where a miles wide asteroid was going to hit. And if anything went wrong in the process, it might well *be* suicide. My wife is an archivist and she has a very low opinion of destructive copying. If such a device were offered to archivists they would recoil in horror. Fortunately I see no reason whatsoever that destructive copying would be needed. There are reasonable ways to upload your mental activity in stages where you could at any point switch consciousness back your regular brain. Keith From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 17 07:48:11 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:48:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net><00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <46240536.6090106@pobox.com> Message-ID: <007301c780c4$cc5534f0$cd064e0c@MyComputer> A much better question is why is health care so fucking expensive? In 1960 the USA spent 5.2% of GNP on health care; by 2004 it had increased to 16 %, far more than any other country, but Americans are not far healthier than people from other countries. This trend can not continue nor should it. My solution could be summed up in one word "deregulation". You go to the doctor, your appointment is at 10 am so you cool your heals for 3 hours and at 1 pm he kindly deems to grant you an audience, for about 4 minutes. After you kiss his ring you hurriedly tell him your health problem while the doctor looks at his watch and glances at you test results, he then gives you a prescription, a permission to buy a drug, and then he sends you on your way. You then give the doctor a big fee, go to the drug store with your permission slip in your hand, and the doctor buys a Ferrari. This is nuts. Most of the time a nurse or a computer program could diagnose your problem as well as the highly paid doctor. True you could be suffering from some extremely rare bizarre ailment that would take a Sherlock Holms (or a Dr. House) to diagnose, but you know what, you probably aren't. It's possible those tracks were made by a zebra, but they were probably made by a horse. Granted no computer program is (yet) as good at diagnoses as a genius doctor who is willing to devote significant time thinking about it, but I maintain a computer program will give at least as good a diagnosis as you are likely to receive in the real world. I think surgery is the only area where a very skilled human being is still needed, at least for now. So to sum up, ALL prescriptions should be over the counter, including Heroin. John K Clark From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 17 08:11:39 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:11:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070417035913.03e24660@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:50 AM 4/17/2007 +1000, Brett wrote: snip >Okay, let me ask you straight then. snip >On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is "definately" >thermodynamically credible? Better than 50 years of studying chemistry. I studied organic (still have the textbook) when I was in the 9th grade. >I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticisms of >Drexler. It took Drexler years, but Smalley came out second best in the December 2003 Chemical and Engineering News which carried a 4 part debate exchanges. They are linked from Drexler's Wikipedia page. >Life molecules like proteins assemble in compartments containing >water. Machine phase chemistry as I understand it is essentially >watery-solution free chemistry. Without a watery solution how do you see >machine phase chemistry managing the folding of proteins? Straw man. It is unlikely you would build and fold proteins in a machine phase system. You might note that I came to cryonics only *after* Drexler's work convinced me that machine phase chemistry, i.e., nanotechnology, was a very reasonable bet in the long run. Keith From codehead at readysetsurf.com Tue Apr 17 10:19:45 2007 From: codehead at readysetsurf.com (codehead at readysetsurf.com) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:19:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140859.03d87cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <46243CD1.12630.B4A4D2C@codehead.readysetsurf.com> On 15 Apr 2007 at 14:10, Keith Henson wrote: > You could also look up the power bills for cooling Biosphere II. When Biosphere II was put up for sale in 2005, the total power bill averaged $150,000 a month. (One of the reasons why it was put up for sale is that sales of tours didn't even cover the power bill, much less the other operational costs.) Of course, there's a great deal of machinery in Biosphere II that has nothing to do with cooling. However, the management from Columbia University (which oversaw Biosphere II operations from 1995 to 2003) believed that if necessary, Biosphere II could run on a third of the power that it normally used. Many of the non-cooling functions could be shut down (which would certainly alter the ecology inside), and the mean temperature would have to rise. So it's likely that ballpark figure for the cooling portion of the bill averages less than $75,000 per month, but probably more than $30,000. E. Sandblade From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Apr 17 10:55:10 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:55:10 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <63545.86.153.216.201.1176807310.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Brett Paatsch wrote: > Saying you wouldn't call yourself a disbeliever doesn't amount to a > positive > asserting of belief. You could be a sceptic or agnostic on the matter. > Let > me invite you off the fence. Would you classify yourself as a believer in > cryonics? I think that cryonic suspension does preserve synaptic structure (when done right and fast enough) and that the frozen brain contains enough information that it could in principle be reconstructed. Given that the information loss is not total, that subcellular scanning appears physically feasible and a result of many development paths and that there is a finite chance that a stored brain could end up in a future where such scanning methods are present, I think that there is a chance that at least some of current cryonics patients will end up uploaded. Does that make me a cryonics believer in your eyes? While I defend a lot of reconstruction methods below, my heart is more in analysing scanning and emulation methods. > On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is "definately" > thermodynamically credible? > > I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticisms > of > Drexler. Life molecules like proteins assemble in compartments containing > water. Machine phase chemistry as I understand it is essentially > watery-solution free chemistry. Without a watery solution how do you see > machine phase chemistry managing the folding of proteins? You can always build hybrids. One simple model would be to assemble proteins in a watery environment and then transfer them to a machine phase environment (with water around them, if needed) for assembly if you are (say) restoring a frozen brain. Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticism seems to be disproven by DNA repair enzymes, and they are working in a liquid environment. Even if general atomic assembly is impossible or too inefficient it is clearly possible to make more specialized forms of moiety assembly, it would just make the systems messier and less easy to do armchair design of. >>Given that frozen cells can be thawed with viability intact, > > I've frozen and thawed cells. Have you? No. But if you are referring to the fact that quite a lot of the cells die in the process, I don't consider that to be any form of counterargument to my previous argument. I was merely showing that there existed a method that had a high likeliehood of assembling a viable cell if implemented, not the best possible such method. > It is > important to get that the brain is an organ of a multicellular life form. > It grows as > a result of the actions of cells but it isn't just a big lump of cells. I > know you know > that as a neuroscience guy but I don't know how well you know that and I > don't > accept expertise on the part of others until I see evidence of it. Well, you can always call me a theoretical neuroscientist. I know about the brain structure, but the closest I get is looking over the shoulders of experimenters doing rat brain slice work. Brain tissue is terribly complex and labyrinthine, and I think standard cryo suspensions do nasty things to it. That is why I'm not so much of a believer of bodily cryonic revival but rather in uploading - I can see how that could in principle be done, and it is even possible to get down to gritty details already to callibrate our predictions. (actually, I really ought to be working on that paper right now) > I don't think its (organs like kidneys have been done). I'd want to see a > peer > reviewed journal to give it (say a kidney thawing) credit as having been > really > been done because scientists too are excellent at kidding themselves. > Thats > why peer review matters it helps take out the garbage. Sure. We all want peer reviewed studies of our favorite fields. Cryonics suffers because it is proactive. If the neanderthals had foreseen genomics they might have preserved some of their DNA for future testing (let's say in amber or by putting it into glacier caves). Tens of thousands of years later genomics might indeed scan the DNA as desired, finding whatever answers once desired ("Is Groo really the son of Ugh?") But a neanderthal critic would of course have been able to both criticise the project on the grounds of the faith in genomics and in the assumption that amber or glacier caves were a good way of going about it - even if those assumptions (in this thought experiment) were entirely right. Would that have made Ughs paternity test project irrational (beside the issue that he would never know the answer, but lets assume he felt there was a good reason anyway)? It doesn't seem so. Faith in future genomics may be impossible to prove, but one can develop methods that are the best possible given one's technology to preserve tissue. They may very well have other good spinoffs (imagine the neanderthals inventing the ice box and then the refrigerator 40,000 years ago) and may in any case not be a huge drain of resources from stone science and spear ballistics. We are in a better position than the neanderthals because we have a bit better information about the effects of our suspension methods, the physiology of tissues, can do simple experiments etc. It is still a very uncertain research project, that is true, but it doesn't strike me as inherently irrational. > Though we can grow cells in quantity in E.coli, we can't build as opposed > to > growing a just a single frozen cell. A growing cell can preserve the > integrity > of mitochondrial membranes. You can't do that working from the outside > to built the membrane. Hmm, suppose you were putting down phospholipids in a matrix of vitrified water, starting from the bottom and adding layer after layer. Why couldn't you just print the inner membrane? It would be just like the 3d printing of the nested spheres in the middle of this page: http://www.georgehart.com/rp/rp.html > We can produce in vitro cell free systems to do research on. We can create > liposomes - lipid enclosed spheres that aren't cells. But we can't create > a > living cell as a manufacturing process. No, not yet. But unless you believe in vitalism, you would agree that is *somehow* the molecules making up a cell were just placed in the right pattern it would become a living cell, right? Now it is just up to us arguing that it can be done to show that it is possible to achieve this using a physical system, and for the people arguing that it is likely to be done to show why such a system is likely. > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell > that > was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. We don't even > know that much in principle yet. Or even that it was a cell. I'm pretty convinced that it was more akin to a ribozyme. >> Cells are pretty robust (otherwise they wouldn't survive, and >> temperature changes and thermal noise would instantly kill them), so you >> only need to get close enough to the attractor state(s) that correspond >> to >> a working cell to get it to spontaneously do the final pieces of >> selforganisation. > > "only" "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" :-) > > So talk to me like a cell biologist. Tell me your protocol or point me to > a peer reviewed paper. > > "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" sounds like > believer psuedo-explanation handwaving to me. I am a computational biologist. At best I can explain my thinking and results to you, but I dont do "protocols" and attractor states are my bread and butter. A bilayer is an attractor state in the configuration space of phospholipid molecules in water (e.g. see S.J. Marrink, E. Lindahl, O. Edholm, and A. Mark. Simulation of the spontaneous aggregation of phospholipids into bilayers. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 123:8638-8639, 2001. ) Membrane biophysics is not my field, but I'm pretty certain there are characterizations of how far lipids can be displaced before the structure breaks. And I know there are molecular dynamics simulations of membranes (such as the one above) that would allow you to experiment with jittering their positions. So unless it has already been done, there is a nice paper in characterizing the probability of reforming properly from different levels of positional (and rotational) uncertainty. In fact, one could also try changing the simulation temperature to see if there is any phase transitions or other troubles if one starts with a vitrified ice state and move up to physiological temperature (I'd love to do that paper if I had the time, simulator and some more expertise). [In fact, given results such as the animation at the bottom of http://www.memphys.sdu.dk/~besold/research.html a more proper characterization would be: does this organisation happen fast enough to not cause significant leaks or topological defects of the membrane. ] Locations of biomolecules is an interesting chapter. Given the rapid diffusion of most small molecules and proteins not bound to anything, they can essentially be put in the right compartment and they will extremely quickly spread out. More care is needed for membrane-bound molecules that have to be placed on the right membranes and macromolecular structures such as microtubuli. My guess is that it is the later that are going to be the most troublesome objects to reconstruct. Again, if it has not been done yet it is not a terribly hard research project to characterize how much noise in position these structures can handle, and how quickly they relax into correct (or incorrect) configurations. Cells are stable to thermal noise and other minor distortions due to e.g. mild sound waves. Most of this I would expect is because of the bilayers. To me it makes sense to regard a living cell as a particular set of points in the configuration space of all its molecules. We know small deviations from this set like an indentation of the membrane will relax away, so it is an attracting set. What needs to be characterized is the distance to the boundaries of the basin of attraction for this set: if an intervention or recreation manages to stay within that distance from the "true" cell it will converge back to the proper state. > You say that as though you have done it. But you haven't actually done it > have you. Had you done it you'd have had a lead paper in Science and > Nature. Them's fighting words. Let's race you to the cover? :-) > That sort of handwaving is highly characteristic of what transhumanists > do when they prentend to actually discuss technology. It works to give > the illusion of knowledge without demonstrating any. It poo poos whats > necessary to be done without either demonstrating that it has been > done and without giving a protocol that demonstrates that it can be > done even in principle. Have you seen Nick Szabo's essay on falsifiable designs? http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/02/falsifiable-design-methodology-for.html I think he has a good idea for an antidote. >>To have a realistic chance of doing it right you first need to have >> scanned >> a cell, > > With current technology, cryo EM one can't scan a single cell. You scan > lots of them and get an aggregated averaged out picture. Fair warning > handwaving about future technology will prompt me to want to see what you > know about the relevant small scale physics. I think cryo EM is changing quite rapidly, and given some of the references I'm adding to my paper it seems that making pretty good 3D models of single cells is within the near future. The biggest problem is that EM cannot distinguish protein types, and that is of course what we really want. Would you think Raman spectroscopy would enable that? >> picking it apart molecule by molecule and recording the locations and >> type. If that can be done piling them together seems to be equally hard. > > > I disagree. I think it is much much harder. I even think it is impossible. > Because > you have to get your manufacturing fingers around the cell clusters whilst > the > cells in the centre of the cluster have to be at the right temperature to > act like > cells and bind to the other cells. My assumption was -170 C. It seems that your view is that cells at this temperature do not correspond to viable cells at all? > Your brain and mine would at one level be variations on the theme of homo > sapiens male brains. But what makes me me and you you is in the > nanoscale details. Knowing how to build Bretts brain as a manufacturing > process wouldn't give you an algorithm for building an Anders brain. At > the > nanoscale where the synapse make their connections our individual brains > would be too different. Sure. The differences are actually far larger than nanoscale, you can see different folding patterns even in twin brains. >> Maybe it would be worthwhile doing a careful critique of nanoscale >> dissassemblers? > > Biological or theoretical? What nanoscale dissassemblers are you > talking about? Theoretical. Since many of the wilder projects discussed here tend to be based on the assumption that they can work, clearly analysing the underlying assumptions and constraints would help constrain the handwaving. > That I think is ultimately what transhumanism is. Its not the successor to > humanism its a cultural support system for cryonicists and technological > religious types that can't find salvation in the normal religions. Thats > why > transhumanism doesn't produce anything except writers and entertainers > - although individual transhumanists do produce some things those things > are > in their capacities as people not as transhumanists. That is an interesting criticism. And one that I actually agree with to some extent. However, I'm much more hopeful about the usefulness of transhumanism. > The wheels came off the transhumanist movement when transhumanists did > not take a strong enough stand when US political conservatives turned into > religious regressives. Actually, that might have been the breakthrough. Because it made bioethicists much more transhumanist, and that will make a major change in policy and funding in the long run. > >> That a lot of entropy is being pushed around (making unordered atoms >> into >> an ordered cell) adds a bit to the heat problem, but can still be >> managed >> by slowing things down or dividing the workpieces so that radiating the >> entropy into the environment is easy. > > No offense Anders but conversation needs a lot more credibility > established > before we can do the handwavey stuff. Excuse me, but where is the handwaving *here*? You might slap my fingers on cell biology, but it seems pretty strange that you find *these* statements handwaving. Or do you think that Brillouin's inequality or the various heat laws do not apply? >> That molecules are dancing around isn't an enormous problem at -170, >> since the cryonic brain is essentially a crystal lattice with thermal >> vibrations are on the order of 0.01 nm. > > The resolution of electron microscopes are about 2 nanometres from memory > perhaps 0.2. Its not the state of the brain when frozen as a block of > tissue > thats the (or rather a) problem its that each brain is so massively unique > in > its arborial structures to very low resolutions. Lipid bilayers are only > around > 6 nanometres thick and if the bilayers are breached the ions leak and the > organelle will not work. You have to be able to manufacture to place your > lipids to that degree of precision whilst keeping the heat out that would > change > the chemistry of the lipids. It can't be done not. Hmm, and why shouldn't I start to accuse you of handwaving and asking you to refer to peer reviewed papers here? It is one thing to state that it looks very unlikely, another to categorically state that it cannot. The latter actually suggests some kind of scientific evidence against the possibility. Now, our big disagreement really seems to be the constructability of bilayers. I say they probably can be put together according to fairly complex specifications by working a LN temperatures and then thawing, you say it cannot be done. Maybe we should start a separate thread to actually hash it out freshly, stating assumptions and all that? [ this paper seems relevant, but I haven't found the full text yet: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=2DB1538444172C5407EB5A708E22DA6E.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=365124 ] > Nature grows her brains as one-offers > she > doesn't manufacture them and she doesn't build in service laneways for > repair. > That we do know. And my approach would be to add layer after layer rather than trying to go from the outside in. > Granted. I ranted. We all do. Sometimes it is useful. > You ask other questions in your post which are fair ones and I drafted > answers > to them but I can't spend more time on this right now so I'll post this > much. Same here, but I mean the thing about a thread on bilayers. As I said, not my main area of expertise but likely cruicial for a lot of arguments here. > I'm studying cell biology currently. Actually I should be writting up my > research > project. I mostly interested in seeing what you have under the bonnet as > a > neuroscientist rather than as a ethical philosopher anyway. Right now I get to do neuroscience to some extent, since I'm preparing a review of what we know today for a workshop on the feasibility of uploading. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Tue Apr 17 12:09:18 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:09:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <20070417120918.GN9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 11:50:35AM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > Okay, let me ask you straight then. I'm not Anders (and backlogged), but. > > Saying you wouldn't call yourself a disbeliever doesn't amount to a > positive > asserting of belief. You could be a sceptic or agnostic on the > matter. Let > me invite you off the fence. Would you classify yourself as a believer > in > cryonics? Cryonics is not a belief system, if not done by cargo cult, so there's no point to call cryobiology people working in cryonics believers than you would call evolutionary biologists believers. > My point about the caveat against believers btw is that believers > reason > differently and argue differently - by differently I mean > fundamentally > dishonestly and evasively. Any pointers towards that? > On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is "definately" > thermodynamically credible? Thermondynamics is a very wide envelope. I can assure you that the structure strain and hence stability is not an issue. What you're probably asking is kinetics, i.e. how to get there. This is indeed a problem, because you need working nanotechnology to build working nanotechnology, so you're facing about the same bootstrap issues life had to work with. > I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers > criticisms of They were not much of criticisms http://www.imm.org/SciAmDebate2/smalley.html I don't have much time to address the issues here, so I won't. > Drexler. Life molecules like proteins assemble in compartments > containing > water. Machine phase chemistry as I understand it is essentially > watery-solution free chemistry. Without a watery solution how do you Yes. > see > machine phase chemistry managing the folding of proteins? You fold them in a water compartment, of course. > >Given that frozen cells can be thawed with viability intact, > > I've frozen and thawed cells. Have you? Yes. We're not talking about freezing, but devitrification of systems deposited (think of it as a rapid prototyping device depositing the organims in layers, not atomically). You print the system around a fractal heat exchanger/heater, in vitrified state, but without cryopreservatives. You never have to freeze, only to devitrify. The devitrification rate could be kK to MK/s. > I've not personally frozen embryos but that can be done too, also not > reliably > in the case of a single embryo, as I understand - but that we (people, > scientists) > can do it at all speaks to the robustness of life in *simple* forms > and yet says > nothing at all about the freezing of organs like brains. We can't do Check out http://www.21cm.com/index.stm > organs. I think > I recall Eugen saying Greg Fahy is interested in that (perhaps > kidneys). It is Greg is interested in many things, brains especially. But you have to follow certain conventions. You can't transplant brains, but you can kidneys. Once you have done a kidney, that's a nice validation, and you are free to move on to more challenging and interesting systems. > important to get that the brain is an organ of a multicellular life > form. It grows as > a result of the actions of cells but it isn't just a big lump of > cells. I know you know > that as a neuroscience guy but I don't know how well you know that and > I don't > accept expertise on the part of others until I see evidence of it. What we've seen from vitrified rabbit brain so far, it looks very good. I reserver my judgment until further data comes in. > I don't think its (organs like kidneys have been done). I'd want to > see a peer > reviewed journal to give it (say a kidney thawing) credit as having > been really > been done because scientists too are excellent at kidding themselves. > Thats > why peer review matters it helps take out the garbage. You should read more Cryobiology, Cryo Letters, and similiar publications. > Though we can grow cells in quantity in E.coli, we can't build as > opposed to > growing a just a single frozen cell. A growing cell can preserve the > integrity > of mitochondrial membranes. You can't do that working from the outside > to built the membrane. I don't know what the issue is (why would one want to build vitrified tissue, to resurrect monkeys? For what purpose, circus amusement?), but you can deposit any biological structure layer by layer, or assemble from such prebuilt blocks by convergent assembly. > We can produce in vitro cell free systems to do research on. We can > create > liposomes - lipid enclosed spheres that aren't cells. But we can't > create a > living cell as a manufacturing process. Yes, I agree without nanotechnology you're sorely pressed to bootstrap a live cell from scratch. Viruses are much easier. > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell > that > was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. We don't > even > know that much in principle yet. It's quite likely that there's enough fossil molecular fragments in very old sediments left that we can get a more or less good idea of how early life looked like. I still don't understand how that relates to cryonics, though. > "only" "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" :-) > > So talk to me like a cell biologist. Tell me your protocol or point me > to > a peer reviewed paper. > > "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" sounds like > believer psuedo-explanation handwaving to me. I suggest looking at synthetic biology folks, and Venter's latest venture. He's by no means there yet, but a primitive life form appears quite doable. > > That you need a lot of information to place the macromolecules right > and > > get the right concentrations of small molecules is just messy brute > force > > issues. > > You say that as though you have done it. But you haven't actually done > it > have you. Had you done it you'd have had a lead paper in Science and > Nature. In future, there will be. This list is not a peer reviewed publication, but a place to brainstorm your ideas. They have to be reasonably plausible, however. > I know something about in vitro cell free systems but I don't know > what > you know. Show me that you know something relevant. > > That sort of handwaving is highly characteristic of what > transhumanists > do when they prentend to actually discuss technology. It works to give > the illusion of knowledge without demonstrating any. It poo poos whats > necessary to be done without either demonstrating that it has been > done and without giving a protocol that demonstrates that it can be > done even in principle. As someone who has produced a number of ideas which over the course of almost three decades became reality, I have absolutely no issues with *informed* speculation. > Transhumanists talk about technology with the same disrespect for the > difference between actual and real as religious people. Please don't mistake us with the cargo cult folks. That's the basement, third corridor left. > > See it as a ridiculously detailed form of 3D printing, where you > want > > to write prepared molecules into a matrix of frozen water. > > Handwaving. Show me a paper or a protocol. You're asking of Wrights pre-flight of a travel agency glossy. No sir, we do not offer flights to Sao Paulo yet. We're trying to get off the ground first. Please come back in a half a century, or so. Inkjet printing has been become quite good recently, and I could see a prototype which deposits a few hundred or thousand layers of some 20-odd types of ink on a cryogenic platform. But this is still a fair distance from squirting cytosol from a nanotube onto a platform. > >To have a realistic chance of doing it right you first need to have > scanned > > a cell, > > With current technology, cryo EM one can't scan a single cell. You > scan With current technology, we can assemble a single neuron or scan an entire (1 kCell) animal from serial sections, with lots of manual work. While automation would improve this, there are promising alternatives (Cryo AFM, vaccum sublimation and excimer UV contrasting, fs laser ablation). > lots of them and get an aggregated averaged out picture. Fair warning > handwaving about future technology will prompt me to want to see what > you > know about the relevant small scale physics. Um, this is not a business plan and not a research grant application. I don't see why you're insisting to troll so hard here. If you want to put a distance from the fringe, and assert your place as a mainstream scientist, I can send you some made-up document which proves we've expelled you, because you were not worthy of partake of the Koolaid, and hitch a ride on the UFO behind the comet. > > > picking it apart molecule by molecule and recording the locations > and > > type. If that can be done piling them together seems to be equally > hard. > > I disagree. I think it is much much harder. I even think it is > impossible. Because > you have to get your manufacturing fingers around the cell clusters > whilst the > cells in the centre of the cluster have to be at the right temperature > to act like > cells and bind to the other cells. And once they are like that they > will start to > die faster than your manufacturing fingers can build more cells onto > the seed > cells. You seem to have gone away from cryogenic assembly to in-vivo assembly. That's a very different animal, and rather more challenging. I would address it by build a retractable 3d scaffold with transport capacities, build tissue on it by transporting individual cells in, and then retrcting, creating the result to compact spontaneously. I have no idea whether this would work, but it's a straightforward idea. > But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Putting together any old cell, > (assembling > it like a manufacturing process not growing it like in cell culture) Why not taking cells from a cell culture, or from a live person, or one from cryogenic assembly? > rebuilding a > single celled organism say that functions like a single celled > organism, (eats, > moves, divides to replicate) - that would be the Science or Nature > paper of the > year in which it was done. I wish I had an issue of Science a century from now (assuming, I would be able to read it, I have a hint I'd need more than a dictionary). > You know something of neuroscience if I recall correctly. What you > know > though in practice I don't know. Please feel free to impress me. Please feel free to stop trolling. If you were a newcomer, at this point you would be on moderation. > Your brain and mine would at one level be variations on the theme of > homo > sapiens male brains. But what makes me me and you you is in the > nanoscale details. Knowing how to build Bretts brain as a > manufacturing > process wouldn't give you an algorithm for building an Anders brain. > At the > nanoscale where the synapse make their connections our individual > brains > would be too different. Yes, sometimes you need submolecular resolution for a numerical model of an animal, if it is to be personally accurate. But this doesn't mean you absolutely need that resolution anterior to posterior. > Anders brain structure isn't in a planned manufactured construction of > Anders genes its far more haphazard than that. Its the result of > one-time > only environmental interrelationships between the Anders genome and > the > environement the Anders genome found itself in as the genome directed > Anders cells to grow, divide and built organs including Anders brain. I agree that you need a genome activity model for modelling animal growth, or even do a long-term simulation. However, I don't think this is necessary at a higher level of theory (built from a more or less brute-force model of live tissue). > > Maybe it would be worthwhile doing a careful critique of nanoscale > > dissassemblers? > > Biological or theoretical? What nanoscale dissassemblers are you > talking about? A set of abstraction reactions, or deconstruction pipelines which pull a tissue apart organelle by organelle molecule by molecule, and look at each functional group and residue individually. > Scientists are doing basic discovery of the machines that are part of > biological systems as part of contemporary science. We are still > trying > to discover at the molecular level how the machinery of the cell works > so Yes. > that we don't have to settle for handwaving pretend knowledge. We No. Speculation is explicitly encouraged here. As long as it stays within limits. > haven't > done it yet. No shit, Sherlock. > > What is the thermodynamical problem you are refering to? > Are you familiar with Smalleys fat and sticky fingers objections to > Drexler? Yes. According to these, a whole number of papers in Science and Nature are completely bogus. We *can* form and break bonds, and even resolve subatomic structures (Si orbitals). > Inside cells, biomolecules, proteins assemble and fold into the right > shapes > in water. Proteins won't fold the way they do out of water. Change Yes, we are aware. > either the > material you are working with, what you are using as proteins and RNAs If you want to resurrect a frozen monkey verbatim, you need to work with the original building blocks, yes. (However, there's not much point in doing so, unless we're contemplating building parts to be inserted by crude surgery). > to > construct your molecular machines, ribosomes, spliceosomes, signal > recognition > particles, various chaperones and enzymes or the watery environment > and you > change the physics and chemistry that is the only physics and > chemistry that we Are you trying to build life, or build a model of life? These are very different goals. > know works because not because we understand it at molecular detail > yet. > > We do know that you need working membrane bilayers for cells to work. > You > can't have working membrane bilayers if the bilayers are breached and > the > ions inside can get outside. This isn't a problem when organisms grow One of the mechanisms of chilling injury are leaky cells. This is the reason why you have to traverse the unfriendly terrain quickly. In terms of nanoprinted systems, you only have to do it one way, and don't have the issues of dealing with high molality of toxic chemicals. > as > they start out as a few cells that do the manufacturing of later cells > working > from inside the membrane bilayers. The chemistry of lipids doesn't > allow you > to have working bilayers below normal temperatures for life. Having to Yes, frozen critters are not alive. But warmed critters are. > do > your manufacturing from the outside doesn't allow you to have unbroken > lipid layers as its the lipid layers around organelles that you are > having to > build in the first place because you are manufacturing not growing the > cells. Not at all. You can build arbitrary shapes by depositing layer by layer. It's what rapid prototyping is all about. > > I can see a heat problem from lots of nanosystems working, so they > have to > > be cooled and/or slowed down - which may make the process very slow. > > Dunno what you mean. Only working nanoSYSTEMS I know of are biological > ones the others are purely speculative (fanciful even). You're typing this in a machine with working nanosystems. Feature size is down to 45 nm this year. 16 nm is due 2018, assuming easy sailing. > > Merkle's paper suggested a three year process of scanning and > > rebuilding. > I'm assuming you are referring to the Molecular Repair of the Brain. > Merkle's > paper was gently worked over by Fahy who apparently knows what a > science > paper looks like and wasn't so frustrated with Merkle that he gave up > on him. > The kindest thing I will say about that paper is it isn't good enough, > it isn't > structured enough, to be even usefully wrong. Fahy didn't critique > Merkles > mess which would have required him to rewrite it first - he just > rewrote a > better one. I agree that it's a bad paper. FWIW, I had some heated arguments with Merkle about certain damage modes in cryonics, which I've seen in person, and which he vigoriosly denied existed, based on theoretical grounds. As a practical chemist and molecular biology person (latter just the usual lab courses, no original research) I am frequently very impatient and frustrated with computer science people, too. So we're very much on the same page here. > Because folks like Robert and Eugen kept referring to the Merkle paper I didn't. If I ever knowingly did, I apologize, and retract that referral. > I thought > before reading it that as a service to fellow students or truth > seekers I might read > it and give a critique, but I gave it up as a task that I'd have to be > paid to do > because the Merkle paper was so poorly structured and because I > couldn't trust > that he'd been honest with his referencing. From memory I think I > discovered mistakes > in his referencing that looked to be not just mistakes but blatant > misrepresentations > of the sort that lose scientists their credibility. I've had the same > experience > reading some of Freitas stuff - where he misrepresents the views of > his critics, > but less so. Really? I would like to see a few pointers to that. > When one encounters works that look like pseudoscience like say > intelligent > design, one has to be careful about providing criticism that can be > used to make > the pseudoscience stronger. Drexlerian nanotech and cryonics are in my > opinion > in the same sort of pseudoscience camp as intelligent design. The > believers so > much want to believe that they only collect facts and criticisms that > help them > make the superstructures of their beliefs more solid. That's a value statement, not a point of critique. > Its like what is really going on is that a bunch of tech savvy don't > want to die > folk have gotten together into a sort of group religion where they > reinforce each > others rationalisations and shore up each others hopes. But the > science doesn't > go anywhere it is pseudoscience in fact because there isn't enough > honest > criticism and honest truthseeking in the enterprise. The desire to > find a technical > solution to death drives the psychology of the folk involved. Its > like a bunch of > engineers got struck by the religion lightening bolt, had too much > engineering > savvy to fall for the conventional religions and so had to invent one > of their own. We're just trying to actually deliver a product widely advertised by all world religions. Don't deny there's demand for it. Boy there's demand for it, especially after we'll get our first Lazarus animal. > That I think is ultimately what transhumanism is. Its not the > successor to > humanism its a cultural support system for cryonicists and > technological > religious types that can't find salvation in the normal religions. > Thats why > transhumanism doesn't produce anything except writers and entertainers > - although individual transhumanists do produce some things those > things are > in their capacities as people not as transhumanists. I'm sorry, but this is entirely bogus. As long as a person actually does something in the mainstream, he stops being a transhumanist? Because transhumanists are only the ineffectual mental masturbation circle? Transhumanism is a value system. Many mainstream scientists are transhumanists, without even having heard of the label once. > The wheels came off the transhumanist movement when transhumanists did > not take a strong enough stand when US political conservatives turned > into > religious regressives. But I am digressing. This whole post is largely a digression. You started with cryonics not ever working, then nanotechnology not ever working, then accused transhumanists of being limp-wristed pseudoscientist cargo-cult type folks, and then we're also the culprit for some country's administration. (Me, I'm not even to blame for the Ferkel). > > That a lot of entropy is being pushed around (making unordered atoms > into > > an ordered cell) adds a bit to the heat problem, but can still be > managed > > by slowing things down or dividing the workpieces so that radiating > the > > entropy into the environment is easy. > > No offense Anders but conversation needs a lot more credibility > established > before we can do the handwavey stuff. Anders is way too busy with some other stuff right now, so don't expect him to spend a lot of time for convincing a troll. > Time and again Drextech folk point at biological systems and say see > biology > is nanotech. If nature can do it we can do it only better. That's not an unreasonable thing to say, given the estimates. > But scientists are still learning at the molecular detail how nature > does what > it does. We are still in discovery phase with respect to natures > machinery. No disagreement. But nanotechnology is not molecular biology. It is much simpler in many respects. > It is religious-like faith to presume that (a) we know all we really > need to > know about how nature has made its biological machines work and (b) > that > we can replace those organic machines which operate within > physiological > temperature ranges with non-organic machines which don't and yet which > we want to do the same sort of things with. We actually have some of these machines. They're just terribly bulky, and take a skilled human operator. Nanorobotics has hardly started yet, so give it some more time. > The resolution of electron microscopes are about 2 nanometres from > memory > perhaps 0.2. Its not the state of the brain when frozen as a block of > tissue > thats the (or rather a) problem its that each brain is so massively > unique in > its arborial structures to very low resolutions. Lipid bilayers are > only around > 6 nanometres thick and if the bilayers are breached the ions leak and > the > organelle will not work. You have to be able to manufacture to > place your > lipids to that degree of precision whilst keeping the heat out that > would change > the chemistry of the lipids. It can't be done not. Not at the scale of Do you think that building a vesicle in vitrified state by laying down the lipids one by one in a water glass matrix can't be done? Which particular heat sources do you expect from such molecular deposition? > something > as large as the brain which doesn't have room within itself for > accessing service Yes, in vivo stuff is really hairy. You need to severely expand the volume, which will provide enough material for anime. > bots. Nature didn't do it like that. Nature grows her brains as > one-offers she > doesn't manufacture them and she doesn't build in service > laneways for repair. > That we do know. All very true, and very irrelevant. > Granted. I ranted. > > You ask other questions in your post which are fair ones and I drafted > answers > to them but I can't spend more time on this right now so I'll post > this much. I also have no time for this, but let me summarize: none of your critique points are new. I had many of these myself. A lot of what you consider unsurmountable obstacles are actually engineering constraints: if it hurts, you're doing things wrong. So don't do things that way, try something that works. > I'm studying cell biology currently. Actually I should be writting up > my research > project. I mostly interested in seeing what you have under the bonnet > as a > neuroscientist rather than as a ethical philosopher anyway. What you have shown is under you bonnet, does not impress me so far. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Tue Apr 17 15:56:13 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:56:13 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] ping Message-ID: <20070417155613.GA27149@leitl.org> If you're reading this message, you should not be reading this message. From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Apr 17 16:09:47 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:09:47 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1256.163.1.72.81.1176826187.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Jef Allbright wrote: >> > How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? Aristoi - Walter John Williams Cosmos - Carl Sagan G?del, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Mind Children - Hans Moravec Neverness - David Zindell Permutation City - Greg Egan The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - Barrow and Tipler The Transparent Society - David Brin > It would be wonderful if any and all who engage in discussions of > personal identity were familiar with Reasons and Persons, but I was > disappointed at what I perceive as Parfit's reluctance to fully > embrace the implications of his own work. Such tentativeness seems to > distinguish your thinking from mine as well. I suspect it is more a > matter of temperament than philosophy, assuming you must be (I)NTP on > the MTBI, while I'm INTJ. Hmm, which implications would that be? If you have a list, I could try to talk to him about them (he is literally one flight of stairs upstairs from me). -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Tue Apr 17 21:42:49 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:42:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <385570.5038.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <712382.84564.qm@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> As a side question: I know that it is still generally unresolved in physics whether or not space/time is continuous or if it is discrete. Would an appropriate hyothetical description of "continuous" space/time be that the fundamental units are infinitely small? If the units were smaller than infinitely small, would that not force that they cannot exist, period? If that were the case, and continous space/time can appropriately be described as consisting of infinitely small units, wouldn't that allow for a conceptual duality regarding the nature of space/time? Ie. It could be considered either (or both) continuous *and/or* discrete. Just to rephrase, it could be considered continuous because the fundamental units are infinitely small. And, it could be considered discrete based on the fact that it could in theory be counted using the rational "Natural" (AKA "Counting") numbers, provided that the "action" of counting continued into the infinite future. Or, I could be totally, ass-backwards wrong about that. Does anyone know? Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From pharos at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 22:29:33 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:29:33 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > Indeed, there are countries that are likely to suffer a net loss as a > result of warming. I am not familiar with any credible (i.e. produced > by professional economists and published in economics journals) > estimates of the worldwide impact. It is important to note that the > regions most likely to gain are the arid and semiarid regions - the > primary mechanism of the beneficial effect of CO2 fertilization is the > reduction of transpiration from leaves. If there is a lot of CO2 in > the air, plants can absorb all they need while keeping their stomata > partially closed, which leads to less evaporation. So, surprisingly, a > lot of hot places will be better off too. > Quote: As the world warms, water - either too little or too much of it - is going to be the major problem for the United States, scientists and military experts said Monday. It will be a domestic problem, with states clashing over controls of rivers, and a national security problem as water shortages and floods worsen conflicts and terrorism elsewhere in the world, they said. At home, especially in the Southwest, regions will need to find new sources of drinking water, the Great Lakes will shrink, fish and other species will be left high and dry, and coastal areas will on occasion be inundated because of sea-level rises and souped-up storms, U.S. scientists said. The scientists released a 67-page chapter on North American climate effects, which is part of an international report on climate change impact. Meanwhile, global-warming water problems will make poor, unstable parts of the world - the Middle East, Africa and South Asia - even more prone to wars, terrorism and the need for international intervention, a panel of retired military leaders said in a separate report. "Water at large is the central (global warming) problem for the U.S.," Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said after a press conference featuring eight American scientists who were lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate-effects report. BillK From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Wed Apr 18 00:05:16 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:05:16 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <02d101c7814d$3ea84af0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 4/17/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell > > that was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. > > We don't even know that much in principle yet. > > > Maybe, but unless it was a miracle, science should be able to > reproduce it. I was going to say there'd be a Nobel prize in the acheivement but its actually a much bigger deal than that. In Pasteur's time there was a doctrine, started by his work, that life only comes from life. The ghosts of Pasteur and Darwin would probably stand up and salute the scientist that could demonstrate the creation of a living cell without using another living cell. Its important in science and technology to be honest about what one doesn't know. Without that honesty current ignorance is not remediable. On the other hand if all one is looking for is to shore up belief then lots of handwaving and pseudo-explanation will attract other believers to one and one can huddle together with them and feel just fine until reality runs over you. I don't believe in gods or miracles. I'm a Bright. I have a question for you Stathis. Why are you confident that science (ie. scientists) should be able to do what nature did? Based on your "maybe" above, it seems you don't even know if I am telling you the truth or not - and if I was lying you probably could have found that out with a google search wouldn't you think? Are you a scientist, a truthseeker yourself, or do you look to scientists (other people) as a sort of priest substitute to reassure you that all is fine so you don't have to worry ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Wed Apr 18 03:56:26 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:56:26 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] test References: <004401c77d98$23408380$6501a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <1c9801c7816d$a3b64bc0$0200a8c0@Nano> test -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 17 13:37:22 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:37:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: On 4/16/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: I know you asked Anders, but... > Would you classify yourself as a believer in cryonics? > I would argue that if you cannot make a reasonable case that the information content is completely destroyed, as would be the case say with cremation, then at some point we will have the technology to recover it. Your question is unclear as to whether you want cryonics to simply preserve the information content or whether you expect it to lead to a full recovery of the original biological body with most (or all) of the original atoms or molecules where they were before undergoing cryonics. My point about the caveat against believers btw is that believers reason > differently and argue differently - by differently I mean fundamentally > dishonestly and evasively. > I would argue that is a misstatement. I think there are probably only about a dozen people, at most a few dozen, in the world who have the depth of knowledge required for an *informed* discussion of the topic. Others aren't so much arguing dishonestly or evasively but from a simple lack of knowledge. On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is "definately" > thermodynamically credible? > On the basis that *ALL* of biology is assembled molecule by small molecule. (Drexler effectively argued this in his 1981 PNAS paper that most people haven't read.) The use of the term "machine phase chemistry" is ill-defined. What are DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and the ribosome if they are not machines conducting chemistry!?! (And if you don't know what they are and how they work go look them up in Wikipedia or Google. Go read [1], and then come back to the discussion. What I think you mean to take issue with is precision general purpose molecular assembly which is somewhat different from what is done in biology. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, Drexler *never* said that you could assemble anything and everything -- he said that there were a lot of things that you could assemble which cannot be assembled which could not be assembled using current methods. (And the entire history of chemistry over the last 100 years is a fairly clear demonstration of that.) I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticisms of > Drexler. > I assume you know that Smalley's criticisms are a decade or more old and haven't done a recent PubMed article review using the keyword "nanoassembly" or "nanoassemblies" and are unaware of [2]. Life molecules like proteins assemble in compartments containing water. Machine > phase chemistry as I understand it is essentially watery-solution free > chemistry. Without a watery solution how do you see machine phase > chemistry managing the folding of proteins? > Not really. It is "free radical based" chemistry that would be difficult to do in water (or many other solutions). A primary reason "water" is undesirable other than the fact that it would interfere with free radical based chemistry is that it is a solid below 32C. There is nothing preventing one from doing mechanical assembly in say LN2 or LH2 or LHe. The lower temperatures reduce the inaccuracies due to thermal motion of the molecules. To quote directly from Nanosystems, Section 1.2.2a: - A machine-phase system is one in which all atoms follow controlled trajectories (within a range determined in part by thermal excitation). - Machine-phase chemistry describes the chemical behavior of machine-phase systems, in which all potentially reactive moieties follow controlled trajectories. There is no problem (at least in my mind) for assembling proteins (or nucleic acids) at low temperatures in non-water based solutions (I would love to know what fraction of enzymes still function properly in cooled liquid ammonia (or how difficult it would be to evolve them)). If you want proteins (which are sequences of amino acids) to "fold" properly then you have to put them into the environment (water + temperature) for which they evolved. Even then some proteins will not fold properly without the assistance of other proteins such as heat shock factors and chaperonins. I've frozen and thawed cells. Have you? > I made cooked some frozen vegetables the other night, does that count? I think as a child I also may have fed frozen brine shrimp to my tropical fish. Don't know if I thawed them to bring them back to life however. (Just as an FYI, since I'm doing research on it now, there are a number of species of both plants and animals, including brine shrimp, tardigrades and rotifers which can be dessicated and/or frozen and thawed and survive quite well after such "death" events. In mammals the best example may be arctic ground squirrels which allow their temperatures to drop to near freezing for extended periods during the winter.) I've not personally frozen embryos but that can be done too, also not > reliably > in the case of a single embryo, as I understand - but that we (people, > scientists) > can do it at all speaks to the robustness of life in *simple* forms and > yet says > nothing at all about the freezing of organs like brains. > It is unclear from any studies I've seen whether it is the freezing & thawing that destroys the embryos or whether the embryos were non-viable in the first place. You have to bear in mind that 60-70% of natural conceptions seem to result in miscarriages. Those eggs & sperm are not "perfect" in from the get-go. We can't do organs. I thinkI recall Eugen saying Greg Fahy is interested in > that (perhaps kidneys). > I'd suggest you do a PubMed search on "Fahy GM [AU]" and read his paper from ~2003-6. It is important to get that the brain is an organ of a multicellular life > form. It grows as > a result of the actions of cells but it isn't just a big lump of cells. I > know you know > that as a neuroscience guy but I don't know how well you know that and I > don't > accept expertise on the part of others until I see evidence of it. > The brains of tardigrades and rotifers aren't as big as ours but they survive freezing and thawing. The caveat would be that their genomes have evolved to allow that. Though we can grow cells in quantity in E.coli, we can't build as opposed to > growing a just a single frozen cell. A growing cell can preserve the > integrity > of mitochondrial membranes. You can't do that working from the outside > to built the membrane. > Actually, I've got some very large rhododendrons out in front of my house and I'm reasonably certain that in spite of the fact that their leaves all froze several times this winter that their cells (and mitochondria and chloroplasts) will be fine in a couple of weeks. We can produce in vitro cell free systems to do research on. We can create > liposomes - lipid enclosed spheres that aren't cells. But we can't create > a > living cell as a manufacturing process. > Perhaps not, but there are parasites which inhabit human cells, e.g. Toxoplasma gondii which have ~80 megabase genomes which is probably enough for replacing a significant part of the human genome in human cells should it become severely damaged. (No need to wait for chromallocytes when you can start building genome patches today (if one has enough imagination and $$$)) [3]. So talk to me like a cell biologist. Tell me your protocol or point me to a > peer reviewed paper. > I don't understand the emphasis on creating a "synthetic cell". Why is this necessary? Its much simpler to reprogram existing cells and deliver them where needed (e.g. enhanced genome stem cell therapy). More importantly if you are going to develop "real" cryonic suspension reanimation methods one probably wants precision delivery of proteins and genetic materials so one is talking complex forms of gene therapy -- not synethetic cell therapy. > > See it as a ridiculously detailed form of 3D printing, where you want > > to write prepared molecules into a matrix of frozen water. > > Handwaving. Show me a paper or a protocol. > There are a number of published peer reviewed papers on 3D printing of cells onto various matrices and having them grow into functional biological systems. I believe one of the more recent involved the growing of heart valves. The printing of molecules is more complex and we do not yet have print heads capable of that level of resolution. AFMs have the positioning accuracy required and there is no reason to believe we can't produce tips (or ink jets) capable of spitting out a few molecules at a time. There is no financial driver at this time to produce these methods. In part because organ transplants are still expensive and risky propositions. Even if you were able to manufacture (print) or grow new organs they are not an ideal solution. With current technology, cryo EM one can't scan a single cell. You scan > lots of them and get an aggregated averaged out picture. Fair warning > handwaving about future technology will prompt me to want to see what you > know about the relevant small scale physics. > I'd suggest you might want to review [4-7]. I even think it is impossible. Because you have to get your manufacturing > fingers around the cell clusters whilst the cells in the centre of the > cluster have to be at the right temperature to act like > cells and bind to the other cells. And once they are like that they will > start to die faster than your manufacturing fingers can build more cells > onto the seed cells. > Do you think we can't get fingers around something 10 microns in size? Hell we are patterning hundreds of millions of devices at 45nm in microelectronics (and planning to go below 30nm). Do you think hydrogen bonds stop working if you are using them at -190C? Putting a frozen water cell down on a cube of other frozen cells at -190C and getting it to stay where you put it does not sound like a problem to me. Putting a cell filled with liquid N2 down on a cube of cells filled with liquid N2 doesn't sound like a problem either. The tricky part will be replacing the lN2 with lH2O. You might be able to go from N2 to NH4 to H2O but the liquid phases don't overlap unless you subject them to some pressure I would suspect (some I guess some work needs to be done here...). But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Putting together any old cell, > (assembling > it like a manufacturing process not growing it like in cell culture) > rebuilding a > single celled organism say that functions like a single celled organism, > (eats, > moves, divides to replicate) - that would be the Science or Nature paper > of the > year in which it was done. > Its also way beyond the technology we need to have. I would say assembling a eukaryotic cell from scratch would normally come *after* you have assembled the first nanorobot from scratch. Biological or theoretical? What nanoscale dissassemblers are you talking > about? > The biological ones clearly exist. In your stomach, you intestines, certain soil bacteria and particularly fungi have lots of them. Inside cells, biomolecules, proteins assemble and fold into the right > shapes > in water. Proteins won't fold the way they do out of water. > That isn't clear. So long as you have a solvent which will form hydrogen bonds I strongly suspect that at least some proteins will fold properly (there's a PhD thesis or several idea for you...). If you have a folded protein and cool it down it doesn't become "unfolded" (they unfold on heating because the increased atomic motion disrupts the hydrogen bonding which holds them together). Proteins (or membranes) primarily become disrupted on cooling due to crystal growth in the liquids (primarily ice) disrupting the physical structures, potentially in some cases causing covalent bond breakage (but I know most of those covalent bonds aren't broken otherwise my vegetables would have turned to mush when I boiled them on the stove). It is interesting that one of the primary methods used by organisms to resist desiccation is to produce trehalose which appears to form lots of hydrogen bonds with the biological molecules and sheltering them and perhaps allowing them to resist structural distortions during from the removal of the water. > Dunno what you mean. Only working nanoSYSTEMS I know of are biological > ones the others are purely speculative (fanciful even). > The nanoSYSTEMS of antarctic bacteria work down to at least -4C. Though they probably work a bit more slowly than those we commonly encounter. [BIG SNIP -- because I've got limited time to critique emails to the ExICh list] Brett, I am glad that you are studying Cell Biology. Its one of the fields people will need to know to contribute to these efforts in the future. But I think it is reasonable to assume that Anders has studied it as well (as well as god knows how many other subjects). Its only when one has a good grasp of one field that one begins to understand what is required to integrate it with others of equal complexity. That is why Nanosystems will always go down in my book as one of the most brilliant books ever written. Chapter 12 I could easily understand because it was my field of expertise but its taken me more than a decade to begin to understand some of the other areas and the kind of research that went into them. So one can argue against cryonics for a few more decades, perhaps you have the time and energy to do so. Or you can simply ask whether people like Eric D., Marvin M., Ralph M. and Robert F. might be able to connect some insights together better than people who seem to have focused in very narrow areas much of their lives (e.g. Dr. Smalley). Robert 1. Kornberg, A., "DNA Replication" (2005) http://www.amazon.com/Dna-Replication-Arthur-Kornberg/dp/1891389440 2. Hickenboth, C. R. et al, "Biasing reaction pathways with mechanical force," Nature 466:423-427 (22 Mar 2007). 3. Note, I am not suggesting patches onto T. gondii, I am suggesting assembly lines that produce T. gondii packages that deliver largely human genome subsets. If one assumes only 2-2.5% of the 3 gigabase human genome codes for useful sequence (particularly if one is delivering "organ" specific genome subsets), then T. gondii could carry a complete human genome set of genes. 4. "New light microscope sharpens scientists' focus" (10 Aug 2006) http://www.physorg.com/news74439510.html 5. Betzig, E. et al, "Imaging intracellular fluorescent proteins at nanometer resolution," Science 313:1642-5 (15 Sep 2006). 6. "Imaging Transparent Brains" (3 Apr 2007). http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/imaging-transparent-brains/ 7 .Dodt HU et al, "Ultramicroscopy: three-dimensional visualization of neuronal networks in the whole mouse brain," Nat. Meth 4(4):331-6 (Apr 2007). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 17 20:36:40 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:36:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net><00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com><7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> <3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <003d01c78130$38d142c0$36094e0c@MyComputer> A much better question is why is health care so fucking expensive? In 1960 the USA spent 5.2% of GNP on health care; by 2004 it had increased to 16 %, far more than any other country, but Americans are not far healthier than people from other countries. This trend can not continue nor should it. My solution could be summed up in one word "deregulation". You go to the doctor, your appointment is at 10 am so you cool your heals for 3 hours and at 1 pm he kindly deems to grant you an audience, for about 4 minutes. After you kiss his ring you hurriedly tell him your health problem while the doctor looks at his watch and glances at you test results, he then gives you a prescription, a permission to buy a drug, and then he sends you on your way. You then give the doctor a big fee, go to the drug store with your permission slip in your hand, and the doctor buys a Ferrari. This is nuts. Most of the time a nurse or a computer program could diagnose your problem as well as the highly paid doctor. True you could be suffering from some extremely rare bizarre ailment that would take a Sherlock Holms (or a Dr. House) to diagnose, but you know what, you probably aren't. It's possible those tracks were made by a zebra, but they were probably made by a horse. Granted no computer program is (yet) as good at diagnoses as a genius doctor who is willing to devote significant time thinking about it, but I maintain a computer program will give at least as good a diagnosis as you are likely to receive in the real world. I think surgery is the only area where a very skilled human being is still needed, at least for now. So to sum up, ALL prescriptions should be over the counter, including Heroin. John K Clark From hibbert at mydruthers.com Tue Apr 17 05:10:36 2007 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:10:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <462456CC.7050503@mydruthers.com> I pay Blue Cross California $224 every other month. I'm self-employed and healthy. I went for almost the highest deductible they offered. When I was employed in 2004-5, I continued to pay for my private insurance even though I had company coverage. I'd been warned when I hired on that it was going to be a 1 or 2 year gig. It lasted 18 months, and when it was over I was 47 and glad I didn't have to qualify for health coverage again. Chris -- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com Blog: http://pancrit.org From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Tue Apr 17 01:48:24 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:48:24 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle Message-ID: <012301c78092$7c756f40$e7e18f9b@homepc> Max wrote: > Even if we buy into the idea that global warming > is real, significant, sustained, and largely > human-caused, Let me invite you off the fence Max. Do you or don't you Max think global warming is real, significant, sustained and largely human-caused? I don't know much about global warming as I've not been following it closely. Reputable, multiple news sources seems to be reporting that that is the current scientific consensus. They could be wrong but to me as a sort of Bayesian its seems they are together more likely to be right. I respect you as an independent thinker - what do you actually think? I don't know anything about Chief Executive other than what the name suggests to me. (I am definitely no socialist.) Telling a bunch of guys (probably Americans) that may want to deny something that's true in order to shirk their responsibility for doing something about it isn't appealing. It looks like appeasing and kissing up. It looks like cash for comment or curry-favouring towards that. But I could be wrong. I'm just being honest about what it looks like. I would be wrong if you have thought through independently the situation on global warming and are standing up for the truth even if it is unpopular to do so. Brett Paatsch PS. I respect that in the past you have not taken positions in favour of democracy. I hope you would not take a position in favour of fascism and promise breaking. I am concerned that the direction that the US is moving is that way. I think the US could be a couple of generations away from producing the global conditions that will see us become a working instance of the Fermi paradox. Very high technology in the hands of very vengeful tribal mortals that don't care much when they die as long as they can die killing what they oppose. And a lot of them are starting to direct their hate at the US hypocrisy. 300 million people breaking social contracts (real ones -treaties not imaginary ones) with the rest can do that. America is only part of the West not all of it. Outside of America are westerners that if forced to live as second class citizens will fight like Geronimo (or like the US Founders) when treaties are broken and that has not the slightest bit to do with radical Islam or Muhabbism. It has to do with the resentment of undeserved priviledge coupled with broken promises - broken treaties. In a way it is the most natural thing for humans to do when the paths to better ways are blocked by the baseness of others. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 17 08:19:52 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:19:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070417041946.03e30880@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:44 PM 4/15/2007 -0700, you wrote: >Keith writes > > > Think about how hot it gets inside a parked car in the summer > > and you will get an idea of how hard it would be to seal up a > > greenhouse. You could also look up the power bills for cooling > > Biosphere II. > >Why doesn't this furnish a productive energy source? It's not. >That is, the >temperature difference generated between such an enclosure and >the outside sounds as though it could be useful. Awful as it gets inside a closed car in the summer (lethal) it not enough temperature difference to extract much energy. Look up a web page on thermodynamics. Keith From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 18 16:49:32 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:49:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: <1256.163.1.72.81.1176826187.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1256.163.1.72.81.1176826187.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > Jef Allbright wrote: > >> > How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? > > Aristoi - Walter John Williams > Cosmos - Carl Sagan > G?del, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter > Mind Children - Hans Moravec > Neverness - David Zindell > Permutation City - Greg Egan > The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - Barrow and Tipler > The Transparent Society - David Brin Excellent list, disappointing to me only that I've already read them. ;-) > > It would be wonderful if any and all who engage in discussions of > > personal identity were familiar with Reasons and Persons, but I was > > disappointed at what I perceive as Parfit's reluctance to fully > > embrace the implications of his own work. Such tentativeness seems to > > distinguish your thinking from mine as well. I suspect it is more a > > matter of temperament than philosophy, assuming you must be (I)NTP on > > the MTBI, while I'm INTJ. > > Hmm, which implications would that be? If you have a list, I could try to > talk to him about them (he is literally one flight of stairs upstairs from > me). I remember my disappointment with the tentativeness of his conclusions, but after so many years I don't remember the specifics. I just retrieved my copy of the book and upon perusing the table of contents I am surprised anew by its extent. I'm also reminded that nearly any idea that feels original to me has been picked up or synthesized from other sources. I'll review the book and organize my thoughts and get back to you on this as quickly as practical. Who knows, I may find that I see it differently so many years later. Thanks! - Jef From sentience at pobox.com Wed Apr 18 17:20:32 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:20:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <003d01c78130$38d142c0$36094e0c@MyComputer> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net><00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com><7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> <3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> <003d01c78130$38d142c0$36094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <46265360.20701@pobox.com> John K Clark wrote: > > Granted no computer program is (yet) as good at diagnoses as a genius doctor > who is willing to devote significant time thinking about it, but I maintain > a computer program will give at least as good a diagnosis as you are likely > to receive in the real world. As long as you have a nurse to enter the symptoms into the terminal, simple computer programs have been more accurate than human doctors since the 1970s. Humans suck at summating evidence. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Apr 18 17:26:04 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:26:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism? In-Reply-To: <462456CC.7050503@mydruthers.com> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <33266.72.236.102.97.1176766280.squirrel@main.nc.us> <462456CC.7050503@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: <33840.72.236.102.97.1176917164.squirrel@main.nc.us> > I pay Blue Cross California $224 every other month. I'm self-employed > and healthy. I went for almost the highest deductible they offered. > Dang! Every *other* month? And I pay BCBS of NC $268 every month, with the highest deductible they offer, and good health. That goes to show the difference in health insurance in different states, I guess. Geez. Also self employed. And utterly disgusted. I've *never* met a deductible. Ever. In my whole life. For which I am grateful, though a bit resentful... sort of contradictory, that! :))) Regards, MB From iamgoddard at yahoo.com Wed Apr 18 17:14:42 2007 From: iamgoddard at yahoo.com (Ian Goddard) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:14:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity, a Personal Choice? Message-ID: <263800.58670.qm@web52601.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Before exploring the subject-heading theme, let me respond to an important point Randall raises: Randall Randall wrote: >>> Taken literally, the statement "two systems are >>> indistinguishable" is a logical contradiction. >> >> Physics doesn't care a fig about what a monkey >> thinks is a contradiction. >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles > > It seems obvious that this doesn't apply to complex > macroscopic objects like DVDs and people, any more > than the fact that electrons have no "wet" property > can be applied to a bucket of water. There are a > lot of firm statements I'm willing to make about a > cup of coffee on my desk that I freely admit don't > apply to the particles that make up the coffee. > Nor do I think that this means the coffee is > somehow not wet, or the cup is somehow not green. Exactly! Well said! Quantum-physics phenomena that violate classical logic are considered to be confined to subatomic and atomic scales. Is there a quantum physicist who suggests that quantum logic (QL) [1] should be assumed to be applicable on macroscopic scales because it is applicable on subatomic scales? Otherwise, classical logic with Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles provides an effective identity rule (or at least starting point) for the macroscopic-scale questions at hand. [2] But perhaps over & above those considerations... What strikes me these days is a view pointed to by at least one critic of my past efforts to derive ontological conclusions from a purported holistic nature of identity, which is that any logical rule we may have to define 'identity' is merely an algorithm applied by a computational unit like a person to govern the application of names to, and categorization of, observed phenomena. In other words, 'identity' is all in our heads, it's a mental fabrication governed by some construction algorithm and different people may execute different identity algorithms. But a category error arises when we assume that an identity rule reveals ontic truth. That view might explain the never-ending nature of debates about copies of selves by proposing that the 'right theory' of personal identity is ultimately a matter of personal choice because 'identity' per se is a matter of personal construction. As such, the only logical criterion for which indentity rule is the best is which one, when applied, best meets the needs of a given user or set of users. ~Ian http://IanGoddard.net "A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it." Wittgenstein _____________________________________________________ [1] QL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantlog/ [2] http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2006-November/030142.html http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2006-November/030144.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From scerir at libero.it Wed Apr 18 17:49:34 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:49:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] ping References: <20070417155613.GA27149@leitl.org> Message-ID: <004401c781e1$ed539110$78bf1f97@archimede> > If you're reading this message, > you should not be reading this message. But I'm not reading this message. I'm reading the story of the bees here... http://www.synchronizm.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/29/the-bees-who-flew-too-h igh/ and here... Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees. By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross Published: 15 April 2007 It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well. The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives. The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast. CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned. Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK." The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left". No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks. German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines. Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause. Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real." The case against handsets Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up. Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset. Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives. Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting. Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers. From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Wed Apr 18 17:59:59 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:59:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <600974.9049.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Stathis, Stathis wrote: ... "Have I completely misunderstood something?" It's possible, but it would mostly be due to a piss-poor presentation [Or I could just be wrong]. That's not entirely indefensible since I'm finding it really hard to present this argument in a straightforward way. Although it's not conventional, and may even be just plain weird, if the time-units are discrete (rational), then using a fraction with a decreasing denominator is a completely valid way to count-up time. It also is more applicable for these purposes since doing it with a fraction allows you to prespecify (within the number) how long this hypothetical Universe will last. For example, to "test" a Universe with a finite lifespan, I would prespecify it by making the numerator a finite number (like 3). To test a Universe with an infinite lifespan, I would prespecify it by making the numerator positive infinity. You can't do that unless you use fractions. If you insist that time is continuous instead of discrete, then the argument still holds because the passage of 3 infinitely small time-units is not going to allow a Universe with internal observers who can see an advancing age of their Universe. Only a Universe with an infinite number of infinitely small time-units (ie. +Infinity/+Infinity) is going to allow internal observers who can see the passage of time. But the really weird aspect of it is that in an actual +Infinity/+Infinity Universe, the fundamental time-units don't actually have to be infinitely small, they can be a finite size (it might even be variable perhaps), not inconsistent with the Planck-Interval for example. I know that this still probably makes no sense, but it's probably about as well as I can do currently. If you're still curious, ask me about it again in 30 years, after the Singularity. Or at least give me a little more time to learn some physics and cosmology :-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich > > I still find your use of fractions confusing: I > assumed you are talking > about the fraction of the total age of the universe, > but at times you seem > to be talking about fractions of time units as well. > > I can see that if time comes in discrete quanta (my > understanding is that > physicists are divided as to whether this is the > case) you can't really have > a "zero" time, because the first event has to occur > in the first unit. So in > the universe you describe, the first event occurs > during "1", the second > during "2" and the final during "3". There is time > for an observer to > experience 3 states, at most. This would work just > as well in a block > universe cosmology (actually, continuous time would > work just as well in a > block universe, if you just make the time slices > infinitesimally small). > Have I completely misunderstood something? > > Stathis Papaioannou > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 18 18:21:08 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:21:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity, a Personal Choice? In-Reply-To: <263800.58670.qm@web52601.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <263800.58670.qm@web52601.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/18/07, Ian Goddard wrote: > But perhaps over & above those considerations... > > What strikes me these days is a view pointed to by at > least one critic of my past efforts to derive > ontological conclusions from a purported holistic > nature of identity, which is that any logical rule we > may have to define 'identity' is merely an algorithm > applied by a computational unit like a person to > govern the application of names to, and categorization > of, observed phenomena. In other words, 'identity' is > all in our heads, it's a mental fabrication governed > by some construction algorithm and different people > may execute different identity algorithms. But a > category error arises when we assume that an identity > rule reveals ontic truth. Well said. If we could establish this as our baseline, then these discussions could proceed, in light of the commonality of our physical, biological, cultural contexts,.toward pragmatic extrapolations relevant to social issues of social identity, decision-making, responsibility, morality, ownership, justice, etc. All of these hinge on effective understanding of personal identity, which we've unfortunately seen is firmly mired in today's simple "common-sense", even the common-sense of many who consider themselves radical futurists. - Jef From scerir at libero.it Wed Apr 18 18:26:46 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:26:46 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing References: <011f01c7762a$e2fb6a20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002901c776d5$ee89ac20$cb971f97@archimede><002801c7779a$7e5f1d20$c4bf1f97@archimede><000301c77873$9f917270$b2bf1f97@archimede><000301c778fb$a80283d0$1f961f97@archimede><006701c77f82$375fa6c0$51b81f97@archimede> Message-ID: <000401c781e7$20000850$78bf1f97@archimede> > Isn't it obvious that determinism is *required* for the experience of > free will? How meaningless a concept if there were no experience of a > causal link between subjective choice, action, and consequences. > > - Jef Maybe. But note that 'determinism' has a double meaning. One sometimes speaks of systems (or quantum states) that evolve deterministically in time, and such systems (q. states) are contrasted with those systems (q. states) whose temporal evolution is stochastic, or even worse. One sometimes speaks of determinism meaning the definiteness (probability = 0 or 1) of the predicted outcome of the possible observation (measurement) performable on a system (or q. state) while it is in a given (pre-assigned) state. The problems came when people began to use expressions like 'deterministic causality', or 'causal determinism', or 'statistical correspondence' (W.Pauli), or 'statistical causality' (Fock; N.Bohr; etc.), since in these expressions both aspects of determinism are mixed up. From max at maxmore.com Wed Apr 18 18:09:16 2007 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:09:16 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <012301c78092$7c756f40$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <012301c78092$7c756f40$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <200704181808.l3II8QUb006755@ms-smtp-03.texas.rr.com> A brief and partial reply, at least for now: At 08:48 PM 4/16/2007, Brett wrote: >Max wrote: > > > Even if we buy into the idea that global warming > > is real, significant, sustained, and largely > > human-caused, > >Let me invite you off the fence Max. You're welcome to. However, there are four distinct questions there, and for two of them no part of my body is in the least bit supported by the fence. Only on the last am I resting some of my weight after a long walk through the fields of debate. Real? Yes. Significant? Not yet, but likely to be soon, yes. Sustained? Depends on the time period, of course. I'm leaning lightly against the fence on this question is we're talking about a time period of decades, including the future and not just the past. Largely human-caused? This is where I bless the fence for supporting more of my weight. I'm not sufficiently schooled in the relevant subjects nor sufficiently arrogant to form a strong belief in the absence of relevant knowledge to be sure here. I think it's pretty likely that it's largely human-caused, but not entirely convinced, having seen similar claims in the 1970s--except then it was about the imminent disaster of a new ice age. My main concern and criticism of most commentary of this subject is not concerning these four questions. It's about the most rational RESPONSE. I noted: >In fact, at least two consensus views are being >pushed on us?and pushed hard. One is that global >warming is not only happening but is primarily >anthropogenic. The second is that we must >immediately institute a set of strong global >controls on carbon dioxide production. Stepping well away from the fence, I say that it would be a big mistake to impose drastic controls on carbon dioxide production. That doesn't mean I favor doing nothing. But that's for another post. Onward! Max >PS. I respect that in the past you have not taken positions in >favour of democracy. I hope you would not take a position in >favour of fascism and promise breaking. I can barely believe that you asked me that question. However, my eyes insist that these incoming photons accurately represent the words you wrote, so I suppose I must. I'm not deeply enthusiastic about democracy because I see it as restricting the liberty (and responsibility) of the individual. That's as far as I will go in dignifying an answer to this particular question. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Apr 18 19:42:09 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:42:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704181242n73f30eabs1597f8d2917f0799@mail.gmail.com> On 4/17/07, BillK wrote: > At home, especially in the Southwest, regions will need to find new > sources of drinking water, the Great Lakes will shrink, fish and other > species will be left high and dry, and coastal areas will on occasion > be inundated because of sea-level rises and souped-up storms, U.S. > scientists said. ### And a plague of blood-sucking locusts will descend on the sinners! I absolutely refuse to believe that the persons quoted above have the ability to model local changes in precipitation fifty years from now. Absolutely. Nobody has so far been able to model the pattern of multiyear droughts that have been coming in and going in the US for thousands of years (credited with destroying the Anasazi, etc., and responsible for the Dust Bowl in the 20th century). Now some presumptuous activists claim that they can not only predict the weather in 50 years, nay, they can predict it while taking into consideration global warming whose magnitude is itself estimated with a roughly 500% margin of error. Nah, I know science when I read it, and this isn't science. Rafal From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 18 20:20:01 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:20:01 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704181242n73f30eabs1597f8d2917f0799@mail.gmail.com> References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com> <49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com> <7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704181242n73f30eabs1597f8d2917f0799@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/18/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > Nah, I know science when I read it, and this isn't science. > Well, it is putting up a brave front of being science. The IPCC bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. And has been working on this since 1988. Mandate and Membership of the IPCC Recognizing the problem of potential global climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. It is open to all members of the UN and WMO. The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. Its role, organisation, participation and general procedures are laid down in the "Principles Governing IPCC Work". BillK From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 18 21:09:03 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:09:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Recurrent topics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070417035913.03e24660@pop.bloor.is.net.cable. rogers.com> References: <014201c78092$caddc2e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070418170750.03df0240@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> I don't want to contribute to the clutter here, but I did spot this. http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050103 Keith From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Apr 18 21:38:23 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:38:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <007301c780c4$cc5534f0$cd064e0c@MyComputer> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <46240536.6090106@pobox.com> <007301c780c4$cc5534f0$cd064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704181438u79c84bb1w97673de99e4196c1@mail.gmail.com> On 4/17/07, John K Clark wrote: True you could be suffering > from some extremely rare bizarre ailment that would take a Sherlock Holms > (or a Dr. House) to diagnose, ### Chances are, your doc won't know that ailment. He will send you to a specialist, and both will buy Porsches. > So to sum up, ALL prescriptions should be over the counter, including > Heroin. ### Yep. Rafal From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 19 00:01:32 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:01:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <46265360.20701@pobox.com> References: <003d01c78130$38d142c0$36094e0c@MyComputer> <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com> <3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> <003d01c78130$38d142c0$36094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070418195922.0b886620@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:20 AM 4/18/2007 -0700, you wrote: >John K Clark wrote: > > > > Granted no computer program is (yet) as good at diagnoses as a genius > doctor > > who is willing to devote significant time thinking about it, but I maintain > > a computer program will give at least as good a diagnosis as you are likely > > to receive in the real world. > >As long as you have a nurse to enter the symptoms into the terminal, >simple computer programs have been more accurate than human doctors >since the 1970s. Humans suck at summating evidence. They do indeed. Why is fairly clear from the EEA. You were much more likely to survive on a good enough answer quickly than you were to ponder all the possibilities and come up with a late answer to the charging bear. Keith From emlynoregan at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 01:12:00 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:42:00 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <007301c780c4$cc5534f0$cd064e0c@MyComputer> References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net> <00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com> <7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com> <46240536.6090106@pobox.com> <007301c780c4$cc5534f0$cd064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704181812m7e722f57j9143659fde087a4b@mail.gmail.com> I guess you could balk at making everything over the counter, but instead insert a new layer of health care... the computer + operators (ah, nurses) level, which could be state subsidised if necessary (may not be, should be cheap), could dish out prescriptions, and is evaluated on a statistical basis - covers only stuff that doesn't make people worse more than 5% of the time (or whatever constant). There'd be a "no guarantee" clause in using that system (ie: some people will get the wrong treatment and you may not sue), and patients would always have the choice of going to a doctor if they think their problem is beyond the automated system's abilities. The automated system might also recommend going to a doctor itself in some cases. The bit about indemnifying the automated system is really really important. You'd also want to make it free or stupidly cheap, and have no coersion involved in using it. There's a big problem with this though - hmm, it's a government sponsored monopoly with no accountability. Not fun. How about allowing all comers to build and provide these systems (all indemnified), but they'd be regulated before entry to the market, the government would collect stats on efficacy, and there'd be big financial penalties for failing the efficacy tests, proportional to the degree of failure (fines might be used to pay some degree of regulated compensation?). Does that give the right incentives to all parties? Then I suppose you remove subsidies on the rest of the healthcare system (or if you can identify them, the costly, mostly unnecessary bits). I'd go to the automated system, for sure. I find GPs just dish out antibiotics anyway (broken leg? Here's some penicillin, now fuck off). Like others have said, computers wont replace Dr House, but they would probably crap all over the <10 minute consult. Emlyn On 17/04/07, John K Clark wrote: > A much better question is why is health care so fucking expensive? In 1960 > the USA spent 5.2% of GNP on health care; by 2004 it had increased to 16 %, > far more than any other country, but Americans are not far healthier than > people from other countries. This trend can not continue nor should it. My > solution could be summed up in one word "deregulation". > > You go to the doctor, your appointment is at 10 am so you cool your heals > for 3 hours and at 1 pm he kindly deems to grant you an audience, for about > 4 minutes. After you kiss his ring you hurriedly tell him your health > problem while the doctor looks at his watch and glances at you test results, > he then gives you a prescription, a permission to buy a drug, and then he > sends you on your way. You then give the doctor a big fee, go to the drug > store with your permission slip in your hand, and the doctor buys a Ferrari. > This is nuts. Most of the time a nurse or a computer program could diagnose > your problem as well as the highly paid doctor. True you could be suffering > from some extremely rare bizarre ailment that would take a Sherlock Holms > (or a Dr. House) to diagnose, but you know what, you probably aren't. It's > possible those tracks were made by a zebra, but they were probably made by a > horse. > > Granted no computer program is (yet) as good at diagnoses as a genius doctor > who is willing to devote significant time thinking about it, but I maintain > a computer program will give at least as good a diagnosis as you are likely > to receive in the real world. I think surgery is the only area where a very > skilled human being is still needed, at least for now. > > So to sum up, ALL prescriptions should be over the counter, including > Heroin. > > John K Clark > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 01:28:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:28:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Meta re recurring threads was Personal Identity Bis In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070417032745.03dc9be8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415140730.038172b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070417032745.03dc9be8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, Keith Henson wrote: I don't think it would necessarily be suicide, but it goes on my list of > dire, last resort methods. I.e., I would opt for destructive copying if > that was the only way to get away from where a miles wide asteroid was > going to hit. Then there is room for more debate regarding personal identity, because I consider destructive copying much the same as ordinary life (assuming of course that nothing goes wrong with it). I don't wish to restart the whole argument, just to point out that despite the endless discussions, even people on (roughly) the same side can disagree about fundamentals. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 01:36:47 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:36:47 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <02d101c7814d$3ea84af0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <02d101c7814d$3ea84af0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: On 4/18/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 4/17/07, Brett Paatsch > > wrote: > > > >* > *>* > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first > cell > *>* > that **was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. > * > *> > We don't even **know that much in principle yet. > *>* > *> > > Maybe, but unless it was a miracle, science should be able to > > reproduce it. > > I was going to say there'd be a Nobel prize in the acheivement but > its actually a much bigger deal than that. > > In Pasteur's time there was a doctrine, started by his work, that > life only comes from life. > > The ghosts of Pasteur and Darwin would probably stand up and > salute the scientist that could demonstrate the creation of a living > cell without using another living cell. > > Its important in science and technology to be honest about what > one doesn't know. Without that honesty current ignorance is not > remediable. > > On the other hand if all one is looking for is to shore up belief > then lots of handwaving and pseudo-explanation will attract > other believers to one and one can huddle together with them > and feel just fine until reality runs over you. > > I don't believe in gods or miracles. I'm a Bright. > > I have a question for you Stathis. > > Why are you confident that science (ie. scientists) should > be able to do what nature did? Based on your "maybe" > above, it seems you don't even know if I am telling you > the truth or not - and if I was lying you probably could have > found that out with a google search wouldn't you think? > I don't doubt that it would be very difficult to create a cell, but as cells exist, it should be possible. We can come to this conclusion even in the absence of any scientific knowledge about cells, just as people 200 years ago should have been able to conclude that heavier than air flight must be possible from the fact that birds can fly. Only physically impossible things are physically impossible. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 19 01:50:44 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:50:44 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: References: <02d101c7814d$3ea84af0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070418204758.021dec40@satx.rr.com> At 11:36 AM 4/19/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: >On 4/18/07, Brett Paatsch ><bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote: > > > Maybe, but unless it was a miracle, science should be able to > > reproduce it. > >Why are you confident that science (ie. scientists) should >be able to do what nature did? Based on your "maybe" >above, it seems you don't even know if I am telling you >the truth or not - and if I was lying you probably could have >found that out with a google search wouldn't you think? > >I don't doubt that it would be very difficult to create a cell, but >as cells exist, it should be possible. We can come to this >conclusion even in the absence of any scientific knowledge about >cells, just as people 200 years ago should have been able to >conclude that heavier than air flight must be possible from the fact >that birds can fly. You're missing Brett's point, Stathis, as he missed yours. He thinks this is self-evident, as do you. He suspects you of being a mystagogue. God knows why. (That was a joke, Brett.) Sigh. Damien Broderick From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Wed Apr 18 22:36:05 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:36:05 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 43, Issue 24 References: Message-ID: <002b01c78209$f3649400$e7e18f9b@homepc> Max wrote: >>PS. I respect that in the past you have not taken positions in >> favour of democracy. I hope you would not take a position in >> favour of fascism and promise breaking. > > I can barely believe that you asked me that > question. However, my eyes insist that these > incoming photons accurately represent the words > you wrote, so I suppose I must. I'm not deeply > enthusiastic about democracy because I see it as > restricting the liberty (and responsibility) of > the individual. That's as far as I will go in > dignifying an answer to this particular question. They aren't questions Max they are statements. I do respect that in the past you have had the courage and integrity to be open about your reservations about democracy. I too have reservations about democracy. If no one did then nothing better could arise. I am a libertarian. Being a libertarian in my book carries duties to defend freedom when freedom is threatened. George W Bush's "war on terror" is the stupidist most absurb proposition turned into policy that a country full of appeasers has sat and nodded at since Caligula married his horse. When the nazis came to power in Germany they were able to do so because men and women that could have together done something about it did not act early enough. I have issues with American libertarians because they are not, in sufficient numbers or more importantly in significant effective efforts, defending the most fundamental freedoms of all. Your extropian principles were an excellent effort by the younger man that was yourself to articulate a vision for a way forward. But fine words uttered in ones youth are not enough. If one will not stand up and fight for a principle and struggle and even die for a principle, ones most cherished principle, then one is not really alive. Why haven't I see you lobbying or writing for the impeachment of President Bush Max? There are people in your country that are - the case for it, the need for it could hardly be clearer. Why aren't you defending the constitution that is the bedrock of your real freedom? Your extropian principles, as has been discussed before, by folk like Hal come into tension with each other. We all have to make our living in this less than ideal world. But if we don't take a stand on anything because the highest goal we have is always to keep ourselves alive then we never really live. Bush has attacked science and reason and technology and people. He has said you are with us (meaning him) or against us. When Presidents or Feuhrers say those things and act above the law we cannot not take them seriously. The rule of law could use your support at this point in history Max. Humanity could. I could. Regards, Brett From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 19 03:30:46 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:30:46 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fw: Re: Impeachment: A duty, not an option Message-ID: <00aa01c78233$1e4dd9f0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Bill said I could post this to the list - so okay I will. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brett Paatsch" To: "BillK" Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 7:59 AM Subject: Re: OFFLIST: Re: [extropy-chat] Impeachment: A duty, not an option > Thanks Bill. > > But why didn't you post it to the list. It would have done more good > that way. > > Lee Iacocca is a successful businessman and entrepreneur. > > Libertarian capitalists like John and Rafal respect that type. > You might have nudged their consciences. > > Regards, > Brett > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "BillK" > To: "Brett Paatsch" > Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 2:29 AM > Subject: OFFLIST: Re: [extropy-chat] Impeachment: A duty, not an option > > >> On 4/17/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: >>> >>> http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/935 >>> Carla Binion: Impeachment: A duty, not an option >>> >> >> Now that John has started the list up again ----- >> >> Sounds like you might enjoy this new book. >> >> >> >> Excerpt >> Where Have All the Leaders Gone? >> By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney >> >> >> >> Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? >> Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. >> We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right >> over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we >> can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. >> But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads >> when the politicians say, "Stay the course." >> >> Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the >> damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! >> etc...... >> >> >> >> Lido Anthony "Lee" Iacocca (born October 15, 1924) is an American >> industrialist most commonly known for his revival of the Chrysler >> brand in the 1980s when he was the CEO. Among the most widely >> recognized businessmen in the world, he was a passionate advocate of >> U.S. business exports during the 1980s. >> >> >> BillK >> > From emlynoregan at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 03:42:32 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:12:32 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403154239.022e37a0@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070403193302.0231ce58@satx.rr.com> <4613523E.8000200@thomasoliver.net> <7641ddc60704050942v6f8f26d5w8ef76c690618fbb7@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070405123804.02257798@satx.rr.com> <46154721.2090903@pobox.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704182042q660034e2l4abe10cf143ab78d@mail.gmail.com> I read that article, but I don't quite understand what is fundamentally wrong with carbon credits. >From my reading, it makes these points: 1 - Buying carbon credits is like buying indulgences Well, there is a similarity. But that's just a bit of muck raking - that doesn't make them not work. I bet there is a not a single person who bought indulgences who ended up in hell or even purgatory :-) Basically, its a witty comparison, but not important. 2 - Carbon credits encourage using more energy Well, possibly true. This comes down to the problem that they are not entirely an absolution. Using fossil fuel based energy both pollutes with CO2, and uses up fossil fuels. Carbon Credits can potentially offset the pollution, but they don't replace the fuel (a stand of trees is not a barrel of oil). So it's a matter of awareness to make it clear that wasting finite resources is still an issue. But offsetting the emissions is still an excellent thing to do! 3 - Carbon credits export the impact of the excesses of the rich to the third world Ok, people have been complaining for years that the first world is inducing the third world to rip up all its forests. This would seem to be the opposite. Surely creating an economic incentive to plant trees is a Good Thing, or at the very least an exactly neutral thing. I don't hold much by the example they gave in the article of people being forced off their land - you can find examples of people doing crappy things to each other in all human endeavour. Anecdotal. It didn't convince me that planting trees leads to human misery in general. 4 - Carbon credits are worthless because you can print money (ie: fake them) This was the strongest point in my mind, actually a really good point. Being able to get positive credits by reducing emissions is just a recipe for abuse, because you don't lose credits by increasing emisions again somewhere else. So what do you do? Well, you either go for a global approach, that tallies everyone's positive and negative impacts and doesn't let anyone get away with anything. Sounds pretty much impossible. Or, you go for private sellers of Credits who can prove to you that they control for this problem. One way for a company to do this might be to not accept reduction of emmisions from a poluter unless they agree to have their entire operations taken into account. Or, a company might restrict itself to things that positively remove carbon from the air, rather than people commiting to put less in. So tree planting is probably the big one here. Basically, these companies are creating a currency to represent carbon, and letting you buy into it, so they need to prove that the currency actually represents the amount of carbon they say it does, and isn't just worthless paper (bits?). Still, I don't see this argument as a killing blow. Rather, the industry needs to mature, and consumers need to be more sceptical and demanding of the operations of the companies that provide credits. Emlyn On 06/04/07, David McFadzean wrote: > On 4/5/07, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > From what I've heard, he buys carbon credits to offset this. It's an > > interesting policy - I have to approve the dry rationalist chutzpah of it. > > Time recently published this article about the hypocrisy of carbon credits>> > http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599714,00.html > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 19 04:33:18 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:33:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle In-Reply-To: <200704181808.l3II8QUb006755@ms-smtp-03.texas.rr.com> References: <012301c78092$7c756f40$e7e18f9b@homepc> <012301c78092$7c756f40$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419002308.03e02528@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:09 PM 4/18/2007 -0500, Max More wrote: >A brief and partial reply, at least for now: > >At 08:48 PM 4/16/2007, Brett wrote: snip > >In fact, at least two consensus views are being > >pushed on us?and pushed hard. One is that global > >warming is not only happening but is primarily > >anthropogenic. The second is that we must > >immediately institute a set of strong global > >controls on carbon dioxide production. > >Stepping well away from the fence, I say that it >would be a big mistake to impose drastic controls >on carbon dioxide production. > >That doesn't mean I favor doing nothing. But that's for another post. I agree, at least not immediately, the economic shock would cause too much damage. I frankly don't think that the global warming problem (serious as it might be) is as serious as the problem of low cost energy. The latter is likely to starve an extremely large number of people, most of them in the poorer parts of the world. Even that would probably not be a such a serious set back to the singularity except for the fact that people with looking into a bleak future can cause an awful lot of problems. So finding a technical solution such as space elevators and power sats which would give the world a long term bright future seems like a really good idea. Keith From tyleremerson at gmail.com Fri Apr 13 15:51:44 2007 From: tyleremerson at gmail.com (Tyler Emerson) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:51:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] SIAI Spring 2007 Update Message-ID: <632d2cda0704130851l2ae1b72dj48da35503742d00c@mail.gmail.com> SIAI Spring 2007 Update In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk. Ray Kurzweil Joins Board of Directors http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/team#kurzweil SIAI Announces $400,000 Matching Challenge http://www.singinst.org/challenge SIAI Creates R&D Program http://www.singinst.org/research SIAI Proposes Research Grant Program http://www.singinst.org/researchgrants Singularity Summit at Stanford Media Now Online http://www.singinst.org/media SIAI Announces Partner Network to Build Influential Network of Contributors http://www.singinst.org/donate/partnernetwork Dr. Ben Goertzel Joins as Director of Research http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/team#goertzel Bruce Klein Joins as Director of Outreach http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/team#klein Neil Jacobstein and Dr. Barney Pell Join Board of Advisors http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/advisors SIAI Interview Series: Peter Thiel, Founder, Clarium Capital, Co-Founder, PayPal http://www.singinst.org/media/peterthiel SIAI Interview Series: Dr. Barney Pell, Founder & CEO, Powerset http://www.singinst.org/media/drbarneypell New Publication: Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk http://www.singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf New Publication: Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf SIAI Employment Opportunities http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/opportunities SIAI Volunteer Opportunities http://www.singinst.org/aboutus/volunteer Featured Partner: Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk Featured Link: Ben Goertzel and Bruce Klein Join SIAI http://www.novamente.net/blog/?p=4 --- Are you a blogger? Please consider writing about this SIAI update to help build awareness. We love feedback: institute at singinst.org. --- (c) 2007 Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Inc. P.O. Box 50182, Palo Alto, CA 94303 USA institute at singinst.org | www.singinst.org | 866-667-2524 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ogrc_br at yahoo.com Wed Apr 11 14:51:25 2007 From: ogrc_br at yahoo.com (Orlando) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:51:25 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] new member In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411093606.046b64d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <810942.92862.qm@web55414.mail.re4.yahoo.com> Hello peoples, I?m just introducing myself, my name is Orlando Costa, i?m from Rio de Janeiro, brasil. And well, i?ll follow the discussions, as the concept of extropy is new for me, i?ll be more listenis, actually, reading. g Orlando __________________________________________________ Correo Yahoo! Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ?gratis! Reg?strate ya - http://correo.espanol.yahoo.com/ From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Tue Apr 10 04:15:21 2007 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 21:15:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] i love this! Stfop and Smell the Roses Message-ID: <9b9887c80704092115q105247feya36c215c6404d2b9@mail.gmail.com> it is worth the long read! it made me think how much we miss of one nother as we wisk our lives along. love, ilsa Pearls Before Breakfast Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C.rushhour? Let's find out. By Gene Weingarten Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10 HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant. Monday, April 9, 2007 1 p.m. ET Post Magazine: Too Busy to Stop and Hear the Music Can one of the nation's greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Gene Weingarten set out to discover if violinist Josh Bell -- and his Stradivarius -- could stop busy commuters in their tracks. Save & Share Article What's This? Digg Google del.icio.us Yahoo! Reddit Facebook ad_icon Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment? On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend? The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls. The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous. So, what do you think happened? HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP. Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people? "Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening." So, a crowd would gather? "Oh, yes." And how much will he make? "About $150." Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened. "How'd I do?" We'll tell you in a minute. "Well, who was the musician?" Joshua Bell. "NO!!!" A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work. Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still. "Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ." He smiled. ". . . on Kreisler's violin." It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick -- and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie "The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a god." When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said: "Uh, a stunt?" Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly? Bell drained his cup. "Sounds like fun," he said. Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro, in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling. That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies. He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell. Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously, with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw." For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate. It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article. It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion. One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch. TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin. Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection. "Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he just . . . knew." Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts," Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still. The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood. "This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees. Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument. Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million. All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant. AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant." At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips. On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they were of a mind to take note. Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version." Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility. If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." So, that's the piece Bell started with. He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past. Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something. A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened. Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look. No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second. It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity. Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost. Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts. IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD? It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)? We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro. "At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ." Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story." With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance. "It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ." The word doesn't come easily. ". . . ignoring me." Bell is laughing. It's at himself. "At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous. "It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little." Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro? "When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ." He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12. MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station. "Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'" Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters. Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal. "Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right." So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby? "He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing." And that's that. Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's bow first touched the strings. White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark. It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing." On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen. Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes. As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big. Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace." So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money. THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece. After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history. A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand. "I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement." Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3. You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door. "There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time." So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs. "Evan is very smart!" The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too. There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away. IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to work. He was at work. The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was. But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well. "You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician. "Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound." A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize. J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in "Titanic," before the iceberg. "I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto. When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs. "Is he ever going to play around here again?" "Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him." "Damn." Tillman didn't win the lottery, either. BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting. Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!" He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon. Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off. It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket. And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight. "Where was he, in relation to me?" "About four feet away." "Oh." There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod. For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists. The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes. "YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him struck me as much of anything." You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn't noticing the music at all. "I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially." What do you do, Jackie? "I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract." THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes. Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined." Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he tried to calm her down. Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights. Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long. What about Joshua Bell? He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police." Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here." Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look. "People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?" What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. -- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life? We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth. Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly. "Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance." In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them. "This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said. If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing? That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before. Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo. THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head. Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes. Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist. "There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza." Haven't you seen musicians there before? "Not like this one." What do you mean? "This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space." Really? "Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day." Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered. "Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me." When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore. When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be. Does he have regrets about how things worked out? The postal supervisor considers this. "No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever." BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES, in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift. Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post. In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc. As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it. Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end. "It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?" When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies. "Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent." These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.") Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America. Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff writer, can be reached at weingarten at washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. -- don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person. john coletrane www.mikyo.com/ilsa http://rewiring.blogspot.com www.hotlux.com/angel.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 16 10:28:13 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:28:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <004901c77fe7$ffc93da0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <849183.20787.qm@web35605.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I comment: discussion from John Grigg Brett Paatsch wrote: > From: Eugen Leitl > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? > Gradual/incremental in vivo uploading is quite a way off, You can say that again. But you can't say how far off until you can say how its possible to do it even in principle. And I don't think you as a chemist can do that either. > since requiring > medical devices assembled by NC-chemistry, aka machine-phase. Do you know of anyone that is not also a believer in cryonics that thinks machine-phase chemistry is (a) credible at all thermodynamically, and (b) can construct a cell even in principle? Cell grow from the inside out, not the outside in. I think the fatal flaw in the whole nano-medicine thing is that you can't assemble the components of a cell - lipids, proteins, *ions* placed to drive ion pumps, from the outside at any temperature no matter how cold. Cells being made of biological stuff only behave as cells within the engineering constraints of their biological stuff. ie. Temperature matters. Temperature affects the properties of the materials. > Working > at below -150 C has definite advantages, since you can work with sections > of cryogenic water glass, imaging from the surface down > abrasively/ablatively, > and process data with macroscale equipment which doesn't have to be in > situ. It matters not unless you can put the structure you resolve or a functional emulation of the structure you resolve back together again. In cryonics the emulation of the structure one would want to resolve is the structure of ones own brain. Can't do that. Thermodynamics and the requirement to work from outside in won't allow it. I comment: Will this statement still hold true a century from now? Two centuries from now? Five centuries from now? A millennia from now? Two millennia from now? Our current technology would seem nearly "impossible" to scientists from a century or even half century in the past. At least it would if it were described to them and they were expected to justify how it would actually successfully work. When you are floating in a liquid nitrogen dewar, you can afford to wait a *long time* if necessary. > And cryonics is nuts anyway. Creative nuts but nuts. I comment: I view cryonics as a lottery ticket to the future. But the odds of cryonics working over the long haul is FAR greater than the odds of anyone ever winning at the lottery. And the payoff would be far greater. > Theoretically, and in my view far more importantly, practically, we all only know each other through the evidence of our senses recorded in our brains now. We are all the makers of our own matrices quite naturally as we model the world including others in our brains as part of life. But we cannot remake ourselves once we are dissembled any more than we made ourselves before we were born. The whole cryonic idea at its best can only amount to producing a *likeness* of someone that is missed to a degree of detail that at best satisfies the person who is doing the emulating. Its there sentimentality and degree of discrimination which will inevitably be the determinant of any emulation as the to-be-emulation has no say in it. I comment: You are placing limits on cryonic reanimation based on present-day science and the limited technologies it has so far produced. Your comment strikes at the heart of so many classic cryonics discussions as to whether the damage of ischemia and freezing can be limited enough that the bulk of your identity/information is not lost. Centuries from now they may dredge up the comments in your post and laugh at it in a TransVision 2207 A.D. Conference because the technology WAS developed to actually bring back the frozen original, rather than simply make a facsimile copy. > A reanimated Eugen or Robert would be more like a photograph a sentimental momento made to someone elses specifications than an actual Eugen or Robert. The actual Eugen and Robert were not designed in the first place, genes interacted with environments to produce once-onlys. Nature was able to do it precisely because she didn't give a damn what she made - anything that sort of worked was going to be fine. You and Robert on the other hand do care. You want to remake not just any old person that pops up - but yourselves. Your task is harder than natures as you are trying to steer towards an outcome using materials that cannot be steered. Actually its even harder than that. You and Robert know you can't do a biological recreation of your brains with biological stuff so you say you prefer an emulation. Get the information that is you onto a non-biological substrate and you have more engineering degrees of freedom to work with. But *you* can't do any comparisons of the accuracy of your emulations of organic-substrate Eugen vs inorganic-substrate Eugen unless you actually have an actual organic-substrate Eugen to do the comparisons against. Obviously you can't do the comparisons as you can't be the subject and the object. And the person that wants to remake Eugen doesn't have an organic-Eugen to work with to get the one-copy only structures unless they start before you go through cryonics and your one-of-a-kind accidental structure is lost. Someone is going to have to be extremely wealthy and extremely fond of Eugen or Robert to want to go to the trouble and expense of recreating Eugens and Roberts. I comment: I thought with the advent of mature nanotech (let's say around 2100 at the latest) and A.I. that the cost of reanimating/recreating a cryonaut would be very affordable, even to the point of being much less expensive in resources as compared to even doing an open heart surgery operation in our present day. > A moral question comes up? What have you done objectively in your lives to justify that sort of committment? This isn't personal. What has any transhumanist or frequenter of these lists done to deserve the investment that would be required of someone in the futures part to recreate you? I comment: Considering that the investment to bring them back will not be very large, they will not have to be "Abraham Lincoln" caliber men and women to be considered worthy of being brought back. lol I think a future society of at least fairly enlightened people and machines would want to bring back most if not all cryonauts simply as part of the ethical imperative to cherish human life. > You might point at conversations you've recorded on the internet but some of those may mark you as too dangerous to reanimate. I comment: Well, the people/machines of the future could always put "crime inhibitors" into our violent and scheming little minds to keep us well behaved. Or they could put any potential trouble makers on a well-guarded and isolated island or space colony. > Robert might be brought back only for a horsewhippin each Ramadan :-) I comment: Or he might be brought back to fight as a grunt against the hostile invading armies of rogue A.I. or reptilian alien monsters who are the current big threat! "Mr. Bradbury, we will now carry out our very experimental procedure on you to turn you into a living utility fog of fighting fury." "Let's not discuss the myriad ways this process could go horribly wrong..." : ( > I suspect that the sort of folk that hang out on these lists might be the sort that don't get anything done. They ain't villains and they ain't heros. They are the emminantly forgettable, not too good, not too bad, that history forgets as soon as the generations increment a couple of times. Remembered by their friends and the lives they touch but not much more. I comment: I must painfully admit I fit that description! lol But you have folks like Anders, Max, Natasha, Robert, Brent, Eliezer, Damien, etc. who for various reasons would be worth bringing back. Please remember, the people of the future will most likely want to "show off" and reanimating cryonauts would be a great way to do it with the whole world/space watching! > How hard would current day Eugen or Robert work to reanimate there 17th paternal grandfather or their 16th? Unless they did something with their lives to earn fame or notoriety you probably don't even know the names of those ancestors. I comment: I bet if it was within their power that they actually would work to reanimate them. And that they would do this even if these men were not famous. Family history is something people often find very addictive and when family history meets reanimation technology, it will only increase on its grip on people. I am a strong believer in the march of technological progress and that as the decades, centuries and millennia go by, all these technical concerns of yours will be successfully overcome. But I will say that those who think they will be brought by the 21st or even 22nd Century may find themselves in the wrong. It may take much longer than even that. I do realize that the information/matter must be available for the A.I. and nano machines to have something to actually work with. I once knew a fellow who was convinced that even a SEVERELY damaged/ischemic brain with massive/near total information loss could experience a full restoration via future super technologies. lol Now perhaps a millennia from now "time scanners" would allow views of this brain which could lead to a reanimation. But even then this would really just be an excellent recreation of the deceased person. I think to deal with this problem successfully we would need a full-fledged time machine! lol Most of us hold our lives dearly and I think this is the way it should be. We hope through cryonics or restricted calorie diet or a singularity that we will make it to the distant shore of incredible nanotech prosperity and indefinite lifespan. But at least some of us realize this just may not happen for us as individuals. But time will tell in the end. I don't see Ray Kurzweil going down without a fight! : ) Today is my 40th birthday (how did I ever get so dang old??) and it seems like only yesterday I was in my early twenties. I have suffered enough from the vicissitudes of life (and my own bad decisions, lol) to already question whether I would really want to live for centuries or even millennia. I realize the society I would live in at that point would be so much greater/fun/enlightened than our own but still I wonder how much pain I would bear there (and how much pain others would). I would say for not only my own sake but those who have come before me by decades or even centuries, I hope there is an afterlife. I have a feeling most of us will find out in the end, with or without cryonics. John Grigg > Brett Paatsch _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 16 14:13:43 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:13:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <219135.90602.qm@web35610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > On the other hand, maybe there will be long, long periods of dynamic > equilibrium, evn between competing species grossly mismatched in > intelligence, such as humans and bacteria. That's because, in my view, human beings just got here. Another eye- blink from now, and just why will we or our >H successors permit anything to use valuable energy besides ourselves (themselves)? I wouldn't write off bacteria as easily. By prevalence, total biomass, hardiness and species longevity they far surpass humans. It's only in the last century that we have really been able to fight them, and in the last couple of decades we have fallen behind in that battle as they develop resistance to antibiotics even while medical science advances in leaps and bounds. Tigers are smarter, bigger and stronger than bacteria and we've almost wiped them out without meaning to, while we haven't made much impact on even the most pathogenic bacteria that we would dearly like to see extinct. A planet-wide catastrophe of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs would not have much impact on bacteria, and it is even possible that bacterial spores might travel through space and seed other planets. We are very proud of our intelligence, but in the greater scheme of things, it might turn out to be just an evolutionary dead end. Life took hold and spread almost everywhere on the surface of the Earth over billions of years without need of intelligence. My comment: Considering how bacteria have been found to communicate and even cooperate with each other at a surprisingly sophisticated level, do you think they might evolve over time into a roughly human level or better form of intelligence, but of the hive mind variety? I could envision giant bacterial "brains/colonies" floating on the seas, rooted in the land and floating along in the sky. It would be very interesting to see where the virus would fit in such an alien ecology. This could make for a good science fiction novel but I bet it has already been done a number of times. John Stathis Papaioannou _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 19 09:32:29 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:32:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 43, Issue 24 In-Reply-To: <002b01c78209$f3649400$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <002b01c78209$f3649400$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <20070419093229.GU9439@leitl.org> Killthread. On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 08:36:05AM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > Max wrote: > > > >>PS. I respect that in the past you have not taken positions in > >> favour of democracy. I hope you would not take a position in > >> favour of fascism and promise breaking. > > > > I can barely believe that you asked me that > > question. However, my eyes insist that these > > incoming photons accurately represent the words > > you wrote, so I suppose I must. I'm not deeply > > enthusiastic about democracy because I see it as > > restricting the liberty (and responsibility) of > > the individual. That's as far as I will go in > > dignifying an answer to this particular question. > > They aren't questions Max they are statements. I do respect > that in the past you have had the courage and integrity to be > open about your reservations about democracy. I too have > reservations about democracy. If no one did then nothing > better could arise. > > I am a libertarian. Being a libertarian in my book carries > duties to defend freedom when freedom is threatened. > > George W Bush's "war on terror" is the stupidist most > absurb proposition turned into policy that a country full > of appeasers has sat and nodded at since Caligula married > his horse. > > When the nazis came to power in Germany they were able > to do so because men and women that could have together > done something about it did not act early enough. > > I have issues with American libertarians because they are > not, in sufficient numbers or more importantly in significant > effective efforts, defending the most fundamental freedoms > of all. > > Your extropian principles were an excellent effort by the > younger man that was yourself to articulate a vision for a > way forward. But fine words uttered in ones youth are not > enough. > > If one will not stand up and fight for a principle and struggle and > even die for a principle, ones most cherished principle, then one > is not really alive. > > Why haven't I see you lobbying or writing for the impeachment > of President Bush Max? There are people in your country that > are - the case for it, the need for it could hardly be clearer. Why > aren't you defending the constitution that is the bedrock of your > real freedom? > > Your extropian principles, as has been discussed before, by folk > like Hal come into tension with each other. > > We all have to make our living in this less than ideal world. But > if we don't take a stand on anything because the highest goal > we have is always to keep ourselves alive then we never really > live. > > Bush has attacked science and reason and technology and > people. He has said you are with us (meaning him) or against > us. When Presidents or Feuhrers say those things and act > above the law we cannot not take them seriously. > > The rule of law could use your support at this point in history > Max. Humanity could. I could. > > Regards, > Brett > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 10:24:51 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:24:51 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] i love this! Stfop and Smell the Roses In-Reply-To: <9b9887c80704092115q105247feya36c215c6404d2b9@mail.gmail.com> References: <9b9887c80704092115q105247feya36c215c6404d2b9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/10/07, ilsa wrote: it is worth the long read! it made me think how much we miss of one nother > as we wisk our lives along. love, ilsa > Read it straight through, despite having lots of other important stuff to do. Thanks! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 10:30:59 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:30:59 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <219135.90602.qm@web35610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <219135.90602.qm@web35610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/17/07, John Grigg wrote: > Considering how bacteria have been found to communicate and even cooperate > with each other at a surprisingly sophisticated level, do you think they > might evolve over time into a roughly human level or better form of > intelligence, but of the hive mind variety? I could envision giant > bacterial "brains/colonies" floating on the seas, rooted in the land and > floating along in the sky. It would be very interesting to see where the > virus would fit in such an alien ecology. This could make for a good > science fiction novel but I bet it has already been done a number of times. > > Greg Bear's "Blood Music" comes to mind. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 19 10:42:44 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:42:44 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] test send of message with attachment Message-ID: <011c01c7826f$76e5a250$e7e18f9b@homepc> Just testing to see if list will accept attachments. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 50 nm cubes 0001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 84741 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 19 10:45:56 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:45:56 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] test send to self Message-ID: <012701c7826f$e8e68270$e7e18f9b@homepc> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Books&cmd=search&doptcmdl=DocSum&term=molecular+biology+of+the+cell+AND+mboc4%5Bbook%5D -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 11:23:11 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:23:11 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] i love this! Stfop and Smell the Roses In-Reply-To: References: <9b9887c80704092115q105247feya36c215c6404d2b9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/19/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > Read it straight through, despite having lots of other important stuff to > do. Thanks! > > I will second that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Michael at videosonics.com Thu Apr 19 11:10:49 2007 From: Michael at videosonics.com (Michael Lawrence) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:10:49 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle References: <4eaaa0d90704031325h7d53aa72gbaebb232cae989a9@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704051555s592fc8few21cdcab19f66a1ca@mail.gmail.com><49213AA8-DF10-4BB6-9EEA-1FAA896468FA@mac.com><7641ddc60704051649v2699572g81eae93e02ba75bf@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704060727y411924e2rca49c4de795de2cb@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161549w3e026b59w92225fe755aab43d@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704181242n73f30eabs1597f8d2917f0799@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <750F2420704C0148A533E717A633CBBE49EBB0@delanceyserver.videosonics.local> RE the IPCC: The claim that the IPCC presents objective scientific opinion is quite disingenuous. The IPCC is the government representatives who meet in plenary, as they did a few weeks ago in Paris. The Secretariat is the relatively small team of UN staff who support the panel and its work programme. It is hosted in Geneva by WMO and staff are funded by WMO and UNEP - WMO and UNEP jointly appoint the IPCC Secretary. The IPCC Panel selects the Bureau to manage the work of the Panel from its 'members' but the Bureau are not UN staff. They retain their own government job, are paid by their respective governments, work by correspondence and come together in meetings. The Bureau nominates the lead authors and work program of the working groups and these are put to the Panel for confirmation. For the first three assessments the UK had volunteered to host and largely fund the Secretariat for Working Group 1 and John Houghton was Co-Chair of the Working Group. Susan Solomon was co-chair of the WG1 of the fourth Assessment and the WG1 Secretariat was in NCAR. To be co-chair of a working group it is necessary to have your government funding to maintain the secretariat. The two most powerful positions in the IPCC are the Chairman of the IPCC itself but more powerful is the co-chair of WG1 (Houghton and now Solomon). The latter can have great influence on setting the agenda, nominating contributors and finally editing the assessment. The IPCC Chairman (Bolin, Watson and now ?) get a lot of publicity because they are the front of the organisation, travel and speak publicly, and present the results of the working groups Summary for Policymakers agreed at plenary. The IPCC Secretary located in Geneva really only has small influence with the agenda at the meetings of the Panel. It manages the IPCC fund which is donations by members to pay for travel and per diem of people going to the various non-panel meetings and publications. The IPCC is open to all UN Members but participation in the panel is at the expense of each country. There is however a fund administered by the Secretariat to pay the travel and per diem of developing country members. To put it another way: The IPCC is not a body of scientists but of government officials who select scientific advisor's. The IPCC is not selected by the scientific community but is a body selected and maintained primarily by environmental bureaucracies, including helpers from UN. These UN helpers (UNEP and WMO) are in the end also funded by governments, and in the case of UNEP have to fight for funding annually. It is also politically important that the Bureau (selected not elected by the Panel, I.e. by governments), nominates lead authors who are indeed scientists, often in charge of large research programmes or 'on the make' to becoming science managers / government advisors at home. Working for the IPCC is a good career move. Michael ... who adds ... Global temperatures have not again reached the high they did in the El Nino year of 1998. Indeed, the global temperature trend has seen global cooling for the last nine years. Also, several recent studies (e.g. Krotov, 2001; Klyashtorin & Lyubushin, 2003; Loehle, 2004; and Abdusamatov, 2006) suggest that we are entering a cooling phase. Question - how many more years of the world not warming do we need in order for the AGW theory to get a critical review? On 4/18/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > Nah, I know science when I read it, and this isn't science. > Well, it is putting up a brave front of being science. The IPCC bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. And has been working on this since 1988. Mandate and Membership of the IPCC Recognizing the problem of potential global climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. It is open to all members of the UN and WMO. The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. Its role, organisation, participation and general procedures are laid down in the "Principles Governing IPCC Work". BillK _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: winmail.dat Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 5716 bytes Desc: not available URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 11:49:54 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:49:54 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] new member In-Reply-To: <810942.92862.qm@web55414.mail.re4.yahoo.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411093606.046b64d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <810942.92862.qm@web55414.mail.re4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/11/07, Orlando wrote: > > > Hello peoples, > I?m just introducing myself, my name is Orlando Costa, i?m from Rio de > Janeiro, brasil. And well, i?ll > follow the discussions, as the concept of extropy is new for me, i?ll be > more listenis, actually, reading. Orlando, welcome. Just as a side note a few months back a URL was posted for a piece discussing how extropianism (or transhumanism) is "just common sense". I think Reason may have been the author. If you can find that URL in the archives, or someone can post the reference to it, I think it is worth reading. It says in a few words what normally involves a much longer discussion. You will find this a mixed group, some of us have been around for a decade or more, some are relative newcomers. Some are people who have been here forever and some are those who fade away and return from time to time. We do from time to time get into heated discussions but for the most part we are all trying to learn things where we lack knowledge or understanding and hopefully find the best path(s) forward. Newcomers are quite welcome and after we keel haul you and drop you in boiling oil a few times (:-)) I'm sure you will fit right in. Not knowing your background or education I'll offer a suggestion. If you run across an area with which you lack education you may want to post an "OFFLIST" note to someone asking them the best source(s) for background. We are a very diverse group from all over the world but due perhaps simply due to history we are more "Western" than "Eastern" in many thought patterns. Do not hesitate to post opinions where you are confident of your perspective. (We do not have many, if any, voices from Brazil for example.) If you want to assert claims, particularly anything "unusual" in areas of science, you should be prepared to back them up. Live long and prosper. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 12:02:45 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:02:45 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: List attachments Message-ID: If the extropy-chat mail software is not blocking attachments, then it probably should. Most lists I am in do not allow attachments, in order to remove the risk of mailing viruses to list members. The standard advice is to never open mail attachments or click on them (especially if you are not expecting to receive an attachment), without first scanning them with your antivirus software. BillK From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 12:37:54 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:37:54 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/15/07, Jef Allbright wrote: It would be wonderful if any and all who engage in discussions of > personal identity were familiar with Reasons and Persons, but I was > disappointed at what I perceive as Parfit's reluctance to fully > embrace the implications of his own work. Such tentativeness seems to > distinguish your thinking from mine as well. I suspect it is more a > matter of temperament than philosophy... I guess you're right. If I were to fully embrace the implications of my beliefs about personal identity, I would not care any more about my own future experiences than I do about anyone else's, but I just can't bring myself to think this way. I am slightly less worried about my own own death than I was before, and I am slightly less inclined to be selfish than I was before, but these changes are not commensurate with the radical intellectual shift. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 13:12:35 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:12:35 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: List attachments In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5366105b0704190612s49477bf1hd1c61e02de5f0467@mail.gmail.com> 0851 Thursday, 19 April 2007 On 4/19/07, BillK wrote: > If the extropy-chat mail software is not blocking attachments, then it > probably should. > I strongly agree. If you have something to attach to an email to the list, please post it to a public service (ftp, web host, openomy, etc.) and announce that in the email. I'd rather follow a link to something new and strange than open a mass-mailed attachment. The former piques my curiosity. The latter presumes my attention. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From jay.dugger at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 13:23:22 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:23:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] new member In-Reply-To: <810942.92862.qm@web55414.mail.re4.yahoo.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070411093606.046b64d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <810942.92862.qm@web55414.mail.re4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0704190623u30a0a0adl8a3d7bb873700b99@mail.gmail.com> 0913 Thursday, 19 April 2007 Orlando, Welcome to the list! Robert's introduction has lots of good advice, to which I can only add: check the archives whenever a discussion thread stops making sense or starts repeating itself. You can find the list's archives at these links. 2003-present http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/ Older archives might still exist. Try: http://bbs.extropy.org/exi-lists/archive/ I can't reach that site from work, so your next stop might need to be a search engine. Again, welcome! On 4/11/07, Orlando wrote: > > Hello peoples, > I?m just introducing myself, my name is Orlando > Costa, i?m from Rio de Janeiro, brasil. And well, i?ll > follow the discussions, as the concept of extropy is > new for me, i?ll be more listenis, actually, reading. > g > Orlando > > __________________________________________________ > Correo Yahoo! > Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ?gratis! > Reg?strate ya - http://correo.espanol.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 13:43:51 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:43:51 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: List attachments In-Reply-To: <5366105b0704190612s49477bf1hd1c61e02de5f0467@mail.gmail.com> References: <5366105b0704190612s49477bf1hd1c61e02de5f0467@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704190643o2c2a7eadh6b2f41126b7cd965@mail.gmail.com> On 4/19/07, Jay Dugger wrote: > > I strongly agree. If you have something to attach to an email to the > list, please post it to a public service (ftp, web host, openomy, > etc.) and announce that in the email. I'd rather follow a link to > something new and strange than open a mass-mailed attachment. The > former piques my curiosity. The latter presumes my attention. > I strongly disagree. If a particular attachment doesn't interest you, you can simply ignore it just as you can with a link that doesn't interest you. But the idea is to cut down on the number of steps required to perform simple operations, not start increasing it again, and email attachments are the simplest way, requiring the fewest steps, to send a file. As Whitehead put it, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 19 14:00:53 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:00:53 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: List attachments In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704190643o2c2a7eadh6b2f41126b7cd965@mail.gmail.com> References: <5366105b0704190612s49477bf1hd1c61e02de5f0467@mail.gmail.com> <8d71341e0704190643o2c2a7eadh6b2f41126b7cd965@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070419140053.GA9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 02:43:51PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > I strongly disagree. If a particular attachment doesn't interest you, > you can simply ignore it just as you can with a link that doesn't Well, in theory you can ignore spam, too. In practice, it depends on how much of it you get, and how much bandwidth you have and how much it costs (wireless and dialup, ahem). This is a mailing list with 567 members, run on volunteer resources, so I *will* start blocking large attachements if people will start sending them without dire purpose. > interest you. But the idea is to cut down on the number of steps > required to perform simple operations, not start increasing it again, Publishing a web file is a single drag and drop, and cut & paste of an URL. > and email attachments are the simplest way, requiring the fewest > steps, to send a file. As Whitehead put it, "Civilization advances by > extending the number of important operations we can perform without > thinking about them". Nice quote. But our connectivity is so far rather pathetic/our demands expand to fill all available volume. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 19 15:12:00 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:12:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Defending freedom In-Reply-To: <002b01c78209$f3649400$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419003705.0b886310@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:36 AM 4/19/2007 +1000, Brian wrote: >Max wrote: snip >They aren't questions Max they are statements. I do respect >that in the past you have had the courage and integrity to be >open about your reservations about democracy. I too have >reservations about democracy. If no one did then nothing >better could arise. > >I am a libertarian. Being a libertarian in my book carries >duties to defend freedom when freedom is threatened. So it seemed to me back in 1996 when the scientology cult threatened freedom of speech by trying to destroy a news group. Somebody had to do it, but I can tell you the cost so far has been a large multiple of the most I ever earned in a year. >George W Bush's "war on terror" is the stupidist most >absurb proposition turned into policy that a country full >of appeasers has sat and nodded at since Caligula married >his horse. > >When the nazis came to power in Germany they were able >to do so because men and women that could have together >done something about it did not act early enough. I used to think that way. Wore a white rose to my court appearances even. Now I am not at all sure they could have had an effect against the social forces at work and the psychological traits humans have that came out of our history as hunter gatherers. >I have issues with American libertarians because they are >not, in sufficient numbers or more importantly in significant >effective efforts, defending the most fundamental freedoms >of all. It takes organized groups to affect policy in a democracy. Organizing libertarians is a task akin to herding cats. Max did it better than anyone else I know. I am even more of a "lead by example" and look where it got me. >Your extropian principles were an excellent effort by the >younger man that was yourself to articulate a vision for a >way forward. But fine words uttered in ones youth are not >enough. > >If one will not stand up and fight for a principle and struggle and >even die for a principle, ones most cherished principle, then one >is not really alive. I agree with you. Sorry if I have not been paying attention, but could you fill me in with what you have been doing? I know it is not on the level you want to deal with, but would you like to picket the scientology cult with me? It isn't *that* likely to get you jail time or make you an exile. >Why haven't I see you lobbying or writing for the impeachment >of President Bush Max? There are people in your country that >are - the case for it, the need for it could hardly be clearer. Why >aren't you defending the constitution that is the bedrock of your >real freedom? You really should not expect people to maintain the fire for more than a few decades. >Your extropian principles, as has been discussed before, by folk >like Hal come into tension with each other. > >We all have to make our living in this less than ideal world. But >if we don't take a stand on anything because the highest goal >we have is always to keep ourselves alive then we never really >live. That's true. I have been with Max when we both had HIV contaminated fluids up to our elbows. That's taking a stand and a serious risk to life. By your standard we have really lived. Hope you have really lived as well. >Bush has attacked science and reason and technology and >people. He has said you are with us (meaning him) or against >us. When Presidents or Feuhrers say those things and act >above the law we cannot not take them seriously. Unfortunately, an irrational leader is what you should expect to develop when the hunter gatherer band is under attack. But if you have any specific ideas, please let me know. Private email if you like. >The rule of law could use your support at this point in history >Max. Humanity could. I could. It's a much more difficult situation than I thought it would be eleven years ago. The rule of law depends on honest courts. What can you do when you find the courts themselves are committing criminal acts? Try here if you want to see an accidently exposed document that demonstrates that. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.scientology/msg/d2ef82e36c8140e2?hl=en& Keith From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 19 15:32:37 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:32:37 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Lipid bilayer constraints and considerations -- Was Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <017501c78297$f5bcc450$e7e18f9b@homepc> Anders wrote: > Now, our big disagreement really seems to be the constructability of > bilayers. I say they probably can be put together according to fairly > complex specifications by working a LN temperatures and then > thawing, you say it cannot be done. Maybe we should start a separate > thread to actually hash it out freshly, stating assumptions and all that? [ this paper seems relevant, but I haven't found the full text yet: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=2DB1538444172C5407EB5A708E22DA6E.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=365124 ] Okay. Sure. The relevant bilayers for cells, that are functional as cells, are not flat ones like sheets of fat floating on water, they are volume containing 3D ones like balloons of different shapes and sizes that separate what is inside from what is outside them. They can be as thin as 6 nm. In neurons the bilayers, like a skin, have an arboreal shape of the interleaving neurons themselves and may extend in individual neurons extend unbroken from the axon to dendrite tips which may be separated by distances as much as a metre. These bilayers are found for instance in the plasma membrane that is around the cell overall around mitochondria where the bilayers are crucial to the functioning of the hydrogen ion pumping of the mitochondria, in the ER and the nucleus, in the golgi, and in lysosomes etc and, rupturing these bilayers is often going to be fatal to the cell. Vesicles also have bilayers. The human brain has a volume on average of 1450 millilitres or cubic centimetres. (figure 1 associated email attachment) This volume is approximately equivalent to that of a cube with sides of 11.318512 cm or 113,185,120 nanometres.(fig 2) Assume 50 nanometre cubic volumes are sufficient for requisite level of molecular detail. (fig 4) This means that the human brain could be conceptualised as comprising about 1.45 10^24 such cubic volumes. 1.45 trillion trillion cubes. Lipid bilayers will be disperse throughout those cubes not necessarily evenly and of course without particular structures like filopodia falling neatly into those 50 nm volumes. If the 50 nm cubes can be put together using a manufacturing process and attached to each other such that the lipid bilayers fuse and their contents are not spilled then you'd have a successful reconstruction of the biological brain. But I say, it can't be done. The physics and chemistry of the biomolecules won't allow it to be done as a manufacturing process. Anders you say it can? Then let's see how. - Brett Paatsch PS: Apologies for the very rough sketches. For simplicity I'm assuming a filopodia containing a single actin "strut" is the finest scale of bilayer-enclosed structure than formed by cells in the brain. I'm assuming that you need to be able to restore to brain to the filopodial scale. Late last year I asked a Melbourne University neuroscientist and lecturer in the school of anatomy and cell biology what level of detail would be needed to accurately pick up the structural information of the brain - he said 50 nm. I think 50 nm seems reasonable based on two lipid bilayers of 6 nm each, 1 actin strut of 5-9 nm, some space around the strut for assembling it say 12nm and build into the lipid bilayer are molecules such as integrins which bind cadherins and the extracellular matix, as well as other proteins and sugars getting to around 50 nm in cross section. Sizes of structures taken from Alberts Molecular Biology of the Cell 4th Edition 2002 available at the NCBI bookshelf. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 16:06:18 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:06:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Kevin Kelly: How does technology evolve? Like we did Message-ID: Here's a TED video which, despite a few quibbles, I think will be of interest to many on this list. "Kevin Kelly uses evolutionary theory to discuss the purpose and value of technology. By asking, "What does technology want?" he shows that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life. Using a discipline-hopping range of examples -- from exotic flora to the Big Bang, from the Amish to Mozart -- Kelly not only draws an encompassing picture of humans and machines evolving, but discovers, while he's at it, a moral assignment for everyone in his audience." - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 18:50:52 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:50:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Parfit's Reasons and Persons Message-ID: On 4/18/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > On 4/17/07, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I remember my disappointment with the tentativeness of his > conclusions, but after so many years I don't remember the specifics. > I just retrieved my copy of the book and upon perusing the table of > contents I am surprised anew by its extent. I'm also reminded that > nearly any idea that feels original to me has been picked up or > synthesized from other sources. > > I'll review the book and organize my thoughts and get back to you on > this as quickly as practical. Who knows, I may find that I see it > differently so many years later. Anders, I spent a few hours last night reviewing _Reason's and Persons_. The challenge to reassess my impression that Parfit stopped short was a sufficient motive for me to review and type in all 154 topic headings and create the bookmark structure for my electronic copy of the book. On a possibly relevant note, was something of the book's essence lost as I destructively scanned the sheets, or might it be that the essence of the book was actually enhanced by being made more accessible and interactive via the electronic medium? While doing so I refreshed my recollection of the topics, subtopics and arguments, and I found that my impression has not substantially changed. Very briefly it is this: Parfit argues theories of personal identity and of morality. He does so within the paradigm of classical analytical philosophy, uncovering branches of reasoning and pruning those branches via the discovery of inconsistencies at various levels. This approach follows an esteemed western philosophical tradition thousands of years old and still very influential and active today, but such a paradigm, in its Aristotelian rigor, transparently assigns the human reasoner a privileged position as an effectively rational, objective observer of the world being described. This is quite acceptable when the topic being described is within a sub-context that can be treated effectively objectively, however the topics of personal identity and morality are subjective at a fundamental level. This paradigm, strikingly to me, neglects the subjective certainty, systems theory, evolutionary theory and semiotics that (seem to me) essential to understanding not only our world, but more importantly, our understanding of our world. With regard to personal identity, Parfit shows very clearly and correctly that there is no logically warranted basis for belief in a discrete self. He then proceeds to espouse what he calls the Reductionist View, claiming that "...we cannot explain the unity of a person's life by claiming that the experiences in this life are all had by this person . We can explain this unity only by describing the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and their relations to a particular brain . We could therefore describe a person's life in an impersonal way, which does not claim that this person exists." True to the spirit of Reductionism, it can't be faulted on its own terms, but it misses the point that the meaning of personal identity doesn't inhere in such detail, and stronger yet, such detail is to a variable extent irrelevant and could be altered with no practical effect on personal identity. Personal identity has no ontological status; it consists entirely in its role as a label. Parfit recognizes the logical inconsistency of the concept of a discrete personal identity, but retreats into reductionism rather than taking the conceptual leap to a more encompassing paradigm encompassing the observer and the process of meaning-making. I don't intend to join the debate on the strengths and weaknesses of reductionism, but my main point is that explanations should be evaluated according to their explanatory power which is necessarily dependent on context. I went down that same road many years ago and found that there was no Self at the end. This was significant, because it meant I could stop looking for an ontic Self. I then asked myself, what is the *meaning* of self, and found a very effective extensible operational description that has passed testing for several years since. Meanwhile, some people are still down near the end of that road scratching around and looking for what *is* Self, and Parfit appears to be standing at the very end of the reductionist road shaking his head knowingly and saying "there is no self, but it leaves tracks in terms of its relationships to other things." There's still a bit of unresolved dualism left in that view, resolvable by expanding the paradigm. People deal perfectly with personal identity every day, without ever resorting to tracing the web of relations to a particular brain. Nature deals perfectly with soap bubbles without ever computing the infinite expansion of the digits of pi. Further, as I have argued in other posts, personal identity depends not on any physical, functional or historical similarity whatsoever, but rather on perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity. The agency is perfectly knowable, while the entity is only indirectly knowable, even if it's oneself. (There's only one mention of agency in the book, and that's the "agency of hearing".) With regard to moral theory, Parfit recognizes the moral problems of narrow collective self-interest, but concludes that these imply the need for a more *impersonal reductionist* approach. He apparently doesn't consider the possibility of a more coherent but typically non-intuitive approach of *broadening* the context of self-identification, in other words making decisions not impersonal, but *more* personal, over larger context of decision-making. This is again due to operating within a reductionist paradigm. He describes with great accuracy the pitfalls of consequentialist ethics, but does not appear to consider anything like morality assessed as the extent to which the values of an increasing context of decision-making are expected in principle to be promoted over an increasing scope of consequences. He realizes that the discrete Self does not exist, but does not follow the implications that a fully *effective Self* most certainly does (else who makes decisions, and is assigned responsibility for consequences?) and he does not consider that this effective Self could effectively identify with an expanding sphere of values much as a good mother identifies with her children, and further in an expanding sphere of understanding of our causal and consequential inter-relatedness In the concluding chapter, Parfit mentions the Non-Identity problem as yet unresolved, along with the Mere Addition "paradox" and the resulting Repugnant Conclusion and Absurd Conclusion. I have not taken the considerable time that would be required to construct an adequate reply, but these problems seem to be the natural result of assuming a privileged status (both moral status and observer status) for humans, rather than reasoning from a more realistic Systems Theoretical paradigm of computing agents reasoning within bounds, evaluating choices relative to necessarily local sets of values, and acting not as objectively rational goal seekers, but subjective values promoters. I recall that when reading the book several years ago, I was impressed with the depth and breadth of logical rigor, but disappointed that the work seemed transparently enmeshed in the classical paradigm of analytic philosophy, with little or no consideration of the implications of the semiotics of subjective agents embedded in the very reality being considered. Parfit's work is a quite comprehensive and rigorous analysis of concepts of personal identity and provides a valuable contribution to the field, but remains confined within the limits of his paradigm. In the concluding chapter he acknowledges some weaknesses and paradox and expresses his belief that "others could succeed." which is in no sense arbitrary but rather an increasingly probable outcome of evolutionary processes. A work as important as Derek Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ deserves a well researched and presented response and so I would not want to give the impression of criticism of what stands, when my intent, time allowing, would be one of extension. I apologize in advance for the sloppy and incomplete presentation in this brief email. Paradox is always a matter of insufficient context. In the bigger picture all the pieces must fit. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 19:03:43 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:03:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resend: Parfit's Reasons and Persons Message-ID: [Sorry, resend due to a sentence fragment that got attached to an entirely different paragraph.] On 4/17/07, Anders Sandberg < asa at nada.kth.se> wrote: > I remember my disappointment with the tentativeness of his > conclusions, but after so many years I don't remember the specifics. > I just retrieved my copy of the book and upon perusing the table of > contents I am surprised anew by its extent. I'm also reminded that > nearly any idea that feels original to me has been picked up or > synthesized from other sources. > > I'll review the book and organize my thoughts and get back to you on > this as quickly as practical. Who knows, I may find that I see it > differently so many years later. Anders, I spent a few hours last night reviewing _Reason's and Persons_. The challenge to reassess my impression that Parfit stopped short was a sufficient motive for me to review and type in all 154 topic headings and create the bookmark structure for my electronic copy of the book. On a possibly relevant note, was something of the book's essence lost as I destructively scanned the sheets, or might it be that the essence of the book was actually enhanced by being made more accessible and interactive via the electronic medium? While doing so I refreshed my recollection of the topics, subtopics and arguments, and I found that my impression has not substantially changed. Very briefly it is this: Parfit argues theories of personal identity and of morality. He does so within the paradigm of classical analytical philosophy, uncovering branches of reasoning and pruning those branches via the discovery of inconsistencies at various levels. This approach follows an esteemed western philosophical tradition thousands of years old and still very influential and active today, but such a paradigm, in its Aristotelian rigor, transparently assigns the human reasoner a privileged position as an effectively rational, objective observer of the world being described. This is quite acceptable when the topic being described is within a sub-context that can be treated effectively objectively, however the topics of personal identity and morality are subjective at a fundamental level. This paradigm, strikingly to me, neglects the subjective certainty, systems theory, evolutionary theory and semiotics that (seem to me) essential to understanding not only our world, but more importantly, our understanding of our world. With regard to personal identity, Parfit shows very clearly and correctly that there is no logically warranted basis for belief in a discrete self. He then proceeds to espouse what he calls the Reductionist View, claiming that "...we cannot explain the unity of a person's life by claiming that the experiences in this life are all had by this person . We can explain this unity only by describing the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and their relations to a particular brain . We could therefore describe a person's life in an impersonal way, which does not claim that this person exists." True to the spirit of Reductionism, it can't be faulted on its own terms, but it misses the point that the meaning of personal identity doesn't inhere in such detail, and stronger yet, such detail is to a variable extent irrelevant and could be altered with no practical effect on personal identity. Personal identity has no ontological status; it consists entirely in its role as a label. Parfit recognizes the logical inconsistency of the concept of a discrete personal identity, but retreats into reductionism rather than taking the conceptual leap to a more encompassing paradigm encompassing the observer and the process of meaning-making. I don't intend to join the debate on the strengths and weaknesses of reductionism, but my main point is that explanations should be evaluated according to their explanatory power which is necessarily dependent on context. I went down that same road many years ago and found that there was no Self at the end. This was significant, because it meant I could stop looking for an ontic Self. I then asked myself, what is the *meaning* of self, and found a very effective extensible operational description that has passed testing for several years since. Meanwhile, some people are still down near the end of that road scratching around and looking for what *is* Self, and Parfit appears to be standing at the very end of the reductionist road shaking his head knowingly and saying "there is no self, but it leaves tracks in terms of its relationships to other things." There's still a bit of unresolved dualism left in that view, resolvable by expanding the paradigm. People deal perfectly with personal identity every day, without ever resorting to tracing the web of relations to a particular brain. Nature deals perfectly with soap bubbles without ever computing the infinite expansion of the digits of pi. Further, as I have argued in other posts, personal identity depends not on any physical, functional or historical similarity whatsoever, but rather on perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity. The agency is perfectly knowable, while the entity is only indirectly knowable, even if it's oneself. (There's only one mention of agency in the book, and that's the "agency of hearing".) With regard to moral theory, Parfit recognizes the moral problems of narrow collective self-interest, but concludes that these imply the need for a more *impersonal reductionist* approach. He apparently doesn't consider the possibility of a more coherent but typically non-intuitive approach of *broadening* the context of self-identification, in other words making decisions not impersonal, but *more* personal, over larger context of decision-making. This is again due to operating within a reductionist paradigm. He describes with great accuracy the pitfalls of consequentialist ethics, but does not appear to consider anything like morality assessed as the extent to which the values of an increasing context of decision-making are expected in principle to be promoted over an increasing scope of consequences. He realizes that the discrete Self does not exist, but does not follow the implications that a fully *effective Self* most certainly does (else who makes decisions, and is assigned responsibility for consequences?) and he does not consider that this effective Self could effectively identify with an expanding sphere of values much as a good mother identifies with her children, and further in an expanding sphere of understanding of our causal and consequential inter-relatedness which is in no sense arbitrary but rather an increasingly probable outcome of evolutionary processes. In the concluding chapter, Parfit mentions the Non-Identity problem as yet unresolved, along with the Mere Addition "paradox" and the resulting Repugnant Conclusion and Absurd Conclusion. I have not taken the considerable time that would be required to construct an adequate reply, but these problems seem to be the natural result of assuming a privileged status (both moral status and observer status) for humans, rather than reasoning from a more realistic Systems Theoretical paradigm of computing agents reasoning within bounds, evaluating choices relative to necessarily local sets of values, and acting not as objectively rational goal seekers, but subjective values promoters. I recall that when reading the book several years ago, I was impressed with the depth and breadth of logical rigor, but disappointed that the work seemed transparently enmeshed in the classical paradigm of analytic philosophy, with little or no consideration of the implications of the semiotics of subjective agents embedded in the very reality being considered. Parfit's work is a quite comprehensive and rigorous analysis of concepts of personal identity and provides a valuable contribution to the field, but remains confined within the limits of his paradigm. In the concluding chapter he acknowledges some weaknesses and paradox and expresses his belief that "others could succeed." A work as important as Derek Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ deserves a well researched and presented response and so I would not want to give the impression of criticism of what stands, when my intent, time allowing, would be one of extension. I apologize in advance for the sloppy and incomplete presentation in this brief email. Paradox is always a matter of insufficient context. In the bigger picture all the pieces must fit. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 19:53:56 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:53:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070418204758.021dec40@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <902603.49203.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I don't know how relevant this is to the intended purpose of this thread, but... How much of a factor would weight-distortions be when trying to build something using a (general) "dry" nanofactory? A naked human brain for example, would be a lot like a squishy puddle if you laid it on the table. As a separate consideration, if you tried to build a replica of it with a nanofactory, would the weight-distortions during assembly significantly add to the difficulty (eg. because of strained chemical bonds). I suppose one (dry-assembly) way around this would be to do the nano-assembling in orbit where the weight-distortion problem would effectively disappear. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 20:33:19 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:33:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0704181812m7e722f57j9143659fde087a4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <354314.61143.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Emlyn, "> I'd go to the automated system, for sure. I find GPs > just dish out > antibiotics anyway (broken leg? Here's some > penicillin, now fuck off). > Like others have said, computers wont replace Dr > House, but they would > probably crap all over the <10 minute consult. > > Emlyn" Me too! I'd sure as hell prefer an expert-system. In 9.8 out of 10 of my experiences with doctors, I'd swear they weren't listening to a damn thing I was saying, anyway. Like Eliezer said, state-of-the-art expert-systems have been superior to doctor diagnoses for many years. Ever wonder why they haven't yet become the standard? Can I say: a not so subtle conflict of interest? We should probably expect the same thing in the next couple of years when automated systems are also superior at performing all surgeries. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 20:43:01 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:43:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Lipid bilayer constraints and considerations -- Was Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <017501c78297$f5bcc450$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <017501c78297$f5bcc450$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704191343m157784f0q865f621b7fba6170@mail.gmail.com> On 4/19/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > But I say, it can't be done. The physics and chemistry of the biomolecules > won't allow it to be done as a manufacturing process. > > Anders you say it can? Then let's see how. ### You may want to consider that the macromolecules are for the most part not bound covalently to each other. They are bound by weaker interactions - hydrophobic, electrostatic, even van der Waals. This means that merely placing such molecules in close proximity in the right orientation should assure proper interactions, without the need to induce complex chemical reactions. A molecular printer should therefore be able to assemble the tissue out of single molecules, just as similar simple assemblages of non-biological molecules have already been made with STMs. It's true that many millions of different molecular species would be needed by the printer, and the process would be excruciatingly slow but I know of no fundamental physical or chemical obstacles to its success. This said, I really think molecular printing will not be necessary to produce conscious devices patterned after vitrified brains. Ablative scanning and in-silico reconstruction/modeling seem to be much easier. Rafal From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 20:51:35 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:51:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resend: Parfit's Reasons and Persons In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: [Very sorry, resending in plain text due to report that the previous version was full of HTML garbage viewed on a Eudora 7 client.] [Jef wrote:] >>> I remember my disappointment with the tentativeness of his >>> conclusions, but after so many years I don't remember the specifics. >>> I just retrieved my copy of the book and upon perusing the table of >>> contents I am surprised anew by its extent. I'm also reminded that >>> nearly any idea that feels original to me has been picked up or >>> synthesized from other sources. >On 4/17/07, Anders Sandberg < asa at nada.kth.se> wrote: >> Hmm, which implications would that be? If you have a list, I could try to >> talk to him about them (he is literally one flight of stairs upstairs from >> me). > I'll review the book and organize my thoughts and get back to you on > this as quickly as practical. Who knows, I may find that I see it > differently so many years later. Anders, I spent a few hours last night reviewing _Reason's and Persons_. The challenge to reassess my impression that Parfit stopped short was a sufficient motive for me to review and type in all 154 topic headings and create the bookmark structure for my electronic copy of the book. On a possibly relevant note, was something of the book's essence lost as I destructively scanned the sheets, or might it be that the essence of the book was actually enhanced by being made more accessible and interactive via the electronic medium? While doing so I refreshed my recollection of the topics, subtopics and arguments, and I found that my impression has not substantially changed. Very briefly it is this: Parfit argues theories of personal identity and of morality. He does so within the paradigm of classical analytical philosophy, uncovering branches of reasoning and pruning those branches via the discovery of inconsistencies at various levels. This approach follows an esteemed western philosophical tradition thousands of years old and still very influential and active today, but such a paradigm, in its Aristotelian rigor, transparently assigns the human reasoner a privileged position as an effectively rational, objective observer of the world being described. This is quite acceptable when the topic being described is within a sub-context that can be treated effectively objectively, however the topics of personal identity and morality are subjective at a fundamental level. This paradigm, strikingly to me, neglects the subjective certainty, systems theory, evolutionary theory and semiotics that (seem to me) essential to understanding not only our world, but more importantly, our understanding of our world. With regard to personal identity, Parfit shows very clearly and correctly that there is no logically warranted basis for belief in a discrete self. He then proceeds to espouse what he calls the Reductionist View, claiming that "...we cannot explain the unity of a person's life by claiming that the experiences in this life are all had by this person . We can explain this unity only by describing the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and their relations to a particular brain . We could therefore describe a person's life in an impersonal way, which does not claim that this person exists." True to the spirit of Reductionism, it can't be faulted on its own terms, but it misses the point that the meaning of personal identity doesn't inhere in such detail, and stronger yet, such detail is to a variable extent irrelevant and could be altered with no practical effect on personal identity. Personal identity has no ontological status; it consists entirely in its role as a label. Parfit recognizes the logical inconsistency of the concept of a discrete personal identity, but retreats into reductionism rather than taking the conceptual leap to a more encompassing paradigm encompassing the observer and the process of meaning-making. I don't intend to join the debate on the strengths and weaknesses of reductionism, but my main point is that explanations should be evaluated according to their explanatory power which is necessarily dependent on context. I went down that same road many years ago and found that there was no Self at the end. This was significant, because it meant I could stop looking for an ontic Self. I then asked myself, what is the *meaning* of self, and found a very effective extensible operational description that has passed testing for several years since. Meanwhile, some people are still down near the end of that road scratching around and looking for what *is* Self, and Parfit appears to be standing at the very end of the reductionist road shaking his head knowingly and saying "there is no self, but it leaves tracks in terms of its relationships to other things." There's still a bit of unresolved dualism left in that view, resolvable by expanding the paradigm. People deal perfectly with personal identity every day, without ever resorting to tracing the web of relations to a particular brain. Nature deals perfectly with soap bubbles without ever computing the infinite expansion of the digits of pi. Further, as I have argued in other posts, personal identity depends not on any physical, functional or historical similarity whatsoever, but rather on perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity. The agency is perfectly knowable, while the entity is only indirectly knowable, even if it's oneself. (There's only one mention of agency in the book, and that's the "agency of hearing".) With regard to moral theory, Parfit recognizes the moral problems of narrow collective self-interest, but concludes that these imply the need for a more *impersonal reductionist* approach. He apparently doesn't consider the possibility of a more coherent but typically non-intuitive approach of *broadening* the context of self-identification, in other words making decisions not impersonal, but *more* personal, over larger context of decision-making. This is again due to operating within a reductionist paradigm. He describes with great accuracy the pitfalls of consequentialist ethics, but does not appear to consider anything like morality assessed as the extent to which the values of an increasing context of decision-making are expected in principle to be promoted over an increasing scope of consequences. He realizes that the discrete Self does not exist, but does not follow the implications that a fully *effective Self* most certainly does (else who makes decisions, and is assigned responsibility for consequences?) and he does not consider that this effective Self could effectively identify with an expanding sphere of values much as a good mother identifies with her children, and further in an expanding sphere of understanding of our causal and consequential inter-relatedness which is in no sense arbitrary but rather an increasingly probable outcome of evolutionary processes. In the concluding chapter, Parfit mentions the Non-Identity problem as yet unresolved, along with the Mere Addition "paradox" and the resulting Repugnant Conclusion and Absurd Conclusion. I have not taken the considerable time that would be required to construct an adequate reply, but these problems seem to be the natural result of assuming a privileged status (both moral status and observer status) for humans, rather than reasoning from a more realistic Systems Theoretical paradigm of computing agents reasoning within bounds, evaluating choices relative to necessarily local sets of values, and acting not as objectively rational goal seekers, but subjective values promoters. I recall that when reading the book several years ago, I was impressed with the depth and breadth of logical rigor, but disappointed that the work seemed transparently enmeshed in the classical paradigm of analytic philosophy, with little or no consideration of the implications of the semiotics of subjective agents embedded in the very reality being considered. Parfit's work is a quite comprehensive and rigorous analysis of concepts of personal identity and provides a valuable contribution to the field, but remains confined within the limits of his paradigm. In the concluding chapter he acknowledges some weaknesses and paradox and expresses his belief that "others could succeed." A work as important as Derek Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ deserves a well researched and presented response and so I would not want to give the impression of criticism of what stands, when my intent, time allowing, would be one of extension. I apologize in advance for the sloppy and incomplete presentation in this brief email. Paradox is always a matter of insufficient context. In the bigger picture all the pieces must fit. - Jef From test at ssec.wisc.edu Thu Apr 19 20:44:40 2007 From: test at ssec.wisc.edu (Bill Hibbard) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:44:40 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] singularity fiction Message-ID: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/g/mcnrs.html From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 22:07:43 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:07:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of any list members here be most closely described as Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 22:18:48 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:18:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/19/07, A B wrote: > > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > any list members here be most closely described as > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting increasingly effective cooperation. Does that count? - Jef From mfj.eav at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 22:56:00 2007 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:56:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle Message-ID: <61c8738e0704191556m77f1dc62y2f724f7e9269cc15@mail.gmail.com> Exactly, and I would suggest that one of the first achievements for a singularity level AGI should be the development of several detailed 50 year +++ global weather prediction and proposed modification plans complete with input/output time/location etc specifications. These sort of plans might give the species something besides petty turf wars and religeous/political/wealth management bickering we see now. Global warming if it is occuring is just the kick in the arse nations and persons need to force longer term global scale decision making to occur. Or it will enable rational transhumans/H+ to move ahead of the modern humans like we moved ahead of the neanderathals???.... wishful thinking??? $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ The great global warming swindle To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <7641ddc60704181242n73f30eabs1597f8d2917f0799 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed I absolutely refuse to believe that the persons quoted above have the ability to model local changes in precipitation fifty years from now. Absolutely. Nobody has so far been able to model the pattern of multiyear droughts that have been coming in and going in the US for thousands of years (credited with destroying the Anasazi, etc., and responsible for the Dust Bowl in the 20th century). Now some presumptuous activists claim that they can not only predict the weather in 50 years, nay, they can predict it while taking into consideration global warming whose magnitude is itself estimated with a roughly 500% margin of error. Nah, I know science when I read it, and this isn't science. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 19 22:57:16 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:57:16 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070419175305.0223d008@satx.rr.com> At 03:18 PM 4/19/2007 -0700, Jef wrote: >On 4/19/07, A B wrote: > > > > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > > any list members here be most closely described as > > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? > >I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting increasingly >effective cooperation. Does that count? Of course. In fact, I'd say it's the traditional definition of the anarchist ideal. It's why I tend to label myself an anarchist communitarian. (For reasons lost in 19th and early 20th century history and establishment propaganda, people and the media often use "anarchist" synonymously with "bomb-throwing deranged terrorist." Obviously I repudiate that.) Damien Broderick From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Apr 19 23:25:18 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:25:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070419175305.0223d008@satx.rr.com> References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070419175305.0223d008@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <34920.72.236.103.21.1177025118.squirrel@main.nc.us> Damien writes: > > (For reasons lost in 19th and early 20th century history and > establishment propaganda, people and the media often use "anarchist" > synonymously with "bomb-throwing deranged terrorist." Obviously I > repudiate that.) > Indeed, I'd like to see exactly what definition the OP was thinking of! ;) Because I've wondered about anarchism too. Regards, MB From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 23:09:57 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:09:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Jef, Jef wrote: "> I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting > increasingly > effective cooperation. Does that count?" I suppose (at this stage) it would depend on whether or not that promotion took the form of enforced laws. Based on our ongoing discussions I'm currently presuming that it would (but please correct me if I'm mistaken). The type of Anarchy I was thinking of was a true absence of laws, but I'm certainly interested in hearing any variations. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Jef Allbright wrote: > On 4/19/07, A B wrote: > > > > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory > thread; > > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology > of > > any list members here be most closely described as > > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? > > I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting > increasingly > effective cooperation. Does that count? > > - Jef > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Thu Apr 19 23:37:09 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:37:09 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Anders re Cryonics is the only option? Message-ID: <01c401c782db$a6154910$e7e18f9b@homepc> From: "Anders Sandberg" Brett Paatsch wrote: >> .. Would you classify yourself as a believer in cryonics? > > I think that cryonic suspension does preserve synaptic structure > (when done right and fast enough) and that the frozen brain contains > enough information that it could in principle be reconstructed. Given > that the information loss is not total, that subcellular scanning appears > physically feasible and a result of many development paths and that > there is a finite chance that a stored brain could end up in a future > where such scanning methods are present, I think that there is a > chance that at least some of current cryonics patients will end up > uploaded. > > Does that make me a cryonics believer in your eyes? In my eyes, very probably. In your first sentence above you didn't use the word believe or belief, you used "think" implying actual reckoning. And I think your are sort of reckoning, (but largely intuiting), however I am almost certain that you haven't seen for a fact that "cryonic suspension preserves synaptic structures when done right and fast enough" because I am almost certain that the requisite experiments and technology that would allow you to validly hold that view, without allowing wishful thinking to sway you allocation of probabilities the unknowns, don't exist yet. I think you are doing a very typical human thing. I think that when you are confronted by a complex matter with many aspects/variables in it you are allocating a higher probability to those aspects/variables/unknowns that accord with your desires than is objectively warranted. I think that if you and I continue to talk about this that I will undermine your faith/confidence in cryonics. But that remains to be seen ;-) > While I defend a lot of reconstruction methods below, my heart is > more in analysing scanning and emulation methods. > > > On what basis do you think machine phase chemistry is > >"definitely" thermodynamically credible? > > > I'm assuming you are aware of Smalleys fat and sticky fingers > > criticisms of Drexler. Life molecules like proteins assemble in > > compartments containing water. Machine phase chemistry as > > I understand it is essentially watery-solution free chemistry. > > Without a watery solution how do you see machine phase > > chemistry managing the folding of proteins? > You can always build hybrids. One simple model would be to assemble > proteins in a watery environment and then transfer them to a machine phase > environment (with water around them, if needed) for assembly if you are > (say) restoring a frozen brain. I would like to see you develop this line of thinking but do it within a controlled way where you can't handwave away known scientific facts mostly facts about cell structure, function, size and shape that I confront you with. (ie. In the other thread). You may use any creativity you can get from anyone else but I propose to discuss this only with you because I won't have time to deal with all the true believers. You have not yet lost my trust unfortunately Robert who is knowledgeable and whom I like has. So you can use any of Roberts arguments or references you like, but because I have to manage my time as a limited resource I ask that you only use stuff that Robert or others give you that you understand well enough to endorse as coming from you. > Smalleys fat and sticky fingers criticism seems to be disproven by DNA > repair enzymes, and they are working in a liquid environment. My view would be that (and Smalley recognized that) the liquid environment is a very special case where every water molecule acts like a finger. Water is the only molecule that acts like water at physiological (ie. living metabolising cell) temperatures. Outside of physiological temperature (say roughly 45C to 40C in mammals like humans) water molecules don't even behave like water molecules anymore, that is outside of the narrow temperature range, the special small and sticky finger capacities of water molecules are no longer able to handle the biomolecules in the necessary ways. > Even if general atomic assembly is impossible or too inefficient it > is clearly possible to make more specialized forms of moiety assembly, > it would just make the systems messier and less easy to do armchair > design of. >>> Given that frozen cells can be thawed with viability intact, >> > >I've frozen and thawed cells. Have you? > No. But if you are referring to the fact that quite a lot of the cells die > in the process, I don't consider that to be any form of counterargument to > my previous argument. I was merely showing that there existed a method > that had a high likeliehood of assembling a viable cell if implemented, > not the best possible such method. I do grant there exists a method whereby there is a high likelihood of frozen (to -170c) cells (not organs, not tissues) surviving on thawing. When I took mouse ES cells to -170C I did it in two stages, taking them to first -70C for 24 hours - for the moment I can't recall why something to do with DMSO - I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure that taking them straight to -170C, would have disrupted their plasma membranes and killed them. > > It is important to get that the brain is an organ of a multicellular > > life form. It grows as a result of the actions of cells but it isn't > > just a big lump of cells. I know you know that as a neuroscience > > guy but I don't know how well you know that and I don't > > accept expertise on the part of others until I see evidence of it. > > Well, you can always call me a theoretical neuroscientist. I know about > the brain structure, but the closest I get is looking over the shoulders > of experimenters doing rat brain slice work. Okay. Theoretical neuroscientist it is. > Brain tissue is terribly complex and labyrinthine, and I think standard > cryo suspensions do nasty things to it. That is why I'm not so much of a > believer of bodily cryonic revival but rather in uploading - I can see how > that could in principle be done, and it is even possible to get down to > gritty details already to callibrate our predictions. >(actually, I really ought to be working on that paper right now) I can imagine Eugen and Robert nodding furiously. But we each have to prioritize as we see best. [snip] > > Though we can grow cells in quantity in E.coli, [or yeast might have been a better example for me to have used] >> we can't build as > > opposed to growing just a single frozen cell. A growing cell can > > preserve the integrity of mitochondrial membranes. You can't do > > that working from the outside to built the membrane. > Hmm, suppose you were putting down phospholipids in a matrix > of vitrified water, starting from the bottom and adding layer after > layer. Why couldn't you just print the inner membrane? Here's where we should switch over to the other thread. Its a three dimensional container, that can't leak in any dimension at physiological conditions because its got to keep its inside separate from its outside for the ATP pumps etc to work just to give one of many reasons. The membrane proteins embedded in it mean that it wouldn't be smooth like a sphere even at the scale of a couple of nanometres it would be rough with the embedded proteins. I'm not sure what picture you have in you minds eye but the picture I image *you* have involves an extruding device laying down molecules of water and other molecules onto a grid that represents planes in a 3D volume. Is that right? I mean do you think that individual water molecules are going to drop or be fired out of the extruding device as if they were little frozen lego blocks made of one oxygen between two hydrogens so that you could place precisely each individual water molecule and also place each individual hydrogen ion so you have the difference in concentration of hydrogen ions on the inside and the outside. Is that essentially what you are thinking? [Aside: What I want you to do for the purpose of our discussion/exploration is visualise the brain as a volume (1450 ml) containing matter that can be arbitrarily broken down into smaller cubic volumes. (other thread - then I can impose cell physiologic facts into those volumes showing you the scales of whatever we are talking about). This will get rid of a lot of the handwaving I suspect.] > It would > be just like the 3d printing of the nested spheres in the middle of > this page: http://www.georgehart.com/rp/rp.html I looked but I can't see it what you mean. Could be I can see coz I don't get it but I think its I cant see because I have a different picture/representation of what a mitochondrial membrane looks like at the nanoscale than you do. > > We can produce in vitro cell free systems to do research on. > > We can create liposomes - lipid enclosed spheres that aren't > > cells. But we can't create a living cell as a manufacturing process. > > No, not yet. But unless you believe in vitalism, you would agree > that iF *somehow* the molecules making up a cell were just > placed in the right pattern it would become a living cell, right? If *somehow* then yes. I'm not a believer in vitalism. I'm a hard core materialist. > Now it is just up to us arguing that it can be done to show that > it is possible to achieve this using a physical system, and for > the people arguing that it is likely to be done to show why > such a system is likely. Well that would be a first step to pursuading me sure. But we need to proceed with some discipline. > > At this stage, we, science, don't know how for instance the first cell > > that was the progenitor of all life on earth formed. Not exactly. > > We don't even know that much in principle yet. > > Or even that it was a cell. Right. Not a cell as we know cells today. >I'm pretty convinced that it was more akin to a ribozyme. It can't have been just a ribozyme. The replicative machinery needed to be constrained in space to concentrate its raw materials for self assembly. Membranes with "filters" play a vital role in helping to concentrate raw input materials. There have to be enough molecules of substrate around that the enzyme can encounter them as they hit it through brownian motion fast enough. > >> Cells are pretty robust (otherwise they wouldn't survive, and > >> temperature changes and thermal noise would instantly kill them), so you >> > only need to get close enough to the attractor state(s) that correspond >> > to >> > a working cell to get it to spontaneously do the final pieces of >> > selforganisation. >> > > "only" "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" :-) > > > > So talk to me like a cell biologist. Tell me your protocol or point me to > > a peer reviewed paper. > > > > "attractor state(s) that correspond to a working cell" sounds like > > believer psuedo-explanation handwaving to me. > I am a computational biologist. At best I can explain my thinking > and results to you, but I dont do "protocols" and attractor states > are my bread and butter. Okay. Lets not get hung up on the word protocol. If you can outline a series of steps each one of which makes sense and is intelligible in its own right taking us from state a to f through b c d and e then thats good enough for me in terms of you being able to "do" a protocol for our purposes. I've offered you a model (other thread, brain as volume containing matter) into which you can propose a series of steps either for scanning or for rebuilding the brain. I'm more interested in the rebuilding side myself but both are problematic for cryonics. > A bilayer is an attractor state in the configuration space of phospholipid > molecules in water (e.g. see S.J. Marrink, E. Lindahl, O. Edholm, and A. > Mark. Simulation of the spontaneous aggregation of phospholipids into > bilayers. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 123:8638-8639, 2001. ) Okay. You found a paper and built trust. Thanks I looked at it. I still don't know what the words attractor state means exactly but it probably doesn't matter I can find out if I need to to understand you if its important. But for our purposes a flat bilayer in a plane like say fat might form on top of a sink full of water isn't enough the bilayer of an organelle or a plasma membrane or even vesciles are all three dimensional bilayers like balloons with insides and outsides. Its this capacity to keep whats inside separate from whats outside so there can be concentration differences etc that is critical to cellular life and cell function. Break the 3D integrity when the cellular machinery is doing its thing and your concentrations are gone and your cell dies. > Membrane biophysics is not my field, but I'm pretty certain there are > characterizations of how far lipids can be displaced before the structure > breaks. And I know there are molecular dynamics simulations of > membranes (such as the one above) that would allow you to experiment > with jittering their positions. So unless it has already been done, there is > a nice paper in characterizing the probability of reforming properly from > different levels of positional (and rotational) uncertainty. In fact, one > could also try changing the simulation temperature to see if there is any > phase transitions or other troubles if one starts with a vitrified ice state > and move up to physiological temperature (I'd love to do that paper if > I had the time, simulator and some more expertise). > > > [In fact, given results such as the animation at the bottom of > http://www.memphys.sdu.dk/~besold/research.html a more proper > characterization would be: does this organisation happen fast enough to > not cause significant leaks or topological defects of the membrane. ] Cute animation. The issue though is spherical bilayers which can contain a volume within a larger volume without leaking. > Locations of biomolecules is an interesting chapter. Given the rapid > diffusion of most small molecules and proteins not bound to anything, they > can essentially be put in the right compartment and they will extremely > quickly spread out. > More care is needed for membrane-bound > molecules that have to be placed on the right membranes and > macromolecular structures such as microtubuli. They aren't placed on though they are embedded in. The amino acid sequences of the proteins that are intended to be membrane proteins itself interacts with translocation machinery of the cell (in liquid conditions) to place the proteins into the membrane. When cells (and of course the tissues and organs made of them) are growing all this protein trafficing into and through membranes can take place at physiological conditions with the water molecules acting as fingers. > My guess is that it is > the later that are going to be the most troublesome objects to > reconstruct. Again, if it has not been done yet it is not a terribly hard > research project to characterize how much noise in position these > structures can handle, and how quickly they relax into correct > (or incorrect) configurations. I'm only tangentially interested in the attractor state stuff your are talking about. So long as we are clear we are talking about 3D volumes not flat bilayers like the ones in your links. > Cells are stable to thermal noise and other minor distortions due > to e.g. mild sound waves. Most of this I would expect is because > of the bilayers. > To me it makes sense to regard a living cell as a > particular set of points in the configuration space of all its molecules. Whatever floats your boat. But please consider it in the context of the brain volume of 1450 ml in the other thread. > We know small deviations from this set like an indentation of the > membrane will relax away, so it is an attracting set. What needs to > be characterized is the distance to the boundaries of the basin of > attraction for this set: if an intervention or recreation manages to > stay within that distance from the "true" cell it will converge back > to the proper state. > > You say that as though you have done it. But you haven't actually > > done it have you. Had you done it you'd have had a lead paper > > in Science and Nature. > > Them's fighting words. Let's race you to the cover? :-) :--) Recognizing that you haven't done it doesn't mean that I think I can. But who knows maybe we'll amble in that direction together. > > That sort of handwaving is highly characteristic of what > > transhumanists do when they prentend to actually discuss > > technology. It works to give the illusion of knowledge without > > demonstrating any. It poo poos whats necessary to be done > > without either demonstrating that it has been done and without > > giving a protocol that demonstrates that it can be done even in > > principle. > Have you seen Nick Szabo's essay on falsifiable designs? > http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/02/falsifiable-design-methodology-for.html > I think he has a good idea for an antidote. I hadn't. I just skimmed the first bit then. At present I'm not feeling the need for assistance in falsifying designs. I'm feeling I can falsify other people unsound designs already. Maybe later. I wouldn't agree that Drexler and Kurzweil are "widely esteemed scientists and engineers" though. I certainly don't widely esteem them as such and transhumanists are the only folk that I know of that do. I do esteem them both as creative and intelligent individuals. >>> To have a realistic chance of doing it right you first need to have >>> scanned a cell, > > > With current technology, cryo EM one can't scan a single cell. You > > scan lots of them and get an aggregated averaged out picture. > > Fair warning handwaving about future technology will prompt me to > > want to see what you know about the relevant small scale physics. Actually, I mispoke there. You wouldn't scan a whole several micron scale cell with cryo EM its used for much smaller structures. > I think cryo EM is changing quite rapidly, and given some of the > references I'm adding to my paper it seems that making pretty good 3D > models of single cells is within the near future. The biggest problem is > that EM cannot distinguish protein types, and that is of course what we > really want. Would you think Raman spectroscopy would enable that? "within the near future" :-) I think cryo EM is only about 5 years or so old I'm not an expert I only just started learning about it recently. We had to review a Nature paper from November 2006 that made use of it in a third year subject called molecular aspects of cell biology I'm currently doing. You switch from talking about cryo EM to EM. With traditional EM the sample is fixed. With cryo EM its in solution so the protein or particle (rnas may be part of it) can still have close to its natural shape rather than being squashed flat. cryo EM helps seen the shape of cellular machinery made of proteins and rnas like translocons and signal recognition particles bound to nascent chains on ribosomes etc. Do I think Raman spectroscopy would enable the distinguishing of protein types? Not on the surface of whole cells, whole cells are too large. If your testing my knowledge of Raman spectrosopy I don't have much. I can get it if I need it but I don't need it right now, not yet, for my current purpose. I try to be a hardcore rationalist. This means I don't have to know everything but I have to know what I know and what I don't. I am not an expert in cell biology, I'm a student. But even as a student its my conviction that I already know enough cell biology to know that cryonics can't work which is really the point of this discussion whether or not I am an expert in anything is irrelevant. >> picking it apart molecule by molecule and recording the locations and >> type. If that can be done piling them together seems to be equally hard. > > > I disagree. I think it is much much harder. I even think it is impossible. > Because you have to get your manufacturing fingers around the cell > clusters whilst the cells in the centre of the cluster have to be at the > right temperature to act like cells and bind to the other cells. > My assumption was -170 C. It seems that your view is that cells at this > temperature do not correspond to viable cells at all? Yes. That is my view. In order to take cells down to - 170 you take them down to say - 70 for 24 hours or so first. You can't just plung them into - 170. You can do that slow stepped freezing with cells that are just cells, like the mouse ES cells I've worked with (or pretty much any cells, that aren't still in tissue form) because they have a small surface to volume ratio. > Your brain and mine would at one level be variations on the theme of homo > sapiens male brains. But what makes me me and you you is in the > nanoscale details. Knowing how to build Bretts brain as a manufacturing > process wouldn't give you an algorithm for building an Anders brain. At > the nanoscale where the synapse make their connections our individual > brains would be too different. > > Sure. The differences are actually far larger than nanoscale, you can see > different folding patterns even in twin brains. They are ALSO far larger than nanoscale, but that they are different at the big scales is really beside the point. The point is that they are different at the small scales where memories are made. In the 1450 ml volume of your brain and my brain are lots of 50 nm cubic volumes. Our brains differ to the 50 nm scale from each others and from what they would have been if our respective genomes had developed and grown us in different enviroments so that we had different experiences and learned different things. Our neural nets are what they are in part because of our experience. To recreate the structure we need to go down to the 50 nm scale where the smallest parts of cells reach out and touch other cells to make new connections like memories. >> Maybe it would be worthwhile doing a careful critique of nanoscale >> dissassemblers? >> > >Biological or theoretical? What nanoscale dissassemblers are you >> talking about? > > Theoretical. Since many of the wilder projects discussed here tend > to be based on the assumption that they can work, clearly analysing > the underlying assumptions and constraints would help constrain the > handwaving. Indeed. > > That I think is ultimately what transhumanism is. Its not the > > successor to humanism its a cultural support system for cryonicists > > and technological religious types that can't find salvation in the normal > > religions. Thats why transhumanism doesn't produce anything except > > writers and entertainers - although individual transhumanists do > > produce some things those things are in their capacities as people > > not as transhumanists. > > That is an interesting criticism. And one that I actually agree with to > some extent. However, I'm much more hopeful about the usefulness of > transhumanism. Clearly. >> The wheels came off the transhumanist movement when transhumanists >> did not take a strong enough stand when US political conservatives >> turned into religious regressives. > Actually, that might have been the breakthrough. Because it made > bioethicists much more transhumanist, and that will make a major > change in policy and funding in the long run. No, I completely reject that silver lining interpretation. But that's another topic. Arguably a more important topic, but I want to have that conversation with others, because I want to have this one with you. > >> That a lot of entropy is being pushed around (making unordered atoms >> into an ordered cell) adds a bit to the heat problem, but can still be >> managed by slowing things down or dividing the workpieces so that > >radiating the entropy into the environment is easy. > > No offense Anders but conversation needs a lot more credibility > established before we can do the handwavey stuff. > Excuse me, but where is the handwaving *here*? You might slap > my fingers on cell biology, but it seems pretty strange that you find > *these* statements handwaving. My bad. When I post to Exi-chat on cryonics I expect to be beset by true believers right and left and so I feel like I have to make very clear that I am not going to waste my time or mince words. You are perfectly right to call me on handwaving when you think I am. >> > That molecules are dancing around isn't an enormous problem at -170, >> > since the cryonic brain is essentially a crystal lattice with thermal >> > vibrations are on the order of 0.01 nm. >> >> The resolution of electron microscopes are about 2 nanometres from >> memory perhaps 0.2. Its not the state of the brain when frozen as a block of > >tissue thats the (or rather a) problem its that each brain is so massively unique > >in its arborial structures to very low resolutions. Lipid bilayers are only > > around 6 nanometres thick and if the bilayers are breached the ions leak and the > > organelle will not work. You have to be able to manufacture to place your > > lipids to that degree of precision whilst keeping the heat out that would > > change the chemistry of the lipids. It can't be done not. > Hmm, and why shouldn't I start to accuse you of handwaving and asking > you to refer to peer reviewed papers here? You could, that would be fair enough. But scientists are hardly climbing over themselves to critique cryonics most of them dismiss it out of hand. I'm giving you a shot at making a case for it and of making a convert that would have the skills to make lots of other converts. But there is risk in this for you because I may end up depriving you or a belief that you would prefer not to be deprived of. Brett Paatsch PS : I sent an attachment to the list but it seems folk don't want that if you haven't got it and you want to pursue this then let me know and I'll put it on a web site. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 19 23:51:45 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:51:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/19/07, A B wrote: > Jef wrote: > > "> I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting > > increasingly > > effective cooperation. Does that count?" > > I suppose (at this stage) it would depend on whether > or not that promotion took the form of enforced laws. > Based on our ongoing discussions I'm currently > presuming that it would (but please correct me if I'm > mistaken). The type of Anarchy I was thinking of was a > true absence of laws, but I'm certainly interested in > hearing any variations. Laws? Laws?! We don't need no steeeeenking laws! To the extent that we are mutually and effectively aware of our values and mutually and effectively aware of methods of promoting them. (Which includes methods of discouraging free-riders, some minimal level of administration, etc.) Note that I'm not as idealistic as that may appear, since both of these domains of awareness entail a huge (and increasing) amount of complexity, currently encoded into our biological and cultural representations of "what's right" and "what works." But I believe that it is to our co-evolutionary advantage to make these systems as frictionless as possible, thus anarchy. - Jef From emlynoregan at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 00:11:22 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:41:22 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: References: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704191711x6d682320je882763e98e3c614@mail.gmail.com> How about some kind of tech-anarchy? Minimal governance, automated rather than requiring human judgement wherever possible, using only open source code. Emlyn On 20/04/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > On 4/19/07, A B wrote: > > > Jef wrote: > > > > "> I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting > > > increasingly > > > effective cooperation. Does that count?" > > > > I suppose (at this stage) it would depend on whether > > or not that promotion took the form of enforced laws. > > Based on our ongoing discussions I'm currently > > presuming that it would (but please correct me if I'm > > mistaken). The type of Anarchy I was thinking of was a > > true absence of laws, but I'm certainly interested in > > hearing any variations. > > Laws? Laws?! We don't need no steeeeenking laws! > > To the extent that we are mutually and effectively aware of our values > and mutually and effectively aware of methods of promoting them. > (Which includes methods of discouraging free-riders, some minimal > level of administration, etc.) > > Note that I'm not as idealistic as that may appear, since both of > these domains of awareness entail a huge (and increasing) amount of > complexity, currently encoded into our biological and cultural > representations of "what's right" and "what works." > > But I believe that it is to our co-evolutionary advantage to make > these systems as frictionless as possible, thus anarchy. > > - Jef > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 20 00:06:17 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:06:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Scanning and simulation, rather than reconstruction after cryonic preservation Message-ID: On 4/19/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > From: "Anders Sandberg" > > Brett Paatsch wrote: > > >> .. Would you classify yourself as a believer in cryonics? Brett, I appreciate the point you are trying to make and I don't want to get in the way, but I would like to initiate (possibly a brief) parallel discussion path. In my view, there is nothing in principle to prevent cryonic preservation followed by repair and revival, but I see formidable difficulties in terms of physical constraints such as managing heat generation (from the reconstruction process) over a reasonable period of time. So I would think that scanning the original and reproducing its patterns within a computing substrate is likely to be more practical. Care to argue that aspect as well? - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 20 00:21:32 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:21:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0704191711x6d682320je882763e98e3c614@mail.gmail.com> References: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <710b78fc0704191711x6d682320je882763e98e3c614@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/19/07, Emlyn wrote: > How about some kind of tech-anarchy? Minimal governance, automated > rather than requiring human judgement wherever possible, using only > open source code. I think we'll very quickly require a framework for augmented wisdom as you describe, but both the code (corresponding to its evolving methods) and the data (corresponding to its evolving values) must be open, and if we pursue this line of reasoning I think we find that it must be a broadly distributed system in order to meet our moral need for self determination, at least as far as such a configuration remains competitive. After that, well it'll be a different game. - Jef From mbb386 at main.nc.us Fri Apr 20 01:03:07 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:03:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] singularity fiction In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <34949.72.236.103.40.1177030987.squirrel@main.nc.us> > http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/g/mcnrs.html > Thanks. :) That was different. And I enjoyed reading it. Regards, MB From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Apr 20 02:28:30 2007 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:28:30 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] 'Einstein Speaks' References: <46224617.6090302@lineone.net><00c601c77fdb$4e588d20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60704160740t18203348k669773b37382d0f1@mail.gmail.com><7641ddc60704161521oa808a50i6167e68ab0dd512c@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070416174556.02222570@satx.rr.com><7641ddc60704161609nd482596s3d4bc039057a83a2@mail.gmail.com><3cf171fe0704161647t4d0cab82h9b6fbe83ac934a8a@mail.gmail.com> <004c01c780b2$b8169450$0200a8c0@Nano> Message-ID: <012601c782f3$d7f96ca0$0200a8c0@Nano> Okay you guys will find this one entertaining! For your viewing pleasure, a short (and fun) experimental piece in photographic lip syncing - called 'Einstein Speaks'. http://www.nanogirl.com/personal/espeaks.htm Feel free to comment at the blog! http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ ~ My demo reel: http://www.nanogirl.com/demoreel.htm Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 01:57:51 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:57:51 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <902603.49203.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070418204758.021dec40@satx.rr.com> <902603.49203.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/20/07, A B wrote: > > ... A naked human brain for example, would be > a lot like a squishy puddle if you laid it on the > table. Not really, more like a wobbly lump of jelly. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 02:10:07 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:10:07 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <354314.61143.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <710b78fc0704181812m7e722f57j9143659fde087a4b@mail.gmail.com> <354314.61143.qm@web37410.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/20/07, A B wrote: Me too! I'd sure as hell prefer an expert-system. In > 9.8 out of 10 of my experiences with doctors, I'd > swear they weren't listening to a damn thing I was > saying, anyway. Like Eliezer said, state-of-the-art > expert-systems have been superior to doctor diagnoses > for many years. Ever wonder why they haven't yet > become the standard? Can I say: a not so subtle > conflict of interest? We should probably expect the > same thing in the next couple of years when automated > systems are also superior at performing all surgeries. I doubt that automated surgeons, or even automated hairdressers, are a couple of years away. And I don't think automated doctors will become generally accepted until automated friends, lovers and governments also become acceptable. It will happen, but not for a while yet. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sti at pooq.com Fri Apr 20 02:04:53 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:04:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <46281FC5.7040501@pooq.com> A B wrote: > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > any list members here be most closely described as > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? > Not me personally, but my wife has been a member of this list, and she claims that Anarchism is the closest approximation to her preferred political system. From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 20 02:46:29 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:46:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Scanning and simulation, rather than reconstruction after cryonic preservation In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419223830.02c1dd58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 05:06 PM 4/19/2007 -0700, you wrote: >On 4/19/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > > > > From: "Anders Sandberg" > > > > Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > > >> .. Would you classify yourself as a believer in cryonics? > >Brett, I appreciate the point you are trying to make and I don't want >to get in the way, but I would like to initiate (possibly a brief) >parallel discussion path. > >In my view, there is nothing in principle to prevent cryonic >preservation followed by repair and revival, but I see formidable >difficulties in terms of physical constraints such as managing heat >generation (from the reconstruction process) over a reasonable period >of time. You have your finger on an engineering problem that has been there since the dawn of electrical engineering. One approach is to fracture the brain into tiny pieces, map all the surfaces and expand it in LN2 or some other way of getting rid of the heat. >So I would think that scanning the original and reproducing >its patterns within a computing substrate is likely to be more >practical. Care to argue that aspect as well? Gross as it might seem to us today, this might be the way. I kind of doubt it since a 3D infiltration would work faster than a mess of 2D scans, but who knows? Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 20 00:39:40 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:39:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419202910.03df2590@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:07 PM 4/19/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: >I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; >I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of >any list members here be most closely described as >Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? There has always been considerable spread, but the historical version of this group started out more or less centered around lower case libertarian. You could also say it branched off from cryonics as well. (Cryonics and for that matter the space colony bunch had a strong libertarian contingent in it, though members of both groups ranged far over the political spectrum.) The drift in the high tech areas I know about has been toward evolutionary psychology, but there isn't a political ideology formed up around that yet. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 20 03:05:06 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:05:06 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? References: Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070419220246.0220d358@satx.rr.com> At 08:39 PM 4/19/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >The drift in the high tech areas I know about has been toward evolutionary >psychology, but there isn't a political ideology formed up around that yet. Of course EP/sociobiology has always been pilloried as a contrived/one-sided/bogus ideological mask for social darwinist special interests, although a few on left such as Peter Singer (and perhaps the ideologues of Tony Blair's "Third Way") belatedly saw the sense of the thing. Damien Broderick From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Fri Apr 20 01:29:30 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:29:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4628177A.9010309@thomasoliver.net> A B wrote: >I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; >I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of >any list members here be most closely described as >Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? > >Best Wishes, > >Jeffrey Herrlich > A former member of the Libertarian Party, I now find myself strangely drawn to the anarchist persuasion. I propose, as a sort of panacea for legal ills, the repeal of all laws granting collective title. Does that imply anarchy? -- Thomas From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 05:25:12 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:25:12 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/20/07, A B wrote: > > > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > any list members here be most closely described as > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? Anarchism has long been my political ideal, although I admit I've voted a few times while waiting for the state to wither away. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 20 06:29:57 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:29:57 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Lipid bilayer constraints and considerations -- Was Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704191343m157784f0q865f621b7fba6170@mail.gmail.com> References: <017501c78297$f5bcc450$e7e18f9b@homepc> <7641ddc60704191343m157784f0q865f621b7fba6170@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20070420062957.GH9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 04:43:01PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > But I say, it can't be done. The physics and chemistry of the biomolecules > > won't allow it to be done as a manufacturing process. > > > > Anders you say it can? Then let's see how. > > ### You may want to consider that the macromolecules are for the most > part not bound covalently to each other. They are bound by weaker Lipid bilayers specifically self-assemble. I don't understand what the problem is with building vitrified liposomes by placing lipids down one by one, and squiring water around it. In fact, given enough grad-student time we should be able to build a ring of lipids on HOPG or silicon, by dragging around lipids by AFM or STM -- today. Brett, would you say this can't be done? > interactions - hydrophobic, electrostatic, even van der Waals. This > means that merely placing such molecules in close proximity in the > right orientation should assure proper interactions, without the need > to induce complex chemical reactions. A molecular printer should > therefore be able to assemble the tissue out of single molecules, just > as similar simple assemblages of non-biological molecules have already > been made with STMs. It's true that many millions of different > molecular species would be needed by the printer, and the process If course if you synthesize these from more primitive building blocks, the diversity goes down. Way down, in the end you only need a small subset of the PSE. > would be excruciatingly slow but I know of no fundamental physical or > chemical obstacles to its success. Ayup. > This said, I really think molecular printing will not be necessary to > produce conscious devices patterned after vitrified brains. Ablative > scanning and in-silico reconstruction/modeling seem to be much easier. Agreed, the requirement for cryonics to work is to have mature nanotechnology is a red herring. You don't need machine-phase for resurrecting patients, if we're talking about numerical models. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 20 06:41:30 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:41:30 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20070420064130.GI9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 03:07:43PM -0700, A B wrote: > > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > any list members here be most closely described as > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? Yes, please. (However, as a realist I perfectly understand that with the current agent makeup the current system is somewhere in a potential minimum. This will only change by making the average bear smarter). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 20 06:43:13 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:43:13 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? In-Reply-To: References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20070420064313.GK9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 03:18:48PM -0700, Jef Allbright wrote: > I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting increasingly > effective cooperation. Does that count? Hah! My position precisely. Only cooperation would emerge naturally as a result of more smarts, as in ability to track lots of transaction histories with many agents, and ability to model ahead. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 10:17:11 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:17:11 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Surgical robots Message-ID: Three major advances aided by surgical robots have been remote surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and unmanned surgery. Major potential advantages of robotic surgery are precision and miniaturization. Further advantages are articulation beyond normal manipulation and three-dimensional magnification. Some surgical robots are autonomous, and they are not always under the control of a surgeon. They are only sometimes used as tools to extend the surgical skills of a trained surgeon. (Check the links at the foot of this article). ------------------------ Autonomous surgical robots are still rare at the present time. Keyhole surgery robots are available now in some hospitals. The army is especially interested in remote-control surgical robots and a lot of development is going on. A search on - surgical robot - (both a news search and a web search) turns up lots of hits of exciting new developments. It doesn't look as though these machines are very far away. BillK From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 11:14:46 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:14:46 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Surgical robots In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/20/07, BillK wrote: > > > > Three major advances aided by surgical robots have been remote > surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and unmanned surgery. Major > potential advantages of robotic surgery are precision and > miniaturization. Further advantages are articulation beyond normal > manipulation and three-dimensional magnification. Some surgical robots > are autonomous, and they are not always under the control of a > surgeon. They are only sometimes used as tools to extend the surgical > skills of a trained surgeon. > > (Check the links at the foot of this article). > ------------------------ > > Autonomous surgical robots are still rare at the present time. > Keyhole surgery robots are available now in some hospitals. > The army is especially interested in remote-control surgical robots > and a lot of development is going on. > > A search on - surgical robot - (both a news search and a web search) > turns up lots of hits of exciting new developments. > > > > It doesn't look as though these machines are very far away. If you check out the links, most of them describe either telepresence robots controlled by a surgeon or else very specialised, stereotypic surgical procedures. The difference between an autonomous robot surgeon and a human surgeon today is like the difference between an apple-peeling machine and a robot with general dexterity that can drive to the supermarket, find and buy the apples, drive home, find the appropriate knife in the kitchen, and start peeling them. In a sense, it would be like passing the Turing test for motor skills. It will probably happen, but I don't think it's just around the corner. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 11:33:44 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:33:44 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Surgical robots In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/20/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > If you check out the links, most of them describe either telepresence robots > controlled by a surgeon or else very specialised, stereotypic surgical > procedures. Agreed. Initially autonomous surgical robots will be for specific surgical procedures. That is happening already. > The difference between an autonomous robot surgeon and a human > surgeon today is like the difference between an apple-peeling machine and a > robot with general dexterity that can drive to the supermarket, find and buy > the apples, drive home, find the appropriate knife in the kitchen, and start > peeling them. In a sense, it would be like passing the Turing test for motor > skills. It will probably happen, but I don't think it's just around the > corner. > I don't think anybody expects anytime soon a general purpose robot surgeon to wander into the surgery saying 'What's scheduled for today?'. :) BillK From neptune at superlink.net Fri Apr 20 11:36:56 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:36:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? References: <35277.69717.qm@web37409.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <008b01c78340$33ad75e0$7b893cd1@pavilion> On Thursday, April 19, 2007 7:09 PM A B austriaaugust at yahoo.com wrote: > "> I'd be in favor of a system of anarchy promoting > > increasingly > > effective cooperation. Does that count?" > > I suppose (at this stage) it would depend on whether > or not that promotion took the form of enforced laws. > Based on our ongoing discussions I'm currently > presuming that it would (but please correct me if I'm > mistaken). The type of Anarchy I was thinking of was a > true absence of laws, but I'm certainly interested in > hearing any variations. I think it's helpful to distinguish between anarchy, social chaos, and anomie. Of course, usually, the three are conflated. However, I think it's best to think of the former as a society where there's no ruler -- not one where there are no rules. Social choas and anomie, however, are where there are no rules -- no laws per se -- not even laws derived from free interaction. Some thinkers, such as Robert Ellickson in his _Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes_, would also distinguish between a society without a ruler and without formal rules. In his study of Shasta County, CA, Ellickson finds that neighbors often settle disputes without resorting to formal laws -- even when such formal laws would give them a pecuniary advantage. Given this distinction, one can imagine an anarchist society that's anal about formal rules and one that's much more like Ellickson's Shasta County. (My view is real world anarchies would fall somewhere in between, though tilt toward the informal side simply because even inside "archies" people usually behave informally if not anarchically.) Regards, Dan See "Free Market Anarchism: A Justification" at: http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/AnarchismJustified.html From neptune at superlink.net Fri Apr 20 11:42:27 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:42:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419202910.03df2590@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <009801c78340$f91fb9a0$7b893cd1@pavilion> On Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:39 PM Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers.com wrote: > The drift in the high tech areas I know about has > been toward evolutionary psychology, but there > isn't a political ideology formed up around that yet. Need one's political philosophy well up from one's beliefs about psychology? I think just as the multiplication table doesn't necessarily change with each new fashion in psychology (or other theories), one need not come up with a different political outlook with each change of fashion in other beliefs. This is not to say all views are insulated here, but certain things seem to apply formally no matter what the content is or what the other givens are. Think of economics as a model here. The law of supply and demand applies regardless of whether one is talking about ascetic monks, sybaritic hedonists, middle class American moms, lower class Chinese factory workers, or rich Arab oil men -- or whatever social, cultural, philosophical, or ideological background shapes them. Regards, Dan From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 11:47:48 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:47:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] HUMOR: Dilbert invents the future iPod Message-ID: Don't say you weren't warned! :) BillK From neptune at superlink.net Fri Apr 20 11:25:54 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:25:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy? References: <980819.50405.qm@web37411.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <007601c7833e$a916c040$7b893cd1@pavilion> On Thursday, April 19, 2007 6:07 PM A B austriaaugust at yahoo.com wrote: > I'm not aiming to make this an inflammatory thread; > I'm simply curious: Would the political ideology of > any list members here be most closely described as > Anarchist? As compared to other possible systems? Mine would. Or perhaps "libertarian anarchist" or "free market anarchist" would best describe my political philosophy at this time. See: "Anarchism, Minarchism, and Freedom" at http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/Anarchism.html "Family, Social Order, and Government" at http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/FamilySOG.html "Free Market Anarchism: A Justification" at http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/AnarchismJustified.html Regards, Dan http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 20 11:54:40 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:54:40 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! Message-ID: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? ;) From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 12:23:56 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:23:56 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704200523kf057edeu3b0f792b147b6dc7@mail.gmail.com> On 4/20/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? > ;) > Heh. I'm a small-L libertarian; I believe central government is needed to keep the peace and enforce contracts, I just don't think it should go much beyond that. I vaguely remember there was a survey on something like this awhile back, though not the details. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 20 15:25:49 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:25:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:54:40 -0400, Eugen Leitl wrote: > A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? ;) Since you ask, I don't personally have much use for anarchism. Too idealistic for my taste. Talk to me again about anarchism when we're all as enlightened as Buddha or Jesus, assuming those characters were enlightened enough for anarchism in the first place. In the meantime I'm interested mainly in keeping my feet on the ground, and in devoting my thought processes to the real word in which we live today. Oops, sorry for the blasphemy! -gts From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 20 16:24:18 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:24:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070420162418.GJ9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 11:25:49AM -0400, gts wrote: > Since you ask, I don't personally have much use for anarchism. Too > idealistic for my taste. Of course it's idealistic, all desiderata are that at some point. > Talk to me again about anarchism when we're all as enlightened as Buddha > or Jesus, assuming those characters were enlightened enough for anarchism > in the first place. In the meantime I'm interested mainly in keeping my > feet on the ground, and in devoting my thought processes to the real word > in which we live today. As a realist, I agree, and hence this is why I'm interested in human augmentation (numerical people models are arguably pretty good augmentation). Of course, some of the relevant augmentation (distributed reputation databases, crypto, AR, etc.) can be done with quite cheap wearables, even though currently only less than 1% in developed countries who would bother could actually improvise that a platform. That's rather piss-poor, in terms if interoperability, since most of your interactions will be with mundanes. Otoh, there's a lot of augmentation market in virtual environments, and since Linden Lab announced they'll open source the server (and OpenCroquet has gone 1.0 quite quite a while ago) things will remain interesting. > Oops, sorry for the blasphemy! And from the thunder, a mighty Voice spoke.... "Repaint! Repaint and thin no more!" -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 16:38:44 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:38:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? [was: Anarchy!] Message-ID: Though I tend to lean in the anarchist (minimal government) and anti-Transparent-Society (excessive government observation) I am reminded of the events in the U.S. this week when a person perceiving individuals and/or society harming him decided to strike back against that "class" of individuals and/or society. Now, as far as I know right now the U.K. has the most surveillance of any society but to the best of my knowledge this isn't viewed as reducing the overall crime level. Surveillance run by a government is unlikely to prevent incidents like those at Virginia Tech (unless it gets much more invasive -- to the level of Brin's Transparent Society or beyond). But one would suspect one could not completely stop such things until one has either automatic personal shields (and this probably requires utility fog type technology) or implanted human shutdown chips (i.e. in response to the first gunshot every human on the campus is deactivated). There is nothing wrong with anarchy but unless it is operating in an environment where another individual cannot harm you I don't see how it accomplishes much (sure it might make the society more efficient but it doesn't inherently make the society safer -- and if "real" life extension technology becomes widespread it is personal safety you are going to be primarily concerned with). Everyone carrying a gun isn't the answer. Hell, there was an example the other day of a secret service person at the White House accidentally discharging his weapon and injuring another secret service person. If the secret service can't handle weapons safely how can one expect a society where everyone carries weapons to work? The "Transparent Society" doesn't work with anarchy. So long as either (a) "mentally ill" or (b) "reactive"(?) individuals exist it doesn't do any good to know you are going to "catch" someone. Cleaning up after the damage has been done isn't the answer. When one has people who cannot be rational or behave irrationally (or suicidally) then an anarchist system is not likely to lead to a society with minimal injury or loss of life. If someone can show me how it will, I'd be happy to consider the arguments. On a tangent note, I was happy to note that the Montana legislature passed and the governor signed a law recently telling the U.S. government what they could do with their national license "Real-ID" program. (An example of a knee jerk reaction to try and solve a problem which increased surveillance, decreased privacy, allowed potential for government abuse and probably did little to really make people safer.) Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 16:59:25 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:59:25 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? [was: Anarchy!] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/20/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > Though I tend to lean in the anarchist (minimal government) and > anti-Transparent-Society (excessive government observation) I am reminded of > the events in the U.S. this week when a person perceiving individuals and/or > society harming him decided to strike back against that "class" of > individuals and/or society. > > There is nothing wrong with anarchy but unless it is operating in an > environment where another individual cannot harm you I don't see how it > accomplishes much (sure it might make the society more efficient but it > doesn't inherently make the society safer -- and if "real" life extension > technology becomes widespread it is personal safety you are going to be > primarily concerned with). Everyone carrying a gun isn't the answer. Hell, > there was an example the other day of a secret service person at the White > House accidentally discharging his weapon and injuring another secret > service person. If the secret service can't handle weapons safely how can > one expect a society where everyone carries weapons to work? > > The "Transparent Society" doesn't work with anarchy. So long as either (a) > "mentally ill" or (b) "reactive"(?) individuals exist it doesn't do any good > to know you are going to "catch" someone. Cleaning up after the damage has > been done isn't the answer. When one has people who cannot be rational or > behave irrationally (or suicidally) then an anarchist system is not likely > to lead to a society with minimal injury or loss of life. > > If someone can show me how it will, I'd be happy to consider the arguments. > Agreed. Most of the idealistic designs don't seem to notice that our present society expends a huge amount of resources on defending society against the bottom half of the human race. Police, prisons, the legal system, A&E staff, security professionals, Amnesty, social workers, etc. etc. The horror that is being just kept under control can ruin the most wonderful of systems. I doubt if Eugen's augmentation will help much. I don't much fancy the prospect of facing augmented gangsters, drug dealers, rapists, fraudsters, etc. BillK From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 20 17:16:57 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:16:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] EP and political philosophy was Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <009801c78340$f91fb9a0$7b893cd1@pavilion> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419202910.03df2590@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070420113216.0397b550@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 07:42 AM 4/20/2007 -0400, you wrote: >On Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:39 PM Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers.com >wrote: > > The drift in the high tech areas I know about has > > been toward evolutionary psychology, but there > > isn't a political ideology formed up around that yet. > >Need one's political philosophy well up from one's beliefs about >psychology? I think just as the multiplication table doesn't >necessarily change with each new fashion in psychology (or other >theories), one need not come up with a different political outlook with >each change of fashion in other beliefs. This is not to say all views >are insulated here, but certain things seem to apply formally no matter >what the content is or what the other givens are. This is something I have not given a lot of thought to and it clearly would take a lot. EP is an extremely pragmatic study. It accounts for the psychological mechanisms people have because those mechanisms contributed to reproductive success (in the inclusive sense) during the EEA or are side effects of some trait that did contribute. Large scale political beliefs as well as large scale religions emerged with the formation of states. States, of course, were not part of the EEA so it gets tricky when you start considering how EEA mechanisms cope with an environment they were not shaped in. I have been considering war, particularly what conditions set off wars, in this context. It's a depressing model that emerges. But take one example from the libertarian spectrum, objectivism. Now I don't make the least claim to understand all the ins and out of objectivism, but I was exposed many years ago to an objectivist who claimed that if an objectivist were offered a choice, the objectivist should value his life more than that of all the rest of the human race. Assuming my informant properly represented the objectivist political view, then EP (applying Hamilton's rule) will say this is just wrong and in fact not likely to happen if such a choice happened to an objectivist. We evolved to (in some circumstances) value other lives more than our own. Azar Gat goes into considerable detail about this in his new book _War in Human Civilization_ and it is the point behind the recent movie 300. >Think of economics as a model here. The law of supply and demand >applies regardless of whether one is talking about ascetic monks, >sybaritic hedonists, middle class American moms, lower class Chinese >factory workers, or rich Arab oil men -- or whatever social, cultural, >philosophical, or ideological background shapes them. Even so, economics needs to be informed by EP. Otherwise how can you explain why people forgo huge sums of money for status and why people pay high prices for drugs and the attention they get in cults? Sorry for harping on this, but understanding EP is really critical toward making sense out of the social world. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 20 17:30:13 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:30:13 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070420122606.02186180@satx.rr.com> At 11:25 AM 4/20/2007 -0400, gts wrote: >Since you ask, I don't personally have much use for anarchism. Too >idealistic for my taste. > >Talk to me again about anarchism when we're all as enlightened as Buddha >or Jesus Take a look at the Mondrag?n Corporaci?n Cooperativa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Corporation Having its problems, but still an intriguing real-life experiment. Damien Broderick From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 20 21:09:47 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:09:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <492499.5069.qm@web60521.mail.yahoo.com> --- Robert Bradbury wrote: > Though I tend to lean in the anarchist (minimal > government) and > anti-Transparent-Society (excessive government > observation) I am reminded of > the events in the U.S. this week when a person > perceiving individuals and/or > society harming him decided to strike back against > that "class" of > individuals and/or society. There will always be abberrant individuals. Even if you cull them from society, they will arise again by fresh mutation. Governments, laws, and absurd levels of surveillance cannot keep you safe. They can only oppress you, violate you, and make society even more intolerable for the malcontents. Only by being an enlightened individual fully aware and accepting of his or her own flaws, limitations, and terrifyingly awesome power can one hope to preserve ones self and ones society. > Now, as far as I know right now the U.K. has the > most surveillance of any > society but to the best of my knowledge this isn't > viewed as reducing the > overall crime level. Surveillance run by a > government is unlikely to > prevent incidents like those at Virginia Tech > (unless it gets much more > invasive -- to the level of Brin's Transparent > Society or beyond). Agreed. > But one > would suspect one could not completely stop such > things until one has either > automatic personal shields (and this probably > requires utility fog type > technology) or implanted human shutdown chips (i.e. > in response to the first > gunshot every human on the campus is deactivated). Future technology is unavailable in the present. What is available in the present is decisiveness and courage. One enlightened janitor willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good could have brained the Virginia Tech punk with mop handle and saved over two-dozen lives. > There is nothing wrong with anarchy but unless it is > operating in an > environment where another individual cannot harm you There is no such environment. In fact the environment's momentum is such that individuals are becoming able to harm ever increasing numbers of people at once. > I don't see how it > accomplishes much (sure it might make the society > more efficient but it > doesn't inherently make the society safer Sure it does. It puts the responsibility for personal safety squarely where it belongs. In the hands of the individual. No degree of legislation can substitute for the security I feel in knowing that I am willing, able, and prepared to defend myself and the ones I love at any instant with anything up to and including deadly force. > -- and if > "real" life extension > technology becomes widespread it is personal safety > you are going to be > primarily concerned with). I don't know about that. A tired 800 year old man who had "done it all" might decide to take up skydiving for the hell of it. > Everyone carrying a gun > isn't the answer. At Virginia Tech another armed student could have dropped the rogue human and kept the death toll below five. > Hell, > there was an example the other day of a secret > service person at the White > House accidentally discharging his weapon and > injuring another secret > service person. If the secret service can't handle > weapons safely how can > one expect a society where everyone carries weapons > to work? Humans err, technology fails, and the unexpected happens. Like I said true safety is an illusion. You can have a society of sheep that comply with enlightened laws to the letter, and a rock the size of Killamanjaro can fall on your head, a tsunami could drown you, or a super volcano could explode. I would expect a society where everyone carried weapons to work very politely. > The "Transparent Society" doesn't work with anarchy. > So long as either (a) > "mentally ill" or (b) "reactive"(?) individuals > exist it doesn't do any good > to know you are going to "catch" someone. Cleaning > up after the damage has > been done isn't the answer. When one has people who > cannot be rational or > behave irrationally (or suicidally) then an > anarchist system is not likely > to lead to a society with minimal injury or loss of > life. > If someone can show me how it will, I'd be happy to > consider the arguments. A society of individuals willing to accept responsibility for the greater good at any personal cost will be able to neutralize the threat caused by such individuals rather quickly. This is the case whether they have guns or not. The fact that so many of the shootings happened in the engineering building at Virginia Tech is a monument to how timid Americans have become. A university engineering building is practically an armoury of improvisable weapons. You can blind somebody with a fire-extinguisher or measly laser pointer for crying out loud. > On a tangent note, I was happy to note that the > Montana legislature passed > and the governor signed a law recently telling the > U.S. government what they > could do with their national license "Real-ID" > program. (An example of a > knee jerk reaction to try and solve a problem which > increased surveillance, > decreased privacy, allowed potential for government > abuse and probably did > little to really make people safer.) I too am glad to hear this. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new." -Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher and Emperor of Rome. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From moses2k at gmail.com Sat Apr 21 02:54:47 2007 From: moses2k at gmail.com (Chris Petersen) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:54:47 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] 3 Laws Unsafe (at any speed) Message-ID: <3aff9e290704201954y5aed0b1q31b7e164c3f59f00@mail.gmail.com> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVnkd7ot_pw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Sat Apr 21 02:51:01 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:51:01 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fw: Google Alert - impeachment Bush Message-ID: <00b901c783bf$e5c16f00$e7e18f9b@homepc> Hooray for Vermont, but where the F**k are the Californians? And the New Englanders? Many of the Americans I regard as decent and intelligent live in progressive California and New England and yet they continue to do nothing or as near as close to nothing as makes no difference. They don't write their congressmen or representatives who are probably waiting and hoping for their contact so they can show that their is the public will to put behind the legal case for impeachment but the citizens are so disengaged that most of them seem to not even know who there representatives are. Save humanity from my fucking lazy stupid Americans. Only 100 million people can vote in US Presidential elections or lobby US politicians to do the right thing for all the rest of us 6 billion on the planet that want rule of law not perpetual war. But 6 billion of us can wage our individually wars on a lawless deserving anti-human country when that countries citizens conspicuoulsy sit idle as their feuher tears up their rule book (the constitution) and ours (the UN charter). Not every libertarian is a parasite, there are non-American libertarians, but every parasite sitting unnoticed on the back of greater beings is a liberatarian just hoping to stay unnoticed so they can continue to freely keep on sucking. ----- Original Message ----- From: Google Alerts To: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2007 7:06 AM Subject: Google Alert - impeachment Bush Google News Alert for: impeachment Bush Vermont senators: Impeach Bush and Cheney USA Today - USA MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have ... See all stories on this topic Senate adopts resolution seeking president's impeachment WCAX - Burlington,VT,USA MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Vermont senators adopted a nonbinding resolution Friday seeking the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. ... See all stories on this topic Vermont Senate: Impeach the president Denver Post - Denver,CO,USA MONTPELIER, Vt.- Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have ... See all stories on this topic Vermont Senate: Impeach the President San Francisco Chronicle - San Francisco,CA,USA Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious ... See all stories on this topic Vermont Senate: Impeach the President Worcester Telegram - Worcester,MA,USA MONTPELIER, Vt.- Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions in Iraq ... See all stories on this topic Vermont Senate adopts resolution seeking impeachment of Bush, Cheney San Diego Union Tribune - San Diego,CA,USA MONTPELIER, Vt. - Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have ... See all stories on this topic Vermont senate adopts resolution to impeach Bush Reuters India - Mumbai,India Russell Feingold's call last year to censure Bush -- a step short of an impeachment -- found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats. ... See all stories on this topic Emotions flare as legislators discuss Bush impeachment The Spokesman Review - Spokane,WA,USA Thursday after the state Senate opted not to vote on a resolution urging a congressional impeachment investigation of President Bush. "We must end this war. ... See all stories on this topic Delegation responds to impeachment resolution BurlingtonFreePress.com - Burlington,VT,USA "As Vermont's representatives to Congress we fully understand and share the frustration and anger of Vermont legislators and many Vermonters with the Bush ... See all stories on this topic Vermont Senate: Impeach the President Sarasota Herald-Tribune - Sarasota,FL,USA MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have ... See all stories on this topic -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google. Remove this alert. Create another alert. Manage your alerts. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sti at pooq.com Sat Apr 21 04:27:08 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:27:08 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4629929C.5030501@pooq.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: > A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? > ;) I'm not. Not sure quite what my ism is, although I tend to favour liberal socialist schemes. A few years ago I was asked to invent some examples of possible world governments for the 2003 Worldcon. Alas, they were never used, but I must admit that the concept of the Democratic Meritocracy that I came up with more closely resembles my dream govt. than any other. On the other hand, I don't think we actually have the sociological knowledge needed to pull it off successfully: http://sti.pooq.com/archive/Documents/worldgov/meritocracy.txt From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Apr 21 04:52:28 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 23:52:28 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <4629929C.5030501@pooq.com> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> <4629929C.5030501@pooq.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070420235124.022c0598@satx.rr.com> At 12:27 AM 4/21/2007 -0400, Stirling Westrup wrote: >the concept of the Democratic Meritocracy that I came up with >more closely resembles my dream govt. than any other. A quick glance suggests that you've reinvented the Confucian system of governance. Would that Greg Burch were still here! Damien Broderick From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Sat Apr 21 05:23:25 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:23:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Defending freedom Message-ID: <00e401c783d5$2fafedc0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Keith wrote: At 08:36 AM 4/19/2007 +1000, Brian wrote: >I am a libertarian. Being a libertarian in my book carries >duties to defend freedom when freedom is threatened. So it seemed to me back in 1996 when the scientology cult threatened freedom of speech by trying to destroy a news group. Somebody had to do it, but I can tell you the cost so far has been a large multiple of the most I ever earned in a year. > We can't take out money with us Keith. What we can do is influence the reputations we leave behind. >George W Bush's "war on terror" is the stupidist most >absurb proposition turned into policy that a country full >of appeasers has sat and nodded at since Caligula married >his horse. > >When the nazis came to power in Germany they were able >to do so because men and women that could have together >done something about it did not act early enough. I used to think that way. Wore a white rose to my court appearances even. Now I am not at all sure they could have had an effect against the social forces at work and the psychological traits humans have that came out of our history as hunter gatherers. > You are wrong about the psychological traits that came out of human history. Its not hunter gather times that shapes modern behavior its the modern jungle still there beneath the thinest of thin venears. >I have issues with American libertarians because they are >not, in sufficient numbers or more importantly in significant >effective efforts, defending the most fundamental freedoms >of all. It takes organized groups to affect policy in a democracy. > Crap. How many organised people was Jefferson, (I count him as one). How many was Madison (I count him as one more). The list goes on an on. Those guys didn't have the internet to work with or to speak from. Organizing libertarians is a task akin to herding cats. > Dial a cliche. Max did it better than anyone else I know. > Did. As in past tense. I am even more of a "lead by example" and look where it got me. > I am glad to see that you are posting. I am glad to see you are not in Guantamano bay. >Your extropian principles were an excellent effort by the >younger man that was yourself to articulate a vision for a >way forward. But fine words uttered in ones youth are not >enough. > >If one will not stand up and fight for a principle and struggle and >even die for a principle, ones most cherished principle, then one >is not really alive. I agree with you. Sorry if I have not been paying attention, but could you fill me in with what you have been doing? I know it is not on the level you want to deal with, but would you like to picket the scientology cult with me? > No. The scientology cult isn't in a position to appoint supreme court judges, tear up the constitution or invade foreign countries. It isn't *that* likely to get you jail time or make you an exile. You really should not expect people to maintain the fire for more than a few decades. > I expect that if they don't then other people will light fires under them. >Your extropian principles, as has been discussed before, by folk >like Hal come into tension with each other. > >We all have to make our living in this less than ideal world. But >if we don't take a stand on anything because the highest goal >we have is always to keep ourselves alive then we never really >live. That's true. I have been with Max when we both had HIV contaminated fluids up to our elbows. That's taking a stand and a serious risk to life. By your standard we have really lived. Hope you have really lived as well. >Bush has attacked science and reason and technology and >people. He has said you are with us (meaning him) or against >us. When Presidents or Feuhrers say those things and act >above the law we cannot not take them seriously. Unfortunately, an irrational leader is what you should expect to develop when the hunter gatherer band is under attack. > My point exactly. If you country is no better than a hunter gather band, stand by, to be replaced by something better and more evolved. But if you have any specific ideas, please let me know. Private email if you like. > My idea is that you uphold the constitution and laws that you already have. My idea is that when a President takes an oath to you as a citizen that he will uphold the constitution and its laws, that you bloody well insist that he does. My idea for you is that you should write your representatives in congress demanding that the promise that was made you be kept. >The rule of law could use your support at this point in history >Max. Humanity could. I could. It's a much more difficult situation than I thought it would be eleven years ago. The rule of law depends on honest courts. > The President picks the supreme court judges. The President appoints the Attorney General. Are you aware of where the Attorney General is at the moment? What can you do when you find the courts themselves are committing criminal acts? > If you don't wait to long you can use your free speach to stop the rot. > You can get others of like minds to work with you. If you do wait to long the characters like Hitler just rewrite the constitution and appoint the judges and then the "scientologists" or any scoundrels they like do what they like. I know of your adventures and troubles with scientology. I am glad you took a stand. But you are right about one thing scientology is small beer compared to trying to get a president impeached when that president has the power to declare you an enemy combatant, suspend habeas corpus (the Military Commissions Act 2006) and have you picked up and imprisoned, and essentially tortured whilst not calling it torture entirely on his say so. At this point in time one does not need to fight in the streets of america to stop it becoming the fourth reich. One can, at this point in time, use the political process and write, or email, or protest. But that can change. If you don't impeach this president any politician with dictatorial aspirations watching current politics will learn that the American sheeple are ripe for ready for fleecing and roasting. Brett Paatsch From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Sat Apr 21 05:41:45 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:41:45 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Re Hierarchies of principle Message-ID: <00f301c783d7$bf2bbb30$e7e18f9b@homepc> Thomas asks : But where can I find a representative? And I agree -- Skip Gonzales. In the interest of the past, present and future, let us impeach Bush and Cheney. Which country are you in? Which state are you in? Which county? What newspapers are you aware of? What internet forums? Who or how many whos are out there claiming to be your representative relying on your complacency whist you can find them? Why can't you even represent yourself? Let your local, state and federal representatives know that there are two more homo sapien testicles out there mixed in with their dull domesticated flock of subservient sheeple. You may find that they are delighted to hear from you. If you want someone to proof read a letter or email for you before you send it then forward it on over. Brett Paatsch From neptune at superlink.net Sat Apr 21 11:46:41 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 07:46:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> <8d71341e0704200523kf057edeu3b0f792b147b6dc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <005501c7840a$bb368400$74893cd1@pavilion> Libertarians, in the sense of people who embrace the noninitiation of force principle, come in two flavors: anarchist and minarchist. Your position is simply the libertarian minarchist one. Not to start up a long debate on the issue, but my view is that minarchism -- a government limited to protecting individual negative rights, which is what I think you have in mind -- is not possible. Once there is a government in place, it will, I fear soon become non-libertarian. Why? Well, it will have to be the strongest agent in its area of operations and will have no legitimate competition. (If it's not the strongest in its area, then whatever is stronger will, sooner or later, overcome it. At that point, it will not longer be a government -- and people will question whether it was a government in the first place. If it has legitimate competitors, likewise, it's not really a government.) It will have little need to adhere to libertarian principles under those conditions -- save the fear of rebellion or of invasion. Since those two possibilities are usually unlikely, I doubt any minarchy will stay minarchist. Regards, Dan From: Russell Wallace To: ExI chat list Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 8:23 AM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! On 4/20/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? ;) Heh. I'm a small-L libertarian; I believe central government is needed to keep the peace and enforce contracts, I just don't think it should go much beyond that. I vaguely remember there was a survey on something like this awhile back, though not the details. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From neptune at superlink.net Sat Apr 21 12:03:41 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:03:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <005b01c7840d$1b52c900$74893cd1@pavilion> On Friday, April 20, 2007 11:25 AM gts gts_2000 at yahoo.com wrote: > On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:54:40 -0400, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > A different question: is here anyone who *isn't* an anarchist? ;) > > Since you ask, I don't personally have much use for anarchism. Too > idealistic for my taste. > > Talk to me again about anarchism when we're all as enlightened as Buddha > or Jesus, assuming those characters were enlightened enough for anarchism > in the first place. I actually think this is not the case. I believe anarchism -- at least, market anarchism of the sort advocated by people like Molinari, Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, George H. Smith, Edward Stringham* -- is practical and applies to regular people. Just as economic laws apply to all people under scarcity, I think the political philosophy of anarchism can be applied to all people -- whether they be Buddhas or average people or even less than average people. In fact, I think it's unwise to trust people will the power to govern others -- which is what having a government is -- if you don't have saints or angels. So, absent saints and angels, it seems unwise to have a government populated by people who are likely to be very un-enlightened and shortsighted even if not outright corrupt and evil. Given that real world governments are unlikely to be run by the Buddha, why put any trust in them? (Also, any real world government run by the Buddha would still face economic problems that even his saintly character could not solve. (Not that he would want to. The goal of the Buddha was achieving nirvana and bringing that enlightenment to others. That is an apolitical goal and can even be carried on in a forced labor camp.)) > In the meantime I'm interested mainly in keeping my > feet on the ground, and in devoting my thought > processes to the real word in which we live today. Same here. And I'm sure you want to change that world -- even if only in some small way. One way to make the world a better place is to devote some thought to what practical political arrangements -- of which I think market anarchism is one -- can improve things. > Oops, sorry for the blasphemy! No blasphemy involved. You and I just disagree over what's practical. My guess is, too, that most people on this list are NOT anarchists or even libertarians.** I could be wrong. Regards, Dan See "Free Market Anarchism: A Justification" at: http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/AnarchismJustified.html * Stringham is one of the newer members of the market anarchist movement. He has a homepage at: http://www.sjsu.edu/stringham/ Check out some of his works at: http://www.sjsu.edu/stringham/Pubs-stringham.html ** There are libertarian anarchists and libertarian minarchists. The latter believe that some form of limited government is compatible with libertarianism. From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Apr 21 12:04:21 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:04:21 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resend: Parfit's Reasons and Persons In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/20/07, Jef Allbright wrote: With regard to personal identity, Parfit shows very clearly and correctly > that there is no logically warranted basis for belief in a discrete > self. He then proceeds to espouse what he calls the Reductionist View, > claiming that > > "...we cannot explain the unity of a person's life by claiming that the > experiences > in this life are all had by this person . We can explain this unity only > by describing > the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and > their relations > to a particular brain . We could therefore describe a person's life in an > impersonal way, > which does not claim that this person exists." > > True to the spirit of Reductionism, it can't be faulted on its own terms, > but it misses the point that the meaning of personal identity doesn't inhere > in such detail, and stronger yet, such detail is to a variable extent > irrelevant and could be altered with no practical effect on personal > identity. Personal identity has no ontological status; it consists entirely > in its role as a label. Parfit recognizes the logical inconsistency of the > concept of a discrete personal identity, but retreats into reductionism > rather than taking the conceptual leap to a more encompassing paradigm > encompassing the observer and the process of meaning-making. Parfit uses the term "Reductionist View" in a very specific sense, contrasting it with the "Non-Reductionist" view as shown in this passage (R&P, p210): "Many Non-Reductionists believe that we are separately existing entities. On this view, personal identity over time does not just consist in physical and/or psychological continuity [i.e. the Reductionist View]. It involves a further fact. A person is a separately existing entity, distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences.On the best-known version of this view, a person is a purely mental entity: a Cartesian Pure Ego, or spiritual substance. But we might believe that a person is a separately existing physical entity, of a kind which is not yet recognised in the theories of contemporary physics." (Actually, I think Parfit is too generous in the space he gives the Non-Reductionist view, which I see as not just wrong but incoherent, but that is another argument). This does not mean that the emergent phenomenon/ illusion/ trick of personal identity is not significant or lacks explanatory power, any more than chemistry should be called fraudulent because it reduces to physics. I don't intend to join the debate on the strengths and weaknesses of > reductionism, but my main point is that explanations should be evaluated > according to their explanatory power which is necessarily dependent on > context. I went down that same road many years ago and found that there was > no Self at the end. This was significant, because it meant I could stop > looking for an ontic Self. I then asked myself, what is the *meaning* of > self, and found a very effective extensible operational description that has > passed testing for several years since. Meanwhile, some people are still > down near the end of that road scratching around and looking for what *is* > Self, and Parfit appears to be standing at the very end of the reductionist > road shaking his head knowingly and saying "there is no self, but it leaves > tracks in terms of its relationships to other things." There's still a bit > of unresolved dualism left in that view, resolvable by expanding the > paradigm. People deal perfectly with personal identity every day, without > ever resorting to tracing the web of relations to a particular brain. > Nature deals perfectly with soap bubbles without ever computing the infinite > expansion of the digits of pi. My being me consists solely in the fact that I think I'm me and remember being me. The details of the workings of my brain or the laws of physics are irrelevant except insofar as they allow those thoughts to occur, in the same way as the chemical composition of paper and ink is irrelevant except insofar as it allows writing to occur. If that's dualistic then I guess I'm a dualist. Further, as I have argued in other posts, personal identity depends not on > any physical, functional or historical similarity whatsoever, but rather on > perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity. The agency is perfectly > knowable, while the entity is only indirectly knowable, even if it's > oneself. (There's only one mention of agency in the book, and that's the > "agency of hearing".) I'm not familiar with what you mean by "perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity". What if I close my eyes and think, "Yep, I'm the same person I was a moment ago all right" ? With regard to moral theory, Parfit recognizes the moral problems of narrow > collective self-interest, but concludes that these imply the need for a more > *impersonal reductionist* approach. He apparently doesn't consider the > possibility of a more coherent but typically non-intuitive approach of > *broadening* the context of self-identification, in other words making > decisions not impersonal, but *more* personal, over larger context of > decision-making. This is again due to operating within a reductionist > paradigm. He describes with great accuracy the pitfalls of consequentialist > ethics, but does not appear to consider anything like morality assessed as > the extent to which the values of an increasing context of decision-making > are expected in principle to be promoted over an increasing scope of > consequences. He realizes that the discrete Self does not exist, but does > not follow the implications that a fully *effective Self* most certainly > does (else who makes decisions, and is assigned responsibility for > consequences?) and he does not consider that this effective Self could > effectively identify with an expanding sphere of values much as a good > mother identifies with her children, and further in an expanding sphere of > understanding of our causal and consequential inter-relatedness which is in > no sense arbitrary but rather an increasingly probable outcome of > evolutionary processes. I'm less impressed with Parfit's attempt to derive reconcile ethics with personal identity theory. Suppose it turns out that God issued us all with souls that determine our unique identity from birth to death, so that teleportation experiments lead to mindless zombies: would that have any implications for morality? In the concluding chapter, Parfit mentions the Non-Identity problem as yet > unresolved, along with the Mere Addition "paradox" and the resulting > Repugnant Conclusion and Absurd Conclusion. I have not taken the > considerable time that would be required to construct an adequate reply, but > these problems seem to be the natural result of assuming a privileged status > (both moral status and observer status) for humans, rather than reasoning > from a more realistic Systems Theoretical paradigm of computing agents > reasoning within bounds, evaluating choices relative to necessarily local > sets of values, and acting not as objectively rational goal seekers, but > subjective values promoters. > > I recall that when reading the book several years ago, I was impressed > with the depth and breadth of logical rigor, but disappointed that the work > seemed transparently enmeshed in the classical paradigm of analytic > philosophy, with little or no consideration of the implications of the > semiotics of subjective agents embedded in the very reality being > considered. > Hmm, you're probably not going to like "Language, Truth and Logic", although you might appreciate it as a masterpiece of English non-fictional prose. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From neptune at superlink.net Sat Apr 21 11:40:09 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 07:40:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] EP and political philosophy References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419202910.03df2590@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070420113216.0397b550@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <003a01c78409$d1a0d8e0$74893cd1@pavilion> On Friday, April 20, 2007 1:16 PM Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers.com [Keith Henson] > > > The drift in the high tech areas I know about has > > > been toward evolutionary psychology, but there > > > isn't a political ideology formed up around that yet. [Me] > >Need one's political philosophy well up from one's beliefs about > >psychology? I think just as the multiplication table doesn't > >necessarily change with each new fashion in psychology (or other > >theories), one need not come up with a different political outlook with > >each change of fashion in other beliefs. This is not to say all views > >are insulated here, but certain things seem to apply formally no matter > >what the content is or what the other givens are. [Keith Henson] > This is something I have not given a lot of thought to and it clearly would > take a lot. EP is an extremely pragmatic study. It accounts for the > psychological mechanisms people have because those mechanisms contributed > to reproductive success (in the inclusive sense) during the EEA or are side > effects of some trait that did contribute. > > Large scale political beliefs as well as large scale religions emerged with > the formation of states. States, of course, were not part of the EEA so it > gets tricky when you start considering how EEA mechanisms cope with an > environment they were not shaped in. > > I have been considering war, particularly what conditions set off wars, in > this context. It's a depressing model that emerges. > > But take one example from the libertarian spectrum, objectivism. Now I > don't make the least claim to understand all the ins and out of > objectivism, but I was exposed many years ago to an objectivist who claimed > that if an objectivist were offered a choice, the objectivist should value > his life more than that of all the rest of the human race. > > Assuming my informant properly represented the objectivist political view, > then EP (applying Hamilton's rule) will say this is just wrong and in fact > not likely to happen if such a choice happened to an objectivist. We > evolved to (in some circumstances) value other lives more than our > own. Azar Gat goes into considerable detail about this in his new book > _War in Human Civilization_ and it is the point behind the recent movie 300. But how does this deny any economic laws? For instance, scarcity would still apply both to the Objectivist or to the person disagreeing with him. The Objectivist, just like anyone else, is forced to use scarce means to attain his ends -- whether you or your theory judge these ends wrong. Now, imagine his philosophy or his particular application of it is not something he'd really do if the choice were truly put before him. How does that violate economics? It would only violate his particular statement. (It's really an open question of whether this person is correct about what Objectivism counsels with regard to this particular choice -- and it does NOT matter anyway.) > >Think of economics as a model here. The law of supply and demand > >applies regardless of whether one is talking about ascetic monks, > >sybaritic hedonists, middle class American moms, lower class Chinese > >factory workers, or rich Arab oil men -- or whatever social, cultural, > >philosophical, or ideological background shapes them. > > Even so, economics needs to be informed by EP. Otherwise how can you > explain why people forgo huge sums of money for status and why people pay > high prices for drugs and the attention they get in cults? > > Sorry for harping on this, but understanding EP is really critical toward > making sense out of the social world. I disagree about economics needing to be informed by EP. What is economics about? Understanding why people have certain ends? No. It's merely a formal science, in the purest sense, of how people (or, to be more abstract, agents) with scarce means and competing ends choose between them. (To elaborate: the scarce means can serve different ends. E.g., I have a few hours this morning before I have to do some tasks. How do I use these scarce means to satisfy my many ends -- all of which cannot be satisfied.* I want, e.g., do some email, get some reading done, finish watching a documentary on the French and Indian War, etc. And the trail of tears for me, here, is that all these ends would require much more than the few hours I have. So I'll have to pick and choose. I've chosen, here, to do this particular email -- not the others and not read all the books I want to, etc. Now, you could argue EP might tell me why I have the particular ends I have or why I might choose replying to this email as opposed to all the other ends I could've chosen, but it cannot explain away the fact that the means are scarce in this context and a choice must be made. That's just a brute fact about the situation.) This is regardless of their motivations, psychology, or evolution. In fact, sound economic laws and science would should apply regardless of even what sort of agent is involved or what sort of psychological theory is in vogue. An analogy might be how to base mathematics. The multiplication table (for whole numbers) still works and is valid, whether you accept set theory as a reduction of numbers or category theory or something else. Even if you accept the set theoretic does not give you a particular reduction and there are at least two inside ZF set theory that lead to radical different sets standing for the same number. (Recall Benacerraf's famous paper "What numbers could not be." He uses the example of the number three being covered by both {{{?}}} and {? , {?}, {?, {?}}} -- where, set theoretically, it's obvious that {{{?}}} and {? , {?}, {?, {?}}} are different sets. To some, this seems to mean there is no set theoretic reduction possible and that number is actually something more foundational than set -- strange as that seems.) But regarding the multiplication table, it still works regardless of whatever reduction one chooses. In fact, wouldn't the test of any reduction be that the multiplication table still works with it? Wouldn't a failure, in this regard, signal a failure of the theory? Likewise, were an EP theory to contradict a claim of economics -- let's say it openly contradicts the Law of Supply and Demand -- then that would, in my mind, be grounds for abandoning that theory -- at least, to the extent that it contradicts that law. Now, getting to your particular example -- "... how can you explain why people forgo huge sums of money for status and why people pay high prices for drugs and the attention they get in cults?" -- economics per se has nothing to say about why people do this or that, it really only is about how people deal with scarcity with the ends they have. Given that they want to get high or join a cult, then economics can talk about how, given their values -- without ever needing to explain how they arrived at those values or even whether those values make sense -- they use their scarce means to pursue them. E.g., the Law of Supply and Demand applies to drugs and to cults. Neither are outside that law -- not when it comes to the context of scarcity. Regards, Dan See more of my musings at: http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ * If they can all be satisfied, then there is no scarcity involved. Scarcity is always relative to the ends. If my means are enough to satisfy all my ends, then there is no economic problem involved. From neptune at superlink.net Sat Apr 21 12:18:40 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:18:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? References: Message-ID: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> On Friday, April 20, 2007 12:59 PM BillK pharos at gmail.com wrote: > I doubt if Eugen's augmentation will help much. > I don't much fancy the prospect of facing augmented gangsters, drug > dealers, rapists, fraudsters, etc. I don't put drug dealers in the same category as the rest. After all, they're really not violating anyone's rights -- to the degree that they merely sell drugs to willing buyers. I.e., just selling drugs to willing buyers is NOT, in my book, criminal. A few months back on another list, George H. Smith pointed out that Locke's _A Letter Concerning Toleration_, a sort of founding document of religious tolerance, has as one of its core arguments that people, in Locke's time, were allowed to ingest whatever substances they wanted into their body as long as they harm no one else. The argument goes: we allow this in regards to medicines and drugs, why not in regards to beliefs? If people hold differing religious beliefs and harm no one, why bother them? (Of course, Locke was 100% consistent here. He was still suspicious of atheism and was not tolerant of it.) Smith pointed out that it was strange that today there is religious tolerance galore in Western societies and especially America, but people who ingest certain substances and bother no one are harrased and jailed -- when they're not shot outright. Regards, Dan http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ From pharos at gmail.com Sat Apr 21 13:49:40 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:49:40 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? In-Reply-To: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: On 4/21/07, Technotranscendence wrote: > I don't put drug dealers in the same category as the rest. After all, > they're really not violating anyone's rights -- to the degree that they > merely sell drugs to willing buyers. I.e., just selling drugs to > willing buyers is NOT, in my book, criminal. > There you go again. (Not you in particular). ;) The whole thrust of this thread is that we are not talking about some theoretical fairyland where drug dealers might be thought of as misunderstood, victimised entrepreneurs. (I'd like to live there as well, sounds really cool). In the real world, drug dealers are amoral armed gangs who kill people to defend their territory and their business of destroying the lives of their 'customers', who in turn are engaged in constant minor criminal activities to finance their addiction. Let me know how you feel about this after the ruthless drug gangs move in to your street, near your family, and you get burgled or mugged once a month by druggies. BillK From neptune at superlink.net Sat Apr 21 15:18:55 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:18:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Drug dealers and their ilk/was Re: Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <001501c78428$615a13c0$e1893cd1@pavilion> On Saturday, April 21, 2007 9:49 AM BillK pharos at gmail.com wrote: > On 4/21/07, Technotranscendence wrote: > > I don't put drug dealers in the same category as the rest. After all, > > they're really not violating anyone's rights -- to the degree that they > > merely sell drugs to willing buyers. I.e., just selling drugs to > > willing buyers is NOT, in my book, criminal. > > There you go again. (Not you in particular). ;) No, there you go again! :) > The whole thrust of this thread is that we are not > talking about some theoretical fairyland where > drug dealers might be thought of as misunderstood, > victimised entrepreneurs. (I'd like to live there as > well, sounds really cool). > > In the real world, drug dealers are amoral armed > gangs who kill people to defend their territory and > their business of destroying the lives of their > 'customers', who in turn are engaged in constant minor > criminal activities to finance their addiction. You must live in a different reality than me. Yes, some drug dealers and drug users are criminals -- in the sense of perpetrating crimes with victims, such as theft, assault, and even murder -- but not all are and being a drug dealer or user does not necessitate criminal behavior. (And some scientists are criminals too. Does that mean being scientist necessarily involves criminality?) I'm not sure of the percentages, but, from my personal experiences, I've known many drug dealers and drug users who would, aside from the illicit trade, be considered normal if not good citizens. I also freely admit that I've used and experimented with many of these drugs in high school and college. Needless to say, I have yet to go on a criminal rampage... Doubtless with an estimate 30 million Americans who have smoked pot -- the number of Europeans, Canadians, etc. who have done so is probably much larger -- were your view of drug use and trade correct, the entire continent would look like something out of a Mad Max film. Ever wonder why it doesn't? Could it be that your view of the world is a bit off? Also, not all users are addicts. Of course, this might be quibbling, but I've known and still know many people who use illegal drugs casually and don't seem addicted in the fantasy TV sense of someone who spends every waking moment craving his next fix and plotting his next crime to fund it. > Let me know how you feel about this after the ruthless > drug gangs move in to your street, near your family, > and you get burgled or mugged once a month by druggies. I've lived and worked in areas where drug dealing is a normal activity. Also, you're not considering the whole context. Why is there a large criminal element involved with illegal drugs, but not with, say, legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco? It's mostly because the former are illegal. Remove the illegality and almost all the criminal element -- the thugs, the gangs, etc. -- will go away. Don't believe me? Consider what happened in the US during Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and early 1930s: criminal gangs got involved in the alcohol trade, police raids with bystanders being injured or killed, and turf wars over who gets to see alcohol in this city or that. Suddenly, what had been a normal part of life -- casual alcohol use -- became illicit, even dangerous, and involved a heavy dose of violence. (Side note: the type of alcohol "pushed" also became stronger. Why is this? Economic laws come into play. Given the same means, high strength alcohol products (e.g., whiskey) brought in more money than the previously popular low strength products (e.g., beer). The economics drives this: people would rather risk life and limb to fetch a higher profit than a lower one, other things being equal. No doubt, the same applies to current illegal drugs and partly explains why pure cocaine is smuggled over, say, smuggling the leaves of the plant. I owe this insight to economist Mark Thornton.) Regards, Dan http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 21 15:53:44 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:53:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resend: Parfit's Reasons and Persons In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 4/21/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/20/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > > With regard to personal identity, Parfit shows very clearly and correctly > that there is no logically warranted basis for belief in a discrete self. > He then proceeds to espouse what he calls the Reductionist View, claiming > that > > > > > > "...we cannot explain the unity of a person's life by claiming that the > experiences > > in this life are all had by this person . We can explain this unity only > by describing > > the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and > their relations > > to a particular brain . We could therefore describe a person's life in an > impersonal way, > > which does not claim that this person exists." > > > > True to the spirit of Reductionism, it can't be faulted on its own terms, > but it misses the point that the meaning of personal identity doesn't inhere > in such detail, and stronger yet, such detail is to a variable extent > irrelevant and could be altered with no practical effect on personal > identity. Personal identity has no ontological status; it consists entirely > in its role as a label. Parfit recognizes the logical inconsistency of the > concept of a discrete personal identity, but retreats into reductionism > rather than taking the conceptual leap to a more encompassing paradigm > encompassing the observer and the process of meaning-making. > > Parfit uses the term "Reductionist View" in a very specific sense, > contrasting it with the "Non-Reductionist" view as shown in this passage > (R&P, p210): > > "Many Non-Reductionists believe that we are separately existing entities. On > this view, personal identity over time does not just consist in physical > and/or psychological continuity [ i.e. the Reductionist View]. It involves a > further fact. A person is a separately existing entity, distinct from his > brain and body, and his experiences.On the best-known version of this view, > a person is a purely mental entity: a Cartesian Pure Ego, or spiritual > substance. But we might believe that a person is a separately existing > physical entity, of a kind which is not yet recognised in the theories of > contemporary physics." > > (Actually, I think Parfit is too generous in the space he gives the > Non-Reductionist view, which I see as not just wrong but incoherent, but > that is another argument). > > This does not mean that the emergent phenomenon/ illusion/ trick of personal > identity is not significant or lacks explanatory power, any more than > chemistry should be called fraudulent because it reduces to physics. > > > > I don't intend to join the debate on the strengths and weaknesses of > reductionism, but my main point is that explanations should be evaluated > according to their explanatory power which is necessarily dependent on > context. I went down that same road many years ago and found that there was > no Self at the end. This was significant, because it meant I could stop > looking for an ontic Self. I then asked myself, what is the *meaning* of > self, and found a very effective extensible operational description that has > passed testing for several years since. Meanwhile, some people are still > down near the end of that road scratching around and looking for what *is* > Self, and Parfit appears to be standing at the very end of the reductionist > road shaking his head knowingly and saying "there is no self, but it leaves > tracks in terms of its relationships to other things." There's still a bit > of unresolved dualism left in that view, resolvable by expanding the > paradigm. People deal perfectly with personal identity every day, without > ever resorting to tracing the web of relations to a particular brain. > Nature deals perfectly with soap bubbles without ever computing the infinite > expansion of the digits of pi. > > My being me consists solely in the fact that I think I'm me and remember > being me. The details of the workings of my brain or the laws of physics are > irrelevant except insofar as they allow those thoughts to occur, in the same > way as the chemical composition of paper and ink is irrelevant except > insofar as it allows writing to occur. If that's dualistic then I guess I'm > a dualist. > > > Further, as I have argued in other posts, personal identity depends not on > any physical, functional or historical similarity whatsoever, but rather on > perceived agency with respect to an abstract entity. The agency is perfectly > knowable, while the entity is only indirectly knowable, even if it's > oneself. (There's only one mention of agency in the book, and that's the > "agency of hearing".) > > I'm not familiar with what you mean by "perceived agency with respect to an > abstract entity". What if I close my eyes and think, "Yep, I'm the same > person I was a moment ago all right" ? > > > With regard to moral theory, Parfit recognizes the moral problems of > narrow collective self-interest, but concludes that these imply the need for > a more *impersonal reductionist* approach. He apparently doesn't consider > the possibility of a more coherent but typically non-intuitive approach of > *broadening* the context of self-identification, in other words making > decisions not impersonal, but *more* personal, over larger context of > decision-making. This is again due to operating within a reductionist > paradigm. He describes with great accuracy the pitfalls of consequentialist > ethics, but does not appear to consider anything like morality assessed as > the extent to which the values of an increasing context of decision-making > are expected in principle to be promoted over an increasing scope of > consequences. He realizes that the discrete Self does not exist, but does > not follow the implications that a fully *effective Self* most certainly > does (else who makes decisions, and is assigned responsibility for > consequences?) and he does not consider that this effective Self could > effectively identify with an expanding sphere of values much as a good > mother identifies with her children, and further in an expanding sphere of > understanding of our causal and consequential inter-relatedness which is in > no sense arbitrary but rather an increasingly probable outcome of > evolutionary processes. > > I'm less impressed with Parfit's attempt to derive reconcile ethics with > personal identity theory. Suppose it turns out that God issued us all with > souls that determine our unique identity from birth to death, so that > teleportation experiments lead to mindless zombies: would that have any > implications for morality? > > > In the concluding chapter, Parfit mentions the Non-Identity problem as yet > unresolved, along with the Mere Addition "paradox" and the resulting > Repugnant Conclusion and Absurd Conclusion. I have not taken the > considerable time that would be required to construct an adequate reply, but > these problems seem to be the natural result of assuming a privileged status > (both moral status and observer status) for humans, rather than reasoning > from a more realistic Systems Theoretical paradigm of computing agents > reasoning within bounds, evaluating choices relative to necessarily local > sets of values, and acting not as objectively rational goal seekers, but > subjective values promoters. > > > > I recall that when reading the book several years ago, I was impressed > with the depth and breadth of logical rigor, but disappointed that the work > seemed transparently enmeshed in the classical paradigm of analytic > philosophy, with little or no consideration of the implications of the > semiotics of subjective agents embedded in the very reality being > considered. > > > > Hmm, you're probably not going to like "Language, Truth and Logic", although > you might appreciate it as a masterpiece of English non-fictional prose. > > Stathis Papaioannou I'm really at a loss how to proceed here. I (believe I) clearly see the gap and both sides, but within the constraints of disparate backgrounds and limited bandwidth I don't see an effective method for constructing the desired bridge. I'm strongly reminded of my experience over more than twenty years managing very bright teams of technical support engineers and applications specialists in a field of leading-edge scientific instrumentation. We all agreed that our goal was for the customer to experience satisfaction with our product. The hardware support specialists understood that in order to achieve the goal, it was essential that the equipment function reliably within specifications. There was a written specification -- some of the more philosophically-inclined might point out that all such specs are inherently incomplete -- but what mattered is that there was a spec for performance in the field and that there were technical means for achieving it. They knew clearly that what mattered, before any more superficial concerns, was that the equipment be right. The software/applications people considered themselves more sophisticated, and they knew that the specific condition of the hardware didn't necessarily matter, as long as the equipment could be made to deliver the expected range of results. In other words, the customer doesn't actually care about the hardware, but the results. Now if there had been a chat list connecting (while separating) these groups, there would have been interminable discussions about what was really "right", and perhaps once in a while someone would interject a comment about fnord "category error" fnord but such statements would be hardly noticed since they are clearly far removed from what really matters. My point in this analogy is that all agreed their goal was for the customer to experience satisfaction, and they each intimately knew the nature of that experience, but almost no one realized that there is no element of customer satisfaction in the hardware, software or apps. A very few did see this, through a broader paradigm that included the customer and the process of meaning-making that leads to the experience of satisfaction. One of them said one day, "My philosophy is that I take care of the customer first, and then work on the equipment if necessary." The others thought this was rather cute, if pretentious, and went about their usual business. Some time later that same individual said, "I've found that no matter what I do to the equipment (maybe nothing at all) if I clean the video screen and the keyboard then the customer seems to experience genuinely greater satisfaction with the equipment." The others, knowing that this had absolutely nothing to do with actual functioning or results, continued doing as always. Funny thing was, that strange engineer who had the strange ideas about customer satisfaction, also found that he just happened to keep getting those customers who ended up being the most satisfied. The hardware engineers realized that this was clearly because he was not only lucky, but also had decent hardware skills. The software/apps engineers realized that clearly he was not only lucky, but had decent understanding of software and apps. And every once in a while someone would hear "category error" or "semiotics" or see strange unexpected usage of quotation marks around words like "right", and fnord life would go on. - Jef From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Apr 21 16:03:33 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:03:33 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <005501c7840a$bb368400$74893cd1@pavilion> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> <8d71341e0704200523kf057edeu3b0f792b147b6dc7@mail.gmail.com> <005501c7840a$bb368400$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704210903k2045825bk99bc633b74b82ef@mail.gmail.com> On 4/21/07, Technotranscendence wrote: > > Libertarians, in the sense of people who embrace the noninitiation of > force principle, come in two flavors: anarchist and minarchist. Your > position is simply the libertarian minarchist one. > Yep. Not to start up a long debate on the issue, but my view is that minarchism > -- a government limited to protecting individual negative rights, which is > what I think you have in mind -- is not possible. > Maybe. These days I've adopted the philosophy in a number of areas, political philosophy included, that I don't know whether the ultimate ideal can be fully realized, nor do I really need to know. What I focus instead on is movement - what can we do to move towards the ideal? So in the political arena, anything we can do to move towards greater freedom - or to retard movement in the direction of lesser freedom - is good. And these things are possible. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Apr 21 16:10:01 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:10:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704210903k2045825bk99bc633b74b82ef@mail.gmail.com> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> <8d71341e0704200523kf057edeu3b0f792b147b6dc7@mail.gmail.com> <005501c7840a$bb368400$74893cd1@pavilion> <8d71341e0704210903k2045825bk99bc633b74b82ef@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <35843.72.236.103.129.1177171801.squirrel@main.nc.us> Russell wrote: > These days I've adopted the philosophy in a number of areas, > political philosophy included, that I don't know whether the ultimate ideal > can be fully realized, nor do I really need to know. What I focus instead on > is movement - what can we do to move towards the ideal? So in the political > arena, anything we can do to move towards greater freedom - or to retard > movement in the direction of lesser freedom - is good. And these things are > possible. > Thanks for this. I'm keeping it. :) Regards, MB From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 21 16:20:28 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:20:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy! In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704210903k2045825bk99bc633b74b82ef@mail.gmail.com> References: <20070420115440.GA9439@leitl.org> <8d71341e0704200523kf057edeu3b0f792b147b6dc7@mail.gmail.com> <005501c7840a$bb368400$74893cd1@pavilion> <8d71341e0704210903k2045825bk99bc633b74b82ef@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/21/07, Russell Wallace wrote: > Maybe. These days I've adopted the philosophy in a number of areas, > political philosophy included, that I don't know whether the ultimate ideal > can be fully realized, nor do I really need to know. What I focus instead on > is movement - what can we do to move towards the ideal? So in the political > arena, anything we can do to move towards greater freedom - or to retard > movement in the direction of lesser freedom - is good. And these things are > possible. This is a very good statement recognizing that that while we can never know what is "best" we most certainly can have an opinion of what is "better". And as we move toward our ideal, we evolve as well. The move towards greater freedom is key, but how few recognize, as with the "free-will paradox" that increasing freedom entails increasing ability to predict consequences -- not increasing irrelevance of consequences, but just the opposite. Thanks Russell. - Jef From jonkc at att.net Sat Apr 21 16:46:53 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:46:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ?. References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <005601c78434$d5b42fb0$5d084e0c@MyComputer> "BillK" Wrote: > In the real world, drug dealers are amoral armed gangs who kill people > to defend their territory and their business That is of course true, but have you ever asked yourself why it is true? If Merck and Lilly get into a dispute over the distribution of their pain killers they can ask the courts to settle the dispute, and if necessary have the police enforce the decision; If the Medellin cartel has a dispute with the Cali cartel over the distribution of their pain killers the only way to settle the matter is a shotgun blast to the face. If candy bars were illegal then working for the Hershey or Mars candy company would be as dangerous as that of any street drug pusher. John K Clark From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 13:54:59 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:54:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Taking A Stand Message-ID: <847223.86969.qm@web35610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Max wrote: >>PS. I respect that in the past you have not taken positions in >> favour of democracy. I hope you would not take a position in >> favour of fascism and promise breaking. > > I can barely believe that you asked me that > question. However, my eyes insist that these > incoming photons accurately represent the words > you wrote, so I suppose I must. I'm not deeply > enthusiastic about democracy because I see it as > restricting the liberty (and responsibility) of > the individual. That's as far as I will go in > dignifying an answer to this particular question. They aren't questions Max they are statements. I do respect that in the past you have had the courage and integrity to be open about your reservations about democracy. I too have reservations about democracy. If no one did then nothing better could arise. > I wrote: As Winston Churchill was quoted as saying "Democracy is a bad system, but still the best one around" I'm wondering if the above mentioned problem with democracy is that the majority of politically active people tend to close-minded and fractious, which causes suffering for the individual who wants to go his own way and not be hemmed in with red tape at every corner. I would hope AI and nanotech will allow humanity to become more creative and just in terms of government choices. We will see. > I am a libertarian. Being a libertarian in my book carries duties to defend freedom when freedom is threatened. George W Bush's "war on terror" is the stupidist most absurb proposition turned into policy that a country full of appeasers has sat and nodded at since Caligula married his horse. > I wrote: I would say Neville Chamberlain's attempts at appeasing Adolph Hitler were right up there on the list. Bush surely has his faults but he does not order congressmen to have their wives have sex with him or else die. Also, the president does not have an army of secret police assassins going around and killing all his enemies on the domestic front. If Caligula somehow visited our time, I'm sure he would be quite shocked at the lack of power Bush must deal with as compared to the free rein of a Roman Emperor. > When the nazis came to power in Germany they were able to do so because men and women that could have together done something about it did not act early enough. > I wrote: Do you see a "The Handmaid's Tale" type scenario eventually gripping the United States as a result of the Bush Administration's policies? I'd like to know what exactly you think is coming down the pike. I also wonder what Australian political ambitions and actions would be if your continent were much more arable with a population comparable to the United States. Now that would make for a good science fiction story. > I have issues with American libertarians because they are not, in sufficient numbers or more importantly in significant effective efforts, defending the most fundamental freedoms of all. > I wrote: I have been to several lectures by prominent Libertarians and always felt they were out of touch with political reality. I tend to think many Libertarians would rather fantasize about stripping down the U.S. federal government to almost nothing, etc., rather than dealing with the current urgent realities of this country and the world. I even recall that during my college years the Libertarian presence was not taken very seriously by the students there. > Your extropian principles were an excellent effort by the younger man that was yourself to articulate a vision for a way forward. But fine words uttered in ones youth are not enough. > I wrote: Aha! But could these be the fine words uttered in *your* youth?! : ) > If one will not stand up and fight for a principle and struggle and even die for a principle, ones most cherished principle, then one is not really alive. > I wrote: The founding fathers of the United States would surely agree with you. Perhaps you should become a U.S. citizen to better carry on the fight. > Why haven't I see you lobbying or writing for the impeachment of President Bush, Max? There are people in your country that are - the case for it, the need for it could hardly be clearer. Why aren't you defending the constitution that is the bedrock of your real freedom? > I wrote: Brett, how do you know what Max has been doing behind the scenes? Hmm? Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan but doing something like trying to get congress to put a deadline on the time our troops will spend in Iraq is very doable. I hope to see the next president (either hopefully Obama or Clinton, I envision Obama winning) hit the brakes on the excesses of the "war on terror" and to pull U.S. soldiers out of Iraq. I see the Constitution as "sacred" and if our civil liberties are seriously curtailed for an extended/permanent period of time then the terrorists really have won. This is all about the classic quote "in fighting monsters do not become one." > Your extropian principles, as has been discussed before, by folk like Hal come into tension with each other. > I wrote: As any veteran Extrope would know, the Extropian Priniciples are a work in progress. : ) > We all have to make our living in this less than ideal world. But if we don't take a stand on anything because the highest goal we have is always to keep ourselves alive then we never really live. > I wrote: Does this tie in with the classic science fiction staple of the cowardly immortal? lol Critics of cryonics often accuse those involved of being very self-centered. On the other hand I tend to think of Transhumanists/cryonicists as optimistic do-gooders who really want a better world. But perhaps they fall too easily into simply talking about it and not doing much on the practical "real world" level. I often feel to have really lived I must join the military and see combat in a "good war." This is a family tradition of sorts and like many American men, deep down I somewhat believe to be a "real man" I must serve my country in the military and even go to the extent of seeing combat. I don't know if this is a common feeling among European males. I do think in an era of indefinite lifespan that this will change because of what will be at stake. But perhaps I will be proven wrong. If cryonics work, I'd like upon my reanimation to join the "Mobile Infantry" or "Starfleet" of the time, even if it means gambling with my indefinite lifespan. > Bush has attacked science and reason and technology and people. He has said you are with us (meaning him) or against us. When Presidents or Feuhrers say those things and act above the law we cannot not take them seriously. > I wrote: It amazes me that Bush continues to attack stem cell research with his veto power. We are now at a point where even other conservative Republicans are breaking party ranks to go against him on this vital issue. When a national leader acts as to be above the law we must take him/her *very* seriously and then act accordingly. > The rule of law could use your support at this point in history Max. Humanity could. I could. > I wrote: I consider Max More a great man so I agree. But again, you do not know all he has been up to lately in these trying times. John > Regards, Brett --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 19 09:29:13 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 02:29:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Fw: Re: Impeachment: A duty, not an option In-Reply-To: <00aa01c78233$1e4dd9f0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <765134.96744.qm@web35610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I remember in highschool writing a book review of Lee Iacocca's excellent autobiography. I did a book report of Chuck Yeager's autobiography back to back with his and I saw quite a bit of similarity between the two great American men. I'm not going to claim remembering all that much from my highschool years but the pages of both those two books still stick out in my mind. I just wanted to say thank you to Bret for bringing Iacocca's new book to my attention and I will soon be ordering a copy from Amazon to be passed around to friends once I'm done reading it. I should not have been so surprised that a very wise and "no nonsense" kind of guy like Lee Iacocca would finally say "enough is enough" and speak out with a new book. People who would normally not speak up against the president and the "war on terror" will feel much more prone to after they realize even Iacocca has had it with the way things are going. Thanks, John Grigg Brett Paatsch wrote: Bill said I could post this to the list - so okay I will. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brett Paatsch" To: "BillK" Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 7:59 AM Subject: Re: OFFLIST: Re: [extropy-chat] Impeachment: A duty, not an option > Thanks Bill. > > But why didn't you post it to the list. It would have done more good > that way. > > Lee Iacocca is a successful businessman and entrepreneur. > > Libertarian capitalists like John and Rafal respect that type. > You might have nudged their consciences. > > Regards, > Brett > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "BillK" > To: "Brett Paatsch" > Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 2:29 AM > Subject: OFFLIST: Re: [extropy-chat] Impeachment: A duty, not an option > > >> On 4/17/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: >>> >>> http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/935 >>> Carla Binion: Impeachment: A duty, not an option >>> >> >> Now that John has started the list up again ----- >> >> Sounds like you might enjoy this new book. >> >> >> >> Excerpt >> Where Have All the Leaders Gone? >> By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney >> >> >> >> Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? >> Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. >> We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right >> over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we >> can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. >> But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads >> when the politicians say, "Stay the course." >> >> Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the >> damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! >> etc...... >> >> >> >> Lido Anthony "Lee" Iacocca (born October 15, 1924) is an American >> industrialist most commonly known for his revival of the Chrysler >> brand in the 1980s when he was the CEO. Among the most widely >> recognized businessmen in the world, he was a passionate advocate of >> U.S. business exports during the 1980s. >> >> >> BillK >> > _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 21 19:07:43 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:07:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Defending freedom In-Reply-To: <00e401c783d5$2fafedc0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070421140558.02c4e520@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:23 PM 4/21/2007 +1000, Brian wrote: >Keith wrote: snip > > We can't take out money with us Keith. What we can do > is influence the reputations we leave behind. You forget who I am. snip >I used to think that way. Wore a white rose to my court appearances >even. Now I am not at all sure they could have had an effect against the >social forces at work and the psychological traits humans have that came >out of our history as hunter gatherers. > > > You are wrong about the psychological traits that came out of human > history. Its not hunter gather times that shapes modern behavior its > the modern jungle still there beneath the thinest of thin venears. History as hunter gatherers = evolutionary history. snip >Unfortunately, an irrational leader is what you should expect to develop >when the hunter gatherer band is under attack. > > > My point exactly. If you country is no better than a hunter gather > band, stand by, to be replaced by something better and more > evolved. It isn't countries, it's people. People are the result of millions of years of selection in hunter gatherer bands. If you want to get to the root of things like war, support for war develops by an evolved mechanism for powering up the circulation of xenophobic memes in peoples who foresee a bleak future. This is what drove our ancestors into wars and what drives the remaining hunter gatherer groups into wars. In the EEA, a bleak future could almost always be made brighter by killing off neighbors and taking their resources. Mapping these stone age mechanisms in the current world isn't easy, but it sure accounts for a lot of what we see. >But if you have any specific ideas, please let me know. Private email if >you like. > > > My idea is that you uphold the constitution and laws that you already > have. My idea is that when a President takes an oath to you as a citizen > that he will uphold the constitution and its laws, that you bloody well >insist > that he does. My idea for you is that you should write your >representatives > in congress demanding that the promise that was made you be kept. And it is your thesis that this will have an effect? Do you think I have not written representatives *many* times? snip >It's a much more difficult situation than I thought it would be eleven >years ago. The rule of law depends on honest courts. > > > The President picks the supreme court judges. The President appoints > the Attorney General. Are you aware of where the Attorney General > is at the moment? > >What can you do when you find the courts themselves are committing >criminal acts? > > > If you don't wait to long you can use your free speach to stop the rot. > > You >can get others of like minds to work with you. I have been doing this for better than a decade now with very little effect. Using free speech arguments of exposing criminal activity was overruled by copyright considerations by Judge Whyte and the cult was awarded about $200,000. Picketing and posting on the net got me convicted by a corrupt court of "interfering with a religion." The link I posted in my last exchange with you showed that the court itself was engaged in crime. Please examine the history of my efforts. If you have solid suggestions as to how I could have done better, please share them. Better yet, try them yourself. >If you do wait to long the characters like Hitler just rewrite the >constitution >and appoint the judges and then the "scientologists" or any scoundrels >they like do what they like. > >I know of your adventures and troubles with scientology. I am glad you >took a stand. But you are right about one thing scientology is small beer >compared to trying to get a president impeached when that president >has the power to declare you an enemy combatant, suspend habeas >corpus (the Military Commissions Act 2006) and have you picked >up and imprisoned, and essentially tortured whilst not calling it torture >entirely on his say so. You might note that I am not in the US by my own choice. snip Keith From mabranu at yahoo.com Sun Apr 22 01:33:50 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:33:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > Message: 13 > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:09:21 -0500 > From: Damien Broderick > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the > future? > To: ExI chat list > Message-ID: > <7.0.1.0.2.20070318120339.024b0320 at satx.rr.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; > format=flowed > > > >It?s not clear to me that the > >chances of being saved by future posthumans is > >increased more, or even equally much, by a Ray > >Kurzweil way of living, than/as for example by a > >Mother Theresa way of being ? given that the > >posthumans value altruism more than anything else. > > Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will > they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa. You may be right about Mother Teresa. It doesn?t matter. What I meant was: It may be best to live such that you will look like a 100% altruistic person in the eyes of the posthumans ? whatever way of living that is. > Message: 16 > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:25:59 -0400 > From: "Robert Bradbury" > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the > future? > To: "ExI chat list" > Message-ID: > > Of course, on a somewhat more serious note, unless > you > invoke "magic > physics" the looking back in time exercise is > probably > a pipe dream. This is how I think (correct me if I?m wrong): Looking back in time should be possible by simply looking far in space. Tremendous amounts of information about our past exists, and will always exist, in the form of waves and particles that constantly leave our planet. Only a small fraction of all that stream will ever bounce on other planets, stars etc, although a lot of it may get distorted by colliding with particles in the "empty space" (as space isn?t totally empty). But even if only, say, one thousandth of the "pixels" from Earth reach the eyes of the posthuman beholder in a distant future, they will still get a picture of us, maybe just a pretty unclear picture. I mean, even though a small, old photo of a given person may have only a thousandth of the pixels of a large, modern photo of the same person, you can often still recognize the person on the small, old photo and get an idea of what he or she is like. To solve the problem that the information about Earth?s past is travelling away from Earth (and, presumably, the posthumans) at the speed of light, the posthumans could use some gravitational field to bend the direction of those streams of information so that they catch up with them in a very distant future. Then they will be able to see us all, albeit maybe only from certain angles and only when we are outdoors (unless they will be able to calculate how waves and particles from the buildings, where we spend a lot of time, are effected by our behaviour inside of those buildings, and such). Given enough information, in the form of waves and particles constantly leaving Earth, about our environment, and enough knowledge about the laws of physics, the posthumans should be able to conclude what we must have been like, so that they can resurrect us. We can already accurately conclude a lot about particles that we can?t see with any instrument. Posthumans zillions of times more intelligent than today?s scientists should be able to make accurate conclusions on the basis of a lot less information than today?s scientists. I wonder though what will happen from my perspective if the posthumans don?t get it exactly right, just almost. Let?s say due to insufficient and/or misleading information they only manage to resurrect ?almost me? ? somebody who is like me to 99,999%. Will that person be me? How much must a future copy of me resemble me in order for me to continue my life in his body (when he is created after my death)? Another way to solve the problem of light escaping from Earth faster than one can travel after it, is to travel until one finds an alien civilisation that has caught the light from Earth and saved that information in detail, and then buy that information from those aliens. > What > you can hope for is an allocation of resources > sufficient to recreate a > million (or maybe even a billion) variants on > entities > who leave behind > enough information that one can get "reasonable > approximations". So > anyone > with a significant "dataprint" stands a chance of > being recreated. That would be a welcome addition to the information collected the way I suggest above. To create a maximally accurate ?dataprint? of oneself, for example by telling a video camera about one?s thoughts and feelings for lenghty periods of time throughout life, one has to be totally honest to the camera about everything, or the future person that posthumans will think to be their successful copy of you may not be you. That insight will make people only think and do the kinds of things that they will some day be ready to tell everything about to the video camera (as anything they tell the video camera may be used against them, if not by contemporary people who accidentally find their recordings, in any case by the posthumans after one?s resurrection). Will that insight make people better (more altruistic), or overly cautious and just plain boring? Maybe both, but which side is going to dominate? > Whether > any future intelligences would bother to do so is an > open question. We > have > the complete genome sequence of C. elegans, various > Drosophila species, > even > Pufferfish (Fugu rubripes). We could, with > sufficient > funding, create > them > from scratch in a lab. Would we choose to do so? I > doubt it. IMO, > only at > such time as there are no forward progress vectors > available will > people > turn around and wrestle with the large scale > recreation of the past. I > doubt there will be a lack of forward progress > vectors > for a very long > time. (Mind you we may close out the theoretical > progress vectors in > the > not-so-distant future, but that does not eliminate > the > engineering > progress > vectors.) It doesn?t matter a lot to me how long it takes before the progress ceases so that I get resurrected, as long as it happens some time. The sooner the better, but better late than never. Given an infinite future, sooner or later some crazy scientist posthuman must decide to resurrect us. And then it may not matter how we lived. If future isn't infinite though, but long enough that some future scientist will some day decide to resurrect some humans from today, then how we lived may effect his decision on which humans to resurrect. As that may be the only scenario in which we can greatly influence our future as individuals, it may be the only scenario worth pondering about (from our egoist point of view). > So, the questions you should be asking are not > whether > you are > appealing on > a universal basis, but whether you can make oneself > appealing (for > recreation purposes) to a circa 2200, 2300, 2400, > etc. > era historian, > archaeologist or anthropologist who may have > resources, but only of a > limited nature, at their disposal. > > Robert That may still mean we should try to be appealing on a universal basis, as we don't know what preferences that historian etc will have. > Message: 18 > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:03:15 +0100 (MET) > From: "Anders Sandberg" > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the > future? > To: "ExI chat list" > Message-ID: > <2045.163.1.72.81.1174244595.squirrel at webmail.csc.kth.se> > Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 > > > Damien Broderick wrote: > > > >>It?s not clear to me that the > >>chances of being saved by future posthumans is > >>increased more, or even equally much, by a Ray > >>Kurzweil way of living, than/as for example by a > >>Mother Theresa way of being ? given that the > >>posthumans value altruism more than anything else. > > > > Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will > > they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa. I suggest > > you read Christopher Hitchens? book The Missionary > Position. > > Or posthumans with a sarcastic sense of humour. > "Hello > madam. As you no > doubt know, you have been dead for 334 years. During > this time, did you > go > to heaven?" > > I think altruism is irrelevant as a "bait" for > posthuman retrieval, as > are > most other motivations. I came to think of another way in which altruism may be the best choice: If all of us don?t do all we can now to make sure that the technological singularity goes well, the techological singularity may wipe out all life (for example by unfriendly AI and nanobots going crazy). ?Doing all we can to make sure the singularity goes well?, what specific actions might that strategy consist of? Maybe to make sure that as many people as possible get to be happy, good and productive (so they contribute optimally with the ground work necessary for the singularity to happen) rather than frustrated from hunger and illness, angry and therefore easily destructive. Furthermore, the happier and saner people are in the countries with technology of mass destruction, the smaller the existential risk. I?m not saying Mother Teresa contributed any more to a happier and saner world than anyone else, but I?m saying maybe contributing to a happier and saner world is the egoistically smartest thing to do, to maximize chances that a posthumanity will become reality so that one day they can resurrect you. Maybe it is in your own interest to take all the money that you had planned to use on your cryopreservation, optimal supplements, medical supervision etc, and instead use it to help those people who are worst off on Earth get a better life ? so that more people contribute more to a successfull singularity. Or maybe the money should be spent on, for example, some measures necessarity to prevent unfriendly AI from getting the power over mankind before friendly AI does. My point is that cryopreservation, supplements and such egoistical ends may not be the optimal way to prolong your life, but that devoting all of your life and all of your resources to charity of some kind may be. > Uniqueness makes much more > sense. The more > unique, > interesting and tangled up in important things you > are, the better. You > might also go for the trick suggested by Charles > Sheffield in _Tomorrow > and Tomorrow_, where the protagonist deliberately > set > out to create > mysteries only he knew the truth about, and ensured > that future > historians > would know that he knew. What kind of mystery could a human of today possibly create that posthumans won?t be able to figure out by themselves, but want to figure out? > But as Robert said, resurrection is unlikely to > happen > through > Clarke-Baxter wormholes. I would bet on massive > brute-force constraint > calculations retrodicting the possible past, and > that > would create > resurrections of everybody. Would it really? Isn?t it possible that posthumans will be able to calculate what we were like, without having to resurrect us? Or do you inevitably create a person by thinking about him/her? For example, is merely thinking about torturing a person a kind of mental voodoo that actually creates actual suffering (other than the relatively mild degree of suffering you experience yourself by thinking about the torture in question). > It still remains to > ensure > that you get > fished > up from the simulator and given access to base > reality > if the > posthumans > are not totally into ultra-altruism (or something > more > sinister, like > post-Jehova's Witnesses trying to convert > *everybody* > retroactively - > the > mormons may baptise past generations, but the PJWs > will try to get them > to > join the church actively). > > I'd rather get to posthumanity by growing up into a > posthuman than > becoming their pet. That way of thinking seems undebatable at first, but I think it can be misleading. Everyone can?t grow up into a posthuman today, precisely because some of us try to grow up into posthumans in order to save their own skin rather than contribute optimally to creating the singularity required before there can be any posthumans. Those who have more money and other resources than they need to stay alive (for a traditional lifespan) might be better off sharing their resources with the poor today, so that the resources of this planet get distributed as evenly as possible. That way, less people will be ill, meaning there will be more hands working to create a good singularity sooner, so that for example unfriendly AI, if developed, will be less likely to win the technological race for power. Or, one might be better off spending one?s money on fighting global warming, to diminish the risk that some countries will soon threaten mankind?s survival with weapons of mass destruction in order to get drinking water and other necessities. Singularity will probably happen sooner of later if all existential risks are avoided. If singularity happens, we may all get eternal life. Therefore, it seems to me it may be infinitely more desirable, even from a purely selfish hedonistic perspective, to ever so slightly contribute to increasing the chance for a good singularity happening, than to prolong one?s life a little by spending a fortune on supplements and/or to increase one?s chances of eternal life slightly by cryopreservation. > Message: 21 > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:17:55 -0700 > From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the > future? > To: ExI chat list > Message-ID: <45FD9063.3070408 at pobox.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; > format=flowed > > Look, there's within-species variance in altruism, > and > then there's > between-species variance in altruism. You know how, > the same that, > even > though human beings think they have intelligence > differences from other > human beings, and think that "brains aren't > everything > in the real > world", they don't invite chimps to be the CEOs of > major corporations? But a human would gladly reward a chimp who saved his life. Just out of pure gratitude. Similarly, any future posthuman who becomes aware that some of the humans today contributed a lot to making it possible for him (the posthuman) to come to existence at all, might reward those humans out of pure gratitude, for example by resurrecting them. Such gratitude may not be egoistically irrational, by the way. I'm thinking that the behaviour of rewarding another person's good behaviour even when it doesn't seem to be egoistically rational (for example when the one you reward can't reward you back for rewarding him or punish you if you don't reward him/her), can be egoistically rational due to a prisoner's dilemma kind of mechanism. If every new species rewards the previous (perhaps even long dead) species for helping it out (or for making its existence possible), a kind of unspoken contract is created, a contract that is beneficial for all (or nearly all) of the species that imply the contract with their actions. > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:17:37 -0700 > From: "spike" > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the future? > To: , "'ExI chat list'" > > Message-ID: > <200703181927.l2IJRnTn029585 at andromeda.ziaspace.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > > > > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of TheMan > ... > > Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the > future? > > > > In Arthur C Clarke's and Stephen Baxter's "The > Light > > Of Other Days", posthumans develop quantum > technology... > > TheMan, I don't recall seeing posts from you in the > past. This is a great > first post, lotsa thoughts and coherence. Thanks! > > ...I'm a hedonist. I want a life that is as long > and > > happy as possible ... /Par > > I am with you there bigtime. I hedon as often as > possible. Such a nice day > is this, I think I shall go out hedoning now in > fact. > > Welcome TheMan! Or shall we call you /Par? Thanks! Call me whichever you like. No, actually, I prefer TheMan. > Message: 14 > Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:14:39 +0100 > From: Eugen Leitl > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the future? > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Message-ID: <20070319081439.GL1450 at leitl.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 05:34:20AM +0100, Giu1i0 > Pri5c0 wrote: > > > Clarke-Baxter technique: seem workable if the > underlying assumption of > > a high density distribution of micro wormholes in > vacuum is correct. > > One hell of an assumption. Until we know the > opposite, the information > constituting our being leaks out of us at the speed > of light, and > is lost irreversibly. Isn?t it theoretically possible to bend the light with gravitational fields for a very long time, while travelling very fast after it, so that one eventually catches up with it? If it isn't, there's still a way: the posthumans could measure the light that, after leaving Earth, bounces back from other planets, and then, knowing all about the laws of physics, calculate what that light must have been like when it left Earth. Other planets could serve as the Earth's mirrors. > Message: 17 > Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:06:40 -0300 > From: "Henrique Moraes Machado (oplnk)" > > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the future? > To: , "ExI chat list" > > Message-ID: <00de01c76a1f$0e225550$fe00a8c0 at cpd01> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; > charset="iso-8859-1"; > reply-type=original > > Don't forget the simulation hypothesis. We can all > be copies already. Yes, but does that mean we should do something else with our lives than what we should do if we are the originals? > Message: 18 > Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:13:04 +0100 > From: Eugen Leitl > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into > the future? > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Message-ID: <20070319121304.GH1450 at leitl.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 09:06:40AM -0300, Henrique > Moraes Machado (oplnk) wrote: > > > Don't forget the simulation hypothesis. We can all > be copies already. > > No, we can't. Not without infinite computing power. Why would it take infinite computing power? Why wouldn?t for example a googolplexian times more computing power than we have today be enough? And if the universe is infinite, an extremely advanced civilisation must somewhere _happen_ to create perfect copies of an Earth, even if they have very poor or close to no computing power. Chance and quantum instability may be enough, in an infinite universe with an infinite number of such trials taking place. If, on the other hand, the universe is very large but not infinite, only a finite number of such copies of Earth may take place. None of them may contain all of us. Then it may still be important how we live. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 22 03:43:20 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:43:20 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? In-Reply-To: References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: On 4/21/07, BillK wrote: The whole thrust of this thread is that we are not talking about some > theoretical fairyland where drug dealers might be thought of as > misunderstood, victimised entrepreneurs. > (I'd like to live there as well, sounds really cool). > > In the real world, drug dealers are amoral armed gangs who kill people > to defend their territory and their business of destroying the lives > of their 'customers', who in turn are engaged in constant minor > criminal activities to finance their addiction. > > Let me know how you feel about this after the ruthless drug gangs move > in to your street, near your family, and you get burgled or mugged > once a month by druggies. That's all because it's illegal. You don't have fruit sellers shooting each other and fruit buyers ending up homeless or mugging people so that they can get their fix. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From benboc at lineone.net Sun Apr 22 08:04:23 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 09:04:23 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462B1707.7020600@lineone.net> "Stathis Papaioannou" wrote: > On 4/17/07, John Grigg wrote: > > Considering how bacteria have been found to communicate and even cooperate > > with each other at a surprisingly sophisticated level, do you think they > > might evolve over time into a roughly human level or better form of > > intelligence, but of the hive mind variety? I could envision giant > > bacterial "brains/colonies" floating on the seas, rooted in the land and > > floating along in the sky. It would be very interesting to see where the > > virus would fit in such an alien ecology. This could make for a good > > science fiction novel but I bet it has already been done a number of times. > > > > Greg Bear's "Blood Music" comes to mind. Reminds me of an idea for a fictional story setting i once had, a place where bacterial colonies cooperate to build 'robot' bodies and brains for the animals there, where all the functional parts were synthetic, but built and maintained by the bacteria. But that's just a setting, and i never came up with an actual story set there, and i suck at writing fiction anyway. But i often wondered if it was a viable idea, with these 'evolved robots' walking around, some of which developed intelligence. i suppose there's a parallel with nanotech, with the bacteria standing in for nanobots. They'd be barely noticeable, just biofilms in and around the synthetic parts. Anyway, there's a free idea if anyone wants to do anything with it. ben zaiboc From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 22 08:49:27 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 04:49:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] EP and political philosophy was Anarchy? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070420113216.0397b550@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070419202910.03df2590@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <009801c78340$f91fb9a0$7b893cd1@pavilion> <5.1.0.14.0.20070420113216.0397b550@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/20/07, Keith Henson wrote: > Sorry for harping on this, but understanding EP is really critical toward > making sense out of the social world. Keith, I have no argument with this. However, one runs the risk of thinking that the forest is more significant than the trees. EP is a social and therefore an "average" perspective way of viewing things. If one watches society at large adopting the internet, cell phones, Blackberries, iPods, assaulting Nigerian oil platforms, various bombings in many countries [1], one might be struck by the copy-cat they seem to have. If XYZZY is doing thus-and-so then XYZZZ might as well do it too. However, all brains are not equal, there are those which have selected from the gene pool the creation of a different vector. Mostly these probably fail. Sometimes they are successful. I would offer the "spin" that EP is trailing the successful novel vectors pioneered by single individuals. You can attempt to stick your finger in the dam at the EP level -- in which case you are dealing with many more individuals. Or you can attempt to stick your finger into the works at the "pioneer" level -- long before EP becomes manifest. Robert 1. http://www.adl.org/terrorism/terrorism_db/default.asp?valuedb=Attacks -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amaraa at gmail.com Sun Apr 22 09:00:06 2007 From: amaraa at gmail.com (Amara D. Angelica) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 05:00:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: <462B1707.7020600@lineone.net> References: <462B1707.7020600@lineone.net> Message-ID: <001301c784bc$9f77dfe0$650fa8c0@HP> >"evolved robots" walking around, some of which developed > intelligence. Hmmm. Homo sapiens? From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 22 17:08:42 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:08:42 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien wrote > From: Damien Broderick > > Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will > they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa. Anyone who is not acquaited with Mother Teresa's multitudinous sins must read Christopher Hitchens. But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her back to life? I am reminded of Calvinist retribution. Try to place yourself (impossibly) in the position of vastly transcendental beings who can and do bring back to life some human beings. Perhaps the nearest analogy that suffices for humans now is to imagine that you have visited a day-care center, and have observed how obnoxious, aggressive, and unpleasant some particular two-year old is. Would the thought ever cross your mind that this particular two-year old does not merit existence? The preceding analogy is actually completely unfair to the transcendent future beings who will possibly be making such decisions about us! The reason is that we are far, far closer in mentality and understanding to two- year olds than such transcendental entities are to us. So if somehow you could find it in your heart to give that two-year old another chance at life, then it stands to reason that future beings cannot possibly be so harsh as to keep Mother Teresa dead forever ---if they still have even a vestige of humanity left about them. Lee From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 22 18:01:44 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 11:01:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/22/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > The preceding analogy is actually completely unfair to the > transcendent future beings who will possibly be making > such decisions about us! The reason is that we are > far, far closer in mentality and understanding to two- > year olds than such transcendental entities are to us. > So if somehow you could find it in your heart to give > that two-year old another chance at life, then it > stands to reason that future beings cannot possibly > be so harsh as to keep Mother Teresa dead forever > ---if they still have even a vestige of humanity left > about them. Lee, I completely agree that such a powerful being would do all these nice things, to the precise extent that such actions were valuable on its terms. - Jef From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 22 18:13:52 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:13:52 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070422130946.024cdec0@satx.rr.com> At 10:08 AM 4/22/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: >Damien wrote > > > Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will > > they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa. > >Anyone who is not acquaited with Mother Teresa's >multitudinous sins must read Christopher Hitchens. > >But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay >dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her >back to life? That's an old thread, but I believe the original context selected MT as someone posthumans might go to some trouble to retrieve *due to her especial humanitarian merit*... which was my objection. It was like finding oneself in the Soviet Union half a century ago and hearing everyone babbling about the supreme virtue of Stalin. Well, perhaps not *quite* like that. :) Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 22 21:38:28 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:38:28 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/21/07, TheMan wrote: > >chances of being saved by future posthumans is > > >increased more, or even equally much, by a Ray > > >Kurzweil way of living, than/as for example by a > > >Mother Theresa way of being ? given that the > > >posthumans value altruism more than anything else. > > > > Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will > > they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa. [God knows how many snips...] Future "salvation vectors" are much more likely to be based upon "wisdom vectors" rather than "mercy vectors". Wise actions will save many more people than merciful behaviors, particularly those directed towards an improbable and unprovable direction.). Ray does not understand this completely but he is light years ahead of people such as M. Theresa. The bottom line is that ~6 million people a year are dying (99.9+% on an unrecoverable path). So when one presents an argument in this forum it should be in the context of *this* will save *X* million people a year. Anything less than that and you tend to lose my interest. Someone has to set the bar. Robert Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 22 22:46:40 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 15:46:40 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070422130946.024cdec0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes >>But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay >>dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her >>back to life? > > That's an old thread, but I believe the original context selected MT > as someone posthumans might go to some trouble to retrieve *due to > her especial humanitarian merit*... which was my objection. All right, thanks for the clarification. Since I can't complain about you, then, maybe I can go after Robert, who just wrote > Future "salvation vectors" are much more likely to be based upon > "wisdom vectors" rather than "mercy vectors". Wise actions will > save many more people than merciful behaviors, particularly those > directed towards an improbable and unprovable direction.). By "salvation vector" are you trying to describe a merit list of those who *deserve* to be saved? If so, then this still smacks of a rather vengeful God who punishes people in the next life for what they've done in the first one. It *may* make sense to exact retribution against a misbehaving two- year old, because we wish to elecit better behavior from him or her. I fail to see our mind children, if they're both sensible and merciful, with any wisdom trying to do the same. Lee From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 22 23:23:43 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 19:23:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070422130946.024cdec0@satx.rr.com> <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/22/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > Since I can't complain about you, then, maybe I can go after Robert, > who just wrote > > > Future "salvation vectors" are much more likely to be based upon > > "wisdom vectors" rather than "mercy vectors". Wise actions will > > save many more people than merciful behaviors, particularly those > > directed towards an improbable and unprovable direction.). Oh yea, pick on the minority will ya.... You, I hope, will note that I am not specifying directions, I am simply laying out possible paths. By "salvation vector" are you trying to describe a merit list of those > who *deserve* to be saved? If so, then this still smacks of a rather > vengeful God who punishes people in the next life for what they've > done in the first one. God, can we scrap this vector? There is no "god" and there is no "salvation" vector". Can we put it to rest in this forum, as a thread, forever? Now completely separate from that one has a discussion of "who deserves to be saved". I would argue that the "saving" paradigm is a brief intersection in the MBrain paradigm. There may be a few moments during which the saving of static paradigms is a default. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 22 23:56:17 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 16:56:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070422130946.024cdec0@satx.rr.com> <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <03b901c78539$f416e640$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert writes >> > > Since I can't complain about you, then, maybe I can go after Robert, >> > > who just wrote >> > >> > Future "salvation vectors" are much more likely to be based upon >> > "wisdom vectors" rather than "mercy vectors". Wise actions will >> > save many more people than merciful behaviors, particularly those >> > directed towards an improbable and unprovable direction.). > >Oh yea, pick on the minority will ya.... There aren't a lot of posts, right now---I just don't have much to work with. > You, I hope, will note that I am not specifying directions, > I am simply laying out possible paths. > > By "salvation vector" are you trying to describe a merit list of those > > who *deserve* to be saved? If so, then this still smacks of a rather > > vengeful God who punishes people in the next life for what they've > > done in the first one. > > God, can we scrap this vector? There is no "god" and there is no > "salvation" vector". Well, you're the one who used the term, such things whatever they are being as you said more likely based on wisdom than mercy. > Can we put it to rest in this forum, as a thread, forever? Fine with me! :-) > Now, completely separate from that, one has a discussion of "who > deserves to be saved". Okay: that is not a "salvation vector" which term is now officially beyond the pale by all right thinking people :-) But we *do* have a discussion of "who deserves to be saved"??? > I would argue that the "saving" paradigm is a brief intersection in > the MBrain paradigm. There may be a few moments during which > the saving of static paradigms is a default. Translating into my simple-speak, I take you to mean that in the likely course of evolution of super-advanced intelligence, the preservation of static programs (i.e. people) may occur as a default? For a while? Thanks, Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 23 00:02:59 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:02:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jef writes > On 4/22/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > >> ...stands to reason that future beings cannot possibly >> be so harsh as to keep Mother Teresa dead forever >> ---if they still have even a vestige of humanity left >> about them. > > Lee, I completely agree that such a powerful being would do all these > nice things, to the precise extent that such actions were valuable on > its terms. That's a truism. But I take you to mean that you'd be willing to defer to its terms. No? As for me, if it is cheap in terms of time and resources, and the advanced entities could save us---but choose not to (for whatever reasons)---then I'd just as soon they not exist either. The bastards. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 23 00:05:10 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:05:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H References: <462B1707.7020600@lineone.net> Message-ID: <03c301c7853b$5b4ce840$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Ben writes > Reminds me of an idea for a fictional story setting i once had, a place > where bacterial colonies cooperate to build 'robot' bodies and brains > for the animals there, where all the functional parts were synthetic, > but built and maintained by the bacteria. But that's just a setting, and > i never came up with an actual story set there, and i suck at writing > fiction anyway. See James Hogan's "Code of the Life Maker". It's really very good. Lee > But i often wondered if it was a viable idea, with these 'evolved > robots' walking around, some of which developed intelligence. i suppose > there's a parallel with nanotech, with the bacteria standing in for > nanobots. They'd be barely noticeable, just biofilms in and around the > synthetic parts. > > Anyway, there's a free idea if anyone wants to do anything with it. From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 00:22:52 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 20:22:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <62c14240704221722s4bb06e79u95ef1e700232a2a2@mail.gmail.com> On 4/22/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > That's a truism. But I take you to mean that you'd be willing to > defer to its terms. No? As for me, if it is cheap in terms of time > and resources, and the advanced entities could save us---but > choose not to (for whatever reasons)---then I'd just as soon > they not exist either. The bastards. What about if the "advanced entities" generalize humanity to a set of initial conditions and a process of evaluating state - which can be calculated to any arbitrarily amusing degree of detail they choose. If that case, the outlying 1% of this list probably have been normalized out of the pattern. Sorry but we're just not "general" enough to provide the typical "humanity v1.0" experience. Maybe if there is sufficient interest, the "Extropian" add-on could be worked out as an upgrade to the basic program. .. just a thought. From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Apr 23 01:27:01 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:27:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070422130946.024cdec0@satx.rr.com> <03b201c78530$2515d260$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <462C0B65.30007@mac.com> Lee Corbin wrote: > Damien writes > > >>> But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay >>> dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her >>> back to life? >>> >> That's an old thread, but I believe the original context selected MT >> as someone posthumans might go to some trouble to retrieve *due to >> her especial humanitarian merit*... which was my objection. >> > > All right, thanks for the clarification. > > Since I can't complain about you, then, maybe I can go after Robert, > who just wrote > > >> Future "salvation vectors" are much more likely to be based upon >> "wisdom vectors" rather than "mercy vectors". Wise actions will >> save many more people than merciful behaviors, particularly those >> directed towards an improbable and unprovable direction.). >> > > By "salvation vector" are you trying to describe a merit list of those > who *deserve* to be saved? If so, then this still smacks of a rather > vengeful God who punishes people in the next life for what they've > done in the first one. > > I didn't get any such thing from Robert's comments. I believe he is simply saying that we need wisdom and intelligence more direly than we need mercy and all-inclusive goodwill if are to maximize the actual good outcome quickly and for as many as possible. I don't always agree with needing that "more" as I think we need a lot of both. But without the "wisdom-vector" all the "mercy-vector" in the world will do no good. Your interpretation seem bizarre to me. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Apr 23 01:30:16 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:30:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> Lee Corbin wrote: > Jef writes > > > >> On 4/22/07, Lee Corbin wrote: >> >> >>> ...stands to reason that future beings cannot possibly >>> be so harsh as to keep Mother Teresa dead forever >>> ---if they still have even a vestige of humanity left >>> about them. >>> >> Lee, I completely agree that such a powerful being would do all these >> nice things, to the precise extent that such actions were valuable on >> its terms. >> > > That's a truism. But I take you to mean that you'd be willing to > defer to its terms. No? As for me, if it is cheap in terms of time > and resources, and the advanced entities could save us---but > choose not to (for whatever reasons)---then I'd just as soon > they not exist either. The bastards. > You would prefer no intelligence at all in the local universe if that intelligence wasn't human or formerly human? - samantha From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 02:30:24 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 22:30:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704221930k6709b485g3358f1b0b99ddb27@mail.gmail.com> On 4/22/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Lee Corbin wrote: > > That's a truism. But I take you to mean that you'd be willing to > > defer to its terms. No? As for me, if it is cheap in terms of time > > and resources, and the advanced entities could save us---but > > choose not to (for whatever reasons)---then I'd just as soon > > they not exist either. The bastards. > You would prefer no intelligence at all in the local universe if that > intelligence wasn't human or formerly human? If They are so full of themselves that they can't be bothered to run LeeCorbin as a screen saver, then Lee is justifiably bitter and is (verbally) spitting on them. :) (at least, that's how how I read it) From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 23 03:17:16 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 20:17:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com><039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> <62c14240704221930k6709b485g3358f1b0b99ddb27@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <03d101c78555$f5caee20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Mike writes > Samantha wrote: >> Lee Corbin wrote: >> > That's a truism. But I take you to mean that you'd be willing to >> > defer to its terms. No? As for me, if it is cheap in terms of time >> > and resources, and the advanced entities could save us---but >> > choose not to (for whatever reasons)---then I'd just as soon >> > they not exist either. The bastards. >> >> You would prefer no intelligence at all in the local universe if that >> intelligence wasn't human or formerly human? That's right. At least under the condition that they could have saved us---at no expense yet!---but did not deign to. To hell with them. You can't let people push you around. > If They are so full of themselves that they can't be bothered to run > LeeCorbin as a screen saver, then Lee is justifiably bitter It's the least they could do. And I can't believe that not everyone would be a bit miffed at their actions: Suppose an AI takes over the world, answers all our math, physics, and general knowledge questions, and then suddenly says "Oh, by the way, I've decided I don't want you around no more. Tuesday---then that's it!" > and is (verbally) spitting on them. :) Yeah---and don't forget I'm making a fuss for the rest of you too! Let's plant fear right now: fear that it's all a test and that we have a secret way to pull the plug---or that they're in a simulation and we're waiting to see if they pass a test of basic gratitude! :-) Lee From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 23 05:43:23 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 01:43:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Anyone with just a bit of chemistry beyond high school knows that liquid fuels can be made from virtually any reduced carbon source. That included coal, wood, plant trimmings, paper, and any sort of plastic or rubber (except maybe PVC). Come the revolution (the nanotech revolution of course) this should be easy to do, though for a number of reasons it could be that nobody would care. The question is . . . given the kinds of automation you can get with microprocessors and what we now know about chemical processing, is a gadget that converted household waste into a liquid fuel (such as ethanol) possible? The production need not be all that high since it wouldn't be that easy for most people to round up the 100 pounds of carbon a week that would be needed for 20 gallons of fuel. I know. Heated with wood this last winter and burned tons of wood. Still, such a thing, if it could be built, would be saving a person $3000 a year at current prices. Given slightly more than a 3 year payback, it could be sold for $10,000. I realize that there are few if any chemists in this crowd, so suggestions as to where I should take this discussion would also be welcome. Keiht From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Mon Apr 23 06:12:18 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:12:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Robert Bradbury wrote: > God, can we scrap this vector? There is no "god" > and there is no "salvation" vector". Can we put it > to rest in this forum, as a thread, forever? I apologize Robert, I have read a few opinions on God and Religion on this list in the last year and a half and thought it would be a good time to bring up my complete and utter boiled up frustration before the list decides to put it to rest. I do feel that the Extropy List has some of the most highly exercised minds that I have ever had the opportunity to exchange with. On that note, I don't understand how on highly evolved lists, such comments are made. I am not a religious person but yet I find it utterly useless to denounce Religion in any way as then I feel that I am stomping on the beliefs of millions of people. At the same time, I find it useless to ignore Religion as I believe that any movement(such as Transhumanism) that will result in change (such as the Singularity) will have to deal with such minds. This list is supposed to be about prolonging life, the use of technology, transhumanism etc. If you believe God doesn't exist and have the right to say it then I would assume that a religious person may have those same rights and discuss the existence of God. (Which I believe will end up in a tug of war). If the list does not wish to dwell on Religion then any and all comments that are in regard to God or Religion should not be made. If I have misunderstood and all Extropians are Atheists, then I think that should be made clear and concrete. I personally would fully appreciate discussing Religion, Science and Politics from a rational and Universal point of view but I guess that's wishful thinking. People get funny in the head when they are convinced they have the one and only answer. Anyhow thanks for listening and letting me let off some steam. Anna:) Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Mon Apr 23 03:53:25 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:53:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Taking a stand References: Message-ID: <007e01c7855a$f23503e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> John Grigg wrote: > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan Why would you think that? If the founding fathers can found a republic with a constitution that includes impeachment proceedings in a time when they are fighting the British and in Lincolns time the country can go to an election during a civil war, what makes this generation of Americans, so inept? The only answer I can come up with is that the current crop of voting age American's are more stupid and selfish than their predecessors. Mathematically, we outsiders are obliged to be anti-American by a simple look at the numbers. 53 % supported Bush after the illegal invasion of Iraq. There has to be some sort of bystander calculus going on. You guys must think that individually you can't do anything because you are just individuals and that individually you won't be held accountable by the rest of the world. What you don't seem to be rational enough to grasp is that not only the world is turning on you but sooner or later by setting aside the rule of law and allowing promises to be conspicuously broken you are ensuring that you will turn on each other. You are raising children, some of you, in environments where the message you will be teaching them in your culture is keep your heads down and if your break your word thats fine so long as your brazen or strong it doesn't even matter if you get caught. Its like you have a collective Easter Island style deathwish. Any society or group of people that wants or needs to live together with children and people of less than the highest judgement (ie. most ordinary people) and character having freedom needs to have or to discover the simple economic efficiency of the social contract. In simplicity, promises made cannot be allowed to go broken lest no promises be kept. Even three anarchists would agree in a resource restricted envirnoment/world that it makes sense for any two of them to disallow betrayal of the others by any one of them. The principle of keeping solemn promises and upholding contracts is absolutely fundamental to freedom in any form of group where the individuals are not perfect. Brett Paatsch From eugen at leitl.org Mon Apr 23 06:58:44 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:58:44 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Taking a stand In-Reply-To: <007e01c7855a$f23503e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <007e01c7855a$f23503e0$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <20070423065844.GW9439@leitl.org> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > John Grigg wrote: > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan > > Why would you think that? Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 07:39:36 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:39:36 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423023712.0219c2d0@satx.rr.com> At 02:12 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Anna T wrote: >If I have misunderstood and all >Extropians are Atheists Pretty much. Bear in mind that Buddhists are atheists. Many are madly *superstitious* atheists, but that's a different problem. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Apr 23 08:29:44 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:29:44 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070423082944.GA9439@leitl.org> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:43:23AM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > The question is . . . given the kinds of automation you can get with > microprocessors and what we now know about chemical processing, is a gadget > that converted household waste into a liquid fuel (such as ethanol) Automation doesn't help you to do Fischer-Tropsch or pyrolysis small-scale one bit. During WWII many cars were run on gas generator trailers, which took wood chips, though. Your main difficulties are a) solid educts b) high pressure/temperature in a small volume c) catalyst tarring. I would frankly forget it. So if it's wood, I would just use it for heating purposes. > possible? The production need not be all that high since it wouldn't be > that easy for most people to round up the 100 pounds of carbon a week that > would be needed for 20 gallons of fuel. I know. Heated with wood this > last winter and burned tons of wood. I think what would work is a direct methane oxidation plant, ran from natural gas. > Still, such a thing, if it could be built, would be saving a person $3000 a > year at current prices. Given slightly more than a 3 year payback, it > could be sold for $10,000. > > I realize that there are few if any chemists in this crowd, so suggestions How do you know how many chemists are present? > as to where I should take this discussion would also be welcome. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 09:47:23 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:47:23 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Anna Taylor wrote: This list is supposed to be about prolonging life, the > use of technology, transhumanism etc. If you believe > God doesn't exist and have the right to say it then I > would assume that a religious person may have those > same rights and discuss the existence of God. (Which I > believe will end up in a tug of war). If the list > does not wish to dwell on Religion then any and all > comments that are in regard to God or Religion should > not be made. If I have misunderstood and all > Extropians are Atheists, then I think that should be > made clear and concrete. I don't know the numbers (it would be an interesting survey if it hasn't already been done), but I would be surprised if the incidence of atheism amongst those who identify as transhumanists isn't considerably higher than in the general community, especially in the US. It seems to me that many mainstream adherents of the Abrahamic faiths (Islam is in there with Judaism and Christianity, for those who didn't know) would be horrified at all but the mildest goals of transhumanism. It's one thing for scientists to simply regard religion as irrelevant to their work, but when they start to talk about transcending biology and living forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun of Satan's rebellion against God. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 10:05:49 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:05:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <03d101c78555$f5caee20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> <62c14240704221930k6709b485g3358f1b0b99ddb27@mail.gmail.com> <03d101c78555$f5caee20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Hmmm... seems my comments may have stirred the pot so to speak. Let me attempt to qualify. With respect to wisdom vs. mercy... It was a comment on how many more vectors could be saved if we had the wisdom to pursue them. For example, and this is not a comment on the war in Iraq, I'm observing the fact that I estimated circa 2001 the cost of an assembly line for a nanorobot at $3.6 trillion and considered this to be a sum one could *never* extract from the "funding community" and yet I am witnessing us spending $0.5 trillion on a war which makes little difference to the average U.S. citizen. If I had been "wise" I might have gone back and calculated what we spent in WWII in current dollars and framed things in terms of costs and benefits. Little did I realize (in early 2001) how what in retrospect was a "small" event [1] can reshape the operational context. I do and will take a strong opposing position with respect to "mercy" vectors that assume an afterlife which is not in evidence. So the Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists are all toast (as their current frameworks are justified to the best of my knowledge). (If you can lay out the proof that this is a sim and we are being judged before me I am willing to look at the evidence.) Now, all that being said, I am still wrestling with the slope of the singularity. If it develops very fast, as I suspect it might, the pre-KT-I to KT-II level transition is very fast (within a human "generation"). More importantly at the KT-II level, the resources required for a KT-I level are insignificant. One gains much more with an improvement to a computational algorithm or architecture (even 0.01%) than one gains by turning Earth, Mars or Venus into computronium. So why bother with the fleas on the back of the dog? So the problem one has to wrestle with is not whether the wisdom vector or the mercy vector produces results which translate into "redemption" but whether or not "redemption" of "fleas" is worthy of notice by entities focused on more important problems [2]. Robert 1. You can take down a couple of buildings and remove 0.001% of the population but you are not significantly impacting the entity (other than to really piss them off). (As an FYI the daily U.S. death toll (due in large part to aging) was/is more than double the 911 "event" death toll. 911 was hardly a bump in the road other than the attention which was paid to it.) 2. I think a recent show on either the science channel or the discovery channel indicated that our galaxy is going to collide with one of our sister galaxies in ~3 billion years. 3 billion years is a relatively short time span, esp. if we starlift the sun so it will last a trillion years or more. During galactic collisions, one is less concerned with the survival of "meat" vectors and more concerned with whether or not one gets sucked into one of the black holes whose fundamental raison d'etre seems to be the disassembly of organized forms of matter in the universe. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 10:18:13 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:18:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > [snip] > It's one thing for scientists to simply regard religion as irrelevant to > their work, but when they start to talk about transcending biology and > living forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun of Satan's > rebellion against God. > Though I am sure there are some readers of the Bible or Koran who could cite "Satan's rebellion against God" in detail (Spike perhaps?) I suspect a majority only is aware of it in a very loose sense (speaking as someone brought up in a "traditional" Irish Catholic framework.) It is only those who know those writings in depth (and happen to believe in them) where transhumanism is a problematic rerun. The goal before transhumanists is to displace "belief in fantasy" with "belief in science". It is a simple transformation of "We can never go to the moon." to "We have walked on the moon.". Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sti at pooq.com Mon Apr 23 10:18:53 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:18:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> Keith Henson wrote: > Anyone with just a bit of chemistry beyond high school knows that liquid > fuels can be made from virtually any reduced carbon source. That included > coal, wood, plant trimmings, paper, and any sort of plastic or rubber > (except maybe PVC). > > Come the revolution (the nanotech revolution of course) this should be easy > to do, though for a number of reasons it could be that nobody would care. > > The question is . . . given the kinds of automation you can get with > microprocessors and what we now know about chemical processing, is a gadget > that converted household waste into a liquid fuel (such as ethanol) > possible? The production need not be all that high since it wouldn't be > that easy for most people to round up the 100 pounds of carbon a week that > would be needed for 20 gallons of fuel. I know. Heated with wood this > last winter and burned tons of wood. > > Still, such a thing, if it could be built, would be saving a person $3000 a > year at current prices. Given slightly more than a 3 year payback, it > could be sold for $10,000. > > I realize that there are few if any chemists in this crowd, so suggestions > as to where I should take this discussion would also be welcome. > I could swear I read about a prototype of such a machine just recently. Processes a wide variety of household wastes (food scraps, wood chips, whatever) and converts it into one of three different fuels depending on what it deems the better choice, and then burns the fuel to produce electricity. IIRC it was being developed for emergency relief and for military applications. I'll try to dig up a reference, if you're interested. From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 11:06:44 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:06:44 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: It's one thing for scientists to simply regard religion as irrelevant to > > their work, but when they start to talk about transcending biology and > > living forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun of Satan's > > rebellion against God. > > > > Though I am sure there are some readers of the Bible or Koran who could > cite "Satan's rebellion against God" in detail (Spike perhaps?) I suspect a > majority only is aware of it in a very loose sense (speaking as someone > brought up in a "traditional" Irish Catholic framework.) It is only those > who know those writings in depth (and happen to believe in them) where > transhumanism is a problematic rerun. > > The goal before transhumanists is to displace "belief in fantasy" with > "belief in science". It is a simple transformation of "We can never go to > the moon." to "We have walked on the moon.". > Sure, I've been an atheist since birth, but there are a lot of people who believe in God and Satan, especially in America, and I'd be interested in hearing their views on transhumanism should any be reading this. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 11:08:16 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:08:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <496201.28394.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <03c201c7853b$5b39d570$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <462C0C28.1030306@mac.com> <62c14240704221930k6709b485g3358f1b0b99ddb27@mail.gmail.com> <03d101c78555$f5caee20$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I think a recent show on either the science channel or the discovery > channel indicated that our galaxy is going to collide with one of our sister > galaxies in ~3 billion years. 3 billion years is a relatively short time > span, esp. if we starlift the sun so it will last a trillion years or more. > During galactic collisions, one is less concerned with the survival of > "meat" vectors and more concerned with whether or not one gets sucked into > one of the black holes whose fundamental raison d'etre seems to be the > disassembly of organized forms of matter in the universe. > Hey, I think you're being a panic-monger! Are you trying to get a budget allocation for saving the galaxy? :) The distances are so vast that it is most unlikely that stars or planets will have close encounters of the catastrophic kind. Quote: "Perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that life on Earth ? whatever it may be ? will probably live through and witness the entire merger over the billion-year dance of the two galaxies, he says. The reason is that the expected lifetime of our sun is projected to last another five billion years. Plus, the likelihood of stars and planets slamming into each other is very low because the distance between them is so vast. The interaction will be "collision-less," with the most significant effect involving huge gravitational distortions of the systems as they coalesce." Download the video from here: BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 11:18:25 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:18:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> Message-ID: It is worth noting that the DoD (in the U.S.) is funding the production of waste to fuel research vectors as they have recognized that trucking fuel from "production locations" to "consumption locations" is a recipe for killing individuals in the armed services. If one drops onto the ground a self-sustainable entity it is far better off than an entity which depends upon external inputs to sustain itself. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 12:20:14 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:20:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Stathis, Re: > Sure, I've been an atheist since birth, but there are a lot of people who > believe in God and Satan, especially in America, and I'd be interested in > hearing their views on transhumanism should any be reading this. > You cannot be an "athiest since birth" since at birth you were incapable of having or holding beliefs. Ones brain could not frame or hold onto such concepts. So I will assume you are speaking allgorically. There are a lot of people who believe in a lot of things and I am not the best person to comment on society dictated belief vectors (since I rejected many of them very early in my development) . I would be interested in comments by "indoctrinated" individuals who simply said "this does not make sense". We have before us a possible intersection -- Individuals such as Eugen or Rafal who may have been brought up in societies with no predispositions compared with individuals such as myself or spike who had very directed dispositions. And then one adds on top of this people like Anders or Nick whose predelictions go off in god knows what directions... Test. Propose a vector that you have viewed as having been "worthy." My absolute criteria is "How many lives saved". Caveat: Saving lives may be less interesting than saving specific lives. For example, and you can rake me over the coals for this argument if in the course of the discussion one minds the topic of whether such as Anders or Eugens minds should be preserved forever. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Apr 23 11:49:43 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:49:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/22/07, Anna Taylor wrote: > If I have misunderstood and all > Extropians are Atheists, then I think that should be > made clear and concrete. Anna, while there is no rule that Extropians are atheists, and extropy implies appreciation of diversity, this is very much a refuge of rationality. We discuss here a wide range of thinking and beliefs (and thinking and beliefs about thinking and beliefs) but for most of us Theism had been exposed as highly irrational (making highly improbable claims unsupported by observation) long before we found this list. Personally, I find inspiration, as well as profound humility and awe, in contemplation of the increasingly probable -- and increasingly surprising -- natural cosmos and our relation to it as subjective agents. - Jef From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 13:02:12 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:02:12 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > > Stathis, > > Re: > > > Sure, I've been an atheist since birth, but there are a lot of people > > who believe in God and Satan, especially in America, and I'd be interested > > in hearing their views on transhumanism should any be reading this. > > > > You cannot be an "athiest since birth" since at birth you were incapable > of having or holding beliefs. Ones brain could not frame or hold onto such > concepts. So I will assume you are speaking allgorically. > No, I'm speaking literally. Atheist means "without God", from the Greek, so it's the natural state when you don't know anything. Then as kids grow up their heads are filled with religious and other ideas by their parents. My parents might have mentioned God once or twice, but I honestly can't remember a time when the concept seemed less than a fantasy. The girl I sat next to in grade prep swore that she saw the tooth fairy once and I believed her, so I won't claim that I skipped childish credulity altogether, but, well, she had *evidence*. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 13:03:20 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:03:20 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Stirling Westrup wrote: > I could swear I read about a prototype of such a machine just recently. > Processes a wide variety of household wastes (food scraps, wood chips, > whatever) and converts it into one of three different fuels depending on what > it deems the better choice, and then burns the fuel to produce electricity. > IIRC it was being developed for emergency relief and for military > applications. I'll try to dig up a reference, if you're interested. > As you are in Canada, it might be this story you are thinking of: POSTED ON 21/04/07 In search of fuel's holy grail Companies in Canada are closing in on a profitable way to turn wood waste into ethanol to use as an alternative to gasoline. The last page has an explanation of the various processes involved. BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 13:10:30 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:10:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> On 4/23/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > We have before us a possible intersection -- Individuals such as Eugen or > Rafal who may have been brought up in societies with no predispositions > compared with individuals such as myself or spike who had very directed > dispositions. And then one adds on top of this people like Anders or Nick > whose predelictions go off in god knows what directions... "in god knows what" - amusing choice of language given the context :) My wife asked me to go to church with her. We regularly discuss how have a belief in a compassionate overlord is easier than trying to understand it all. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but that state should not be an end in itself. We don't expect a 3 year old to grasp the household budget or the political climate in which they live - at least until they grow up enough to ask questions. I feel encountering stark reality would be an unimaginably terrifying experience to those who have been taught only a dependence on god. I think the aggresive anti-god stance of many hard-core atheists only alienates the 'believers' into closing their minds even further. If christians are talking about actively converting followers, but only talk to other christians then they're missing the point of their stated goal. If extropians only bash god followers with other atheists, it's the same thing. So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how exponential growth evolves our understanding? From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 23 11:46:10 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:46:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423074457.043fab48@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:18 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Stirling Westrup wrote: >Keith Henson wrote: snip >I could swear I read about a prototype of such a machine just recently. >Processes a wide variety of household wastes (food scraps, wood chips, >whatever) and converts it into one of three different fuels depending on what >it deems the better choice, and then burns the fuel to produce electricity. >IIRC it was being developed for emergency relief and for military >applications. I'll try to dig up a reference, if you're interested. Please do. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 23 12:35:15 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:35:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423074816.04616e08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 07:47 PM 4/23/2007 +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >On 4/23/07, Anna Taylor ><femmechakra at yahoo.ca> wrote: > >>This list is supposed to be about prolonging life, the >>use of technology, transhumanism etc. If you believe >>God doesn't exist and have the right to say it then I >>would assume that a religious person may have those >>same rights and discuss the existence of God. (Which I >>believe will end up in a tug of war). If the list >>does not wish to dwell on Religion then any and all >>comments that are in regard to God or Religion should >>not be made. If I have misunderstood and all >>Extropians are Atheists, then I think that should be >>made clear and concrete. > >I don't know the numbers (it would be an interesting survey if it hasn't >already been done), 62% secular, atheist 24% religious (long list of types) 14% other/don't know. This is from the paper James Hughes delivered a week ago at the "workshop on transhumanism and the concept of human nature." It was a fairly good conference, only one speaker made me want to run out screaming, but even with this paper about religious attitudes held by people identifying as transhumanists, it was a conference intended to be about the implications of transhumanism, not a conference *for* transhumanists. I went there to meet John Tooby and Pascal Boyer. >but I would be surprised if the incidence of atheism amongst those who >identify as transhumanists isn't considerably higher than in the general >community, especially in the US. I think it might was higher, perhaps much higher, back in the days when the Extropian movement kind of grew out of libertarianism and cryonics. It might be higher on this list than other transhumanist oriented lists because of that history. >It seems to me that many mainstream adherents of the Abrahamic faiths >(Islam is in there with Judaism and Christianity, for those who didn't >know) would be horrified at all but the mildest goals of transhumanism. >It's one thing for scientists to simply regard religion as irrelevant to >their work, but when they start to talk about transcending biology and >living forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun of Satan's >rebellion against God. No doubt. The sponsor speaker from Metanexus, William Grassie wasn't a happy camper. I get the impression that they are trying to get science to find God or at least get religion and are not happy with the results of spending considerable sums on these grants. Keith PS. In between session conversation, Dr. Tooby mentioned (due to his work trying to understand the EP origin of fiction) that autistics can't enter the mind state required for fiction. Dr. Pascal noted the same thing about religions. Autistics are essentially blind to both religions and fiction. Neither of them had the slightest idea why nor do I. This report set off some interesting discussion on the (closed) Hacker's list. There were no ideas there either not even from the ones who tend in that direction. From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 15:16:58 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:16:58 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com > References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: >So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we >are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive >process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how >exponential growth evolves our understanding? Wishful thinking? Category mistake? Damien Broderick From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 23 15:45:15 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:45:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest. References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <006a01c785be$71a5a4f0$f6074e0c@MyComputer> "Anna Taylor" > I find it utterly useless to denounce Religion in any way Not in ANY way? I'm curious, are there any other great lies you think should never be challenged, any other great evil? > as then I feel that I am stomping on the beliefs of > millions of people. That statement is quite simply ridicules. I am not stomping on anyone, I'm just making what I believe is an objective statement when I say religious ideas are asinine. They are perfectly free to call me asinine in return if they wish. Well Ok, I suppose you could say I stomped on them metaphorically, but the trouble is all too often religious people stomp on people with ideas like mine LITERALLY. > If I have misunderstood and all Extropians are Atheists, then I think that > should be made clear and concrete. I am only an authority on this Extropian. At age 10 or so I started to have serious doubts about the dogma of the particular religious franchise I was brought up in, and by the age of 12 I had nothing but contempt for the very idea of God. My contempt has only increased over the years. John K Clark From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 23 15:29:20 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:29:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com > References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423112021.04610ba0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: snip >So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we >are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive >process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how >exponential growth evolves our understanding? "What is it called . . ." Wrong most likely. Because at some point your understanding of humans should make it obvious why we have such beliefs. We might be as little as 5 years or perhaps even less from understanding where, why and how such feelings arise. There is a *lot* of money being spend on autism and I suspect from what Tooby and Boyer said last week that the path to understanding autism will also give us an answer to why humans have religions at all. Strange as this might be . . . Keith From scerir at libero.it Mon Apr 23 15:52:16 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:52:16 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002b01c785bf$5ec2f030$f0bd1f97@archimede> Anna Taylor: > If I have misunderstood and all Extropians > are Atheists, then I think that should be > made clear and concrete. Is there any difference between a 'God' and a 'Great Programmer' (J.Schmidhuber) or a 'Great Simulator'? Because the 'simulation' is one of those recurring threads ;-) s. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious." From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 16:28:50 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:28:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <002b01c785bf$5ec2f030$f0bd1f97@archimede> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <002b01c785bf$5ec2f030$f0bd1f97@archimede> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, scerir wrote: > > "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you > will find that, behind all the discernible laws and > connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. > Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can > comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious." As am I, but if indeed it turns out that this happens to be one of the multiverses in which life can develop, survive and evolve, boy am I ever going to be pissed if there are "more perfect" subsets where less suffering is the common rule of the day. Thought exercise for you... Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and there standing before you are 3 "yous" -- one from a better universe and two from "worse" universes [1]. Robert 1. Kind of puts the whole "am I my copy" debate into a context for consideration... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 16:44:16 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:44:16 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423112815.021c7b28@satx.rr.com> At 08:35 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >In between session conversation, Dr. Tooby mentioned (due to his work >trying to understand the EP origin of fiction) that autistics can't enter >the mind state required for fiction. Dr. Pascal noted the same thing about >religions. Autistics are essentially blind to both religions and >fiction. But as often noted, people on the boundaries (Aspies, etc) are unusually prevalent among science fiction readers and to a lesser extent sf writers. Hard to know whether the typical cardboard/stereotyped/rudimentary characterization of much sf is due to the Asperger readership or vice versa. Notably, characters in Greg Egan's fiction often exist at the margins of autism. Of course, there are aesthetic reasons for this as well--technically, sf's foregrounding of its schemata, maps that serve as territories, rather than r?cit; sf emphasizes aspects of the objective world (as science tries to do), although of course usually through the engaging or plodding invention of stories about imagined subjects - that is, aware, feeling, thinking persons (typical of literary fictions). And sf's "sense of wonder" is a naturalized form of the religious response (or perhaps religion is a perverted form of natural wonderment) to the vast, sublime and ineffable--and an attempt to eff it. I wonder if Tooby has investigated such paraliteratures? Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 16:57:41 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:57:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423115519.02217d68@satx.rr.com> At 11:29 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >We might be as little as 5 years or perhaps even less from understanding >where, why and how such feelings arise. There is a *lot* of money being >spend on autism and I suspect from what Tooby and Boyer said last week that >the path to understanding autism will also give us an answer to why humans >have religions at all. Further to this, here's a nice story I published by Pam Sargent about a machine that immunizes people against religion: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/907 Damien Broderick From kevin at kevinfreels.com Mon Apr 23 17:47:50 2007 From: kevin at kevinfreels.com (kevin at kevinfreels.com) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:47:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Taking a stand Message-ID: <20070423104750.38f036b76284185e041b1b237c97abe6.1f8538c975.wbe@email.secureserver.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Mon Apr 23 18:19:34 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:19:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism Message-ID: <19930428.47811177352374185.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >At 08:35 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >>In between session conversation, Dr. Tooby mentioned (due to his work >>trying to understand the EP origin of fiction) that autistics can't enter >>the mind state required for fiction. Dr. Pascal noted the same thing about >>religions. Autistics are essentially blind to both religions and >>fiction. It's about mirror neurons and empathy creation. Autists have diminished mirror neuron use and diminished ability to empathize. We use the mirror neurons to, among other things, create empathy. Fiction reading is an empathy creating activity (you are putting yourself in the shoes of your characters, etc.). If you don't have the neurons to appreciate fiction, you don't read it. Or get it. Also, interestingly, narcissists don't read fiction either, for the same reasons -- lack of empathy. I wrote a paper on this for the WTA's book on H+, which has yet to find a publisher. http://www.pj-manney.com/empathy.html Damien wrote: >But as often noted, people on the boundaries >(Aspies, etc) are unusually prevalent among >science fiction readers and to a lesser extent sf >writers. Hard to know whether the typical >cardboard/stereotyped/rudimentary >characterization of much sf is due to the >Asperger readership or vice versa. Notably, >characters in Greg Egan's fiction often exist at the margins of autism. It's why hard SF fiction is a literary ghetto: most people like character-driven fiction, because they CAN empathize and want to empathize. When they read something that doesn't allow for increased empathy, most readers reject it. Hard SF is idea driven, which is alientating for most readers. And as you said, most of the writers aren't exactly the poster children for empathy creation, either. I've written about this, too... Respectfully, PJ From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 17:03:50 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:03:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] OFFLIST: Putting God to Rest Message-ID: > I apologize Robert, I have read a few opinions on God and Religion on this > list in the last year and a half and thought it would be a good time to > bring up my complete and utter boiled up frustration before the list decides > to put it to rest. Anna, please take my comments with a grain of salt. I would be one of the first people to argue that we do not know the causal factor(s) if any which may have produced the "big bang". I am also one of the few people on the list who has a serious understanding of whether or not reality as we perceive it is a simulation (having run the numbers and thought about it a good deal). I consider "actions" by an unknown causal factor to be very valid way to look at either our perceived universe and/or our perception of its potentially artificial state. However, I draw the line at "making stuff up". Since much of Christianity is based on "miracles" which either did not occur or can easily be explained using nanotechnology I view it the entire basis for Catholic and Protestant religions as problematic. This is why, I, like John, in my teenage years looked at the Western religious paradigms and said "this is bullshit". We, and many others on the list, want hard cold evidence for the things we believe in. When such evidence is lacking or inherently cannot be produced [1] we tend to frown upon it. This is inherently the difference between evidence based beliefs and faith based beliefs. A "wise" person clearly lays out the boundaries where the evidence is not, and perhaps may not ever, be available. If one chooses to define spirituality or "magic" as being beyond that boundary so be it. However when presenting it to others one must recognize that one is presenting "facts not in evidence" and that "followers" are acting on faith in ones interpretation. An "unwise" person simply chooses to accept whatever they are fed as "reality" because for thousands of years others less able to separate fact from fiction have accepted it as well. As a side note, I consider myself to be a spiritual person, and I hope (to the core of my soul) that we can pull ourselves out of the deck that evolution has handed to us and transform it into something more productive going forward. On my good days I am optimistic. On my bad days, well those are my bad days. Robert 1. Give me a break. Just because "virgin birth" is uncommon among mammals is not a hard and fast rule that it cannot occur. A reptile in a London Zoo underwent "virgin birth" in the last year. And outlining the various ways nanotechnology can be used to turn water into wine or that human bodies can be resurrected, well they are too many to count on one, maybe two hands. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 10:33:52 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 03:33:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Templeton Research Lectures on "The Challenge of Transhumanism" Message-ID: <194154.83412.qm@web35603.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I recently attended a lecture about "The Challenge of Transhumanism" at Arizona State University. The speaker was Anthropology Professor John Tooby, who is a Co-Director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The main thrust of his argument was that the brain is run by extremely complicated computer software-like programs and that there is still so much we just don't know. He views Transhumanists as not taking this into serious consideration as they propose to use direct bio/nanotech intervention to greatly augment human cognitive ability. The lecturer used straw man arguments and I was not overly impressed by either his delivery skills or the message itself. During the question and answer phase I said that I felt Transhumanism had been misrepresented as the "bogeyman" and I asked him what he personally felt about Transhumanists. Tooby replied that he ultimately believes in technological development for the cause of helping the human race and so he sees a positive connection between himself and Transhumanism. This lecture is part of a four year program, which will explore the various aspects of how Transhumanism will eventually impact humanity. It was been funded by the Metanexus Institute (I had never heard of them before) and also The John Templeton Foundation. I have long been fascinated by John Templeton and the foundation he created. http://www.asu.edu/transhumanism/about.html I was happy to see on the links page The World Transhumanist Association, The Extropy Institute, Max More, Vernor Vinge, Nick Bostrom, KurzweilAI and even to my surprise the Mormon Transhumanist Association (go MTA!!, hee). I just wish Anders Sandberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky and also Natasha Vita-More had been listed. http://www.asu.edu/transhumanism/resources.html I very much plan to attend the future lectures and look forward to seeing how things progress. The event was extremely well-attended (usually the public ASU lectures are not), which is a definite indication of public interest in the subject matter. I will continue to keep readers here informed of developments. Lastly, I will say the refreshments were excellent! : ) John Grigg --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 11:01:52 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:01:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <4647.31087.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Robert Bradbury wrote: Though I am sure there are some readers of the Bible or Koran who could cite "Satan's rebellion against God" in detail (Spike perhaps?) I suspect a majority only is aware of it in a very loose sense (speaking as someone brought up in a "traditional" Irish Catholic framework.) It is only those who know those writings in depth (and happen to believe in them) where transhumanism is a problematic rerun. > I have always liked the story of Prometheus and how he stole fire from the gods to aid humanity. I see him as a noble and tragic hero figure, while I view Lucifer as more like a spoiled and vicious fratboy who got just what was coming to him and is not deserving of our sympathy & adulation. Prometheus acted out of love for humanity but Lucifer was motivated by burning self-aggrandizement and had no regard for others. I would much rather be a "Promethean" brand of Transhumanist than a "Luciferian" one. John Grigg --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 18:38:30 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:38:30 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423115519.02217d68@satx.rr.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423115519.02217d68@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423133401.02305390@satx.rr.com> Here's a recent newspaper review of two books on putting God to rest (apologies if I've posted this previously): God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist By Victor J. Stenger Prometheus Books, 294pp. The Comprehensible Universe: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? By Victor J. Stenger Prometheus Books, 340pp. Reviewed by Damien Broderick Do we live in an age of resurgent belief, as the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, and of Islam elsewhere, suggests? Or is the "faith of our fathers" getting corroded, as many believers suspect with dismay, by an unholy blend of sceptical science and consumerist self-indulgence? The popularity of The Da Vinci Code and Philip Pullman's death-of-god His Dark Materials trilogy for young readers is certainly striking. Famous film stars enthusiastically endorse a cult claiming that a galactic overlord named Xenu stranded us all here 75 million years ago. Meanwhile, defiantly atheistic books have been bestsellers: evolutionist Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, philosopher Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Sam Harris's brilliantly incisive little tract Letter to a Christian Nation. Not to mention claims by filmmaker James Cameron that the tomb of Jesus has been found at last. What in heaven's name is going on? I have a sneaking suspicion that doubts about faiths are fuelled less by the shock of Darwinian insight, say, than by a deep, unconscious revulsion after 19 ardent true believers murdered 2973 people on September 11, 2001. Detesting militant Islam required no great intellectual courage on the part of Westerners, but a side effect has been a dawning sense that if one major faith could propel such brutality--could constitute, indeed, the new post-Communist threat--then perhaps religious conviction in general might be questionable. Traditionally, brand-name religion is instilled from infancy, often with ferocious warnings against heretics and infidels, making it hard to doubt the precepts one has grown up with. When I was a kid in a Catholic school run by nuns, I parroted a catechism that explained vacuously "We cannot see God because he is a Spirit, and cannot be seen by us in this life." Later, I learned such classic proofs for God's existence as the argument from design (the world is complex, and so must have a watchmaker), which the proven process of evolution had long ago dispelled. Other arguments seemed, eventually, equally frail. The First Mover gambit was amusingly parodied by a friend's phrase: "If there's no God, who pulls up the next Kleenex?" One last resort argument for the necessity of the divine was a real puzzler, though: Why is there Something, rather than Nothing? Who put the bang in the Big Bang? Veteran particle physicist Victor Stenger offers an answer to that deep question in his two new books, arguing a materialist, god-free account of the cosmos, equally antagonistic to superstition, the paranormal, and religions archetypal and newfangled alike. He refuses to accept the polite accommodation urged by the late agnostic Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion can never be in conflict as they are non-overlapping "magisteria". Faith, for Gould, dealt with morals, science with testable fact. This bid for mutual tolerance gained little traction in either camp. Evolutionary psychology pressed hard against the territorial prerogatives of religion, showing how traditional ethical codes had developed on the basis of templates selected--for good and ill--by a million years of human prehistory. But aren't the central dogmas of Christian civilisation, indeed of all the Abrahamic societies including Judaism and Islam, derived from the infallible word of God delivered in Scripture? Stenger offers a familiar corrective: the moral guidance of the Bible is confused and often reprehensible, supporting slavery and other atrocities. We interpret its words according to today's superior moral insight and sensitivity, so the interpretations given by Christians "must depend on ideals that they have already developed from some other source." Unlike some cautious critics of faith, Stenger takes the tough line that deity is not just an unnecessary hypothesis, nor one where an honest thinker can choose to accept or reject it. No, it is "the failed hypothesis". This is a bold claim indeed, and certain to meet scornful rejection from prelates and pious alike. Nothing daunted, Stenger trots briskly through all the obvious claims and his objections to them, concluding in each case that the evidence for the traditional God is too weak to accept or can be dismissed as mistaken. For example, while human life is well-suited to this planet (inevitably, since we evolved here), the universe as a whole is an uncongenial place, vast, empty and hostile. Far from being carefully designed and calibrated for humankind, the cosmos looks precisely the sort of place one would expect had it emerged unplanned from the void. That assertion still seems to most non-scientists merely a conjuring trick. How can something burst into existence from nothing? Philosophers debated this for centuries but the question assumes that "nothing" has a clear meaning. Actually, we never see nothing, only the change of one thing into another, the slow dispersal of energy into exhaustion. As Stenger points out in his remarkable book The Comprehensible Cosmos, all the matter and energy in the universe, including the newly discovered dark matter and dark energy that comprise most of the cosmos, balances out to zero. "`Nothing'," as physics Nobelist Frank Wilczek put it, "is unstable." The void cannot be conceived as ultimately empty. The astonishing random event that led to an explosion of matter and energy and expanding spacetime--to the creation of a local universe--seems finally within our mental grasp. Stenger does not stint in his treatment of these remarkable ideas. The first half of his book sets out for any reader with a basic scientific training the way in which symmetry gives rise to the "laws of nature"--conservation of energy and momentum, the quantum rules that rewrote physics in the 20th century, special and general relativity. His lucid if demanding treatment offers a somewhat controversial account of the way in which everything we see about us takes the form it does due to one simple demand: that no physical standpoint is privileged over another. This does not mean, as he takes pains to stress, that "anything goes" in the postmodern vein. Readers prepared to follow his argument into elementary calculus and quantum theory will find it spelled out in detail in the second half of the book. The tragedy of the 21st century is that so few people have been equipped by the education system to take that journey into hard-won insight. Which is probably one reason why, when the pain and confusion of life becomes too great to bear, so many of us turn to Xenu or God, and abandon the struggle to understand. From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 18:44:52 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:44:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423112815.021c7b28@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <356819.60967.qm@web56508.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Damien Broderick said: "Hard to know whether the typical cardboard/stereotyped/rudimentary characterization of much sf is due to the Asperger readership or vice versa." It's funny you should say that, because I never actually *noticed* that the characterization in a lot of sf was "rudimentary". I mean, at this point in my life there are some recurring cliche elements I can recognize in sf (both in terms of characterization and in terms of plot), but it took me a long time to get to the point where I started noticing things like that. - Anne "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Apr 23 19:19:36 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:19:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <462D06C8.5050206@pobox.com> Anna Taylor wrote: > > I apologize Robert, I have read a few opinions on God > and Religion on this list in the last year and a half > and thought it would be a good time to bring up my > complete and utter boiled up frustration before the > list decides to put it to rest. You're feeling frustrated because you're on the wrong mailing list. There are dozens of forums in the world that will not create this feeling of utter frustration in you. Find one. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 23 20:03:15 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:03:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest. References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com><002b01c785bf$5ec2f030$f0bd1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <002001c785e2$793b9700$be084e0c@MyComputer> Robert Bradbury Wrote: > Thought exercise for you... Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and there > standing before you are 3 "yous" -- one from a better universe and two > from "worse" universes. Kind of puts the whole "am I my copy" debate into > a context for consideration... A thought experiment need not be physically possible but it must be logical, this is not. One of these people comes from a hideous world of horror, through a miracle he has somehow managed to survive it but not without memories and experiences far beyond the nightmares of Stephan King. The other comes from a fairy tail, Norman Rockwell, Teletubby world so sweet the only danger is developing diabetes. If Many Worlds is the correct interpretation of Quantum Mechanics then both these beings exist somewhere in the multi-verse, but neither of these people remember being you, they have vastly different memories from each other and from you. They would be as much "you" as the man in the moon is. John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 23 20:15:57 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:15:57 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] New Hope for the Dead Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423151348.0228c1f0@satx.rr.com> This *Nature* storyette, by Dave Langford, is very droll: "New Hope for the Dead" http://ansible.co.uk/writing/new_hope.html ...The simplest scheme is what our client-advisors amusingly call "being dead for tax reasons". Maintaining your full activity as an EGAN requires continuing exabyte-scale storage capacity and very substantial 24/7 processor power. We can enormously reduce the associated expenses by storing you in static, compressed Zip format for reactivation in a time of better economic weather. etc Damien Broderick From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 20:35:55 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:35:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <19930428.47811177352374185.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <60377.83467.qm@web56504.mail.re3.yahoo.com> PJ: I think the jury is still out on the science in that department -- we don't necessarily know that a particular pattern of mirror neuron functioning is necessary in order for a person to *feel* empathy. It might be that when autistics experience empathy, different regions of the brain are used than when nonautistics feel empathy. I'm guessing that mirror neurons have a lot more to do with modeling and imitative behavior than with "empathy". There's a difference between empathy and "the ability to pick up and respond to neurotypical social cues". There's obviously more than one way to emote -- look at the animal kingdom and you'll see plenty of species variation in communicative behavior. I do have difficulty figuring out standard body language, but people also get MY body language wrong all the time, so I'm pretty convinced it's a signal mismatch rather than a case of one person lacking some intrinsic ability to feel something. But -- I'll fully admit that I had difficult empathizing with the kids who made fun of me in junior high -- I couldn't put myself in their shoes at all, and found their actions to be perplexing and nonsensical. Similarly, though, they couldn't understand me either, and probably thought that I was deliberately acting in a bizarre manner in order to provoke them (at least, that's what I gathered from some of the things they said to me). If neurotypicals are so empathetic as a group, why do autistic kids get bullied so much? Why, when I was 8 years old, did I get chased at the park by a mob of kids around my age (and older) who pelted me with sticks and rocks? Why didn't these kids' mirror neurons tell them that, you know, it hurts when you hit someone with a hard projectile? I'm guessing that the answer has something to do with the fact that, far from being an intrinsic property of nonautistic neurology, empathy is dependent upon degrees of similarity between populations or persons. If you're in a group of people you can readily relate to -- who are neurologically similar to you -- of course you'll tend to feel what they feel in response to similar stimulus. You'll be able to look at those people and imagine easily how they are feeling when they act a certain way, because it's so close to how you would feel in that situation. However, the situation changes when someone who is configured differently enters the group. That differently-configured person will probably respond to situations in ways that seem bizarre or maladaptive from your point of view, but that are actually quite rational from the standpoint of that person's neurology, or culture, for that matter. There's a reason we have people serving as ambassadors between different cultures -- because so much of the content and substance of human communication is contained within the symbolic framework of culturally-constrained information. There's also a reason we have religious wars and battles over political ideology -- because communication is a difficult and confounding thing, and because people make so many incorrect heuristic-based assumptions about people in outgroups. People tend to assume everyone else is like them (or should be like them) and so get confused and fearful when they encounter someone whose demeanor and behavior do not match established patterns. As for the fiction thing: My reading material as a kid wasn't exactly typical (it involved a lot of medical textbooks and ingredients labels), but it did include a fair amount of science fiction. My guess is that a lot of fiction is written with neurotypical social patterning in mind (and neurotypical psychology) and perhaps this is why you might find autistics reading less fiction, or more restricted genres of fiction. I bet that if most novels were written from the perspective of an autistic person, you wouldn't find too many nonautistic people gravitating toward those novels. - Anne pjmanney wrote: >At 08:35 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >>In between session conversation, Dr. Tooby mentioned (due to his work >>trying to understand the EP origin of fiction) that autistics can't enter >>the mind state required for fiction. Dr. Pascal noted the same thing about >>religions. Autistics are essentially blind to both religions and >>fiction. It's about mirror neurons and empathy creation. Autists have diminished mirror neuron use and diminished ability to empathize. We use the mirror neurons to, among other things, create empathy. Fiction reading is an empathy creating activity (you are putting yourself in the shoes of your characters, etc.). If you don't have the neurons to appreciate fiction, you don't read it. Or get it. Also, interestingly, narcissists don't read fiction either, for the same reasons -- lack of empathy. I wrote a paper on this for the WTA's book on H+, which has yet to find a publisher. http://www.pj-manney.com/empathy.html Damien wrote: >But as often noted, people on the boundaries >(Aspies, etc) are unusually prevalent among >science fiction readers and to a lesser extent sf >writers. Hard to know whether the typical >cardboard/stereotyped/rudimentary >characterization of much sf is due to the >Asperger readership or vice versa. Notably, >characters in Greg Egan's fiction often exist at the margins of autism. It's why hard SF fiction is a literary ghetto: most people like character-driven fiction, because they CAN empathize and want to empathize. When they read something that doesn't allow for increased empathy, most readers reject it. Hard SF is idea driven, which is alientating for most readers. And as you said, most of the writers aren't exactly the poster children for empathy creation, either. I've written about this, too... Respectfully, PJ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au Mon Apr 23 20:20:34 2007 From: bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au (Brett Paatsch) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 06:20:34 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] META My position on the secular sin of censorship -- Was Take a stand Message-ID: <01a501c785e4$d96ee670$e7e18f9b@homepc> From: Eugen Leitl >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > >John Grigg wrote: > > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan > > > > Why would you think that? > > Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list. Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If you kill this thread, or call for it to be killed again. If your are that censorious, I will remember it and hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would oppose your reanimation. I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic vector. I am willing to be censored off the list, it is a private list after all, but actions (like censorship) are facts that shape reactions. Being a person in a world of persons, I take things personally. Fair warning. If I am censored off the list I would take that as diagnostic of the degeneration of the list. It is one thing to take issue with a persons arguments and say so. It is another to stop other people from hearing those arguments and expressing their reactions which may include opposition to them. I regard censorship as a form of killing - as do you by the use of your word killthread. You are yourself a transient information threaD that the universe has yet to rule on. Sincerely, Brett Paatsch -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Apr 23 21:33:21 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:33:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] META My position on the secular sin of censorship -- Was Take a stand In-Reply-To: <01a501c785e4$d96ee670$e7e18f9b@homepc> References: <01a501c785e4$d96ee670$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: On 4/23/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > From: Eugen Leitl > > >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > >John Grigg wrote: > > > > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan > > > > > > Why would you think that? > > > > Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list. > > Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If you kill this thread, or > call > for it to be killed again. If your are that censorious, I will remember it > and > hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would oppose your reanimation. > I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic vector. Brent, I too think this email thread was distinctly off-topic for the Extropy-chat list. Further, I would point out that you've demonstrated very poor etiquette in the aggressive and hostile manner in which you've confronted members of this list. That sort of offensive behavior would indicate not just a kill thread, but having all your posts put on moderation for a time due to the disturbing and intimidating effect it may have on other posters. You might want to thank Eugen for his leniency so far. I hope that I have communicated clearly here, at least as strongly as did Eugen with his Killthread directive, and with regard to your threat against Eugen, I'll stand with him and suggest you consider any such threats to be against both of us and anyone else who might care to similarly express their indignation at your recent behavior. > opposition to them. I regard censorship as a form of killing - as do > you by the use of your word killthread. A "form of killing"? Brent, try to get real. A discussion-thread was judged off-topic for this list. - Jef From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 21:55:22 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:55:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Lee, Lee wrote: ..."Anyone who is not acquaited with Mother Teresa's multitudinous sins must read Christopher Hitchens. But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her back to life? I am reminded of Calvinist retribution."... I use a simple thought experiment when thinking about things like this, although I admit that it betrays my personal beliefs about personal identity and free will. Imagine that a perfect brain scan exists of some truly horrible, awful person, say Adolf Hitler. Imagine that the scan was made one minute before Adolf died, and that it is so detailed that a true Adolf would be resurrected if the brain scan was ever implemented. The question I consider is: If some future human chose to resurrect Adolf in this particular way, would it be "right" or "just" to punish this Adolf with imprisonment or execution. After all, from a subjective point of view, he *IS* Adolf Hitler. He *IS* a truly monstrous and evil person. And he remembers doing all those horrible things he has done. And if he were placed in a similar context, he himself would almost certainly continue to do evil and horrible things to people; because he is still evil. In other words, he is entirely indistinguishable from the original Adolf. He *is* Adolf Hitler. But the question arises: Is *he*, evil Adolf, actually entirely responsible for this situation. Because in this case it was the future human who chose to give him life, as evil as he is. Similarly, none among us humans, even the evil ones, had the choice to come into existence. No-one first asked me whether or not I'd like to awaken within this particular Universe. And no-one asked any of us. Just as we might put the blame on the above-mentioned future human for the existence of evil Adolf; we might be just as justified in placing the blame on this (currently) unintelligent Universe for having created any evil person to begin with. What I'm trying to get at is that perhaps we should place blame precisely where it is justified... nowhere. In my opinion, we shouldn't punish solely for the sake of punishing. As others have said, that doesn't mean we shouldn't take practical measures to promote and protect our human and transhuman values. We can all, *all of us*, still become truly great people with more kindness and nobility and virtue than anything this world has ever seen. If we make that choice when the choice becomes available. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From pj at pj-manney.com Mon Apr 23 22:46:21 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:46:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism Message-ID: <14290511.86311177368381390.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Anne, did you actually read my essay? While claiming "the jury is still out" and wishing to disregard it, you have instead defended many of my points with your own life experience and theories. Curious... Also, all the neuroimaging and other research about this subject over the last several years have done nothing but reinforce this idea of mirror neurons, imitative behavior and empathy creation as a linked system in primates. Like us. They even think they've found it in rodents. If it isn't linked in autists, that alone is interesting, since diminished imitative behavior and 'empathy' (as defined in the majority of humans) is a part of autistic behavior and autist's mirror neuron system does not fire (as seen on an fMRI). The picture is far from complete, but no one has found anything contrary to the underlying hypothesis yet and I see new research all the time. The UCLA people (Iacoboni and Dapretto, etc.) have done a good deal of work on this subject. Also see the ideas of Ramachandran, Restak, etc. The only thing I can think of is that maybe not all behaviors considered 'autistic spectrum' manifest the same way or are created the same way. (I still think we'll find out that autism is like cancer or diabetes, in that there are multiple triggers and causes for a similar symptomatic outcome that has been given a single, all inclusive name.) But no one has done the Aspergers vs. Autism mirror neuron comparison yet. So if you self identify as an Aspie, you may be right, in the sense that you don't have Autism, but a different situation. But that's not what I'm writing about. And autism is actually a hot fiction topic. See "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," etc. You've got a chip on your shoulder and I completely understand why. But not all non-autists throw rocks and the world doesn't always ignore autists or how they think. Please don't think that research into this subject is demeaning or degrading to autists. It's all about trying to figure out how the brain works and that means generalizing about the majority of brains (but we've had this argument about generalization before). If someone could explain to me why I'm different, with a dyslexic, male-centric, wacky brain that makes some pretty crazy connections at times, I wouldn't take it personally. It would be illuminating. My daughter's thoughts generate music in her head throughout the day. If you met her, you'd hear her humming and singing it (although she's learned not to do it while having conversations or in the classroom and she knows she's unusual). She doesn't take it personally and would like to know why, too. Please don't take this the wrong way, because I have enormous respect for you and your writing, but may I suggest less defensiveness and more trying to see both sides of the same issue? Autism may be your subject. But empathy is mine. They are two sides of the same coin of human interaction. Maybe if we put our heads together, we could come up with something illuminating. ? PJ From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 23 22:38:01 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:38:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] META My position on the secular sin of censorship -- Was Take a stand In-Reply-To: <01a501c785e4$d96ee670$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <803134.46740.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Brett: You asked someone to take a stand, so here it is. Eugen and the other list moderators have a voluntary responsibility to keep topics somewhat close to what they personally interpret as relevant to transhumanism. I think it is more than plausible that Eugen geniuinely felt that this was too far off-topic for this list. You can be quite sure that there are many other *political* lists out there that would love to hear your views on this. You can't move it over there? If you'd like to present your beliefs to the people on this list... fine, it's simple. Make an invitation for the interested parties to follow your discussions on whatever other list you select. Threatening a person here with what amounts to permanent death is not going to be well recieved on this list. You ask Eugen to be tolerant and fair of your written viewpoints and yet you threaten him narry a sentence later. That is extremism, Brett. Isn't that something you're trying to get away from? --- Brett Paatsch wrote: > From: Eugen Leitl > > >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett > Paatsch wrote: > > >John Grigg wrote: > > > > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is > not a realistic plan > > > > > > Why would you think that? > > > > Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic > for the list. > > Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If > you kill this thread, or call > for it to be killed again. If your are that > censorious, I will remember it and > hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would > oppose your reanimation. > I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic > vector. > > I am willing to be censored off the list, it is a > private list after all, but > actions (like censorship) are facts that shape > reactions. Being a person > in a world of persons, I take things personally. > Fair warning. > > If I am censored off the list I would take that as > diagnostic of the > degeneration of the list. It is one thing to take > issue with a persons > arguments and say so. It is another to stop other > people from hearing > those arguments and expressing their reactions which > may include > opposition to them. I regard censorship as a form of > killing - as do > you by the use of your word killthread. > > You are yourself a transient information threaD that > the universe > has yet to rule on. > > Sincerely, > Brett Paatsch > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Apr 23 23:39:49 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:39:49 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] META My position on the secular sin of censorship -- Was Take a stand In-Reply-To: References: <01a501c785e4$d96ee670$e7e18f9b@homepc> Message-ID: <5366105b0704231639m43924e03y22d289d16633e71d@mail.gmail.com> 18:27 Monday, 23 April 2007 On 4/23/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > On 4/23/07, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > > From: Eugen Leitl > > > > >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > > > >John Grigg wrote: > > > > > > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan > > > > > > > > Why would you think that? > > > > > > Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list. > > > > Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If you kill this thread, or > > call > > for it to be killed again. If your are that censorious, I will remember it > > and > > hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would oppose your reanimation. > > I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic vector. > Mr. Paatsch, please calm down, and please consider taking A B's advice. Taking your topics to a more appropriate forum and inviting others to follow might work very nicely for everyone. Remember every (not just yours) post to the list presumes that the list membership will find it interesting reading. Persistent off-topic posts abuse the hospitality of others' attentions. A killthread directs at a topic of conversation, not at a person, and is much less serious than moderation or plonking. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Tue Apr 24 00:51:59 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:51:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest Message-ID: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I apologize if the post is too long. I have a distinct feeling the thread will not last too long before meta arrives:) Here are my main points: Robert wrote: >The goal before transhumanists is to displace "belief >in fantasy" with "belief in science". It is a simple >transformation of "We can never go to the moon." >to "We have walked on the moon.". I agree but simply saying Religion and the existence of God is bullshit will not convince people of faith. The main point of my post was to imply that I don't believe in judgement and that I respect other people's choice of belief. >However when presenting it to others one must >recognize that one is presenting "facts not in >evidence" and that "followers" are acting on faith in >ones interpretation. I understand religion very well. I have read theology as much as I have read philosophy. I am in no way promoting religion but merely the fact that everybody has a right to there beliefs. If on this list you can say that "God doesn't exist" then a religious person has the exact same right to dispute it. You need proof but the next right beside you doesn't! They just believe. I don't see the point in debating who's right or wrong. John Clark wrote: >Not in ANY way? I'm curious, are there any other >great lies you think should never be challenged, any >other great evil? That statement is quite simply >ridicules. I don't believe Religion is evil, I believe that the humans that run Religious orders can/may/will be evil. I find that statement rather humorous. My mother is a dioceses in a Protestant church, we spend much of our time debating the none religious versus the religious, I being the none religious. I would gladly challenge many of the stories that religion tells. Just the other day we had a debate about cryonics. My clever story was that "if Jesus was considered human, and he was resurected, why would God object to all humans being resurected?" My point was not about whether God and Religion is right or wrong but about the respect for other peoples beliefs. >I am not stomping on anyone, I'm just making what I >believe is an objective statement when I say >religious ideas are asinine. I don't feel that you are making an objective statement, I feel you are giving me your opinion. I just don't agree with the opinion. >Well Ok, I suppose you could say I stomped on them >metaphorically, but the trouble is all too often >religious people stomp on people with ideas like mine >LITERALLY. That's exactly my point. The tug of war seems futile to me. I can't change my mother's mind about God, I don't even try, though I try and change the way she looks at Religion. >They are perfectly free to call me asinine in return >if they wish. Well Ok, I suppose you could say I >stomped on them metaphorically, but the trouble is >all too often religious people stomp on people with >ideas like mine LITERALLY. Does that mean that I have to choose who is right or wrong to be on this list? Stathis: It's one thing for scientists to simply regard religion as irrelevant to their work, but when they start to talk about transcending biology and living forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun of Satan's rebellion against God. Jeff Albright wrote: >We discuss here a wide range of thinking and beliefs (and thinking and beliefs about thinking and beliefs) but for most of us Theism had been exposed as highly irrational (making highly improbable claims unsupported by observation) long before we found this list. I agree. I'm not saying that religion is rational, I am saying that it exists and that I respect people beliefs. I don't see what's wrong with that? Keith wrote: We might be as little as 5 years or perhaps even less from understanding where, why and how such feelings arise. There is a *lot* of money being spend on autism and I suspect from what Tooby and Boyer said last week that the path to understanding autism will also give us an answer to why humans have religions at all. I have no problem with religion, I have a problem with the mentality that's running it. If this study can examine why people need religion then I am all for it and interested. Eliezer: You're feeling frustrated because you're on the wrong mailing list. There are dozens of forums in the world that will not create this feeling of utter frustration in you. Find one. This list doesn't cause me frustration in the least. I find the posts fascinating, pleasant, educational, respectful and all together a progress to my growth. I have tried to find other lists that have captivated my attention but none have compared. This thread caused an utter frustration. If you and others on the list think I don't belong on the list please feel free to let me know offlist and I will seize from posting. (I am rather surprised that you didn't already meta this thread. For someone that is considering building a Friendly AI, out of courtesy, put on it's list, "please don't be rude.") I didn't want this to be a big debate. I just wanted to get my point accross. I apologize if it offended anybody, it wasn't my intention. Anna:) Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 02:21:00 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:21:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <042c01c78617$d8e3dc50$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jeffrey writes > Lee wrote: > > > ..."Anyone who is not acquaited with Mother Teresa's > > multitudinous sins must read Christopher Hitchens. > > > > But does this mean that Mother Teresa should stay > > dead for *all* time if the power existed to bring her > > back to life? I am reminded of Calvinist > > retribution."... > > I use a simple thought experiment when thinking about > things like this, although I admit that it betrays my > personal beliefs about personal identity and free > will. > > Imagine that a perfect brain scan exists of some truly > horrible, awful person, say Adolf Hitler. Imagine that > the scan was made one minute before Adolf died, and > that it is so detailed that a true Adolf would be > resurrected if the brain scan was ever implemented. > > The question I consider is: If some future human chose > to resurrect Adolf in this particular way, would it be > "right" or "just" to punish this Adolf with > imprisonment or execution? After all, from a > subjective point of view, he *IS* Adolf Hitler. He > *IS* a truly monstrous and evil person. And he > remembers doing all those horrible things he has done. > And if he were placed in a similar context, he himself > would almost certainly continue to do evil and > horrible things to people; because he is still evil. That's an excellent thought experiment. I've conducted some variations on it myself, though thanks for writing it up so well and posing the question so starkly. My solution---up to now---has been that indeed Hitler *should* be reanimated and with all his memories quite intact. However, he ought also be given an enhancement that makes it perfectly clear to him exactly what the causal consequences of his horrific actions were, and to the degree that he's actually sociopathic, that too should be repaired before he gets any further runtime. I believe that this can be done without truly altering "who he is". Let his subsequent remorse and soul-searching be adequate enough punishment. > In other words, he is entirely indistinguishable from > the original Adolf. He *is* Adolf Hitler. > > But the question arises: Is *he*, evil Adolf, actually > entirely responsible for this situation. Because in > this case it was the future human who chose to give > him life, as evil as he is. We have to remember that both his original parents and his later saviors acted in his best interests when they brought him into being (i.e. arranged for him to have further runtime i.e. further experience, and that it's as unproductive to blame them for his actions as it would have been (or is) to blame German society or certain German philosophers for *his* decisions. If we are totally free from the idea that there are souls, and yet on the other hand are free from the notion that uncaused events can occur, then the Adolf Hitler system can and must logically be held accountable for the actions it undertook. > Similarly, none among us > humans, even the evil ones, had the choice to come > into existence. No-one first asked me whether or not > I'd like to awaken within this particular Universe. > And no-one asked any of us. Just as we might put the > blame on the above-mentioned future human for the > existence of evil Adolf; we might be just as justified > in placing the blame on this (currently) unintelligent > Universe for having created any evil person to begin > with. What I'm trying to get at is that perhaps we > should place blame precisely where it is justified... > nowhere. In my opinion, we shouldn't punish solely for > the sake of punishing. No, but punishment traditionally has four justifications: (1) deterence (2) removal (3) rehabilitation, and (4) retribution. Now while I am certainly prone to accept even (4) (as would be seen by my actions in a scenario in which an entity had severely harmed or destroyed those who I love), we still must assume that a righteous incredibly advanced superior life form who is beneficent would be as above that as, say, I would be above denying run-time to a two-year old who'd kicked sand in a playmate's eyes. In other words, retribution makes sense morally only if you cannot help but have a personal stake in what has happened. > As others have said, that doesn't mean we shouldn't > take practical measures to promote and protect our > human and transhuman values. We can all, *all of us*, > still become truly great people with more kindness and > nobility and virtue than anything this world has ever > seen. If we make that choice when the choice becomes > available. > Best Wishes, > Jeffrey Herrlich Very well said! It's something we can all strive for, yet without sacrificing rationality at all, or taking unrealistic views of situations. Best wishes always to you too, Jeffrey. Thanks, Lee From brent.allsop at comcast.net Tue Apr 24 03:06:22 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:06:22 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423074816.04616e08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070423074816.04616e08@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <462D742E.7060407@comcast.net> Keith Henson posted: > 62% secular, atheist > 24% religious (long list of types) > 14% other/don't know. Fascinating! Obviously higher percentage atheist than in the general population. But I think we can and should know much more than just these types of crude numbers to way to general of a topic. Anna, I really appreciated your comments! I?m a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. (http://transfigurism.org) All of them (except for me) definitely believe in God. (I just believe in their great culture, and that humans can become God. And there was some trepidation about letting me, a devout Atheist in. ;) I wanted to use the word ?Extropy? more in the organization and such but I discovered that they don?t like that term, primarily because they think all ?Extropians? are atheists. They much prefer Transhumanist which they all definitely are ? as much as they are Mormon. As far as knowing much more quantitatively, precisely who believes what and why, that is precisely the goal of the Canonizer (http://test.canonizer.com) As you can see, there is a structured wikipedia type topic there about God. (About the only real topic so far.) Most MTA members are in this camp: Agreement / Theist / Monotheism / Christian / LDS / Transhuminist But I am in this camp: Agreement / Traditional / Extropian And to me the most important part of this ?camp? about God is that if there is already a powerful God, while there is such evil as isolation and death? Then were are screwed, and even if we become as powerful as him, we will be as impotent as him at eliminating such evils. I would be interested to know if there is any objection here to my usage of the term ?Extropian? as a name for this belief about God. And about the general usage of the term extropy to refer to an Atheist Transhumanist. I would like to see this "Canonized" What do you all think? And of course, I would like to know precisely what camp all of you, all transhumanists, and everyone else is in also. Wouldn?t it be great if you knew precisely who believed what, why and all that? And wouldn?t it be fun to see when people converted from one camp to another, and to find out why and everything? I bet we?d find some real surprises! And once all your POV is adequately documented, when the topic comes up again on the list, instead of going through the same old same old again, you could finally just refer the commenter to your camp?s statement page on this (or any other) topic right?! Currently I have this structured Wiki functionality completed in the Canonizer so people can now add their POV. I almost have the functionality required to ?support? or vote on a camp. I would sure love it if all of you would visit there, and each of you basically ?cast your vote? on what you believe about God. If your POV isn?t contained or adequately described in that structure, wouldn?t it be great if someone entered a new camp in the proper location to justly represent that POV? (And remember, it is still just a crude prototype work in progress, any and all feedback, and even more ? any and all help, would be greatly appreciated and compensated [see the what is the Canonizer link on the side bar.].) Just how diverse are all of your beliefs??? Wouldn?t it be great to know this precisely and quantitatively??? Brent Allsop From brent.allsop at comcast.net Tue Apr 24 03:12:53 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:12:53 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> No! It is the opposite of wishful thinking isn't it? This is just what the theist want you to say, in their completely twisted and lying way. Never give them this! If there is truly already a God that is so impotent against overcoming evil, and just hides from it all, then we must be condemned to the same eternal impotent damnable full of evil and isolation hell even if we become as powerful! I hope to soon be much more than such an impotent God in hell is is the God described in the Bible. Atheists are the ones with truly "wishful thinking" and true faith and hope aren't they!? We believe evil isn't all that hard to overcome, and we are the only ones that can hope that we will soon have the power to completely overcome much of it right? It also just so happens that our beliefs are much more than "wishful thinking" and futile faith or hope right? Damien Broderick wrote: > At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > >> So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we >> are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive >> process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how >> exponential growth evolves our understanding? >> > > Wishful thinking? Category mistake? > > Damien Broderick > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 03:40:26 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:40:26 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <039701c78501$3a2e68d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, A B wrote: But the question arises: Is *he*, evil Adolf, actually > entirely responsible for this situation. Because in > this case it was the future human who chose to give > him life, as evil as he is. Similarly, none among us > humans, even the evil ones, had the choice to come > into existence. No-one first asked me whether or not > I'd like to awaken within this particular Universe. > And no-one asked any of us. Just as we might put the > blame on the above-mentioned future human for the > existence of evil Adolf; we might be just as justified > in placing the blame on this (currently) unintelligent > Universe for having created any evil person to begin > with. What I'm trying to get at is that perhaps we > should place blame precisely where it is justified... > nowhere. In my opinion, we shouldn't punish solely for > the sake of punishing. > > As others have said, that doesn't mean we shouldn't > take practical measures to promote and protect our > human and transhuman values... Neither people nor inanimate objects have any real freedom, in the final analysis, since every object in the universe including Adolf Hitler is bound to follow the laws of physics. However, punishing inanimate objects for doing things we don't like is unlikely to make any difference, whereas punishing people, or the threat of punishment, might. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Tue Apr 24 04:00:56 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462D742E.7060407@comcast.net> Message-ID: <649883.2323.qm@web37210.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Brent Allsop wrote: > Anna, I really appreciated your comments! Thank you. >I?m a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. >(http://transfigurism.org) All of them (except for >me) definitely believe in God. (I just believe in >their great culture, and that humans can become God. >And there was some trepidation about letting me, a >devout Atheist in. ;) Well good for you! I don't promote any religious Transhumanist Association within the Mormon Religion but i'm happy to see that someone within the Mormon field feels a connection to the Transhumanist Association. >I wanted to use the word ?Extropy? more in the >organization and such but I discovered that they >don?t like that term, primarily because they >think all ?Extropians? are atheists. They much prefer >Transhumanist which they all definitely are ? as much >as they are Mormon. I think you need to look up the word "Extropy" to figure out what it means, I'm sure Samantha can give you the information:) >No! It is the opposite of wishful thinking isn't >it? This is just what the theist want you to say, in >their completely twisted and lying way. Never give >them this! If there is truly already a God that is >so impotent against overcoming evil, and just hides >from it all, then we must be condemned to the same >eternal impotent damnable full of evil and isolation >hell even if we become as powerful! I hope to soon >be much more than such an impotent God in hell is is >the God described in the Bible. Atheists are the ones >with truly "wishful thinking" and true faith and >hope aren't they!? We believe evil isn't all that >hard to overcome, and we are the only ones that can >hope that we will soon have the power to completely >overcome much of it right? It also just so happens >that our beliefs are much more than "wishful >thinking" and futile faith or hope right? See! Funny in the head! I don't understand it! Anna Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 04:56:36 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:56:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Anna writes > Robert wrote: >>The goal before transhumanists is to displace "belief >>in fantasy" with "belief in science". > > I agree but simply saying Religion and the existence > of God is bullshit will not convince people of faith. Well, Robert's motive is to speak the truth frankly, and exactly as he sees it. Of course that is to be not only welcomed but embraced. Within the limits of *civility*, of course, (see below). > The main point of my post was to imply that I don't > believe in judgement and that I *respect* other people's > choice of belief. I'm not sure that I would go THAT far :-) (italics added) but other people certainly do deserve to be treated with respect as fellow human beings engaged in polite discourse. That's why >> I'm curious, are there any other great lies you >> think should never be challenged, any other >> great evil? That statement is quite simply >> ridiculous.... I'm just making what I believe >> is an objective statement when I say >> religious ideas are asinine. No one enjoys that writer's posts as much as I do, I'm sure, but still! Here we have the intriguing conjecture that certain ideas are objectively asinine! Surely very few objective statements are so loaded with insult and emotion. Listen, I think that it's perfectly all right for black people to tell jokes about white people, and vice-versa, but only so long as none of the "targets" are within listening range. Insults, derogatory remarks, and even jokes put people into uncomfortable positions, where often they even have to decide whether to be confrontational about the slights received. Sensible and courteous folks simply DO NOT say such things in mixed audiences. For all the derogatory remarks I've made about either religious or political views, I must apologize to my targets insofar as they feel that they have been placed in such an uncomfortable position. Knowing now that some religious people are interested in transhumanist ideas and are even here participating in these discussions requires that I---and everybody else---adhere to decorum, and find ways of saying what is true without being insulting about it. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 04:59:20 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:59:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg References: <4647.31087.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <048301c7862d$95139f90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Hi John, I've tried contacting you off-list several times. Could you at least reply to me as to whether you got my messages? Thanks, Lee lcorbin at rawbw.com From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Apr 24 05:07:10 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:07:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> Anna Taylor wrote: > I apologize if the post is too long. I have a > distinct feeling the thread will not last too long > before meta arrives:) Here are my main points: > > Robert wrote: > >> The goal before transhumanists is to displace "belief >> in fantasy" with "belief in science". It is a simple >> transformation of "We can never go to the moon." >to >> > "We have walked on the moon.". > > I agree but simply saying Religion and the existence > of God is bullshit will not convince people of faith. > The main point of my post was to imply that I don't > believe in judgement and that I respect other people's > choice of belief. > Is it our job to convince them? I don't think it is. Are they more likely to find the truth if we do not state the truth we have found without beating clearly and strongly? I don't think so. > >> However when presenting it to others one must >> recognize that one is presenting "facts not in >> evidence" and that "followers" are acting on faith in >> ones interpretation. >> > > I understand religion very well. I have read theology > as much as I have read philosophy. I am in no way > promoting religion but merely the fact that everybody > has a right to there beliefs. If on this list you can > say that "God doesn't exist" then a religious person > has the exact same right to dispute it. You need proof > but the next right beside you doesn't! They just > believe. I don't see the point in debating who's > right or wrong. > Actually everyone has a right to believe whatever they wish but they have no right whatsoever to respect or kind treatment for believing pernicious nonsense. The nonsense itself has no "rights" at all. There is no "debate" implied or required here. > John Clark wrote: > >> Not in ANY way? I'm curious, are there any other >> great lies you think should never be challenged, any >> other great evil? That statement is quite simply >> ridicules. >> > > I don't believe Religion is evil, I believe that the > humans that run Religious orders can/may/will be evil. > I have had many bouts of spirituality/religiosity in my life. While there were many positives at some of these times overall I would that I had not become entangled in it so. A great number of years were, as I see it now, wasted and my own understanding and integration in life without myths took a great deal longer. I thought for some time that the power of religion in human beings could be used for the good, for transhumanist ends. But the more I thought on those lines the more certain I became that religion itself is very strongly in the way of such ends. > I find that statement rather humorous. My mother is a > dioceses in a Protestant church, we spend much of our > time debating the none religious versus the religious, > I being the none religious. I would gladly challenge > many of the stories that religion tells. Just the > other day we had a debate about cryonics. My clever > story was that "if Jesus was considered human, and he > was resurected, why would God object to all humans > being resurected?" My point was not about whether God > and Religion is right or wrong but about the respect > for other peoples beliefs. > > What, by debating how many angels can dance on a nanobot? How does that help anyone? As a non-believer how does it help you or other non-believers to frame conversations in terms of belief? What business do you have speaking about God and what God might object to? You know you are talking nonsense yet you condescendingly talk religious baby talk to them to try to get your point across to those who believe. This is dishonest and perhaps cowardly. Are you ashamed to be an atheist? >> I am not stomping on anyone, I'm just making what I >> believe is an objective statement when I say >> religious ideas are asinine. >> > > I don't feel that you are making an objective > statement, I feel you are giving me your opinion. I > just don't agree with the opinion. > > You don't? Then why aren't you a believer? >> Well Ok, I suppose you could say I stomped on them >> metaphorically, but the trouble is all too often >> religious people stomp on people with ideas like mine >> LITERALLY. >> > > That's exactly my point. The tug of war seems futile > to me. I can't change my mother's mind about God, I > don't even try, though I try and change the way she > looks at Religion. > > You may do something worse than not try. You seem to sort of pretend to take her side. >> They are perfectly free to call me asinine in return >> if they wish. Well Ok, I suppose you could say I >> stomped on them metaphorically, but the trouble is >> all too often religious people stomp on people with >> ideas like mine LITERALLY. >> > > Does that mean that I have to choose who is right or > wrong to be on this list? > > Who said that? Where does that sort of question come from? > Stathis: > It's one thing for scientists to simply regard > religion as irrelevant to their work, but when they > start to talk about transcending biology and living > forever, that might sound to a believer like a rerun > of Satan's rebellion against God. > > If God exists and is as the majority of Christians believe then I would most certainly be on the "other side". Such a Being would be monstrously evil. > Jeff Albright wrote: > >> We discuss here a wide range of thinking and beliefs >> > (and thinking and beliefs about thinking and beliefs) > but for most of us Theism had been exposed as highly > irrational (making highly improbable claims > unsupported by observation) long before we found this > list. > > I agree. I'm not saying that religion is rational, I > am saying that it exists and that I respect people > beliefs. I don't see what's wrong with that? > > Do you see what is wrong with telling many of us here that we must "respect their beliefs" in a similar fashion to what you choose to do or we aren't reasonable people? Thank you for your opinion but it is certainly not binding on me. > Keith wrote: > We might be as little as 5 years or perhaps even less > from understanding where, why and how such feelings > arise. There is a *lot* of money being spend on autism > and I suspect from what Tooby and Boyer said last week > that the path to understanding autism will also give > us an answer to why humans have religions at all. > > I have no problem with religion, I have a problem with > the mentality that's running it. If this study can > examine why people need religion then I am all for it > and interested. > > Then I do not believe you are through learning about religion. If you knew it better you would have a problem with it. > Eliezer: > You're feeling frustrated because you're on the wrong > mailing list. There are dozens of forums in the world > that will not create this feeling of utter frustration > in you. Find one. > > This list doesn't cause me frustration in the least. > I find the posts fascinating, pleasant, educational, > respectful and all together a progress to my growth. I > have tried to find other lists that have captivated my > attention but none have compared. > This thread caused an utter frustration. What for? What is it about a group of people who are more shut of religion saying what they think of it that bothers you so much? You grant religious folks room to believe and practice all manner of zany and even dangerous things and respect them doing so and don't go out your way to challenge them. Yet a few things set by atheists here and you feel utter frustration and get upset? Why? I think you may need to examine what is going on in you more deeply. - samantha From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 05:35:52 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:35:52 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: Anna Taylor wrote: > This list doesn't cause me frustration in the least. > > I find the posts fascinating, pleasant, educational, > > respectful and all together a progress to my growth. I > > have tried to find other lists that have captivated my > > attention but none have compared. > > This thread caused an utter frustration. What for? What is it about a group of people who are more shut of > religion saying what they think of it that bothers you so much? You > grant religious folks room to believe and practice all manner of zany > and even dangerous things and respect them doing so and don't go out > your way to challenge them. Yet a few things set by atheists here and > you feel utter frustration and get upset? Why? I think you may need to > examine what is going on in you more deeply. Why such acrimony? Why can't discussions about religion be just like dicussions about any other matter, where dissenting parties present their respective reasoning, and end up with either one party convincing the other or else an elucidation of where the impasse lies. That's the ideal, at any rate. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Tue Apr 24 05:38:52 2007 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:38:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001801c78632$d8486b60$6501a8c0@brainiac> From: "Lee Corbin" To: "ExI chat list" > Listen, I think that it's perfectly all right for black people to tell > jokes about white people, and vice-versa, but only so long as none of the > "targets" are within listening range. Insults, derogatory remarks, and > even jokes put people into uncomfortable positions, where often they even > have to decide whether to be confrontational about the slights received. > Sensible and courteous folks simply DO NOT say such things in mixed audiences. Mixed audiences? What precisely is a mixed audience (or not)? (And, I say ... HOW would you know whether you were in a "mixed" audience or not?) > For all the derogatory remarks I've made about either religious or political views, I must apologize to my targets insofar as they feel that they have been placed in such an uncomfortable position. Knowing now that some religious people are interested in transhumanist ideas and are even here participating in these discussions requires that I---and everybody else---adhere to decorum, and find ways of saying what is true without being insulting about it. There's respecting someone's opinions ... and there's respecting a person's right to those opinions. I personally have no compunction in telling someone (i.e., someone into superstition) that I don't have respect for their opinions - only their right to those views. Olga From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 06:18:15 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:18:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424010230.02340d10@satx.rr.com> At 09:56 PM 4/23/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: [John K Clark:] > >> I'm curious, are there any other great lies you > >> think should never be challenged, any other > >> great evil? That statement is quite simply > >> ridiculous.... I'm just making what I believe > >> is an objective statement when I say > >> religious ideas are asinine. > >No one enjoys that writer's posts as much as I do, I'm >sure, but still! Here we have the intriguing conjecture >that certain ideas are objectively asinine! Surely very >few objective statements are so loaded with insult and >emotion. If not asinine (stupid), what about somewhere between puerile and anile? But are there not a great many ideas, Lee, that most on this list would agree are stupid *on their face* given what is now knowable by an intelligent adult? A child might indeed believe in the Tooth Fairy; this is a puerile act of trusting acceptance. For an adult, it would be evidence of either stupidity, extraordinary gullibility, or mental disorder. An adult today who insists that the earth is flat and that no humans have stood on the moon is stupid, not just badly informed, or perhaps being deliberately perverse and unworthy of our attention. The fact that many great thinkers of high intelligence in the childhood of our culture accepted the idea of a god is really of no more than historic interest; most such thinkers before the Greek experimentalists probably believed the sun moves around the flat earth. Anyone making such a claim today is objectively asinine. It is rude and offensive to racists, anti-evolutionists and neo-Nazis to call them fools and shitheads, but that is what they are. If we conclude that the teaching of lies about a "god" is comparably pernicious (and in some quarters that would be an easy case to make at the moment), I'm with John. Name them for what they are, and hope that the sting of rejection from a prestigious corner of the community (the scientifically informed corner) shames them into thinking a bit about their favorite nonsense. But that is a hard thing to say, and perhaps shows a want of sympathy (as Adam Smith put it). Damien Broderick From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 24 06:41:05 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:41:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg References: <4647.31087.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048301c7862d$95139f90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <008301c7863b$92974c90$2d064e0c@MyComputer> Hi Lee I did not receive your messages. John K Clark ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Corbin" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 12:59 AM Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg > Hi John, > > I've tried contacting you off-list several times. Could you at least > reply to me as to whether you got my messages? > > Thanks, > Lee lcorbin at rawbw.com > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 07:11:51 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 02:11:51 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg In-Reply-To: <008301c7863b$92974c90$2d064e0c@MyComputer> References: <4647.31087.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048301c7862d$95139f90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <008301c7863b$92974c90$2d064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424021018.022dd268@satx.rr.com> At 02:41 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, you wrote: >Hi Lee > >I did not receive your messages. > >John K Clark Probably because you're not John Grigg... ...OR ARE YOU???? (This might become the foundation stone of a whole new eerie chapter in Mormon mythology!) From sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no Tue Apr 24 07:20:46 2007 From: sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:20:46 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? In-Reply-To: References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624B8C6@webmail.sensetech.no> What you are describing is the by-effect of criminalizing drugs. You saw the same thing in New York back in the days when regular spirit/booze was illegal and how the mafia built up around the illegal import and distribution. Today, they use drugs to finance their operations. The same thing happens today with drugs as booze before it. Reasonable, stable, adult people should be in control of their own life. If they want to use drugs, they should be allowed to do so on their own acting. Just as the sex industry, which was one of the first jobs in modern human society, the drug (use) abuse might never disappear. If you illegalize the sex industry, which is a move that the government in Norway is close to do (they have done it in Sweden recently), people won't stop having (buying) sex. Instead, things will be more hidden and secret, and the girls will have worsened situations and more abuse. When I was in Barcelona last year, the image I was left with from that trip is: pimps, hookers, drug addicts and thieves. I don't want any of those in my streets or my neighborhood. When it's illegal, it will stay on the streets. Make it legal and it's easier to control it and keep things civilized. We'll even get taxes, which can be used to help victims of addictions (drugs, sex, computers..) It's not a fairly land and things are different between countries. Germany has a more relaxed view on prostitution (is it legal by law?), and they have little (compared to others) problems with that industry. Violence on the other hand, is heavily censored in Germany. +Sex, -Violence The USA on the other hand, have no problem showing the most gruesome violence on TV, but if there is a nipple or a tit on TV...oh boy! -Sex, +Violence Norway is similar to the US but more liberal, we don't censor as much as the US and Germany, but you won't see anything other than softporn on the TV. Harcore porno is completely censored, even though they air it on Scandinavian networks (it's viewable in Denmark/Sweden). -Sex, +Violence Netherlands, primarily Amsterdam, have a very liberal view on the soft-drugs and they tolerate marihuana in certain coffee shops and prostitutes are on display in the Redlight District. +Drugs, +Sex I don't want my children to be introduced to either drugs or sex in the way our societies works today. It's dangerous and people get killed. If my kids truly wants to try drugs, I'll allow them when I think they are old enough to take that decision on their own. But as I said, the way things are when it's illegal, is dangerous. (If you think marihuana should continue to be illegal, then we should illegalize alcohol straight away as it kills many more people every year. And smoking should be illegal of course. And coffee should be illegal, do we need to illegalize tee that contains caffeine? Sugar (The White Satan) and McDonalds should in any case be illegal) Restrictions of any kind that diminishes the freedom of the individual is negative and should be avoided. /Sondre From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou Sent: 22. april 2007 05:43 To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? On 4/21/07, BillK wrote: The whole thrust of this thread is that we are not talking about some theoretical fairyland where drug dealers might be thought of as misunderstood, victimised entrepreneurs. (I'd like to live there as well, sounds really cool). In the real world, drug dealers are amoral armed gangs who kill people to defend their territory and their business of destroying the lives of their 'customers', who in turn are engaged in constant minor criminal activities to finance their addiction. Let me know how you feel about this after the ruthless drug gangs move in to your street, near your family, and you get burgled or mugged once a month by druggies. That's all because it's illegal. You don't have fruit sellers shooting each other and fruit buyers ending up homeless or mugging people so that they can get their fix. Stathis Papaioannou ********************************************************************** This e-mail has been scanned for viruses and found clean. ********************************************************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 07:02:24 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:02:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <14290511.86311177368381390.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> (In response to PJ): > Anne, did you actually read my essay? Yes, but I wasn't really responding to your essay per se, but rather the content of your last email post. And I was responding very abruptly which is *really* a no-no for me, or at least it ought to be! > While claiming "the jury is > still out" and wishing to disregard it, you have instead defended many of > my points with your own life experience and theories. Curious... Curiouser and curioser. And I don't necessarily dispute the science you've read, just some of the picky points with regard to what some of it might imply -- which I'll need to get into once I have a bit more time. > Also, all the neuroimaging and other research about this subject over > the last several years have done nothing but reinforce this idea of > mirror neurons, imitative behavior and empathy creation as a linked system > in primates. Like us. I'll have to get a clearer definition of what you mean by "empathy" before responding in more detail here, I think. More clarification on why appears later in this message. > If it isn't linked in autists, that alone is interesting, since > diminished imitative behavior and 'empathy' (as defined in the majority of > humans) is a part of autistic behavior and autist's mirror neuron system > does not fire (as seen on an fMRI). I don't dispute that autistics probably have different mirror-neuron functioning than nonautistics do, and I can attest to the fact that in my particular case, imitation is extremely difficult. When it comes to motor activities especially I need to figure out everything myself from the "ground up" based on feedback I get from the environment -- I can't look at someone throwing a ball, or dancing, or doing something along those lines and just be able to do it myself. However, this lack of imitative capacity doesn't seem to be related to what I think of as "empathy" or lack thereof. > The only thing I can think of is that maybe not all behaviors > considered 'autistic spectrum' manifest the same way or are created the same > way. This is probably true. > (I still think we'll find out that autism is like cancer or > diabetes, in that there are multiple triggers and causes for a similar > symptomatic outcome that has been given a single, all inclusive name.) I get your analogy, but just remember that unlike either cancer or diabetes, autism is not a disease. Just pointing out what might be a wee bit of biased language here -- after all, you don't often come across people saying, "Well, perhaps neurotypicality is like cancer or diabetes, in that there are multiple triggers and causes for a similar symptomatic outcome that has been given a single, all inclusive name." Hopefully my pointing this out isn't taken as egregious political correctness or anything along those lines -- I just feel quite strongly that the way we talk about things can influence how we think about them. > But no > one has done the Aspergers vs. Autism mirror neuron comparison yet. I'd be curious to see that, but I am guessing that there won't be much of a difference in those results. > So > if you self identify as an Aspie, you may be right, in the sense that > you don't have Autism, but a different situation. There's actually still quite a bit of controversy with regard to whether Asperger's and Autism are two distinct configurations with a few surface similarities, or whether they are essentially the same thing. L. Mottron, et. al., (Canadian autism researchers) are quoted as saying: "There are no available convincing data that autism with vs. without overt peaks of ability, with vs. without overt speech, or overall autism vs. Asperger syndrome, differs at a genetic level. Even language abilities cannot be used to distinguish autism from Asperger syndrome, as written language experts are as representative of autism as oral language experts are representative of Asperger's." Nevertheless, some researchers do actually believe that a distinct difference between the Autism and Asperger's profile may emerge with further research. If you do a Web search for terms like "Autism" "Asperger's" "Difference", you'll get a variety of articles suggesting different criteria by which the two conditions can be distinguished. There's a pop-science notion, for instance, that seems to suggest that the Asperger's profile is typified in part by fine motor skill deficits not commonly found in autism. There's another notion which suggests that Asperger's overlaps with nonverbal learning disability (which tends to result in people with good language ability but poor motor skills) moreso than autism does. And there's a common (though not necessarily accurate) perception that Asperger's is just another way of saying "autism with normal intelligence" or "high functioning autism". I don't know what the research will reveal eventually, but for now it's rather a confusing mess, which makes it very difficult to make definitive diagnostic or identification statements for the majority of people on the spectrum. I "identify" as Autistic because I consider that to be an all-encompassing term that can describe any member of what is presently a rather heterogeneous population. My official diagnosis is Asperger's, but I don't know how much that really means, especially considering I did have self-help delays and very idiosyncratic language as a child (including echolalia and pronoun reversal) which are more typical of Autism. I also exhibited what is referred to as the "visual-spatial peak" in testing; my highest subtest score on the Weschler intelligence scale both times I took it (at ages 4 and 20) was in Block Design, which is a common autistic pattern. So it's simplest to just consider myself and everyone else on the spectrum to be autistic at this point in time; though I am not attached to or emotionally invested in any particular bit of terminology and I fully expect that categories will probably be different, and possibly more refined, within the next 20 years or so. > And autism is actually a hot fiction topic. See "The Curious Incident > of the Dog in the Night-time," etc. I've read "Curious Incident" and while the autistic viewpoint character (as presented by a non-autistic author) does seem to (in some respects) think and act in ways I can relate to, the book itself reads like a very gimmicky textbook. It's almost like reading through a transcript of a video game ("Ooh, look, here's the Theory of Mind level!"); the book's overt references to pop-psychology theories of autism are a bit jarring and distracting. Another one I've read is "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon, which is a bit better than "Curious Incident" though still a bit irky in some spots. So yes, I guess autism is popping up in fiction here and there -- the question I have is: are most people empathizing with the autistic characters when they read these works of fiction? Or are they just seeing "autism" as a plot device or curiosity? (I'm genuinely curious and not being cynical). > You've got a chip on your shoulder and I completely understand why. It's not so much of a chip as an acknowledgement that society has a long way to go before it actually manages to acknowledge autistic citizens as full and valid persons. I'm sorry if I sounded overly defensive; that's what I get for writing such an off-the-cuff response to your initial message. I mainly reacted the way I did because it seemed like you were making gross generalizations -- I have always liked *some* fiction, and the autistic people I know (or know of) also generally read at least a little bit of fiction. Additionally, I grated at the comparison to narcissists -- narcissism is *nothing like* autism, and I suspect that the mechanisms that result in narcissism vs. the mechanisms that can result in autism are very, very different. Narcissism seems to be a disordered form of personality development mediated by the environment in which a person grows up, whereas autism is neurodevelopmental and affects sensory processing and cognition primarily (as opposed to personality). > But not all non-autists throw rocks and the world doesn't always ignore > autists or how they think. I know this, and I did not say that all non-autists throw rocks -- I was just offering a counter-example to the idea that non-autistics have some special, intrinsic ability to empathize with others (and now I realize that this may not have been what you were suggesting; that's what I get for reading too fast, I guess). I don't generalize about entire groups of people based on the actions of a few bullies, but I still think that the existence of bullying capacity in a neurotype supposedly distinguished by its empathic faculty is worth noting. > Please don't think that research into this > subject is demeaning or degrading to autists. Where would you get the idea that I thought research was degrading? I have no problem with research. I like science; I just think that autistics deserve better science, and I think that it would be wonderful if more autistics were invited to take part in the research side of things. Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently wrote on this very subject: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2147. I think that there's presently a lot of bias in autism research, which is problematic, but I also think there's plenty of potential to reform it. > It's all about trying to > figure out how the brain works and that means generalizing about the > majority of brains (but we've had this argument about generalization > before). I'm fine with trying to figure out how the brain works. Generalization confuses me sometimes but I understand that it's not going away. But I still think generalization algorithms and heuristics themselves ought to be up for constant and unrelenting peer review. :) > If someone could explain to me why I'm different, with a > dyslexic, male-centric, wacky brain that makes some pretty crazy connections at > times, I wouldn't take it personally. It would be illuminating. I felt very illuminated when I found out I was on the autistic spectrum. Knowing what that means with regard to what the biological hardware inside my head looks like would be fascinating. No argument with you here! > My > daughter's thoughts generate music in her head throughout the day. If > you met her, you'd hear her humming and singing it (although she's > learned not to do it while having conversations or in the classroom and she > knows she's unusual). She doesn't take it personally and would like to > know why, too. That's really cool. Does she experience synesthesia or anything like that as well? > Please don't take this the wrong way, because I have enormous respect > for you and your writing, but may I suggest less defensiveness and more > trying to see both sides of the same issue? I didn't mean to come across as so defensive, but I do tend to get a bit jumpy when it's not clear to me whether someone understands the difference between autism and sociopathy. When I think of someone who "lacks empathy", I tend to think in terms of a person who literally doesn't care about the feelings of others even when s/he knows those feelings exist. When I was growing up I got lectured on plenty of occasions about how I supposedly "didn't care about anyone else" or how I was "oblivious to other people's feelings", but the thing is, once I knew the feelings were there I DID feel very bad about hurting them. This is an oversimplification on my part, but in some respects autism and sociopathy almost seem to be dichotomous -- the autistic person might have difficulty picking up on nonautistic emotional cues, but will feel appropriate emotions once s/he does learn of someone else's emotional state, whereas a sociopath (or bully) has no trouble reading the cues -- s/he simply doesn't *care* how the other person feels. Hopefully that explanation makes sense. At any rate, I liked what you said in your essay about how reading books about different kinds of people can increase a person's empathic facility -- in some respects, reading novels is like a microcosmic version of travel, and I've stated myself on several occasions that if people want to improve their Theory of Mind, it is a good idea for them to purposely put themselves in contact with as many different cultures or cultural representatives as possible (through whatever means possible). > Maybe if we put our heads together, we could come up with > something illuminating. That actually sounds like a great idea...I would be very interested in such a project. - Anne "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no Tue Apr 24 07:39:56 2007 From: sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:39:56 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624B8CD@webmail.sensetech.no> >Listen, I think that it's perfectly all right for black people >to tell jokes about white people, and vice-versa, but >only so long as none of the "targets" are within listening >range. Insults, derogatory remarks, and even jokes put >people into uncomfortable positions, where often they >even have to decide whether to be confrontational about >the slights received. Sensible and courteous folks simply >DO NOT say such things in mixed audiences. > >For all the derogatory remarks I've made about either >religious or political views, I must apologize to my targets >insofar as they feel that they have been placed in such an >uncomfortable position. Knowing now that some religious >people are interested in transhumanist ideas and are even >here participating in these discussions requires that I---and >everybody else---adhere to decorum, and find ways of >saying what is true without being insulting about it. > >Lee It is not perfectly all right to tell racist jokes to any type of audience. It is not all right to talk trash about females in any situation. Equal rights and opportunities for everyone, and we should all value the individuals based on their acts and performances. If you continue to talk down on females or anyone other generalized group of individuals, you are only making the situation worse. Religious and political views are personal and chosen opinions (most people don't choose it for themselves, their parents did) and anyone should be open for discrimination, insults and being laughed at for these views. I love being an atheist and I enjoy every single moment of this life. /Sondre ********************************************************************** This e-mail has been scanned for viruses and found clean. ********************************************************************** From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 24 04:40:48 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:40:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:51 PM 4/23/2007 -0400, Anna wrote: (In reply to my post) >I have no problem with religion, I have a problem with >the mentality that's running it. If this study can >examine why people need religion then I am all for it >and interested. This may only be ambiguous only to me, but do you mean mentality like the pope or Pat Robertson or do you mean it generically as humans? In either case, what we call "religion" is a species wide behavioral trait. The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs was shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as religions today is the result of these mechanisms. Now there are two major choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for something else and happen to be used by religions, or they were directly evolved for something like religion. In either case, because they are so widespread, there must have been a considerable selection advantage for these mechanisms. Could modern religions be taking advantage of brain mechanisms evolved for other reasons? It's possible. It is clear that the mechanisms behind drug addiction were selected for something besides getting blitzed on plant sap. I think I understand the brain reward mechanisms that gives rise to modern drug addiction and even what their function was and still is. I have argued that religious memes may be seed xenophobic memes that function to get a tribe moving on the path to killing neighbors when the choice was to kill and take a neighbor's resources or your kids will starve. Religions *do* tend to play a large part in wars. But how this fits in to the observations of Tooby and Boyer is a still mystery to me. Keith From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 24 07:52:29 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:52:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" Wrote: > Here we have the intriguing conjecture > that certain ideas are objectively asinine! I'm flattered you think my idea is intriguing but I almost didn't post it because I thought it was rather obvious, mundane, a clich?; but then I thought clich?'s do have one virtue, most of them are true. > Sensible and courteous folks simply > DO NOT say such things in mixed audiences Courtesy be damned! I believe one of the greatest evils of the modern world is that intelligent people feel they must say nice things about religion even though they know it's BULLSHIT. Logical people have been making nice to religious idiots for years; the end result is that devout believers crash civilian airliners into skyscrapers. Courtesy be damned! > some religious people are interested in transhumanist ideas If religious people are interested in transhumanist ideas then that's fine, it's just that I'm not interested in them. That may or may not be good public relations, I don't know, it's not my forte. > find ways of saying what is true without being insulting about it. God created the universe 4000 years ago and then tortured himself to death so he could forgive us for our sins. How can you treat such moronic babbling without being insulting? And why would you even want to? Insults have their place in the world of ideas. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 10:10:26 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:10:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg References: <4647.31087.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048301c7862d$95139f90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><008301c7863b$92974c90$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424021018.022dd268@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <04a001c78658$feb29930$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> > At 02:41 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, you wrote: >>Hi Lee >> >>I did not receive your messages. >> >>John K Clark > > Probably because you're not John Grigg... > > ...OR ARE YOU???? Especially if John Clark is also Brent Allsop, our official Mormon atheist. > (This might become the foundation stone of a whole new eerie chapter > in Mormon mythology!) Whyever not? We can combine our Johns with the traditional Joseph, and come up with a class of identical John Smiths, and we'd have not only food for identity speculation, but vast potential for a new money-maker. lee From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 10:15:33 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:15:33 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + ??? In-Reply-To: <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624B8C6@webmail.sensetech.no> References: <00b401c7840f$32a812c0$74893cd1@pavilion> <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624B8C6@webmail.sensetech.no> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Sondre Bjell?s wrote: > > What you are describing is the by-effect of criminalizing drugs. You saw > the same thing in New York back in the days when regular spirit/booze was > illegal and how the mafia built up around the illegal import and > distribution. Today, they use drugs to finance their operations. > > > > The same thing happens today with drugs as booze before it. Reasonable, > stable, adult people should be in control of their own life. If they want to > use drugs, they should be allowed to do so on their own acting. > > > > Just as the sex industry, which was one of the first jobs in modern human > society, the drug (use) abuse might never disappear. If you illegalize the > sex industry, which is a move that the government in Norway is close to do > (they have done it in Sweden recently), people won't stop having (buying) > sex. Instead, things will be more hidden and secret, and the girls will have > worsened situations and more abuse. > > > > When I was in Barcelona last year, the image I was left with from that > trip is: pimps, hookers, drug addicts and thieves. I don't want any of those > in my streets or my neighborhood. When it's illegal, it will stay on the > streets. > > > > Make it legal and it's easier to control it and keep things civilized. > We'll even get taxes, which can be used to help victims of addictions > (drugs, sex, computers..) > > > > It's not a fairly land and things are different between countries. > > > > *Germany* has a more relaxed view on prostitution (is it legal by law?), > and they have little (compared to others) problems with that industry. > Violence on the other hand, is heavily censored in Germany. +Sex, -Violence > > > > The *USA* on the other hand, have no problem showing the most gruesome > violence on TV, but if there is a nipple or a tit on TV?oh boy! -Sex, > +Violence > > > > *Norway* is similar to the US but more liberal, we don't censor as much as > the US and Germany, but you won't see anything other than softporn on the > TV. Harcore porno is completely censored, even though they air it on > Scandinavian networks (it's viewable in Denmark/Sweden). -Sex, +Violence > > > > *Netherlands*, primarily Amsterdam, have a very liberal view on the > soft-drugs and they tolerate marihuana in certain coffee shops and > prostitutes are on display in the Redlight District. +Drugs, +Sex > It's a shame if traditionally tolerant, liberal Scandinavian countries are becoming less tolerant and more socially conservative. What is the reason for these changes? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 10:25:19 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:25:19 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424010230.02340d10@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <04a701c7865b$1a8072c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > [Lee wrote] >> Here we have the intriguing conjecture that certain ideas are >> objectively asinine! Surely very few objective statements are >> so loaded with insult and emotion (as was John's). > > If not asinine (stupid), what about somewhere between puerile and > anile? But are there not a great many ideas, Lee, that most on this > list would agree are stupid *on their face* given what is now > knowable by an intelligent adult? A child might indeed believe in the > Tooth Fairy; this is a puerile act of trusting acceptance. Of course. The whole point is how you phrase your, er, criticisms to those who hold beliefs that differ from yours. You may say to *me* that certain beliefs are incredibly naive, or what have you, but what good can come of possibly making such an assertion to the *holder* of that belief? There is no real content to simply announcing that a certain belief held by your interlocutor is puerile or stupid. It's not only rude; it's thoughtless, and *needlessly* inflamatory. > For an adult, it would be evidence of either stupidity, extraordinary > gullibility, or mental disorder. An adult today who insists that the > earth is flat and that no humans have stood on the moon is stupid, > not just badly informed, or perhaps being deliberately perverse and > unworthy of our attention. I agree! But if I knew that some people here on this list were vociferously proclaiming that the NASA moon-landing was a hoax, I would not choose to describe their beliefs as "stupid". Again, what good can possibly come of it? It degenerates to mere name-calling (although for you or me to express to each other such a description of that belief does save many words). > It is rude and offensive to racists, anti-evolutionists and neo-Nazis > to call them fools and shitheads, but that is what they are. You and John Clark do need to consult the literature on the studies that have been done that establish the precise criteria for being a shithead. (While you are at it, please do --- and here I am rather serious --- find out what qualifies one to be an asshole. There have been a number of occasions back a few years where I became almost convinced that the quality of being an asshole could be objectively defined.) > Name them for what they are, and hope that the sting of rejection > from a prestigious corner of the community (the scientifically > informed corner) shames them into thinking a bit about their favorite > nonsense. And they'll predictably retaliate in equally insulting terms, which achieves nothing except to lower the level of discourse. People are seldom *shamed* into changing their views; you may indeed succeed in certain places into shaming them into silence, but that's hardly what I want to do either. > But that is a hard thing to say, and perhaps shows a want of sympathy > (as Adam Smith put it). He turned out to be right about almost everything else. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 10:34:51 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:34:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark writes > "Lee Corbin" Wrote: > >> Here we have the intriguing conjecture >> that certain ideas are objectively asinine! > > I almost didn't post it because I thought it was rather obvious, mundane, > a clich?; but then I thought clich?'s do have one virtue, most of them are true. > >> Sensible and courteous folks simply >> DO NOT say such things in mixed audiences > > Courtesy be damned! You cannot see the consequences of such a policy? Here it takes our civillization hundreds of years to rise above barbarism and also above vicious recrimination, and also---in my opinion---lack of civility and politeness. Reminds me of the short-sighted embracing of Crocker's Rules some people advocate. Recall that courtesy and civility evolved for a REASON, as your intuitions about evolutionary psychology could have informed you. > I believe one of the greatest evils of the modern world > is that intelligent people feel they must say nice things about religion > even though they know it's BULLSHIT. Logical people have been making nice to > religious idiots for years; the end result is that devout believers crash > civilian airliners into skyscrapers. Now that I happen to agree with. Sam Harris's books, for example, take religions to task in both a very insightful as well as very uncompromising way. I even totally agree that science and religion are irreconcileably opposed. But that's not the same thing as simply making empty, insulting statements about them (although just between us atheists, the empty and insulting statements do provide some emotional gratification as well as mirth from time to time). > Courtesy be damned! Discourtesy be damned! :-) >> find ways of saying what is true without being insulting about it. > > God created the universe 4000 years ago and then tortured himself to death > so he could forgive us for our sins. How can you treat such moronic babbling > without being insulting? And why would you even want to? Insults have their > place in the world of ideas. Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, reflecting complete ignorance of psychology. Moreover, they're insipid and ultimately meaningless, being nothing more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Apr 24 11:31:28 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 04:31:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001801c78632$d8486b60$6501a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <04b001c78664$36d99830$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Olga writes (hi Olga!) > From: "Lee Corbin" > >> Listen, I think that it's perfectly all right for black people to tell >> jokes about white people, and vice-versa, but only so long as none of the >> "targets" are within listening range. Insults, derogatory remarks, and >> even jokes put people into uncomfortable positions, where often they even >> have to decide whether to be confrontational about the slights received. >> Sensible and courteous folks simply DO NOT say such things in mixed > audiences. > > Mixed audiences? What precisely is a mixed audience (or not)? (And, I say > ... HOW would you know whether you were in a "mixed" audience or not?) Precisely, a "mixed-audience" is composed of two parts, either along doctrinal or ethnic or gender lines. I consider this audience to now be mixed because some people have had the temerity to actually endorse, or come close to endorsing, religious beliefs. You can never know for sure if there are crypto-fascists on, say, the Extropian lists, but then, certainty is impossible in general in life. It's *safe* to say that there are no fascists on this list. (And that *must* mean, of course, people who self-describe as that way; there is always the kind of name-calling going on, alas, in which many people here are wont to call others fascists or whatever.) > There's respecting someone's opinions ... and there's respecting a person's > right to those opinions. I personally have no compunction in telling > someone (i.e., someone into superstition) that I don't have respect for > their opinions - only their right to those views. It can become clear what you think of their views, and always does! None of us is going to tip-toe around issues to the degree that it's not clear where we stand. (At least I hope so.) The question is not whether one "respects the views of another". In most cases people who debate issues consider the other party to be dead wrong. As they should. What is at question here is the degree of courtesy with which such disagreement is expressed. Hmm... Let's take for granted that *here* no one is questioning that people have a "right to their views" (whatever that means). So that particular straw-horse / dead-man can be laid to rest. The question *is* whether or not insulting language is to be employed, e.g. characterizing the views of others as puerile, stupid, ignorant, etc. Again, use of such language is completely pointless, except as an emotional salve for those who already agree with you. Rah, rah, rah. Lee From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 11:29:54 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 04:29:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <04a701c7865b$1a8072c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <423041.45061.qm@web60523.mail.yahoo.com> This thread has caused me to ponder the philosophical question of whether there is any practical difference between deism and atheism. After all if one belives that God created life and then went on to other projects, thus abandoning us, then deism is a philosophy "without God" not all too different than the belief that God was never there in the first place. (And in God's defense, what artist wants to fuss with a single painting for all of eternity? At some point a painting, story, or whatever must be judged to be finished.) This is an especially interesting notion since as Stathis pointed out in a different thread, sooner or later science will probably manage to create living cells de novo based on some novel chemistry. Oddly enough, this will be a dilemma for many Bayesians looking at the posterior probability of "intelligent design" regarding the original progenote. After all, experiments conducted since the time of Louis Pasteur seem to indicate that the spontaneous generation of life does not happen. Such negative evidence for the "accidental" origin of life combined with the potential positive evidence of our own "intelligent design" of life may cause some Bayesians to draw conclusions they may not like. Either way, belief in God will probably not be very useful with regard to the future survival of humanity, but the questions raised do have some academic merit. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Apr 24 12:01:36 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:01:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: A B: > Imagine that a perfect brain scan exists of some truly > horrible, awful person, say Adolf Hitler. Imagine that > the scan was made one minute before Adolf died, and > that it is so detailed that a true Adolf would be > resurrected if the brain scan was ever implemented. > > The question I consider is: If some future human chose > to resurrect Adolf in this particular way, would it be > "right" or "just" to punish this Adolf with > imprisonment or execution. After all, from a > subjective point of view, he *IS* Adolf Hitler. He > *IS* a truly monstrous and evil person. And he > remembers doing all those horrible things he has done. A different perspective: First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only be destroyed or created. If this future entity decides to create new instance of life, it will have an infinite number of mind types to pick from for this new life. It would be awfully cruel if this future entity chose such a broken and evil type of mind as "Adolf Hitler" for this new instance of life just like it would be equally cruel to unnecessarily "install" mental illness into your child (if such a thing were possible). If this future entity instantiated Adolf Hitler type, the only reason why this new mind should be in jail would not be to punish this mind but to protect society from its negative influence. The true villain here is the monster who instantiated Adolf Hitler type in the first place. But there's an easy fix here. Just reprogram the new instance of type "Adolf Hitler" into some other mind type that's optimized for health and happiness. H. From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 13:04:06 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:04:06 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Heartland wrote: First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only be > destroyed > or created. Yes, but an arbitrarily close to perfect copy is indistinguishable from a resurrection, and indistinguishable from ordinary continuous life. For all you know, you might be dying all the time. You would have to argue that process X is a bad thing to happen to you, even though it is impossible to discern any effects, positive or negative, objective or subjective, from process X. If this future entity decides to create new instance of life, it will have > an > infinite number of mind types to pick from for this new life. It would be > awfully > cruel if this future entity chose such a broken and evil type of mind as > "Adolf > Hitler" for this new instance of life just like it would be equally cruel > to > unnecessarily "install" mental illness into your child (if such a thing > were > possible). > > If this future entity instantiated Adolf Hitler type, the only reason why > this new > mind should be in jail would not be to punish this mind but to protect > society from its negative influence. The true villain here is the monster > who > instantiated Adolf Hitler type in the first place. So if the real Hitler had decided at the end of the war to mend his ways, should he have been punished? What if he had fallen into a frozen lake and then after being revived decided to mend his ways? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 13:35:26 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:35:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> Message-ID: <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> On 4/23/07, Brent Allsop wrote: > No! It is the opposite of wishful thinking isn't it? This is just what > the theist want you to say, in their completely twisted and lying way. > > Atheists are the ones with truly "wishful thinking" and true faith and > completely overcome much of it right? It also just so happens that our > beliefs are much more than "wishful thinking" and futile faith or hope > right? > Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > >> So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we > >> are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive > >> process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how > >> exponential growth evolves our understanding? > > Wishful thinking? Category mistake? Wow, it is difficult to accept that any of us are communicating here. "wishful thinking" was use by Damien as a put down (as I took it) and Brent twisted the same words and took it as a label to support. How will it ever be possible to convey abstract meaning from sentences if we don't have a common understanding of the meaning of the simplest words. The quote from me (above) was asking about defining a term or qualifying a label. I was amazed to see that mathematical induction is not scientific enough for some of the knee-jerk atheists on this list. If you have an argument against the inductive hypothesis that there exists a state of being that exceeds our current understanding of humanity, then please deconstruct it and enlighten me. Know that I will also assume you would be suffering from the perceptual disorder that you believe yourself to be that transcendent being who can explain yourself from the pinnacle of human understanding. Earlier in this thread Damien claimed that "Buddhists are atheists." I can't disagree with that. I have to wonder though if that is also suggesting that Buddhists don't believe in transcendental ideas. You can take away the limited view of the ego-ist anthropic superpower named "God" - but the notion of "something more than this" is (imo) as fundamental and obvious as "there is no largest integer" But if this is suffering from a category mistake, then I don't want to be indoctrinated into accepting this wysiwyg existance is the most we can hope for. From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 13:46:20 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:46:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: > The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs was > shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as > religions today is the result of these mechanisms. Now there are two major > choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for something else and happen to be > used by religions, or they were directly evolved for something like > religion. In either case, because they are so widespread, there must have > been a considerable selection advantage for these mechanisms. Thank you. I hope others follow your example of objective examination of this topic. From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 13:56:48 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:56:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <14290511.86311177368381390.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704240656t52f209b4i1b11c33f689be7bb@mail.gmail.com> On 4/24/07, Anne Corwin wrote: > It's not so much of a chip as an acknowledgement that society has a long way > to go before it actually manages to acknowledge autistic citizens as full > and valid persons. I'm sorry if I sounded overly defensive; that's what I I have been reading this thread (without anything useful to add) so maybe I was just more alert to the issue... I saw on a car today one of those magentic ribbons with a slogan, "think autism, think cure" Was I right to feel offended on behalf of autists? If sales of that 'ribbon' are helping increase understanding of autism, I guess it's an overall good thing - but that slogan struck me as being the exact opposite of understanding. From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 24 14:51:12 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:51:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424101722.04616cc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:07 PM 4/23/2007 -0700, samantha wrote: >Anna Taylor wrote: snip > > I agree but simply saying Religion and the existence > > of God is bullshit will not convince people of faith. > > The main point of my post was to imply that I don't > > believe in judgement and that I respect other people's > > choice of belief. > > >Is it our job to convince them? I don't think it is. Are they more >likely to find the truth if we do not state the truth we have found >without beating clearly and strongly? I don't think so. I don't think so either. For reasons that are not clear *yet* religions are "ROM" like; once religious type memes have occupied a brain (what I called 20 years ago the religious meme receptor site) they are usually hard to dislodge. I admit it is retro for concerned-about-the-future transhumanists to push evolved-in-the-stone-age evolutionary psychology understanding of humans, particularly about why they have religions (or religions have them). But speaking as an engineer, if you want to improve something, you darn better know what it is before you start "improving" it. Right now I can't tell if the capacity for humans to have religions is a bug or a feature. Keith Henson From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 15:26:34 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:26:34 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <14290511.86311177368381390.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424102538.02224478@satx.rr.com> This is a fabulous long post, Anne--and the whole thread is altogether extremely interesting and illuminating. Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 24 15:47:47 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:47:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Resurrection and leaders. In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424105447.046ef9a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:01 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, Heartland wrote: snip >First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only be >destroyed >or created. It's not commonly called that, but in what respect does rebooting your computer in the morning after if being off over night differ from the description of "resurrection"? Re Hitler, I wouldn't run an instance of him, but some graduate student might. I think we may be giving him far too much credit (or blame). The same may be true of Stalin, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, and even the current US president. What evolutionary psychology is likely to do is to take a lot of importance away from leaders and put it on the situation. Getting into wars may be almost as mechanical (on a social level) as drawing back from a hot stove is for an individual. Ultimately an EP model fails to put blame anywhere. What we blame on Hitler most likely resulted from excess population growth and especially without cheap and effective birth control, who can you blame for that? This social level trait isn't objectively good or bad, it just is. But it is something you definitely want to understand if only to stay out of the way. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 16:12:56 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:12:56 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] mathematical induction In-Reply-To: <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com > References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424110422.022aaaa8@satx.rr.com> At 09:35 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: >I was amazed to see that mathematical induction >is not scientific enough What is the relevance of this "mathematical induction" of which you speak? Sure you're not getting it confused with "empirical induction," when actually (as far as I know) it's a form of deduction applicable only to a restricted formal mathematical realm? >If you have an argument against the inductive hypothesis that >there exists a state of being that exceeds our current understanding >of humanity, then please deconstruct it and enlighten me. "Inductive hypothesis"? Would that be like saying: "String theory uses 11 dimensions, so there must be 12, and if there are 12 there must be 13... there must be an infinite number of actual physical dimensions"? This looks like another category mistake to me. Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 16:31:44 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:31:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424101722.04616cc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424101722.04616cc0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > Right now I can't tell if the capacity for humans to have religions is a > bug or a feature. Its both. A feature allows one to accept a system and act productively within said system without having to go through the painstaking process of proving to oneself every last little detail of the system (science is built upon this). (God where am I going to find 3 lbs of plutonium to construct a critical mass so I can prove to myself that nuclear fission is indeed a real phenomena?) There are some cases where "belief" (and faith) are the most efficient paths. There are other cases where the willingness to believe (or trust authority) can be abused. Picking a non-religious example, one might consider the entire population (20+ million people) of North Korea. I doubt humanity would have spread if there was not a mechanism built into us for "trust the preacher". (You mean, what, you want me to climb into a little canoe and paddle out into the middle of the "Great Sea" (Pacific Ocean) in the faint hope that we will find an island to colonize, are completely *nuts*?!?) The interesting part of this discussion is that we do not know how many human beings followed the "chief"/"witch doctor"/etc. and whose descendants are not here to relate the adventure. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 16:46:19 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:46:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424102538.02224478@satx.rr.com> References: <14290511.86311177368381390.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <957426.69006.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424102538.02224478@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: Just a brief add, I note that on Feb. 25, I posted a note about the genetic aspects of autism and Asperger's. While I will not comment on the possible connection between these conditions and mirror neurons (as I have not studied it) I will note that out of the 5-10 genes in OMIM which have been linked with autism/Asperger's, some of them appear to be involved in aspects of neuron structure. So it seems reasonable to me to assume that individuals with these characters might be viewed as "running on significantly different hardware" and thus they are "different". Of course in a decade or so we will all be carrying little gene profile cards documenting our unique differences and so it will not be that novel. But for now it seems interesting as we learn about the variants in humanity that walk among us. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 17:02:39 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:02:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <62c14240704240656t52f209b4i1b11c33f689be7bb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <222886.10777.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Mike: I'm indeed offended by slogans like "Think Autism, Think Cure" -- but I don't necessarily fault the people who use them, at least not when those people aren't informed of non-mainstream views. Culture informs most people that autism is a bad disease we need to cure, and many people never even question that -- I think they should question it, but first they need to be exposed to something that encourages them to question it because they're not going to "get it" by default unless they're very unusual. My position on neurodiversity (and disability rights, for that matter) is based primarily on morphological and cognitive liberty (in addition to the notion of the necessity of informed, nonduressed consent). This isn't exactly a mainstream or widely-known view; in fact, some of what I feel are my best pro-neurodiversity arguments have been informed in part by hanging around transhumanists. :P The idea of not defaulting to a "let's cure it!" position on autism is as weird to a lot of people as the idea of radical life extension is (and I'm in the rather interesting position of not wanting to cure something a lot of people think should be cured, while wanting to cure something most people think is normal and okay! I honestly don't understand that, actually...shouldn't the thing that kills you be the thing we'd most want to cure?). But I digress. Anyway, I don't see much point in just "feeling offended" about anything...if someone has a "cure autism!" sticker on their car, that doesn't tell me much at all about them or the reason why they have the sticker. It could be that they're just trying to support the "Cause of the Week", it could be that they think the government is conspiring to "poison our children" through vaccines (a scary number of people actually think this -- talk about an existential risk!), it could be that they are angry that they didn't get a "normal" child, or it could be that they love their child and want to help them and figure that "cure" is the only possible option. But in any case, the only way to change people's minds on a large scale is to educate them -- if there's anything we do need a cure for (besides aging) it's ignorance. And I would also like to state for the record that I am not opposed to the existence of a "cure" (e.g., a way to make autistic people nonautistic) -- I think that people should be able to choose their configurations according to their own, nonduressed goals and aspirations. If someone wants to be neurotypical I wouldn't stand in their way, just as I wouldn't feel threatened if I knew someone who wanted gender reassignment surgery (e.g., FtM transpeople don't make me feel devalued as a woman). But a lot of this whole debate starts to go very interesting places when you start getting into the concept of what the self is, what identity is, and to what extent a person can change how their brain works whilst retaining what they think of as "the person" -- in other words, totally on-topic for extropy-chat. I'm concerned that if a "cure" existed right now it would not be applied under conditions of informed, nonduressed consent, and I am extremely concerned that autistics who don't mind being autistic would be forced to take this treatment on economic or social grounds. And I'm also concerned about the idea that some people would gladly "cure" their children even if the net effect of that "cure" would be that you had an entirely different person than you had before. Is that ethical? Is that the same thing as effectively killing someone and replacing them with another -- or is it different because the "person" still has access to the same memories? Are memories all that make a person? And if that's the case, is it okay to simply change those around you according to however you'd rather then be so long as you don't touch their memories? (I would say "no, it's definitely NOT okay", which is part of the problem I have with the notion of defaulting to a cure for autistic children -- as much as I know that parents need to make decisions on behalf of their child's best interest, I think that in cases where the stakes are as high as the possibility of destroying everything about an established person except their autobiographical memory, there's much in the way of discussion to be had). If autism is somehow inseparable from what a person thinks about, likes, dislikes, pays attention to, is motivated by, etc. -- then how is making someone nonautistic really any different from, say, downloading that person's memories into a robot configured like a more typical person and starting "from scratch" with regard to personality development? Just some things to think about. - Anne Mike Dougherty wrote: On 4/24/07, Anne Corwin wrote: > It's not so much of a chip as an acknowledgement that society has a long way > to go before it actually manages to acknowledge autistic citizens as full > and valid persons. I'm sorry if I sounded overly defensive; that's what I I have been reading this thread (without anything useful to add) so maybe I was just more alert to the issue... I saw on a car today one of those magentic ribbons with a slogan, "think autism, think cure" Was I right to feel offended on behalf of autists? If sales of that 'ribbon' are helping increase understanding of autism, I guess it's an overall good thing - but that slogan struck me as being the exact opposite of understanding. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Apr 24 17:06:46 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:06:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <462E3926.4070702@mac.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: > On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: > >> The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs was >> shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as >> religions today is the result of these mechanisms. Now there are two major >> choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for something else and happen to be >> used by religions, or they were directly evolved for something like >> religion. In either case, because they are so widespread, there must have >> been a considerable selection advantage for these mechanisms. >> > > The alternative is that religion or the thinking and psychological patterns that give rise to it are a by product of one or more evolutionary advantageous developments. If this is so and if religion in moderns is problematic then it may well take a pretty active conscious set of decisions and some energy to counteract this effect in oneself. Certain types of magical thinking, superstition, authoritarianism and so on may be roughly defaults in human beings. - samantha From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 17:15:33 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:15:33 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424114834.0222f0c8@satx.rr.com> At 03:34 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > > God created the universe 4000 years ago and then tortured himself to death > > so he could forgive us for our sins. How can you treat such > moronic babbling > > without being insulting? And why would you even want to? Insults > have their > > place in the world of ideas. > >Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, reflecting complete >ignorance of psychology. Moreover, they're insipid and ultimately >meaningless, being nothing more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. and added: >The question *is* whether or not insulting language is to be employed, e.g. characterizing the views of others as puerile, stupid, ignorant, etc. Again, use of such language is completely pointless, except as an emotional salve for those who already agree with you. ========= Hmm. Several different points come to mind. For a start, it's not an in-group *salve* so much as a *glue* and that's always handy when a few people hold strong contrarian opinions in the midst of a powerful social consensus. But is it true that psychology teaches us that ridicule is ineffective in changing opinions? When friends, enemies and random people on the street mock those wearing white after Labor Day--a completely arbitrary piece of nonsense--you'd better believe most people will swiftly come to heel, blushing and aghast at their faux pas. Perhaps few on this list would; perhaps most on this list would defiantly wear nothing but ice cream suits and white socks all year long just to stick it to the morons. Derision can stiffen one's idiosyncratic resolve. Not for most people, though, on the evidence. More importantly, ridiculing the ridiculous is a long established technique of considerable effectiveness. The word "satire" comes to mind. On the other hand, a lot of people don't seem to comprehend satire, and get anxious in its presence, complaining that it's "mean." On the third hand this slops over into jeering mindless mobs beating up an individual whose crime is being "different". That being so, it's a technique that has to be used sparingly. But look again at John Clark's summary of Xian beliefs (although I can't say I've ever heard of *anyone* who believes the world was created in 2000 BCE; everyone knows it was actually 4004 BCE). An immortal and transcendentally Cosmic God allowing himself to be tortured to death for our sins but then bouncing back is so utterly ludicrous--taken literally, rather than as a winter/spring metaphor or something--that it calls for a rich serving of ridicule. If not that, what? Must we henceforth remain sweetly demure in the face of *any* ridiculous assertion, lest we hurt someone's feelings or strengthen their resolve to beat the shit out of us? (Now there's a motive I can relate to, alas.) Damien Broderick From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Apr 24 17:22:17 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:22:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <462E3CC9.4020204@mac.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: > >> Damien Broderick wrote: >> >>> At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: >>> >>>> So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we >>>> are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive >>>> process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how >>>> exponential growth evolves our understanding? >>>> >>> Wishful thinking? Category mistake? >>> > > Wow, it is difficult to accept that any of us are communicating here. > "wishful thinking" was use by Damien as a put down (as I took it) and > Brent twisted the same words and took it as a label to support. How > will it ever be possible to convey abstract meaning from sentences if > we don't have a common understanding of the meaning of the simplest > words. > > I believe Damien was pointing out the fact that one can conceive there could be a higher order being than oneself and one always can conceive of such a being is not an argument for God as usually conceived or even for the actual existence of any such being. The line of reasoning is similar to an old argument for God as the highest order being far beyond human conception. > The quote from me (above) was asking about defining a term or > qualifying a label. Which term, God? God is already defined on rather non-defined by the believers. Some rarefied though experiment God is not God as generally though of, worshipped, etc. in the culture. So I don't see where such an effort would gain much. > I was amazed to see that mathematical induction > is not scientific enough for some of the knee-jerk atheists on this > list. If you have an argument against the inductive hypothesis that > there exists a state of being that exceeds our current understanding > of humanity, then please deconstruct it and enlighten me. Know that I > will also assume you would be suffering from the perceptual disorder > that you believe yourself to be that transcendent being who can > explain yourself from the pinnacle of human understanding. > > You say you want communication then you label some of the people here "knee jerk atheist"? That is inconsistent at best if not hypocritical. > Earlier in this thread Damien claimed that "Buddhists are atheists." > I can't disagree with that. I have to wonder though if that is also > suggesting that Buddhists don't believe in transcendental ideas. You > can take away the limited view of the ego-ist anthropic superpower > named "God" - but the notion of "something more than this" is (imo) as > fundamental and obvious as "there is no largest integer" > > Most Buddhist I know believe in considerable orders of higher beings and engage in quite a bit of magical thinking including the assumption that changing one's own consciousness can transform everything and the de facto assumption that the important aspects of suffering are those within one's control with training, i.e., one's attachments. There is considerable cognitive dissonance in simultaneously holding the self as illusory and having reincarnation as an important supporting basis for the general buddhist worldview. Boddhisatva and enlightenment itself not to mention becoming a Buddha are higher states. There are claims that a Buddha frees all beings of suffering on all planes and throughout all time. I don't see how this is substantially different from other religious thinking. > But if this is suffering from a category mistake, then I don't want to > be indoctrinated into accepting this wysiwyg existance is the most we > can hope for. > Do you honestly think that any extropians hold such a bizarre formulation?\ - samantha From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 17:48:04 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:48:04 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] autism In-Reply-To: <222886.10777.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <62c14240704240656t52f209b4i1b11c33f689be7bb@mail.gmail.com> <222886.10777.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424124146.021b0520@satx.rr.com> At 10:02 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Anne wrote: >And I'm also concerned about the idea that some people would gladly >"cure" their children even if the net effect of that "cure" would be >that you had an entirely different person than you had before. Is >that ethical? Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous depression or schizophrenia? On a non-core-identity level: I suffer from (and I *do* suffer, I'm impaired by it) a developmental disability, the lack of stereopsis. Fixing that now would require perhaps extensive neural rewiring. The outcome might be that since my experience of the world suddenly bursts into an additional dimension, my writing and perhaps my thinking would change at least subtly as well. (This actually happened to philosopher David Chalmers; I'm not sure whether it modified his sense of self.) I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged, experientially diminished. And make no bones about it. Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 18:22:31 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:22:31 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] bark sinister Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424131527.021724a0@satx.rr.com> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/science/24wag.html?ref=science If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It's in His Tail < Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate. At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger). In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain). ...Chimpanzee brains are asymmetrical in the same ways as human brains, said William D. Hopkins, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Center and psychologist at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. When chimps are excited, they tend to scratch themselves on the left side of their bodies, reflecting strong negative emotions, he said. And left-handed chimps are more fearful of novel stimuli than right-handers. Their dominant right brains may make them more cautious. Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient trait, Dr. Rogers said.> ............. Makes me wonder if the bias against "sinister" left-handers derives from their consequent "deceitful"/contrary autonomous facial and other signaling, something most people would be only unconsciously aware of, and therefore perhaps a bias especially hard to correct. Damien Broderick From benboc at lineone.net Tue Apr 24 18:35:48 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:35:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> I've wondered before if there would be a niche for 'professional health carers', i.e. people who get paid to care about (not for) your health. They would be augmented by expert medical systems, know enough about medicine to know when it's time to call in the big guns, but above all, they would be 'carers' (as in 'care about', rather than 'care for'). The idea is that if you subscribe to this service (who would actually pay for it? - i don't know), you are guaranteed someone who will familiarise themselves with your medical history, and be in a good position to interpret (with the help of expert systems and other resources) any medical problems you may have. This person sticks with you, you know who you are talking to, you build up a relationship with them, and (hopefully) gain confidence in their skills. They will refer you to a GP or specialist when appropriate, and perhaps even take the hassle out of arranging appointments. They would take a lot of the pressure off doctors who have to deal with people who just need talking to in order to feel a lot better, and a lot of people would feel a lot happier with the knowledge that there was one person that they know, who they turn to if they have a problem, and that that person is knowledgeable enough to talk sense to them, relate their problems to their personal history, and refer them to a more qualified person where appropriate. They'd also know when to be proactive, and pester you to get that pap test/cholesterol test/prostate exam/whatever done, and have the skills to talk to you without hacking you off. This strikes me as a better system than the anonymous consultant that you've never seen before and who has 30 seconds to familiarise themselves with your entire history from some notes written by 14 different people before talking to you. I dunno, maybe it's a tall order, but i think it would be a vast improvement. ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Tue Apr 24 18:39:48 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:39:48 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Manifest Destiny for >H In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462E4EF4.2080408@lineone.net> "Amara D. Angelica" wrote: > >"evolved robots" walking around, some of which developed > > intelligence. > Hmmm. Homo sapiens? What? No, not at all. Sapient, but definitely not Homo. Bacteriorobo sapiens maybe! ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Tue Apr 24 18:35:39 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:35:39 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> The Avantguardian wrote: > I would expect a society where everyone carried weapons to work very > politely. Is this a testable hypothesis? Do we have any examples of such societies, past or present? What about gang societies in certain cities? Or is that a bad example, because the gang members are all 'bad guys'? Would such an armed society /require/ everyone to be armed? Whether they wanted to be or not? I suspect it's not that simple. ben zaiboc From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 18:57:16 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:57:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] autism In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424124146.021b0520@satx.rr.com> References: <62c14240704240656t52f209b4i1b11c33f689be7bb@mail.gmail.com> <222886.10777.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424124146.021b0520@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > > I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged,experientially diminished. And > make no bones about it. Would that we had a few more such damaged individuals contributing to the state of the planet. R. As a completely off topic aside, do people know that J. K. Rowling is a *billionaire*? Something for you to aspire towards D. Then you could have a bunch of us nerd types engineer an "undamaged" D.B. variant and we could run them side by side to see which is more interesting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 18:59:46 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:59:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] bark sinister In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424131527.021724a0@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424131527.021724a0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect > happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face > reflect unhappiness (right brain). This suggest that NLP interpretations of expressions are going to need some serious reworking... R. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 18:47:56 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:47:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624B8CD@webmail.sensetech.no> Message-ID: <291594.91531.qm@web37415.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Sondre, I've witnessed first-hand an exchange between two friends, one white and one black. They obviously regarded each other very highly, this in spite of the fact that the white friend jovially referred to his black friend as "nigga" many times within the same conversation. Above any others, speech and communication need to be the last bastion of absolute freedom. It is through speech or communication in general that the ills of society are confronted; and some of them even manage to be fixed every great once in a while. Speech, in my opinion, should never be forcefully and irreparably constrained in any way. I won't be so dishonest as to say that my feelings would never be hurt by anything someone says. They could; but that's a sacrifice I'll always be willing to make. What this world needs is a tad more rationality in all directions. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich > > It is not perfectly all right to tell racist jokes > to any type of audience. It is not all right to talk > trash about females in any situation. Equal rights > and opportunities for everyone, and we should all > value the individuals based on their acts and > performances. If you continue to talk down on > females or anyone other generalized group of > individuals, you are only making the situation > worse. > > Religious and political views are personal and > chosen opinions (most people don't choose it for > themselves, their parents did) and anyone should be > open for discrimination, insults and being laughed > at for these views. > > I love being an atheist and I enjoy every single > moment of this life. > > /Sondre > > ********************************************************************** > This e-mail has been scanned for viruses and found > clean. > ********************************************************************** > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 24 19:27:12 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:27:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462E3926.4070702@mac.com> References: <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:06 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, samantha wrote: >Mike Dougherty wrote: > > On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > >> The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs was > >> shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as > >> religions today is the result of these mechanisms. Now there are two > major > >> choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for something else and happen > to be > >> used by religions, or they were directly evolved for something like > >> religion. In either case, because they are so widespread, there must have > >> been a considerable selection advantage for these mechanisms. > > >The alternative is that religion or the thinking and psychological >patterns that give rise to it are a by product of one or more >evolutionary advantageous developments. If this is so and if religion >in moderns is problematic then it may well take a pretty active >conscious set of decisions and some energy to counteract this effect in >oneself. Certain types of magical thinking, superstition, >authoritarianism and so on may be roughly defaults in human beings. That's not an alternative, just a restatement. Keith From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Tue Apr 24 19:02:03 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:02:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] autism In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424124146.021b0520@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <940839.64774.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Damien said: > Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous > depression or schizophrenia? It depends, I think...I don't know how deeply those traits run, or how many aspects of a person's being (whatever they perceive that as) are attached to them. I am generally against forcing treatment on anyone, but I realize that sometimes people honestly *don't* know what is good for them (e.g., as in the case of alcoholism), so I'm not 100% sorted on what I think the ethics of treatment ought to be. I don't think anyone really is at this point in history. > On a non-core-identity level: I suffer from (and I *do* suffer, I'm > impaired by it) a developmental disability, the lack of stereopsis. > Fixing that now would require perhaps extensive neural rewiring. The > outcome might be that since my experience of the world suddenly > bursts into an additional dimension, my writing and perhaps my > thinking would change at least subtly as well. (This actually > happened to philosopher David Chalmers; I'm not sure whether it > modified his sense of self.) I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged, > experientially diminished. And make no bones about it. Well, if you perceive your condition as something that makes you suffer, and you don't think it's attached to anything important (or you would be willing to risk losing something you do find important in the process of altering your condition), that's really up to you to make that call. In case it hasn't been made clear yet, I don't advocate forcing people to keep their default configurations (see my example of gender reassignment in my previous post, for instance) if they don't like those configurations. I just think that societies need to become more flexible and accomodating to all different sorts of people, and that if society was more flexible and accomodating, fewer people would be under coercive duress. I don't doubt that there are still gay people nowadays who stay in unhappy hetero relationships because they can't legally marry who they want to -- and I don't think that the answer to this is to make all gay people straight. Flexible, diverse societies are stronger and more resistant to existential risk in the long run. I fear that if we make a practice of simply eliminating traits that are poorly understood on the basis that they disallow a person from functioning optimally in society *as it is configured now*, that's like saying that the way society is configured now is the best we can do. As a transhumanist I can't abide that kind of lack of imagination. - Anne Damien Broderick wrote: At 10:02 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Anne wrote: >And I'm also concerned about the idea that some people would gladly >"cure" their children even if the net effect of that "cure" would be >that you had an entirely different person than you had before. Is >that ethical? Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous depression or schizophrenia? On a non-core-identity level: I suffer from (and I *do* suffer, I'm impaired by it) a developmental disability, the lack of stereopsis. Fixing that now would require perhaps extensive neural rewiring. The outcome might be that since my experience of the world suddenly bursts into an additional dimension, my writing and perhaps my thinking would change at least subtly as well. (This actually happened to philosopher David Chalmers; I'm not sure whether it modified his sense of self.) I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged, experientially diminished. And make no bones about it. Damien Broderick _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 19:34:48 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:34:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Somedays the universe delivers Message-ID: Just when you think life is boring and nothing of real interest well ever happen (after all some of us are waiting and waiting and waiting for real nanotech and real AI and real MBrainization of the solar system, ...) somedays are more interesting than others... E.g. Netcraft shows Smartech Running Ohio Election Servers http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/07/04/24/1735213.shtml The title doesn't make the possible scandal clear. There is a suggestion that the Republican National Committee may have site-jacked some Ohio state web sites during the 2004 election. Of course I found the following comment interesting... "*Nixon is not dead. How do I know? Always two there are, a Master and an Apprentice. *Quantum Physics Parts Ways with Reality* *http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/04/23/231252.shtml* *... "we must give up (some of) the idea that the world exists when we are not looking..."* *So much for frigging reality as we know it (or at least as I would like it to be). We are back in the land of the "blue people" (for those of you who have been around long enough to recall those discussions). I might ask if our reality is in a coherent state with another reality, what the hell happens when the differences are resolved? * *And then of course, the simply mundane, we may be able to have have BBB (Boron BuckyBalls)*. *Go ahead, kick them if you want, I feel nawthink! [1]* *Bucky's brother -- The boron buckyball makes its debut http://www.physorg.com/news96550194.html* * And then of course my favorite... Laser Acceleration of Electrons Excites Physicists* *http://www.physorg.com/news96303978.html I may be stretching things a bit but it looks like properly applied this technology gives me an honest to god phaser. Star Trek technology strikes again... Robert 1. This will mean nothing to those who never watched Hogan's Heros.* * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From benboc at lineone.net Tue Apr 24 19:32:09 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:32:09 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> "Robert Bradbury" wrote: > You cannot be an "athiest since birth" since at birth you were > incapable of having or holding beliefs. Nooooooo! What are you saying?! Atheism is a belief now? > I would be interested in comments by "indoctrinated" individuals who > simply said "this does not make sense". Well, you're getting one. I suppose i qualify, having been brought up until my early teens in a nominally anglican environment. Sunday school, occasionally being taken to church, being drafted into holding candles on a stick, that sort of thing. One day i started to actually read the bible. That really opened my eyes. I soon realised that the whole thing was a bunch of often self-contradictory stories that were obviously made up by lots of different people over a long period of time. I really don't understand how anyone can read it and not conclude that it's all a load of bollocks. Any actual wisdom in there is completely accidental, i'm sure, and mixed in with so much nonsense, not to mention outright viciousness and stupidity, that if you can sort the one from the other, well, you don't /need/ any book to tell you how to live your life. After a bit of thinking, i came to the conclusion that the whole thing was a crock of shite. So it was actually reading the bible that made me realise there are no gods, and we have to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves. I used to say "well, if it turns out there is a god, i'd bloody well like a word with it!". I mean how could any all-powerful and wise being make such a godawful fuck-up of things? If there is a god, it needs a kick up the arse, or at least a good psychiatrist. Later on, when i realised what 'belief' actually entails, i decided i was an atheist. As in someone free of beliefs about gods. Atheism is /not/ a belief system. Just the opposite. I don't 'believe there are no gods', but i do have a lack of belief in them. Completely different thing. If some strong evidence turns up for their existence, i may change my mind. That's not belief. So i don't see a problem with Stathis claiming to be an atheist from birth. ben zaiboc From eugen at leitl.org Tue Apr 24 19:38:58 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:38:58 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> Message-ID: <20070424193858.GZ9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 07:35:39PM +0100, ben wrote: > The Avantguardian wrote: > > > I would expect a society where everyone carried weapons to work very > > politely. > Careful, this way lies gun advocacy and contraadvocacy. It's best not to go there (at some point in the past, we had an official ban on that thread from hell). > Is this a testable hypothesis? > > Do we have any examples of such societies, past or present? > > What about gang societies in certain cities? > > Or is that a bad example, because the gang members are all 'bad guys'? > > Would such an armed society /require/ everyone to be armed? Whether they > wanted to be or not? > > > I suspect it's not that simple. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 19:57:12 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:57:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> <462E3926.4070702@mac.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: > > > On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > >> The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs was > > >> shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as > > >> religions today is the result of these mechanisms. They do not go back that far. The chimp-human split is ~4 million years ago and there is significant discussion as to whether inbreeding took place post-split. Chimps can copy/imitate but they do not have a spoken language (which can be used to transport an emplace memes in other repositories). You have a distinct analytical problem -- did or did not "belief in religion" predate spoken language. Perhaps more importantly did religion predate the organizations which produced such (e.g. pre-Pharaonic cultures 5000-10000 years BCE?) My primary point being that while acceptance and imitation may have biased humanity with respect to religion it is very difficult to make the argument that this is a multi-million year old trait. ... there are two major choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for > something else and happen to be used by religions, or they were directly > evolved for something like religion. In either case, because they are so > widespread, there must have been a considerable selection advantage for > these mechanisms. I deal with this all the time in aging, it is the basis behind the concept of "antagonistic pleiotropy". You select for genes which may promote reproduction but in the long term (when one has a global picture of evolution) are harmful. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 20:20:12 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:20:12 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> At 08:32 PM 4/24/2007 +0100, ben zaiboc wrote: >Later on, when i realised what 'belief' actually entails, i decided i >was an atheist. As in someone free of beliefs about gods. Atheism is >/not/ a belief system. Just the opposite. I don't 'believe there are no >gods', but i do have a lack of belief in them. Completely different >thing. If some strong evidence turns up for their existence, i may >change my mind. That's not belief. Well said. Unless "belief" is decomposed to something like (1) "hold that the likelihood of X approaches 1.00". If it just means (2) "feel strongly that X must be true because my pappy done tole me, and he wouldn't lie, and I'll fight any dirty dog who says otherwise," or (3) "feel strongly that X is true because a transcendently impressive thing happened to me leading me to this conclusion," atheism is indeed an absence of belief. On his blog, the sf writer John C. Wright provides copious articulate and generally well-mounted but entirely incredible comments derived in part from (3). He is not stupid, far from it, although what he feels impelled to defend--his interpretation, that is, not his raw experience--is, on its face, asinine (he has become, of all silly things, a "Christian Scientist"; well, I suppose he might have embraced the E-meter instead). Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 20:24:29 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:24:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, ben wrote: > "Robert Bradbury" wrote: > > > You cannot be an "athiest since birth" since at birth you were > > incapable of having or holding beliefs. > > Atheism is a belief now? Ok, let me modify this slightly. Atheism is a "belief" as in the classical sense it is an assertion that there is *no* god. This gets complex as it tends to devolve into how did the universe originate, how many universes currently exist (in a multiverse framework), etc. Invoking "God" as the ultimate answer makes things so much more simple. > I would be interested in comments by "indoctrinated" individuals who > > simply said "this does not make sense". I rejected the distributed reality around the age of 14 or 15. Comments on the ExiCh list over the years would suggest there are others who did so as well. Keith if you want to apply EP perspectives in a robust way determine *when* the standard paradigm is rejected. Later on, when i realised what 'belief' actually entails, i decided i > was an atheist. As in someone free of beliefs about gods. Atheism is > /not/ a belief system. Just the opposite. I don't 'believe there are no > gods', but i do have a lack of belief in them. Completely different > thing. If some strong evidence turns up for their existence, i may > change my mind. That's not belief. Ben, I would argue that there are variations in this context which should not be cast aside. There are (a) atheists who would assert this is not, and can never be a "god". (b) atheists who would assert a "god" is possible but does not exist in our universe yet. (c) atheists who would assert a "god" is possible and may exist but has no interest in us. (d) atheists who would assert that there is a god and he/she is acitively spinning reality as we know it. Mind you, these are frameworks for an explanation of the universe as we perceive it and not frameworks of classical religious perspectives. So i don't see a problem with Stathis claiming to be an atheist from birth. > > ben zaiboc > _______________________________________________ > 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 Tue Apr 24 21:00:55 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:00:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism In-Reply-To: <222886.10777.qm@web56503.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <62c14240704240656t52f209b4i1b11c33f689be7bb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424153846.0465f8a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:02 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Anne wrote: snip >And I would also like to state for the record that I am not opposed to the >existence of a "cure" (e.g., a way to make autistic people nonautistic) -- >I think that people should be able to choose their configurations >according to their own, nonduressed goals and aspirations. If someone >wants to be neurotypical I wouldn't stand in their way, just as I wouldn't >feel threatened if I knew someone who wanted gender reassignment surgery >(e.g., FtM transpeople don't make me feel devalued as a woman). > >But a lot of this whole debate starts to go very interesting places when >you start getting into the concept of what the self is, what identity is, >and to what extent a person can change how their brain works whilst >retaining what they think of as "the person" -- in other words, totally >on-topic for extropy-chat. > >I'm concerned that if a "cure" existed right now it would not be applied >under conditions of informed, nonduressed consent, and I am extremely >concerned that autistics who don't mind being autistic would be forced to >take this treatment on economic or social grounds. And I'm also concerned >about the idea that some people would gladly "cure" their children even if >the net effect of that "cure" would be that you had an entirely different >person than you had before. Is that ethical? Back to the part I snipped, the person with the "cure" sticker may well have had an autistic child. Do you know people with a seriously autistic child? Have you ever tried to take care of one? (For me, two couples and I took care of one long enough to get a feel of how exceedingly difficult it must be for parents.) For a social animal like humans being autistic is worse than being blind. Most blind kids can grow up and take care of themselves. Few seriously autistic kids manage that and virtually none of them have children. Let's take another kind of mental disability, trisomy 21. It is an interesting fact that 90% of those detected by testing are aborted. There are sill about 5000 a year being born, a number that has been close to flat for a long time in spite numbers of those being aborted rising to about the same level. (Effect of older mothers.) There are thought to be 250,000 in the US--which accords with a short life--few of them live past middle age. Last, consider people in coercive cults. It is now rare, but parents, friends even, used to kidnap people out of cults and deprogram them. Years later almost all of those people think their deprogramming was a good idea. There is no question they are substantially different people from the brainwashed zombies who were in the cult. (Disparagement intentional, and given my experiences in the last ten years I have a right to do it.) Are any of these ethical? This is a hypothetical question. I don't have public answers and your answers are very unlikely to change this situation. Even discussion of practical approaches to one of these cases has earned me much flame. However, due to constant exchanges of memes, mental stability, sanity if you will, is a group endeavor. So is insane behavior in a lot of cases. Keith From scerir at libero.it Tue Apr 24 21:35:40 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:35:40 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com><002b01c785bf$5ec2f030$f0bd1f97@archimede> Message-ID: <005a01c786b8$820cf460$55931f97@archimede> Albert Einstein said: > > "Try and penetrate with our limited means > > the secrets of nature and you will find that, > > behind all the discernible laws and connections, > > there remains something subtle, intangible and > > inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond > > anything that we can comprehend is my religion. > > To that extent I am, in fact, religious." Robert writes: > As am I, but if indeed it turns out that this happens > to be one of the multiverses in which life can develop, > survive and evolve, boy am I ever going to be pissed > if there are "more perfect" subsets where less suffering > is the common rule of the day. Can we say that the chance of having the same particular God (Zeus, Yahweh, the Holy Trinity, etc.), in every place of the (supposed) multiverse, is small, or vanishingly small? Not sure that 'suffering' has the same meaning in every region of the multiverse though. From scerir at libero.it Tue Apr 24 21:33:09 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:33:09 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Somedays the universe delivers References: Message-ID: <005601c786b8$2815a4c0$55931f97@archimede> Robert Bradbury > *Quantum Physics Parts Ways with Reality* http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.2529 Essentially the performed experiment shows a violation of Bell inequality (valid for local-realistic models, both quantum or classical) and a violation of Leggett inequality (valid for a class of nonlocal-realistic models). The set of nonlocal-realistic models (nonlocal hidden variables) is much larger though. > I might ask if our reality is in a coherent > state with another reality, what the hell happens > when the differences are resolved? Dunno. The problem here is 'our reality'. We have been exposed to the superstition according to which the quantum world is afflicted by more uncertainty than the classical world. Sometimes, or often, this seems to be wrong. Quantum phenomena very often are more disciplined than classical phenomena. In example, quantum correlations (i.e. entangled pairs at a distance) are always stronger than classical correlations (i.e. two fragments of a bomb). Perhaps there is just a smooth transition from our 'reality' (whatever it means) to another 'reality', and so on. From jonkc at att.net Tue Apr 24 22:20:37 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:20:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest. References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > if I knew that some people here on this list were > vociferously proclaiming that the NASA moon-landing >was a hoax, I would not choose to describe their > beliefs as "stupid". You say you wouldn't describe it as stupid, but I assume you'd still think it's stupid (if not then there is something seriously wrong with you). So you would be deceitful and hide your contempt for the idea because you think it would be better public relations. If your technique really did work better at convincing people than calling a spade a spade then you might have a point, but I don't believe it does work better, especially when dealing with God stuff. Intelligent people have treated religion with a reverence it does not deserve for far too long. Take off the Kidd gloves! And in my case there is another problem, I find that pretending to respect something when I really don't is so exhausting and unpleasant that I just can't keep it up for long. >Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, > reflecting complete ignorance of psychology. > Moreover, they're insipid and ultimately meaningless, > being nothing more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. If I'd said that there would be howls of protest, demands that I be expelled from the list, and that ridiculously pompous phrase "ad hominem" would be flying all over the place. Believe me this is something I have first hand experience in. But I don't think you should be punished, far from it, I think you should be congratulated! I loved the way the insults came right after your impassioned plea that we should all be polite to each other; it really did have a delightful Hofstadter sort of feel to it, like "this sentence is false". John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Apr 24 23:21:00 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:21:00 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest. In-Reply-To: <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424181634.022e2ba8@satx.rr.com> At 06:20 PM 4/24/2007 -0400, John K Clark wrote: >[Lee:] > >Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, > > reflecting complete ignorance of psychology. > > Moreover, they're insipid and ultimately meaningless, > > being nothing more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. > >If I'd said that there would be howls of protest, demands that I be expelled >from the list, and that ridiculously pompous phrase "ad hominem" would be >flying all over the place.... > >...I loved the way the insults came right after your >impassioned plea that we should all be polite to each other; it really did >have a delightful Hofstadter sort of feel to it, like "this sentence is >false". The trouble with satire is that sometimes it is taken as straight-faced declaration. Surely Lee was (a) engaging in a droll but seriously-intended reductio ad absurdum (another pompous phrase, sorry) a.k.a. "How do *you* like it, buster, eh?" and/or (b) taking the piss. Damien Broderick From pharos at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 23:32:33 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:32:33 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> <462E3926.4070702@mac.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Robert Bradbury wrote: > They do not go back that far. The chimp-human split is ~4 million years ago > and there is significant discussion as to whether inbreeding took place > post-split. Chimps can copy/imitate but they do not have a spoken language > (which can be used to transport an emplace memes in other repositories). > You have a distinct analytical problem -- did or did not "belief in > religion" predate spoken language. Perhaps more importantly did religion > predate the organizations which produced such ( e.g. pre-Pharaonic cultures > 5000-10000 years BCE?) > > My primary point being that while acceptance and imitation may have biased > humanity with respect to religion it is very difficult to make the argument > that this is a multi-million year old trait. > Writing appeared around 3000 BCE in various cultures. Before this period it is pretty much speculation as to what forms religion might have taken, possibly fertility rites and goddess worship. 23,000 years ago the Venus of Willendorf, a small statuette of a female figure, discovered at a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, Austria. 100,000 years ago The first anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) appear in Africa. 150,000 years ago "Mitochondrial Eve" lived in Africa. 700,000 years ago Common genetic ancestor of humans and Neanderthals. But pre-human cave paintings in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania date back to around 2.6 - 1.4 million years ago. It could be that this is the first signs of religion starting, where they tried to encourage hunting success. So I don't think it is much of a stretch to say that the mental origins of religion go back millions of years. Now if you mean civilization and organised religion, then you are talking about 10,000 years ago, when farming and permanent settlements started.. BillK From sentience at pobox.com Tue Apr 24 23:38:24 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:38:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest. In-Reply-To: <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <462E94F0.9020606@pobox.com> John K Clark wrote: > "Lee Corbin" > >>if I knew that some people here on this list were >>vociferously proclaiming that the NASA moon-landing >>was a hoax, I would not choose to describe their >>beliefs as "stupid". > > You say you wouldn't describe it as stupid, but I assume you'd still think > it's stupid (if not then there is something seriously wrong with you). So > you would be deceitful and hide your contempt for the idea because you think > it would be better public relations. If your technique really did work > better at convincing people than calling a spade a spade then you might have > a point, but I don't believe it does work better, especially when dealing > with God stuff. Intelligent people have treated religion with a reverence it > does not deserve for far too long. Take off the Kidd gloves! > > And in my case there is another problem, I find that pretending to respect > something when I really don't is so exhausting and unpleasant that I just > can't keep it up for long. Curiously, I recently spoke with someone who thought the moon landing was a hoax, I did think it was stupid, and I didn't say so because I thought it would be more polite. I hope that doesn't make me a terrible person. I think that we should do our best to preserve the *option* of calling a spade a spade, and that such an act should be applauded rather than censored, but I'm not sure it makes sense to go there on every available occasion. Too many damned spades. Surely the oath of a rationalist forbids that we should actively deceive, or create new misconceptions that did not previously exist, but I do not think the oath of a rationalist requires us to always say everything we know. Is it not proper, from time to time, to let people win or lose by their own strength rather than another's? -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From sentience at pobox.com Tue Apr 24 23:39:14 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:39:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> Message-ID: <462E9522.2020305@pobox.com> "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby." -- Doctor Logic Sounds like a final word on the subject to me. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Tue Apr 24 23:25:00 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:25:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462D907E.7010508@mac.com> Message-ID: <20070424232500.88193.qmail@web37211.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Samantha Atkins wrote: >Actually everyone has a right to believe whatever >they wish but they have no right whatsoever to >respect or kind treatment for believing pernicious >nonsense. The nonsense itself has no "rights" at >all. There is no "debate" implied or required here. There is no debate for you. Are you implying that any and all people that believe in God should have no right to respect? >What, by debating how many angels can dance on a >nanobot? How does that help anyone? I choose to respect her beliefs and in that I try to incorporate ideas to integrate within her reality. Are you saying the best approach is to simply tell her she's a complete idiot for believing in Religion? How does that help anyone? >What business do you have speaking about God and what >God might object to? I have taken the time to learn theology so I feel I have every business discusing God with my mother. >You know you are talking nonsense yet you >condescendingly talk religious baby talk to them to >try to get your point across to those who believe. >This is dishonest and perhaps cowardly. Are you >ashamed to be an atheist? There are many things I respect about Religion therefore I don't believe it's nonsense. If taking the time to understand someone else's point of view is dishonest and cowardly, then yes I am. I don't understand how a post about common courtesy for other people's beliefs has anything to do with me being ashamed to be an atheist. > You don't? Then why aren't you a believer? Who cares whether I am a believer or not? I thought this list was about Transhumanism, future technology, prolonging life etc., if it is, whether the majority is Atheist has no relevancy to the fact that the minority have every right to be respected. If the Extropy list is set on defining that "to be Extropian one must be atheist" then fine but until that is clearly stated everybody on this list deserves the right to be respected. When you denounce Religion, you are not respecting their beliefs. > You may do something worse than not try. You seem > to sort of pretend to take her side. What if I grew up in Religion and decided it wasn't for me? Does that mean I am pretending to take her side? What if I understand her point of view, just simply don't agree?. I may not change her mind about God but bringing up ideas such as Cryonics from her point of view is a creative way at getting my point accross, that to me seems more logical than calling her beliefs "bullshit". >If God exists and is as the majority of Christians >believe then I would most certainly be on the "other >side". Such a Being would be monstrously evil. I would like for you to explain to me what are the common beliefs about God that the majority of Christians have. "Such a Being would be Monstrously evil" is the reason why I brought up the point to begin with. >Do you see what is wrong with telling many of us >here that we must "respect their beliefs" in a >similar fashion to what you choose to do or we aren't >reasonable people? Thank you for your opinion but >it is certainly not binding on me. I am not saying that you have to respect their beliefs, I am saying you should respect the people on this list that may be religious. >Then I do not believe you are through learning about >religion. If you knew it better you would have a >problem with it. Why should I have a problem with it? Explain to me why religion as a whole is that bad. I am aware why I don't believe but I would like to hear your rational point of views. >What for? What is it about a group of people who >are more shut of religion saying what they think of >it that bothers you so much? I loathe disrespect. This list is not about Religion therefore out of respect for those that are religious, comments and statements that ridicule their beliefs should not be made. What is wrong with that? >You grant religious folks room to believe and >practice all manner of zany and even dangerous things >and respect them doing so and don't go out your way >to challenge them. Yet a few things set by atheists >here and you feel utter frustration and get upset? >Why? I think you may need to examine what is going on >in you more deeply. I think it's the other way around. Your blatant hate does nothing to change the minds of those that are religious so why state the opinion in the first place? Have you ever thought that I consider many on this list as being rational and logical and in that respect, I choose to defend the ones that are being subjected to ridicule and contempt? I'm sorry you don't understand that. Obviously my point wasn't well received, I apologize for that. It wasn't my intention to start a battle between the religious and the atheists, I was just trying to give the same respect to those that are Atheists as to those that aren't. You can guarantee I will never bring up Religion again, what a fuss! Anna Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Apr 24 21:52:01 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:52:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> If all of you get KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter I should not bother with posting these gems. Keith Quantum physics says goodbye to reality 20 April 2007 Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871). Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14 From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 01:31:10 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:31:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> Message-ID: <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- ben wrote: > The Avantguardian > wrote: > > > I would expect a society where everyone carried > weapons to work very > > politely. > > > Is this a testable hypothesis? > > Do we have any examples of such societies, past or > present? Yes. Yes, most of Japanese history before their defeat in World War II by atomic deus ex machina. Bushido kept law and order amongst the armed samurai. It was the cornerstone of civilization during periods of great political upheavel and instability and was why Japan never suffered a dark ages as had Europe despite numerous wars. Bushido was an evolved behaviorial code that allowed for civilization in Japan to flourish, despite numerous wars and political instability in the cause of consolidating political power in a centralized Japanese government. Bushido's ideal of the highly educated and philosophically inclined warrior-poet had a civilizing effect on Japanese society even in the midst of war. Samurai would behave with honor, discipline, and rationality toward one another even when while serving opposite political factions. For its simplicity, it is a highly effective means of preserving the rule of law whilst allowing for numerous individuals to wield the power of life and death over others. And it is empirically proven IMHO. > What about gang societies in certain cities? Gang members would derive immense benefit from the practice of Bushido. It would allow them to become a force of social justice instead of being the scourge of civilization. Unfortunately most gang members would probably not be able to cover the intellectual overhead for Bushido. Although adopting Bushido would certainly motivate a great deal more of them to pursue higher education. > Or is that a bad example, because the gang members > are all 'bad guys'? Morality is necessarily culturally relative. Bushido is beautifully adaptive to this situation because it calls for each individual to decisively make appropriately subjective moral judgements and then act on those decisions no matter what the personal cost. In many instances, for example when a superior would order a samurai to perform an act that would violate their individual moral code, the samurai commited sepuku, ritual suicide, instead of doing something he knew was WRONG. > Would such an armed society /require/ everyone to be > armed? Whether they > wanted to be or not? No. Indeed it need not be everybody in society. In Japan it was a specialized warrior-caste. But I do not see why it would necessarily have to apply just to some socio-economic elite. So why not everybody? > I suspect it's not that simple. Well like I said, Bushido requires education so it would certainly raise the bar for weapon ownership. Keep in mind anybody in Japan could have weapons but they were no match for the Bushido practicing samurai and so were never really an issue. You commited a crime in the presence of a samurai and you were summarily dealt with on the spot. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 25 02:02:01 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:02:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424114834.0222f0c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <04e301c786dd$c6d12c40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > At 03:34 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > >> [John Clark wrote] >> > God created the universe 4000 years ago and then >> > tortured himself to death so he could forgive us for >> > our sins. How can you treat such moronic babbling >> > without being insulting? And why would you even >> > want to? Insults have their place in the world of ideas. >> >> Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, >> reflecting complete ignorance of psychology. Moreover, >> they're insipid and ultimately meaningless, being nothing >> more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. [actually-- that is not true; I was being ironic, after all. John's lead sentence contains a powerful argument.] > and added: > >> The question *is* whether or not insulting language is to be employed, e.g. >> characterizing the views of others as puerile, stupid, ignorant, etc. Again, >> use of such language is completely pointless, except as an emotional salve >> for those who already agree with you. Hopefully the irony of the first quoted paragraph was apparent to all. My entire post had been written in an objective tone, and I threw that last paragraph in to make a stark contrast; anyone reading it should have been aware that unlike my earlier paragraphs, this one was merely insulting, and almost entirely without objective content. "simply and totally stupid", "reflecting ignorance", "insipid", etc. ARE WE NOT ABOVE USE OF SUCH LANGUAGE ON THIS LIST?? Alas although I'm sure that Damien got it (despite the appearance of my quotes that he gives), I am far from certain that many other people did. > Hmm. Several different points come to mind. > > For a start, it's not an in-group *salve* so much as a *glue* and > that's always handy when a few people hold strong contrarian opinions > in the midst of a powerful social consensus. And why cannot the "glue" be expressed in uncompromising yet objective prose that does not descend to the level of insult? > But is it true that psychology teaches us that ridicule is > ineffective in changing opinions? Ridicule, alas, may indeed be effective in changing opinions; people are such sheep, and have so little backbone that they cannot stand to be laughed at. > When friends, enemies and random > people on the street mock those wearing white after Labor Day--a > completely arbitrary piece of nonsense--you'd better believe most > people will swiftly come to heel, blushing and aghast at their faux > pas. Perhaps few on this list would; perhaps most on this list would > defiantly wear nothing but ice cream suits and white socks all year > long just to stick it to the morons. Derision can stiffen one's > idiosyncratic resolve. Not for most people, though, on the evidence. Mocking those who wear white after Labor Day elicits a change in behavior? I don't follow. > More importantly, ridiculing the ridiculous is a long established > technique of considerable effectiveness. The word "satire" comes to > mind. On the other hand, a lot of people don't seem to comprehend > satire, and get anxious in its presence, complaining that it's > "mean." Humor exculpates everything, in my book, so long as it doesn't shut down argument. Satire can often get points across economically. But I note that you have drifted away from my chief complaint; namely that insulting language---e.g. name-calling such as "stupid", "asinine", "inane" serves no purpose except among the club of those who already agree. Using them in debate ought to be unacceptable. Indeed, many list rules forbid the ad hominem. > But look again at John Clark's summary of Xian beliefs... An > immortal and transcendentally Cosmic God allowing himself to be > tortured to death for our sins but then bouncing back is so utterly > ludicrous--taken literally, rather than as a winter/spring metaphor > or something--that it calls for a rich serving of ridicule. If not > that, what? Must we henceforth remain sweetly demure in the face of > *any* ridiculous assertion, lest we hurt someone's feelings or > strengthen their resolve to beat the shit out of us? (Now there's a > motive I can relate to, alas.) Well, let's look again at what he wrote, because he raises exactly the same question right there: >> > God created the universe 4000 years ago and then >> > tortured himself to death so he could forgive us for >> > our sins. How can you treat such moronic babbling >> > without being insulting? It's *not* moronic babbling; have you ever seen morons babble? You can treat apparently absurd arguments with the same kind of criticism (if it's worth your while) as you would like your arguments to be criticized. One can make very critical remarks about the above---critical arguments, that is---without name calling. What? Do you think that Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine had no answers to your questions? >> > And why would you even want to? Insults have their >> > place in the world of ideas. They simply do not! Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 02:35:29 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:35:29 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> References: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, ben wrote: > > > I've wondered before if there would be a niche for 'professional health > carers', i.e. people who get paid to care about (not for) your health. > They would be augmented by expert medical systems, know enough about > medicine to know when it's time to call in the big guns, but above all, > they would be 'carers' (as in 'care about', rather than 'care for'). > > The idea is that if you subscribe to this service (who would actually > pay for it? - i don't know), you are guaranteed someone who will > familiarise themselves with your medical history, and be in a good > position to interpret (with the help of expert systems and other > resources) any medical problems you may have. This person sticks with > you, you know who you are talking to, you build up a relationship with > them, and (hopefully) gain confidence in their skills. They will refer > you to a GP or specialist when appropriate, and perhaps even take the > hassle out of arranging appointments. They would take a lot of the > pressure off doctors who have to deal with people who just need talking > to in order to feel a lot better, and a lot of people would feel a lot > happier with the knowledge that there was one person that they know, who > they turn to if they have a problem, and that that person is > knowledgeable enough to talk sense to them, relate their problems to > their personal history, and refer them to a more qualified person where > appropriate. > > They'd also know when to be proactive, and pester you to get that pap > test/cholesterol test/prostate exam/whatever done, and have the skills > to talk to you without hacking you off. > > This strikes me as a better system than the anonymous consultant that > you've never seen before and who has 30 seconds to familiarise > themselves with your entire history from some notes written by 14 > different people before talking to you. > > I dunno, maybe it's a tall order, but i think it would be a vast > improvement. You're describing GP's, or perhaps community nurses. Patients with rare conditions these days may well have more "expert" knowledge about their condition than the GP, but they still benefit from a generalist with a broader perspective on their health needs. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 02:35:29 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:35:29 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> References: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, ben wrote: > > > I've wondered before if there would be a niche for 'professional health > carers', i.e. people who get paid to care about (not for) your health. > They would be augmented by expert medical systems, know enough about > medicine to know when it's time to call in the big guns, but above all, > they would be 'carers' (as in 'care about', rather than 'care for'). > > The idea is that if you subscribe to this service (who would actually > pay for it? - i don't know), you are guaranteed someone who will > familiarise themselves with your medical history, and be in a good > position to interpret (with the help of expert systems and other > resources) any medical problems you may have. This person sticks with > you, you know who you are talking to, you build up a relationship with > them, and (hopefully) gain confidence in their skills. They will refer > you to a GP or specialist when appropriate, and perhaps even take the > hassle out of arranging appointments. They would take a lot of the > pressure off doctors who have to deal with people who just need talking > to in order to feel a lot better, and a lot of people would feel a lot > happier with the knowledge that there was one person that they know, who > they turn to if they have a problem, and that that person is > knowledgeable enough to talk sense to them, relate their problems to > their personal history, and refer them to a more qualified person where > appropriate. > > They'd also know when to be proactive, and pester you to get that pap > test/cholesterol test/prostate exam/whatever done, and have the skills > to talk to you without hacking you off. > > This strikes me as a better system than the anonymous consultant that > you've never seen before and who has 30 seconds to familiarise > themselves with your entire history from some notes written by 14 > different people before talking to you. > > I dunno, maybe it's a tall order, but i think it would be a vast > improvement. You're describing GP's, or perhaps community nurses. Patients with rare conditions these days may well have more "expert" knowledge about their condition than the GP, but they still benefit from a generalist with a broader perspective on their health needs. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 03:17:15 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:17:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] mathematical induction In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424110422.022aaaa8@satx.rr.com> References: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424110422.022aaaa8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704242017s3a741d19lac2744a8bd05cde3@mail.gmail.com> On 4/24/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 09:35 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > What is the relevance of this "mathematical induction" of which you > speak? Sure you're not getting it confused with "empirical > induction," when actually (as far as I know) it's a form of deduction > applicable only to a restricted formal mathematical realm? Hopefully for the sake of the discrete math final I have next week I am clear enough on methematical induction. However, I will admit that what applies to numbers does not apply to words or concepts because the ambiguity precludes the rigid formalism of eg. Real Numbers. In that vein, the reference to induction was the nearest concept to what I was thinking and that I failed to express myself clearly enough. > "Inductive hypothesis"? Would that be like saying: "String theory > uses 11 dimensions, so there must be 12, and if there are 12 there > must be 13... there must be an infinite number of actual physical > dimensions"? This looks like another category mistake to me. I was thinking more of the idea: If we agree to the exponential curve leading to the Singularity, (i'll entertain either side of that argument, but whatever) then given two starting positions with one slightly farther up that curve - how can the lower level surpass the higher level? In the measure required to reach the higher level civilization (for example) the civilization that started at that point has risen exponentially farther away from the lower. Perhaps this is in the identitity class with Zeno's paradox. (or for an interesting diversion off Zeno paradox, check out Thompson's Lamp) Anyway, it might still be a category mistake. I have no strong attachment to defend this idea. From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 25 03:19:39 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:19:39 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: References: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424221345.0220c060@satx.rr.com> At 12:35 PM 4/25/2007 +1000, Dr. P wrote: >You're describing GP's, or perhaps community nurses. Patients with >rare conditions these days may well have more "expert" knowledge >about their condition than the GP, but they still benefit from a >generalist with a broader perspective on their health needs. > >Stathis Papaioannou Not sure that the term "GP" (general practitioner) is known everywhere in the States (although it is here in central TX). Perhaps "family physician" or the like? The one I go to has an off-sider I often see, who charges less and isn't a medico but a "nurse practitioner" or some such. He can write at least some scripts. Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 25 03:23:43 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:23:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Somedays the universe delivers In-Reply-To: <005601c786b8$2815a4c0$55931f97@archimede> References: <005601c786b8$2815a4c0$55931f97@archimede> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424222208.022061c8@satx.rr.com> > > *Quantum Physics Parts Ways with Reality* > >http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.2529 Commenting on this, a guy pointed me to his paper at: Physics without Causality-Theory and Evidence, Richard Shoup, 2006 [slides-PDF, paper-PDF] Abstract: The principle of cause and effect is deeply rooted in human experience, so much so that it is routinely and tacitly assumed throughout science, even by scientists working in areas where time symmetry is theoretically ingrained, as it is in both classical and quantum physics. Experiments are said to cause their results, not the other way around. In this informal paper, we argue that this assumption should be replaced with a more general notion of mutual influence -- bi-directional relations or constraints on joint values of two or more variables. From an analysis based on quantum entropy, it is proposed that quantum measurement is a unitary three-interaction, with no collapse, no fundamental randomness, and no barrier to backward influence. Experimental results suggesting retrocausality are seen frequently in well-controlled laboratory experiments in parapsychology and elsewhere, especially where a random element is included. Certain common characteristics of these experiments give the appearance of contradicting well-established physical laws, thus providing an opportunity for deeper understanding and important clues that must be addressed by any explanatory theory. We discuss how retrocausal effects and other anomalous phenomena can be explained without major injury to existing physical theory. A modified quantum formalism can give new insights into the nature of quantum measurement, randomness, entanglement, causality, and time. Presented at and forthcoming in Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation -- Experiment and Theory, D. P. Sheehan editor, AIP Conference Proceedings for 87th Meeting of AAAS Pacific Division, University of San Diego, 2006 From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 03:25:49 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:25:49 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] autism In-Reply-To: <940839.64774.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424124146.021b0520@satx.rr.com> <940839.64774.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Anne Corwin wrote: > > Damien said: > > Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous > > depression or schizophrenia? > > It depends, I think...I don't know how deeply those traits run, or how > many aspects of a person's being (whatever they perceive that as) are > attached to them. I am generally against forcing treatment on anyone, but I > realize that sometimes people honestly *don't* know what is good for them ( > e.g., as in the case of alcoholism), so I'm not 100% sorted on what I > think the ethics of treatment ought to be. I don't think anyone really is > at this point in history. > It's interesting that involuntary treatment of endogenous mental illness is allowed in some form in most jurisdictions, but not involuntary treatment of substance addiction, except perhaps in a punitive setting. Similarly in court if you do something illegal because you are intoxicated it usually doesn't help your case much, whereas if you do something illegal due to a psychotic illness, it does. The underlying idea is that people choose to use drugs, whereas they don't choose to become mentally ill. However, people don't generally choose to become or remain addicts; while on the other hand, many people with mental illnesses choose not to have treatment, due to side-effects, lack of insight, or even because they enjoy the symptoms of their illness (especially mania). And then there are those who experience clear drug-induced psychosis, indistinguishable from endogenous psychosis. It's a difficult area. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 03:28:49 2007 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:28:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> On 4/24/07, Damien Broderick wrote: (3) "feel > strongly that X is true because a transcendently impressive thing > happened to me leading me to this conclusion," atheism is indeed an > absence of belief. On his blog, the sf writer John C. Wright provides > copious articulate and generally well-mounted but entirely incredible > comments derived in part from (3). He is not stupid, far from it, > although what he feels impelled to defend--his interpretation, that > is, not his raw experience--is, on its face, asinine (he has become, > of all silly things, a "Christian Scientist"; well, I suppose he > might have embraced the E-meter instead). ### The conversion of J.C. Wright is a mystery of epic proportions. How could the man who invented the Golden Oecumene end this way? I have really had the greatest admiration for his brilliance (I have personally contacted him and invited him to join our list) and seeing such an apparently abrupt and sweeping change in his worldview really was guite unnerving. Mr Wright always referred to his transformative experience only in very general terms. I wonder if there is any more detailed information. Was it a vision? A voice? Is it a persistent phenomenon? Was there an underlying susceptibility to Christianity, perhaps due to previous toxic memetic exposure in childhood that never healed properly? I am pretty sure that only a very persistent and multimodal sensory experience, well integrated in my general perception of the world, would be necessary for a religious conversion in me. Any transient discorporeal voices would immediately prompt me to get an MRI scan, since at my age such symptoms are likely to be due to organic rather than primary psychiatric causes. I would order an EEG to look for any suspicious temporal spikes, and in the absence of objective finding, a psychiatric evaluation and a stiff dose of neuroleptics would be in order. Angels, especially little ones scuttling around in the periphery of my vision, would make me suspicious of Charles Bonnet syndrome, or perhaps the beginnings of Levy body dementia. I wish that Mr Wright would tell us about more about the wellspring of his faith. I still think he is one of the best sf writers alive. Rafal From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 25 03:45:23 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:45:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to the Test In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.co m> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424224240.022c4dd0@satx.rr.com> At 11:28 PM 4/24/2007 -0400, Rafal wrote: >Mr Wright always referred to his transformative experience only in >very general terms. I wonder if there is any more detailed >information. Was it a vision? A voice? Is it a persistent phenomenon? As I noted, he's always going on about it in his blog. You have to wade through the "me toos" though. For example: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/85492.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith is belief without evidence? Sir, you are talking to an eyewitness. I am a Christian because I had a religious experience, and saw the divinity face to face, and lived. I am not relying on anyone's testimony but the testimony of my own experience. I am deluged with evidence. It is only Ten O' Clock, and I have prayed twice this morning, and been answered within minutes each time, a thing that simply could not happen in a mechanistic universe. From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 25 03:57:45 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:57:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### The conversion of J.C. Wright is a mystery of epic proportions. > How could the man who invented the Golden Oecumene end this way? I > have really had the greatest admiration for his brilliance (I have > personally contacted him and invited him to join our list) and seeing > such an apparently abrupt and sweeping change in his worldview really > was guite unnerving. > > Mr Wright always referred to his transformative experience only in > very general terms. I wonder if there is any more detailed > information. Was it a vision? A voice? Is it a persistent phenomenon? > Was there an underlying susceptibility to Christianity, perhaps due to > previous toxic memetic exposure in childhood that never healed > properly? John C. Wright was active on our list from March through June of 2005. I enjoyed a long but ultimately circular dialog with him about morality. Ironically, his final post here was an exceedingly patient and polite response to a bit of rudeness from Brett Patsch. - Jef From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 04:10:22 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:10:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462E3CC9.4020204@mac.com> References: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> <462E3CC9.4020204@mac.com> Message-ID: <62c14240704242110y190c2803i97e37c7024b094d7@mail.gmail.com> On 4/24/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > I believe Damien was pointing out the fact that one can conceive there > could be a higher order being than oneself and one always can conceive > of such a being is not an argument for God as usually conceived or even > for the actual existence of any such being. The line of reasoning is > similar to an old argument for God as the highest order being far beyond > human conception. agreed. if "as usually conceived" means the abrahamic god, then i believe I understand this point. I also agree that there is no proof. My position is that to discuss some concept such as "God" there needs to be a mutual understanding of the terms. I am more inclined to start with, "Suppose there exists a sufficiently advanced state of being beyond which current human thinking is unable to conceive, label that God...." and discuss from that point. Any later proof is suspect due to the starting definition, but it does arbitrarily bootstrap the concept. Although I think I have done a poor job establishing this point so far. > > The quote from me (above) was asking about defining a term or > > qualifying a label. > Which term, God? God is already defined on rather non-defined by the > believers. Some rarefied though experiment God is not God as generally > though of, worshipped, etc. in the culture. So I don't see where such > an effort would gain much. I know "God" is so overloaded with meaning that it is different for each person, which I why I attempted the above declaration for point of reference. I was originally asking what Extropians or Transhumanists would call a belief in a recursively defined higher order, such that upon realizing that state the next higher state is implicitly defined to be above the one just realized. Picture the scene in Godel, Escher, Bach where a Djinni must ask G.O.D. for permission to grant additional wishes beyond the normal three. In that example, G.O.D. is a recursive acronym for G.O.D. Over Djinni. Each Djinni invokes another (more powerful lamp) to contact their G.O.D. The request is passed up to infinity. The response back from infinity is, of course, No. > You say you want communication then you label some of the people here > "knee jerk atheist"? That is inconsistent at best if not hypocritical. Yeah, that wasn't right. Thanks for calling me on it so I can apologize. I felt rebuked by what seemed a negative response to what I posted. I was still defensive after a few hours, so the next time I checked the thread I responded emotionally. I read your response a few hours ago and i've been thinking you are right. > Most Buddhist I know believe in considerable orders of higher beings and > engage in quite a bit of magical thinking including the assumption that > changing one's own consciousness can transform everything and the de > facto assumption that the important aspects of suffering are those > within one's control with training, i.e., one's attachments. There is > considerable cognitive dissonance in simultaneously holding the self as > illusory and having reincarnation as an important supporting basis for > the general buddhist worldview. Boddhisatva and enlightenment itself > not to mention becoming a Buddha are higher states. There are claims > that a Buddha frees all beings of suffering on all planes and throughout > all time. I don't see how this is substantially different from other > religious thinking. I don't remember if we're down on just "God" or all "religious thinking" - I know they're usually codependent, but there might be a distinction. I'm 0 for 3 tonight, so I certainly don't want to propose any new ideas :) > > But if this is suffering from a category mistake, then I don't want to > > be indoctrinated into accepting this wysiwyg existance is the most we > > can hope for. > > Do you honestly think that any extropians hold such a bizarre formulation?\ honestly no, that was more immature emotional backlash. I think i'm over that. I do think the extropian phase space for ideas covers so much ground that being on opposite sides of "mainstream" thinking can present a huge challenge. Maybe this is analogous to attempting to differentiate stars across the galactic center. From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 04:18:47 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:18:47 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > If all of you get KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter I should not bother with > posting these gems. Keith > > Quantum physics says goodbye to reality > > 20 April 2007 > > Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual > quantum > events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete > theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by > extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have > performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables > theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that > reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871). > > Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many > > http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14 The many worlds interpretation does away with randomness, non-locality and non-realism without hidden variables. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pgptag at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 04:22:09 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:22:09 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] =?windows-1252?q?Kevin_Warwick=92s_talk_in_Second_?= =?windows-1252?q?Life?= Message-ID: <470a3c520704242122o3ee0f1dl2d6cf45e6cbe3d89@mail.gmail.com> Prof. Kevin Warwick , Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, gave a presentation in Second Life on Monday, April 23, 2007. The event was organized by the Second Life Chapter of the World Transhumanist Association. When we look towards the capabilities of intelligent machines (AI) we can see that these hold some distinct advantages over human intelligence. Mathematical speed, memory, sensing range, multi-dimensional operation and respectable communication being examples. It seems sensible therefore for humans, if they wish, to benefit by directly linking their brain with that of an intelligent machine network. In this presentation Kevin looked at the possibilities, considered some of the experimental work presently going on around the world and described the practical experimentation he has already carried out. Please see this page for pictures and technical details. The page will be updated with pointers to the press and media coverage, transcripts, audio track and videoclips in a few days. I gave a short introduction saying "we talk the talk, but Kevin walks the walk". Of all the the transhumanist events we organized in Second Life so far, this was by far the most popular: the available space filled very soon and I was getting IM messages like "I cannot come because uvvy island is full, please do something". So I had to raise the occupancy limit of the sim risking a crash (that did not happen). 70 persons in total attended the talk. The success of the event is certainly due to the fact that Kevin Warwick is a well known expert in a hot field, but also to the very professional preparation work done by Prof. Warwick's staff and the Second Life Chapter of the World Transhumanist Association, in particular VR Manoj. Prof. Warwick gave a very good talk on current technology and its likely evolution. He stayed mostly on the practical side, but I am sure most people in the audience got the radical, transhumanist implications of Kevin's cutting edge research in interface technologies. The next event organized by the Second Life Chapter of the World Transhumanist Association will be the Seminar on Transhumanism and Religionon April 29. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 04:26:04 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:26:04 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, The Avantguardian wrote: Samurai would behave with honor, discipline, and > rationality toward one another even when while serving > opposite political factions. For its simplicity, it is > a highly effective means of preserving the rule of law > whilst allowing for numerous individuals to wield the > power of life and death over others. And it is > empirically proven IMHO. > > > What about gang societies in certain cities? > > Gang members would derive immense benefit from the > practice of Bushido. It would allow them to become a > force of social justice instead of being the scourge > of civilization. Unfortunately most gang members would > probably not be able to cover the intellectual > overhead for Bushido. Although adopting Bushido would > certainly motivate a great deal more of them to pursue > higher education. Rather than adopting Bushido, we could have everyone including governments and criminal gangs adopt Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, and everything would be hunky-dory. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Apr 25 05:03:05 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:03:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <6b937cdaeed64fe1a654ab82e79387a8@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: <200704250511.l3P5BqGJ001336@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Josh, I have been away on business and vacation, so this may have already been answered by others. > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Josh Cowan > Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 4:36 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right > > Hi Spike, > > For what it's worth, this morning CBC Radio One ran a fifteen second > blip on the THAAD success, though they said it was only the second > success in a row. Depends on how it is counted. In 1999, we were arguing over what should be considered a miss, since some of the test validation phase firings were not really intercept attempts but rather data gathering flights. The 10 June 99 flight might be legitimately considered luck. When it hit the target, some historians cheerfully recorded that as the successful intercept. I am not sure, for if it had missed, we might have argued that it was not really a miss, it was just a test and yakkity yak and bla bla. But if you count that hit as one, we had another hit in 1999, then hits 3,4 and 5 in November 2005 and May and June of 06. Then the 13 September attempt was scrubbed because the target missile failed. That surely must count as a no-test, so that the 27 Jan 07 hit would count as sixth in a row and the 6 April 07 hit would be the seventh. If you count the first and second as luck (they kinda were by some accounts), then this would be the fifth, but I count it as seventh. Lucky shots count in sports; in fact in basketball you get three points if you shoot from way out. I thought of the theme of something's right while on vacation last couple weeks. Wife bought a camper trailer on eBay, I went out to Pennsylvania to pick it up. Drove across the country both directions without my shootin arns, never felt I needed one. I could buy anything I needed, anywhere I found myself. There was never any place I felt danger of any kind. Was caught doing 94 mph in Kansas on my way out with the truck. The friendly highway patrol gave me a warning and sent me on my way. Things are working in society. Something is definitely right here. The apparent downplaying by the mainstream media of THAAD's success, perhaps we should see it as analogous to the daredevil's trade. Karl Wallenda walked the tightrope thousands of times. It matters not how difficult and dangerous his trade; he made the news only by falling off and slaying himself. Roy Horn and his tigers were of no interest until one took a bite out of him. The motorcycle jumper attempting forty buses is not news unless he only manages to clear thirty nine of them. Perhaps the MSM media simply do not like to report when something is very right. spike > > Cheers, > > Josh > On Apr 6, 2007, at 9:51 PM, spike wrote: > > > Friends, > > > > Today we had another hit with the THAAD missile system, the seventh > > consecutive success. Most remarkable is this, considering that when > > trying to hit a missile with another missile, there is so little target and so damn much sky. ... spike From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 25 05:14:56 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:14:56 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <462E9522.2020305@pobox.com> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <462E9522.2020305@pobox.com> Message-ID: <20070425051456.GI9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 04:39:14PM -0700, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby." > -- Doctor Logic Another nice one: If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 04:52:56 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:52:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <339340.61260.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Rather than adopting Bushido, we could have everyone > including governments > and criminal gangs adopt Gandhi's philosophy of > non-violence, and everything > would be hunky-dory. But that is unrealistic. At least until you can literally use technology to "give" somebody a conscience. You know that in every population there is certain percentage of sociopaths that have neither the biological capacity for nor the subjective experience of "moral remorse". I have heard estimates as high as 5% of the population. You are a psychiatrist, you work with themn on a daily basis, so you would know the prevalance better than me. In Gandhi-world, people with these traits take over and oppress the conscientious majority with intimidation and brutality. In Bushido-world such traits are weeded out quickly and efficiently. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Apr 25 05:13:36 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:13:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right In-Reply-To: <50449.86.153.216.201.1176027575.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <200704250523.l3P5NeKr010355@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg ... > > > Taking into account the proportion of multi-machine contributors, we can > > now > > estimate the total number of this particular type of math geeks on the > > planet: around 50,000. Considering the total human population, that > makes > > us rarer than one in a million. I never would have guessed we were so > > few. > > Not all math geeks run GIMPS (cries of surprise and outrage), so being > rarer than one in a million is not that surprising. I wonder how many math > geeks there are worldwide? Maybe GIMPS is missing emerging crowds of geeks > in China, just itching to search for Mersennes? Anders Sandberg, I should have said: those math geeks who do GIMPS and also carelessly flub their BOTECs by an order of magnitude are rarer than one in a million. GIMPSers who do not make such careless errors are rarer than one in a hundred thousand. Your point is noted however. Where are the Chinese and Indian hordes? It will be a lot more fun to hang out once those two kick in and double or triple the size of these kinds of groups. spike From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 25 05:32:30 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:32:30 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to the Test In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424224240.022c4dd0@satx.rr.com> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424224240.022c4dd0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <20070425053230.GL9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 10:45:23PM -0500, Damien Broderick wrote: > Faith is belief without evidence? Sir, you are talking to > an eyewitness. I am a Christian because I had a religious > experience, and saw the divinity face to face, and lived. > I am not relying on anyone's testimony but the testimony of my > own experience. Heh. It's quite easy to see divinity face to face -- all it takes is a small handful of psilocybe mushrooms. Quite reproducible, too. > I am deluged with evidence. It is only Ten O' Clock, and I > have prayed twice this morning, and been answered within minutes > each time, a thing that simply could not happen in a mechanistic > universe. I suppose if this was to happen to me I would let my EEG checked for temporal lobe epilepsy first. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 06:14:33 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:14:33 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: I am pretty sure that only a very persistent and multimodal sensory > experience, well integrated in my general perception of the world, > would be necessary for a religious conversion in me. Any transient > discorporeal voices would immediately prompt me to get an MRI scan, > since at my age such symptoms are likely to be due to organic rather > than primary psychiatric causes. I would order an EEG to look for any > suspicious temporal spikes, and in the absence of objective finding, a > psychiatric evaluation and a stiff dose of neuroleptics would be in > order. Angels, especially little ones scuttling around in the > periphery of my vision, would make me suspicious of Charles Bonnet > syndrome, or perhaps the beginnings of Levy body dementia. The formal definition of a delusion in psychiatry is interesting: a fixed, false belief not in keeping with the patient's cultural background. That last part is added to avoid calling all religious and superstitious beliefs delusions. There are, of course, associated features in psychotic illnesses which help make the diagnosis, but in cases of doubt the only test worth anything available to psychiatry is a therapeutic trial of a neuroleptic. I don't know of any study determining the false positive rate for such a test, but I am sure it would be very low; otherwise, we would be able to cure religion using haloperidol. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 25 06:09:24 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:09:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, The Avantguardian wrote: > No. Indeed it need not be everybody in society. In > Japan it was a specialized warrior-caste. But I do not > see why it would necessarily have to apply just to > some socio-economic elite. So why not everybody? I have a great admiration for the code of honor and discipline at the heart of bushido. In particular, bushido demands that one treat those below oneself (in the class system) with the same strict respect for honor (appropriate to their class) as those in the higher classes. This system worked very well in terms of enforcing social order, especially during the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa era, but this stability was due to the severely enforced hierarchical power structure, ranked from emperor, shogun, daimyou, *four* classes of samurai, followed by peasants, artisans, and merchants at the bottom. Even within the samurai classes, totaling some 7-10% of the population, stratification was such that only the "high samurai" were allowed to ride horses, but all samurai were allowed to wear two swords. As I've said, I admire the honor at the core of bushido and I think it had great strengths compared to other feudal systems, but by its very nature, extremely demanding and rigid, it is impractical for any but an elite, and unsustainable without rigid stratification of power. - Jef From pj at pj-manney.com Wed Apr 25 06:33:46 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:33:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] fiction and autism Message-ID: <2341941.244801177482826827.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Anne C. wrote: >I don't dispute that autistics probably have different mirror-neuron functioning than nonautistics do, and I can attest to the fact that in my particular case, imitation is extremely difficult.? When it comes to motor activities especially I need to figure out everything myself from the "ground up" based on feedback I get from the environment -- I can't look at someone throwing a ball, or dancing, or doing something along those lines and just be able to do it myself.? However, this lack of imitative capacity doesn't seem to be related to what I think of as "empathy" or lack thereof.<< I appreciate your point. I will address it more below. >I get your analogy, but just remember that unlike either cancer or diabetes, autism is not a disease.<< I certainly apologize. They were the only examples I could think of for symptomatic groupings off the top of my head. But as you note, symptoms or behaviors do not imply disease and I didn't mean to imply Autism was a disease, because I don't believe it is. But as a related note to both Mike and Keith's posts, I knew (many years ago - we're college alums) the co-founder of the organization that created the autism sticker Mike saw. He and his wife, who has written books on their experiences, are good, decent people. And he and his organization came up in a conversation I had last year with a top VR scientist, who also works with autism, ADHD, PTSD, etc. (he's discussed in my paper -- I am purposely not mentioning any names to avoid blowback). Their son is, according to this psychologist, an extreme behavioral example of autism and said it has been a heartbreak for his family. From what I can see, they have moved Heaven, Earth, and a great deal of money out of people's wallets to "cure" autism, because they perceive it as a disease, as indicated by their own son's, and other's, symptomology. As far as their site is concerned, they do not see it as a neurodiversity issue. I am certainly not taking sides. But as Keith said, it's tough to put yourself in the place of a parent with a child who is wired so differently, that there is no way that child will grow up with any form of self-sufficiency. Honestly, knowing you'll be taking care of your child, as a child, until you or they die is right up there on a parent's list of "worst nightmares." But as parents, you do what you have to do... >Nevertheless, some researchers do actually believe that a distinct difference between the Autism and Asperger's profile may emerge with further research... I don't know what the research will reveal eventually, but for now it's rather a confusing mess, which makes it very difficult to make definitive diagnostic or identification statements for the majority of people on the spectrum.<< What I find interesting is the difference between conditions that are caused by the same trigger, but manifest differently vs. conditions that manifest similarly, but are caused by different triggers... The entire autistic spectrum issue seems to fall into both simulanteously!!! >I've read "Curious Incident" and while the autistic viewpoint character (as presented by a non-autistic author) does seem to (in some respects) think and act in ways I can relate to, the book itself reads like a very gimmicky textbook... -- the question I have is: are most people empathizing with the autistic characters when they read these works of fiction?? Or are they just seeing "autism" as a plot device or curiosity?? (I'm genuinely curious and not being cynical).<< Well, according to a stroll through Amazon's comments on that book, people seem genuinely involved, more than just curious. I saw real examples of empathetic responses, so... I have to believe there is empathy generation there. >It's not so much of a chip as an acknowledgement that society has a long way to go before it actually manages to acknowledge autistic citizens as full and valid persons.<< I can't argue with you. It's true. Just know I'm not one of them. :-) >I'm sorry if I sounded overly defensive; that's what I get for writing such an off-the-cuff response to your initial message.? I mainly reacted the way I did because it seemed like you were making gross generalizations<< Yes, I'm apparently notorious for that! :-) I had a discussion last night with someone on this list who respects us both. He found our discussion an excellent example of two people wired differently trying to talk about what we think are the same things, but not necessarily succeeding or connecting. What he and I came to was this: I tend to generalize. You tend to bring it back to the specific example. When I use language, I expect it to have an emotional effect. When I read your language, I am assuming an emotional effect that you may not have implied, since you may not have an emotional intention in your statement, but the words we would use are the same. We just see them in different shades. I noticed it first in our discussion on Michael Anissimov's blog about women in H+. We argued past each other. It's very interesting. Now that I'm conscious of it, I will try to write with it in mind. >I have always liked *some* fiction, and the autistic people I know (or know of) also generally read at least a little bit of fiction.<< Again, I am generalizing. And you are specific. Of course you can like fiction! The discussion began about the differences in fiction reading and writing between autists and non-autists. >Additionally, I grated at the comparison to narcissists -- narcissism is *nothing like* autism, and I suspect that the mechanisms that result in narcissism vs. the mechanisms that can result in autism are very, very different.? Narcissism seems to be a disordered form of personality development mediated by the environment in which a person grows up, whereas autism is neurodevelopmental and affects sensory processing and cognition primarily (as opposed to personality).<< Absolutely. I agree 100%. If you notice, in my paper, I don't say narcissism has anything to do with mirror neurons. No one knows anything about that. It was just an interesting thing, that emphasizes being able to empathize with different people is important. [Now, I do know several card-carrying, out of the DSM narcissists (yes, I do live in "Hollyweird") and most don't have a taste for fiction, because they don't think it matters. Because it's not about them. Only when they get to act in the role in a script do they care. Because it IS about them!] >I don't generalize about entire groups of people based on the actions of a few bullies, but I still think that the existence of bullying capacity in a neurotype supposedly distinguished by its empathic faculty is worth noting.<< So do I. It's why I wrote a paper on it. :-) >I just think that autistics deserve better science, and I think that it would be wonderful if more autistics were invited to take part in the research side of things.? Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently wrote on this very subject:? http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2147.? I think that there's presently a lot of bias in autism research, which is problematic, but I also think there's plenty of potential to reform it.<< That link was fascinating. I agree with you -- and it -- completely. I've been doing a good deal of research on certain sensory deficits recently, like blindness. It would be like ignoring John Hull's writings and discounting his knowledge about blindness, because he's blind! [BTW, Damien, I'm very curious about your perception issues. I'd like to discuss them with you some time.] >I'm fine with trying to figure out how the brain works.? Generalization confuses me sometimes but I understand that it's not going away.? But I still think generalization algorithms and heuristics themselves ought to be up for constant and unrelenting peer review. :)<< I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to stop generalizing for good. I'm a "big picture" kinda gal, who looks for the big connections, and I've always been. It's how I'm wired. Please be patient with me... >That's really cool.? Does she experience synesthesia or anything like that as well?<< Not that I can tell or she's said. However, my TV writing partner is synesthesic (she tastes in colors) and she didn't figure out she was unusual until she was 18 or so. She assumed until then everyone did, so she never mentioned it. (I think she said "This is tastes really bright yellow tonight" to her folks at dinner. Being good, earthy Kiwis, they thought she had lost her mind...) But my daughter's pretty hip to this stuff, living with me, so I think we'd know. >I didn't mean to come across as so defensive, but I do tend to get a bit jumpy when it's not clear to me whether someone understands the difference between autism and sociopathy...? This is an oversimplification on my part, but in some respects autism and sociopathy almost seem to be dichotomous -- the autistic person might have difficulty picking up on nonautistic emotional cues, but will feel appropriate emotions once s/he does learn of someone else's emotional state, whereas a sociopath (or bully) has no trouble reading the cues -- s/he simply doesn't *care* how the other person feels.? Hopefully that explanation makes sense.<< Yes, I agree. And I never, never, never meant to imply that autism and sociopathy are related. Never, never, never, never, never. But... and here is the big 'but'... As you said in the first paragraph, it's about the definition of empathy. For me it is simple: it's the ability to imagine yourself in another's shoes, so that their concerns become your own. Some autists can do this using different techniques than neurotypicals, as you describe. Some can't, no matter what they do. But the percentage of autists who can't are not who I'm concerned about. I'm concerned by the neurotypicals who DON'T, rather than can't. They far outnumber autists approximately 150 to 1, and by their sheer numbers in this world, will make it or break it. How you get empathy is unimportant. That you get it is what's important. For neurotypicals, storytelling is a proven and powerful method of creating empathy. Again, I'm sure there are many autist who respond to certain types of fiction better than others, but not all do, by your own description. I just want to generate empathy at all costs, in as many people as possible. To my mind, it's an integral part of the big solution to the big problems and the only way I can see clear to have any real 'future' whatsoever. >At any rate, I liked what you said in your essay about how reading books about different kinds of people can increase a person's empathic facility -- in some respects, reading novels is like a microcosmic version of travel, and I've stated myself on several occasions that if people want to improve their Theory of Mind, it is a good idea for them to purposely put themselves in contact with as many different cultures or cultural representatives as possible (through whatever means possible).<< Thank you. IMHO, trying to understand the diversity of our world, whether you read about it or go there (and I highly recommend both), is the only way to fly. It's probably why I have always identified with Cosmopolitanism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolitanism-Ethics-World-Strangers-Issues/dp/0393061558 >> Maybe if we put our heads together, we could come up with something illuminating.<<< >That actually sounds like a great idea...I would be very interested in such a project.<< Cool! Let's talk! PJ From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 25 06:50:42 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:50:42 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <20070425065042.GP9439@leitl.org> On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 05:52:01PM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > > If all of you get KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter I should not bother with > posting these gems. Keith I also recommend http://science.reddit.com and (toot-toot) http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/ (RSS feed available: http://postbiota.org/pipermail/list.rss ) -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From scerir at libero.it Wed Apr 25 07:45:24 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:45:24 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Somedays the universe delivers References: <005601c786b8$2815a4c0$55931f97@archimede> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424222208.022061c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <003101c7870d$afece110$27bc1f97@archimede> Robert: > > > *Quantum Physics Parts Ways with Reality* me: > >http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.2529 Damien: > Commenting on this, a guy pointed me to his paper at: > Physics > without Causality-Theory and Evidence, Richard Shoup, 2006 > Abstract: The principle of cause and effect is deeply rooted in human > experience, so much so that it is routinely and tacitly assumed > throughout science, even by scientists working in areas where time > symmetry is theoretically ingrained, as it is in both classical and > quantum physics. Experiments are said to cause their results, not the > other way around. In this informal paper, we argue that this > assumption should be replaced with a more general notion of mutual > influence [...] In fact. But as you can see from these quotations from that paper by Zelinger et al. (on 'Nature', 2007) they are well aware of the other existing conceptual possibilities. "It is a very important trait of this model that there exist subensembles of definite polarizations (independent of measurements) and that the predictions for the subensembles agree with Malus' law. It is clear that other classes of non-local theories, possibly even fully compliant with all quantum mechanical predictions, might exist that do not have this property when reproducing entangled states. Such theories may, for example, include additional communication [23] or dimensions [24]. [23] D. Bacon and B. F. Toner, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 157904 (2003). [24] Y. Ne'eman, Found. Phys. 16, 361 (1986)." "We believe that the experimental exclusion of this particular class [of nonlocal-realistic models] indicates that any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive. For example, the concept of ensembles of particles carrying definite polarization could fail. Furthermore, one could consider the breakdown of other assumptions that are implicit in our reasoning leading to the inequality. These include Aristotelian logic, counterfactual definiteness, absence of actions into the past or a world that is not completely deterministic [30]. We believe that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is in agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions. [30] J. S. Bell, Dialectica 39, 103 (1985)." As pointed out, i.e. by N.Gisin, there is another radical conceptual possibility, this one. Quantum theory is not a theory about physics, it is just a 'syntax', or an 'operating system' of the real (but still unknown) theory. The main consequence of this is that the (usual, realistic) space-time does not exists at all for such a quantum theory /'operating system'. More or less. s. From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 07:52:19 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:52:19 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to the Test In-Reply-To: <20070425053230.GL9439@leitl.org> References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424224240.022c4dd0@satx.rr.com> <20070425053230.GL9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > I am deluged with evidence. It is only Ten O' Clock, and I > > have prayed twice this morning, and been answered within minutes > > each time, a thing that simply could not happen in a mechanistic > > universe. > > I suppose if this was to happen to me I would let my EEG checked > for temporal lobe epilepsy first. Or you might think that it was evidence of aliens communicating with you, or that someone had drugged you and implanted some sort of electronic device in your head. My experience is that better educated, more intelligent people aren't really any more likely than average to recognise psychotic experiences for what they are; rather, they come up with more elaborate delusional explanations for them. The problem is that with induction, as opposed to deduction, there is no absolute way to prove or disprove a statement. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sti at pooq.com Wed Apr 25 08:32:59 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 04:32:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> Message-ID: <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> BillK wrote: > On 4/23/07, Stirling Westrup wrote: >> I could swear I read about a prototype of such a machine just recently. >> Processes a wide variety of household wastes (food scraps, wood chips, >> whatever) and converts it into one of three different fuels depending on what >> it deems the better choice, and then burns the fuel to produce electricity. >> IIRC it was being developed for emergency relief and for military >> applications. I'll try to dig up a reference, if you're interested. >> > > As you are in Canada, it might be this story you are thinking of: > > Nope, that wasn't it. Besides, I've recently read about some sort of system developed in China that uses a low-temperature enzymatic reaction that is far superior to the high-temperature version that (as far as I can tell) they are assuming in that article. Anyway, I did find the article I was thinking about. You can find it here: http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/connections/winter2007/05_waste_to_watts.shtml From neptune at superlink.net Wed Apr 25 11:00:42 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:00:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <008b01c78728$f8334660$c2893cd1@pavilion> On Wednesday, April 25, 2007 2:09 AM Jef Allbright jef at jefallbright.net wrote: > On 4/24/07, The Avantguardian wrote: >> No. Indeed it need not be everybody in society. In >> Japan it was a specialized warrior-caste. But I do not >> see why it would necessarily have to apply just to >> some socio-economic elite. So why not everybody? > > I have a great admiration for the code of honor and discipline at the > heart of bushido. In particular, bushido demands that one treat those > below oneself (in the class system) with the same strict respect for > honor (appropriate to their class) as those in the higher classes. > > This system worked very well in terms of enforcing social order, > especially during the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa era, > but this stability was due to the severely enforced hierarchical power > structure, ranked from emperor, shogun, daimyou, *four* classes of > samurai, followed by peasants, artisans, and merchants at the bottom. > Even within the samurai classes, totaling some 7-10% of the > population, stratification was such that only the "high samurai" were > allowed to ride horses, but all samurai were allowed to wear two > swords. > > As I've said, I admire the honor at the core of bushido and I think it > had great strengths compared to other feudal systems, but by its very > nature, extremely demanding and rigid, it is impractical for any but > an elite, and unsustainable without rigid stratification of power. Yes, this is so. I also think it's unrealistic to expect the code to be widely practiced. Even when it was popular in Japan, it seems, not every last member of the samurai class strictly followed it. Also, it's interesting that the Japanese gave up the gun during this period. See _Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879._ by Noel Perrin. Though Perrin seems to use this example to argue for nuclear disarmament -- his case seems to be: if the feudal Japanese could give up firearms, surely moderns can give up nuclear weapons -- he fails to see the price paid: the social stratification you speak of. Specifically, sticking to a society of sword-based warriors means sticking to one where only a tiny minority have a chance of defending themselves -- as using a sword is far more demanding, in terms of training and physical strength, than a firearm. Put another way, two people each with a gun are far more equal than two people each with a sword, especially if other things are unequal, such as skill, raw physical strength, and agility. I, for one, don't want to live in a society where I either have to spend long hours on continuing martial training or end up a second-class citizen. Surely, that sort of thing makes for good films -- think "Harakiri" and "47 Ronin" -- but I'd prefer something more libertarian. (Though "Harakiri" can actually be seen as attacking the samurai as not really practicing what they preach.) Regards, Dan http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Apr 24 20:33:20 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:33:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <20070424193858.GZ9439@leitl.org> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <20070424193858.GZ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/24/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 07:35:39PM +0100, ben wrote: > > The Avantguardian wrote: > > > > > I would expect a society where everyone carried weapons to work very > > > politely. Yes, but it would be an extremely unstable system of politeness, with the evolutionary weakness of having to adapt to the threats of its internal structure rather than the threats of its environment. > Careful, this way lies gun advocacy and contraadvocacy. It's best > not to go there (at some point in the past, we had an official > ban on that thread from hell). As I recall, it was detrimental to the list not because of that particular topic, but because of a small number of extremely strident voices battling over the right to battle. A more extropian approach to the subject might begin with asking what is a weapon, other than an effective method of promoting a relatively small context of values over a disproportionately large scope of consequences? - Jef From neptune at superlink.net Wed Apr 25 10:43:52 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:43:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> Message-ID: <006201c78726$9e80d9e0$c2893cd1@pavilion> On Tuesday, April 24, 2007 2:35 PM ben benboc at lineone.net wrote: > The Avantguardian wrote: > >> I would expect a society where everyone carried >> weapons to work very politely. > > Is this a testable hypothesis? > > Do we have any examples of such societies, past or present? > > What about gang societies in certain cities? Is everyone armed in such societies? I thought that the cities with strong gang cultures in the US -- e.g., LA, NYC, Newark NJ -- are cities with strict gun control. I would expect such cities to have few people carrying guns -- save for criminals. So, I would question your example. > Or is that a bad example, because the gang members are > all 'bad guys'? No, it's a bad example because in places where criminal gangs rule, it tends to be the case that few people are legally allowed to be armed. This doesn't mean that The Avantguardian is correct, but it means your counterexample does not really speak directly to his position. In fact, your example reminds of me of Thomas Hogarty's "empirical" cases against anarchy: "Thomas Hogarty tries to rule anarchy inferior on empirical grounds. He provides three case studies to support why we should have government. As his first example of anarchy, Hogarty points out that brown rats do not have government, and, in fact, often bite each other. As his second example, Hogarty discusses how the children in Lord of the Flies did not have government and engaged in many malicious acts. As his final example, Hogarty argues that a prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War provides an example of individual interaction without a state. Rather than acting cooperatively, the prisoners engaged in aggressive behavior. "All three case studies lack cooperation, so Hogarty concludes we need government. "In response, Virgil Storr questions whether Hogarty's examples justify government. Yes, Storr agrees, brown rats removed from their familiar packs and placed among rats from different localities do in fact bite each other, but he questions how much this experiment can tell us about human cooperation. Storr also questions the extent to which a children's novel, a work of fiction, can be used to draw inferences about interaction under anarchy. Finally, Storr takes issue with the treatment of an overcrowded POW camp as a case study in anarchy. When government imprisons a group of people and controls their supplies, we should not be surprised if conflict arises. To Storr, none of these examples provides evidence of deficiencies in anarchy." >From http://www.mises.org/story/2127 In other words, it's almost like you're providing prison as an example of an armed society -- ignoring the fact that in prisons only a few people are legitimately able to be armed and even those who are illegitimately armed are a small minority. This means the rest are unarmed. > Would such an armed society /require/ everyone to be armed? > Whether they wanted to be or not? Don't we have at least one society where that is a requirement: Switzerland? Isn't each Swiss household required to have a gun? > I suspect it's not that simple. I suspect you're right, though not given the example you bring up. In fact, I think that that case actually supports The Avantguardian. That said, however, I suspect that politeness has more to do with other cultural factors. Of course, these factors would seem to be reinforced by people being allowed free access to arms. Why so? Well, politeness would be one way of defusing most situations that might lead to violence. The abusive might, under such conditions, think twice before insulting or abusing the wimpy guy. Regards, Dan From neptune at superlink.net Wed Apr 25 11:20:45 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:20:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival References: <339340.61260.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <009901c7872b$c5863940$c2893cd1@pavilion> On Wednesday, April 25, 2007 12:52 AM The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com wrote: > --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Rather than adopting Bushido, we could have everyone > > including governments > > and criminal gangs adopt Gandhi's philosophy of > > non-violence, and everything > > would be hunky-dory. > > But that is unrealistic. At least until you can > literally use technology to "give" somebody a > conscience. You know that in every population there is > certain percentage of sociopaths that have neither the > biological capacity for nor the subjective experience > of "moral remorse". I have heard estimates as high as > 5% of the population. You are a psychiatrist, you work > with themn on a daily basis, so you would know the > prevalance better than me. > > In Gandhi-world, people with these traits take over > and oppress the conscientious majority with > intimidation and brutality. In Bushido-world such > traits are weeded out quickly and efficiently. No, this is only if people who are armed consistently practice Bushido. In fact, looking at Japanese history, it appears it was full of hypocrites even after Miyamoto Musashi wrote his famous tome. Regards, Dan http://uweb1.superlink.net/~neptune/ From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 11:54:14 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:54:14 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival In-Reply-To: <006201c78726$9e80d9e0$c2893cd1@pavilion> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <006201c78726$9e80d9e0$c2893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Technotranscendence wrote: Don't we have at least one society where that is a requirement: > Switzerland? Isn't each Swiss household required to have a gun? They are required to have military assault rifles, the storage of both gun and ammunition being very closely regulated. Handguns in Switzerland are also relatively closely regulated. Despite this, Switzerland has the second highest handgun ownership rate *and* the second highest handgun murder rate in the industrialised world: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-switzerland.htm You will note the 1 - 2 orders of magnitude difference in the handgun murder rate in most countries other than Switzerland compared to the United States. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Wed Apr 25 08:36:24 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:36:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Courtesy for other viewpoints (was Putting God to Rest) References: <462E5B39.9070203@lineone.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20070424150857.021a28a0@satx.rr.com> <7641ddc60704242028y5b146632k49b40aca9c66d1c4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <462F1308.9030701@thomasoliver.net> Jef Allbright wrote: >John C. Wright was active on our list from March through June of 2005. > I enjoyed a long but ultimately circular dialog with him about >morality. Ironically, his final post here was an exceedingly patient >and polite response to a bit of rudeness from Brett Patsch. > > > >- Jef > Interesting. I find I agree with Mr. Wright on the subject of rudeness. If contempt breeds familiarity then I'd rather leave it to the contemptible. Courtesy has enormous practical value in the exchange of ideas, as does honesty and respect. I believe greater intelligence evolves by means of integrating many viewpoints. If I were a scientist I would devise an experiment to demonstrate that hypothesis, but who disputes the empirical evidence? I also have a theory that what we say reflects our intentions and can have a degree of influence on reality. So why not have enough self respect to be careful what we say? Why make statements that express the opposite of extropian intentions? It seems to me that consistent alignment of intention and expression produces a better result than becoming hypnotized into aping negative pronouncements. Freedom of expression means we have a choice. It doesn't mandate Tourette's Syndrome. Cancel thought entropy! -- Thomas From jcowan5 at sympatico.ca Wed Apr 25 13:44:01 2007 From: jcowan5 at sympatico.ca (Josh Cowan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:44:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424002025.046e52b8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <62c14240704240646g75a7c791o78b05fa8ebc7ced6@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424152547.0465b180@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <12705ea88749405cef6b1cb7ab45696e@sympatico.ca> For a decent survey of the lay literature on Religion as feature or spandrel check out Dr. Barash's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The DNA of Religious Faith" http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php? id=w4r1q7lrr4rkng6hmkzv96zbmg3rg2db On Apr 24, 2007, at 3:27 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > At 10:06 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, samantha wrote: >> Mike Dougherty wrote: >>> On 4/24/07, Keith Henson wrote: >>> >>>> The mental mechanisms in brains where religion "resides" and runs >>>> was >>>> shaped by evolution going back millions of years. What manifests as >>>> religions today is the result of these mechanisms. Now there are >>>> two >> major >>>> choices, the mechanism(s) were selected for something else and >>>> happen >> to be >>>> used by religions, or they were directly evolved for something like >>>> religion. In either case, because they are so widespread, there >>>> must have >>>> been a considerable selection advantage for these mechanisms. >>> >> The alternative is that religion or the thinking and psychological >> patterns that give rise to it are a by product of one or more >> evolutionary advantageous developments. If this is so and if >> religion >> in moderns is problematic then it may well take a pretty active >> conscious set of decisions and some energy to counteract this effect >> in >> oneself. Certain types of magical thinking, superstition, >> authoritarianism and so on may be roughly defaults in human beings. > > That's not an alternative, just a restatement. > > Keith > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Wed Apr 25 14:51:11 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:51:11 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] New Hope for the Dead In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423151348.0228c1f0@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070423151348.0228c1f0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0704250751l6a71c18dxb3d3de9d7c7274e0@mail.gmail.com> Ha-ha! That story should have been entitled "New Hope for Damnation." Thank you for posting the link, D.B.. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 25 14:59:54 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:59:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido In-Reply-To: References: <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:26 PM 4/25/2007 +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: snip >Rather than adopting Bushido, we could have everyone including governments >and criminal gangs adopt Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, and >everything would be hunky-dory. I really doubt it. The trick to keeping humans out large scale violence is to keep their "bleak future" detectors off. The modern equivalent of game and berries is income per capita. Steady or rising income per capita keeps a population out of "war mode" unless they are attacked. Population growth faster than economic growth, the "per capita" term, is a formula for a population going into war or if they can't into related social disruptions like terrorism. That's where the IRA came from. And because a generation ago Irish women cut the number of children they had to about replacement, economic growth got ahead of population growth. That's why the IRA eventually went out of business. I speak as if this mechanistic view of wars was cut and dried, widely accepted. It isn't of course, but I don't know of a better model that is rooted in evolution, evolutionary psychology and accounts for wars. Certainly the *least* likely countries in the world to go to war are those with the lowest population growth. Of course if the income side starts looking bleak, that could change rapidly. Keith Henson From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Apr 25 15:46:33 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:46:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > Lee wrote > >> Your statements above are simply and totally stupid, >> reflecting complete ignorance of psychology. >> Moreover, they're insipid and ultimately meaningless, >> being nothing more than empty rhetoric and name-calling. > > But I don't think you should be punished, far from it, I think you should be > congratulated! I loved the way the insults came right after your > impassioned plea that we should all be polite to each other; it really did > have a delightful Hofstadter sort of feel to it, like "this sentence is > false". :-) Well, I hope that you truly did appreciate it, and that you knew that it was deliberately ironical. Alas, one just can never be sure in this medium. Surely you sensed a diminution of content as I myself went into silly name-calling mode? Hint: just exactly *what* is added to an argument by throwing in words like "idiotic", "stupid", "asinine", except to indicate your frame of mind? (Which I frankly seldom care about.) >> if I knew that some people here on this list were >> vociferously proclaiming that the NASA moon-landing >> was a hoax, I would not choose to describe their >> beliefs as "stupid". > > You say you wouldn't describe it as stupid, but I assume you'd still think > it's stupid (if not then there is something seriously wrong with you). Sorry to disappoint. I'd merely think their statement wrong. I know that it's not terribly satisfying to fail to throw in pointless insults, but I like sticking to facts. There are a lot of words for the verbally non-challenged to use in its place: "bizarre", "misinformed", "preposterous", and so on, whose syntactic objects clearly are beliefs not people, or the people who hold those beliefs. Ack! I can't keep up with the flood of email right now. Sorry if this point is being made by others. > But I don't think you should be punished, What a weird thought! However did it enter your mind? Punishment indeed. Oh yes. Sometimes people *are* expelled for vicious personal attacks. That's fine with me. Such noise really isn't interesting in the final analysis. Lee From jonkc at att.net Wed Apr 25 16:35:14 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:35:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> <050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> Me: >> You say you wouldn't describe it as stupid, but I assume you'd still >> think it's stupid (if not then there is something seriously wrong with >> you). "Lee Corbin" > Sorry to disappoint. I'd merely think their statement wrong. Ok, now we know, you think the idea of NASA faking the moon landing is not stupid, so could you please give us an example of something you think IS stupid. Or perhaps stupidity does not exist anywhere in the universe and the word should be removed from the English language because it will never be needed. That seems a bit stupid to me. John K Clark From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 17:14:46 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:14:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > The trick to keeping humans out large scale violence is to keep their > "bleak future" detectors off. The modern equivalent of game and berries > is > income per capita. Steady or rising income per capita keeps a population > out of "war mode" unless they are attacked. > > Keith, you keep harping on this topic of population growth as driving war. I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to "going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move there. Lord knows that we mastered taking down a mammoth long before we mastered taking down a walled city. And one could argue that if one is clever about it fewer people lost their lives in the process. And though I realize this will raise the censor awareness level -- *why* precisely did we go to war in (a) Korea; (b) Vietnam; (c) Iraq? You have to stretch very very far to argue that we were up against population constraints and or decreasing income per capita. I would also cite an interesting example involving the Mongols attacking Iran where it had little to do with population pressure and a lot to do with the Iranian's slaughtering Mongol ambassadors. Or consider for example the "Trojan wars" -- they were fought over a girl as stories go. Or the wars of Roman conquest? IMO, there is a lot of ego and lust for power involved in the theory of war. You need to document on a case by case basis the wars since the beginning of recorded history and how population pressure or declining economic fortunes drove them before I'll grant the argument. (I'd suggest this be a non-list based effort, so people can easily review and consider it.) Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brian at posthuman.com Wed Apr 25 17:06:54 2007 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:06:54 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gasoline machine In-Reply-To: <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> Message-ID: <462F8AAE.50601@posthuman.com> There's also this: Making Gasoline from Carbon Dioxide http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18582/ -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Apr 25 17:26:19 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:26:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Heartland: > First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only be >> destroyed >> or created. Stathis: > Yes, but an arbitrarily close to perfect copy is indistinguishable from a > resurrection, and indistinguishable from ordinary continuous life. It's an illusion of resurrection, not an actual resurrection. Stathis: > For all > you know, you might be dying all the time. A living thing can die at most once. It is wrong to think that death behaves just like sleep. If you're sleeping, you can wake up. If you die, you're never coming back. Keith: > It's not commonly called that, but in what respect does rebooting your > computer in the morning after if being off over night differ from the > description of "resurrection"? By rebooting you can only "resurrect" the type of instance which expired yesterday, not the expired instance itself. If you wanted to resurrect that instance, you would have to go back in time and transfer it to today which is, of course, still impossible. Each life is an instance. Once it expires, resurrection of that instance is physically/logically impossible unless posthumans figure out a way to upload from the past. Stathis: > So if the real Hitler had decided at the end of the war to mend his ways, > should he have been punished? > What if he had fallen into a frozen lake and > then after being revived decided to mend his ways? Punishment (especially physical) is so obsolete. It accomplishes nothing. Ideally, I would vote for changing the type on this instance from Adolf Hitler to, say, harmless John Doe - a holy grail of rehabilitation. Punishment can only be experienced by the process/instance, not by a static type. It's the Adolf Hitler type that is evil here, not the instance of life that carries that type. And even though it is the type that should be punished, not the instance, in practice it's physically impossible to punish an abstract symbol as symbols can't experience anything. The only way we could "punish" it would be to erase and replace it with something else. H. From sjatkins at mac.com Wed Apr 25 18:14:28 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:14:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: <002b01c77a57$56848fa0$6501a8c0@brainiac> <461A7C80.6090007@thomasoliver.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070409172544.02c43458@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <462F9A84.8000300@mac.com> Robert Bradbury wrote: > > On 4/9/07, *Keith Henson* > wrote: > > Virtually all of Saudi Arabia's food is imported, swapped for > oil. Anyone > have an idea of how many that part of the world could support > without food > imports? > > > It depends upon whether they invested in desalination plants to grow > fresh water crops or invested in solar ponds to grow fish, shrimp, > etc. in salt water. It isn't as if they *lack* sufficient sunlight to > feed themselves. Indeed it is one of the world's richest countries in > this respect. See [1]. When I was stuck in Riyadh around 1984 supporting a software project I was a designer on I saw a bit of how things were then (when they would let me out of the hotel). The standing joke was that you could tell in S.A. whether something was work or not. If it was work, they would hire a foreigner to do it! It did seem that all low level jobs and a great number of high tech ones as well were done by various immigrant laborers and consultants in the country for longer or shorter times. Most of the management and financial level was Saudi, but not a lot else in my limited 2 month myopic view. Riyadh got all of its water from the coast 300 miles away. Water is a sign of wealth in a desert culture so it was spent with abandon in Riyadh. I think they have the most exotic fountains in all the world. The culture was very schizoid. S.A. build up wonderful housing in its cities and greatly expanded them. It tried to lure in the more traditional and often nomadic Saudis to the cities and more modern ways. Larger numbers refused and the new housing was running 40% vacant in Riyadh. Most of the Saudis I worked with were young and educated in the West. Many were very conflicted between the religious strictures and conservatism of their own culture and what they experienced in school. But the money was really good and they played along. If you went driving outside of the city at night you would see mercedes parked all over the desert for various liasons though. Many educated Saudis flew away to Bahrain or to Bangkok on most weekends. Yet "chop-chop square", where old (sharia?) laws were executed especially ones that required the use of cutlery was alive and well. To be in trouble you need to not only do something against the strictures but be accused by two adult males of good standing. They tended to watch each other's backs. All in all the atmosphere reminded me of a perpetual Baptist retreat except with less honest shenanigans. So much of S.A.'s incredible wealth has left the country, sequestered abroad or simply blown by it's tremendously bloated royal class. S.A. made the mistake as many have pointed out of supporting lavishly its religious infrastructure including very radical and fundamentalist elements. Much of the excess and embezzlement of the royal class has been noticed. The fundamentalists of course believe the rulers are hyprocrits to the faith and must be turned out so that S.A. can turn into much more of a theocracy than in is. > > I suspect that the reason there is so much unemployment is that the > government simply has not adopted policies reflective of dealing with > the situation when the oil runs out. It isn't like they couldn't > afford to build the plants or the ponds -- but I think the culture is > set up such that that work would be done by workers imported from > poorer countries. A funny thing about the oil in S.A. Before the Saudis took full control in 1979 the proven reserves were set by Western standard reporting methods to a bit over 100 billion barrels. In 1979 Saudi Aramco claimed 150 billion barrels in reserves and stopped detailed field by field reporting. By 1982 it had grown to 160 billion with no discoveries sufficient to account for it. In 1988 the Saudis claimed a whopping 260 billion barrels! Even more amazingly this figure has never gone down despite all the oil pumped out of S.A. since then. Such a miracle! No outside group is allowed to attempt to validate these "reserves". A storm is brewing. A great oil credibility bubble is likely to burst soon. Securing abundant cheap energy to replace oil is species critical in the near term. - samantha From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Apr 25 19:05:16 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:05:16 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido References: <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425135510.0223c808@satx.rr.com> At 10:59 AM 4/25/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >Certainly the *least* likely countries in the world to go to war are those >with the lowest population growth. This explains why neither the USA (c. +1.3%) nor Australia (c. +1.2%) are involved in the Iraq conflict. Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 19:06:23 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:06:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Heartland wrote: > > Heartland: > First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only > be destroyed or created. Cannot they be "recreated"? A creation, one might argue is an instantiation of a pattern expressed in matter. Though its "initial" creation, can never be recreated (it violates the definition of "initial") it is certainly hard to argue against a precise rearrangement of atoms that are identical to the original (yes you an argue this but doing so involves significant aspects of identity of atoms, their precise location, etc.) I am arguing that if you take the "original" and the "copy" apart they are effectively identical. Yes, one might argue that isotopic differences mean that they are not "identical" and this would change thought patterns but you are into Penrose territory here and I can easily refute it by citing a precise isotopic copy. Stathis: > > Yes, but an arbitrarily close to perfect copy is indistinguishable from > a > > resurrection, and indistinguishable from ordinary continuous life. Stathis has it right here... (A copy is a copy is a copy...) If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and behaves like a duck -- it is probably a duck until one can present very strong evidence against it being a duck. (This goes down a very interesting path -- to what extent will future extropians be tasked with the problem of "That is not Max", "That is not Anders", "That is not Natasha", "That is not Eugen" and "That does not even remotely resemble Spike". One may need a criteria to accept or reject stand-ins.) It's an illusion of resurrection, not an actual resurrection. All "resurrections" are illusions. To be a true "resurrection" I would argue that you would have to restore the complete atomic state of an individual at the time of their death. As living humans are always "in flux" (exchanging atomospheric atoms for "in body atoms", etc.) it is probably impossible to "ressurrect" someone. So the question under discussion is whether or not one is dealing with a "true resurrection" (which probably is impossible) or an "effective ressurection" which is perhaps quite possible. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 18:38:18 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:38:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] OFFLIST Re: A Grim Vision ...? Message-ID: Samantha, interesting. Perhaps at some point we may have an opportunity to compare your SA experiences with my Russian experiences. Two quite interesting studies in "cultural shifts" IMO. As an aside, I would observe with your observation of the problem of unverified reserves. But I do not paint quite so dire a picture -- the U.S. has demonstrated perviously (during WWII) that it can shift extremely large amounts of industrial capacity should it choose to do so. The power sources, be they nuclear or solar or wind or tidal, are available. It is simply a question of when we will pay the price to take advantage of them. Now of course they all get much cheaper if we had nanotech (or even robust biotech) but it isn't clear when those will be bottles sitting on the shelves in the back of the bar to be selected from. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Apr 25 19:13:31 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:13:31 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] META:Re: Re: A Grim Vision ...? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070425191331.GJ9439@leitl.org> Folks, please do not use OFFLIST in the Subject: unless you want Mailman to automatically held posts for approval. Since I usually can't tell whether it's really private, or not, I usually just approve those, but at a delay. On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 02:38:18PM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > Samantha, interesting. Perhaps at some point we may have an > opportunity to compare your SA experiences with my Russian > experiences. Two quite interesting studies in "cultural shifts" IMO. > As an aside, I would observe with your observation of the problem of > unverified reserves. But I do not paint quite so dire a picture -- > the U.S. has demonstrated perviously (during WWII) that it can shift > extremely large amounts of industrial capacity should it choose to do > so. The power sources, be they nuclear or solar or wind or tidal, are > available. It is simply a question of when we will pay the price to > take advantage of them. Now of course they all get much cheaper if we > had nanotech (or even robust biotech) but it isn't clear when those > will be bottles sitting on the shelves in the back of the bar to be > selected from. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 20:23:36 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:23:36 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > The trick to keeping humans out large scale violence is to keep their > "bleak future" detectors off. The modern equivalent of game and berries is > income per capita. Steady or rising income per capita keeps a population > out of "war mode" unless they are attacked. > > Population growth faster than economic growth, the "per capita" term, is a > formula for a population going into war or if they can't into related > social disruptions like terrorism. That's where the IRA came from. And > because a generation ago Irish women cut the number of children they had to > about replacement, economic growth got ahead of population growth. That's > why the IRA eventually went out of business. > This is a misleading interpretation. The Northern Ireland women had the same birth rate reduction as the rest of the UK. And a similar birth rate reduction occurred in the modern states in Europe as well. The birth rate reduction had nothing to do with the IRA terrorism. Re-arranging the politics and administration so that the Catholics didn't feel as much victimisation as before, caused reduced popular support for the IRA. This, and more Catholic political representation, forced the IRA to stop the bombing and reduce their shooting to 'normal' gangsterism levels. BillK From benboc at lineone.net Wed Apr 25 20:28:58 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:28:58 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] spect (was Putting God to Rest) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462FBA0A.30301@lineone.net> Anna Taylor wrote: > Samantha Atkins wrote: > >Actually everyone has a right to believe whatever > >they wish but they have no right whatsoever to > >respect or kind treatment for believing pernicious > >nonsense. The nonsense itself has no "rights" at > >all. There is no "debate" implied or required here. > There is no debate for you. Are you implying that any > and all people that believe in God should have no > right to respect? ... and lots more about 'respect'. This 'respect' idea is quite interesting. It may be one of those words that everyone uses, but often meaning different things. My take is that respect is earned. If i respect somebody or something, it's because i've been impressed in some way. A lot of people seem to think that if you don't respect someone, then you 'disrespect' them. And that this is a bad thing. Where's the middle ground? It seems to be missing. We need something like 'arespect' or 'abrespect'. Perhaps this is why 'no right to respect' is seen as a negative thing to say. I don't think that believers in gods should have any right to respect, not mine, anyway. But i do think they should have the right to 'arespect', as should everyone until they demonstrate how worthy of respect or contempt they are. I don't respect anyone who holds irrational superstitious beliefs - not for holding them, certainly. I also have no respect for those beliefs themselves (which is a separate thing, that some people often forget, or get confused about). That's not to say that i necessarily hold them in contempt (or 'disrespect', if you insist). I might do, of course, but the one doesn't inevitably follow from the other. It seems funny to me that a lot of people think that they are 'owed respect' from people they've never even met before. I suspect that a lot of the time when people say 'i respect ...' they mean that they tolerate. Suppose i said that Hitler was owed respect for his beliefs about the nature of Jews? Or that atrologers should be given respect because they think that star patterns affect our personalities? Those things make as much sense as saying that belief in gods should be respected, or that the people who hold such beliefs deserve respect. (Oh, no! i just realised, i've fallen foul of Godwin's Law! I'm embarrassed now.) ben zaiboc From sti at pooq.com Wed Apr 25 20:53:19 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:53:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <20070425065042.GP9439@leitl.org> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <20070425065042.GP9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <462FBFBF.6040409@pooq.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 05:52:01PM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: >> If all of you get KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter I should not bother with >> posting these gems. I've wanted to subscribe to the Daily Newsletter but that site is such a pain to navigate that I've never managed to find out how. From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 21:00:27 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:00:27 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <462FBFBF.6040409@pooq.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <20070425065042.GP9439@leitl.org> <462FBFBF.6040409@pooq.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Stirling Westrup wrote: > I've wanted to subscribe to the Daily Newsletter but that site is such a pain > to navigate that I've never managed to find out how. Go here: and type your email address in the box in the left column, just above mid-screen. That's all. :) BillK From benboc at lineone.net Wed Apr 25 20:46:04 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:46:04 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462FBE0C.4010607@lineone.net> "Stathis Papaioannou" wrote: > On 4/25/07, ben wrote: > > > > > > I've wondered before if there would be a niche for 'professional health > > carers', i.e. people who get paid to care about (not for) your health. > > They would be augmented by expert medical systems, know enough about > > medicine to know when it's time to call in the big guns, but above all, > > they would be 'carers' (as in 'care about', rather than 'care for'). ... etc. > > I dunno, maybe it's a tall order, but i think it would be a vast > > improvement. >You're describing GP's, or perhaps community nurses. No, the difference is that GPs and such come and go. The point of the idea is that you have someone who stays with you and gets to know you and your details, and builds up a personal relationship. Each one would have a relatively small number of clients that they could pay attention to. GPs are far too busy, and you have to get a new one if you move. ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Wed Apr 25 21:00:27 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:00:27 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462FC16B.2050808@lineone.net> I do get irked with all the american politics that keeps cropping up, but then i see something like this: >Yeah, that wasn't right. Thanks for calling me on it so I can >apologize. I felt rebuked by what seemed a negative response to what >I posted. I was still defensive after a few hours, so the next time I >checked the thread I responded emotionally. I read your response a >few hours ago and i've been thinking you are right. Mike isn't the only person to have said something like this from time to time. Where else can you see such intellectual honesty and willingness to properly re-examine opinions? Not many places at all. ben zaiboc, being appreciative From benboc at lineone.net Wed Apr 25 21:22:04 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:22:04 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <462FC67C.9030300@lineone.net> "Technotranscendence" wrote: > On Tuesday, April 24, 2007 2:35 PM ben benboc at lineone.net wrote: > > The Avantguardian wrote: > > >> >> I would expect a society where everyone carried >> >> weapons to work very politely. > > > > Is this a testable hypothesis? > > > > Do we have any examples of such societies, past or present? > > > > What about gang societies in certain cities? >Is everyone armed in such societies? I thought that the cities with >strong gang cultures in the US -- e.g., LA, NYC, Newark NJ -- are cities >with strict gun control. I would expect such cities to have few people >carrying guns -- save for criminals. So, I would question your example. > > Or is that a bad example, because the gang members are > > all 'bad guys'? >No, it's a bad example because in places where criminal gangs rule, it >tends to be the case that few people are legally allowed to be armed. > >This doesn't mean that The Avantguardian is correct, but it means your >counterexample does not really speak directly to his position. Yeah, it wasn't a good example. >> I suspect it's not that simple. > >I suspect you're right, though not given the example you bring up. In >fact, I think that that case actually supports The Avantguardian. That >said, however, I suspect that politeness has more to do with other >cultural factors. Of course, these factors would seem to be reinforced >by people being allowed free access to arms. Why so? Well, politeness >would be one way of defusing most situations that might lead to >violence. The abusive might, under such conditions, think twice before >insulting or abusing the wimpy guy. .. or they might just get a bigger gun. ben zaiboc From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 21:54:12 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:54:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I seem to remember Anders Sandberg asking if someone was up for a discussion on consequentialism versus deontologism. I am! The moral part of me is all about hedonistic utilitarianism. I would be interested to know what other beliefs/views people here have on ethics. Do some of you advocate ethics consisting of inviolable rights as opposed to utilitarianism, to any extent whatsoever, and why? Will posthumans more likely be utilitarians, rights advocates or something else? TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 25 22:44:38 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:44:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:14 PM 4/25/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: >On 4/25/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: >> >>The trick to keeping humans out large scale violence is to keep their >>"bleak future" detectors off. The modern equivalent of game and berries is >>income per capita. Steady or rising income per capita keeps a population >>out of "war mode" unless they are attacked. > >Keith, you keep harping on this topic of population growth as driving war. You miss the point of the model. Population could be growing fast and there would be no drift into war provided income was growing as fast or faster. (Or something else was keeping the "bleak future" detectors off.) Population could even be shrinking, but if the economy was shrinking faster that would bias a population toward war. >I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to >"going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources >are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move >there. "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, most productive habitats were normally already taken. "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent encounters with other human groups. "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy penalties. "Moreover, giving in to pressure from outside might establish a pattern of victimization. Encouraged by their success, the alien group might repeat and even increase its pressure. "A strategy of conflict, therefore, concerns not only the object presently in dispute but also the whole pattern of future relations. Standing for one's own might in fact mean lessening the occurrence of conflict in the future. No less so, and perhaps more, than actual fighting, conflict is about deterrence." http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf (This is one of the most influential papers I have read in my life.) >Lord knows that we mastered taking down a mammoth long before we mastered >taking down a walled city. And one could argue that if one is clever >about it fewer people lost their lives in the process. > >And though I realize this will raise the censor awareness level -- *why* >precisely did we go to war in (a) Korea; (b) Vietnam; (c) Iraq? You have >to stretch very very far to argue that we were up against population >constraints and or decreasing income per capita. The modern world is *so* far from the hunter-gatherer bands in which war originated that you have to be very careful. But first you need to see who started the war (attacked). Was it the people with rising incomes and a bright future? Do you have figures on the per capita change in North Korea in the years leading up to the war? (Since they were the ones who started that war.) In both Korea and Vietnam the US going to war was because an attack on allies was taken as an attack on the US. Iraq. The first one was like Korea, they attacked and overran a county we had an interest in protecting, i.e., for oil. Why did Iraq start the war? For that matter why did they start the one with Iran? As a guess both had the stone age goal of burning off excess population, the one against Kuwait was clearly about taking resources. The US attack on Iraq was supported by the US population because they had been outright misled into thinking that the 9/11 attack was supported by Iraq and had been loaded with fear about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction." Stupid I know, but part of the model is that people in war mode lose a lot of their ability to think rationally. >I would also cite an interesting example involving the Mongols attacking >Iran where it had little to do with population pressure and a lot to do >with the Iranian's slaughtering Mongol ambassadors. Actually, that's not the case if you consider what drove the Mongol expansion in the first place. Smaller Mongol groups had been happily killing each other off far back in history and honing the skills of horse warfare against each other. Just before they broke out of that part of the world, the smaller polities were combined. This suppressed the previous warfare between the groups and the population took off. In a static economy whatever number of children the average woman has in excess of those who die off from other reasons has to be burned off in wars. And if you suppress wars between little groups, the only alternative is wars with outside bigger groups. You might note that Mongolia is still a sparsely populated country. "At 1,564,116 square kilometres, Mongolia is the nineteenth largest country in the world, but also the least densely populated. The country contains very little arable land as much of its area is covered by arid and unproductive steppes with mountains to the north and west and the Gobi Desert to the south. Approximately thirty percent of the country's 2.8 million people are nomadic or semi-nomadic." >Or consider for example the "Trojan wars" -- they were fought over a girl >as stories go. Or the wars of Roman conquest? If the human population doubles every generation (which is about the case if the women are reasonably well fed) then unless you get a plague a number equal to half population has to die in wars every generation. For static food production that is. There were times, ancient Greece, Easter Island where farming practices wrecked the agricultural productivity of the land. Other times, Mayans, American Southwest where climate change got them, either directly or through causing wars. >IMO, there is a lot of ego and lust for power involved in the theory of war. Without a doubt. There is ego and lust for power (or status) in just about anything people do--even posting to mailing lists. :-) But wars are a way to get you and your genes wiped out. Genes for going to war when it was wasn't the best survival option for you (and more important, your genes) would be simply weeded out over time. >You need to document on a case by case basis the wars since the beginning >of recorded history and how population pressure or declining economic >fortunes drove them before I'll grant the argument. > >(I'd suggest this be a non-list based effort, so people can easily review >and consider it.) That's a lifetime effort. Besides recorded history is not anything like the EEA where these psychological traits were shaped. For one thing, high techs can exterminate low techs with relatively little danger. They might do it just for profit. How about finding a counter example? Can you think of any group that started a war with a group on the same technological level where the side that started the war was *not* looking at a bleak future? If you want to use the US civil war as an example, the South was (correctly) looking at a bleak economic future without slaves, and they started the war. "Fighting commenced on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a United States (federal) military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, located in the Confederate States of America." Keith From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 22:57:12 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:57:12 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704251557p72ed58fdr98648b51e88fc2ac@mail.gmail.com> On 4/25/07, TheMan wrote: > > The moral part of me is all about hedonistic > utilitarianism. I would be interested to know what > other beliefs/views people here have on ethics. Do > some of you advocate ethics consisting of inviolable > rights as opposed to utilitarianism, to any extent > whatsoever, and why? Yes. Because mortal man is fallible. Suppose we believe it will on balance contribute to the overall good if we lie, cheat, steal, commit murder or whatever. Perhaps it really will. But perhaps we're mistaken and it really won't. _The second possibility is more likely_. So even from a utilitarian standpoint, it's better to have ethical standards that we don't violate, even when we think it's worth doing so in a particular case. Will posthumans more likely be utilitarians, rights > advocates or something else? > *shrug* I lack the gift of prophecy, alas. One could coherently argue that if there was an entity wiser than we are, it might reasonably swing further in the direction of utilitarianism than we should. (In the extreme case, if there were an omniscient, infallible God then He might be a pure utilitarian.) I don't know whether it'll actually work out that way though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:16:09 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:16:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <547567.70168.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 25 23:28:07 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:28:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: <547567.70168.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <547567.70168.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, TheMan wrote: > Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to > take it that we have democracy in the western > societies. Do we really? > > What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? > What should it be like? See previous post on morality becoming collaborative social decision-making for the discovery and application of increasingly effective positive-sum solutions to the problem of how best to promote our shared values (that work) into the future we create. Politics has always been about scarcity, but some of us see it shifting from scarcity of resources to scarcity of attention leading to positive-sum solutions. - Jef From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:16:36 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:16:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <292617.84529.qm@web51911.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? Behave wel nou you. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:16:40 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:16:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <811359.30544.qm@web51909.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? Behave wel nou you. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:17:04 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:17:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <752979.29989.qm@web51909.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? Let blfou bnodf. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:17:10 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:17:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <801763.76245.qm@web51906.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? Let blfou bnodf. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:17:17 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:17:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <841516.98350.qm@web51908.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? What will true democracy be like in a posthuman world? What should it be like? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? The majority of the people? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? But no election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. So some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about it in the first place. Furthermore, 1) assuming hypothetically that the majority of the self-proclaimedly sane part of the people is somehow magically "right" about who should be allowed to judge who is deranged and who is not, and thus who should be allowed to vote and who should not, and 2) assuming this is democracy simply because the self-proclaimedly sane are in majority anyway, and because whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than all the physics PhD's in the world together? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's "category" are like (the category in this case being dyslectics), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity needed for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, one must deny many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults the right to vote. Categories like children and adults are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? Can democracy even be theoretically possible? Let blfou bnodf. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mabranu at yahoo.com Wed Apr 25 23:45:41 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:45:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <74067.10005.qm@web51908.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Most people think of the western countries as democracies. They are officially called democracies. Are they really democracies? Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to vote - or so we are made believe. Some people may think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to vote, whereas others may think the same person is mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? Says who? Says the majority of the people in elections? Then who is the people? The deranged too? Before the deranged have been found deranged by psychiatrists authorized by a people consisting of everybody including those who will be found deranged by those psychiatrists, nobody has the right to deny the deranged the right to vote, right? Because that would be to disqualify them even before they can be democratically disqualified! So until then, they must be allowed to have a say about who should be allowed to decide whether or not they are too deranged to be allowed to vote, right? No election or referendum that includes all those who are currently considered deranged has ever taken place about that issue, as far as I know. This means some people are currently unjustly discriminated by other people, by having been denied their fundamental right to have a say about the whole thing in the first place. But now let's be "generous" and assume this is democracy simply because 1)the now self-proclaimedly sane with a right to vote are (and would be) in majority anyway, and because 2)whenever a majority decides something, it's democracy, then: would it be democracy also if the employed, who are in majority, would deny the unemployed the right to vote? What would be the difference? Now let's look at the concept of democracy from a slightly different angle. If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in every possibly relevant way, and even knows more about politics and society, than a given officially sane 50 year old, why should the 50 year old be allowed to vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of people do probably exist. Isn't denying all children the right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? Should a person who has, for example, severe dyslexia, but is nevertheless miraculously bright in theoretical physics (thanks to help from friends with the studying), be denied a PhD degree in theoretical physics because of his dyslexia? Even if he is better at theoretical physics than any other person in the world? No. Judging someone simply on the basis of what _most_ people in that person's perceived "category" are like (the perceived "category" in this case being "people with dyslexia"), is unjust discrimination. Then, so is judging children on the basis of what most children are like, when it comes to the maturity required for voting. Not letting for example the brightest 15 year olds vote is just as unjust discrimination as would be denying a dyslectic theoretical physics genius a PhD in theoretical physics. Alternatively, many "officially perfectly sane but, compared to the very brightest children in the country/state, relatively immature and/or illiterate" adults should be denied the right to vote. Categories like "children" and "adults" are just mental constructions, just like the dividing of people into dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed and unemployed etc. Like the allegedly mentally deranged, the children too have all the way from the beginning been unjustly denied the right to democratically take part in the decision about whether age criterions or something else (or whether any criterion at all) should decide who should be allowed to vote (about who should be allowed to vote about who should be allowed to vote etc forever), and who should not. So how can anybody say that we live in democracy? Is democracy even theoretically possible? Will true democracy be possible in a posthuman world? How? What will it be like? What _should_ it be like? TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Apr 25 22:49:46 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:49:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Academic Fights In-Reply-To: <462F8AAE.50601@posthuman.com> References: <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425184754.046c6418@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> The author sent me this great paper: Why Are Academic Fights So Nasty? John Orbell Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 "That academic fights are so nasty because there's so little at stake is a clever verbal quip (thus probably invented by an academic ), but obviously wrong. Even academics have better things to do with their time than fighting for no reason at all. But academic fights are often very nasty indeed. So the interesting question is: Why are academic fights so often so nasty? What is at stake? snip "The second is: Ideas are a uniquely volatile medium for status fights because they are critically important to our psychic welfare, making any attack on our particular ideas an attack on that welfare. This requires us to think, for the moment, about human nature in general, not just academic nature, and that gets us to evolution. Implicit in a Darwinian view of life is one simple fact: The world is a very dangerous place. It is probably less dangerous for humans living in modern, secure, urban environments than it was for our ancestors living on the savanna, but the important fact for understanding human psychology is that it was a very dangerous place when their brains were evolving. And having ideas might have played an important role in helping brain-owners survive and reproduce in this ancestral period." snip I wonder if this is the explanation for many fights on the net? The article isn't going to be published though it has been widely circulated. I may try to talk him into putting it on his web site. In the meantime folks who would like to read it could probably get a copy from me. Keith From ben at goertzel.org Wed Apr 25 23:56:40 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:56:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Academic Fights In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425184754.046c6418@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> <462F8AAE.50601@posthuman.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425184754.046c6418@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704251656y6b527c56k5e6b6c42d1807eb1@mail.gmail.com> Well, but only a small percentage of academic fights are actually about ideas... On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > The author sent me this great paper: > > Why Are Academic Fights So Nasty? > > John Orbell > Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403 > > "That academic fights are so nasty because there's so little at stake is a > clever verbal quip (thus probably invented by an academic ), but obviously > wrong. Even academics have better things to do with their time than > fighting for no reason at all. But academic fights are often very nasty > indeed. So the interesting question is: Why are academic fights so often > so nasty? What is at stake? > > snip > > "The second is: Ideas are a uniquely volatile medium for status fights > because they are critically important to our psychic welfare, making any > attack on our particular ideas an attack on that welfare. This requires > us to think, for the moment, about human nature in general, not just > academic nature, and that gets us to evolution. Implicit in a Darwinian > view of life is one simple fact: The world is a very dangerous place. It > is probably less dangerous for humans living in modern, secure, urban > environments than it was for our ancestors living on the savanna, but the > important fact for understanding human psychology is that it was a very > dangerous place when their brains were evolving. And having ideas might > have played an important role in helping brain-owners survive and > reproduce > in this ancestral period." > > snip > > I wonder if this is the explanation for many fights on the net? > > The article isn't going to be published though it has been widely > circulated. I may try to talk him into putting it on his web site. In > the > meantime folks who would like to read it could probably get a copy from > me. > > Keith > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Wed Apr 25 23:58:23 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:58:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> --- Jef Allbright wrote: > I have a great admiration for the code of honor and > discipline at the > heart of bushido. In particular, bushido demands > that one treat those > below oneself (in the class system) with the same > strict respect for > honor (appropriate to their class) as those in the > higher classes. Yes. Much of Bushido evolved to prevent unnecessary fighting. Over-eager warriors had very short military careers in feudal Japan. > This system worked very well in terms of enforcing > social order, > especially during the two and a half centuries of > the Tokugawa era, > but this stability was due to the severely enforced > hierarchical power > structure, ranked from emperor, shogun, daimyou, > *four* classes of > samurai, followed by peasants, artisans, and > merchants at the bottom. > Even within the samurai classes, totaling some 7-10% > of the > population, stratification was such that only the > "high samurai" were > allowed to ride horses, but all samurai were allowed > to wear two > swords. I think you are too fixated on Bushido in its historical context rather than as an abstractable ethical code applicable in any time and place. Bushido as an ethic can be summed up by approximately 8 virtues: wisdom, rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, truth, honor, and loyalty. None of these are dependent on time, place, government, or cultural background. They are applicable anywhere from ancient Japan to the modern American office to an Internet mailing list. In a most general sense Bushido is the "way of the warrior" and war has changed a lot over the years. I for example don't even own a sword. They are practically useless in either modern combat or modern business. But the principles certainly still apply and they have tremendous survival value both on the battlefield and in the boardroom. > > As I've said, I admire the honor at the core of > bushido and I think it > had great strengths compared to other feudal > systems, but by its very > nature, extremely demanding and rigid, it is > impractical for any but > an elite, and unsustainable without rigid > stratification of power. I agree that it is impractical to expect everybody to adhere to such demanding code. But I can't think of any other social software that confers as much survival advantage on the persons and societies espousing it as Bushido. And while its rigor as a practice may indeed make its practitioners a self-selected elite, I think that if at least 10% of the world's population made an earnest attempt to practice it, then humanity and civilization could survive Armageddon, the Singularity, and any other existential risk with flying colors. Furthermore the virtue of "loyalty" need not apply to any hiearchy. It can simply apply to your family, your friends, your company, your country, etc. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 26 00:00:05 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:00:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Academic Fights In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425184754.046c6418@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070423014228.086598a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462C880D.8060303@pooq.com> <462F123B.3030009@pooq.com> <462F8AAE.50601@posthuman.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425184754.046c6418@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > The author sent me this great paper: > > Why Are Academic Fights So Nasty? > > John Orbell > Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403 > I wonder if this is the explanation for many fights on the net? I'd say that in most cases it's much more about status than ideas. - Jef From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 00:12:22 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:12:22 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Heartland wrote: > > Heartland: > > First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only > be > >> destroyed > >> or created. > > Stathis: > > Yes, but an arbitrarily close to perfect copy is indistinguishable from > a > > resurrection, and indistinguishable from ordinary continuous life. > > It's an illusion of resurrection, not an actual resurrection. > > Stathis: > > For all > > you know, you might be dying all the time. > > A living thing can die at most once. It is wrong to think that death > behaves just > like sleep. If you're sleeping, you can wake up. If you die, you're never > coming > back. But suppose science discovers tomorrow evidence that you die during sleep, according to some definition of death you agree to, eg. your EEG goes flat for a few seconds between REM and non-REM sleep every night. Most people would say, "Oh, that's interesting" and get on with their lives (or "their" lives, or their "lives"). You might still claim that this is a very bad thing, but the point is it doesn't make any difference; a perfect illusion of continuous life is just as good as continuous life. I could further claim that you die and are pseudo-resurrected every instant because there is nothing "between" quantum intervals of existence. You might disagree, arguing that it isn't really complete and permanent cessation of physical activity. I could counter that it *is* complete and permanent cessation of physical activity, and the person in the next quantum interval isn't really you, he just thinks he is you. The point is, you can define death the way you do, but then death wouldn't matter to anyone (other than you). We would need a new definition of death which did not involve any pseudo-resurrection to take the place of what people normally worry about when they worry about dying. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Apr 25 23:17:10 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:17:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, TheMan wrote: > I seem to remember Anders Sandberg asking if someone > was up for a discussion on consequentialism versus > deontologism. > > I am! > > The moral part of me is all about hedonistic > utilitarianism. I would be interested to know what > other beliefs/views people here have on ethics. Do > some of you advocate ethics consisting of inviolable > rights as opposed to utilitarianism, to any extent > whatsoever, and why? > > Will posthumans more likely be utilitarians, rights > advocates or something else? I see human morality as preferences with regard to the perceived rightness of various choices, encoded into our biology and our culture via evolutionary processes selecting for what generally "worked" in the domain of multi-agent interaction. Since our preferences to a large extent define us, it is commonly very difficult for individuals to see or rationally evaluate the basis of these choices. Making matters more difficult, we are still riding the wave of social backlash in response to abuses of power in recent history, and any suggestion of "rational" morality is likely to be taken as a threat of "unfeeling" morality. That said, I believe we are in fact on the cusp of extending our moral decision-making beyond the blind evolutionary preferences of our biology and culture, and on the verge of applying an intensional process of collaborative decision-making, promoting an increasing context of shared values into the future we create. This framework, representing (1) awareness of our fine-grained values and (2) awareness of methods of effective interaction, will effectively amplify "wisdom" based on evolving human values beyond the moral capacity of any human individual of today. In contrast to your assumption of hedonistic pleasure as the ultimate "good", I see Growth, in terms of our shared values that work, as a more fundamental good, and would point out that such Growth provides the robust infrastructure for ongoing pleasure. With regard to Utilitarian views of morality and ethics, I would point out the unavoidability of unintended and unanticipated consequences and suggest that it in the bigger picture we can promote our values more effectively by implementing principles of best known methods rather than by directly seeking to maximize utility as currently conceived. Sorry for being so formal. Have a nice day! - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 26 00:13:54 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:13:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> References: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, The Avantguardian wrote: > --- Jef Allbright wrote: > > I have a great admiration for the code of honor and > > discipline at the > > heart of bushido. In particular, bushido demands > > that one treat those > > below oneself (in the class system) with the same > > strict respect for > > honor (appropriate to their class) as those in the > > higher classes. > > Yes. Much of Bushido evolved to prevent unnecessary > fighting. Over-eager warriors had very short military > careers in feudal Japan. > > > This system worked very well in terms of enforcing > > social order, > > especially during the two and a half centuries of > > the Tokugawa era, > > but this stability was due to the severely enforced > > hierarchical power > > structure, ranked from emperor, shogun, daimyou, > > *four* classes of > > samurai, followed by peasants, artisans, and > > merchants at the bottom. > > Even within the samurai classes, totaling some 7-10% > > of the > > population, stratification was such that only the > > "high samurai" were > > allowed to ride horses, but all samurai were allowed > > to wear two > > swords. > > I think you are too fixated on Bushido in its > historical context rather than as an abstractable > ethical code applicable in any time and place. Bushido > as an ethic can be summed up by approximately 8 > virtues: wisdom, rectitude, courage, benevolence, > respect, truth, honor, and loyalty. > > None of these are dependent on time, place, > government, or cultural background. They are > applicable anywhere from ancient Japan to the modern > American office to an Internet mailing list. > > In a most general sense Bushido is the "way of the > warrior" and war has changed a lot over the years. I > for example don't even own a sword. They are > practically useless in either modern combat or modern > business. But the principles certainly still apply and > they have tremendous survival value both on the > battlefield and in the boardroom. > > > > > As I've said, I admire the honor at the core of > > bushido and I think it > > had great strengths compared to other feudal > > systems, but by its very > > nature, extremely demanding and rigid, it is > > impractical for any but > > an elite, and unsustainable without rigid > > stratification of power. > > I agree that it is impractical to expect everybody to > adhere to such demanding code. But I can't think of > any other social software that confers as much > survival advantage on the persons and societies > espousing it as Bushido. > > And while its rigor as a practice may indeed make its > practitioners a self-selected elite, I think that if > at least 10% of the world's population made an earnest > attempt to practice it, then humanity and civilization > could survive Armageddon, the Singularity, and any > other existential risk with flying colors. > > Furthermore the virtue of "loyalty" need not apply to > any hiearchy. It can simply apply to your family, your > friends, your company, your country, etc. Stuart, I don't see any substantial difference in our views here. I generally agree with you on the value of these values to anyone who adopts them, and in a more limited sense, the derivative value to society. My points were more focused on (1) the inherent tendency of this value set to select for an elite group, and (2) the issue of social stability discussed earlier. I don't have a sword either, but that's not to say I'm never armed. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 26 00:26:50 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:26:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:26 PM 4/25/2007 -0400, Heartland wrote: >Keith: > > It's not commonly called that, but in what respect does rebooting your > > computer in the morning after if being off over night differ from the > > description of "resurrection"? > >By rebooting you can only "resurrect" the type of instance which expired >yesterday, >not the expired instance itself. If you wanted to resurrect that instance, >you >would have to go back in time and transfer it to today which is, of >course, still >impossible. > >Each life is an instance. Once it expires, resurrection of that instance is >physically/logically impossible unless posthumans figure out a way to >upload from >the past. It's not so easy. If you leave my desktop on over night, it stays on, but my wife's laptop is a different matter. Depending on how it is set up, after various times of inactivity, it shuts down the screen, slows the memory access to a crawl, then writes the contents of memory out to disk, stops the disk and goes into a sleep mode with memory refresh off. Next time someone moves the mouse it loads memory from disk and continues from where it was with every bit in the same state. Where would you say it expired? Keith From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 00:20:58 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:20:58 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism In-Reply-To: <462FBE0C.4010607@lineone.net> References: <462FBE0C.4010607@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, ben wrote: > >You're describing GP's, or perhaps community nurses. > > No, the difference is that GPs and such come and go. The point of the > idea is that you have someone who stays with you and gets to know you > and your details, and builds up a personal relationship. Each one would > have a relatively small number of clients that they could pay attention > to. GPs are far too busy, and you have to get a new one if you move. I suppose it's different depending on where you live. The traditional GP or "family doctor" is someone people stay with for years. In the UK, patients actually register with a GP, and if they move they re-register, and have all their files transferred. You can't really overcome the fact that doctors and patients will move, retire etc. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 00:31:25 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:31:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! In-Reply-To: <462FC16B.2050808@lineone.net> References: <462FC16B.2050808@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, ben wrote: > Where else can you see such intellectual honesty and willingness to > properly re-examine opinions? Though many may not remember it, my post review of my "nuke Mecca" post was to send in the nanorobots to dismantle the *Al-hajar Al-aswad.* This in an effort to remove "symbols" around which false concepts are organized. I also came to the conclusion that it would be better to broadcast western concepts into the Middle East (something which is being done). I was also the one who suggested that solution to the dispute over the promised land was to use nanorobots to duplicate it, and produce two turned 90 degrees jutting out into the Mediterranean -- then you could give an entire promised land to both the Jews and the Arabs. I suppose once one got started down this path there isn't much argument against giving one to the Christians and Muslims as well. (Though this may not be clear to people -- this is an orthogonal solution to the concept that there can be "only one" promised land.) We provide not only reexamination but also outside of the box thinking. :-) R. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mabranu at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 00:36:19 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:36:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Are we all going to become one, when singularity comes, so that there will be no political and moral issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and nothing else, and never fights with itself? I'm thinking we might all choose to become something like one of those clusters of human minds called "the joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of other days", joined also with AI of course (and why not with the minds of all the animals as well!). Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can there be a survival value, for the human species, in such diversity of opinions that exists today, where people can't accept each other's ways of thinking, where people even kill each other because they have different beliefs etc? If we all become one mind, one personality, one transhuman individual, consisting of the conclusion of all our previous minds merged together, can that transhuman individual at some point in the future be killed by some phenomenon that wouldn't have killed an equally powerful transhuman individual with the personality and opinions and will of some particular human being that exists today? Can, in some very strange situations in the future, even the stupidity of, say, one of the humans today turn out to be the only way to survive? If we become one, we have to decide whether or not to have that stupidity as our survival strategy in such situations. Whichever we decide, we may be less likely to survive than would at least one of today's human minds. So is it safer for the survival of "intelligent Earth-originated life" that we become several different transhuman individuals, with very different personalities, than that we become one? Should even the most stupid and evil personalities be saved for the future, just in case they will one day turn out to be useful? As long as at least some individuals survive, even if they are stupid and evil, they still have the potential to become intelligent and good with time, and once again reach singularity and become for ever more and more fantastic (minus some of them that perhaps should always be stupid and evil). So, can saving diversity, even when it means also saving the (apparently) most stupid and evil features of humanity, be a good idea for the indefinite future? (If yes, that could be the answer to the Hitler question in the "How to be copied into the future" thread. If it becomes possible to resurrect Hitler in the future, transhumans may choose to do so just to increase diversity in order to maximise their own survival chances, just like scientists today save the world's most dangerous bacteria in case mankind will need them for something in the future (for the creation of vaccine or whatever). Maybe the posthumans can save all information about Hitler without actually resurrecting a person with feelings, experiencing himself as Hitler. Or maybe not. If you don't save also the information that is the subjective experience of being Hitler, you don't really save the whole Hitler. And then diversity isn't maximized, meaning the posthumans' survival chances may not be maximized. Maybe a "museum", as complete as possible, consisting of as many resurrected creatures as possible, is what transhumans will create, to maximize their preparedness for unexpected situations?) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 00:18:05 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:18:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival In-Reply-To: <008b01c78728$f8334660$c2893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <783442.66092.qm@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> --- Technotranscendence wrote: > I, for one, don't want to live in a society where I > either have to spend > long hours on continuing martial training or end up > a second-class > citizen. Well I could just as easily say, "I, for one, don't want to live in a society where I either have to spend long hours on a continuing job or end up a second-class citizen." But that doesn't mean I can afford not to have a job. Evolution is not a cake walk. > Surely, that sort of thing makes for good > films -- think > "Harakiri" and "47 Ronin" -- but I'd prefer > something more libertarian. > (Though "Harakiri" can actually be seen as attacking > the samurai as not > really practicing what they preach.) Any ethical or moral system will have its hypocrites. The point is that Bushido has been historically demonstrated to be robust enough to ensure the continuation of civilization despite having its share of hypocrites. Besides, in the context of a transparent society hypocrites will be caught on camera and can be publically shamed. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 26 00:54:49 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:54:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425203735.046d7d18@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:23 PM 4/25/2007 +0100, Billk wrote: >On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > The trick to keeping humans out large scale violence is to keep their > > "bleak future" detectors off. The modern equivalent of game and berries is > > income per capita. Steady or rising income per capita keeps a population > > out of "war mode" unless they are attacked. > > > > Population growth faster than economic growth, the "per capita" term, is a > > formula for a population going into war or if they can't into related > > social disruptions like terrorism. That's where the IRA came from. And > > because a generation ago Irish women cut the number of children they had to > > about replacement, economic growth got ahead of population growth. That's > > why the IRA eventually went out of business. > > > >This is a misleading interpretation. > >The Northern Ireland women had the same birth rate reduction as the >rest of the UK. And a similar birth rate reduction occurred in the >modern states in Europe as well. The birth rate reduction had nothing >to do with the IRA terrorism. You missed the important part of the sentence, "economic growth got ahead of population growth." It doesn't take low birth rate to do that, for example, Ireland could have discovered oil and that would have had the same effect. But it is easier for economic growth to get ahead of population growth if the population growth is low. How do you account for the fact that the modern states of Europe have gone so long without a war? I claim the root cause is population growth below economic growth. If you have an idea that fits the facts better, please speak up. >Re-arranging the politics and administration so that the Catholics >didn't feel as much victimisation as before, caused reduced popular >support for the IRA. Did this happen before or after income per capita started up? snip Keith From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 01:01:29 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:01:29 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704251801m3669d6ccs90115687cfec4887@mail.gmail.com> On 4/26/07, TheMan wrote: > > Are we all going to become one, when singularity > comes, so that there will be no political and moral > issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always > knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and > nothing else, and never fights with itself? > > I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > I can answer that one very easily: I don't choose to become any such thing, so that's a counterexample to the "all" conjecture :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mabranu at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 00:46:08 2007 From: mabranu at yahoo.com (TheMan) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:46:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy; read only the last one of the copies before! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <714370.88069.qm@web51904.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Sorry for posting the same post several times, with added strange words in the end! Those words were experiments, I tried a spell check function in my email server and didn't think it posted every time I spell checked, but apparently it did! The last of my posts titled "democracy" I have edited in other ways by the way, so that's the only one of them that I like you to read. TheMan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 01:29:50 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:29:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > Where would you say it expired? Keith, it is so, so, so unwise to ask this question of someone who learned to program up the street from Eric. Much worse someone whose knowledge (from a biological perspective) is on the cutting edge of what it means to "be alive". Because I'll take you (or Eugen or Anders) to the wall when it comes to the question of "I'm not dead yet." There is a debate which has not yet taken place as to when and precisely one is truly dead. The numbers which justify this have not yet been set onto the table. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 26 01:59:45 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:59:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: <74067.10005.qm@web51908.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425211058.046d4d00@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 04:45 PM 4/25/2007 -0700, TheMan wrote: snip >So how can anybody say that we live in democracy? > >Is democracy even theoretically possible? I think these are the wrong questions. I suspect that the function of what we call "democracy" is similar to monogamy. >Will true democracy be possible in a posthuman world? >How? What will it be like? What _should_ it be like? I don't think anyone can project into that era. Keith . From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 26 02:25:57 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:25:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425222014.046cf678@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:29 PM 4/25/2007 -0400, you wrote: >On 4/25/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> >wrote: >>Where would you say it expired? > >Keith, it is so, so, so unwise to ask this question of someone who learned >to program up the street from Eric. Which Eric? I must know a dozen of them. >Much worse someone whose knowledge (from a biological perspective) is on >the cutting edge of what it means to "be alive". Because I'll take you >(or Eugen or Anders) to the wall when it comes to the question of "I'm not >dead yet." > >There is a debate which has not yet taken place as to when and precisely >one is truly dead. Heh heh. I very much doubt we would disagree then. Ralph Merkle's take on this is essentially the same as mine. Keith From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 02:34:09 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:34:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425222014.046cf678@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425201023.046d1320@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425222014.046cf678@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/25/07, Keith Henson wrote: > Which Eric? I must know a dozen of them. That may be true. But how many do you know whom have shifted reality? Being precise I am observing Eric D. in the mid-70's and '80s at MIT. In the process of defining a new scientific perspective. Heh heh. I very much doubt we would disagree then. Ralph Merkle's take on > this is essentially the same as mine. As has been discussed here recently, Ralph's perspective may need upgrading. But these are minor points. Until something comes along which argues molecular readout and/or reconstruction is impossible we are largely in agreement and only in disagreement with the sceptics with respect to timeframes. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 03:14:08 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:14:08 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! In-Reply-To: References: <462FC16B.2050808@lineone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425221324.021bb628@satx.rr.com> At 08:31 PM 4/25/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: >I was also the one who suggested that solution to the dispute over >the promised land was to use nanorobots to duplicate it, and produce >two turned 90 degrees jutting out into the Mediterranean -- then you >could give an entire promised land to both the Jews and the Arabs. They'd both want the one on the right. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 04:01:22 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:01:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <056901c787b7$d0979b30$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis quotes an excerpt: ___________________________________ Quantum physics says goodbye to reality 20 April 2007 Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871). Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14 ____________________________________________________ and then Stathis goes on to write > The many worlds interpretation does away with randomness, > non-locality and non-realism without hidden variables. Quite so. To any of the physicists or others who actually give any credit to "reality does not exist when we are not observing it", I have a question: Could this account for the excess exhibitionism we see in many people? And do you yourself often entertain company just to avoid fading out of existence now and then when you are unobserved? Lee From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Apr 26 04:22:46 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:22:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics In-Reply-To: <056901c787b7$d0979b30$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070426002132.046c6e90@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:01 PM 4/25/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: snip >Could this account for the excess exhibitionism we see in many >people? And do you yourself often entertain company just to >avoid fading out of existence now and then when you are >unobserved? No. I am self observant. Keith From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 26 03:01:55 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:01:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido =Survival References: <783442.66092.qm@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <46301623.5010609@thomasoliver.net> The Avantguardian wrote: >Any ethical or moral system will have its hypocrites. >The point is that Bushido has been historically >demonstrated to be robust enough to ensure the >continuation of civilization despite having its share >of hypocrites. Besides, in the context of a >transparent society hypocrites will be caught on >camera and can be publically shamed. > > I don't get as upset about hypocrisy as I used to since I learned that it serves an important function in preventing deadly conflict between (multi national) tribes. Per EP the human brain became more or less hard wired for interaction with only 80 to 100 others with whom we shared food, shelter, protection, etc. Those outside the tribe could be killed, robbed or enslaved. As the benefits of intertribal commerce grew, so did the need for a certain "officials" to give false signals of tribal inclusion. This has apparently been honed to a fine art among today's international politicians. -- Thomas From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Apr 26 04:19:10 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:19:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Books - Personal favorites, most influential/inspiring, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200704260427.l3Q4R2Fm027527@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jef Allbright ... > > How about some personal lists of our most influential/inspiring books? > Here are probably my top five: > > Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter > Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig > Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein > The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell > Synergetics - Buckminster Fuller > > Bonus childhood favorite: > A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle > > - Jef Thanks Jef. Your top two are my top two as well. A Wrinkle in Time was one of my childhood faves too. Arthur C. Clarke wrote most of the rest of my childhood favorites. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 04:57:05 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:57:05 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> References: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425234954.0233fda0@satx.rr.com> At 04:58 PM 4/25/2007 -0700, Avant wrote: >I think you are too fixated on Bushido in its >historical context rather than as an abstractable >ethical code applicable in any time and place. Bushido >as an ethic can be summed up by approximately 8 >virtues: wisdom, rectitude, courage, benevolence, >respect, truth, honor, and loyalty. Those are worthy virtues, if a little stern and rigid and authoritarian. How about we add: curiosity, imagination, boldness, compassion, flexibility/adaptability, humor, resistance to arbitrary authority, objectivity... Damien Broderick From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Apr 26 04:56:03 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:56:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415102756.03d87358@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... > > Decades ago Russian researchers spliced a small dog's head on a larger > dog. The heads stayed alive for days to weeks ... > > Keith We have a number of medical ethics principles which prevent western medicine from doing much human experimentation along these lines, but there are those whose religion actually suggests beheading the enemies of their faith. Could they not graft the head of one of their terminally ill to the otherwise perfectly healthy body of a doomed infidel? I wonder if it has occurred to them to attempt it? spike From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Apr 26 05:12:13 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:12:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) In-Reply-To: <00be01c77fd9$e689f4a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704260520.l3Q5K4Hn012314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin ... > > Keith writes > > > Think about how hot it gets inside a parked car in the summer > > and you will get an idea of how hard it would be to seal up a > > greenhouse. You could also look up the power bills for cooling > > Biosphere II. > > Why doesn't this furnish a productive energy source? That is, the > temperature difference generated between such an enclosure and > the outside sounds as though it could be useful. > > Lee Lee this may have already been answered by others. I am way behind on my email due to a business trip and vacation. The reason greenhouse effect doesn't provide an energy source is that the efficiency of running a heat engine in a greenhouse would be very low. To estimate a maximum Carnot efficiency using greenhouse effect, take the difference in temperature inside a typical greenhouse minus the temperature outside, probably about 10 kelvin, and divide by the temperature outside, at least high 200s, probably about 300. A Carnot cycle using a greenhouse as a hot thermal energy reservoir (TER) and the outside as the cold TER could produce power at around 3% efficiency at best, which is still probably on the high end. You would do better with even low efficiency solar cells. Let me know when you have some time, I will bring over to your house my thermodynamics book and show you the equations. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 06:03:25 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:03:25 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] "How To Prepare For Alien Invasion" Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426010230.0238b788@satx.rr.com> http://tinyurl.com/2932l7 Wed 25 Apr 2007 How To Prepare For Alien Invasion By Scott Hillis SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) - When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan. And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day. After all, they have written "An Introduction to Planetary Defense", a primer on how humanity can defend itself if little green men wielding death rays show up at our cosmic doorstep. And yes, they're serious. "The probability really is there that aliens exist and are old enough to have technology to enable them to come here", Taylor said in an interview. Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the Defense Department and the U.S. space agency NASA. But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specializes in fringe topics and books with titles like The Science And Lore Of The Plant Cell Wall and ESP And Psychokinesis. Taylor acknowledged alien invasion is hardly a mainstream concern but said it is naive to assume - as scientists like the late Carl Sagan did - that any beings advanced enough to master star travel will have evolved beyond war. "It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality", Taylor said. Fermi's Blunder? Taylor and Boan - along with co-authors R.C. Anding and T. Conley Powell - revisit two issues that frequently pop up in the debate about whether homo sapiens is alone in the universe: Drake's Equation and Fermi's Paradox. The formula drawn up by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake in 1960 tries to estimate how likely contact with an alien civilization is given factors such as the number of habitable planets. Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10 percent of the speed of light. After crunching the numbers, they say it is possible that our Milky Way galaxy harbors thousands of intelligent alien species and that there is a "high probability" that one or two of them visit Earth every century. But if there are so many aliens out there, why haven't we heard from them already? That is the question famously posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 to dismiss speculation by his colleagues that intelligent life should be routine. Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used Godlike technology to jump across thousands of light years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy. They simply may not have stumbled across our neck of the woods yet. Mujahideen-Style Resistance Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion about defending against terrorist attacks. "One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens. Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute the comments started setting in", Taylor said. "Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway", Taylor said. Failure to prepare may mean mankind will have to dig in and fight with improvised weapons and hit-and-run tactics, much the same way Islamic extremists have battled the U.S. military in Iraq, Taylor said. "You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type resistance", Taylor said. "The insurgents know how to win this war against us. It also tells us that if we were attacked by aliens, this is our best defense." From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Apr 26 07:00:03 2007 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <62c14240704242110y190c2803i97e37c7024b094d7@mail.gmail.com> References: <62c14240704230610o3609e06apa44cff2fdcf9ee4d@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070423101605.02221ce0@satx.rr.com> <462D75B5.8010104@comcast.net> <62c14240704240635i340a43d1h408c2fbab5d4bbbb@mail.gmail.com> <462E3CC9.4020204@mac.com> <62c14240704242110y190c2803i97e37c7024b094d7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <46304DF3.4020703@mac.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: > On 4/24/07, Samantha Atkins wrote: > >> I believe Damien was pointing out the fact that one can conceive there >> could be a higher order being than oneself and one always can conceive >> of such a being is not an argument for God as usually conceived or even >> for the actual existence of any such being. The line of reasoning is >> similar to an old argument for God as the highest order being far beyond >> human conception. >> > > agreed. if "as usually conceived" means the abrahamic god, then i > believe I understand this point. I also agree that there is no proof. > My position is that to discuss some concept such as "God" there needs > to be a mutual understanding of the terms. I am more inclined to > start with, "Suppose there exists a sufficiently advanced state of > being beyond which current human thinking is unable to conceive, label > that God...." and discuss from that point. Any later proof is > suspect due to the starting definition, but it does arbitrarily > bootstrap the concept. Although I think I have done a poor job > establishing this point so far. > > Labeling that "God" is precisely what would be illegitimate. You would be talking about something quite other than what this culture means by such a term and something quite other than what most posters on this thread are talking about. Besides just because a being is sufficiently more advanced than you or I would not mean it was in the least like what the local culture claims God is much less that it was usefully identical even for the purposes of discussion. >>> The quote from me (above) was asking about defining a term or >>> qualifying a label. >>> >> Which term, God? God is already defined on rather non-defined by the >> believers. Some rarefied though experiment God is not God as generally >> though of, worshipped, etc. in the culture. So I don't see where such >> an effort would gain much. >> > > I know "God" is so overloaded with meaning that it is different for > each person, which I why I attempted the above declaration for point > of reference. I was originally asking what Extropians or > Transhumanists would call a belief in a recursively defined higher > order, such that upon realizing that state the next higher state is > implicitly defined to be above the one just realized. Onward! Seriously, we don't think there is a cap on abilities of beings for some ways out. But what does that have to do with how we hold religion especially the local varieties? >> You say you want communication then you label some of the people here >> "knee jerk atheist"? That is inconsistent at best if not hypocritical. >> > > Yeah, that wasn't right. Thanks for calling me on it so I can > apologize. I felt rebuked by what seemed a negative response to what > I posted. I was still defensive after a few hours, so the next time I > checked the thread I responded emotionally. I read your response a > few hours ago and i've been thinking you are right. > > Apology accepted. Thanks. >> Most Buddhist I know believe in considerable orders of higher beings and >> engage in quite a bit of magical thinking including the assumption that >> changing one's own consciousness can transform everything and the de >> facto assumption that the important aspects of suffering are those >> within one's control with training, i.e., one's attachments. There is >> considerable cognitive dissonance in simultaneously holding the self as >> illusory and having reincarnation as an important supporting basis for >> the general buddhist worldview. Boddhisatva and enlightenment itself >> not to mention becoming a Buddha are higher states. There are claims >> that a Buddha frees all beings of suffering on all planes and throughout >> all time. I don't see how this is substantially different from other >> religious thinking. >> > > I don't remember if we're down on just "God" or all "religious > thinking" - I know they're usually codependent, but there might be a > distinction. I'm 0 for 3 tonight, so I certainly don't want to > propose any new ideas :) > People that hold to rationality are generally "down on" all magical thinking about how things are or work. > >>> But if this is suffering from a category mistake, then I don't want to >>> be indoctrinated into accepting this wysiwyg existance is the most we >>> can hope for. >>> >> Do you honestly think that any extropians hold such a bizarre formulation?\ >> > > honestly no, that was more immature emotional backlash. I think i'm over that. > > I do think the extropian phase space for ideas covers so much ground > that being on opposite sides of "mainstream" thinking can present a > huge challenge. Maybe this is analogous to attempting to > differentiate stars across the galactic center. > I don't know of anyone in this phase space who doesn't believe in the possibility of radical change in the human condition. It is pretty much definitive that we believe there is a tremendous amount more to hope for than what we see around us today. We vary in what we think it will requine, in what we think is likely to be the general state of things along the way and even what we think post-Singularity might bring and whether humans as we no them or as augmented have a place there. But I don't think we are so far apart as your metaphor seems to suggest. - s > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 08:45:35 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:45:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> <050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark writes >>> You say you wouldn't describe it as stupid, but I assume you'd still >>> think it's stupid (if not then there is something seriously wrong with >>> you). > > "Lee Corbin" > >> Sorry to disappoint. I'd merely think their statement wrong. > > Ok, now we know, you think the idea of NASA faking the moon landing is not > stupid, so could you please give us an example of something you think IS > stupid. Nothing I know of is *objectively* stupid. Even a dog tied to a stake whose long leash goes around a tree and permits him to come within just a few feet of a treat, and who cannot fathom that he ought to retrace the length of the leash in order to get back around the tree to seize the treat probably should not be called stupid. Neither should people who score below 75 on IQ tests. The reason? In principled discussions like ours, where we are much more interested in expressing what is true than how we feel about something, emotionally charged terms should be avoided. People whose IQ is less than 75 are mentally challenged :-) The great exceptions, as I said, arise either in cases of humor or attempted humor. Also in abbreviation; if Damien or Keith is discoursing upon beliefs of the Ghost Dancers (or other kinds of suicide cults, say in Africa), then we *know* what is trying to be communicated. No harm whatsoever is done. Harm arises when insult is attained. Even insult itself, however, does have a place: The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to adapt to one's own preferences. Only then can we hope to restore the insult to its proper social function of expressing true distaste. -- Judith Martin, "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" But see? Correct behavior of this kind, according unimpeachable authority, serves a *social* function. It's inappropriate in a forum like this where---joking and satire and abbreviations for the initiated aside---we are interested in a search for truth. I assume that you are more interested in stating and knowing the truth than you are merely spouting off. (Humor, satire, in-jokes, etc., aside.) My own behavior changes noticeably when the assumption that I've been addressing a homogeneous element is violated---at that point, I wish to cease saying anything personally offensive. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 08:50:46 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:50:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] META:Re: Re: A Grim Vision ...? References: <20070425191331.GJ9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <05db01c787e0$6abace80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eugen writes > Folks, please do not use OFFLIST in the Subject: unless you want > Mailman to automatically held posts for approval. Since I usually > can't tell whether it's really private, or not, I usually just approve > those, but at a delay. Well, hells bells! Isn't it obvious that anyone who puts "(offlist)" or OFFLIST at the head of a subject line has made a mistake if it gets to the public forum? If it's easy, Eugen, you should just return said post to the sender, and cover for their mistake. That would be neat, since several of us make that mistake a couple of times each year, sometimes with embarrasing results. Thanks, Lee > > On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 02:38:18PM -0400, Robert Bradbury wrote: >> >> Samantha, interesting. Perhaps at some point we may have an >> opportunity to compare your SA experiences with my Russian >> experiences. Two quite interesting studies in "cultural shifts" IMO. >> As an aside, I would observe with your observation of the problem of >> unverified reserves. But I do not paint quite so dire a picture -- >> the U.S. has demonstrated perviously (during WWII) that it can shift >> extremely large amounts of industrial capacity should it choose to do >> so. The power sources, be they nuclear or solar or wind or tidal, are >> available. It is simply a question of when we will pay the price to >> take advantage of them. Now of course they all get much cheaper if we >> had nanotech (or even robust biotech) but it isn't clear when those >> will be bottles sitting on the shelves in the back of the bar to be >> selected from. > > -- > Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org > ______________________________________________________________ > ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org > 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 09:06:36 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:06:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War (was Gandhi and EP was Bushido) References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <05e201c787e2$84ee8010$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > [Robert wrote] >>Keith, you keep harping on this topic of population growth as driving war. > > You miss the point of the model. Population could be growing fast and > there would be no drift into war provided income was growing as fast or > faster. (Or something else was keeping the "bleak future" detectors > off.) Population could even be shrinking, but if the economy was shrinking > faster that would bias a population toward war. I totally agree that population increase provides the fodder for many wars without which they wouldn't have occurred, or the severity would have been greatly diminished. The late Roman Republic "social wars" are a good example, and even the Empire's civil wars were often fueled by too many desperate poor people with no prospects. But it is *not* a catch-all, the way your posts seem to keep claiming. You submit the challenge yet again: > Besides recorded history is not anything like > the EEA where these psychological traits were shaped. For one thing, high > techs can exterminate low techs with relatively little danger. They might > do it just for profit. How about finding a counter example? Can you think > of any group that started a war with a group on the same technological > level where the side that started the war was *not* looking at a bleak > future? There are many. I have provided many in the past, and it seems to me that Robert has provided examples. True, when these examples are presented you tend to retreat to the position that conditions have changed since the EEA. But that wrecks your thesis if you intend to have it apply to the current situations. The Third Reich was not facing bleak prospects when it attacked the Soviet Union. Neither Mexico nor the United States were facing problems in 1846. The American illegal immigrants were moving into some of Mexico's outlying provinces, and they were too proud to stand for it. Yes, the American expansion into these areas was facilitated by a booming population, but the overall population density was still pretty low, and the U.S. at the time had one of the world's very highest standards of living. Population pressure is a factor, but only in some (many) cases. Or---considering the dialog directly below---perhaps you do intend to restrict your thesis to pre-industrial times. Lee >>I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to >>"going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources >>are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move >>there. > > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. > > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, > most productive habitats were normally already taken. > > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent > encounters with other human groups. > > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy > penalties. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 09:19:32 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:19:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] democracy References: <547567.70168.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <061f01c787e4$9f75a8d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> TheMan writes > Democracy is an interesting topic. Many people seem to take it > that we have democracy in the western societies. Do we really? It's all relative. One might ask whether we have achieved Popperian "openness" in our Western society. It's all a matter of degree (Of Course), and it's always relative. We say that the Athenians practiced a form of democracy; and I think it's messing with the meaning of words to deny it by pointing out the very real limitations of their democracy. > Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to > vote (or so we are made believe). Some people may > think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to > vote, whereas others may think the same person is > mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is > right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? It doesn't really matter so long as the extreme cases are dealt with in a somewhat reasonable way. In the U.S.S.R. people were deemed insane because they openly objected to the policies of the Party. (Maybe you would have to be crazy to do that at that time and place :-) But what is crucial is how they were treated. That's a far cry from how the mentally infirm are treated in the West, even though, of course, some injustices occur now and then. > If a given 15 year old is brighter and more mature in > every possibly relevant way, And how do we measure that? > why should the 50 year old be allowed to > vote and not the 15 year old? These two kinds of > people do probably exist. Isn't denying children the > right to vote simply unjust age discrimination? It's age discrimination, but it's hardly unjust. A line has to be drawn somewhere along the continuum. Your purpose here seems to be to deconstruct everything from democracy to mental sickness to maturity; this manner of inquiry is much more suitable for philosophy than for social policy or business decisions. > Categories like children and adults are just mental > constructions, just like the dividing of people into > dyslexic and normal, immature and mature, employed > and unemployed etc. Like I said, you seem to want to deconstruct all of our common sense notions. Can you really assert that there is a difference between the soil that a tree grows in and the tree itself? Do you suppose that there is an ultra-precise boundary? Isn't matter continuous, with particles being only partial maxima in the quantum fields? So who says sub-atomic particles exist? I would recommend a course in philosophy at a nearby college except that my friends who have taken such courses report that it makes the situation worse instead of better. One reported that his introductory philosophy class took most of a semester trying to say that when you remove one stone at a time from a heap, at what point does the heap cease to exist? > So how can anybody claim that we have democracy today? > Can democracy even be theoretically possible? As I say, it's relative, and the boundaries are fuzzy. What do you mean by "theoretically"? Can you provide an *exact* definition that does not require further clarification? I'm saying you have to stand back and start being sensible about categories. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 09:35:48 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:35:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] spect (was Putting God to Rest) References: <462FBA0A.30301@lineone.net> Message-ID: <062901c787e6$ba0b2970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Ben writes > Anna Taylor wrote: > > > Are you [Samantha] implying that any and all people that believe in > > God should have no right to respect? > > ... and lots more about 'respect'. > > > This 'respect' idea is quite interesting. It may be one of those words > that everyone uses, but often meaning different things. Yes! Indeed! There has been some confusion here between respecting certain ideas, respecting the right to express those ideas, and respecting the individuals who hold those ideas. All very different things, and all easily prone to being confused by careless use of that word. When a word starts causing trouble, as I always say, look for substitutes and rephrasings, and try to avoid using it. > My take is that respect is earned. If i respect somebody or something, > it's because i've been impressed in some way. Not for me. I "respect" dogs and cats, for example, in the sense that I try to not be aggressive towards them and show them a little courtesy as we cross, say, in a crowded archway. As an aside, sadly, for many humans, the respect they evince toward someone is governed by the equation Respect = Fear * competance / empathy > Perhaps this is why 'no right to respect' is seen as a negative thing to > say. I don't think that believers in gods should have any right to > respect, not mine, anyway. I wince everytime I read that word in contexts like these. Even when I used it myself, above, to get my meaning across in few words. The term ought to be dropped in this discussion, it seems to me. > I don't respect anyone who holds irrational superstitious beliefs - not > for holding them, certainly. [Thanks for the qualification!] > I also have no respect for those beliefs themselves (which is a separate > thing, that some people often forget, or get confused about). I don't know what the hell it means to respect one belief and not another. Is it meant that the subject _agrees with_ one of the beliefs and not the other? Then why not a little plain speaking? Bad, bad word. > It seems funny to me that a lot of people think that they are 'owed > respect' from people they've never even met before. I am owed courtesy and politeness from people I have never met before, and, of course, freedom from violence at their hands. My beliefs, on the other hand, can and should be freely savaged by them, (but only up to the limit of civility). > Suppose i said that Hitler was owed respect for his beliefs about the > nature of Jews? You'd be sure to be misunderstood! Bad, bad word! Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 09:39:09 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:39:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reality physics References: <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20070424174904.042a1878@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070426002132.046c6e90@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <063601c787e7$6de1d3e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > Lee wrote: > >>Could this account for the excess exhibitionism we see in many >>people? And do you yourself often entertain company just to >>avoid fading out of existence now and then when you are >>unobserved? > > No. I am self observant. Even when asleep I infer. Well, if I'd been hounded by the $cientologists I'd probably be self-observant even when sleeping too, I suppose. Back to the subject: it's pecular that my PC continues to use electricity even when I'm away for days. I wonder how it does that when it doesn't exist. Presumably it also could self-observe, just like trees in forests seem to. Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 09:53:57 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:53:57 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0704251557p72ed58fdr98648b51e88fc2ac@mail.gmail.com> References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <8d71341e0704251557p72ed58fdr98648b51e88fc2ac@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Russell Wallace wrote: > > Suppose we believe it will on balance contribute to the overall good if we > lie, cheat, steal, commit murder or whatever. Perhaps it really will. But > perhaps we're mistaken and it really won't. _The second possibility is more > likely_. > > So even from a utilitarian standpoint, it's better to have ethical > standards that we don't violate, even when we think it's worth doing so in a > particular case. > Ah, but as you admit you have taken a utilitarian stand as the *real* ethics. This is rather like a utilitarian saying that we should all take our ethics as handed down from God on tablets of stone not because it's true, but because people are more likely to comply. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Apr 26 09:59:08 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:59:08 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070415102756.03d87358@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20070426095908.GR9439@leitl.org> On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 09:56:03PM -0700, spike wrote: > Could they not graft the head of one of their terminally ill to the > otherwise perfectly healthy body of a doomed infidel? I wonder if it has Purportedly, experiments (on the other sort of infidel) were done during the Indochina war. The source is an unnamed military intelligence person, so it's unreliable. I personally fail to see the reason. It's not life-prolonging, it's agony-prolonging. > occurred to them to attempt it? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From pharos at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 10:18:27 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:18:27 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: References: <488375.58928.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > My points were more focused on (1) the inherent tendency of this value > set to select for an elite group, and (2) the issue of social > stability discussed earlier. > > I don't have a sword either, but that's not to say I'm never armed. > I notice: LONDON (Reuters) - Hugh Grant has been arrested and questioned by police after a photographer accused the actor of attacking him with a plastic tub of baked beans. Regretfully, the UK government will probably have to ban the carrying of plastic tubs of baked beans in public places. We can't have violent assaults like this going on in our country. BillK From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 10:26:16 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:26:16 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Jef Allbright wrote: That said, I believe we are in fact on the cusp of extending our moral > decision-making beyond the blind evolutionary preferences of our > biology and culture, and on the verge of applying an intensional > process of collaborative decision-making, promoting an increasing > context of shared values into the future we create. This framework, > representing (1) awareness of our fine-grained values and (2) > awareness of methods of effective interaction, will effectively > amplify "wisdom" based on evolving human values beyond the moral > capacity of any human individual of today. Are the fine-grained values the same as those determined by biology and culture? By "increasing context of shared values" do you mean something like a lowest common denominator, or an averaging out of values? What if there is just an irreducible conflict in values, such as between those who think women should "dress modestly" and those who think women should dress however they please (this issue is often assumed to be based on religious or anti-egalitarian considerations, but consider the prudishness of the Russian and Chinese communists)? (These are basic questions, I realise, so feel free to refer me to the list archive if you have already answered them). In contrast to your assumption of hedonistic pleasure as the ultimate > "good", I see Growth, in terms of our shared values that work, as a > more fundamental good, and would point out that such Growth provides > the robust infrastructure for ongoing pleasure. With regard to Utilitarian views of morality and ethics, I would point > out the unavoidability of unintended and unanticipated consequences > and suggest that it in the bigger picture we can promote our values > more effectively by implementing principles of best known methods > rather than by directly seeking to maximize utility as currently > conceived. It would be a very concrete and short-sighted utilitarian who regards immediate sensual pleasure as the only criterion for ethical behaviour. Pleasure can be deferred, and it can take the form of eg. joy in altruistic service. You just need to expand the scope of the utility to include the bigger picture. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pgptag at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 10:54:07 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:54:07 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life Message-ID: <470a3c520704260354r47a54b2fu3b53c8102cfe7a95@mail.gmail.com> *Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life* Sunday, April 29, 2007 10am SLT-PST, uvvy island in SL ------------------------------ Speakers: Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association Extropia Dasilva, Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything. James Hughes , Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies . James will present his paper "The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future" . Giulio Prisco , Executive Director, World Transhumanist Association. Giulio will summarize his article/book precis "Engineering Transcendence". Most speakers will use audio streaming for presentations and answers to questions from the audience. ------------------------------ See also http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_transhumanism_and_religion_in_second_life/ http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/eventinfo/slhreligion/ http://transfigurism.org/community/blogs/administration/archive/2007/04/11/2641.aspx -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From neptune at superlink.net Thu Apr 26 11:06:04 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:06:04 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "How To Prepare For Alien Invasion" References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426010230.0238b788@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <004101c787f2$e31ccf60$d8893cd1@pavilion> Well, there is a zombie survival guide, so why not this? :) Regards, Dan From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 11:13:27 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:13:27 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, TheMan wrote: Are we all going to become one, when singularity > comes, so that there will be no political and moral > issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always > knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and > nothing else, and never fights with itself? Individuals are always "fighting" with themselves. Every single decision that is made involves a weighing up of multiple alternatives, multiple outcomes, multiple utilities for each outcome. If multiple minds were integrated into one person the behaviour of that person would reflect some sort of average of the individual minds. Two careful conservatives + one reckless radical = one mostly careful, sometimes radical joined person. The difference would be that this person could not harm, punish or reward some selected part of himself because all the parts experience what the whole experiences. I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > > Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can > there be a survival value, for the human species, in > such diversity of opinions that exists today, where > people can't accept each other's ways of thinking, > where people even kill each other because they have > different beliefs etc? The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble the collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. The equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out some undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the advantage that no-one actually gets hurt. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 11:40:50 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:40:50 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: <74067.10005.qm@web51908.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <74067.10005.qm@web51908.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, TheMan wrote: Severely mentally deranged people are not allowed to > vote - or so we are made believe. Some people may > think a given person is too deranged to be allowed to > vote, whereas others may think the same person is > mentally sane enough to be allowed to vote. Who is > right about who is too deranged? The psychiatrists? > Says who? Says the majority of the people in > elections? Then who is the people? The deranged too? In Australia, you get fined if you don't vote. Come election time, all the inpatients in the psychiatric wards are given an opportunity to vote, and those who refuse or are so unwell that they are unable to understand what the ballot paper is for get a letter from their doctor so that the fine is waived. So essentially, in Australia mentally ill people *have* to vote, unless they have a good excuse. And I see nothing wrong with this. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 12:17:30 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:17:30 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <8d71341e0704251557p72ed58fdr98648b51e88fc2ac@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704260517m47cceb66vfa847d1f496bee9c@mail.gmail.com> On 4/26/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Ah, but as you admit you have taken a utilitarian stand as the *real* > ethics. > Have I? To me, "*real* ethics" means that which I actually follow, that which I behave as though I believed; not so much that which I cite when asked for philosophical justification. Maybe I'm just quibbling amount semantics, though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 14:11:31 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:11:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Gandhi and EP was Bushido References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425203735.046d7d18@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <064d01c7880d$3f3b45f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith and BillK write >>The Northern Ireland women had the same birth rate reduction as the >>rest of the UK. And a similar birth rate reduction occurred in the >>modern states in Europe as well. The birth rate reduction had nothing >>to do with the IRA terrorism. One important way that reduced population growth *does* play a factor in preventing war is that a country's leaders have much less fuel to play with. Another is that for most of history it has been the young who are warlike and aggressive, not their elders. (For example, World War I was preceded by feelings of intense nationalism far more among the young than the old. [Paul Johnson, "Modern Times, History from the 20s to the 80s.]) And when there is a demographic bulge among the young---who seem predetermined to want to change the world---I do believe there to be "social pressure" for war (normal conditions prevailing). > You missed the important part of the sentence, "economic growth got ahead > of population growth." It doesn't take low birth rate to do that, for > example, Ireland could have discovered oil and that would have had the same > effect. But it is easier for economic growth to get ahead of population > growth if the population growth is low. Yes and no. Consider the events leading up to the tumultous fourteenth century (to use Barbara Tuchman's phrase). There was very steady population growth throughout the thirteenth century in Europe, and yet few wars, even though the poorest were being slowly squeezed to death economically. What happened? It seems to be a combination of effects. There was (1) aristocratic overpopulation (2) climate change (cooling hardens the human condition), and several other factors [see "War and Peace and War", the brilliant history book by Peter Turchin, which may be the single best history book I've ever read]. When (1) the aristocrats---who in normal times have a higher birth rate---become too numerous, they fall to fighting among themselves. One obvious reason is that two or more sons can inherit just one set of properties. If just one son gets it all, then the others are free to engage in Crusades or civil wars. France and England went through multi-cycles of war and peace in their early years (1066 - 1450), (1500-1800), but were often in a different phase. The fact that France and England were not always in the same phase of disintegration/ reintegration does weaken too broad claims of (2): climate change. A worsening climate naturally brings about starvation, and this too makes available for war many bands of desperate men of fighting age. Many factors are involved. > How do you account for the fact that the modern states of Europe have gone > so long without a war? The primary reason that the frequency of war---however you measure it, whether by actual numbers of wars, by percent of time that nations are engaged in war, or by probability that a single male will be killed in war---has almost monotonically decreased over the last thousand years is that wars have become less profitable. Usually nothing was more attractive than pillaging a neighbor land; the Vikings and early Russians lived, it seems, for little else. *One* of the factors that modern states of Europe---I think Keith means since 1945---engage in war less is indeed smaller population growth. When you have fewer young restless men desperate to "do something", it's harder to get a war going. Take the U.S. today: it can barely get enough troops to conquer Iraq, whereas with a tenth of the population a hundred and fifty years ago, the North could conquer the South. Without a lot of young men culturally and politically ready to go at it, wars are just hard to sustain. (That's another reason that the West is really in for bad times in the conflict against militant Islam.) Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Apr 26 14:16:05 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:16:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <8d71341e0704251801m3669d6ccs90115687cfec4887@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <064e01c7880d$f4b31d40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell writes > On 4/26/07, TheMan wrote: > > Are we all going to become one, when singularity > > comes, so that there will be no political and moral > > issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always > > knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and > > nothing else, and never fights with itself? > > > > I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > I can answer that one very easily: I don't choose to become > any such thing, so that's a counterexample to the "all" conjecture :) Well, now I do see the smiley, :-) But it deserves a serious answer. What TheMan clearly means is that either a huge number or even most people may join a group mind. My eternally made point is that you can do both: if you truly believe that physics is a better description that your own intuitions, and your own evolutionarily evolved feelings of anticipation, then you believe that you can be in two places at once, and you further see that you obviously can choose both to go and to stay. Some instances of me would volunteer for group mind duty, and a lot would voluteer for straight uploading, and if resources permit, some would remain in the old bio-machine. Lee From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 14:28:28 2007 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:28:28 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: <064e01c7880d$f4b31d40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <8d71341e0704251801m3669d6ccs90115687cfec4887@mail.gmail.com> <064e01c7880d$f4b31d40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0704260728j6b3bd082l5bede5b156f7ce47@mail.gmail.com> On 4/26/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Well, now I do see the smiley, :-) But it deserves a serious > answer. What TheMan clearly means is that either a huge number > or even most people may join a group mind. Well, I took him to mean that practically everyone will join, that the number who don't will be small enough that the group mind will be where it's at; the serious intent behind my comment was that if someone who abhors this idea is that easy to find, there'll likely be substantial numbers of people who don't so choose. If there are also substantial numbers of people who do, that's fine with me; once we get off this planet we'll have a universe plenty big enough to allow diversity. My eternally made point is that you can do both: if you truly > believe that physics is a better description that your own intuitions, > and your own evolutionarily evolved feelings of anticipation, then > you believe that you can be in two places at once, and you further > see that you obviously can choose both to go and to stay. Certainly. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 26 16:41:36 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 09:41:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > On 4/26/07, TheMan wrote: > > > Are we all going to become one, when singularity > > comes, so that there will be no political and moral > > issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always > > knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and > > nothing else, and never fights with itself? > > Individuals are always "fighting" with themselves. Every single decision > that is made involves a weighing up of multiple alternatives, multiple > outcomes, multiple utilities for each outcome. If multiple minds were > integrated into one person the behaviour of that person would reflect some > sort of average of the individual minds. Stathis, would you agree that "composite" would be a better word than "average" here, since "average" entails a reduction of information? I think this question is key because it appears to highlight that you and I are looking at the same scenario but working in opposite directions. I see "group minds" emerging due to the adaptive benefits of increasing degrees of freedom enabled by a more complexly effective organizational structure operating within an increasingly complex environment. The subjective experience of the composite would be a high level expression of salient features of its internal state over time, fundamentally unavailable to its members. The subjective experience of each member, while subjectively "complete", would reflect a necessarily lower-level description of interactions with the greater "reality." It seems that you are working in the opposite direction, assuming the primality of subjective experience, and imagining how to combine multiple subjective experiences into one, with this combined average subjective agent then interacting with its world. > Two careful conservatives + one > reckless radical = one mostly careful, sometimes radical joined person. The > difference would be that this person could not harm, punish or reward some > selected part of himself because all the parts experience what the whole > experiences. It's not completely clear here, but it appears that you're claiming that each of the parts would experience what the whole experiences. >From a systems theoretical point of view, that claim is clearly unsupportable. It seems to be another example of your assumption of subjective experience as primary. > > I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > > > > Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can > > there be a survival value, for the human species, in > > such diversity of opinions that exists today, where > > people can't accept each other's ways of thinking, > > where people even kill each other because they have > > different beliefs etc? > > The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble the > collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. It seems clear to me that the behavior of the collective would display characteristics *not* present in any of its parts. This is fundamental complexity theory. > The > equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out some > undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the advantage > that no-one actually gets hurt. This sounds nice, but it's not clear to me what model it describes. - Jef From jonkc at att.net Thu Apr 26 16:59:44 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:59:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer><050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > Nothing I know of is *objectively* stupid. Then tell me something that is subjectively stupid, that is, tell me something you think is stupid. For God's sake man give me something to work with! Otherwise the word "stupid" really should be removed from the English language. Meaning needs contrast, if nothing that exists and nothing that does not exist has the "Klogknee" property then the word means nothing. > People whose IQ is less than 75 are mentally challenged :-) And midgets are vertically underprivileged and fat people gravitationally disadvantaged. > Even insult itself, however, does have a place That was my point, if insults weren't often quite good at getting the job done they would not be so common in the meme pool. John K Clark From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Apr 26 17:23:34 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:23:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health Message-ID: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Sorry to those who prefer I copy articles into posts. Too many people can't read them. This is for those singers among us, like Emlyn. This is from the LA Times Health section, on how singing is beneficial to health. It raises immune system indicators, raises oxytocin, raises cognitive fuction, improves quality of life in older age. Group singing seems to improve it even more. http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health My mother-in-law, who is a health professional, church choir member and accompaniest, says conductors are some of the longest lived musicians in the world. Her theory is they wave their arms a lot and get an upper body, cardiovascular workout, while getting the hormonal high from the music. She may be right. PJ From jonkc at att.net Thu Apr 26 17:27:01 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:27:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Europe (was:Gandhi and EP) References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425203735.046d7d18@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <005801c78828$1e25c690$64074e0c@MyComputer> "Keith Henson" > How do you account for the fact that the modern states of Europe have gone > so long without a war? I think the fact the Europe is now the least religious place on planet Earth played a part in this happy circumstance. John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 17:36:37 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:36:37 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts In-Reply-To: <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> <050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426122828.02353498@satx.rr.com> At 12:59 PM 4/26/2007 -0400, JKC wrote: > > Nothing I know of is *objectively* stupid. > >Then tell me something that is subjectively stupid, that is, tell me >something you think is stupid. I take it that Lee is saying "stupid" is a word (an offensive, insulting word) applying to someone whose assessed intelligence is especially low, but not applicable to a belief, opinion, claim, action, etc. Jack, a mentally retarded human, can be called "stupid" but not his habit of wearing a huge bunch of random keys hanging from his belt in emulation of his custodians. This usage advice goes against common practice: < Stupidity is the quality or condition of being stupid, or lacking intelligence. This quality can be attributed to both an individual himself (John Smith is stupid) or his actions, words or beliefs (John Smith's policies are stupid). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid > Damien Broderick From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Apr 26 17:37:00 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:37:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 4/26/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > > That said, I believe we are in fact on the cusp of extending our moral > > decision-making beyond the blind evolutionary preferences of our > > biology and culture, and on the verge of applying an intentional > > process of collaborative decision-making, promoting an increasing > > context of shared values into the future we create. This framework, > > representing (1) awareness of our fine-grained values and (2) > > awareness of methods of effective interaction, will effectively > > amplify "wisdom" based on evolving human values beyond the moral > > capacity of any human individual of today. > > Are the fine-grained values the same as those determined by biology and > culture? Yes. I would rather say that they are *expressed* through our biology and culture, and determined or encoded via an evolutionary process, but I think we're close enough on this point. A more subtle, but important point is that our values necessary evolve. The purpose of this framework for increasing awareness is to facilitate us taking an increasingly intentional role in guiding the direction of our evolving values. > By "increasing context of shared values" do you mean something like a lowest > common denominator, or an averaging out of values? No. I use the phrase "fine-grained values" to mean just the opposite. Our shared values can be approximated as an extremely complex hierarchy with "reality" (the ultimate view of what works) at the root and increasingly subjective branches supporting ever more subjective sub-branches until we reach each individual's values. The key here is that even though each of us has effective access only to our own subjective values at the tips of the outermost branches, we have an increasingly shared interest in the increasingly probable branches (supporting us) leading back to the root. With increasing awareness of this tree structure, we would increasingly agree on which branches best support, not our present values, but growth in the direction indicated by our shared values that work. > What if there is just an irreducible conflict in values, such as between > those who think women should "dress modestly" and those who think women > should dress however they please (this issue is often assumed to be based on > religious or anti-egalitarian considerations, but consider the prudishness > of the Russian and Chinese communists)? See above, and let me know if that does not address your question. > (These are basic questions, I realise, so feel free to refer me to the list > archive if you have already answered them). While I raise this thinking often, I try to do it in five paragraphs or less, planting seeds rather than attempting to transplant a forest. I started to create an outline for a book, but found that in order to address the wide range of cultural and philosophical starting points would require much more than I personally could hope to accomplish. So feel free to comment and ask questions and I'll be happy to co-refine this thinking on or offlist. > > In contrast to your assumption of hedonistic pleasure as the ultimate > > "good", I see Growth, in terms of our shared values that work, as a > > more fundamental good, and would point out that such Growth provides > > the robust infrastructure for ongoing pleasure. > > > With regard to Utilitarian views of morality and ethics, I would point > > out the unavoidability of unintended and unanticipated consequences > > and suggest that it in the bigger picture we can promote our values > > more effectively by implementing principles of best known methods > > rather than by directly seeking to maximize utility as currently > > conceived. > > It would be a very concrete and short-sighted utilitarian who regards > immediate sensual pleasure as the only criterion for ethical behaviour. > Pleasure can be deferred, and it can take the form of eg. joy in altruistic > service. You just need to expand the scope of the utility to include the > bigger picture. Yes! And what do we get as we look for methods of maximizing utility over various (expanding) scope? We get principles. - Jef From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 18:11:30 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:11:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070424021018.022dd268@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <407805.40317.qm@web35607.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Damien Broderick wrote: At 02:41 AM 4/24/2007 -0400, you wrote: >Hi Lee > >I did not receive your messages. > >John K Clark Probably because you're not John Grigg... ...OR ARE YOU???? (This might become the foundation stone of a whole new eerie chapter in Mormon mythology!) The "REAL" John Grigg writes: It sounds to me like someone has been exposed to Mormon radiation! http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39261 John : ) --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Apr 26 18:09:33 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:09:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health In-Reply-To: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <38482.72.236.103.141.1177610973.squirrel@main.nc.us> I like this, PJ, thanks for posting it. :) Some years ago I found a welcoming singing opportunity - people who sing Shape Note Music. Where I live there are several versions of Shape Note Music and I go to all the singings I can get to, four different states! The songs are almost all old (18th and 19th century) religious music, but that doesn't bother me a bit. I have several friends who "can't stand the religiousness of this" - but I love the sound and the people and the singing (and the food!). We often have "all day singings" where we begin in the morning, break an hour for covered dish lunch (ah, the food!), and then sing until late afternoon. I didn't know I could do it, I thought I'd collapse, but I never did... I just kept going and it was a blast. Aside from the music and singing, there's learning to read the various sets of shapes, which I find delightfully challenging as well, like learning to read a code. And there's learning to lead a song - standing in the middle of the Hollow Square and beating time and leading all the singers. :) And there's always a new song, one I've not heard before. I cannot (yet?) read regular round-note music, despite several years of piano lessons in my long-ago childhood. My poor teachers - they were so disgusted and disheartened. My parents were insistent, even offering cash bribes for me to learn to play certain pieces of music. It never really happened. I wonder what they'd think of Shape Note Singing? ;) http://fasola.org/ http://christianharmony.org/ http://www.oldharp.org/ Regards, MB ... who was told (in school) "you don't sing well enough to be in the group" > http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health > From benboc at lineone.net Thu Apr 26 19:23:51 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:23:51 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] KurzweilAI site In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4630FC47.8040600@lineone.net> Stirling Westrup wrote: > Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 05:52:01PM -0400, Keith Henson wrote: >> >> If all of you get KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter I should not bother with >> >> posting these gems. >I've wanted to subscribe to the Daily Newsletter but that site is such a pain >to navigate that I've never managed to find out how. Yay! Let's petition Ray to change that bloody annoying website of his! The content is almost all good, but because of the irritation factor of using the site, i actually avoid it if possible, which is a shame, if lots of other people think the same way. Glad it's not just me, though. ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Thu Apr 26 19:48:18 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:48:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <46310202.5000402@lineone.net> BillK Wrote: >Regretfully, the UK government will probably have to ban the carrying >of plastic tubs of baked beans in public places. >We can't have violent assaults like this going on in our country. Heh. I'm reminded of a flight on a jumbo jet a few years ago, where the airport security were taking nailfiles off people at the airport, and the stewardesses were giving people champagne in glass glasses in the air! I was amused to the point of laughing out loud. If you had hijacking tendencies, which weapon would you prefer: a nailfile or a long piece of freshly-broken glass (which is still the sharpest thing known to man, i think)? In any case, if you've got an imagination, just about anything can be a weapon. Nobody confiscated my deadly shoelaces. ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Thu Apr 26 19:55:25 2007 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:55:25 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> "Stathis Papaioannou" wrote: >In Australia, you get fined if you don't vote. >And I see nothing wrong with this. You see nothing wrong with being forced to vote? Is this really what you're saying? (If so, are you also one of the people who maintain that 'freedom of religion' doesn't include freedom from religion ("and you have to pick a proper one")?) ben zaiboc From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 20:05:13 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:05:13 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Beyond Future Shock: anyone seen this? Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426150233.021846f8@satx.rr.com> Beyond Future Shock (Paperback) by Alex Alaniz, Ph.D. List Price: $7.99 Paperback: 424 pages Publisher: BookSurge Publishing (August 1, 2005) Language: English ISBN-10: 1419609440 ISBN-13: 978-1419609442 About the Author Alex Alaniz, Ph.D., is Los Alamos-based nuclear weapons physicist, as well as a pilot. A former military officer, he has expertise in molecular dynamics, space-based weapons, financial engineering and operations research. (I assume this is self-published) From vrmmail at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 17:46:13 2007 From: vrmmail at yahoo.com (V.R.Manoj) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:46:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life Message-ID: <81412.98246.qm@web52011.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Hello, Here are the details of another upcoming big event brought to you from the World Transhumanist Association through it's second life chapter in the Virtual world of Second Life at uvvy island main auditorium, the same place where Prof.Warwick's brilliant presentation was given ! Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life Sunday, April 29, 2007 10am SLT-PST, uvvy island in SL Speakers: Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association Extropia Dasilva , Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything. James Hughes, Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. James will present his paper "The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future". Giulio Prisco, Executive Director, World Transhumanist Association. Giulio will summarize his article/book precis "Engineering Transcendence". Most speakers will use audio streaming for presentations and answers to questions from the audience. See also http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_transhumanism_and_religion_in_second_life/ http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/eventinfo/slhreligion/ http://transfigurism.org/community/blogs/administration/archive/2007/04/11/2641.aspx Best, Manoj Undercity __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 20:37:09 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:37:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] "How To Prepare For Alien Invasion" In-Reply-To: <004101c787f2$e31ccf60$d8893cd1@pavilion> Message-ID: <448469.54609.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> And there's even a book on surviving a robot attack [should this be required reading?:)], I flipped through it at Barnes and Noble. Pretty funny in spots. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --- Technotranscendence wrote: > Well, there is a zombie survival guide, so why not > this? :) > > Regards, > > Dan > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 20:33:17 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:33:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> References: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> Message-ID: Interesting that mentally ill Australians are forced to vote or pay a fine. What would happen if the majority of Australians were mentally ill and if all of them chose to pay the fine? T'would be a crazy place to live, I think. -gts From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 20:41:19 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:41:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: References: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> Message-ID: I mean to ask, of course, what would happen if the mentally ill majority chose to vote and *not* pay the fine. Gah! :) -gts From estropico at gmail.com Thu Apr 26 21:18:46 2007 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:18:46 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] ExtroBritannia's May event: Paths to life-extension. Scenario planning with Anders Sandberg Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90704261418g45699957tb6220c097b012a4e@mail.gmail.com> The next ExtroBritannia event is scheduled for Sunday the 13th of May at 2,00pm at Conway Hall (Artists' Room), in Holborn, London. Everyone welcome. Paths to life-extension. Scenario planning with Anders Sandberg What would be the social impact of different development paths to life-extension? We could experience a sudden breakthrough, or a slower development. Advancements could be based on complex and expensive medical services, genetic interventions or novel pharmaceutical agents. Do we need a state-sponsored "war on ageing", or will the private sector drive progress in this area? Will life-extension come to be regarded as enhancement, as opposed to therapy? Will there be organised opposition to these developments? Will there be organised support? After an introduction to the basics of scenario planning, Anders Sandberg will lead an informal scenario session exploring these topics. We will be at the Penderel's Oak from 12.30pm for lunch and conversation and will move to Conway Hall at 2pm. We'll be back at the Penderel's post-event for drinks and discussion at approx. 5pm. Feel free to show up at any stage. If it's your first time at an ExtroBritannia event, look out for a copy of Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" at our table. Here's a picture of the book's cover: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book88/MC.cover.gif 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 Penderel's Oak 283-288 High Holborn London WC1V 7HJ Tel: 0207 242 5669 Nearest tube: Holborn MAP: http://tinyurl.com/29swq --- 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 bret at bonfireproductions.com Thu Apr 26 20:53:21 2007 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:53:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life In-Reply-To: <81412.98246.qm@web52011.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <81412.98246.qm@web52011.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3C8F3684-26F3-4A29-99CE-FDA57C537449@bonfireproductions.com> Hi Manoj - will someone be sending teleports to members day-of? a slurl perhaps? Bret Kulakovich (aka Bret Something) On Apr 26, 2007, at 1:46 PM, V.R.Manoj wrote: > Hello, > > > Here are the details of > another upcoming big event brought to you from the World > Transhumanist Association through it's second life chapter in the > Virtual world of Second Life at uvvy island main auditorium, the > same place where Prof.Warwick's brilliant presentation was given ! > > Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life > > Sunday, April 29, 2007 > > 10am SLT-PST, uvvy island in SL > > Speakers: > > Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association > > > Extropia Dasilva , Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. > Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best > mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and > everything. > > > James Hughes, Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and > Emerging Technologies. James will present his paper "The > Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, > Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future". > > > Giulio Prisco, Executive Director, World Transhumanist > Association. Giulio will summarize his article/book precis > "Engineering Transcendence". > > > Most speakers will use audio streaming for presentations and > answers to questions from the audience. > > See also > > http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/ > seminar_on_transhumanism_and_religion_in_second_life/ > > http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/eventinfo/slhreligion/ > > http://transfigurism.org/community/blogs/administration/archive/ > 2007/04/11/2641.aspx > > > Best, > Manoj Undercity > > > > > > __________________________________________________ > 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 From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 21:34:13 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:34:13 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: References: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426162517.02194140@satx.rr.com> At 04:41 PM 4/26/2007 -0400, gts speculated psephologically: >Interesting that mentally ill Australians are forced to vote or pay a fine. What would happen if the majority of Australians were mentally ill and if all of them chose to pay the fine? T'would be a crazy place to live, I think. >... meant to ask, of course, what would happen if the mentally ill majority >chose to vote and *not* pay the fine. The first proposition would be isomorphic to the USian one in its consequences, I take it. The second implies that the mentally ill would be fined even though they voted (unless you mean "rather than pay the fine"). Of course if the majority of voters were insane laws and rules of procedure might to be ignored at the highest levels, but this proposition, too, would be isomorphic to the USian one in its consequences. (Should I add a smiley? Perhaps not, alas.) Damien Broderick From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Thu Apr 26 21:18:04 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:18:04 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer Message-ID: According to Schopenhauer, the world is a representation of the will-to-live. Blind will-to-live is the essence of reality. Schopenhauer inspired Nietzsche. I've taken an interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy and would like to find transhumanist/extropian minded people who might share this philosophical interest. My idea is that we might read Schopenhauer's works, or works about him, and discuss them and interpret them in light of H+, either publicly or privately. Any takers? -gts From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Apr 26 22:16:09 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:16:09 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> At 05:18 PM 4/26/2007 -0400, gts wrote: >I've taken an interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy and would like to find >transhumanist/extropian minded people who might share this philosophical >interest. My idea is that we might read Schopenhauer's works, or works >about him, and discuss them and interpret them in light of H+, either >publicly or privately. The World as Will and Idea is a notion dynamically embodied in Alfred Bester's great baroque sf novel THE STARS MY DESTINATION (aka TIGER! TIGER!), fw that's w. And his flawed protagonist Gully Foyle is one of the first powerful representations of an augmented human. I love it when a trope comes around again. Damien Broderick From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Thu Apr 26 23:09:37 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:09:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer><050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <46313131.8090403@thomasoliver.net> John K Clark wrote: >"Lee Corbin" > > >>Even insult itself, however, does have a place >> >> > >That was my point, if insults weren't often quite good at getting the job >done they would not be so common in the meme pool. > > John K Clark > I prefer the less vulgar variety of insult that puts you in your place while simultaneously making you feel your place is elevated: Having mastered the put down, lets admire the job you've gotten done. And now we'd like to hear your uncommon contributions to the meme pool. ; ) -- Thomas From sentience at pobox.com Fri Apr 27 00:04:08 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:04:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) In-Reply-To: <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer><050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <46313DF8.9010108@pobox.com> John K Clark wrote: > > That was my point, if insults weren't often quite good at getting the job > done they would not be so common in the meme pool. Sounds like a group selection argument. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From neptune at superlink.net Thu Apr 26 23:59:37 2007 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:59:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "How To Prepare For Alien Invasion" References: <448469.54609.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003f01c7885e$f30a7280$48893cd1@pavilion> On Thursday, April 26, 2007 4:37 PM A B austriaaugust at yahoo.com wrote: > And there's even a book on surviving a robot attack > [should this be required reading?:)], I flipped > through it at Barnes and Noble. Pretty funny in spots. I listened to it last year -- as an audio book, of course. I've also read the zombie survival guide. Regards, Dan From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Fri Apr 27 00:30:31 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:30:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health References: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <46314427.6090900@thomasoliver.net> pjmanney wrote: >[...] This is for those singers among us, like Emlyn. > >This is from the LA Times Health section, on how singing is beneficial to health. It raises immune system indicators, raises oxytocin, raises cognitive fuction, improves quality of life in older age. Group singing seems to improve it even more. > >http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health >[...] > From the Times article: "At least one cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker, is skeptical of a primal human need for music. Instead, he sees music and singing as a kind of linguistic dessert ? delicious but not necessary. In his 1997 book, 'How the Mind Works,' he wrote, 'I suspect music is auditory cheesecake.'" I see Pinker has contributed a good deal in the field of EP. In my opinion the "linguistic" aspect of music accounts for a small fraction of its significance. Music has the virtue of arousing and allowing us to express inarticulate emotions of joy, hilarity, loss, longing, etc. When it comes to voicing deep emotion, the lyrics alone cannot satisfy the way a simple sustained vowel sound does. I wonder if Pinker has done much singing. -- Thomas Oliver (the songmaker) From velvethum at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 00:43:13 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:43:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Stathis: >>>> For all >>>> you know, you might be dying all the time. Heartland: >>> A living thing can die at most once. It is wrong to think that death >>> behaves just >>> like sleep. If you're sleeping, you can wake up. If you die, you're >>> never coming >>> back. Stathis: >> But suppose science discovers tomorrow evidence that you die during >> sleep, according to some definition of death you agree to, eg. your >> EEG goes flat for a few seconds between REM and non-REM sleep every >> night. Most people would say, "Oh, that's interesting" and get on >> with their lives (or "their" lives, or their "lives"). You might >> still claim that this is a very bad thing, but the point is it >> doesn't make any difference; a perfect illusion of continuous life >> is just as good as continuous life. I hear this kind of argument all the time. What you're saying here does not really question the fact that flat EEG means death. You merely observe that you find no difference between an illusion of continuous life and a continuous life. Why you don't appreciate the difference? It's probably because you have been conditioned into assuming observer POV which effectively prevents you from seeing this difference. Imagine you have a servant. As a master it makes no difference to you if the servant who does chores for you is being replaced by a perfect copy each time he escapes your field of vision as long as the job is being done. In other words, as an observer, the fact your servant is being constantly replaced makes no difference to you because you *benefit* equally from services of the original or the copy. But you must realize your servant is a person too and you must be able and willing to assume his POV also. Let's say he likes chocolate and looks forward to eating some of it tomorrow. Unfortunately for your servant, you've just lost sight of him and evil forces drag him into your basement, kill him and send his copy to fulfill your new orders. The guy rotting now in your basement you have no awareness of has just been denied the benefit of experiencing the pleasure of eating chocolate tomorrow. The tragedy here is not that servant dies. It's that he permanently loses access to future benefits while you still maintain that access. That's the difference. Stathis: >> I could further claim that you >> die and are pseudo-resurrected every instant because there is >> nothing "between" quantum intervals of existence. You might >> disagree, arguing that it isn't really complete and permanent >> cessation of physical activity. I could counter that it *is* >> complete and permanent cessation of physical activity, and the >> person in the next quantum interval isn't really you, he just thinks >> he is you. And as I argued several times before, any process is defined over time interval bigger than 0 which means that there's no such thing as a "snapshot" of an instance. Snapshots apply only to types (patterns). Besides, if there's nothing between quantum intervals, how is it possible that things exist during multiples of those intervals? After all, nothing times anything should still result in nothing. Heartland: >> Each life is an instance. Once it expires, resurrection of that >> instance is physically/logically impossible unless posthumans figure >> out a way to upload from >> the past. Keith: > It's not so easy. > > If you leave my desktop on over night, it stays on, but my wife's > laptop is a different matter. > > Depending on how it is set up, after various times of inactivity, it > shuts down the screen, slows the memory access to a crawl, then > writes the contents of memory out to disk, stops the disk and goes > into a sleep mode with memory refresh off. Next time someone moves > the mouse it loads memory from disk and continues from where it was > with every bit in the same state. > > Where would you say it expired? Before I could answer you would have to specify what "it" refers to, that is, which subset of all computer processes you want to track. H. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 01:19:23 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:19:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Greenhouse Power? (was A Grim Vision ...?) References: <200704260509.l3Q59mgH091056@mail0.rawbw.com> Message-ID: <067a01c7886a$a89d71f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike writes > [Lee inquired] >> Why doesn't this furnish a productive energy source? That is, the >> temperature difference generated between such an enclosure and >> the outside sounds as though it could be useful. > > Lee this may have already been answered by others. I am way behind on my > email due to a business trip and vacation. :-) You answer it even better than Robert did, whose reply was quite helpful! > The reason greenhouse effect doesn't provide an energy source is that the > efficiency of running a heat engine in a greenhouse would be very low. To > estimate a maximum Carnot efficiency using greenhouse effect, take the > difference in temperature inside a typical greenhouse minus the temperature > outside, probably about 10 kelvin, The temperature difference is ~10 degrees K > and divide by the temperature outside, at > least high 200s, probably about 300. A Carnot cycle using a greenhouse as a > hot thermal energy reservoir (TER) and the outside as the cold TER could > produce power at around 3% efficiency at best, which is still probably on > the high end. Ah, yes, it's coming back. I do now recall in thermodynamics this calculation being carried out for steam engines, where the temperature difference is ~50 or ~100 K if I recall correctly. > Let me know when you have some time, I will bring over to your house my > thermodynamics book and show you the equations. :-) I may have more thermo books than you do! But you've saved me 15 or 20 minutes looking it all back up, and making sure I had the right equations. Thanks, Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 01:31:33 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:31:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Medical Experimentation on Prisoners, and Slippery Slopes References: <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <068101c7886c$0fb6eb40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike writes (gee, it's good to be reading you again, but hope you had a nice vacation) >> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson >> Decades ago Russian researchers spliced a small dog's head on a larger >> dog. The heads stayed alive for days to weeks ... > > We have a number of medical ethics principles which prevent western medicine > from doing much human experimentation along these lines, I have always wondered why criminals condemned to death cannot volunteer for medical experiments. Perhaps someone can explain clearly why that would, what?, lead menacingly down a slippery slope to applying the death penalty more often than it would be otherwise? (This sort of slippery slope argument, I have learned, always needs to be shown on a case by case business---else we admit very foolish arguments, such as "I shouldn't pay my taxes because that's a slippery slope towards complete tyranny", or, "banning assault weapons or weapons of mass destruction is a slippery slope towards putting a population entirely at the mercy of its government and so making tyranny possible", etc. > but there are those > whose religion actually suggests beheading the enemies of their faith. > Could they not graft the head of one of their terminally ill to the > otherwise perfectly healthy body of a doomed infidel? I wonder if it has > occurred to them to attempt it? They're probably not quite so well read on these topics as is Keith. But who knows? Back in the days of the Abbasid Caliphate they might have been more willing than we are to perform such experiments. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 01:42:23 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:42:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "How To Prepare For Alien Invasion" References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426010230.0238b788@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <068b01c7886d$77000010$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > http://tinyurl.com/2932l7>http://tinyurl.com/2932l7 Thanks for saving my time via browser access and yet opening yet another browser window :-) When you do go out of your way to cut & paste the whole article, you save dozens of people a little a little time and a little trouble. If we all did, we'd *all* save time by having to follow fewer links. > Wed 25 Apr 2007 > How To Prepare For Alien Invasion > By Scott Hillis > > SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) - When the aliens finally > invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and > Bob Boan. > ... > Taylor acknowledged alien invasion is hardly a mainstream > concern but said it is naive to assume - as scientists like the > late Carl Sagan did - that any beings advanced enough to master > star travel will have evolved beyond war. > > "It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality", Taylor > said. Of course. Totally indicitive of mid-20th century pre-EP thinking. > Fermi's Blunder? > ... > Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative > estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10 > percent of the speed of light. Even so, I wonder if they're totally innocent of Tipler's arguments and von Neumann probes. It sounds like it. > ... > But if there are so many aliens out there, why haven't we heard > from them already? > > Mujahideen-Style Resistance > > Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an > aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion > about defending against terrorist attacks. And now we add an apparently complete innocence concerning nanotechnology and the nature of tech-Singularities. Hard to believe that they're serious. > Failure to prepare may mean mankind will have to dig in and > fight with improvised weapons and hit-and-run tactics, much the > same way Islamic extremists have battled the U.S. military in > Iraq, Taylor said. What a laugh. Lee > "You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type > resistance", Taylor said. "The insurgents know how to win this > war against us. It also tells us that if we were attacked by > aliens, this is our best defense." From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 01:51:48 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:51:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Medical Experimentation on Prisoners, and Slippery Slopes In-Reply-To: <068101c7886c$0fb6eb40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <068101c7886c$0fb6eb40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <62c14240704261851v5052fd06ueaa475ac3fcaf19c@mail.gmail.com> On 4/26/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > I have always wondered why criminals condemned to death cannot > volunteer for medical experiments. Perhaps someone can explain > clearly why that would, what?, lead menacingly down a slippery > slope to applying the death penalty more often than it would be > otherwise? (This sort of slippery slope argument, I have learned, > always needs to be shown on a case by case business---else we > admit very foolish arguments, such as "I shouldn't pay my taxes > because that's a slippery slope towards complete tyranny", or, > "banning assault weapons or weapons of mass destruction is a > slippery slope towards putting a population entirely at the mercy > of its government and so making tyranny possible", etc. I heard on the radio about a case where a woman murdered and dismembered her husband, and they were keeping her under psychiatric observation for fear of suicide risk. So we need to make sure she is kept alive so the state can officially judge her? I don't get it. disclaimer: I'm sure she's really a nice person and that I am being mean by talking this way about a convicted murderer. From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 02:36:09 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:36:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425234954.0233fda0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <221492.72741.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > At 04:58 PM 4/25/2007 -0700, Avant wrote: > > >I think you are too fixated on Bushido in its > >historical context rather than as an abstractable > >ethical code applicable in any time and place. > Bushido > >as an ethic can be summed up by approximately 8 > >virtues: wisdom, rectitude, courage, benevolence, > >respect, truth, honor, and loyalty. > > Those are worthy virtues, if a little stern and > rigid and > authoritarian. How about we add: curiosity, > imagination, boldness, > compassion, flexibility/adaptability, humor, > resistance to arbitrary > authority, objectivity... Well we could. But then we would have to change the name of the mutated ethic from "Bushido" to "Mystic Science", "Ascensionism", or something similar. ;-) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 02:40:55 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:40:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Medical Experimentation on Prisoners, and Slippery Slopes References: <200704260507.l3Q57uQ3029148@andromeda.ziaspace.com><068101c7886c$0fb6eb40$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <62c14240704261851v5052fd06ueaa475ac3fcaf19c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <069b01c78875$df52df90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Mike writes > I heard on the radio about a case where a woman murdered and > dismembered her husband, and they were keeping her under psychiatric > observation for fear of suicide risk. So we need to make sure she is > kept alive so the state can officially judge her? I don't get it. You're bringing out the Inspector Clouseau in me. How do we know she's not simply distraught over her sister's terrible crime, and isn't sure she can keep fooling the authorities? > disclaimer: I'm sure she's really a nice person and that I am being > mean by talking this way about a convicted murderer. Oh! You forgot to add that last point: we've already decided she's guilty. I totally agree with you! If indeed she's also been sentenced to death then I am almost in favor of leaving scalpels, razor blades, basins of water, heavy-duty sleeping pills and booze all within easy reach. I say *almost*, because in capital cases, it would make much more sense to hold an auction for who gets to kill her. All's fair: you can have a group---like a bunch of capital punishment advocates in a single company get their corporation to submit a collective bid. And don't forget the additional funds the state can obtain from the television rights, etc. Or would this be yet another slippery slope? Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 02:51:08 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:51:08 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > Individuals are always "fighting" with themselves. Every single decision > > that is made involves a weighing up of multiple alternatives, multiple > > outcomes, multiple utilities for each outcome. If multiple minds were > > integrated into one person the behaviour of that person would reflect > some > > sort of average of the individual minds. > > Stathis, would you agree that "composite" would be a better word than > "average" here, since "average" entails a reduction of information? I > think this question is key because it appears to highlight that you > and I are looking at the same scenario but working in opposite > directions. Yes, "composite" is a better word. I see "group minds" emerging due to the adaptive benefits of > increasing degrees of freedom enabled by a more complexly effective > organizational structure operating within an increasingly complex > environment. The subjective experience of the composite would be a > high level expression of salient features of its internal state over > time, fundamentally unavailable to its members. The subjective > experience of each member, while subjectively "complete", would > reflect a necessarily lower-level description of interactions with the > greater "reality." I don't see how you could distinguish the experiences of each member from the experiences of the composite, or each other, if they were truly joined. It would be like separating the part of you that likes chocolate from the part that doesn't want to put on weight. I don't envision the composite as someone with multiple personality disorder (which probably doesn't exist, BTW) but as a completely integrated single person. It seems that you are working in the opposite direction, assuming the > primality of subjective experience, and imagining how to combine > multiple subjective experiences into one, with this combined average > subjective agent then interacting with its world. Yes, although you don't need to call it an average, as you said above. > Two careful conservatives + one > > reckless radical = one mostly careful, sometimes radical joined person. > The > > difference would be that this person could not harm, punish or reward > some > > selected part of himself because all the parts experience what the whole > > experiences. > > It's not completely clear here, but it appears that you're claiming > that each of the parts would experience what the whole experiences. > >From a systems theoretical point of view, that claim is clearly > unsupportable. It seems to be another example of your assumption of > subjective experience as primary. Would you say that the two hemispheres of the brain have separate experiences, despite the thick cable connecting them? > > I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > > > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > > > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > > > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > > > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > > > > > > Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can > > > there be a survival value, for the human species, in > > > such diversity of opinions that exists today, where > > > people can't accept each other's ways of thinking, > > > where people even kill each other because they have > > > different beliefs etc? > > > > The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble > the > > collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. > > It seems clear to me that the behavior of the collective would display > characteristics *not* present in any of its parts. This is > fundamental complexity theory. Yes, I suppose that's true and the fact that the parts are in communication would alter the behaviour of the collective. However, even the disconnected parts would display emergent behaviour in their interactions. > The > > equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out some > > undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the > advantage > > that no-one actually gets hurt. > > This sounds nice, but it's not clear to me what model it describes. In a society with multiple individuals, the Cristians might decide to persecute the Muslims. But if a single individual is struggling with the idea of whether to follow Christianity or Islam, he is hardly in a position to persecute one or other aspect of himself. The internal conflict may lead to distress, but that isn't the same thing. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 02:57:27 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:57:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com><048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer><04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer><050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer><05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> <46313DF8.9010108@pobox.com> Message-ID: <06a201c78877$fa0759e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Lee: >> Even insult itself, however, does have a place John: > That was my point, if insults weren't often quite good at getting the job > done they would not be so common in the meme pool. Eliezer: > Sounds like a group selection argument. Sounds more like *meme* selection to me! But John left out my *argument*---merely quoting my conclusion! Here was my supporting argument, which he did not address. > > ... behavior of this kind, according unimpeachable authority [1], > > serves a *social* function. It's inappropriate in a forum like this > > where---joking and satire and abbreviations for the initiated aside > > ---we are interested in a search for truth. Let me add emphasis so that you see it this time: INSULTS CAN PERFORM A USEFUL *SOCIAL* FUNCTION, NEVER A USEFUL INTELLECTUAL OR CRITICAL FUNCTION. Damien writes > I take it that Lee is saying "stupid" is a word (an offensive, > insulting word) applying to someone whose assessed intelligence is > especially low, but not applicable to a belief, opinion, claim, action, etc. Yes, but though it may not have been clear the way I juxtaposed arguments or I misstated it, indeed there are, I admit after all, "stupid" arguments as well as "stupid people". But such terms have so far as I can see only two functions: (1) a social function as explained by Miss Manners, and (2) an abbreviation to save writing among similarly inclined thinkers. It NEVER does ANY good WHATSOEVER to use them in serious argument, as say, against religious people or people who believe the Earth to be flat. I am appalled at those who do. Have they utterly no appreciation of the role of argument and the proper content of argument? Even if talking to someone who seriously believes in the Moon Landing Hoax or who believes that the Earth is flat, what the hell good does it do to pronounce, "you know pal, that claim is just stupid". Lee [1] Judith Martin, "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior": The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to adapt to one's own preferences. Only then can we hope to restore the insult to its proper social function of expressing true distaste. From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 03:07:58 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:07:58 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <221492.72741.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425234954.0233fda0@satx.rr.com> <221492.72741.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426220431.022a5610@satx.rr.com> At 07:36 PM 4/26/2007 -0700, Stuart wrote: > > Those are worthy virtues, if a little stern and > > rigid and > > authoritarian. How about we add: curiosity, > > imagination, boldness, > > compassion, flexibility/adaptability, humor, > > resistance to arbitrary > > authority, objectivity... > >Well we could. But then we would have to change the >name of the mutated ethic from "Bushido" to "Mystic >Science", "Ascensionism", or something similar. ;-) Yeah, okay, I left out some bridging blah-blah along the lines of: Bushido (not to be confused with the more recent Bush-do-do) is being discussed as a code of conduct perhaps worthy of emulation. However, in addition to some of those virtues, or indeed in several cases in place of them, how about we... Damien Broderick (being humorless) From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 03:33:36 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:33:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070426182823.046a6bd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <06b301c7887c$e2514e50$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > The thesis just says that humans have psychological traits > from our remote past that when activated led to wars in those days. We > still have them and activation of these mechanisms _may_ lead to war in the > modern era. Then we do not disagree. (Communication may be facilitated if you tried harder to avoid giving the impression---that several of us got over the last few years---that population increase or high birth rate was the typical modern direct cause of war, or almost always the most important factor. But see my "mediating" remark below.) > As Azar Gat points out (in the paper I keep citing and nobody seems to > read) population density has little to do with the willingness of people to > go into war. Why? What is important? I understand you to mean that population density and high birth rate sometimes tend to lead to war because they so often lead to desperate circumstances in a population, or, as you put it "grim prospects". In this sense, it is the circumstances and prospects that are merely *mediated* by high birth rates and density. Of course, your quote below applies far more readily to the EEA than to now. Lee > I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to > "going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources > are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move > there. > > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. > > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, > most productive habitats were normally already taken. > > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent > encounters with other human groups. > > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy > penalties. From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Apr 27 03:41:43 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:41:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200704270352.l3R3qWei020205@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ________________________________________ ... Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest ... >Though I am sure there are some readers of the Bible or Koran who could cite "Satan's rebellion against God" in detail (Spike perhaps?) I suspect a majority only is aware of it in a very loose sense ...Robert Isaiah chapter 14 verses 12-14 is often given as the basis for the notion. There is surely a lot of imaginative invention of details for the purposes of encouraging the pew-sitters to drop currency into the offering plates. spike From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 04:00:30 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Europe (was:Gandhi and EP) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427000027.046f49c0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:27 PM 4/26/2007 -0400, you wrote: >"Keith Henson" > > > How do you account for the fact that the modern states of Europe have gone > > so long without a war? > >I think the fact the Europe is now the least religious place on planet Earth >played a part in this happy circumstance. Indeed it is. But is it causal? Or is the decline of religions a effect going so long without wars? Time wise, the decline of religions in Europe happened about a generation after WW II. And as a side note where I can't find the reference as I recall the Falklands War resulted in an up tick in religions activity in Great Briton. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 00:09:53 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:09:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War (was Gandhi and EP was Bushido) In-Reply-To: <05e201c787e2$84ee8010$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070426182823.046a6bd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:06 AM 4/26/2007 -0700, you wrote: >Keith writes > > > [Robert wrote] > >>Keith, you keep harping on this topic of population growth as driving war. > > > > You miss the point of the model. Population could be growing fast and > > there would be no drift into war provided income was growing as fast or > > faster. (Or something else was keeping the "bleak future" detectors > > off.) Population could even be shrinking, but if the economy was > shrinking > > faster that would bias a population toward war. > >I totally agree that population increase provides the fodder for many >wars without which they wouldn't have occurred, or the severity would >have been greatly diminished. The late Roman Republic "social wars" >are a good example, and even the Empire's civil wars were often fueled >by too many desperate poor people with no prospects. > >But it is *not* a catch-all, the way your posts seem to keep claiming. > >You submit the challenge yet again: > > > Besides recorded history is not anything like > > the EEA where these psychological traits were shaped. For one thing, high > > techs can exterminate low techs with relatively little danger. They might > > do it just for profit. How about finding a counter example? Can you > think > > of any group that started a war with a group on the same technological > > level where the side that started the war was *not* looking at a bleak > > future? > >There are many. I have provided many in the past, and it seems to me that >Robert has provided examples. True, when these examples are presented >you tend to retreat to the position that conditions have changed since the >EEA. But that wrecks your thesis if you intend to have it apply to the >current situations. Not at all. The thesis just says that humans have psychological traits from our remote past that when activated led to wars in those days. We still have them and activation of these mechanisms _may_ lead to war in the modern era. The mechanisms might also lead to terrorist acts if the asymmetry in force (technology) is too great. >The Third Reich was not facing bleak prospects when it attacked the Soviet >Union. They were already *in* a war. The US was already in a war when the US attacked Iraq. The model also includes that peoples/leaders in a war are affected with stupid. But if you consider what happened over the next 4 years, you could certainly make a case that the Third Reich was facing bleak prospects. At the time of the attack it had grave problems of industrial supplies, particularly in terms of oil. So did Japan. I wonder if future historians are going to call WW II the first oil war? >Neither Mexico nor the United States were facing problems in 1846. >The American illegal immigrants were moving into some of Mexico's outlying >provinces, and they were too proud to stand for it. Don't forget that there are two ways of getting into war mode. The easy one to understand is being attacked. It may well be that *both* sides had good reason to think they had been attacked on their own territory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Affair >Yes, the American >expansion into these areas was facilitated by a booming population, but >the overall population density was still pretty low, As Azar Gat points out (in the paper I keep citing and nobody seems to read) population density has little to do with the willingness of people to go into war. Why? What is important? >and the U.S. at the time >had one of the world's very highest standards of living. Population pressure >is a factor, but only in some (many) cases. It is only indirectly a factor in any case, though if you hold other factors constant and vary only population, it would be seen as the case. >Or---considering the dialog directly below---perhaps you do intend to >restrict your thesis to pre-industrial times. The psychological traits, like other psychological traits, originated not just pre-industrial, but pre-agricultural. The below quote is out of the Gat paper. Keith >Lee > > >>I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to > >>"going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources > >>are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move > >>there. > > > > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible > > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and > > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy > > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. > > > > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for > > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, > > most productive habitats were normally already taken. > > > > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also > > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding > > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent > > encounters with other human groups. > > > > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose > > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and > > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy > > penalties. > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Apr 27 04:19:55 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:19:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg In-Reply-To: <048301c7862d$95139f90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704270417.l3R4HYmg012856@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Lee the Griggmeister can be reached at desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Surely he would be happy to hear from any old time ExI friends. John Grigg is among the most gentle, kindhearted, good guys that have hung out here over the years. I like his style. Drop him a howdy. Do so now, thanks. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin > Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 9:59 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg > > Hi John, > > I've tried contacting you off-list several times. Could you at least > reply to me as to whether you got my messages? > > Thanks, > Lee lcorbin at rawbw.com From ben at goertzel.org Fri Apr 27 04:24:45 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:24:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest In-Reply-To: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <849287.96958.qm@web37212.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704262124w172607c0ge1bd5fdf6f04c672@mail.gmail.com> I am not a religious person but yet I find > it utterly useless to denounce Religion in any way as > then I feel that I am stomping on the beliefs of > millions of people. It may or may not be useless to denounce religion in public, among religious people... But on this list, denouncing religion is just boring, because nearly all of us have long ago understood that the superstitious and irrational beliefs of religious traditions have no place in a transhumanist world view. At the same time, I find it > useless to ignore Religion as I believe that any > movement(such as Transhumanism) that will result in > change (such as the Singularity) will have to deal > with such minds. That is true, and we also have to deal with sex, drug addiction, video games, sadomasochism, and all sorts of other social and psychological phenomena. But that doesn't mean we need to focus our discussion on all these various social and psychological phenomena. This list is supposed to be about prolonging life, the > use of technology, transhumanism etc. If you believe > God doesn't exist and have the right to say it then I > would assume that a religious person may have those > same rights and discuss the existence of God. You have the right to say that 2+2=5 also, but if you keep repeating it to me I will start deleting all your emails without reading them ;-) If the list > does not wish to dwell on Religion then any and all > comments that are in regard to God or Religion should > not be made. If I have misunderstood and all > Extropians are Atheists, then I think that should be > made clear and concrete. Well, speaking for myself, I really do not wish to discuss religion; and, I also don't care to discuss any philosophical issues with any person who is not either atheist or agnostic (and even "agnostic" is iffy ... but this word encompasses a lot of different attitudes). What I find scary is that so many folks in the modern world still actually believe in some kind of "god" up there in heaven deciding things about the world. Egads!! If people believe absurd things like that, how the heck can we expect them to think rationally about the Singularity??? ;-p I do think there is value in various spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness. But connecting these experiences with ideas about "god", gods, demons and the like is really about as silly as believing the Tooth Fairy takes your tooth from under your pillow and replaces it with a dollar in the middle of the night... Next will we have a long thread about the reality of Santa Claus??? You do after all have the right to believe in Santa, and even to discuss your belief ... but the topic will start to bore a lot of us on this list pretty quickly... -- Ben G -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 04:59:22 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:59:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <06b301c7887c$e2514e50$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net> <195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070426182823.046a6bd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427004650.046473a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 08:33 PM 4/26/2007 -0700, you wrote: >Keith writes snip > > As Azar Gat points out (in the paper I keep citing and nobody seems to > > read) population density has little to do with the willingness of > people to > > go into war. Why? What is important? > >I understand you to mean that population density and high birth rate >sometimes tend to lead to war because they so often lead to desperate >circumstances in a population, or, as you put it "grim prospects". "In extreme cases like the mid-Canadian arctic, where resources are highly diffused and human population density is very low, resource competition and resource conflict may barely exist. "In arid and semi-arid environments, like those of Central Australia, where human population density was also very low, water holes were often the main cause of resource competition and conflict. They were obviously critical in times of drought, when whole groups of Aborigines are recorded to have perished. "For this reason, however, there was a tendency to control them even when stress was less pressing. For example, as Meggitt recorded (1962: 42), between the Walbiri and Waringari hunter-gatherers of the mid-Australian Desert, whose population density was as low as one person per 35 square mile, relatively large-scale fighting, to the order of 'pitched battles' with a 'score or more dead', took place, among other reasons, in order to 'occupy' and monopolize wells. "In well-watered environments, food often became the chief cause of resource competition and conflict, especially at times of stress, but also in expectation of and preparation for stress." >In >this sense, it is the circumstances and prospects that are merely >*mediated* by high birth rates and density. "population density was as low as one person per 35 square mile." "Like aggression, territoriality is not a blind instinct. It is subservient to the evolutionary calculus, especially in humans, whose habitats are so diverse. Among hunter-gatherers, territories vary dramatically in size - territorial behaviour itself can gain or lose in significance - in direct relation to the resources and resource competition. "The same applies to population density, another popular explanation in the 1960s for violence. In other than the most extreme cases, it is mainly in relation to resource scarcity and hence as a factor in resource competition that population density would function as a trigger for fighting. Otherwise, Tokyo and the Netherlands would have been among the most violent places on earth." >Of course, your quote below applies far more readily to the EEA than >to now. I don't think so. Keith >Lee > > I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to > > "going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources > > are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move > > there. > > > > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible > > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and > > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy > > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. > > > > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for > > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, > > most productive habitats were normally already taken. > > > > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also > > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding > > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent > > encounters with other human groups. > > > > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose > > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and > > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy > > penalties. From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 05:19:18 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:19:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Europe (was:Gandhi and EP) In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427000027.046f49c0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable. rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427011717.047635d8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 12:00 AM 4/27/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: >And as a side note where I can't find the reference as I recall the >Falklands War resulted in an up tick in religions activity in Great Briton. Church attendance went up dramatically right after 9/11. Sales of Bibles soared. Google, Results 1 - 10 of about 90 for "church attendance went up" war Keith From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 05:10:01 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:10:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Anarchy + Transparent Society + Bushido = Survival In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426220431.022a5610@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <685655.28836.qm@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > > > Those are worthy virtues, if a little stern and > > > rigid and > > > authoritarian. How about we add: curiosity, > > > imagination, boldness, > > > compassion, flexibility/adaptability, humor, > > > resistance to arbitrary > > > authority, objectivity... > > > >Well we could. But then we would have to change the > >name of the mutated ethic from "Bushido" to "Mystic > >Science", "Ascensionism", or something similar. ;-) > > Yeah, okay, I left out some bridging blah-blah along > the lines of: > Bushido (not to be confused with the more recent > Bush-do-do) Well Bush-do-do is all the more reason to change the name. After all a wise man never said, "a man can never step in the same Bushido twice." > is being > discussed as a code of conduct perhaps worthy of > emulation. Why emulate when one can lead? > However, > in addition to some of those virtues, or indeed in > several cases in > place of them, how about we... Try to do better? Why not? You, Damien, are an apostate theologian- a rare bird and the ultimate acid test for a wanna-be religion. Whatever straws of truth you may have been able to grasp in your inexorable slide to be here with me on the Extropian's list can only add to my paltry pile. > Damien Broderick (being humorless) Stuart LaForge (being humorous as wise man once suggested was virtuous) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 06:40:58 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:40:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><462E4DFB.9030808@lineone.net><195738.6437.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070425101518.08659210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070425135655.046a02d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070426182823.046a6bd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427004650.046473a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <070a01c78897$85e3da50$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > "For this reason, however, there was a tendency to control them even when > stress was less pressing. For example, as Meggitt recorded (1962: 42), > between the Walbiri and Waringari hunter-gatherers of the mid-Australian > Desert, whose population density was as low as one person per 35 square > mile, relatively large-scale fighting, to the order of 'pitched battles' > with a 'score or more dead', took place, among other reasons, in order to > 'occupy' and monopolize wells. The point is well made that resource scarcity can and often does cause conflict. Yes. > "Like aggression, territoriality is not a blind instinct. It is subservient > to the evolutionary calculus, especially in humans, whose habitats are so > diverse. Among hunter-gatherers, territories vary dramatically in size - > territorial behaviour itself can gain or lose in significance - in direct > relation to the resources and resource competition. > > "The same applies to population density, another popular explanation in the > 1960s for violence. In other than the most extreme cases, it is mainly in > relation to resource scarcity and hence as a factor in resource competition > that population density would function as a trigger for fighting. > Otherwise, Tokyo and the Netherlands would have been among the most violent > places on earth." How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th century faced economic deprivation? In what ways did resource scarcity contribute to WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam? Things were booming in Germany before both WWI and WWII, and no one else was much pinched either. (Yes, I suppose that a case can be made about the *Japanese* government motives for WWII aggression, but what about Europe, where most of the big wars occurred? >> Of course, your quote below applies far more readily to the EEA than >> to now. > > I don't think so. Eh? Why not? The circumstances described in most of your post (e.g. Australia) as well as the points below are *not* characteristic of modern societies. Rather, they resemble the scarcity of the EEA, (and of some subsequent medieval history). Lee >> > I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to >> > "going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources >> > are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move >> > there. >> > >> > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible >> > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break contact and >> > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's enemy >> > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. >> > >> > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty spaces" for >> > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, >> > most productive habitats were normally already taken. >> > >> > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also >> > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, finding >> > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent >> > encounters with other human groups. >> > >> > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose >> > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and >> > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve heavy >> > penalties. From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 06:50:25 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:50:25 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Democracy is a lie In-Reply-To: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> References: <463103AD.7000501@lineone.net> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, ben wrote: > > > "Stathis Papaioannou" wrote: > > >In Australia, you get fined if you don't vote. > > > > >And I see nothing wrong with this. The "" changes the context. What I meant was that I see nothing wrong with the fact that *mentally ill* people are treated the same as anyone else as regards voting. For the most part, the mentally ill are aware of their interests to the extent that they might vote for a party that will improve public housing and access to public psychiatry, for example. After all, stupid, apathetic and ignorant people get to vote. On the rare occasion that a mentally ill person votes under instructions from the voices in his head, I doubt that the voices would have a preference for one party over another, so it would be equivalent to an informal vote or a donkey vote. (Yes, in Australia not only the mentally ill but also donkeys get to vote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_voting). Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 08:18:12 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:18:12 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Heartland wrote: I hear this kind of argument all the time. What you're saying here does not > really > question the fact that flat EEG means death. You merely observe that you > find no > difference between an illusion of continuous life and a continuous life. > Why you > don't appreciate the difference? It's probably because you have been > conditioned > into assuming observer POV which effectively prevents you from seeing this > difference. Even if there were a difference, it doesn't matter. Suppose God tells you that you either die and are pseudo-resurrected every moment, or you have continuous life of the sort you describe. You have to guess which is the case, and you get a prize if you are correct. Is there anything about the way you feel, or the way other people see you which would help you guess the right answer? If not, then you would have to admit that it is quite possible that what you take to be continuous life might, in fact, have been continuous death all along. Say God reveals that this was in fact the case, but offers to give you a week of continuous life so you can see how you like it. At the end of the week, you have to admit that it doesn't actually feel any different to what continuous death felt like. I imagine that as a matter of principle, you would still express a preference for continuous life, but most people would probably say, if I've been continuously dying my whole life and didn't know it, and continuous life feels to me exactly the same as continuous death, what's the big deal? It would imply a redefinition of death to *permanent* death, with no successor observer moments ever again. Imagine you have a servant. As a master it makes no difference to you if the > servant who does chores for you is being replaced by a perfect copy each > time he > escapes your field of vision as long as the job is being done. In other > words, as > an observer, the fact your servant is being constantly replaced makes no > difference > to you because you *benefit* equally from services of the original or the > copy. > > But you must realize your servant is a person too and you must be able and > willing > to assume his POV also. Let's say he likes chocolate and looks forward to > eating > some of it tomorrow. Unfortunately for your servant, you've just lost > sight of him > and evil forces drag him into your basement, kill him and send his copy to > fulfill > your new orders. The guy rotting now in your basement you have no > awareness of has > just been denied the benefit of experiencing the pleasure of eating > chocolate > tomorrow. > > The tragedy here is not that servant dies. It's that he permanently loses > access to > future benefits while you still maintain that access. That's the > difference. If the replacement were seamless, it would be perfectly equivalent to ordinary life. You have this notion that something "reaches out" from one moment to the next, and that if it isn't this same something but a mere copy, then that is a bad thing. But in quantum mechanics it is literally impossible to distinguish one subatomic particle from another, so the concept of this proton being the same proton as a moment ago is meaningless. We can say that this proton has a similar relationship to its neighbours as the proton a moment ago, but that's all. As a matter of fact, replacement doesn't even need to be with strictly the same type of matter. If you were fed food entirely consisting of different isotopes to what is naturally found in the body, eventually all of you would demonstrably be made of different matter. This would be a gradual replacement, and you would presumably still agree that you have been continuously alive. But imagine that your metabolic rate is increased so that the replacement occurs faster and faster: weeks, days, minutes, seconds etc. until the limit where the replacement occurs instantaneously (or takes one Planck interval). Would you argue that the replacement is OK if it takes a femtosecond, but murder if it takes a Planck interval? Stathis: > >> I could further claim that you > >> die and are pseudo-resurrected every instant because there is > >> nothing "between" quantum intervals of existence. You might > >> disagree, arguing that it isn't really complete and permanent > >> cessation of physical activity. I could counter that it *is* > >> complete and permanent cessation of physical activity, and the > >> person in the next quantum interval isn't really you, he just thinks > >> he is you. > > And as I argued several times before, any process is defined over time > interval > bigger than 0 which means that there's no such thing as a "snapshot" of an > instance. Snapshots apply only to types (patterns). > > Besides, if there's nothing between quantum intervals, how is it possible > that > things exist during multiples of those intervals? After all, nothing times > anything > should still result in nothing. If time is discrete, then all motion is an illusion, like frames in a film. You may be aware of so-called block universe thories of time, in which every instant occurs statically and eternally (the instants could be of infinitesimal duration) and the "flow" of time is an illusion. The point is, whether or not this is the "true" theory of time, physics is the same in a block universe or a linear universe. If some experiment were done supporting the block universe view, which would mean that the moments of your life are no more closely related than copies in neighbouring rooms, would that be upsetting to you? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 27 10:25:44 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:25:44 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 08:43:13PM -0400, Heartland wrote: > I hear this kind of argument all the time. What you're saying here does not really > question the fact that flat EEG means death. You merely observe that you find no For the benefit of everyone who is not Slawomir: only sustainable flat EEG means death. I wonder what would happen if we'd anaesthesize Slawomir in his sleep, induced a heart arrest and waited a couple minutes after resuscitation. Or merely sedated both his hemispheres, making them transiently electrically silent (a much softer approach). Then, after several months and years we'd tell him. What would be his reaction? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 11:12:13 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:12:13 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 08:43:13PM -0400, Heartland wrote: > > I hear this kind of argument all the time. What you're saying here does > not really > > question the fact that flat EEG means death. You merely observe that you > find no > > For the benefit of everyone who is not Slawomir: only sustainable flat EEG > means death. > > I wonder what would happen if we'd anaesthesize Slawomir in his sleep, > induced a heart arrest and waited a couple minutes after resuscitation. > Or merely sedated both his hemispheres, making them transiently > electrically > silent (a much softer approach). > > Then, after several months and years we'd tell him. What would be > his reaction? We wouldn't need to go to such drastic lengths. Commonly used anaesthetics such as thiopentone and isoflurane cause flat EEG traces, a pattern called "burst suppression". So unless you want to bite down on a piece of wood while the surgeon takes your appendix out, you are going to end up dying and an impostor with your memories will take your place after the operation. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Apr 27 11:27:49 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:27:49 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070427112749.GB9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 09:12:13PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > We wouldn't need to go to such drastic lengths. Commonly used > anaesthetics such as thiopentone and isoflurane cause flat EEG traces, > a pattern called "burst suppression". So unless you want to bite down > on a piece of wood while the surgeon takes your appendix out, you are > going to end up dying and an impostor with your memories will take > your place after the operation. Yes, there's not much death to Slawomir's death. We could as well call it something else. Of course, the French would disagree ("la petite mort"). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 11:40:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:40:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > By "increasing context of shared values" do you mean something like a > lowest > > common denominator, or an averaging out of values? > > No. I use the phrase "fine-grained values" to mean just the opposite. > Our shared values can be approximated as an extremely complex > hierarchy with "reality" (the ultimate view of what works) at the root > and increasingly subjective branches supporting ever more subjective > sub-branches until we reach each individual's values. The key here is > that even though each of us has effective access only to our own > subjective values at the tips of the outermost branches, we have an > increasingly shared interest in the increasingly probable branches > (supporting us) leading back to the root. With increasing awareness > of this tree structure, we would increasingly agree on which branches > best support, not our present values, but growth in the direction > indicated by our shared values that work. > > > > What if there is just an irreducible conflict in values, such as between > > those who think women should "dress modestly" and those who think women > > should dress however they please (this issue is often assumed to be > based on > > religious or anti-egalitarian considerations, but consider the > prudishness > > of the Russian and Chinese communists)? > > See above, and let me know if that does not address your question. In the example I give, both parties would agree that their dress code for women was part of some more general principle. The problem is, they might see different branches, a different trunk, different roots, or claim the same roots for their trunk's exclusive use. There might be perfectly stable, progressive societies ("what works"?) possible based on either ideology. Each side will in the end be reduced to yelling at the other, "My values are better than your values!". This is the case for any argument where the premises cannot be agreed upon. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 13:11:50 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 06:11:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <072c01c788ce$20b74270$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Of course in the current debate between Slawomir (Heartland) and Stathis/Eugen (an ugly combination you don't want to mess with, take it from me) I naturally and wholeheartedly agree with Stathis & Eugen. And I have been arguing this position since 1966, more than forty years now. I may be a bit prejudiced :-) But *one* of the causes that progress is seldom made is that inadequate care is taken in understanding other people's views. In this case, Stathis and Eugen riddle their sentences with assumptions that Slawomir cannot possible agree with, and so those sentences contribute nothing towards understanding, and in fact succeed only in further frustration. For example, Stathis writes > Suppose God tells you that you either die and are pseudo-resurrected every moment, or you have continuous life of the sort you describe. You have to guess which is the case... Say God reveals that this was in fact the case, but offers to give you a week of continuous life so you can see how you like it. At the end of the week, you have to admit that it doesn't actually feel any different to what continuous death felt like. I imagine that as a matter of principle, you would still express a preference for continuous life, but most people would probably say.... < Can people see the intrinsic flaw in what Stathis is suggesting? It's the ambiguity of what is meant in each sentence by the word "you"! Note that Heartland must read the same paragraph as > Suppose God tells you that you either die and are pseudo-resurrected every moment, /* COMMENTED OUT or you have continuous life of the sort you describe*/ or there is a succession of totally different people leading the same sort of life as you describe. /* COMMENTED OUT You have to guess which is the case...*/ These different people subsequently have to guess whether they are the same person or not. Say God reveals that this was in fact the case, but offers to give you a week of continuous life so you can see how you like it. At the end of the week, you have to admit that it doesn't [TO THE PARTICULAR SLAWOMIR INSTANCE] actually feel any different to what continuous death felt like. I imagine that as a matter of principle, [THE LAST PERSON IN THIS SEQUENCE] would still express a preference for continuous life, {no, that new Person, having Slawomir's beliefs, would not!} < Do you see how you beg the very question that's bothering Slawomir? This is one reason that the arguments go around and around without resolution. (Alas, there are other more general reason that they do, such as the fact that people seldom, seldom change their minds in real time---it takes at least months, most often years, for other beliefs to finally sneak in and supplant wrong ones.) Eugen makes *exactly* the same mistake: From: "Eugen Leitl" > I wonder what would happen if we'd anaesthesize [a particular and special > individual who happens to have Slawomir's memories] in "his" sleep, > induced a heart arrest and waited a couple minutes after resuscitation. > Or merely sedated both his hemispheres, making them transiently electrically > silent (a much softer approach). > > Then, after several months and years we'd tell "him" (I.e. the last person in > sequence of people who is stuck with the Heartland memories and beliefs). > What would be [the reaction of this last instance be]? OF course, the reaction of the last instance---from Heartland's belief system ---would be that he is lucky to be alive and that all those previous unlucky individuals are totally dead and gone. Lee P.S. I believe that Slawomir's concept of these different people---being as they are somehow independent in their constitutions from their memories--- is identical to a calculus of souls. Each time a flat EEG is reached, the old soul is discarded, and a new one instantiated. After all, there is nothing *physically* (according to the last three hundred years of science) different about the resuscitated individual that is of any moment. From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 13:21:26 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:21:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:16:09 -0400, Damien Broderick wrote: > The World as Will and Idea is a notion dynamically embodied in Alfred > Bester's great baroque sf novel THE STARS MY DESTINATION (aka TIGER! > TIGER!), fw that's w. And his flawed protagonist Gully Foyle is one of > the first powerful representations of an augmented human. Interesting. Do you recall in what way The World as Will and Idea is embodied in the novel? -gts From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Apr 27 14:14:22 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:14:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under Socialism?. In-Reply-To: <462E4E04.5040509@lineone.net> Message-ID: <200704271432.l3REWPRj007147@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of ben > Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:36 AM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Who Gets Expensive Treatments Under > Socialism?. > > > I've wondered before if there would be a niche for 'professional health > carers', i.e. people who get paid to care about (not for) your health. > They would be augmented by expert medical systems, know enough about > medicine to know when it's time to call in the big guns, but above all, > they would be 'carers' (as in 'care about', rather than 'care for')... > They'd also know when to be proactive, and pester you to get that pap > test/cholesterol test/prostate exam/whatever done... ben zaiboc Ben, a company I worked for 20 years ago did something a little like this. They offered a number of programs to help the smokers kick the habit. One of the programs was an attractive and sincere young lady who was a carer and encourager. Didn't work in most cases, but that does lead to an idea like yours, especially for encouraging middle-aged men to see the medics for the old one-finger howdy, that exam we all put off, in some cases with fatal results. Hospitals or companies could hire an attractive young lady to get palsy walsy with the guys in a vaguely provocative way, encouraging, appearing eager to be present at the examination and so forth. Lives could be saved. Good idea, ben! spike From george at betterhumans.com Fri Apr 27 15:25:14 2007 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:25:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who's coming to TV07? Message-ID: Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for TransVision 07? (I'll be there) Cheers, George From ben at goertzel.org Fri Apr 27 15:28:00 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:28:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who's coming to TV07? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704270828h6674b993h44e869a23f10ee33@mail.gmail.com> i will be speaking there... ben g On 4/27/07, George Dvorsky wrote: > > Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for > TransVision 07? > > (I'll be there) > > Cheers, > George > _______________________________________________ > 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 pj at pj-manney.com Fri Apr 27 15:36:21 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:36:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] Who's coming to TV07? Message-ID: <6944485.242791177688181475.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> George wrote: >Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for >TransVision 07? > >(I'll be there) Me, too. PJ From kevin.osborne at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 16:30:22 2007 From: kevin.osborne at gmail.com (kevin.osborne) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 02:30:22 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] disproving the existence of "souls" Message-ID: <3642969c0704270930t77d443b4u37c0c1ce397b8a7b@mail.gmail.com> A couple of different research groups have now successfully killed, frozen and reanimated pigs and dogs. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,376140-2,00.html and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/29/zombie_dogs/) Now this will no doubt make those with cryo-insurance happier with their purchase, but where it comes in handy for bashing spirituality nonsense is: where was monsieur pig's soul while he was dead? once he was reanimated, how did it get back? of course the answer is that he has no soul, and when his neurons are frozen he's simply in stasis. he can be revived in a number of hours and according to the experiments "there is no neurological damage" and he's the same pig he always was. keen on the green apples, not so much the red. one of the groups is looking to be ready for human trials in 18 months. once they start successfully freezing dead humans and reanimating them down the track this is presumably going to pose a decent theological quandary for the godbotherers and mystics. there has never been and is not now anything more to us than our flesh. there is no afterlife that our essence resides in or dissipates to. we're simply meatsacks buzzing around at 40hz and in the near future we'll be able to put ourselves into storage for the winter just like our bathers. any argument that the "universe" somehow "knew that we weren't -really- going to die" and put us in "limbo" adds a whole new stack of Occam-unfriendly unexplainable crap and tries to reanimate a deterministic universe model that must have surely been finally put to death by http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14. From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 16:40:54 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:40:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:40 PM 4/26/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: snip >How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th >century faced economic deprivation? It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the detectors. This is characteristic of animals in general. In _Influence: the new psychology of modern persuasion_ Dr. Cialdini discusses this in the classic example were a bucket of warm water feels cold to one hand and hot to the other when left and right hands have been presoaked in cold and hot water. Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It would pay genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were gaunt and weak from hunger. >In what ways did resource scarcity >contribute to WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam? Things were >booming in Germany before both WWI and WWII, and no one else was >much pinched either. "At the time of Hitler's release [from jail], the political situation in Germany had calmed and the economy had improved, which hampered Hitler's opportunities for agitation." snip "The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression hit Germany in 1930." snip "Br?ning's measure of budget consolidation and financial austerity brought little economic improvement and was extremely unpopular. Under these circumstances, Hitler appealed to the bulk of German farmers, war veterans and the middle-class who had been hard-hit by both the inflation of the 1920s and the unemployment of the Depression." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler >(Yes, I suppose that a case can be made about the >*Japanese* government motives for WWII aggression, but what about >Europe, where most of the big wars occurred? > > >> Of course, your quote below applies far more readily to the EEA than > >> to now. > > > > I don't think so. > >Eh? Why not? The circumstances described in most of your post (e.g. >Australia) as well as the points below are *not* characteristic of modern >societies. Rather, they resemble the scarcity of the EEA, (and of some >subsequent medieval history). > >Lee > > >> > I feel it is an incomplete theory. Perhaps a much better approach to > >> > "going to war" is simply to "migrate". Find a place where the resources > >> > are more abundant than they are in the current location and simply move > >> > there. > >> > > >> > "The benefits of fighting must also be matched against possible > >> > alternatives (other than starvation). One of them was to break > contact and > >> > move elsewhere. This, of course, often happened, especially if one's > enemy > >> > was much stronger, but this strategy had clear limitations. > >> > > >> > "As we have already noted, by and large, there were no "empty > spaces" for > >> > people to move to. In the first place, space is not even, and the best, > >> > most productive habitats were normally already taken. > >> > > >> > "One could be forced out to less hospitable environments, which may also > >> > had been earlier populated by other less fortunate people. Indeed, > finding > >> > empty niches required exploration, which again might involve violent > >> > encounters with other human groups. > >> > > >> > "Furthermore, a move meant leaving the group's own habitat, with whose > >> > resources and dangers the group's members were intimately familiar, and > >> > travelling into uncharted environments. Such a change could involve > heavy > >> > penalties. > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 17:08:45 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:08:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <074501c788ef$19035ac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes >>How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th >>century faced economic deprivation? > > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the detectors. Okay, then you have to make the case that the *relative* deprivation was greater around 1940 (or 1914 or June, 1950), and so on, than at other times. Actually, prosperity *usually* leads to greater inequality (and, true, envy of those who are better off). My remark applies to both people and nations. > classic example were a bucket of warm water feels cold to one hand and hot to the other when left and right hands have been > presoaked in cold and hot water. We've all experienced this. > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It > would pay genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were gaunt and weak from hunger. Yes, that is so. And yes, some of the causes of WWI are related to this: Unlike the late 1930's, the Germans were filled with foreboding (first chapter, Paul Johnson's "Modern Times: From the twenties to the eighties"), brought upon by an irrational fear of the slavs. I don't know if the common people were so afflicted, but the philosophers and perhaps the government leaders were. The "doom and gloom" philosophical school had won out. And by 1914 the English were very apprehensive of being overtaken by Germany, and were led to their making certain moves that made the outbreak of war more likely (though the actual beginnings, of course, can scarcely be laid at their door). >>In what ways did resource scarcity >>contribute to WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam? Things were >>booming in Germany before both WWI and WWII, and no one else was >>much pinched either. > > "At the time of Hitler's release [from jail], the political situation in Germany had calmed and the economy had improved, which > hampered Hitler's opportunities for agitation." Jeez. That was in the early 20s! By the late thirties economies had begun to recover from the depression, especially in Germany. The people were buoyed with optimism, and the hoi polloi believed that Hitler and the Nazis were the best thing that ever happened. The wikipedia link on Hitler you mentioned says On April 1, 1924 Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Landsberg Prison. Hitler received favoured treatment from the guards and had much fan mail from admirers.[18] He was pardoned and released from jail in December 1924, after serving only nine months of his sentence, or just over a year if time on remand is included.[18] In an earlier post, you said that the Hitler invasion of the Soviet Union did not go against your scheme for the reason that a war was already in progress. But there was *utterly* no reason whatsoever that made any sense to invade Russia; not militarily, not economically, nothing. (Well, yes, if the Germans conquered Russia then they'd have their own oil; but Stalin was acting like Hitler's stooge in the real war that was going on.) The invasion of the Soviet Union was one man's crazy idea. > "The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression hit Germany in 1930." > > snip > > "Br?ning's measure of budget consolidation and financial austerity brought little economic improvement and was extremely > unpopular. Under these circumstances, Hitler appealed to the bulk of German farmers, war veterans and the middle-class who had > been hard-hit by both the inflation of the 1920s and the unemployment of the Depression." That's how he came to power, yes. But the cause of the European WWII is pretty simple (as compared to WWI): one small German party sought the total conquest of Europe or perhaps the world. When Hitler and Stalin took Poland, they didn't really think that England and France would declare war--- all this is much more particular than generalizations about relative privation, birth rates, and so on. And it is particulars like these afford the true, actual explanations. Lee From jef at jefallbright.net Fri Apr 27 17:23:05 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:23:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/26/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 4/27/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > > Stathis, would you agree that "composite" would be a better word than > > "average" here, since "average" entails a reduction of information? I > > think this question is key because it appears to highlight that you > > and I are looking at the same scenario but working in opposite > > directions. > > Yes, "composite" is a better word. > > > I see "group minds" emerging due to the adaptive benefits of > > increasing degrees of freedom enabled by a more complexly effective > > organizational structure operating within an increasingly complex > > environment. The subjective experience of the composite would be a > > high level expression of salient features of its internal state over > > time, fundamentally unavailable to its members. The subjective > > experience of each member, while subjectively "complete", would > > reflect a necessarily lower-level description of interactions with the > > greater "reality." > > I don't see how you could distinguish the experiences of each member from > the experiences of the composite, or each other, if they were truly joined. > It would be like separating the part of you that likes chocolate from the > part that doesn't want to put on weight. I don't envision the composite as > someone with multiple personality disorder (which probably doesn't exist, > BTW) but as a completely integrated single person. I don't think multiple personality order exists as popularly conceived as essentially discrete personalities inhabiting one physical body. I do think multiple personality order makes sense in the sense of multiple systems of behavior (with associated differences in accessing subjective "resources") emerging at various times to dominate the observed behavior of the larger system, like multiple attractors within a chaotic system. It seems that our difference comes down to our difference in understanding the nature of subjective experience. You seem to believe that subjective experience is fundamental or primary in some important way (it is, but to apply it to "objective" descriptions of the world entails a category error), while I see "subjective experience" very simply as a description of the perceived internal state of any system, as perceived by that system. The recursive nature of this model tends to throw people off. [Any progress yet on IAASL?] > > It seems that you are working in the opposite direction, assuming the > > primality of subjective experience, and imagining how to combine > > multiple subjective experiences into one, with this combined average > > subjective agent then interacting with its world. > > Yes, although you don't need to call it an average, as you said above. > > > > Two careful conservatives + one > > > reckless radical = one mostly careful, sometimes radical joined person. > The > > > difference would be that this person could not harm, punish or reward > some > > > selected part of himself because all the parts experience what the whole > > > experiences. > > > > It's not completely clear here, but it appears that you're claiming > > that each of the parts would experience what the whole experiences. > > >From a systems theoretical point of view, that claim is clearly > > unsupportable. It seems to be another example of your assumption of > > subjective experience as primary. > > Would you say that the two hemispheres of the brain have separate > experiences, despite the thick cable connecting them? No doubt you're aware of very famous split-brain experiments showing that if the corpus callosum is cut, then the existence of separate experiences is clearly shown. With the corpus callosum intact and feedback loops in effect, then the "subjective reality" of various functional modules of the brain is driven in the direction of a coherent whole, but (if one could interrogate individual brain modules individually), one would observe that each module necessarily reports its own internal state ("subjective experience") in terms relevant to its own functioning. It might be informative to consider the distinction between "subjective reality" and "subjective experience" above. > > > > I'm thinking we might all choose to become something > > > > like one of those clusters of human minds called "the > > > > joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of > > > > other days", joined also with AI of course (and why > > > > not with the minds of all the animals as well!). > > > > > > > > Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can > > > > there be a survival value, for the human species, in > > > > such diversity of opinions that exists today, where > > > > people can't accept each other's ways of thinking, > > > > where people even kill each other because they have > > > > different beliefs etc? > > > > > > The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble > the > > > collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. > > > > It seems clear to me that the behavior of the collective would display > > characteristics *not* present in any of its parts. This is > > fundamental complexity theory. > > Yes, I suppose that's true and the fact that the parts are in communication > would alter the behaviour of the collective. However, even the disconnected > parts would display emergent behaviour in their interactions. Stathis, I repeatedly detect either unfamiliarity or discomfort with systems thinking in your world view. What could it possibly mean to say that "...disconnected parts would display emergent behavior..."? Emergent behavior is meaningless in regard to parts, it can refer only to systems of parts. I'm sure you had a point. I'm not sure it was coherent. I would be interested in knowing what you intended. I apologize for my bluntness. ;-) > > > The > > > equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out some > > > undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the > advantage > > > that no-one actually gets hurt. > > > > This sounds nice, but it's not clear to me what model it describes. > > In a society with multiple individuals, the Cristians might decide to > persecute the Muslims. But if a single individual is struggling with the > idea of whether to follow Christianity or Islam, he is hardly in a position > to persecute one or other aspect of himself. The internal conflict may lead > to distress, but that isn't the same thing. As I see it, clearly one of those conflicting systems of thought is going to lose representation, corresponding to "dying" within the mind of the person hosting the struggle. Maybe here again we see the same fundamental difference in our views. In your view (I'm guessing) the difference is that no one died, no unique personal consciousness was extinguished. In my view, a person exists to the extent that they have an observable effect (no matter how indirect); there is no additional ontological entity representing the unique core of their being, or subjective experience, or whatever it is called by various peoples for the thousands of years since people became aware of their awareness. You will of course recognize the implication of an unfounded belief in a soul in the above, and most likely reject it out of hand since you are a modern man, well-read and trained in science and most certainly do not believe in a soul. Obviously Jef doesn't really know who he's dealing with (thus this paragraph.) But my point is that despite any amount of evidence or debate, even with belief in the heuristic power of Occam's Razor, the subjective experience of subjective experience tends to hold sway. As I mentioned above, it has the advantage of being (subjectively) complete. BTW, I just received Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic from the used book store, and in skimming through it I find his precise use of language a real treat, but his actual thinking on Positivism may elicit a different reaction. I'll get to it right after I finish Taleb's The Black Swan. His Fooled by Randomness was much better in my opinion. - Jef From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 17:25:13 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:25:13 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the > detectors. This is characteristic of animals in general. In _Influence: > the new psychology of modern persuasion_ Dr. Cialdini discusses this in the > classic example were a bucket of warm water feels cold to one hand and hot > to the other when left and right hands have been presoaked in cold and hot > water. > > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak > conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It would pay > genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were gaunt and weak > from hunger. > Well, that pretty well covers all options. Either: 1) the warrior group is suffering deprivation and this causes war. or, 2) if they're not suffering deprivation, then they are probably worrying about possible future deprivation and this causes war. You do realize that this is a meaningless unfalsifiable argument? > "At the time of Hitler's release [from jail], the political situation in > Germany had calmed and the economy had improved, which hampered Hitler's > opportunities for agitation." > > snip > > "The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression hit > Germany in 1930." > Selective political quotations can prove anything. The Great Depression hit the USA far worse that Germany Try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II Many people view World War II as a continuation of World War I. After World War I, the German State had lost land to Lithuania, France, Poland, and Denmark. Notable losses included the Polish Corridor, Danzig, the Memel Territory (to Lithuania), the Province of Posen and the most economically valuable eastern portion of Upper Silesia. The result of this loss of land was population relocation and bitterness among Germans who wanted to get revenge and reclaim the lost territory. BillK From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:27:00 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:27:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:40:54 -0400, Keith Henson wrote: > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak > conditions. Was Saddam Hussein anticipating bleak conditions for himself or his country when he ordered his military to invade Kuwait in 1990? He tried to justify this attack on his peaceful neighbor, but isn't it true that in reality Saddam was just a greedy aggressor who misjudged the world's reaction? -gts From jonkc at att.net Fri Apr 27 17:39:27 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:39:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > You merely observe that you find no difference between an > illusion of continuous life and a continuous life. The most astonishing word in your entire post is of course "merely". If I think I've survived why should I give a flying fuck if I "really" (whatever that means) have or not? >Why you don't appreciate the difference? Because I stopped believing in religion at the age of 12. > It's probably because you have been conditioned > into assuming observer POV which effectively prevents > you from seeing this difference. If so then the last thing I'd want to do is change my conditioning because the sort of conditioning you are you talking about is a belief in the scientific method. Science can detect no difference between one hydrogen atom and another, absolutely none, but nevertheless you think atoms can magically confer individuality to us even though they have none themselves. This is not science, this is religion and the word you are trying so desperately to avoid is SOUL. > Unfortunately for your servant, you've just lost sight of > him and evil forces drag him into your basement, kill > him and send his copy to fulfill your new orders. > The guy rotting now in your basement The guy is rotting? The guy? The atoms that once behaved is a servantish sort of way no longer are and are changing their chemical composition; but I forgot, for you that's the same thing because EVERY Atom Is Sacred. Didn't Monty Python write a song about that? Every atom is sacred. Every atom is great. If a atom is wasted, God gets quite irate. Every atom is wanted. Every atom is good. Every atom is needed In your neighborhood. > if there's nothing between quantum intervals, how is it > possible that things exist during multiples of those intervals? Good point, and for exactly the same reason a motion picture projector is imposable. John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 17:46:38 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:46:38 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427124452.02494c20@satx.rr.com> At 09:21 AM 4/27/2007 -0400, gts wrote: > > The World as Will and Idea is a notion dynamically embodied in Alfred > > Bester's great baroque sf novel THE STARS MY DESTINATION (aka TIGER! > > TIGER!), fw that's w. And his flawed protagonist Gully Foyle is one of > > the first powerful representations of an augmented human. > >Do you recall in what way The World as Will and Idea is >embodied in the novel? Yes. If you've read it, you'll know why; if you haven't, it wouldn't help to have it laboriously spelled out at second hand. Damien Broderick From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:42:40 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:42:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg In-Reply-To: <200704270417.l3R4HYmg012856@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <843187.12753.qm@web35604.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Wow. Spike, I'm truly touched by your kind words and they give me something to live up to. My list posting seems to be working fine now. John : ) spike wrote: Lee the Griggmeister can be reached at desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Surely he would be happy to hear from any old time ExI friends. John Grigg is among the most gentle, kindhearted, good guys that have hung out here over the years. I like his style. Drop him a howdy. Do so now, thanks. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin > Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 9:59 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [extropy-chat] Getting in touch with John Grigg > > Hi John, > > I've tried contacting you off-list several times. Could you at least > reply to me as to whether you got my messages? > > Thanks, > Lee lcorbin at rawbw.com _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 18:44:34 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:44:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cartoon? Message-ID: <23751.88299.qm@web60511.mail.yahoo.com> The following illustration by Hope Larson is entitled, "Queen of the Last Summer Day": http://hopelarson.com/illo/lastsummerday.jpg Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ 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 Apr 27 19:21:33 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:21:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health Message-ID: <14993081.273551177701693355.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> MB wrote: >I cannot (yet?) read regular round-note music, despite several years of piano >lessons in my long-ago childhood. My poor teachers - they were so disgusted >and >disheartened. My parents were insistent, even offering cash bribes for me to >learn >to play certain pieces of music. It never really happened. > >I wonder what they'd think of Shape Note Singing? ;) > >http://fasola.org/ >http://christianharmony.org/ >http://www.oldharp.org/ I never saw this before! Even when I sang with Presbyterians, they didn't use the Shape Note system. This is awesome. I think I prefer the seven note system over the four note. It makes more sense to me. What excites me the most is that I might actually learn to read music properly if I used this. My dyslexia -- or what I'm starting to think is actually a form of dyscalculia, too -- might finally lose in the battle of the musical notation. The shapes help differentiate the notes and the notes seem less 'lost' on the staff. I, too, had disgusted teachers. I played by ear, faking it on the flute and piano for a couple of years, each, but there came a point where it was just too hard and I quit both. It's why I stuck with singing. I could fake it, pretty much forever, as long as I heard the song once before I had to sing from sheet music. There's even a fasola group not far from me. Of course, I think it will have to wait until my kids are in college, with all my free time and all... Ah, something to look forward to in my retirement. Thanks so much for this! PJ From velvethum at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 19:35:24 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:35:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: Heartland replying to Stathis: >> You merely observe that you find no difference between an >> illusion of continuous life and a continuous life. John K Clark interjects: > The most astonishing word in your entire post is of course "merely". If I > think I've survived why should I give a flying fuck if I "really" (whatever > that means) have or not? That's classified. The Pope of Original Atom Cult has finally put his foot down and ordered me to shut up about the cult's teachings but if you're willing to make a big donation to the cult I can arrange a special enlightenment session for you. Just call 1-800-STRAWMN and get in touch with our treasurer. H. From randall at randallsquared.com Fri Apr 27 19:30:56 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:30:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> On Apr 27, 2007, at 1:39 PM, John K Clark wrote: > Science can detect no difference between one hydrogen > atom and another, absolutely none, but nevertheless you think atoms > can > magically confer individuality to us even though they have none > themselves. A masterful disproof of wetness and softness. Or perhaps you believe that there are "wet" atoms? > This is not science, this is religion and the word you are trying so > desperately to avoid is SOUL. He was being kind to you not to mention it. It is, after all, your position that two instances of John Clark with completely different histories can somehow share identity, not his. What else but a soul could explain this psychic linkage which makes them the same person, as you assert? Now, it's clear to me that you don't really think that there's a soul. You're just using the word "person" to mean "type of instance", in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are often said loosely to be the "same book". Nevertheless, you persist in making these kinds of assertions about what Heartland is saying, even though you *must* know by now that this is a word choice difficulty alone. -- Randall Randall "Everything's stolen these days. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. " - Jamie McCarthy From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 20:26:17 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:26:17 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427152039.021b1628@satx.rr.com> Barbara and I had our farmhouse burned to the ground a few months ago in an electricity company accident. The insurers are being assholes, and we wish to substantiate our claim by displaying some 300 fairly high density digital pix of the damage somewhere the assholes can readily access them. (We'll probably also save the images on CD-ROM and mail it to them but it would be convenient to have them stored on the web somewhere.) Anyone got nifty advice on where and how we might do this either cheaply or free (maybe 450 megs of pixels), and how best to get the images there? Can a whole folder be shunted somewhere? (Blogger seems to have a limit of 300 megs.) This is a gruesomely primitive question, I know. Suggestions welcome on or offlist. Damien Broderick From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 20:45:23 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:45:23 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427152039.021b1628@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427152039.021b1628@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > Anyone got nifty advice on where and how we might do this either > cheaply or free (maybe 450 megs of pixels), and how best to get the > images there? Can a whole folder be shunted somewhere? (Blogger seems > to have a limit of 300 megs.) This is a gruesomely primitive > question, I know. Suggestions welcome on or offlist. > There are many free web photo sharing sites. Try Google. (No - not search for 'free web photo storage'). :) I mean Google's own photo storage. You need to install their free Picasa software, then upload your photos to your Picasa google account. http://picasa.google.com/ https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?hl=en_US&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2F&service=lh2&passive=true Best wishes, BillK From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 20:58:44 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:58:44 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> BillK suggested Picasa. Thanks for that. Meanwhile, Barbara has found FlipDrive with unlimited space for pics and able to upload the whole doggone folder in one fell free swoop. What a good time to be a human. Damien Broderick From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 21:16:38 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:16:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <076601c78911$88583540$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jef writes > As I see it, clearly one of those conflicting systems of thought is going to > lose representation, corresponding to "dying" within the mind of the person > hosting the struggle. Yes, that sounds like what has happened to me when my belief system underwent a major change. > Maybe here again we see the same fundamental difference in our views. > In your [Stathis's] view (I'm guessing) the difference is that no one died, no > unique personal consciousness was extinguished. Okay. > In my view, a person exists to the extent that they have an observable > effect (no matter how indirect); there is no additional ontological entity > representing the unique core of their being, Perhaps you are only targeting the concept of a soul. But consider someone of very high integrity---integrity in the sense of wholeness and lack of internal inconsistency, tension, or resolved (or unresolved inner conflict). Might we not say that there *is* a pretty whole "self" to the person? (Surely it is this thing that people can be said to be wanting to protect and which they want to survive in memory-erasure or duplication experiments.) Lee P.S. > BTW, I just received Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic from the used > book store, and in skimming through it I find his precise use of > language a real treat, but his actual thinking on Positivism may > elicit a different reaction. 'Way to go, there, Jef on your stamina and focus in your reading. You keep tackling and discharging rather formidable books that I tried to read thirty years ago, but gave up on. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 21:24:29 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:24:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark denounces the doctrines of the so-called High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult: > If so then the last thing I'd want to do is change my conditioning because > the sort of conditioning you are you talking about is a belief in the > scientific method. Science can detect no difference between one hydrogen > atom and another, absolutely none, but nevertheless you think atoms can > magically confer individuality to us even though they have none themselves. Excuse me, but I recall that Heartland *specifically* said that it's not the atoms that are the problem; keep the same atoms or not, it does not matter to him. What DOES matter is whether a process is suspended or not. To Slawomir, any time you halt a process---either by freezing a human or by temporarily halting the execution of a computer program or by allowing a human EEG to flatline---you have allowed an instance to perish. And according to him, that's the whole ball game. Slawomir, please comment on the degree to which I have captured your views; I do not want to falsely misrepresent John Clark. (If I am going to misrepresent him, I wish to do so truely, not falsely.) Meanwhile, I am appalled at the way that you and Stathis keep trying to take down a straw man. There is plenty to attack in his properly stated beliefs :-) Again, apologies if you and Stathis have not misunderstood Heartland's views. Lee From mmbutler at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 21:34:06 2007 From: mmbutler at gmail.com (Michael M. Butler) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:34:06 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427124452.02494c20@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070427124452.02494c20@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7d79ed890704271434j5f75490bt8d3ec318dcf1508a@mail.gmail.com> On 4/27/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 09:21 AM 4/27/2007 -0400, gts wrote: > If you've read it, you'll know why; if you haven't, it wouldn't help > to have it laboriously spelled out at second hand. In a funny way, I've always had a sentiment that there are parallels between Gully Foyle/Geoffry Fourmyle (sp) and Waldo F. Jones. Does Heinlein's _Waldo_ count as a World as Will & Idea story, in your view, Damien? -- Michael M. Butler : m m b u t l e r ( a t ) g m a i l . c o m 'Piss off, you son of a bitch. Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it's going to take the whole building with it. I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." -- Rick Rescorla (R.I.P.), cell phone call, 9/11/2001 From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Apr 27 21:36:38 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:36:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> To defend John Clark (who needs defending about as much as a sting ray needs a BB gun), I must comment on Randall's remarks. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Randall Randall" Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 12:30 PM > It is, after all, your position that two instances of John > Clark with completely different histories can somehow > share identity, not his. Completely different? Completely different histories? To me that sounds as though there is very little memory overlap. Now Tom Delay and I have completely different histories, not John and a very recent copy of John. Now, yes, John (I think) (and certainly I ) believes that people can have slightly different *recent* histories and still be the same person. That is, I mean literally that I and my recent duplicate share the same self. My duplicate objectively has all the things about me that I want to preserve. So if this one (pinches cheek) dies and that instance of me over there lives, then I still wake up tomorrow morning, not someone else masquerading as me. I even look forward to waking up tomorrow in this case, just as much as I would if no harm was to come to this instance. > What else but a soul could explain this psychic linkage > which makes them the same person, as you assert? It's not a psychic linkage at all. There aren't such things so far as we know. The linkage is similarity of structure to an extraordinary degree. > Now, it's clear to me that you don't really think > that there's a soul. You're just using the word > "person" to mean "type of instance", Right. > in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are > often said loosely [sic] to be the "same book". Loosely? That *is* the common way of speaking, and if I say that my fiancee and I found upon meeting that we had read the same book, no one would suppose that we merely read the same particular copy. The book analogy is pretty good actually. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 22:01:31 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:01:31 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: <7d79ed890704271434j5f75490bt8d3ec318dcf1508a@mail.gmail.co m> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070427124452.02494c20@satx.rr.com> <7d79ed890704271434j5f75490bt8d3ec318dcf1508a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427165535.02312f90@satx.rr.com> At 02:34 PM 4/27/2007 -0700, Mike Butler wrote: >Does >Heinlein's _Waldo_ count as a World as Will & Idea story, in your >view, Damien? Possibly. But Heinlein doesn't actually explicitly *reference* the idea, as Bester does (embodying it in the primordial substance PyrE, which is a sort of congealed Will to Power activated by Will and Idea). From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Apr 27 22:11:56 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:11:56 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Arthur Schopenhauer In-Reply-To: <7d79ed890704271434j5f75490bt8d3ec318dcf1508a@mail.gmail.co m> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070426171227.02328eb8@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070427124452.02494c20@satx.rr.com> <7d79ed890704271434j5f75490bt8d3ec318dcf1508a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427170821.0222e448@satx.rr.com> Where there's a Will... Fwiw, here's a chapter dealing very fleetingly with this notion. It's from my book *x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction*: ========== 7: The Stars My Desperation I remember in reviewing one of Jim Blish's books, `For God's sake, Jim, will you go out and chase ladies, gamble, rob a bank, do something. Get experience, because although your science is great your characters are completely unreal.' Alfred Bester, Schweitzer Interview (13) i Alfie Bester's strategy was always to lead the reader a merry dance, not to say a danse macabre, to leap from concealment with shouts and firecrackers, to lurk and entice and disguise and... unmask! Explosion! Concussion! When he was in form, his pace, attack, payoff were exemplary, dazzling. Out of form, he was... not flabby, as you might expect, but strained, herniated, desperate, clattering maniacally with his varicose veins on a stage stuffed with burst toys, while the last of the audience gritted their teeth in humiliation and pity. Damon Knight noticed all this half a century ago, when Bester was writing at the top of his form: Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester's methods. His stories never stand still for a moment; they're forever tilting into motion, veering, doubling back, firing off rockets to distract you.... Bester's science is all wrong, his characters are not characters but funny hats; but you never notice: he fires off a smoke-bomb, climbs a ladder, leaps from a trapeze, plays three bars of `God Save the King,' swallows a sword and dives into three inches of water. Good heavens, what more do you want? (Knight, 1967 [1956], 234) When I was fourteen or fifteen, I loved Bester like a father. (I loved Arthur C. Clarke like a Father, the sort with a white reversed collar and a vision of the City of God built out of science, transcending science. Strange chariots!) Yes, imagine how it would be if your old man had a brain like that, sizzling with lunacy, knowing, cynical but flushed with a baroque unashamed romanticism that was not all that common under the grey banner of the close of the 1950s. Later I had the guilt of conspiring with the other siblings, spiteful and oedipal, in trying to kick the old man off to Sunshine Acres, making it plain that he should have taken himself there while he still possessed some decent control over his sphincter. The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956) were unforgettable neon poetry blazing against the suburban night. But it is hard to remember anything at all from The Computer Connection (1976), also known as Extro, also known as The Indian Giver. That last variant offers a clue: wasn't there a wild-man Native American in it? And... a bunch of immortals who had defeated death by yielding to it at the nastiest possible moment. And... some super-intelligent slugs, first of a new breed of Homo Superior. And... a global computer? And... a narrator whose name was given both as Daniel Curzon and as Edward Curzon, which perhaps indicated exactly how riveted Bester himself was by the whole exercise. In a 1979 interview with Charles Platt, he called it `a disaster... that confounded book': `There was something vitally wrong with that book, and I knew it when I finished it, and I couldn't patch it then, and to this day... I can't understand it, so I can't profit by it' (in Platt, 1983, 243). Some two decades earlier, Bester's masterwork left one in no doubt of the protagonist's name. The Penguin edition back jacket blurb caught it with vulgar precision: What is Gully Foyle? ...Saviour, liar, lecher, ghoul, walking cancer... a man possessed... a blazing hero of a science fiction novel that transcends its category. This last claim, however, is precisely wrong, for the book is a quintessence that exactly epitomizes, emblematizes its genre category. Samuel Delany, who rightly esteems it, noted that `The Stars My Destination (or Tiger! Tiger! in its original title) is considered by many readers and writers, both in and outside the field, to be the greatest single sf novel.... It chronicles a social education, but within a society which, from our point of view, has gone mad' (Delany, 1978, 35). More than that, it is the apogee of Bester's consistent struggles with a single theme: the heightened image of a compulsively driven individual bursting through the prison bars of nature and nurture both, marked by demonic and transcendent stigmata, a Bergsonian emergent evolutionary salient embodied in one passionate, driven creature who hurtles through a world stripped to hard, brilliant, teleological metaphors. Here is Bester's crucial notion, now long abandoned by practicing biologists and philosophers: that Nature is in some sense a Designer with a Plan and a Purpose, shaking the bottle of elan vital until it seethes and spurts. Bester's books are overgrown with grotesque coincidence, lucky accidents of history that have the obvious narrative merit of advancing the story with maximum attack but through their failure to offend us conveying as well, and more importantly, a subterranean awareness that in these universes Nature is a participant, a partisan, rooting for the seed-bearers. In an incompetent way The Computer Connection, Bester's belated return to the sf novel, persisted with this theme, but blurred its expression hopelessly by skeining the dialectic, shortsheeting the narrative, splitting the typical Besterian dyad into a multitude of funny hats performing comic capers, some of them not so comic. The Demolished Man, Bester's bravura mystery story set in a world policed by telepaths, evoked that dyad stunningly in Ben Reich/Lincoln Powell (criminal/detective), Ben Reich/Craye D'Courtney (upstart/tycoon, and son/father), Ben Reich/The Man With No Face (conscious/unconscious selves). All of those were subsumed, quite deliberately on Bester's part, into an archetypal mandala of contest which can be represented (at some cost) as Eros/Thanatos, Life/Death. In The Stars My Destination, the dyad is above all Gully Foyle/Olivia Presteign, each at once the other's sibling Other and Self. This is true at least in terms of narrative impulse, but the dialectic between them points to something grandiose and in individual terms almost unspecifiable: perhaps the emergent salient of Life itself, set against the frigid, uncaring vacuum of spacetime. On the social level, the ground halfway between the psychological rampaging of individual compulsion and the final magisterial epiphany of Foyle-as-god, the dyad is manifest as common humanity versus power elite. Foyle effects a one-man revolution in human consciousness and power by dispersing PyrE, a kind of primordial Schopenhauerish element, to the brutalized masses of the world. PyrE is the primal stuff of the universe, latent force in its purest form, responsive only to Will and Idea. On the one hand, Foyle's act seems precisely an unwitting metaphor for mid-fifties liberal aspiration. On the other, it is an intriguing figure (no doubt overdetermined) for the devastating potential of both art and science in the conduct and context of human affairs. ii A quarter century later, Bester had recused from the social dimension. Golem^100 (1980) revived the dyad abandoned in The Computer Connection, as male/female, although this is not self-evident, since the male component is further bifurcated, without thereby generating a triad. Its imagined society, shared with The Computer Connection, is a pot-pourri of gaudy images with no underlying texture, no embeddedness in gritty reality. While this is true also of The Stars My Destination, in that book the apparent cartoons are clearly emblematic, at once shimmering with wit and satirical laughter and darkening into depths of authentic pain, cruelty, aspiration. The Guff of the later books?most loathsome sector of the Northeast Corridor?is `a lunacy of violence inhabited by a swarming population with no visible means of support and no fixed residence' (1980, 32). It is `a raree show', curiously premonitory of William Gibson's Swarm (a conurbation running down the eastern edge of his cyberspaced future America). Portions of Third World cities already fit his description, but Bester's adoption of the locale possesses no rationale beyond his patent wish to strut his exhausted obsessives one more time on the peep-show stage?a desire confirmed in his final novel, The Deceivers, a terminal case of frenetic technique in the service of nothing beyond its own tired exercise. (A dire posthumous collaboration with Roger Zelazny, Psycho Shop [1998] is better passed over in silence.) The story line in Golem^100 is surprisingly frail. Eight bourgeois `bee' ladies with twee `secret names' while away their bored lives in the protected redoubts of the brutal Guff, playing at raising the devil. Their rituals bear fruit only when a husband, Droney Lafferty, `the celebrated necrophile' and piebald haploid, introduces a radioactive catalyst into their incense. Awakened and given focus, `the brutal cruelty that lies buried deep within us all' (10)?as Bester simple-mindedly characterizes Freud's Id, evidently having learned nothing after the same simplifications in The Demolished Man were lambasted by critics?emerges, expressing its nature in atrocities. These crimes defy normal explanation, to the chagrin of Police subadar Adida Alkhand-Sarangdar-ind'dni (whose palindromic names hint at some ontological mirroring or antinomy). Events from Bester's 1974 short story `The Four-Hour Fugue' were modified and incorporated as an alternate narrative strand. Scent chemist Dr. Blaise Shima (previously Skiaki) is slacking at work. Warlock Salem Burne (sic!) and psychodynamician Gretchen Nunn determine that Shima's supernal olfactory acuity, coupled with his neurotic self-pity, make him obsessively vulnerable to human pheromone trails: specifically, the trail of would-be suicides. In the reversed or inverted mask-persona of `Mr. Wish', Shima tracks these unfortunates and becomes the occasion, though not the agent, of their demise. For no clear reason, the Golem monster-from-the-Id makes its presence known in such a way as to implicate Nunn and Shima in its roster of crimes. To clear themselves they must find the monster and defuse it. Their attempts to do so merely destroy its original embodiment, the eightfold `hive', and provoke Gretchen Nunn (meanwhile revealed as `the new Primal Man') into re-establishing the hive with herself as Queen. As part of the murderous nuptial flight preceding this consummation, Nunn couples with numerous `drones', including a dog, and climaxes by tearing Shima's penis from his body with the muscles of her clenched vulva. Awakening, she learns with horror (perhaps) that the honest policeman Ind'dni has been replaced by his negative self, a perverted being from the same Collective Under-realm which gave birth to the Golem. Luckily, he is now an extraordinary lover, a Primal Man fit for a Queen. He is, in fact, Golem^101. Bolstering this inane and attenuated plot were, firstly, the usual Besterian helter-skelter pyrotechnics, inventive setpieces, and concrete poetry formal variants, segueing to and from, secondly, about a hundred pages of quite fine integrated graphics by sf artist Jack Gaughan, doing by and large what could not be done by text alone. Alas, the fireworks were no better than bizarre variants on Bester's genuinely original and brilliant games of the fifties. Replacing Lady Olivia Presteign, albino heiress blind to all but the infrared, is Gretchen Nunn, Watusi genius who sees through the eyes of others (a singularly unworkable notion) and in the cosmic ray spectrum through the `cloud chamber' of her own flesh (a singularly useless ability). Visual disabilities or variants crop up repeatedly in Bester. Shima himself is color blind, Salem Burne semiotically `sees' the meaning of physical gesture. No doubt this emphasis is motivated by Bester's own eye troubles: `my eyes failed, like poor Congreve's' (`My Affair With Science Fiction', 450). This is no accident in any case, for the second great theme in Bester is perception: sight and insight, sleight of sight (the Man With No Face) and enhanced perception (telepathy; the obsessional rhythms of the Pi Man; a Baudrillardian replacement of vision by sheer motion, in teleportation; the Promethium-induced visions of Golem^100. Unhappily, the variants forced in his late novels like stones from the urethra are agonizingly constructs, with no imaginative life. Above all, in these late texts Bester's own artistic perception and tact seemed crusted with cataracts. In a schoolboyish note of lavatory puerility, a character named Phlegmy utters this Pukebox song (admittedly quite prescient of the rap lyrics popular two decades later): Vomitation. Vomitation. Retchitation. Retchitation. Spew. Spew. Upchuck, daddy, With a solid pour. (374) Presumably this was intended as a scathing if-this-goes-on satire provoked in the early 1970s by, say, Alice Cooper. But the sexist and nightmarish play-format scene on the next page is there for its relish: (A Hang-Glider sails low overhead, slowly descending. A man hangs by the neck from the glider, the strangling noose knotted into the traditional 13 turns of the rope.) PI Ooo look, Miz Gretch person. I seen a lot of suicides but never like this one before. A gaggle of crones follows the falling glider avidly absorbing the emissions from the spasming penis of the suicide.) (375) At one level this is familiar territory to readers of William Burroughs. On another, it is an extreme extension of the Extrapolation Theory of sf proclaimed by Bester in his electrifying short story collection, Starlight (1976): Here's my definition: Extrapolation. The continuation of a trend, either increasing, decreasing or steady-state, to its culmination in the future. The only constraint is the limit set by the logic of the universe. `And good luck,' he added, `to the late, great Alfred Bester, American author' (377-78). He needed more than good luck to persuade us that the Hang-Glider scene (a pun with all the spritzig of the Salem Burne jest) fell within the logic of the social universe inhabited by human beings. In another introduction in the same gathering, Bester declared against pornography: A Puritan streak in my nature has always stifled the slightest temptation to do that sort of work. I'm strongly opposed to censorship in any form, and yet I confess to being disgusted by the passages that diagram it for you. (321) From the outset, Bester builds clues to his sociobiological culmination. The eight middle-class nitwits are referred to as `charming bee ladies' who meet in `the hive'. This parallel is not pressed immediately: `They were not all cut from the identical pattern like insect-type bees. They were intensely individual human-type ladies'. Nevertheless, the leader is Regina (pronounced Re-JYN-a), `the Queen Bee'. They `buzzed with gossip... did bee-dances... gorged on sweets... butted heads to establish an informal dominance-order' (7-9). At the outset we learn that one of the husbands (not Regina's; she is a virgin) is nicknamed Droney. The moment Gretchen Nunn inveigles her way into the hive, she is dubbed `Black Beauty' (for her Negro good looks), or BB, or, to spell it out, Bee-Bee. After a time the reader becomes dazed, over-eager to seize this motif. When the Glacial Army sing a revival hymn entitled `Where You Beez Come God's Big Freeze', one's attention is stung, perhaps in error. This is textual ontology with a vengeance, utterly overdetermined. The irruption of the inverse Ind'dni from the contra-universe is specified like an Attic fate in the shape of his palindromic name: not merely Ind'dni, the short form of his patronymic, but in his first name, mentioned once and neglected thereafter. Midway between these manifestations of the World as Word and Idea are the characters' names: Blaise Shima, the Japanese raised as a French Catholic (`Shima' is the Japanese for `island', an opportunity for the horrendous pun `Hero Shima'). Gretchen Nunn reeks of metaphor and metonymy. Some of the other names are purely for fun, if that is your idea of fun: the thespian Sarah Heartburn, the lesbian Yenta Catienta (a Yiddish pun), the twins Oodgedye and Udgedye, which Bester tells us is Chekhovian Russian for `Guess Who' and `Guess Which'. The impulsive conceit, of the bee-ladies and their hives, seems consequent on the original story, `The Four-Hour Fugue', and its preliminary exploration of the pheromone-compulsion motif. Bester took the lazy way out in developing this concept to novel length. Yes, pheromones are typical of insects, not humans. This is a good reason for supposing that humans do not use pheromones to organize their sexual drives, rather than for supposing that if humans did use pheromones they would become like insects. In his late work, Bester turned to an always-present but previously-contained taste for Grand Guignol (the nickname, after all, of the narrator of The Computer Connection) and it became the more schoolboy unpleasant in its execution. Shima's castration is unexceptionable, true, the stuff of archaic myth, harvest festivals, turned to sf usage more than once by Philip Jos? Farmer and postmodern use by, say, Martin Amis, Iain Banks or Will Self. But the ugliness of the Golem atrocities is unrewardingly disgusting: The man was circling a pillar stub of the decayed opera-house portico; crawling, falling, rising, stumbling, crying piteously, shrieking, calling on Christ and cursing his gods. There was a gash in his belly that oozed blood and extruded intestine. One end of his gut had been fastened to the pillar, and as he circled and circled it was torn out of him, inch by inch, to garland the column with a bloody, grey hawser. (28) My reaction on reading this botched book, despairingly confirmed by the novel that followed it, The Deceivers (1981), was simple dismay. Leave aside the discussions of masks and persona theory in Jung, the way Bester got Freud ludicrously wrong in his gutter psychoanalysis, how finally the supposed theme of transcendence got its comeuppance in the Epilogue (set 105 years on, but on internal evidence clearly meant to stand at the beginning), how the book's proofreader could not spell `architectonic' correctly or decide on a consistent abbreviation of the element Promethium (Pm, or P-M, although on p. 88 it is explicitly spelled out), how Golem to the hundredth power is a rather larger quality than 100 times Golem, which Bester meant, how impoverished the Apollinaire calligrammes had become in their fall from The Demolished Man to Sarah Heartburn's tawdry expostulations. All this detail dimmed to irrelevancy before the heartbreaking wish to cry out (now superfluously): Give the game away, now that you have lost your skill at it, the late, great Alfred Bester, American author. Break your staff and bury it. For Bester, and perhaps for widescreen baroque sf, it was too late for reprise, for recovery, for the persistence of memory. Like the bloated late fictions of Isaac Asimov's, these depressing texts were, awful though it is to recognize the fact, nothing better than a final spastic fouling of the nest. From velvethum at hotmail.com Fri Apr 27 22:18:11 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:18:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: Heartland: > I hear this kind of argument all the time. What you're saying here does not >> really >> question the fact that flat EEG means death. You merely observe that you >> find no >> difference between an illusion of continuous life and a continuous life. >> Why you >> don't appreciate the difference? It's probably because you have been >> conditioned >> into assuming observer POV which effectively prevents you from seeing this >> difference. Stathis: > Even if there were a difference, it doesn't matter. Stathis, do you think it's possible that when you say "it doesn't matter" it might be because you fail to see what this difference actually is? I'm afraid the master and servant example is the best explanation I can offer right now that was designed to illustrate the difference between survival defined in terms of "likeness" vs. survival defined in terms of "utility." Eugen: > I wonder what would happen if we'd anaesthesize Slawomir in his sleep, > induced a heart arrest and waited a couple minutes after resuscitation. > Or merely sedated both his hemispheres, making them transiently electrically > silent (a much softer approach). > > Then, after several months and years we'd tell him. What would be > his reaction? Let me solve that mystery for you right now. The future instance of "my" type would probably make another attempt at explaining to you why you murdered someone who shared similar brain structure. :) If you had a perfect twin right now, would it be OK if you killed him too? I imagine you would still argue with the guards, while being dragged to your cell or even a death chamber, that you should go free since the victim's death was not a big deal because the type of your twin's brain structure still remains or because flat EEGs are poor indicators of death so, according to your definition of death, you didn't kill anyone. Lee: > Of course in the current debate between Slawomir (Heartland) and Stathis/Eugen > (an ugly combination you don't want to mess with, take it from me) I naturally > and wholeheartedly agree with Stathis & Eugen. And I have been arguing this > position since 1966, more than forty years now. I may be a bit prejudiced :-) > > But *one* of the causes that progress is seldom made is that inadequate care > is taken in understanding other people's views. In this case, Stathis and Eugen > riddle their sentences with assumptions that Slawomir cannot possible agree with, > and so those sentences contribute nothing towards understanding, and in fact > succeed only in further frustration. Lee, thanks for noticing an impenetrable wall I bang my head into almost every time I talk to "type" types. :) That wall is, of course, inability of the other side to process/evaluate proposed conclusions using only those assumptions that led to these conclusions (that is, my assumptions). The other side obviously uses its own assumptions in this evaluation which always ends with a statement that the proposed conclusion makes no sense. Conveying my conclusions reminds me of trying to communicate in English with someone who knows only Japanese in a internet chat room in a world where English-Japanese dictionaries and Japanese books about English grammar have been banned. Obviously, the person who knows only Japanese interprets English sentences as gibberish. But it gets worse. The person who knows only Japanese then usually attempts to type in an explanation (in Japanese, of course) why these English sentences are incorrect since they do not adhere to the rules of Japanese grammar. :) Lee: > Eugen makes *exactly* the same mistake: > > From: "Eugen Leitl" > >> I wonder what would happen if we'd anaesthesize [a particular and special >> individual who happens to have Slawomir's memories] in "his" sleep, >> induced a heart arrest and waited a couple minutes after resuscitation. >> Or merely sedated both his hemispheres, making them transiently electrically >> silent (a much softer approach). >> >> Then, after several months and years we'd tell "him" (I.e. the last person in >> sequence of people who is stuck with the Heartland memories and beliefs). >> What would be [the reaction of this last instance be]? Lee: > OF course, the reaction of the last instance---from Heartland's belief system > ---would be that he is lucky to be alive and that all those previous unlucky > individuals are totally dead and gone. Wow, someone who doesn't agree with me actually understands my posts. :) Lee: > P.S. I believe that Slawomir's concept of these different people---being as > they are somehow independent in their constitutions from their memories--- > is identical to a calculus of souls. Each time a flat EEG is reached, the old > soul is discarded, and a new one instantiated. After all, there is nothing > *physically* (according to the last three hundred years of science) different > about the resuscitated individual that is of any moment. Obviously just because you found a copy of an English-Japanese dictionary and can understand the sentences doesn't necessarily guarantee that you understand the message that's being conveyed by these sentences. You know *what* my position is, and I'm frankly impressed that you do, but I don't think you understand *why* I hold this position. Your analogy to souls is obviously wrong but instead of defending against it let me throw it back to you hoping you'll experience the strawman for yourself and perhaps resolve to not commit the same sin again. >From my point of view, I could stick a "soul" label on a specific collection of memories you hold so dear and ask you why this soul is so important to you and why you want to preserve it. I could argue that there's nothing special about any specific collection of memories and that there exists no rational justification for your attachment to these memories. Finally, I could point out the fact that memories are not reliable and are in constant flux which means your attachment to memories is attachment to something that isn't stable (or is that acceptable?) and whose existence is probably an illusion; a ghost; a soul. John K Clark in 145th episode of "Zombie Strawman Returns!": >> This is not science, this is religion and the word you are trying so >> desperately to avoid is SOUL. Randall: > He was being kind to you not to mention it. It is, > after all, your position that two instances of John > Clark with completely different histories can somehow > share identity, not his. What else but a soul could > explain this psychic linkage which makes them the > same person, as you assert? Thank you, Randall. Incidentally, the Pope of Original Atom Cult has just called me. He wants to promote you to a bishop. :) Lee: > Excuse me, but I recall that Heartland *specifically* said that it's not > the atoms that are the problem; keep the same atoms or not, it does > not matter to him. What DOES matter is whether a process is > suspended or not. To Slawomir, any time you halt a process---either > by freezing a human or by temporarily halting the execution of a > computer program or by allowing a human EEG to flatline---you > have allowed an instance to perish. And according to him, that's > the whole ball game. > > Slawomir, please comment on the degree to which I have captured > your views; You've captured them perfectly, at least here. Thanks for paying attention. :) Lee: > Meanwhile, I am appalled at the way that you [John K Clark] and Stathis keep > trying > to take down a straw man. There is plenty to attack in his properly > stated beliefs :-) Thanks again, Lee. H. From randall at randallsquared.com Fri Apr 27 22:35:10 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:35:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Apr 27, 2007, at 5:36 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > From: "Randall Randall" >> It is, after all, your position that two instances of John >> Clark with completely different histories can somehow >> share identity, not his. > > Completely different? Completely different histories? > To me that sounds as though there is very little memory > overlap. Now Tom Delay and I have completely different > histories, not John and a very recent copy of John. "Very little memory overlap" is very much not what I meant by that. To use the book analogy you liked below, a notebook in which an author had written an entire novel by fountain pen may be (as often used) the "same book" as a paperback I have shipped from Amazon, but while they have similar content, that content was produced by very different histories for each instance (hand writing vs mass production printing). > Now, yes, John (I think) (and certainly I ) believes that > people can have slightly different *recent* histories > and still be the same person. That is, I mean literally > that I and my recent duplicate share the same self. My > duplicate objectively has all the things about me that > I want to preserve. So if this one (pinches cheek) > dies and that instance of me over there lives, then I > still wake up tomorrow morning, not someone else > masquerading as me. I even look forward to waking > up tomorrow in this case, just as much as I would if > no harm was to come to this instance. Again, histories and memories are distinct: history involves the process by which the physical memories were constructed, while memories are merely content. Heartland (I think) (and certainly I) believes that it's the process which is a person, not the content. That said, he and I differ on what constitutes "the process", since I don't think suspending electrical activity in the brain necessarily ends it. >> What else but a soul could explain this psychic linkage >> which makes them the same person, as you assert? > > It's not a psychic linkage at all. There aren't such things > so far as we know. The linkage is similarity of structure > to an extraordinary degree. I was exaggerating for effect, as I explained below. :) >> Now, it's clear to me that you don't really think >> that there's a soul. You're just using the word >> "person" to mean "type of instance", > > Right. > >> in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are >> often said loosely [sic] to be the "same book". > > Loosely? That *is* the common way of speaking, and > if I say that my fiancee and I found upon meeting that > we had read the same book, no one would suppose > that we merely read the same particular copy. Right. Well, that's because of the confusion in how we use the term "book" for both "an instance" and "all books with sufficiently similar content". Sometimes people mean one, and sometimes the other, even within the same sentence, and cleanly separating the uses makes a large part of this problem one of terminology. A similar problem obfuscates debates about "intellectual property." -- Randall Randall "Everything's stolen these days. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. " - Jamie McCarthy From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 23:11:02 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:11:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <074501c788ef$19035ac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:08 AM 4/27/2007 -0700, you wrote: >Keith writes > > >>How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th > >>century faced economic deprivation? > > > > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the detectors. > >Okay, then you have to make the case that the *relative* deprivation was >greater around 1940 (or 1914 or June, 1950), and so on, than at other >times. Relative to immediately *previous* times. >Actually, prosperity *usually* leads to greater inequality (and, true, >envy of those who are better off). My remark applies to both people and >nations. The theory says nothing about inequity at least I don't know what to make of it. It was probably not much of a factor in hunter gatherer bands.. What is the effect of the GNP going up but a substantial fraction of the middle class dropping into the lower class? That's been the developing situation as the US becomes more like a third world country in terms of income distribution. Does this make the country as a whole more likely to support a war? Any thoughts? > > classic example were a bucket of warm water feels cold to one hand and > hot to the other when left and right hands have been > > presoaked in cold and hot water. > >We've all experienced this. > > > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak > conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It > > would pay genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were > gaunt and weak from hunger. > >Yes, that is so. And yes, some of the causes of WWI are related to this: > >Unlike the late 1930's, the Germans were filled with foreboding (first >chapter, >Paul Johnson's "Modern Times: From the twenties to the eighties"), brought >upon by an irrational fear of the slavs. I don't know if the common people >were so afflicted, but the philosophers and perhaps the government leaders >were. The "doom and gloom" philosophical school had won out. And by >1914 the English were very apprehensive of being overtaken by Germany, >and were led to their making certain moves that made the outbreak of war more >likely (though the actual beginnings, of course, can scarcely be laid at >their door). > > >>In what ways did resource scarcity > >>contribute to WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam? Things were > >>booming in Germany before both WWI and WWII, and no one else was > >>much pinched either. > > > > "At the time of Hitler's release [from jail], the political situation > in Germany had calmed and the economy had improved, which > > hampered Hitler's opportunities for agitation." > >Jeez. That was in the early 20s! By the late thirties economies had begun to >recover from the depression, especially in Germany. The people were buoyed >with optimism, and the hoi polloi believed that Hitler and the Nazis were the >best thing that ever happened. The wikipedia link on Hitler you mentioned >says > > On April 1, 1924 Hitler was sentenced to five years' > imprisonment > at Landsberg Prison. Hitler received favoured treatment > from the > guards and had much fan mail from admirers.[18] He was pardoned > and released from jail in December 1924, after serving only > nine > months of his sentence, or just over a year if time on > remand is included.[18] > > >In an earlier post, you said that the Hitler invasion of the Soviet Union >did not go >against your scheme for the reason that a war was already in >progress. But there >was *utterly* no reason whatsoever that made any sense to invade Russia; not >militarily, not economically, nothing. That was my point. It *was* irrational. Leaders in "war mode" do things like that and their followers don't stop them. Consider the current situation in Iraq if you want another example. >(Well, yes, if the Germans conquered Russia >then they'd have their own oil; but Stalin was acting like Hitler's stooge >in the real >war that was going on.) The invasion of the Soviet Union was one man's >crazy idea. My point exactly. > > "The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression > hit Germany in 1930." > > > > snip > > > > "Br?ning's measure of budget consolidation and financial austerity > brought little economic improvement and was extremely > > unpopular. Under these circumstances, Hitler appealed to the bulk of > German farmers, war veterans and the middle-class who had > > been hard-hit by both the inflation of the 1920s and the unemployment > of the Depression." > >That's how he came to power, yes. But the cause of the European WWII >is pretty simple (as compared to WWI): one small German party sought the >total conquest of Europe or perhaps the world. When Hitler and Stalin took >Poland, they didn't really think that England and France would declare war--- That is correct, and yet another example of people in "war mode" having their rationality impaired. >all this is much more particular than generalizations about relative >privation, >birth rates, and so on. And it is particulars like these afford the true, >actual >explanations. I disagree. There are proximal and ultimate explanations. It is one thing to say "Hitler was a madman," and quite another to ask why a madman came to power. I am looking for the deep causes, things rooted in human biology. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 23:31:28 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:31:28 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427191216.046d48e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:25 PM 4/27/2007 +0100, you wrote: >On 4/27/07, Keith Henson wrote: > > > > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the > > detectors. This is characteristic of animals in general. In _Influence: > > the new psychology of modern persuasion_ Dr. Cialdini discusses this in the > > classic example were a bucket of warm water feels cold to one hand and hot > > to the other when left and right hands have been presoaked in cold and hot > > water. > > > > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak > > conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It would pay > > genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were gaunt and weak > > from hunger. > > > > >Well, that pretty well covers all options. >Either: >1) the warrior group is suffering deprivation and this causes war. >or, >2) if they're not suffering deprivation, then they are probably >worrying about possible future deprivation and this causes war. > >You do realize that this is a meaningless unfalsifiable argument? No. And there should be evidence. You should see a drop in wars after a major plagues because the drop in population should make for a brighter (less economically stressed) future for those who are left. Anyway, gene theory says that anticipation of privation should be the trigger, but that's usually rooted in physical reality, like game getting hard to fine. In any case, just deprivation per se doesn't trigger war. It is deprivation after people are used to better times, especially the rapid onset of deprivation. Also, if the deprivation comes on fast, like the Irish potato famine, there isn't time for the xenophobic meme phase. Or so goes my speculation. > > "At the time of Hitler's release [from jail], the political situation in > > Germany had calmed and the economy had improved, which hampered Hitler's > > opportunities for agitation." > > > > snip > > > > "The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression hit > > Germany in 1930." > > > >Selective political quotations can prove anything. >The Great Depression hit the USA far worse that Germany Is that true? I.e., can you cite the relative drops in GDP per capita for the US and Germany? One of the things I cited in my earliest memetics papers, long before I had any thoughts on what might account for it, was the inverse relation between US economic downturns and up ticks in neo nazi activities. Perhaps at that time there just were not anyone considered an enemy or a big enough social fault line for the country to go into civil war. >Try: >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II > >Many people view World War II as a continuation of World War I. >After World War I, the German State had lost land to Lithuania, >France, Poland, and Denmark. Notable losses included the Polish >Corridor, Danzig, the Memel Territory (to Lithuania), the Province of >Posen and the most economically valuable eastern portion of Upper >Silesia. > >The result of this loss of land was population relocation and >bitterness among Germans who wanted to get revenge and reclaim the >lost territory. That's consistent with an EP model. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Apr 27 23:43:58 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:43:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427152039.021b1628@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427194010.04763e70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:26 PM 4/27/2007 -0500, Damien wrote: >Barbara and I had our farmhouse burned to the ground a few months ago >in an electricity company accident. snip There must be a story behind this. One of the more interesting articles Jerry Pournelle wrote for Byte was when a car hitting a power pole dropped 4160 volt lines onto his house power. Every light in the house went off like a flash bulb and he had some interesting tales to tell about surge protectors. Keith From jay.dugger at gmail.com Fri Apr 27 23:44:40 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:44:40 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0704271644x4e363e45l45fcc59bc711cf60@mail.gmail.com> 18:43 Friday, 27 April 2007 D.B. I offer my sympathies for your misfortune. May I suggest you use more than one of Picasa, S3 (I believe Jef Albright has experience with them), Picasa, or Flickr? The point here, of course: have multiple back-ups. Also known as not putting all your eggs in a single basket. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 00:10:37 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:10:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070425221324.021bb628@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704280022.l3S0M1d3001180@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! > > At 08:31 PM 4/25/2007 -0400, Robert wrote: > > >I was also the one who suggested that solution to the dispute over > >the promised land was to use nanorobots to duplicate it, and produce > >two turned 90 degrees jutting out into the Mediterranean -- then you > >could give an entire promised land to both the Jews and the Arabs. > > They'd both want the one on the right. Worse than that: they would both want both. Make three, one for Arabs, one for Jews, one for Christians. They would all want all three. Interesting experiment: create a SecondLife virtual promised land, see if the various warring religions could get along there. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 00:33:12 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:33:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? In-Reply-To: <20070426095908.GR9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200704280033.l3S0XLrB023601@andromeda.ziaspace.com> It was of course suggested in the grim humorous spirit of Swift's Modest Proposal. I wouldn't want to do anything to encourage them in this practice. Stem cell technology may advance to the point of allowing practical head transplants by repairing severed spinal cords and tuning of the immune system to avoid head rejection. In that day, I could envision a grim scenario in which the Presbyterians and Episcopalians would kidnap members of each other's tribes and graft the heads of their own onto the captured infidel's bodies. spike > -----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, April 26, 2007 2:59 AM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Cryonics is the only option? > > On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 09:56:03PM -0700, spike wrote: > > > Could they not graft the head of one of their terminally ill to the > > otherwise perfectly healthy body of a doomed infidel? I wonder if it > has > > Purportedly, experiments (on the other sort of infidel) were done during > the Indochina war. The source is an unnamed military intelligence person, > so > it's unreliable. > > I personally fail to see the reason. It's not life-prolonging, it's > agony-prolonging. > > > occurred to them to attempt it? > > -- > Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org From sentience at pobox.com Sat Apr 28 00:34:39 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:34:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Ah, now i know why i like this list! In-Reply-To: <200704280022.l3S0M1d3001180@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200704280022.l3S0M1d3001180@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <4632969F.6010004@pobox.com> spike wrote: > > Worse than that: they would both want both. Make three, one for Arabs, one > for Jews, one for Christians. They would all want all three. Interesting > experiment: create a SecondLife virtual promised land, see if the various > warring religions could get along there. The only place I've actually seen Israelis and Palestinians get along was in the #sl4 chat room. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 01:00:58 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:00:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health In-Reply-To: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <200704280101.l3S117ZH024888@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > My mother-in-law, who is a health professional, church choir member and > accompaniest, says conductors are some of the longest lived musicians in > the world. Conductor Rostropovich died yesterday at age 80. http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2491814.ece I agree with PJs mother-in-law. I can see how it could have a life extension effect to conduct a good orchestra, for I know of no greater high. Of course I have never hooted heroin. Or whatever one does with heroin. But I did get a chance to conduct a band, and it is way cool. {8-] spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney > Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 10:24 AM > To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org; extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health > > Sorry to those who prefer I copy articles into posts. Too many people > can't read them. > > This is for those singers among us, like Emlyn. > > This is from the LA Times Health section, on how singing is beneficial to > health. It raises immune system indicators, raises oxytocin, raises > cognitive fuction, improves quality of life in older age. Group singing > seems to improve it even more. > > http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he- > sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health > > My mother-in-law, who is a health professional, church choir member and > accompaniest, says conductors are some of the longest lived musicians in > the world. Her theory is they wave their arms a lot and get an upper > body, cardiovascular workout, while getting the hormonal high from the > music. She may be right. > > PJ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 28 01:05:13 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:05:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > > By "increasing context of shared values" do you mean something like a > lowest > > > common denominator, or an averaging out of values? > > > > No. I use the phrase "fine-grained values" to mean just the opposite. > > Our shared values can be approximated as an extremely complex > > hierarchy with "reality" (the ultimate view of what works) at the root > > and increasingly subjective branches supporting ever more subjective > > sub-branches until we reach each individual's values. The key here is > > that even though each of us has effective access only to our own > > subjective values at the tips of the outermost branches, we have an > > increasingly shared interest in the increasingly probable branches > > (supporting us) leading back to the root. With increasing awareness > > of this tree structure, we would increasingly agree on which branches > > best support, not our present values, but growth in the direction > > indicated by our shared values that work. > > > > > > > What if there is just an irreducible conflict in values, such as between > > > those who think women should "dress modestly" and those who think women > > > should dress however they please (this issue is often assumed to be > based on > > > religious or anti-egalitarian considerations, but consider the > prudishness > > > of the Russian and Chinese communists)? > > > > See above, and let me know if that does not address your question. > > In the example I give, both parties would agree that their dress code for > women was part of some more general principle. The problem is, they might > see different branches, a different trunk, different roots, or claim the > same roots for their trunk's exclusive use. There might be perfectly stable, > progressive societies ("what works"?) possible based on either ideology. What an interesting choice of words: "perfectly stable, progressive societies." Within an evolutionary framework such as the one being discussed, it sounds like an oxymoron. It's jarring to see "stable" as if that were somehow something good in the Red Queen's Race. Even in the sense of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy or Nash equilibrium in game theory, such stability can be good only if the environment also is stable. Even in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the now-venerable Tit-for-Tat strategy is known to be less than optimum if one's opponents cooperate, which is to be expected in the real world. And within this evolutionary context, what might be meant by "progressive"? Of course I realize that "progressive" has been appropriated by some to mean social progress *toward* some more ideal condition (implicity defined contra the existing "repressive" structures of power), whereas I see social progress as progressively moving *away* from what doesn't work, scientific progress as progressively ruling out what doesn't work, and so on, generating increasingly probable principles of what does work supporting an increasing variety of possibilities that might work. That said, I assume that "perfectly stable, progressive societies" is intended to mean free from civil unrest and proceeding toward increasingly free exercise of individual rights, or something similar. Sounds nice, but I don't know of any functional model that supports it. As Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." I think some people are moving in a good direction with "deliberative democracy", because I think they're slowly moving toward the kind of framework I propose. Your statement refers also to competing ideologies, whereas I was talking about competing values, my ideology being that increasing awareness (of values and methods, etc., etc.) leads to increasingly moral choices. As I mentioned earlier, and as evidenced by the "talking past each other" going on here, the seeds of thought I've been planting don't go nearly far enough to properly frame what is really a very simple, but alien idea. Call me Michael Valentine? No, please don't. > Each side will in the end be reduced to yelling at the other, "My values are > better than your values!". This is the case for any argument where the > premises cannot be agreed upon. I think the key point here is that you and I agree that values are subjective, and there is absolutely no basis for proving to an individual that their values are "wrong". But -- we share a great deal of that tree, diverging only with the relatively outermost branches. To the extent that we identify with more of our branch of that tree, we will find increasing agreement on principles that promote our shared values (that work) over increasing scope. If that is still too abstract, consider the Romulans and the Klingons. They share a common humanoid heritage but have diverged into quite separate cultures. The Klingons have taken the way of the warrior to an extreme, while the Romulans have grown in the direction of stealth and deception. Caricatures, sure, but they illustrate the point, which is that they hold deeper values in common. They must care for their children, they value the pursuit of happiness (however they define happiness), they value the right to defend themselves, they value cooperation (to the extend that it promotes shared values), ... and of course I could go on and on. We could even apply this thinking to robotic machine intelligence vis-?-vis humans. The intersecting branches would be a little further down, closer to the roots, but to the extent that these hypothetical robots had to interact within our physical world, within somewhat similar constraints, then there would be some basis for empathy and cooperation, effectively moral agreement. Your thoughts? - Jef From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 01:28:33 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:28:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Medical Experimentation on Prisoners, and Slippery Slopes In-Reply-To: <62c14240704261851v5052fd06ueaa475ac3fcaf19c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200704280128.l3S1Sh4L025978@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Medical Experimentation on Prisoners,and > Slippery Slopes > > On 4/26/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I have always wondered why criminals condemned to death cannot > > volunteer for medical experiments. Perhaps someone can explain > > clearly why that would, what?, lead menacingly down a slippery > > slope to applying the death penalty more often than it would be > > otherwise? ... > > I heard on the radio about a case where a woman murdered and > dismembered her husband... Consider those countries which are ruled by medieval law. One would suppose there are legitimate death penalty cases occasionally: a man is seen by 50 adult males raping a woman who had not peeked out from under her veil, for instance. Why would not they harvest his organs? Or transplant the head of a decent fidel on his soon-to-be-vacant shoulders? That wouldn't be encouraging the death penalty, for those radical Presbyterians already use it there as often as is merited. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Apr 28 01:53:55 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:53:55 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427152039.021b1628@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427204116.02348a88@satx.rr.com> At 07:43 PM 4/27/2007 -0400, Keith wrote: > >Barbara and I had our farmhouse burned to the ground a few months ago > >in an electricity company accident. > >snip > >There must be a story behind this. One of the more interesting articles >Jerry Pournelle wrote for Byte was when a car hitting a power pole dropped >4160 volt lines onto his house power. Every light in the house went off >like a flash bulb and he had some interesting tales to tell about surge >protectors. Surge protectors, ha. A guy wire failed on a post holding up a transformer somewhere off our land. The thing fell over into dry grass, spilling oil (?) and spitting sparks (presumably) and the fire raged unobserved until it reached the property and the 100 year old trees surrounding it, burning the whole thing to the ground including workshop full of tools, various vehicles (couple of classic Kombi vans, etc), greenhouse, storage sheds full of furniture waiting to be moved to another house in a week or two, antiques, the dwelling itself, etc. Nobody was there, no animals locked in. A neighbor alerted us (we're an hour away to the south). Total devastation. I don't think they have surge protectors for that. The Bluebonnet electric company admits total responsibility; their insurers have not denied it. An assessor wandered by, took a few desultory photos and notes, rushed on the next job. Now the sons of bitches are offering a pittance. Luckily (in so far as one can invoke "luck" in any of this unpleasantness) Barbara is a lawyer sharing office space with other expert lawyers, if it comes to that. Damien Broderick From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sat Apr 28 02:02:47 2007 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:02:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health In-Reply-To: <14993081.273551177701693355.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <14993081.273551177701693355.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <38984.72.236.103.4.1177725767.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > There's even a fasola group not far from me. Of course, I think it will have to > wait until my kids are in college, with all my free time and all... > > Ah, something to look forward to in my retirement. Thanks so much for this! > Kids can do fasola also, you know. There are pictures of little kids leading - old pictures. The singing masters used to come and have classes and the children learned to do this. There is a Camp FaSoLa in Alabama, and Camp DoReMi in North Carolina will have its first season this summer. But I admit we haven't many children who want to. People are now trained to *watch* and be entertained... not *do* and entertain themselves. My daughter loves this stuff but she no longer lives near me and there is no fasola near her. My son doesn't seem to grasp the concept, alas. He doesn't understand "parts" and seems confused about harmony. I agree with you about the 4 vs. 7 shape systems. I find the 7 are easier for me to grasp, but what I've learned to do is find "do" on the page and then go from there. I sing the four shape songs in 7 shape names. ;) It has taken a while for me to figure this out. ;) I hope you find it something you really can enjoy and do. I wish I'd found it sooner. Regards, MB From jay.dugger at gmail.com Sat Apr 28 02:30:38 2007 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:30:38 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Who's coming to TV07? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5366105b0704271930j2abe90b4n7a6bd3b07de462b7@mail.gmail.com> 21:30 Friday, 27 April 2007 On 4/27/07, George Dvorsky wrote: > Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for > TransVision 07? > Undecided, but probably not. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From emlynoregan at gmail.com Sat Apr 28 03:48:32 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:18:32 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health In-Reply-To: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704272048k293683d6p8552d3a359142227@mail.gmail.com> Just came across this post, nice one! This stuff is facinating. I've passed it on to my wife Jodie, who conducts a whole bunch of community choirs. I particularly like the interval-oriented approach - that's the way to good sight reading. Emlyn On 27/04/07, pjmanney wrote: > Sorry to those who prefer I copy articles into posts. Too many people can't read them. > > This is for those singers among us, like Emlyn. > > This is from the LA Times Health section, on how singing is beneficial to health. It raises immune system indicators, raises oxytocin, raises cognitive fuction, improves quality of life in older age. Group singing seems to improve it even more. > > http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health > > My mother-in-law, who is a health professional, church choir member and accompaniest, says conductors are some of the longest lived musicians in the world. Her theory is they wave their arms a lot and get an upper body, cardiovascular workout, while getting the hormonal high from the music. She may be right. > > PJ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 03:55:39 2007 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:55:39 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] Who's coming to TV07? In-Reply-To: <6944485.242791177688181475.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <6944485.242791177688181475.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <4632C5BB.8060905@comcast.net> I'll be there, along with Lincoln Cannon (president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association), Dale Allsop, Cory Funk, and maybe even John Grigg (right John?) So we'll have around 5 representatives of the MTA there. An MTA goal is to some day be able to host a Transvision in Utah. Perhaps Salt Lake City, or Park City? This will be way fun. It has been way to long since I saw some of you guys at extro-5 back in 2001. There has been a lot of changes since those pre dot bomb days. I'm looking forward to seeing all you guys again. We've all got to do sushi together again right!? See you there! Brent Allsop pjmanney wrote: > George wrote: > >> Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for >> TransVision 07? >> >> (I'll be there) >> > > Me, too. > > PJ > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Apr 28 04:35:15 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:35:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704280435.l3S4ZO5r004813@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick ... > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] a request for cyber-guidance > > ... What a good time to be a human. > > Damien Broderick Thanks for that meme Damien. This has been rattling around in my brain for some time now. Gratitude is a powerful emotion; lately I have been feeling it a lot. Gratitude to those who have gone before me, worked hard so that we can have the things we have, built the interstate highway system allowing me to use it to go as far as we want without cost other than gas, which is still very cheap, to those who built the other infrastructure and did so very competently, who helped set up the legal system that works so well, who did the engineering that gave us these wonderful machines which currently sit in front of us giving us unprecedented entertainment and education, all practically free, gratitude to evolution which gave me my beloved son. Life is gooood. And getting better. spike From emlynoregan at gmail.com Sat Apr 28 04:53:00 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:23:00 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] LA Times - Singing and health In-Reply-To: <38482.72.236.103.141.1177610973.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <23954791.142201177608214789.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <38482.72.236.103.141.1177610973.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704272153i6dc0ea6ep659cbecd115e870e@mail.gmail.com> Sorry, I didn't realise the shape note stuff was from MB. Awesome stuff. Check this out, it made me laugh (struck a chord, as it were)... "Black Gospel Choir Makes Man Wish He Believed In All That God Bullshit" http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28174 Emlyn On 27/04/07, MB wrote: > I like this, PJ, thanks for posting it. :) > > Some years ago I found a welcoming singing opportunity - people who sing Shape Note > Music. Where I live there are several versions of Shape Note Music and I go to all > the singings I can get to, four different states! The songs are almost all old (18th > and 19th century) religious music, but that doesn't bother me a bit. I have several > friends who "can't stand the religiousness of this" - but I love the sound and the > people and the singing (and the food!). > > We often have "all day singings" where we begin in the morning, break an hour for > covered dish lunch (ah, the food!), and then sing until late afternoon. I didn't > know I could do it, I thought I'd collapse, but I never did... I just kept going and > it was a blast. > > Aside from the music and singing, there's learning to read the various sets of > shapes, which I find delightfully challenging as well, like learning to read a code. > And there's learning to lead a song - standing in the middle of the Hollow Square > and beating time and leading all the singers. :) And there's always a new song, one > I've not heard before. > > I cannot (yet?) read regular round-note music, despite several years of piano > lessons in my long-ago childhood. My poor teachers - they were so disgusted and > disheartened. My parents were insistent, even offering cash bribes for me to learn > to play certain pieces of music. It never really happened. > > I wonder what they'd think of Shape Note Singing? ;) > > http://fasola.org/ > http://christianharmony.org/ > http://www.oldharp.org/ > > Regards, > MB > ... who was told (in school) "you don't sing well enough to be in the group" > > > > http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-sing23apr23,1,2749174.story?coll=la-headlines-health > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 06:22:58 2007 From: desertpaths2003 at yahoo.com (John Grigg) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:22:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] Who's coming to TV07? In-Reply-To: <4632C5BB.8060905@comcast.net> Message-ID: <526697.21877.qm@web35603.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Yes, Brent (and everyone), I will definitely be there! : ) John Brent Allsop wrote: I?ll be there, along with Lincoln Cannon (president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association), Dale Allsop, Cory Funk, and maybe even John Grigg (right John?) So we?ll have around 5 representatives of the MTA there. An MTA goal is to some day be able to host a Transvision in Utah. Perhaps Salt Lake City, or Park City? This will be way fun. It has been way to long since I saw some of you guys at extro-5 back in 2001. There has been a lot of changes since those pre dot bomb days. I?m looking forward to seeing all you guys again. We?ve all got to do sushi together again right!? See you there! Brent Allsop pjmanney wrote: George wrote: Can I have a quick show of hands to see who's coming to Chicago for TransVision 07? (I'll be there) Me, too. PJ _______________________________________________ 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 --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 28 09:04:23 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:04:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 06:18:11PM -0400, Heartland wrote: > > Then, after several months and years we'd tell him. What would be > > his reaction? > > Let me solve that mystery for you right now. The future instance of "my" type would > probably make another attempt at explaining to you why you murdered someone who > shared similar brain structure. :) Do you think that "instance of your type" would have a good case in court? Do you think anyone undergoing general anaesthesia could sue their anaesthesiologists for manslaughter? Does it mean that I can anything from that "instance of your type", because it no longer has a plausible claim to his house, wife, life and all general assets? That instance is just an impostor, after all. Why don't you sue that gal at Starbucks, because she wilfully disrupted your "Slawomir" process by a really strong double latte? > If you had a perfect twin right now, would it be OK if you killed him too? I If it was your sort of "killing", any time. If it was a perfectly synchronized instance of the me-process I could even kill him physically. > imagine you would still argue with the guards, while being dragged to your cell or "Yes, your honor, we had to anaesthesize this person, because of an appendectomy. Please don't be too harsh with our sentence. We just wanted to spare him the experience of having his belly slit open while fully conscious". > even a death chamber, that you should go free since the victim's death was not a > big deal because the type of your twin's brain structure still remains or because Excuse me? I'm not a type believer, and I believe, you've just murdered a strawman. Guards! Guards! > flat EEGs are poor indicators of death so, according to your definition of death, Not my definition of death. *Everybody's* definition of death. With the exception of Slawomir, that is. > you didn't kill > anyone. I wish I could murder that thread. It never goes anywhere. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From andrewcburrows at hotmail.com Sat Apr 28 06:44:31 2007 From: andrewcburrows at hotmail.com (Andrew Burrows) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 06:44:31 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mouse brain simulated on computer Message-ID: News article is linked here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6600965.stm and after some searching, here is the official site with papers: http://brain.cs.unr.edu/index.php Don't get too excited from the sensationalist title. It's not quite a whole brain simulation, just 8,000 neurons. However the researchers are trying to be faithful to the real world interactions of neurons. And presumably with this model it can help deduce simpler neuron representations, further increasing efficiency. I won't expect any practical applications to come from this for many years at least due to the computational expense of the model. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Hotmail is evolving - check out the new Windows Live Hotmail http://get.live.com/betas/mail_betas From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 28 09:37:53 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:37:53 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mouse brain simulated on computer In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070428093753.GS9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 06:44:31AM +0000, Andrew Burrows wrote: > News article is linked here: > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6600965.stm > and after some searching, here is the official site with papers: > http://brain.cs.unr.edu/index.php > > Don't get too excited from the sensationalist title. It's not quite a whole > brain simulation, just 8,000 neurons. However the researchers are trying to As usual, the reporters didn't bother to check their numbers for plausibility. It was 8 MNeurons, on a 4 kNode Blue Gene/L. The Blue Gene topping Top 500 is a 64 kNode system, which, assuming the simulation would scale, would give you 8 mice, or one mouse run at about realtime. Of course, that simulation is rather removed from biologic realism, but it is a nice benchmark for spiking codes for AI applications. The Blue Gene family is designed to scale to some 2 MNodes, and future models will be based on the Cell CPU. > be faithful to the real world interactions of neurons. > > And presumably with this model it can help deduce simpler neuron > representations, further increasing efficiency. I won't expect any practical > applications to come from this for many years at least due to the > computational expense of the model. A 4 kNode Blue Gene/L is a low end model, as far as scientific supercomputers go. It's just two racks of hardware. Right now you could buy a few PS3, install Linux + MPI on them, and hook them up to a large GBit switch. You'd get a 48-node/12 GByte Cell cluster for the low, low price of 25 k$. And it would scale as far as your electricity bill could carry. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 28 10:45:34 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 12:45:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] scientific computing with the PS3 Message-ID: <20070428104534.GY9439@leitl.org> http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf has some details on the GBit interface (yes, it's virtualized). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 12:58:00 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:58:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Randall writes > [Lee wrote] > >> Now, yes, John [and I believe] that >> people can have slightly different *recent* histories >> and still be the same person. That is, I mean literally >> that I and my recent duplicate share the same self. My >> duplicate objectively has all the things about me that >> I want to preserve. So if this one (pinches cheek) >> dies and that instance of me over there lives, then I >> still wake up tomorrow morning, not someone else >> masquerading as me. I even look forward to waking >> up tomorrow in this case, just as much as I would if >> no harm was to come to this instance. > > Again, histories and memories are distinct: history > involves the process by which the physical memories > were constructed, while memories are merely content. Let me see if I understand. The historical process by which you in 2007 came to be is the traditional one: birth, raised by parents, school, etc. But if we authoritatively told you that this was all a lie, and that you had been raised as a part of a government experiment, that you indeed did not exist before 2005, that all your memories were implanted and false, that your consciousness came into true focus only last week---would you, given that you substantiate these amazing claims---suppose that you are not the person that you thought you were? (My answer to that is this: Oh, I'm still Lee Corbin all right. My actual history doesn't too strongly affect what is important to me, how I want the rest of my life to continue indefinitely, my values, and my friendships (given that all the people who I am close to had arisen via similar government experimentation and that their memories were as false as mine). My good friend F and I would simply argue---since we're both believers in Hugh Everett's Many Worlds---that we were in effect copied into *this* universe from an adjacent one in which we actually did have all those things happen to us.) > Heartland (I think) (and certainly I [Randall]) believes that > it's the process which is a person, not the content. > > That said, he and I differ on what constitutes "the > process", since I don't think suspending electrical > activity in the brain necessarily ends it. But the logical ramification of your (not Heartland's) belief is that if you were replaced by a copy that we made ten minutes ago, your number would be up, you'd be dead, and this other Randall who is not you would inherit your life. Right? Well, not John Clark, IIRC, would go to the extreme that I, Robin Hanson, and many others would, namely, an instance of us would choose vaporization so that a recent duplicate frozen in the next room would get $10M, and we would be making that choice for *entirely* selfish reasons. Lee P.S. I've copied John Clark on this because I am interested to reacqaint myself with his views regarding his replaceability with a copy of him in the next room we made a few minutes ago. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 13:28:21 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 06:28:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <07a601c78999$6cf0a3e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes >> >>How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th >> >>century faced economic deprivation? >> > >> > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the detectors. >> >> Okay, then you have to make the case that the *relative* deprivation was >> greater around 1940 (or 1914 or June, 1950), and so on, than at other >> times. > > Relative to immediately *previous* times. You mean to assert that Germany was either economically worse off in 1939, or that the prospects of the people (or, hell, even the leaders) was more grim, than, say it had been in 1936, 1932, 1928, etc.? Sorry---I cannot fathom that Germany was bad off at all in 1939. As BillK pointed out, they didn't suffer the depression to the same degree that America did, and they were all quite hopeful of the future with their new Autobahns etc. than at immediately previous times. No? > The theory says nothing about inequity... It was probably not much of a > factor in hunter gatherer bands. The potlatch cultures and "big man" solutions seem to be the way that the EEA types would have addressed the issue. Envy is a powerful force that retards economic development severely. Religion is very good at countering envy. > What is the effect of the GNP going up but a substantial fraction > of the middle class dropping into the lower class? According to Peter Turchin ("War and Peace and War"), the effect is that rising inequality destabilizes a society, reduces its asabiya, and---in pre-modern times, e.g. before 1700---tends to reintroduce the beginning "war" phase of the entire cycle. "Warre brings peace, and peace brings warre" as a 16th century observer acutely saw. > That's been the developing situation as the US becomes more like a third > world country in terms of income distribution. Does this make the country > as a whole more likely to support a war? Any thoughts? My guess: rising inequality now has the opposite effect: there is more alienation between the higher and lower classes, and less identification with the "entire nation". Thus we as Americans feel less insulted that our power is being challenged somewhere (e.g. Iraq) than would the U.S. of 1907. But a crucial fact I really need: In absolute terms, are the poor worse off than 50 years ago? The answer has to be nuanced, because, for example, an influx of poor people from Mexico will lower the average wealth, even though it may be that *all* the poor people are better off today than 50 years ago when you go individual by individual (including their parents). What do you suppose? >>In an earlier post, you said that the Hitler invasion of the >>Soviet Union did not go against your scheme for the >>reason that a war was already in progress. But there >>was *utterly* no reason whatsoever that made any >>sense to invade Russia; not militarily, not economically, >>nothing. > > That was my point. It *was* irrational. Leaders in "war mode" do things > like that and their followers don't stop them. Consider the current > situation in Iraq if you want another example. Okay; I think that some of us were interpreting you to mean that it was the entire culture or nation that was in "war mode". Yes, throughout history one prince will invade another's kingdom either because it's spring time and he's feeling his oats (typical American Indian fashion), or because he himself will profit from it, or to avenge a wrong, international prestige, etc. The current situation in Iraq, which began in 2002, may have been a reaction to 9-11. After all, the Congress fully supported the Iraq invasion, although I don't want to get into an argument over whether or not they were responsible (since intelligence agencies around the world and the Bush administration misinformed them). But clearly the Americans were still smarting from 9-11. >>That's how he came to power, yes. But the cause of the European WWII >>is pretty simple (as compared to WWI): one small German party sought the >>total conquest of Europe or perhaps the world. When Hitler and Stalin took >>Poland, they didn't really think that England and France would declare war--- > > That is correct, and yet another example of people in "war mode" having > their rationality impaired. How is it that going into war mode seems to afflict a small ruling class or even one king, but not a whole people? All the examples that usually come to mind---the ones above like Hitler---seem to be exceptional. In the EEA, surely it was an entire group. Different situations. >> all this is much more particular than generalizations about >> relative privation, birth rates, and so on. And it is particulars >> like these afford the true, actual explanations. > > I disagree. There are proximal and ultimate explanations. > It is one thing to say "Hitler was a madman," and quite > another to ask why a madman came to power. I am > looking for the deep causes, things rooted in human biology. Let's make sure---for my benefit---that we don't overuse one example. And what is the focus here, anyway? Is it modern times, e.g. post 1700, or is it civilization (1500 B.C. - 1700 A.D.), or is it the EEA (1.8 M - 100K B.C.)? I'm doubtful that the same explanations work in all cases. In 1870 the French Emperor traded insults with the German Emperor (who, himself, was actually pretty innocent), and the newspapers exaggerated the insults. People got mad, and there was a war. What happened in 1905? In 1812? In 1066? When Caesar conquered Gaul? I only throw these out at random, and am making no point; I just want more examples. Any will do, but we should avoid cherry-picking. You seem to contend sometimes that it's war fever among a small ruling elite, at other times that an entire tribe or nation has "grim prospects", and at other times that it's current deprivation of an entire band, and so on. Can you summarize? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 13:34:04 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 06:34:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427191216.046d48e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <07ab01c7899a$20e16600$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes in a reply to BillK >> > Even more significant (or so I think) is *anticipation* of bleak >> > conditions. My case for this is the logic of gene selection. It would pay >> > genes for the warriors to kill neighbors *before* they were gaunt and weak >> > from hunger. >> >> Well, that pretty well covers all options. >> Either: >> 1) the warrior group is suffering deprivation and this >> causes war. or, >> 2) if they're not suffering deprivation, then they are >> probably worrying about possible future deprivation >> and this causes war. >> >> You do realize that this is a meaningless unfalsifiable argument? > > No. And there should be evidence. You should see a drop in wars after a > major plagues because the drop in population should make for a brighter > (less economically stressed) future for those who are left. I will try to check it out. Well documented causes exist for the wars between England and France that broke out in the 1300s. The plague came later (1346) but I don't think slowed the war any except for a bit of financial exhaustion among the rulers. The 15th century was still very war-prone in Europe. >> Selective political quotations can prove anything. >> The Great Depression hit the USA far worse that Germany > > Is that true? I.e., can you cite the relative drops in GDP > per capita for the US and Germany? Yes, we should get to the bottom of that. Lee > One of the things I cited in my earliest memetics papers, long before I had > any thoughts on what might account for it, was the inverse relation between > US economic downturns and up ticks in neo nazi activities. From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 16:57:09 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:57:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] kieth check this In-Reply-To: <07a601c78999$6cf0a3e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704281709.l3SH9iET008655@andromeda.ziaspace.com> http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/us/2007/04/28/matting ly.vatech.scientology.cnn From jonkc at att.net Sat Apr 28 17:17:51 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:17:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > I recall that Heartland *specifically* said that it's not the atoms that > are the problem True but for ever time I've heard him say atoms are not important I've twice heard him go on and on about atom's space time trajectories and how important they are in defining identity; on Monday Wednesday Friday and Saturday atoms are important, on Tuesday and Thursday they are not, and on Sunday he rests. > What DOES matter is whether a process is > suspended or not. And that's why he also thinks anesthesia is the equivalent to death. Do you really want to defend that 18'th century idea? > And according to him, that's the whole ball game. And that's exactly what makes his idea downright comical. According to him the whole ball game is something that is imposable to detect subjectively but nevertheless (for reasons never explained) I should be very concerned about it, subjectively. To say this is silly is a vast understatement. According to him the John Clark of yesterday could be dead and if he was I should be concerned if I thought the same thing was going to happen to the John Clark of today tomorrow; however despite my frequent requests he is unable to explain without getting all vague and mystical why if that's all death is I should give a hoot in hell about it one way or the other. > I am appalled at the way that you and Stathis keep trying to take down a > straw man. Straw man be damned! If The High Priest says he changed his mind and no longer things matter determines identity and stops harping on the vast "difference" between the copy and the original then I will say no more about it; but until then I will not apologies for pointing out the absurd places this train of thought leads to. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Sat Apr 28 17:33:44 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:33:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <010b01c789bb$6290e0a0$59074e0c@MyComputer> "Randall Randall" > It is, after all, your position that two instances of John > Clark with completely different histories can somehow > share identity Two copies are made of me and then the original is destroyed. After the copying A and B have different experiences. Both A and B have an equal right to call themselves John Clark because they both remember being me; but A is NOT equal to B. > What else but a soul could > explain this psychic linkage It's not psychic but there is a linkage, it is caused by the closest thing to a soul the Scientific Method can find, information. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 18:41:24 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:41:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 (Identity over Interruption) Message-ID: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> One of the most difficult problems, I would think, for anyone who suggests that mere interruption of a physical process is tantamount to death of a person (or even an instance of some person), is that in general, philosophy abhors a discontinuity. It used to be that nature abhorred vacua, but today we know better. Maybe some day philosophy will accomodate discontinuities, but I don't think that the time has yet come. Here is a criticism of Heartland's position that I think goes to the heart of the matter. In cryonics we have had to vigorously resist the notion that a failing patient's death is an all or nothing affair. There is no precise moment of death. Even conventional medical practice recognizes that mere cessation of a beating heart cannot be a definition of death; nor (for most medical practitioners can a very momentary flatlining of an EEG). One of the huge philosophical problems anti-abortionists face also stems from nature seemingly abhoring a discontinutity. As a sperm approaches and egg, or as the hours-long process of inception begins, there simply cannot be any strict line at which a human life can be said to begin. (In the older terminology, there is no precise moment at which a soul can be said to enter the body of a fertilized fetus.) Even we (i.e. the majority of people who are reading this who also, I'm sure, agree with me) cannot always say that the survival of a person is an all or nothing affair. What if the revived patient has brain damage? Clearly the question of whether or not he has survived lies on a continuum. However, we *may* say that a person has survived a routine medical operation if he appears to be functioning fully normally following the operation, regardless of exactly what transpired during that operation. (I myself, actually, do not 100% conform to this consensus in one EXTREMELY abstract philosophical possibility: for me, if somehow---assuming physics that may turn out to be impossible---the patients brain has been replaced by a computronium GLUT, then I would not say that the patient has survived. But that old conundrum doesn't deserve a place in this particular thread.) So the challenge for Heartland amounts to this: just how long does a patient's EEG need go to zero for the person to have died? If you embrace the position that life and death are like 1 and 0, then you'll have a problem answering. If the EEG were to go flat for a trillionth of a second, what then? What is an EEG anyway except a very rought statistical measure of brain activity? Say some neurons fire and some do not---which after all is exactly the normal functioning of a human brain. Just what implications for survival does that have? What if the left hemisphere has its brain activity totally shut down by drugs or temporary freezing? Is some fraction of the person now dead, even though he appears to have been wholly restored? What if one percent of my cerebral cortex fails to have any neural activity for a moment? Is the degree of my survival impacted? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 18:59:23 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:59:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <07c201c789c7$a16f6d80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John writes > And that's why he [Slawomir] also thinks anesthesia is the > equivalent to death. Do you [Lee] really want to defend > that 18'th century idea? I may disagree with someone's opinion, but I will defend to the death their right to be understood correctly. :-) Nothing should have given you the impression that I would defend the notion that general anesthesia by definition kills anybody. Slawomir may think that, but not I. I can only surmise that because I tried to clarify what he was saying---and thereby was speaking in his defense, sort of--- that you think I'm on his side in the general debate. Whats wrong witch you? >> And according to him, that's the whole ball game. > > And that's exactly what makes his idea downright comical. And it's blunt statements like that that have caused the degeneration of your exchanges with him to wry shouting matches. Or is that all you're here for? > According to him the whole ball game is something that is > imposable to detect subjectively but nevertheless (for reasons > never explained) I should be very concerned about it, > subjectively. To say this is silly is a vast understatement. No! No, It is not silly it's not even wrong :-) It's not even incorrect! Slawomir is correct--- *on the meaning of his terms*. Can't you see that you keep begging the question? What if you are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor they've paid to imitate John K.Clark. The person acts like you do, and since (say) you're a recluse, no one notices (he has studied your emails carefully). What if, to make it convincing, they also somehow hypnotize that actor to actually believe that he is the person he's imitating? Then *you* are dead, regardless of your phony criterion of "subjectively". Subjectively he thinks he's you. Does that make him you? OF course not! There is simply a fact of the matter! For you and me either the new creature has your memories and basic behavior, or it does not. (Actually, of course, it's a matter of degree.) For Slawomir, it is also a fact of the matter: either it's the same non-interrupted running process or it's not. (I don't know how he handles matters of degree.) But your criterion of "subjectivity" is bogus, even if it is somehow coherent. > > I am appalled at the way that you... keep trying to take down a > > straw man. > > Straw man be damned! If The High Priest says he changed his mind and no > longer things matter determines identity and stops harping on the vast > "difference" between the copy and the original... But surely, you wish to address his actual beliefs, not the beliefs you erroneously attribute to him, right? Lee From spike66 at comcast.net Sat Apr 28 20:02:39 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:02:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 (Identity overInterruption) In-Reply-To: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704282002.l3SK2mjp014769@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin ... > One of the huge philosophical problems anti-abortionists face also > stems from nature seemingly abhoring a discontinutity. As a sperm > approaches and egg, or as the hours-long process of inception begins, > there simply cannot be any strict line at which a human life can be said > to begin. (In the older terminology, there is no precise moment at > which a soul can be said to enter the body of a fertilized fetus.) ... > Lee Lee, after reading your paragraph above, I realized you are absolutely right. I have decided to become a super radical anti-abortionist right to lifer. As the sperm approaches the egg, the pair represent a sacred potential human life. The same argument still works even before they actually approach, so I must conclude that it is murderously immoral to not copulate at every opportunity. Kewallll. spike {8^D From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 20:09:06 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:09:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <424485.86153.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that our Universe is not going to end in a Big Crunch but will continue forever. I was trying to think of a way to continually produce energy for an infinite period (assuming that the Universe may eventually run out of use-able nuclear fuels, etc.) What about a giant, planet-sized generator of sorts? Construct a gigantic permanent magnet (with a decent amount of gravity) that has a powerful magnetic field. Then put wire coils attached to batteries or capacitors into a tight and fast orbit around the magnet. (Under typical conditions, a wire moving through a magnetic field will carry an electric current). Alternatively, you could also attach the wire coils "directly" to orbiting computers. It looks to me that all that is required is gravity (which I don't see going anywhere), and that nuclear protons don't eventually decay (Hasn't this already been tested with results indicating no decay?). No doubt, there will be far, far more efficient methods in the future, this is just a simple example. Does anyone familiar with physics, cosmology, or engineering know of a reason why this wouldn't work? I'd be interested to know. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 20:43:15 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:43:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay Message-ID: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Despite the questionable practice of leveling Japanese cities with incediaries---which may or may not have saved lives, may or may not have shortened the war---the *real* legacy of General Curtis E. LeMay was his leadership of SAC, the very pronunciation of which terrorized the Russian leadership. In the early days of the cold war, when Soviet bomber fleets and American bomber fleets threatened to implement their government's policies of total nuclear war, the Soviets, in part thanks to their very effective spy network, knew that the Americans still held the edge technically. It was at this time that Curtis LeMay uttered the immortal words: "If I see 'em massing for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of 'em." Notice that he did not say "we", or "the U.S.", but rather "I will knock" said shit out of the Soviets. It was the cold knowledge on the other side that there were a number of Americans in very high places that very probably staved off total war. Anyone who cannot understand this evidently cannot understand incentives in the context of brinksmanship, and such people puzzle me greatly: how can they understand and anticipate others' behavior in other contexts, such as labor/management negotiations, or game theory, or even when buying a used car? Lee From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 20:49:14 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:49:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Heartland, It's nice to be debating this again with you. You're very creative and provocative (and I admire you're endurance with this topic). But this is all I'm going to post on it for the foreseeable future. You say that it is a unique trajectory through space and time that specifies an identity. (Correct me if that is not a fair or correct representation).On the face of it, I actually don't disagree with you. Another way to describe that is that two different trajectories are different precisely because they are separated both in space and time (which are both intertwined entities as far as I know). But this, in addition to other "factors" is why I believe it is appropriate to believe that no "self" continues through time, and that we are in fact "dieing" continuously (and it's not a big deal). With every passing moment, I am separated temporally with my "previous self" (if I wasn't, I'd be "frozen in time"), and by extension, I must also be separated spatially. Doesn't that meet your definition of a different trajectory? And therefore a "new" person with every passing moment? Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From eugen at leitl.org Sat Apr 28 21:07:39 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:07:39 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay In-Reply-To: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <20070428210739.GG9439@leitl.org> On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 01:43:15PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Despite the questionable practice of leveling Japanese cities with > incediaries---which may or may not have saved lives, may or may > not have shortened the war---the *real* legacy of General Curtis This guy here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay ? "Critics have characterized him as a belligerent warmonger (even nicknaming him "Bombs Away LeMay") whose aggressiveness threatened to inflame tense Cold War situations (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis) into open war between the United States and the Soviet Union. LeMay is perhaps most famous for suggesting in a 1965 book that the United States should escalate its bombing of North Vietnam: "My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they?ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we?re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."" Some character indeed. Sounds like a great candidate for a war criminal trial, or a great model for Colonel Arnold Hawthorne. > E. LeMay was his leadership of SAC, the very pronunciation of > which terrorized the Russian leadership. Did it? I'm not sure we can reliably theorize about emotional state of people past. > In the early days of the cold war, when Soviet bomber fleets and > American bomber fleets threatened to implement their government's > policies of total nuclear war, the Soviets, in part thanks to their very > effective spy network, knew that the Americans still held the edge > technically. How do you know? It's never been tested in practice. Also, whether you can do a 10000x overkill, or a 8000x overkill, it doesn't matter that much in practice. Armageddon still results. > It was at this time that Curtis LeMay uttered the immortal words: > > "If I see 'em massing for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out > of 'em." I think we all can be really thankful that nobody really tested MAD in practice. > Notice that he did not say "we", or "the U.S.", but rather "I will > knock" said shit out of the Soviets. And the Russkies would have turned a large number of U.S. cities into trinitite. None of us would be able to read this message. Most of us would be dead, or never been born. The Internet wouldn't exist. The world would be a very different place than it is now. I don't really care much for that other alternate reality branch. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 28 20:19:37 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:19:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <07a601c78999$6cf0a3e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 06:28 AM 4/28/2007 -0700, you wrote: >Keith writes > > >> >>How is the point made that modern European nations any time in the 20th > >> >>century faced economic deprivation? > >> > > >> > It's not absolute deprivation but *relative* that trips the detectors. > >> > >> Okay, then you have to make the case that the *relative* deprivation was > >> greater around 1940 (or 1914 or June, 1950), and so on, than at other > >> times. > > > > Relative to immediately *previous* times. > >You mean to assert that Germany was either economically worse off in 1939, >or that the prospects of the people (or, hell, even the leaders) was more >grim, >than, say it had been in 1936, 1932, 1928, etc.? Sorry---I cannot fathom >that Germany was bad off at all in 1939. As BillK pointed out, they didn't >suffer the depression to the same degree that America did, and they were >all quite hopeful of the future with their new Autobahns etc. than at >immediately >previous times. No? Lee, it has been said on this list recently that WW II was a continuation of WW I. Perhaps. Wars among primitive peoples run on for generations. However, think the important time period for WW II was when Hitler and the Nazi party took power and that was when things looked bleak in Germany. > > The theory says nothing about inequity... It was probably not much of a > > factor in hunter gatherer bands. > >The potlatch cultures and "big man" solutions seem to be the way that the >EEA types would have addressed the issue. Envy is a powerful force that >retards economic development severely. Religion is very good at >countering envy. I don't understand this at all. > > What is the effect of the GNP going up but a substantial fraction > > of the middle class dropping into the lower class? > >According to Peter Turchin ("War and Peace and War"), the effect >is that rising inequality destabilizes a society, reduces its asabiya, Jeeze. Google: 701 for asabiya Asabiya is the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; it can increase or decrease with time. ... >and---in pre-modern times, e.g. before 1700---tends to reintroduce >the beginning "war" phase of the entire cycle. "Warre brings peace, >and peace brings warre" as a 16th century observer acutely saw. > > > That's been the developing situation as the US becomes more like a third > > world country in terms of income distribution. Does this make the country > > as a whole more likely to support a war? Any thoughts? > >My guess: rising inequality now has the opposite effect: there is more >alienation between the higher and lower classes, and less identification >with the "entire nation". Thus we as Americans feel less insulted that >our power is being challenged somewhere (e.g. Iraq) than would the >U.S. of 1907. > >But a crucial fact I really need: In absolute terms, are the poor worse >off than 50 years ago? The answer has to be nuanced, because, for >example, an influx of poor people from Mexico will lower the average >wealth, even though it may be that *all* the poor people are better >off today than 50 years ago when you go individual by individual >(including their parents). What do you suppose? For this theory it doesn't matter since the bleak future detectors seem to respond to relative future conditions. > >>In an earlier post, you said that the Hitler invasion of the > >>Soviet Union did not go against your scheme for the > >>reason that a war was already in progress. But there > >>was *utterly* no reason whatsoever that made any > >>sense to invade Russia; not militarily, not economically, > >>nothing. > > > > That was my point. It *was* irrational. Leaders in "war mode" do things > > like that and their followers don't stop them. Consider the current > > situation in Iraq if you want another example. > >Okay; I think that some of us were interpreting you to mean that it >was the entire culture or nation that was in "war mode". Yes, >throughout history one prince will invade another's kingdom either >because it's spring time and he's feeling his oats (typical American >Indian fashion), or because he himself will profit from it, or to avenge >a wrong, international prestige, etc. > >The current situation in Iraq, which began in 2002, may have been >a reaction to 9-11. After all, the Congress fully supported the Iraq >invasion, I don't think it was unanimous, but close. >although I don't want to get into an argument over whether >or not they were responsible (since intelligence agencies around the >world and the Bush administration misinformed them). But clearly the >Americans were still smarting from 9-11. What I said in the EP memes and war paper: "How did the US get into this Iraq mess? "Once a tribe is attacked (and goes into war mode) rationality really suffers. It's not different from the damage to rationality that comes from the build-up of war memes in a tribe with bleak prospects but it happens much faster. Under those circumstances, tribes follow leaders who are often less rational than their supporters. In this case the US had the misfortune of a leader who had a preconceived notion of which country he wanted to attack. Also perceptions of being under attack are more important than reality in activating behavior switches. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked." [17] In the months leading up to the attack on Iraq, the message put out by the US administration was "be afraid, be very afraid, we are about to be attacked with Saddam's weapons of mass destruction!" " The reference [17] was to a statement by Hermann Goering. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm ******** The quote [below] was part of a conversation Gilbert held with a dejected Hermann Goering in his cell on the evening of 18 April 1946, as the trials were halted for a three-day Easter recess: Sweating in his cell in the evening, Goering was defensive and deflated and not very happy over the turn the trial was taking. snip Later in the conversation, Gilbert recorded Goering's observations that the common people can always be manipulated into supporting and fighting wars by their political leaders: We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction. "Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." ******** > >>That's how he came to power, yes. But the cause of the European WWII > >>is pretty simple (as compared to WWI): one small German party sought the > >>total conquest of Europe or perhaps the world. When Hitler and Stalin took > >>Poland, they didn't really think that England and France would declare > war--- > > > > That is correct, and yet another example of people in "war mode" having > > their rationality impaired. > >How is it that going into war mode seems to afflict a small ruling class >or even one king, but not a whole people? All the examples that usually >come to mind---the ones above like Hitler---seem to be exceptional. >In the EEA, surely it was an entire group. Different situations. It is and it isn't. In the EEA, the entire tribe knew when game was getting hard to find, and they darn sure knew when they were being attacked. Now we get information indirectly, ever more remotely. It started with word of mouth, then written word, newspapers, radio, TV and this offered the ability to inject false information. It need not even be "leaders" who take advantage as Goering discussed. The Spanish-American war was largely caused by William Randolph Hearst manipulation of information flow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst "Hearst's use of "yellow journalism" techniques in his New York Journal to whip up popular support for U.S. military adventurism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 was also criticized in Upton Sinclair's 1919 book, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism. According to Sinclair, Hearst's newspaper employees were 'willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.' " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish-American_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29 But as any US citizen who watched the WTC attack on TV knows, such information does reach the emotional mechanism involved in flipping our thinking into "war mode." > >> all this is much more particular than generalizations about > >> relative privation, birth rates, and so on. And it is particulars > >> like these afford the true, actual explanations. > > > > I disagree. There are proximal and ultimate explanations. > > It is one thing to say "Hitler was a madman," and quite > > another to ask why a madman came to power. I am > > looking for the deep causes, things rooted in human biology. > >Let's make sure---for my benefit---that we don't overuse one example. >And what is the focus here, anyway? Is it modern times, e.g. post 1700, >or is it civilization (1500 B.C. - 1700 A.D.), or is it the EEA (1.8 M - >100K B.C.)? I'm doubtful that the same explanations work in all cases. The EEA. Which means hunter gatherers up to agriculture. The same mechanisms exist in modern humans, 0.5% of our evolutionary history isn't enough to much affect the prevalence of such psychological traits. >In 1870 the French Emperor traded insults with the German Emperor >(who, himself, was actually pretty innocent), and the newspapers >exaggerated the insults. People got mad, and there was a war. > >What happened in 1905? In 1812? In 1066? When Caesar conquered >Gaul? I only throw these out at random, and am making no point; I just >want more examples. Any will do, but we should avoid cherry-picking. > >You seem to contend sometimes that it's war fever among a small ruling >elite, at other times that an entire tribe or nation has "grim prospects", >and at other times that it's current deprivation of an entire band, and so on. >Can you summarize? No. We are just working from such different data bases that I think I should not respond again until you have read the Azar Gat paper. Let me know when you have. If you want to discuss the paper in more detail than I can supply, perhaps we could get Professor Gat to respond. http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf Keith From jef at jefallbright.net Sat Apr 28 21:27:44 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:27:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/28/07, A B wrote: > Hi Heartland, > > It's nice to be debating this again with you. You're > very creative and provocative "Creative"? Slawomir's position, no matter how dressed up in talk of atoms and space-time trajectories, reduces to nothing more than arguing against the well-known identity of indiscernibles. The opposition argue in functional terms that to the extent a difference makes no difference, it is no difference. However, they continue to state this as if "differences" can be completely objective. Both sides appear to be utterly blind to the necessity of an observer function, to any discussion of meaning. If this debate ever develops from "what is personal identity" to "what do we mean by person identity" then it might get interesting. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 28 21:36:50 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:36:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <424485.86153.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428173333.040ffc20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 01:09 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, you wrote: > For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that >our Universe is not going to end in a Big Crunch but >will continue forever. I was trying to think of a way >to continually produce energy for an infinite period >(assuming that the Universe may eventually run out of >use-able nuclear fuels, etc.) What about a giant, >planet-sized generator of sorts? Construct a gigantic >permanent magnet (with a decent amount of gravity) >that has a powerful magnetic field. Then put wire >coils attached to batteries or capacitors into a tight >and fast orbit around the magnet. (Under typical >conditions, a wire moving through a magnetic field >will carry an electric current). Alternatively, you >could also attach the wire coils "directly" to >orbiting computers. It looks to me that all that is >required is gravity (which I don't see going >anywhere), and that nuclear protons don't eventually >decay (Hasn't this already been tested with results >indicating no decay?). No doubt, there will be far, >far more efficient methods in the future, this is just >a simple example. Does anyone familiar with physics, >cosmology, or engineering know of a reason why this >wouldn't work? I'd be interested to know. It won't work. Conservation of energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether Sorry. Keith From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 21:40:28 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:40:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Human Reproductive Manifest Destiny References: <200704282002.l3SK2iWp048254@mail0.rawbw.com> Message-ID: <07e901c789de$12f0e270$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike writes > Lee, after reading your paragraph above, I realized you are absolutely > right. Spike is being a little tongue-in-cheek since I was speaking out against the anti-abortionists, but goes on to make an absolutely telling point: > I have decided to become a super radical anti-abortionist right to > lifer. As the sperm approaches the egg, the pair represent a sacred > potential human life. The same argument still works even before they > actually approach, so I must conclude that it is murderously immoral to not > copulate at every opportunity. > Kewallll. "Cool???" Mrs. Jones may have some serious forebodings about what this may lead to in your particular case. Watcha you mouth. Seriously, you are totally correct in the moral imperative to rescue as many people from non-existence as possible. Not only---because we failed to listen to Brigham Young and to Sir Francis Galton---have we in the West failed miserably at reproducing ourselves, we are also allowing untold numbers of eggs from highly intelligent women to go unfertilized! Now in earlier times this unfortunate failure could be excused for lack of resources. Not now. I always heard that the average women has several hundred eggs, corresponding---in my great ignorance---I suppose to the number of months she lives before a certain degeneracy due to age sets in. Anyone know some numbers? But anyway, lookee here: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/03/62609 It may be a lot more than several hundred! Thus all eggs from teenage American girls who have IQs over 140 should be harvested and subjected to artificial insemination with male sperm acquired from the healthiest, most intelligent, and most conscientious specimens who also have a stirling family tree. (Alas, I must use the word "specimens" out of respect for Peter Seller's wonderful parody of Von Neumann in "Dr. Strangelove".) Lee > spike > > {8^D From velvethum at hotmail.com Sat Apr 28 21:51:32 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:51:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 (Identity over Interruption) References: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Lee: > So the challenge for Heartland amounts to this: just how long does > a patient's EEG need go to zero for the person to have died? The only reason why I mentioned "flat EEG" was because I consider flat EEG a first available and objectively verifiable evidence that the last instance of mind process has expired. In reality, an actual death of an instance occurs much earlier which is far more difficult to explain (as you will learn in a moment :)) and absorb (I imagine) than the idea that the instance is *definitely* dead after it had experienced flat EEG. So flat EEG is just an objectively verifiable "confirmation" of death after the moment of expiration, and not an indication of when death happens. With that, let me attempt a treacherous task of explaining when the death actually occurs. Obviously it is a death of an instance but an instance of what? After all, humans are collections of many physical processes and it is important to identify only that subset of these processes that cause life. It's safe to say we shouldn't focus on processes inside our stomachs, for instance. The crucial processes happen in the brain. But which ones? Well, only those that are responsible for causing the mind. But before we can go any further with this investigation we need new clues that arrive after spending some time on defining what it means exactly "to live." I define "living" as being able to "access reality" which reduces to being able to think and process sensory information. I survive only by maintaining that access and perish when I lose it. With that, I may resume my quest for the subset of processes that cause life. Based on my definition of "living" I should not be interested in all processes that cause the mind but only in those that allow access to reality. Finally, it is the collective instance of those mind subprocesses that allow access to reality that I want to preserve. Death occurs when that instance expires which could be well before medical staff observes flat EEG. The rest is just Leibniz's law applied to the above. Lee: > If > you embrace the position that life and death are like 1 and 0, then > you'll have a problem answering. If the EEG were to go flat for > a trillionth of a second, what then? Another instance of the same type has been created. A 1/1000000s gap and 10^45s gap is still a gap. :) Lee: > Say some neurons fire and some do not---which after all is exactly > the normal functioning of a human brain. Just what implications for > survival does that have? None, as long as you maintain access to reality. Lee: > What if the left hemisphere has its brain > activity totally shut down by drugs or temporary freezing? Is some > fraction of the person now dead, even though he appears to have > been wholly restored? It sounds like some degree of access to reality throughout the procedure was being maintained. The patient survives. Lee: > What if one percent of my cerebral cortex > fails to have any neural activity for a moment? Is the degree of my > survival impacted? Probably not, but I would have to know exactly how the brain/mind works to give you a definite answer. H. From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 21:55:11 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:55:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428173333.040ffc20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <337614.71726.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> :-{ Do you know of *any* theoretical ways to produce energy forever, Keith? I guess this is gonna become a pretty serious issue for us transhumans. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 21:23:00 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:23:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Insults in Posts (was Putting God to Rest) In-Reply-To: <06a201c78877$fa0759e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <363844.63297.qm@web37206.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <048201c7862d$94f6efd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <039701c78645$8a088cb0$2d064e0c@MyComputer> <04aa01c7865c$8162fd90$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <016201c786be$d1b58170$c5074e0c@MyComputer> <050e01c78751$6fc990d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <004201c78757$c39bf170$b00a4e0c@MyComputer> <05ce01c787df$b6c79b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002301c78824$57957000$64074e0c@MyComputer> <46313DF8.9010108@pobox.com> <06a201c78877$fa0759e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: >> That was my point, if insults weren't often quite good at getting the >> job done they would not be so common in the meme pool. Here is one of the most incredible insults I've ever seen, levied in the third person against the philosopher Spinoza by the elders in his place of worship: "With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Espinoza, the whole sacred community assenting, in the presence of the sacred books with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts written therein, pronouncing against him the malediction wherewith Elisha cursed the children, and all the maledictions written in the Book of the Law. Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down, and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky; may the Lord sever him from evil from all the tribes of Israel, weight him with all the maledictions of the firmament contained in the Book of the Law; and may all ye who are obedient to the Lord your God be saved this day. Hereby then all are admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, none hold communication with him by writing; that no one do him any service, no one abide under the same roof with him, no one approach within four cubits of him, and no one read any document dictated by him, or written by hand." Obviously Spinoza wrote some interesting posts. :-) -gts From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Apr 28 21:59:48 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:59:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay References: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <20070428210739.GG9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <080701c789e0$e3a528c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eugen writes, >> Despite the questionable practice of leveling Japanese cities with >> incediaries---which may or may not have saved lives, may or may >> not have shortened the war---the *real* legacy of General Curtis > > This guy here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay ? That's the one. Great article. I'm glad you read it first before "bombs away", er, or in this case, "words away" as is our usual wont. > "Critics have characterized him as a belligerent warmonger > (even nicknaming him "Bombs Away LeMay") whose aggressiveness > threatened to inflame tense Cold War situations (such as the > Cuban Missile Crisis) into open war between the United States > and the Soviet Union. Yes, but his idea to actually bomb Cuba may have been all right--- as you say, we don't know. > Some character indeed. Sounds like a great candidate for > a war criminal trial, or a great model for Colonel Arnold > Hawthorne. Oh, I wasn't commenting so much on his character. What I was commenting on was his achievement during the early stages of the cold war. \> Also, whether you can do a 10000x overkill, or a 8000x overkill, it > doesn't matter that much in practice. Armageddon still results. Again, in the late 50's, we don't know just how many bombs would have gotten through. As you again say, we never ran the experiment. But it's safe to say that there wasn't much real overkill back then. >> Notice that he did not say "we", or "the U.S.", but rather "I will >> knock" said shit out of the Soviets. > > And the Russkies would have turned a large number of U.S. cities into > trinitite. None of us would be able to read this message. Most of us > would be dead, or never been born. Are you following the scenario? He said, "*If* I see them massing for an attack...", which to me indicates that in the late 50s it was possible for secret spy planes and what not to give one a heads-up on impending attack. So in the scenario described, i.e., knowing what "If" means, then even more U.S. cities would have been destroyed and even more lives lost. Lee From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 22:24:09 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:24:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428173333.040ffc20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <915727.81065.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Keith, I forgot to ask before. How would the limitation imposed by the conservation of energy manifest itself in this particular example? Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From amara at amara.com Sat Apr 28 22:06:28 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:06:28 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] John Perry Barlow- the remake Message-ID: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tl7MMHEfvmU Well, now this is inspiring. John Perry Barlow remakes himself from a 56 year old with an 80 year old body, to a 56 year old with a 52 year old body. "One doctor said that with all of the digital information on me, he could probably email me someplace..." Enjoy! Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From randall at randallsquared.com Sat Apr 28 23:01:11 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:01:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <95548DD8-C537-4C6E-8C89-8C3FC28171DA@randallsquared.com> On Apr 28, 2007, at 1:17 PM, John K Clark wrote: > And that's exactly what makes his idea downright comical. According > to him > the whole ball game is something that is imposable to detect > subjectively > but nevertheless (for reasons never explained) I should be very > concerned > about it, subjectively. To say this is silly is a vast understatement. You would find your own death impossible to detect subjectively, no matter *who* else lives on after you. Therefore, should you not be concerned about avoiding it? -- Randall Randall "This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3 because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8." - Scott Aaronson From randall at randallsquared.com Sat Apr 28 23:10:21 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:10:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> On Apr 28, 2007, at 8:58 AM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Randall writes >> [Lee wrote] >> Again, histories and memories are distinct: history >> involves the process by which the physical memories >> were constructed, while memories are merely content. > > Let me see if I understand. The historical process by which > you in 2007 came to be is the traditional one: birth, raised > by parents, school, etc. But if we authoritatively told you > that this was all a lie, and that you had been raised as a part > of a government experiment, that you indeed did not exist > before 2005, that all your memories were implanted and > false, that your consciousness came into true focus only > last week---would you, given that you substantiate these amazing > claims---suppose that you are not the person that you thought you > were? Of course. I thought I was the person who had those pre-2005 experiences, but after substantiating that I wasn't, it seems tautological that I'm someone else! That doesn't mean that I would value myself any less than before; just that it would change my perception of who I am. > (My answer to that is this: Oh, I'm still Lee Corbin all right. > My actual history doesn't too strongly affect what is important > to me, how I want the rest of my life to continue indefinitely, > my values, and my friendships (given that all the people who > I am close to had arisen via similar government experimentation > and that their memories were as false as mine). I actually don't disagree with any of the above. >> Heartland (I think) (and certainly I [Randall]) believes that >> it's the process which is a person, not the content. >> That said, he and I differ on what constitutes "the >> process", since I don't think suspending electrical >> activity in the brain necessarily ends it. > > But the logical ramification of your (not Heartland's) belief > is that if you were replaced by a copy that we made ten > minutes ago, your number would be up, you'd be dead, and this other > Randall who is not you would inherit your > life. Right? Assuming "replaced" is a euphemism for "killed and replaced", yes. -- Randall Randall "Is it asking too much to be given time [...] I'll watch the stars go out." -- Dubstar, Stars From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Apr 28 23:55:52 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:55:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <337614.71726.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428173333.040ffc20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428195341.04110658@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:55 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: > :-{ > >Do you know of *any* theoretical ways to produce >energy forever, Keith? The simple answer is no. >I guess this is gonna become a >pretty serious issue for us transhumans. The more complex answer is that it is one heck of a long time before this becomes a serious concern and that gives us time enough to find an answer *if* there is one to be found. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 00:02:50 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:02:50 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070428185550.02314ea8@satx.rr.com> At 07:10 PM 4/28/2007 -0400, Randall Randall wrote: > > But the logical ramification of your (not Heartland's) belief > > is that if you were replaced by a copy that we made ten > > minutes ago, your number would be up, you'd be dead, and this other > > Randall who is not you would inherit your > > life. Right? > >Assuming "replaced" is a euphemism for "killed and replaced", >yes. Randall's answer must so *obviously* be "yes" that I can't begin to understand how anyone can deny it (as I've been saying here for more than a decade). But given that John Clark and others are so insistent that confirming this obvious point requires one to assert the reality of a soul (whatever that would be), I find myself driven toward considering that possibility. It would be amusing if some day I find that I have to thank John and the others for hounding me against my will--but with dog's grace, no doubt--into that dualistic metaphysical position. Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 29 00:26:48 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:26:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <915727.81065.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428173333.040ffc20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070428202311.040ff178@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:24 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, Jeffrey wrote: >Hi Keith, > >I forgot to ask before. How would the limitation >imposed by the conservation of energy manifest itself >in this particular example? If you are extracting energy from something rotating, it slows down. The Wiki page I pointed you to talks about how to lower an object in orbit by extracting energy or raise it by putting energy into it. It is just an electric motor or generator. That's always the case when you talk about moving wires relative to magnet fields or vice versa. Keith From velvethum at hotmail.com Sun Apr 29 00:33:34 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:33:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen: > Do you think that "instance of your type" would have a good case in court? Not yet. Eugen: > Why don't you sue that gal at Starbucks, because she wilfully disrupted your > "Slawomir" process by a really strong double latte? She did? Heartland: >> If you had a perfect twin right now, would it be OK if you killed him too? I >> imagine you would still argue with the guards, while being dragged to your cell >> or Eugen: > "Yes, your honor, we had to anaesthesize this person, because of an appendectomy. > Please don't be too harsh with our sentence. We just wanted to spare him the > experience of having his belly slit open while fully conscious". Quote: "We just wanted to spare him the experience of having his belly slit open while fully conscious." Subtext: I've already assumed that the guy who opens his eyes after the operation will be one and the same. When you say "spare him" you assume the conclusion you haven't even begun to prove. Heartland: >> even a death chamber, that you should go free since the victim's death was not a >> big deal because the type of your twin's brain structure still remains or >> because Eugen: > Excuse me? I'm not a type believer, and I believe, you've just murdered a > strawman. Guards! Guards! I'm having hard time believing you do not worship at the altar of type (after all, you don't think there's anything wrong with cryonics). But if I wrongly accused you, I apologize and am curious about what exactly you do believe. Eugen: > I wish I could murder that thread. It never goes anywhere. Define "anywhere." I hope you don't define it as, "everyone involved adopts Eugen Leitl's position." I used to think I could convince someone of my beliefs about survival in a matter of few posts. The reality is that it takes many steps to change someone's mind. At each step you need to convince him/her of some point that is necessary to build your argument. It's a slow process that could take years or even decades depending on how emotionally attached a person is to his/her irrational beliefs. The people with other points of view obviously apply the same process to you and it's entirely possible that somewhere along the way it is your belief that will change. So even though a casual observer might think that no progress is being made, this debate moves forward (if we ignore the hecklers). I admit that it moves forward at snail's pace but that shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, people are intimately connected to their ideas of survival and abandoning them involves overcoming emotional obstacles which takes a long time. And besides, it's fun to talk about these things and argue (politely) with people. If you don't want to play, then don't play but stop planning on taking away our ball. That would be totally not cool. Lee: >> I recall that Heartland *specifically* said that it's not the atoms that >> are the problem John K Clark: > True but for ever time I've heard him say atoms are not important I've twice > heard him go on and on about atom's space time trajectories and how > important they are in defining identity; on Monday Wednesday Friday and > Saturday atoms are important, on Tuesday and Thursday they are not, and on > Sunday he rests. Huh? Oh well, nevermind. Look, Lee understood my argument (even though he disagrees with it) based on a small fraction of posts that I've written to you. Is it really my fault you still have no idea what I'm talking about? John K Clark to Lee: >> And that's why he [Slawomir] also thinks anesthesia is the >> equivalent to death. Do you [Lee] really want to defend >> that 18'th century idea? Lee: > I may disagree with someone's opinion, but I will defend to > the death their right to be understood correctly. :-) ..and you are doing it admirably, I might add. :) Lee: >>> And according to him, that's the whole ball game. John: >> And that's exactly what makes his idea downright comical. Lee: > And it's blunt statements like that that have caused the degeneration > of your exchanges with him to wry shouting matches. Or is that all > you're here for? Has there been a doubt at any time that he's here for something else than just that? I also recall a recent, somewhat amusing, "free energy" thread where "bull manure" was being gratuitously applied to poster's comments by a certain someone. :) Lee to John: > Can't you see that you keep begging the question? What if you > are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor > they've paid to imitate John K.Clark. The person acts like you do, > and since (say) you're a recluse, no one notices (he has studied > your emails carefully). What if, to make it convincing, they also > somehow hypnotize that actor to actually believe that he is > the person he's imitating? Then *you* are dead, regardless of > your phony criterion of "subjectively". > > Subjectively he thinks he's you. Does that make him you? OF > course not! I agree with that! Jef: > Slawomir's position, no matter how dressed up in talk of > atoms and space-time trajectories, reduces to nothing more than > arguing against the well-known identity of indiscernibles. If you meant "for" instead of "against," then you're correct. Leibniz ended debate about what it means to be identical back in 17th century (I think) as far as I am concerned. Jef: > The opposition argue in functional terms that to the extent a > difference makes no difference, it is no difference. However, they > continue to state this as if "differences" can be completely > objective. > > Both sides appear to be utterly blind to the necessity of an observer > function, to any discussion of meaning. And I think Leibniz's law applied by a creative observer could be that function. I suspect you mean something else. Jef: > If this debate ever develops from "what is personal identity" to "what > do we mean by person identity" then it might get interesting. You might be referring to others here, of course. I stopped caring about personal identity a long time ago. These days I'm only interested in what it means to survive which is what I was going after in the first place. H. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 01:26:16 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:26:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 References: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <082901c789fd$725283d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes >> So the challenge for Heartland amounts to this: just how long does >> a patient's EEG need go to zero for the person to have died? > > The only reason why I mentioned "flat EEG" was because I consider flat EEG a first > available and objectively verifiable evidence that the last instance of mind > process has expired. In reality, an actual death of an instance occurs much earlier > which is far more difficult to explain.. > > Obviously it is a death of an instance but an instance of what? After all, humans > are collections of many physical processes and it is important to identify only > that subset of these processes that cause life... > > But before we can go any further with this investigation we need new clues that > arrive after spending some time on defining what it means exactly "to live." I > define "living" as being able to "access reality" which reduces to being able to > think and process sensory information. I survive only by maintaining that access > and perish when I lose it. First objection: are you dead in a sensory deprivation chamber? How about for prolonged periods of time? Is being in a coma the same as having died? Is being asleep tantamount to having perished? >> What if the left hemisphere has its brain activity totally shut down by drugs >> or temporary freezing? Is some fraction of the person now dead, even though >> he appears to have been wholly restored? > > It sounds like some degree of access to reality throughout the procedure was being > maintained. The patient survives. I'm glad that you are starting to at least use the terminology "to some degree". Yet by "The patient survives" you're still clinging to it being an all or nothing proposition. I prophesy that will be trouble for you. What if 99% of your brain is temporarily frozen? What about 30% or 50%. Don't plead too much ignorance as to the specifics of brain function: do you really imagine that reality can be forced into "yes, he survived with 100% fidelty" or "no, he did not survive at all"? Lee From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 01:45:07 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:45:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <913A07F7-146D-4FDB-944D-41812FA9F4F1@randallsquared.com> On Apr 28, 2007, at 8:33 PM, Heartland wrote: > Eugen: >> Excuse me? I'm not a type believer, and I believe, you've just >> murdered a >> strawman. Guards! Guards! > > I'm having hard time believing you do not worship at the altar of > type (after all, > you don't think there's anything wrong with cryonics). But if I > wrongly accused > you, I apologize and am curious about what exactly you do believe. Let me point out that it's perfectly possible to expect that a pause in an otherwise continuous process doesn't end the process, and cryonics, while risky, isn't necessarily certain death. -- Randall Randall "Everything's stolen these days. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. " - Jamie McCarthy From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 01:56:09 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:56:09 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] a sign from god! Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070428204949.0229b1f8@satx.rr.com> ha ha! http://www.talkingsquid.net/archives/46 From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 02:01:45 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:01:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes > Lee, it has been said on this list recently that WW II was a continuation > of WW I. Perhaps. Wars among primitive peoples run on for generations. > However, think the important time period for WW II was when Hitler and the > Nazi party took power and that was when things looked bleak in Germany. In 1933 World War II was not pre-ordained. After all, we believe that if Hitler had known that England and France would declare war against him (though not, peculiarly, against the U.S.S.R.), then in 1939 he would not have invaded Poland. The Western powers, as so often they do, (as in right now, for example) continue to signal weakness towards despots, almost as if seemingly they were doing everything in their power to actually provoke wars. In fact, a number of conspiracy theorists really do accuse Britain of deliberately having brought about WWI and WWII by pretending vacillation and weakness, but I won't get into a discussion of these delusional beliefs. So if Hitler had known that he'd truly made his last territorial grab for power that he could get away with, then presumably there'd have been no war for quite some time. (At least until some stupid thing in the Balkans or some other unforeseeable "one damn thing after another" occurred.) > attack. Also perceptions of being under attack are more important than > reality in activating behavior switches. "All you have to do is tell them > they are being attacked." [17] In the months leading up to the attack on > Iraq, the message put out by the US administration was "be afraid, be very > afraid, we are about to be attacked with Saddam's weapons of mass > destruction!" " > > The reference [17] was to a statement by Hermann > Goering. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm [below] Thanks, Keith, for then going ahead and cutting and pasting. Who knows, you've not only made life more efficient for perhaps dozens and dozens of people reading your post, but make your post more readable itself; in addition to those above, people whose interest is just sufficient for skimming can also get the drift vastly better. > The quote [below] was part of a conversation Gilbert held with a dejected > Hermann Goering in his cell ... > Later in the conversation, Gilbert recorded Goering's observations that the > common people can always be manipulated into supporting and fighting wars > by their political leaders: First, some people in some nations are more easily manipulated than others. The UK could not and would not have dared invade the Falklands without huge popular support that the leadership did *not* instigate. > We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to > his [Goering's] attitude, I did not think that the common people are very > thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction... [He replied] > "Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in > England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. > But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy > and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a > democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist > dictatorship." > > "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people > have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in > the United States only Congress can declare wars." > > "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can > always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have > to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for > lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same > way in any country." Goering understood Germany of the first half of the 20th century, but he did not truly understand the nature of freer countries where dissent had a long tradition. Do you think that Bush today could simply fabricate a "Gulf of Tonkin incident" the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war out of Congress against Iran? Of course not. Goering just didn't understand that the phenomenon in less dictatorial coutries which also have a free press and freedom of speech. >>How is it that going into war mode seems to afflict a small ruling class >>or even one king, but not a whole people? All the examples that usually >>come to mind---the ones above like Hitler---seem to be exceptional. >>In the EEA, surely it was an entire group. Different situations. > > It is and it isn't. In the EEA, the entire tribe knew when game was > getting hard to find, and they darn sure knew when they were being > attacked. Now we get information indirectly, ever more remotely. It > started with word of mouth, then written word, newspapers, radio, TV and > this offered the ability to inject false information. > > It need not even be "leaders" who take advantage as Goering discussed. The > Spanish-American war was largely caused by William Randolph Hearst > manipulation of information > flow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst You're right there! It *can* happen. But Goering was wrong: it need *not* always be possible for the leaders to manipulate a nation. There were *many* people like me who thought that going after *all* of America's enemies in 2001 was a good idea. That's why I wanted Iraq invaded; so long as terrorists could find a haven in countries openly celebrating 9/11, I was in favor of invading them---at least if it was practicable. > But as any US citizen who watched the WTC attack on TV knows, such > information does reach the emotional mechanism involved in flipping our > thinking into "war mode." Without this ability to emotionally react to such threats no nation since 1789 (and no group in the EEA) stood much chance of surviving. It's a very *good* thing in my opinion that the West still has some collective outrage remaining. >>Let's make sure---for my benefit---that we don't overuse one example. >>And what is the focus here, anyway? Is it modern times, e.g. post 1700, >>or is it civilization (1500 B.C. - 1700 A.D.), or is it the EEA (1.8 M - >>100K B.C.)? I'm doubtful that the same explanations work in all cases. > > The EEA. Which means hunter gatherers up to agriculture. The same > mechanisms exist in modern humans, 0.5% of our evolutionary history isn't > enough to much affect the prevalence of such psychological traits. But our examples riddle modern history too. And hasn't it been adequately shown by many besides me that factors besides the EEA generated ones also cause war? Perhaps, though, we need to again look at proximal vs. distant causes, as you were saying much earlier. I will agree that if surgery were performed on people that removed their capability of being offended, that removed their identification with their own cultures and nations, that made them act only in their own very singular and individually selfish interest, then yes, humans would cease being warlike. Actually, that is true only for a short while. Very soon a mutation would arise that permitted a small gang to act collectively, and the unstable dove equilibrium would vanish, as all the game theory simulations have shown. Lee P.S. I'll get around to Professor Gat's paper presently, and start a new thread if it seems appropriate. I will also respond to some very interesting but snipped parts of your post that aren't actually germane to this thread. From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 02:19:28 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:19:28 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8131F430-7FB9-4CDD-A277-9006B6624AE3@randallsquared.com> On Apr 28, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: >> >> "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the >> people can >> always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All >> you have >> to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the >> pacifists for >> lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works >> the same >> way in any country." > > Goering understood Germany of the first half of the 20th century, > but he > did not truly understand the nature of freer countries where > dissent had > a long tradition. Do you think that Bush today could simply > fabricate a > "Gulf of Tonkin incident" the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war > out of Congress against Iran? Of course not. Of course, he could. It would be a lot harder now than the mere suggestion of WMDs was, but he could certainly do it and have a good chance of working, for a while. Eventually it would all come out, but for a while, it might well work. -- Randall Randall "If you are trying to produce a commercial product in a timely and cost efficient way, it is not good to have somebody's PhD research on your critical path." -- Chip Morningstar From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 02:29:11 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:29:11 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070428212734.02314148@satx.rr.com> At 07:01 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: >Do you think that Bush today could simply fabricate a >"Gulf of Tonkin incident" the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war >out of Congress against Iran? Of course not. ???!!! Unlike his WoMD fabrication, and his Iraq+AlQ => 9/11? Nobody would have fallen for that? Damien Broderick From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 02:29:26 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:29:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 In-Reply-To: <082901c789fd$725283d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <082901c789fd$725283d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <62c14240704281929i44a4344tdb3c059c5522cadd@mail.gmail.com> On 4/28/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > What if 99% of your brain is temporarily frozen? What about 30% or 50%. > Don't plead too much ignorance as to the specifics of brain function: do you > really imagine that reality can be forced into "yes, he survived with 100% > fidelty" or "no, he did not survive at all"? Does the photon go through the right slit or the left? Is there some kind of interference pattern equivalent that indicates life? From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 02:43:35 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:43:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Randall writes >> Let me see if I understand. The historical process by which >> you in 2007 came to be is the traditional one: birth, raised >> by parents, school, etc. But if we authoritatively told you >> that this was all a lie, and that you had been raised as a part >> of a government experiment, that you indeed did not exist >> before 2005, that all your memories were implanted and >> false, that your consciousness came into true focus only >> last week---would you suppose that you are not the person >> that you thought you were? > > Of course. I thought I was the person who had those > pre-2005 experiences, but after substantiating that I > wasn't, it seems tautological that I'm someone else! > That doesn't mean that I would value myself any less > than before; just that it would change my perception > of who I am. Sounds like we're using different words, but agree here: >> (My own answer to that is this: Oh, I'm still Lee Corbin all right. >> My actual history doesn't too strongly affect what is important >> to me, how I want the rest of my life to continue indefinitely, >> my values, and my friendships (given that all the people who >> I am close to had arisen via similar government experimentation >> and that their memories were as false as mine). > > I actually don't disagree with any of the above. So you just decree---as does Heartland---that if we revealed to you that ever since you were age 6, a copy has been made of you every night as you were fast asleep, and that the originals were then killed, you would not be the same person from day to day, and you dread tonight? Right? That you were lucky to get just one day of life? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 02:58:22 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:58:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070428185550.02314ea8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <083d01c78a0a$c1ad88f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes >> > But the logical ramification of your belief is that if >> > iyou were replaced by a copy that we made ten >> > minutes ago, your number would be up, you'd be >> > dead, and this other Randall who is not you would >> > inherit your life. Right? >> >> Assuming "replaced" is a euphemism for "killed and replaced", >> yes. > > Randall's answer must so *obviously* be "yes" that I can't begin to > understand how anyone can deny it (as I've been saying here for more > than a decade). In my case, it was driven by physical imagery supplemented by a cold, hard belief in the completeness of physics. It happened to me at age 18. I had become an utter mechanist who believed that *all* events and all processes in the universe obeyed some set of physical laws, laws quite quite remote from mere human life. From the galaxies to the quarks (which, at the time, were not yet named), I believed that the possibility of a complete physics description totally exhausted the reality of whatever processes were taking place. Then I happened one day to imagine a machine that made a perfect copy, or a teleporter that didn't destroy the original. There seemed to be a peculiar, insoluable dilemma: which one would I be, the copy or the original? For according to physics, there *ARE* no differences save location. And location itself seemed irrelevant: I had no trouble (nor does anyone) instantly teleporting by spacewarp and so instantaneously being there instead of here, even if I were to be warp-teleported a million times a second, with only a blur of locations evident to my senses. Within a few days (I have diary entries of all this) I decided that I would "be both and be neither". That is, in some sense I had to be both my duplicate and the original, and in some sense I was really neither. (That latter, of course, is just a foreshadowing of those who believe that we are not the same person from second to second.) Soon, I also realized that the experience of a few moments is expendable: I'd be the same person even if I realized that I had just taken midazolam or erased some memory some other way. So, that's how it happened. I eventually saw that if I believed in the potential of total physics comprehension of reality (and I do not mean comprehension in the sense of understanding, but rather of "accounting for") then the symmetry of the physics demanded that I adjust my intuitions, and recognize that it made no sense to say that I was one of them and not the other. Or rather, that I was each of them at least to the same degree that I will be the same person tomorrow that I am today. Just in case you really *did* want to pursue an understanding Lee > I can't begin to understand how anyone can deny it (as I've been > saying here for more than a decade). From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Sun Apr 29 03:43:20 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:43:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest Message-ID: <632002.99831.qm@web37205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >But on this list, denouncing religion is just boring, >because nearly all of us have long ago understood >that the superstitious and irrational beliefs of >religious traditions have no place in a transhumanist >world view. If Transhumanist is a world view then I have to assume that within that world view are religious people (unless everybody is an atheist). I respect that and don't see anything wrong with that. It doesn't really matter if there are religious people that believe it or atheists. Transhumanism is about one thing and Religion is about another. I personaly don't care as long as everybody believes in rationality and respect towards the list and what that list represents. (Which I was led to believe was about future technology, Transhumanism, cryonics, etc.) >That is true, and we also have to deal with sex, drug >addiction, video games, sadomasochism, and all sorts >of other social and psychological phenomena. But that >doesn't mean we need to focus our discussion on all >these various social and psychological phenomena. I don't see how from my post you got the impression I was going to go off in detail to what my beliefs are. I was simply frustrated with the lack of respect. I apologize again, I clearly do not understand what the fuss is about. >>This list is supposed to be about prolonging life, >>the use of technology, transhumanism etc. If you >>believe God doesn't exist and have the right to say >>it then I would assume that a religious person may >>have those same rights and discuss the existence of >>God. >You have the right to say that 2+2=5 also, but if you >keep repeating it to me I will start deleting all your >emails without reading them ;-) I don't know where in my posts that I have made a blatant false equation. I don't know how to compare an equation to a belief? It's comparing "I believe that God doesn't exist because there is no known proof" compared to "I believe in something that I don't need proof for." My point was about respect. >Well, speaking for myself, I really do not wish to >discuss religion; Then we agree, I don't recall in any of my posts my wish to discuss religion. >and, I also don't care to discuss any philosophical >issues with any person who is not either atheist or >agnostic (and even "agnostic" is >iffy ... but this >word encompasses a lot of different attitudes). That's fine. I find it very hard to discuss philosophical issues with any person who doesn't have any clue or knowledge of religion. To each it's own. >What I find scary is that so many folks in the modern >world still actually believe in some kind of "god" up >there in heaven deciding things about the world. >Egads!! If people believe absurd things like that, >how the heck can we expect them to think rationally >about the Singularity??? Scary as it may be, there are millions of people doing just that whether I find it rational or not. How does one have anything to do with the other? Are you implying that people can't believe about the Singularity if they believe in "God"? >I do think there is value in various spiritual >experiences and altered states of consciousness. But >connecting these experiences with ideas about "god", >gods, demons and the like is really about as silly as >believing the Tooth Fairy takes your tooth from under >your pillow and replaces it with a dollar in the >middle of the night... That's confusing for me. If you value various spiritual experiences and altered states of consciouness how can you not understand that people may label that with the idea of "God"? If someone understands spiritual experience and altered states of consciouness they wouldn't need stories like the "Tooth Fairy". >You do after all have the right to believe in Santa, >and even to discuss your belief ... but the topic >will start to bore a lot of us on this list pretty >quickly... I would like you to tell me my beliefs as I don't recall mentioning them. I don't mean to be so straight forward but I feel like i'm going around in circles. I still haven't got a clue how this became an issue about whether I believe in God or Religion and whether it is right or wrong. Anna Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 04:12:50 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:12:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Human Reproductive Manifest Destiny In-Reply-To: <07e901c789de$12f0e270$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704290412.l3T4CxVR020973@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > From: Lee Corbin [mailto:lcorbin at rawbw.com] > Subject: Human Reproductive Manifest Destiny > > Spike writes ... > > ... I must conclude that it is murderously immoral to not > > copulate at every opportunity. > > Kewallll. > > "Cool???" Mrs. Jones may have some serious forebodings about what > this may lead to in your particular case. Watcha you mouth... In my case, I meant every opportunity *with Mrs. Jones* of course. {8^] I could not imagine trying to explain my pro-life theory to some young nubile. I would likely land in prison. {8^D ... > > I always heard that the average women has several hundred eggs, > corresponding---in my great ignorance---I suppose to the number > of months she lives before a certain degeneracy due to age sets in. > Anyone know some numbers?... Lee A young woman can have over a million follicles, or immature eggs. Usually only one per month becomes an ovum, but with the application of certain follicle stimulating hormones, she may drop a bunch of them in one month. During one of our tortuous and unsuccessful fertility treatments, the medics retrieved thirty two follicles. Of those, twelve were successfully fertilized in vitro, seven managed to survive the freezing and thawing process and divide to the eight cells stage and five appeared healthy enough to be subsequently implanted in two separate implantations that time. But none managed to survive, that time nor the other attempts, no baby. I would rather forget those emotionally and financially challenging episodes. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 04:23:54 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:23:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] a sign from god! In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070428204949.0229b1f8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704290434.l3T4YG3O007484@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 6:56 PM > To: 'ExI chat list' > Subject: [extropy-chat] a sign from god! > > ha ha! > > http://www.talkingsquid.net/archives/46 No no, Damien, it was a big misunderstanding. That wasn't the virgin Mary, it was her slutty sister Martha. They did look alike, or rather that part of them looked alike. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 04:51:14 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:51:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] sri lanka attacked by rebels In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Damien, holy crap! http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/04/28/srilanka.tamil/index.html Is Sri Lanka in civil war now? Is AC Clarke safe? Would he call or post you or someone here if he is in danger? If necessary, we could put out the word, perhaps raise some money like we did during Keith's time of trouble, attempt a rescue or something. Has anyone heard any more about this, or is CNN making it sound worse than it really is, or perhaps the rebels only want to wreck oil infrastructure, business as usual? Oy vey, damn. Damien, what do we do now, coach? spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 05:20:02 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:20:02 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] sri lanka attacked by rebels In-Reply-To: <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429001653.0229d830@satx.rr.com> At 09:51 PM 4/28/2007 -0700, Spike wrote: >Is Sri Lanka in civil war now? Well, arguably it has been for decades. >Is AC Clarke safe? Would he call or post >you or someone here if he is in danger? If necessary, we could put out the >word, perhaps raise some money like we did during Keith's time of trouble, >attempt a rescue or something. He's a multi-millionaire with people close to him, living in a sort of compound. I think he'll be looked after. But bear in mind that he's very old, with post-polio syndrome, memory problems, and failing, or so I understand. Damien Broderick From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 05:37:09 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 01:37:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Apr 28, 2007, at 10:43 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Randall writes >>> (My own answer to that is this: Oh, I'm still Lee Corbin all right. >>> My actual history doesn't too strongly affect what is important >>> to me, how I want the rest of my life to continue indefinitely, >>> my values, and my friendships (given that all the people who >>> I am close to had arisen via similar government experimentation >>> and that their memories were as false as mine). >> I actually don't disagree with any of the above. > > So you just decree---as does Heartland---that if we revealed to > you that ever since you were age 6, a copy has been made of > you every night as you were fast asleep, and that the originals > were then killed, you would not be the same person from day > to day, and you dread tonight? Right? That you were lucky > to get just one day of life? Yup. -- Randall Randall "[W]e ARE the market, this IS the market working, there's nothing external to be deferred to." -- Ian Bicking, on "let the market decide" From fauxever at sprynet.com Sun Apr 29 07:20:09 2007 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:20:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <632002.99831.qm@web37205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <01f101c78a2e$d2cac020$6501a8c0@brainiac> From: "Anna Taylor" To: Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 8:43 PM > If Transhumanist is a world view then I have to assume that within that > world view are religious people (unless everybody is an atheist). I > respect that and don't see anything wrong with that. 600 years ago you would have been right to assume there were many people who believed the world was flat, too. What's wrong with that is that it wasn't - and isn't - true. The flat earth world view (no pun intended) has largely disappeared, so maybe there's hope (and help) for the religious mindset, too. Olga From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 08:38:34 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:38:34 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/28/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > > I see "group minds" emerging due to the adaptive benefits of > > > increasing degrees of freedom enabled by a more complexly effective > > > organizational structure operating within an increasingly complex > > > environment. The subjective experience of the composite would be a > > > high level expression of salient features of its internal state over > > > time, fundamentally unavailable to its members. The subjective > > > experience of each member, while subjectively "complete", would > > > reflect a necessarily lower-level description of interactions with the > > > greater "reality." > > > > I don't see how you could distinguish the experiences of each member > from > > the experiences of the composite, or each other, if they were truly > joined. > > It would be like separating the part of you that likes chocolate from > the > > part that doesn't want to put on weight. I don't envision the composite > as > > someone with multiple personality disorder (which probably doesn't > exist, > > BTW) but as a completely integrated single person. > > I don't think multiple personality order exists as popularly conceived > as essentially discrete personalities inhabiting one physical body. > > I do think multiple personality order makes sense in the sense of > multiple systems of behavior (with associated differences in accessing > subjective "resources") emerging at various times to dominate the > observed behavior of the larger system, like multiple attractors > within a chaotic system. OK, but the important difference between this and MPD or separate individuals is that neither the systems of behaviour dominant at different times nor the larger system consider the parts as "other", mainly because thoughts and feelings are shared. It seems that our difference comes down to our difference in > understanding the nature of subjective experience. You seem to > believe that subjective experience is fundamental or primary in some > important way (it is, but to apply it to "objective" descriptions of > the world entails a category error), while I see "subjective > experience" very simply as a description of the perceived internal > state of any system, as perceived by that system. I'm not sure how to respond to this, because I don't see the disagreement. That there is some subjective experience associated with certain physical processes is surely undeniable. For all I know, there may also be a some tiny subjective experience when a thermostat responds to a temperature change, or even when the thermostat just sits there. The "perceived internal state of any system as perceived by the system" is as good a description of this as any, and captures the fact that there is no separate consciousness juice at work here. As to whether the subjective experience is part of an objective description of the world, that might just boil down to be a matter of linguistic taste. Did I just write that sentence because I wanted to, or did I *really* write that sentence because the matter in my brain, a slave to the laws of physics, made me do so? The recursive > nature of this model tends to throw people off. [Any progress yet on > IAASL?] I'm only about a third of the way through. The first few chapters do deal with the notions of reductionist versus higher order explanation, and of a hierarchy of conscious experience depending on the system's complexity. It all makes perfect sense so far. > > It's not completely clear here, but it appears that you're claiming > > > that each of the parts would experience what the whole experiences. > > > >From a systems theoretical point of view, that claim is clearly > > > unsupportable. It seems to be another example of your assumption of > > > subjective experience as primary. > > > > Would you say that the two hemispheres of the brain have separate > > experiences, despite the thick cable connecting them? > > No doubt you're aware of very famous split-brain experiments showing > that if the corpus callosum is cut, then the existence of separate > experiences is clearly shown. With the corpus callosum intact and > feedback loops in effect, then the "subjective reality" of various > functional modules of the brain is driven in the direction of a > coherent whole, but (if one could interrogate individual brain modules > individually), one would observe that each module necessarily reports > its own internal state ("subjective experience") in terms relevant to > its own functioning. But the crucial point is that all the functional subsystems in the brain are normally in communication, creating an integrated whole, or the illusion of an integrated whole if you prefer that qualifier. If I am linked to another person so that I experience his thoughts, feelings, memories and he mine, then the he/me distinction will vanish even though in reality there are still two distinct brains and bodies. The original "me" will not have a preference that the other "me" experiences pain because the original "me" will experience that pain as well. The original "me" will not be able to even consider himself as separate as mental exercise, because the other "me" will inevitably have the same thought. It would be like trying to think of your left hand as alien even though you are neurologically intact. It might be informative to consider the distinction between > "subjective reality" and "subjective experience" above. ? > > > The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble > > the > > > > collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. > > > > > > It seems clear to me that the behavior of the collective would display > > > > characteristics *not* present in any of its parts. This is > > > fundamental complexity theory. > > > > Yes, I suppose that's true and the fact that the parts are in > communication > > would alter the behaviour of the collective. However, even the > disconnected > > parts would display emergent behaviour in their interactions. > > Stathis, I repeatedly detect either unfamiliarity or discomfort with > systems thinking in your world view. What could it possibly mean to > say that "...disconnected parts would display emergent behavior..."? > Emergent behavior is meaningless in regard to parts, it can refer only > to systems of parts. I like to think of reductionism as the "true" theory explaining the world. A hydrogen atom behaves differently from a proton and electron, but really, it is *no more* than a proton and electron; it's just that we're not smart enough for the behaviour of a hydrogen atom to be immediately and intuitively obvious when we contemplate its components, so we call it emergent behaviour. To give another example, we normally don't consider that two marbles sitting next to each other are any more than, well, two marbles sitting next to each other; and yet it is possible to assert that they actually form a system, namely a pair of marbles, which is somehow different to, or greater than, either marble individually. It would be crazy to go around thinking of every object and interaction in the world in terms of subatomic particles, but that's what it actually is. With regard to my point, I originally asserted that multiple individuals who are joined might end up making similar decisions to the same collection of separate individuals voting or trying to arrive at a consensus. This is probably an unwarranted assumption, as being joined is a new factor which might change the net behaviour. In other words, there are more subatomic particles in the joined than in the individualist collective, namely those particles forming connections between individuals, so the two collections would be expected to behave differently. When I said that disconnected parts would also display emergent behaviour, I meant that the disconnected parts when interacting would display emergent behaviour as compared to disconnected parts on their own. This is by analogy with the hydrogen atom: the proton and electron together will display emergent behaviour in that it was not evident when they were widely separated. However, with both people and subatomic particles, the foundations for the emergent behaviour were already clearly present in the parts, it's just that we weren't knowledgeable and bright enough to immediately see it. > > > The > > > > equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out > some > > > > undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the > > advantage > > > > that no-one actually gets hurt. > > > > > > This sounds nice, but it's not clear to me what model it describes. > > > > In a society with multiple individuals, the Cristians might decide to > > persecute the Muslims. But if a single individual is struggling with the > > idea of whether to follow Christianity or Islam, he is hardly in a > position > > to persecute one or other aspect of himself. The internal conflict may > lead > > to distress, but that isn't the same thing. > > As I see it, clearly one of those conflicting systems of thought is > going to lose representation, corresponding to "dying" within the mind > of the person hosting the struggle. > > Maybe here again we see the same fundamental difference in our views. > In your view (I'm guessing) the difference is that no one died, no > unique personal consciousness was extinguished. Yes; the part that "loses" the battle lives on in the consciousness of the whole, and might even reassert itself at some future point. It's a matter of who gets hurt or upset, and how complete and irreversible the process is. In my view, a person > exists to the extent that they have an observable effect (no matter > how indirect); there is no additional ontological entity representing > the unique core of their being, or subjective experience, or whatever > it is called by various peoples for the thousands of years since > people became aware of their awareness. I would agree that a person cannot exist without having an observable effect, and that this observable effect is necessary and sufficient for the existence of that person. However, the observable effect is only important to the person themselves insofar as it does give rise to this feeling of personhood or consciousness. That is, if the same effect could be reproduced using computer hardware, or by God in heaven, or whatever, that would be fine with me. You will of course recognize the implication of an unfounded belief in > a soul in the above, and most likely reject it out of hand since you > are a modern man, well-read and trained in science and most certainly > do not believe in a soul. Obviously Jef doesn't really know who he's > dealing with (thus this paragraph.) > > But my point is that despite any amount of evidence or debate, even > with belief in the heuristic power of Occam's Razor, the subjective > experience of subjective experience tends to hold sway. As I > mentioned above, it has the advantage of being (subjectively) > complete. Computationalism contains the idea of multiple realizability, which means that the mind can survive destruction of the substrate on which it is being run. This has striking similarities with the concept of an immaterial soul and the possibility of resurrection after the death of the body. The modern advance over dualism is that the need for a separate soul-substance is obviated. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 09:25:21 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:25:21 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] consequentialism/deontologism discussion In-Reply-To: References: <181013.36414.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/28/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > Each side will in the end be reduced to yelling at the other, "My values > are > > better than your values!". This is the case for any argument where the > > premises cannot be agreed upon. > > I think the key point here is that you and I agree that values are > subjective, and there is absolutely no basis for proving to an > individual that their values are "wrong". But -- we share a great > deal of that tree, diverging only with the relatively outermost > branches. To the extent that we identify with more of our branch of > that tree, we will find increasing agreement on principles that > promote our shared values (that work) over increasing scope. > > If that is still too abstract, consider the Romulans and the Klingons. > They share a common humanoid heritage but have diverged into quite > separate cultures. The Klingons have taken the way of the warrior to > an extreme, while the Romulans have grown in the direction of stealth > and deception. Caricatures, sure, but they illustrate the point, > which is that they hold deeper values in common. They must care for > their children, they value the pursuit of happiness (however they > define happiness), they value the right to defend themselves, they > value cooperation (to the extend that it promotes shared values), ... > and of course I could go on and on. > > We could even apply this thinking to robotic machine intelligence > vis-?-vis humans. The intersecting branches would be a little further > down, closer to the roots, but to the extent that these hypothetical > robots had to interact within our physical world, within somewhat > similar constraints, then there would be some basis for empathy and > cooperation, effectively moral agreement. I guess my main focus in the previous post was a meta-ethical position. I don't know why, but I am very taken with the idea that there is no objective ethics, out there in the world which can be demonstrated to be true in the way empirical or logical facts can be demonstrated to be true. Thus, it may be the case that all evolved or even artificial life have some core values in common, but it need not necessarily be the case. If we came across Berserker machines intent on wiping out all life they encountered we could disagree with them and fight them (after trying to find some common value that might win them over to our side, of course), but we would not necessarily be able to show them that they had made an empirical or logical error, as we would if they believed that the Moon was made of cheese or that 16 was a prime number. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 09:47:49 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:47:49 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > P.S. I'll get around to Professor Gat's paper presently, and start a new > thread if it seems appropriate. I will also respond to some very interesting > but snipped parts of your post that aren't actually germane to this thread. You don't get off that easy! ;) The paper was published in 2000. Gat has since updated his research by publishing 'War in Human Civilization'. Hardcover: 848 pages Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 23, 2006) Book Description Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization? And what of war today - is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? In this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the 'riddle of war' throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and evolutionary psychology to sociology and political science. There are three enthusiastic customer reviews. A less enthusiastic review is here: This wikipedia article discusses the many causes of war (incl. references to Azar Gat) BillK From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 10:12:08 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:12:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland opines on his prospects of getting folks to see the truth, and quotes first > Eugen: >> I wish I could murder that thread. It never goes anywhere. > > Define "anywhere." I hope you don't define it as, "everyone > involved adopts Eugen Leitl's position." I dunno; but he's right in the sense that you almost *never* see anyone change positions in real time. That is, you never see anyone say, "Oh, thank you! Now I see the light! How could I have been so mistaken? Thanks for straightening me out!" That *never* happens in deep political or philosophical discussions because (a) emotions are involved (b) positions have been years or decades in the making, and contrary information has during all that time filtered out, and (c) even when our position is irrevocably weakened, we rationalize in order to preserve the integrity of our beliefs (i.e. wholeness of them), and in order to avoid losing face. > I used to think I could convince someone of my beliefs about > survival in a matter of few posts. Ha! Evidently you never engaged in political arguments with the same people over years. I had the good fortune while I was a Christian conservative of talking at length nearly every school day with a Deist liberal from age 12 to age 17. The symmetry of our positions was quickly obvious to us, and neither considered the other simply wrong. We each realized that we were---although Thomas Sowell's wonderful phrase had not yet been coined--- struggling with a deep conflict of visions. Anyway, I learned at a very tender age that neither "a few posts" nor many hours' discussion is going to change anyone's mind. But that is *not* the same thing as saying that minds never change. See below! > The reality is that it takes many steps to change someone's mind. > At each step you need to convince him/her of some point that is > necessary to build your argument. It's a slow process that could > take years or even decades depending on how emotionally > attached a person is to his/her irrational beliefs... Tch, tch, tch. You don't get it. The other beliefs are *not* irrational. I wish that you and John Clark could see this. It's possible that they're not even incorrect. It's possible that it's a "conflict of visions" sort of phenomenon. But change of mind *does* happen, and here is how. I hope in the present discussion, for example, that as soon as it ends and you have a chance to think about other things for a few years, the awkwardnesses of some of the things that you have had to assert to us will unconsciously begin to tell on your beliefs. (Naturally, you are entitled to hope that the same thing happens to us.) It takes at least months, more often, as you say years, and it can take decades. But it does *not* mean that the discussions are futile. They not only accomplish what I just described, but allow each of us to analyse and consistentize (if I may coin a term) our positions, and within our own schemes seek a more rational stable position. > So even though a casual observer might think that no progress is > being made, this debate moves forward (if we ignore the hecklers). Right. > I admit that it moves forward at snail's pace but that shouldn't surprise > anyone. After all, people are intimately connected to their ideas of > survival and abandoning them involves overcoming emotional obstacles > which takes a long time. Quite right. > And besides, it's fun to talk about these things and argue (politely) > with people. Evidently :-) > If you don't want to play, then don't play but stop planning on taking > away our ball. That would be totally not cool. Well said. P.S. > Lee: > >> I may disagree with someone's opinion, but I will defend to >> the death their right to be understood correctly. :-) > > ..and you are doing it admirably, I might add. :) Thank you! From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 10:19:47 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:19:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Mr. Bush's Magical Effectiveness References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8131F430-7FB9-4CDD-A277-9006B6624AE3@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <085601c78a48$653e5250$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Randall writes > On Apr 28, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > >> Goering understood Germany of the first half of >> the 20th century, but he did not truly understand >> the nature of freer countries where dissent had >> a long tradition. Do you think that Bush today >> could simply fabricate a "Gulf of Tonkin incident" >> the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war >> out of Congress against Iran? Of course not. > > Of course, he could. And now with a Democratic Congress???? What are you smoking. He can't even keep the leader of the House of Representatives from executing her own foreign policy. Somehow I just think that if Bush said that a terrrrrrible event happened in the Persian Gulf and we needed to go to war with Iran right now, he'd be asked for a lot of evidence. Actually, the understatement of my last sentence is staggering. > It would be a lot harder now than the mere > suggestion of WMDs was, but he could certainly > do it and have a good chance of working, for a while. No way. Besides, as I said earlier, for a lot of us the WMD wasn't really the issue. On the Extropians list at the time I listed *five* reasons that I thought invading Iraq was a good idea. The WMD was probably about reason #4. (The idea being that while there was no immanent threat, just as Bush said, it seemed clear that Hussein's heart was set on getting some nukes sooner or later, and he seemed just crazy enough to use them on us, or have some unaccountable stooges do it for him. But that's not the main point. You don't think--- especially since there has been no serious terrorist attack against the U.S. in the last five years that a (now Democratic controlled!) Congress would give him carte blanche all over again?? Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 10:30:43 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:30:43 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest References: <632002.99831.qm@web37205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <086201c78a49$cca1ccf0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Anna writes > I don't see how from my post you got the impression I > was going to go off in detail to what my beliefs are. > I was simply frustrated with the lack of respect. I > apologize again, I clearly do not understand what the > fuss is about. You were right to kick up a fuss that your views were not being respectfully handled. I immediately changed the tone of my own denunciations when I realized that there was a crackpot among us. It's very important to maintain at all times a civil tone. Disagreements are fine, and even some in-joke disparagement is fine (calling certain beliefs "asinine" and so on)---and irony and sarcasm are fine too, so long as no one is drowned out (which cannot happen on a list). But it is not fine to call people or their beliefs "crackpot" or "stupid", etc. And by now :-) of course you realize that I was just joking above. What I would seriously have written was "I immediately changed the tone of my own denunciations when I realized that there were religious believers on the list", and of course I would never have used such a term as "crackpot" in any serious way in mixed company. > Then we agree, I don't recall in any of my posts my > wish to discuss religion. Yes, you just were tired of the offhand putdowns by us atheists of religious beliefs, and I don't blame you one bit. Lee From emlynoregan at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 10:36:18 2007 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:06:18 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <710b78fc0704290336n5396e107k45f60c471cba1561@mail.gmail.com> > That *never* happens in deep political or philosophical discussions > because (a) emotions are involved (b) positions have been years or > decades in the making, and contrary information has during all that > time filtered out, and (c) even when our position is irrevocably > weakened, we rationalize in order to preserve the integrity of our > beliefs (i.e. wholeness of them), and in order to avoid losing face. I believe this occurs when there's no useful evidence for any of the positions in the subject in question. It's a good indicator that the entire subject area is essentially content free, and could be safely ignored until someone discovers something new. Emlyn From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 10:41:45 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:41:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Randall writes >> So you just decree---as does Heartland---that if we revealed to >> you that ever since you were age 6, a copy has been made of >> you every night as you were fast asleep, and that the originals >> were then killed, you would not be the same person from day >> to day, and you dread tonight? Right? That you were lucky >> to get just one day of life? > > Yup. And so what if the process were happening 100 times per second? That is, microsecond 0-1 Randall is frozen microsecond 1-2 Randall is copied atom for atom into Randall 2 microsecond 2-3 Randall 1 is vaporized microsecond 3-4 Randall 2 is moved to exactly the same place that Randall 1 was microseconds 4-10000 Randall2 thinks his Randall-squared type thoughts and experience his Randall^2 life microsecond 10000-10001 the process starts all over again with Randall N being frozen for a microsecond, completing a full 100 copy & replace operations per second. So what would you make of your life? How can you be sure that it's not really happening? In order to be consistent---which is okay---my guess is that "you" would have to conclude that "your" consciousness was a delusion, and that you might as well just kill yourself (modulo the effects on friends and relatives, etc.) because there was no "you" that had any duration and had no life to speak of. Am I correct? (Note that this would merely be *awkward* for you to admit. It's equally awkward for me when I voice a similar conclusion that I'm just a GLUT (giant lookup table), and that I did not possess any real subjectivity. Of course, I would never say that I did, because I would constantly announce a feeling that I did not possess because I was in fact a zombie. Such are the tight corners that our modern knowledge sometimes puts us in.) Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 10:52:13 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:52:13 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 (Identity over Interruption) In-Reply-To: References: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Heartland wrote: But before we can go any further with this investigation we need new clues > that > arrive after spending some time on defining what it means exactly "to > live." I > define "living" as being able to "access reality" which reduces to being > able to > think and process sensory information. I survive only by maintaining that > access > and perish when I lose it. With that, I may resume my quest for the subset > of > processes that cause life. > > Based on my definition of "living" I should not be interested in all > processes that > cause the mind but only in those that allow access to reality. Finally, it > is the > collective instance of those mind subprocesses that allow access to > reality that I > want to preserve. Death occurs when that instance expires which could be > well > before medical staff observes flat EEG. You can define death in this way if you want (and indeed I sometimes define death in an even more extreme way, as occurring every conscious moment), but the question you have to answer is, what is the significance of this definition? The millions of people who have had general anaesthetics will say, "If that's what death is, then death is no big deal"; and they would then form a new view of death, call it hyper-death, in which even the illusion of continuity is lost because no copy survives, to take the place of the old death as something to be avoided. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 10:50:53 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:50:53 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <710b78fc0704290336n5396e107k45f60c471cba1561@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <087001c78a4c$9cb89ac0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Emlyn writes > [Lee writes] >> That *never* happens in deep political or philosophical discussions >> because (a) emotions are involved (b) positions have been years or >> decades in the making, and contrary information has during all that >> time filtered out, and (c) even when our position is irrevocably >> weakened, we rationalize in order to preserve the integrity of our >> beliefs (i.e. wholeness of them), and in order to avoid losing face. > > I believe this occurs when there's no useful evidence for any of the > positions in the subject in question. It's a good indicator that the > entire subject area is essentially content free, and could be safely > ignored until someone discovers something new. On the contrary, I think that there is all sorts of good evidence. Consider for example just the evidence about Niger yellow-cake uranium. The trouble is that both sides have their own rather comprehensive explanations. But then, 50 years ago both sides had their own comprehensive explanations of whether Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy or not. But the evidence finally became overwhelming. Unfortunately, no one ever did admit that they were wrong; many people on the left just shut up, and many others who did not just got old and died. I wonder if there are American conservatives still alive who think that the Sino-Soviet split was just a smokescreen to fool the west. Same thing: for the reasons *I* gave above, despite mountains of evidence, people holding deep philosophical or religious or political opinions can rationalize their way out of anything. Lee From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 11:05:06 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:05:06 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay In-Reply-To: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: It was at this time that Curtis LeMay uttered the immortal words: > > "If I see 'em massing for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out > of 'em." > > Notice that he did not say "we", or "the U.S.", but rather "I will > knock" said shit out of the Soviets. > > It was the cold knowledge on the other side that there were a number > of Americans in very high places that very probably staved off > total war. Do you think that the existence of similarly motivated loose cannons on the Soviet side would also have been a good thing? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 11:18:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:18:15 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: <424485.86153.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <424485.86153.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, A B wrote: > > > For the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that > our Universe is not going to end in a Big Crunch but > will continue forever. I was trying to think of a way > to continually produce energy for an infinite period > (assuming that the Universe may eventually run out of > use-able nuclear fuels, etc.) What about a giant, > planet-sized generator of sorts? Construct a gigantic > permanent magnet (with a decent amount of gravity) > that has a powerful magnetic field. Then put wire > coils attached to batteries or capacitors into a tight > and fast orbit around the magnet. (Under typical > conditions, a wire moving through a magnetic field > will carry an electric current). Alternatively, you > could also attach the wire coils "directly" to > orbiting computers. It looks to me that all that is > required is gravity (which I don't see going > anywhere), and that nuclear protons don't eventually > decay (Hasn't this already been tested with results > indicating no decay?). No doubt, there will be far, > far more efficient methods in the future, this is just > a simple example. Does anyone familiar with physics, > cosmology, or engineering know of a reason why this > wouldn't work? I'd be interested to know. What you're proposing is a kind of perpetual motion machine. One way it would all come to grief is the magnetic braking effect which would cause the satellite's orbit to decay. You can feel this easily if you take a strong permanent magnet and run it along the surface of a copper or aluminium plate. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 11:51:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:51:15 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 4/28/07, Heartland wrote: If you had a perfect twin right now, would it be OK if you killed him too? I > imagine you would still argue with the guards, while being dragged to your > cell or > even a death chamber, that you should go free since the victim's death was > not a > big deal because the type of your twin's brain structure still remains or > because > flat EEGs are poor indicators of death so, according to your definition of > death, > you didn't kill > anyone. In reality, you couldn't have a "perfect" twin for more than a moment, because as soon as the twin came into existence he would start to have his own thoughts, different from your thoughts, and would anticipate that if you killed him he would never have any more thoughts again; that is, there would never be any more copies or twins or people or spirits or whatever that identify as being him and continue his thoughts. The twin would not have the illusion of continuity (if you wish to call it an illusion, that's fine with me), which is what I worry about when I worry about death. As for Lee's criticisms of my criticisms of your position, I do understand that you don't think it will really be you if you are copied or resuscitated after flatlining, but pronoun use gets very cumbersome in these discussions. Suppose I propose that you die as a result of a good night's sleep, according to my definition of "death". How would you criticise that definition if you didn't agree with it? You might point out that people go to sleep all the time and still wake up OK, but of course I would say that they are not the same people. You would deny that death has occurred due to such and such a criterion, but I might be able to show you new medical criteria that show death *has* occurred, in fact has always occurred whenever anyone falls asleep. What evidence would you use to support a claim that the new medical criteria are wrong? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Sun Apr 29 11:55:16 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:55:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Heartland: >> The reality is that it takes many steps to change someone's mind. >> At each step you need to convince him/her of some point that is >> necessary to build your argument. It's a slow process that could >> take years or even decades depending on how emotionally >> attached a person is to his/her irrational beliefs... Lee: > Tch, tch, tch. You don't get it. The other beliefs are *not* irrational. > I wish that you and John Clark could see this. It's possible that they're > not even incorrect. It's possible that it's a "conflict of visions" sort of > phenomenon. Perhaps I should have said "illogical" or "inconsistent" instead of "irrational." Lee: > But it does *not* mean that the discussions are futile. They not only > accomplish what I just described, but allow each of us to analyse and > consistentize (if I may coin a term) our positions, and within our own > schemes seek a more rational stable position. Exactly. The progress in this debate does not necessarily come in the form of someone changing his/her mind, but almost exclusively in the form of increased clarity of our own thinking and increased ability to communicate our beliefs to others that are byproducts of frequent interaction with our critics. Over the years I was forced to update my argument many times in order to remove inconsistencies that I was not aware of at the time. Almost all updates/upgrades were caused/inspired by other poster's comments. Also, what used to take me 20-40 posts to describe, now takes 1 or 2. To me, that's progress. H. From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 12:06:46 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:06:46 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Jef Allbright wrote: The opposition argue in functional terms that to the extent a > difference makes no difference, it is no difference. However, they > continue to state this as if "differences" can be completely > objective. If I-now think I've survived as a continuation of I-before, then that's what matters in survival. Is that objective or subjective? Both sides appear to be utterly blind to the necessity of an observer > function, to any discussion of meaning. > > If this debate ever develops from "what is personal identity" to "what > do we mean by person identity" then it might get interesting. "What is personal identity" doesn't have a clear answer; the best I can come up with in an attempt to be clear and consistent is to say that there is no objective self persisting through time, but that this is a construct from separate moments of observerhood, which usually but by no means necessarily originate in a single brain. "What do we mean by personal identity" is best answered by asking what matters in survival, as above. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 12:09:45 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:09:45 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Human Reproductive Manifest Destiny In-Reply-To: <07e901c789de$12f0e270$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200704282002.l3SK2iWp048254@mail0.rawbw.com> <07e901c789de$12f0e270$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: (Alas, I must use the word "specimens" out of respect for Peter > Seller's wonderful parody of Von Neumann in "Dr. Strangelove".) I always thought it was Edward Teller he was parodying. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 12:48:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:48:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <07c201c789c7$a16f6d80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> <07c201c789c7$a16f6d80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: Can't you see that you keep begging the question? What if you > are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor > they've paid to imitate John K.Clark. The person acts like you do, > and since (say) you're a recluse, no one notices (he has studied > your emails carefully). What if, to make it convincing, they also > somehow hypnotize that actor to actually believe that he is > the person he's imitating? Then *you* are dead, regardless of > your phony criterion of "subjectively". > > Subjectively he thinks he's you. Does that make him you? OF > course not! If it's done perfectly, then you would have to say that the actor is you, wouldn't you? The converse situation is that the gangsters don't kill you, but knock you around and brainwash you so that you forget everything about your past and identity, and instead have false memories implanted. In that case, the gangsters have done almost as good a job as killing you outright - and I say "almost" only because there may be some hope that the procedure is reversible. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 12:57:32 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:57:32 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: I had the good fortune while I was a > Christian conservative... Really? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 13:16:31 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:16:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: References: <424485.86153.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Didn't Dyson solve this problem by simply runing slower and slower over time? I can look the paper up if someone wants. This is hard for biological entities (though you could consider cryonics to be a form of this) -- but once ones mind is uploaded running at slower and slower clock rates isn't a big deal. The real problem is going to be whether or not protons decay. If they do one can probably only exist as some kind of photonic cloud. The long term prospects are discussed in The Five Ages of the Universe -- though they don't get into how one preserves "minds" as thing start to decay towards the "dead" universe. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Sun Apr 29 13:35:32 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:35:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Type vs. instance with respect to identity across time (a reply to Jeffrey) References: <20061102062735.57668.qmail@web52612.mail.yahoo.com><015601c7010a$6a7d5d50$450a4e0c@MyComputer><008101c701b4$37b35870$250b4e0c@MyComputer><3C5E9884-5CD8-46CC-9841-28C6980CE600@randallsquared.com> <059a01c701f8$841e1670$bb0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: A B: > Hi Heartland, > > It's nice to be debating this again with you. Hi Jeffrey. It's nice to hear from you again. A B: > You say that it is a unique trajectory through space > and time that specifies an identity. (Correct me if > that is not a fair or correct representation).On the > face of it, I actually don't disagree with you. > Another way to describe that is that two different > trajectories are different precisely because they are > separated both in space and time (which are both > intertwined entities as far as I know). But this, in > addition to other "factors" is why I believe it is > appropriate to believe that no "self" continues > through time, and that we are in fact "dieing" > continuously (and it's not a big deal). With every > passing moment, I am separated temporally with my > "previous self" (if I wasn't, I'd be "frozen in > time"), and by extension, I must also be separated > spatially. Doesn't that meet your definition of a > different trajectory? And therefore a "new" person > with every passing moment? I think we had talked about it before and I remember giving you some half-baked explanations at the time. Since then, I had thought about it a lot (a typical reaction after reading your posts:)) and I think I found the right answer and it has to do with the basic nature of process. A year ago, during one of our debates on this list about identity, I wrote a post addressing this issue. I didn't sent it because, frankly, I didn't think people would understand it or be interested enough to read it. But since you asked for my opinion, here it is. ---- Ian Goddard in response to John K Clark: "Notice that the logical identity analyses I posted may run into trouble with respect to any person over time. Today I have properties I lacked yesterday, does that mean I'm not that Ian? Personal identity may call upon a dynamic intensional model of identity, rather than the static one I proposed." Right. Suppose we reduce a person to a string of bits (that is, "person=pattern of bits"). Tomorrow or even a second later that person-representing string will get longer or shorter (as new memories are being created and old ones evaporate) while the bits that make up the string change also so that the pattern of bits is almost certainly different at different times. If so, then each of these strings at different times must be assigned different identity according to Leibniz's law and if we still assume that persons are nothing but strings, we are forced to conclude that people die constantly. However, we are more like minds and processes rather than brains and patterns. I claim that "person=instance of process" is the only model that can accurately reflect the dynamic nature of our minds in contrast to static patterns. So how does this "person=instance of process" model performs with respect to identity across time? Unlike patterns, processes are undefined in time intervals equal to 0. It simply does not make sense to say that there is such a thing as process-at-t3 and process-at-t789. Instead, any process is necessarily defined across *all* ts in the interval equal to the duration of an instance of that process. Because processes are defined across time, it is impossible to find a single property y of an instance of the process at any t1 in the interval with a value that is going to be different from a value of property y of this instance at t2 (because these values will refer to the same exact instance). Leibniz's law applied to "person=instance of process" model suggests that I'm still the same person (instance of process) I was yesterday. ---- Even though the above analysis was done with respect to time, the same analysis also applies to space as processes are necessarily defined across space. This is why I still claim we don't die as we glide through time and space. Slawomir From sti at pooq.com Sun Apr 29 13:28:40 2007 From: sti at pooq.com (Stirling Westrup) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:28:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> Lee Corbin wrote: >> Eugen: >>> I wish I could murder that thread. It never goes anywhere. >> Define "anywhere." I hope you don't define it as, "everyone >> involved adopts Eugen Leitl's position." > > I dunno; but he's right in the sense that you almost *never* see anyone > change positions in real time. That is, you never see anyone say, "Oh, > thank you! Now I see the light! How could I have been so mistaken? > Thanks for straightening me out!" I've done this, more than once. Its not easy, for two reasons. First, no one believes it, and two no one SHUTS UP after saying something that profoundly changes my views. Even when I ask. Even when I tell them that they may have just won the argument. The trouble is, if someone says something that points out the fundamental difference in your points of view, and its something where you are willing to reexamine your position, it takes time to process. And I find that that is impossible if the person who has (usually) just stumbled upon the key difference keeps going on and on about other irrelevant things because they are so dedicated to convincing you of their point of view that they aren't willing to admit victory. From pgptag at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 14:19:46 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:19:46 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life later tonight Message-ID: <470a3c520704290719s5d3b64b3n55e95741950119d2@mail.gmail.com> Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_h_and_religion_in_sl/ Sunday, April 29, 2007 10am SLT-PST, uvvy island in SL Speakers: Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association Extropia Dasilva, Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything. James Hughes, Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. James will present his paper The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future. Giulio Prisco, Executive Director, World Transhumanist Association. Giulio will summarize his article/book precis Engineering Transcendence. I made the final preparations for the Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life (beginning in 3 hours) and uploaded slides for all presentations. Extropia Dasilva will not use slides. We made all voice stream tests. The only technical challenge for this event is coordinating sound streams from different remote locations, but we did not have any problems in tests. James Hughes and Lincon Cannon will use the Shoutcast plugin for Winamp to stream to our Shoutcast server, and I will use Nicecast on a Mac to do the same. My presentation begins, as usual, with a personal introduction slide where I say that I am with the WTA but am now speaking on behalf of Giulio Prisco, Giulio Perhaps (my avatar in SL), Yours Truly, the Fat Ugly Guy here (my avatar again) and Myself. I will, in fact, present my own views on transhumanism and religion, which are not and cannot be represented as official WTA views. I think the "cosmic" part of transhumanism *is* an alternative to religion, firmly based on the scientific worldview, but able to provide much of what most people search in a religion. James has a monster presentation, a must see. Lincoln's presentation is also very interesting. I look forward to seeing you all tonight at the seminar. From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 15:38:39 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:38:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] i am a strange loop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200704291538.l3TFclbc019536@andromeda.ziaspace.com> On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: (Alas, I must use the word "specimens" out of respect for Peter Seller's wonderful parody of Von Neumann in "Dr. Strangelove".) I always thought it was Edward Teller he was parodying. Stathis Papaioannou Teller has a book published about 15 years ago called Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics. Check it out. I think Sellers' Dr. Strangelove was intended as a composite character that has elements of Teller and Verner von Braun. Teller's book describes the origin of terms megadeaths, overkill, etc, the ethereal world that the early nuke weapons people found themselves. Herman Kahn has a book called Thinking About the Unthinkable which covers some of the same ground. I noticed Hofstadter has a new book called I Am a Strange Loop. Anyone read it? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amara at amara.com Sun Apr 29 16:13:43 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:13:43 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] i am a strange loop Message-ID: Stathis Papaioannou : >I always thought it was Edward Teller he was parodying. Nope. (Good try, though) Spike: >Teller has a book published about 15 years ago called Conversations on >the Dark Secrets of Physics. Check it out. I think Sellers' Dr. >Strangelove was intended as a composite character that has elements of >Teller and Verner von Braun. Teller's book describes the origin of >terms megadeaths, overkill, etc, the ethereal world that the early >nuke weapons people found themselves. Herman Kahn has a book called >Thinking About the Unthinkable which covers some of the same ground. You almost had it. Kubrick modelled the Dr. Strangelove character after Herman Kahn. Amara ==================================================================== Repost of 14 October 2004 wta-talk and extropy-chat message. From: Amara Graps Subject: Dr. Strangelove - the "documentary" :-) ==================================================================== some large pieces from this wonderful article about the Dr. Strangelove Movie ........ "that was a documentary!" Amara http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=543243.html Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' Fred Kaplan NYT Wednesday, October 13, 2004 Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American political or movie history. For its 40th anniversary, Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next month. One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive chapters of the cold war. As countless histories relate, Kubrick set out to make a serious film based on a grim novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George, a Royal Air Force officer. But the more research he did (reading more than 50 books, talking with a dozen experts), the more lunatic he found the whole subject, so he made a dark comedy instead. The result was wildly iconoclastic: Released at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. Strangelove" dared to suggest that our top generals might be bonkers and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine. What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similarities: Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. Strangelove" as a comic book. [...] The most popular guessing game about the movie is whether there was a real-life counterpart to the character of Dr. Strangelove (another Sellers part), the wheelchaired ex-Nazi who directs the Pentagon's weapons research and proposes sheltering political leaders in well-stocked mineshafts, where they can survive the coming nuclear war and breed with beautiful women. Over the years, some have speculated that Strangelove was inspired by Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun. But the real model was almost certainly Herman Kahn, an eccentric, voluble nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Air Force think tank. In 1960, Kahn published a 652-page tome called "On Thermonuclear War," which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover. According to a special-feature documentary on the new DVD, Kubrick read "On Thermonuclear War" several times. But what the documentary doesn't note is that the final scenes of "Dr. Strangelove" come straight out of its pages. [...] Toward the end of the film, officials uncover General Ripper's code and call back the B-52s, but they notice that one bomber keeps flying toward its target. A B-52 is about to attack the Russians with a few H-bombs; General Turgidson recommends that we should "catch 'em with their pants down," and launch an all-out, disarming first-strike. Such a strike would destroy 90 percent of the U.S.S.R.'s nuclear arsenal. "Mr. President," he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!" If we don't go all-out, the general warns, the Soviets will fire back with all their nuclear weapons. The choice, he screams, is "between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments - one where you get 20 million people killed and the other where you get 150 million people killed!" Kahn made precisely this point in his book, even producing a chart labeled, "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States." When Strangelove talks of sheltering people in mineshafts, President Muffley asks him, "Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead?" Strangelove exclaims that, to the contrary, many would feel "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." Kahn's book contains a long chapter on mineshafts. Its title: "Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?" One sentence reads: "We can imagine a renewed vigor among the population with a zealous, almost religious dedication to reconstruction." -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From amara at amara.com Sun Apr 29 16:16:32 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:16:32 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] i am a strange loop Message-ID: Here is the location of the full 2004 IHT article: Truth Stranger than 'Strangelove' by Fred Kaplan http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/12/features/strange.php Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 16:38:48 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:38:48 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] sri lanka attacked by rebels In-Reply-To: <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> >Is AC Clarke safe? A friend who visited him recently tells me: "He's deep inside the diplomatic core, a klick from the presidential residence, with armed guards on his street--no problem." Damien Broderick From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 16:52:27 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:52:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] sri lanka attacked by rebels In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200704291652.l3TGqYN8020699@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Cool thanks Damnien. If you post him an email, do pass along our well wishes from his many friends and admirers. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2007 9:39 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] sri lanka attacked by rebels > > > >Is AC Clarke safe? > > A friend who visited him recently tells me: > > "He's deep inside the diplomatic core, a klick from the presidential > residence, with armed guards on his street--no problem." > > Damien Broderick > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From pj at pj-manney.com Sun Apr 29 16:55:50 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:55:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay Message-ID: <16475549.362501177865750655.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Amara wrote >Here is the location of the full 2004 IHT article: > >Truth Stranger than 'Strangelove' >by Fred Kaplan >http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/12/features/strange.php FYI -- LeMay was parodied by both generals -- Ripper and Turgidson. There are recognizable LeMay behaviors and dialogue in both performances. BTW -- have any of you ever seen "The Fog of War"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War PJ From jonkc at att.net Sun Apr 29 16:45:18 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:45:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070428185550.02314ea8@satx.rr.com> <083d01c78a0a$c1ad88f0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001c01c78a7d$e22c07f0$d9074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > I happened one day to imagine a machine that made a perfect copy, > or a teleporter that didn't destroy the original. There seemed to be > a peculiar, insoluable dilemma: which one would I be, the copy > or the original? They would both always be you, but after they started having different experiences they would not be each other. There is no paradox here, no insoluble dilemma, it's just an unusual situation; unusual because up to now teleporter machines of that sort are rather rare. Of course once these machines become common some grammatical changes in the use of words like "I" and "you" would probably be in order. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Sun Apr 29 17:14:57 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:14:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> Lee Corbin" > Can't you see that you keep begging the question? No I can't see that, I can't see that at all. > What if you are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor > they've paid to imitate John K. Clark. But I am also an actor, playing the part of John K Clark of yesterday, and I am such a good actor I think I'm him. I am not in distress, I feel fine, so I see no reason to be unhappy if the same thing happens to me again tomorrow. And another thing, you lambasted me for saying the High Priest thought atoms were sacred, but in your above quotation you throw around the word "replaced" as if the meaning were obvious; but what is actually being "replaced"? What it means is that you got a bunch of atoms to interact in the same way as an original group of atoms, and then you changed the organization of the original group of atoms (for example blowing up the original man with a stick of dynamite). You claim there has been a HUGE subjective difference (even though the person in question can detect no subjective difference!), but what has actually changed? We now use different atoms, that's it, atoms the Scientific method can find no difference in. So don't tell me I'm being unfair to call it the sacred atoms theory. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 17:17:19 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:17:19 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <08a101c78a82$971e10a0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Heartland writes > [Lee wrote] > >> The other beliefs [e.g. differing philosophical and political ones] are >> *not* [necessarily, I should have said] irrational. I wish that you and >> John Clark could see this. It's possible that they're not even incorrect. >> It's possible that it's a "conflict of visions" sort of phenomenon. > > Perhaps I should have said "illogical" or "inconsistent" instead of "irrational." No! In the worst case phenomena, they aren't even illogical or inconsistent. In the general case, say political disagreement, all that can be done (besides in certain cases awaiting events, though people are still arguing about the French Revolution), is to illustrate certain "awkwardnesses" that the other position must accomodate. For example, one minor awkwardness of my position is that if someone asks "how are you" to an instance of me, they must receive the muddled answer "This unit only knows how it is doing, and it is doing fine, thank you very much. This unit does not know in general how LeeCorbin in general is doing, even though all LeeCorbins are belong to us." > The progress in this debate [or in many] does not necessarily come in the form of > someone changing his/her mind, but almost exclusively in the form of increased > clarity of our own thinking and increased ability to communicate our beliefs to > others that are byproducts of frequent interaction with our critics. Over the years > I was forced to update my argument many times in order to remove inconsistencies > that I was not aware of at the time. Almost all updates/upgrades were > caused/inspired by other poster's comments. Also, what used to take me 20-40 posts > to describe, now takes 1 or 2. To me, that's progress. We concur. I hope that everyone sees the light. That is, I hope that there are no "conflicts of vision" here, and that everyone can recognize what you and I think are the truths of the matter here. Lee From scerir at libero.it Sun Apr 29 17:01:43 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:01:43 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Life and Death is not like 1 and 0 References: <07be01c789c4$d42d4380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><082901c789fd$725283d0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <62c14240704281929i44a4344tdb3c059c5522cadd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <008101c78a80$10c52130$61941f97@archimede> Mike: > Does the photon go through the right slit or the left? Supposing we know what a photon is (and perhaps we don't), it depends on the informations (in principle available). Perfect symmetry of the set-up + no markers at the slits (or after) + no markers (polarizers, etc.) before the slits + no entanglement between that photon (signal) and another one (idler) => you get interference, because of indistinguishability. On the contrary, if there is some marker, or some asymmetry, interference pattern becomes smooth and smoother (depending on the available informations). > Is there some kind of interference pattern equivalent > that indicates life? I think it is like the above, a transition between life and not. (But is life the opposite of death? Birth?). From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 17:25:37 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:25:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> Message-ID: <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stirling writes > [Lee wrote] >> I dunno; but he's right in the sense that you almost *never* see anyone >> change positions in real time. That is, you never see anyone say, "Oh, >> thank you! Now I see the light! How could I have been so mistaken? >> Thanks for straightening me out!" > > I've done this, more than once. Its not easy, for two reasons. First, no one > believes it, and two no one SHUTS UP after saying something that profoundly > changes my views. Even when I ask. Even when I tell them that they may have > just won the argument. Amazing. I have to take your word for it that they don't shut up because I have seen few (or no) instances of what you describe. You have a rare control over your ego, or else you just don't get passionate about these issues, or maybe you just don't identify with a position you have taken. Most people get those attachments, and to admit they were wrong is like losing a very important contest. Also, I need add, people have a very legitimate reason for not wanting to admit they were wrong. It greatly complicates their life. Let me illustrate. Suppose that someone presents ample evidence to me that God exists. Then Jesus---what am I to make of everything else I've spent my whole life understanding? A zillion questions come up! Why did God do all that? Why isn't He nice? What's up with the ineffectiveness of prayer? On what occasions can we expect physical law to be violated? My universe has intellectually become vastly more complicated, and I really must start at square one all over again. Likewise if someone demonstrated that ESP works. Why didn't evolution seize upon it? Why aren't the very gifted few already at work cleaining out the casinos in Las Vegas? What are the physical laws that account for it? Do ESP influences travel faster than light? If so, what happens to relativity theory? And on and on and on. Back to square one all over again. Lee > The trouble is, if someone says something that points out the fundamental > difference in your points of view, and it's something where you are willing to > reexamine your position, it takes time to process. And I find that that is > impossible if the person who has (usually) just stumbled upon the key > difference keeps going on and on about other irrelevant things because they > are so dedicated to convincing you of their point of view that they aren't > willing to admit victory. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 17:30:50 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:30:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Vagaries of Belief (was Changing Other Poster's Minds) References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <08ae01c78a84$b6271800$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I had the good fortune while I was a Christian conservative... > Really? >From age 12 through 15 I was a pretty vociferous and stalwart Christian. At age 16, I had intuitions about what was good for societies, and for two weeks I actually adhered to Islam. But clearly the *belief* in anything was weaking and I gradually became agnostic. Then one day in the summer when I was 18 (1966), a friend opined that he thought that agnostics were simply people who were too chicken to admit that they were atheists, and I have been a vociferous and stalwart atheist ever since. I think that this is the answer you were after. I'm sure that many people have more interesting confessionals than mine. Lee From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 17:58:46 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:58:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <04EC18B1-A3AC-4C5B-A8B6-15B53E51D25E@randallsquared.com> On Apr 29, 2007, at 8:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I had the good fortune while I was a > Christian conservative... > > Really? In case it's the presence of former Christians on this list that astounds you, let me add that I, too, used to be a Christian conservative (grew up fundamentalist). -- Randall Randall 'Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"?' -- Garrison Keillor From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 18:03:06 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:03:06 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Vagaries of Belief In-Reply-To: <08ae01c78a84$b6271800$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <08ae01c78a84$b6271800$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429130101.02184af0@satx.rr.com> At 10:30 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: >for two weeks I actually adhered to Islam. OMD! If it's possible to delete messages from the archives, this one should probably go. You've just publicly declared yourself an apostate and therefore liable to be killed for this crime against Allah. (Or so I gather.) From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 18:04:22 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 14:04:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Apr 29, 2007, at 6:41 AM, Lee Corbin wrote: > And so what if the process were happening 100 times per second? > That is, > microsecond 0-1 Randall is frozen > microsecond 1-2 Randall is copied atom for atom > into Randall 2 > microsecond 2-3 Randall 1 is vaporized > microsecond 3-4 Randall 2 is moved to exactly > the same place > > that Randall 1 was > microseconds 4-10000 Randall2 thinks his Randall-squared > type thoughts > a > nd experience his Randall^2 life > microsecond 10000-10001 the process starts all over again with > Randall N > being frozen for a > microsecond, completing > a full 100 copy & > replace operations per second. > > So what would you make of your life? How can you be sure that it's > not really > happening? Well, I can't. I can't be sure, in the same way, that the Old Ones won't return tomorrow to eat our brains. But I don't much worry about them, either. > In order to be consistent---which is okay---my guess is that "you" > would have to conclude that "your" consciousness was a delusion, > and that > you might as well just kill yourself (modulo the effects on friends > and relatives, etc.) because there was no "you" that had any > duration and had no life to speak > of. Am I correct? As far as you go, yes. Thanks for putting "you" in quotes, to show that you understand that I don't think there's any single point of view, there. -- Randall Randall "Perhaps the real obstacle to the widespread adoption of CL is that the language is inherently blasphemous." - Alan Crowe From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Apr 29 18:09:09 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:09:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] In Fond Remembrence of Curtis LeMay References: <07e201c789d6$5a737070$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <08c401c78a89$a06d0380$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > > It was at this time that Curtis LeMay uttered the immortal words: > > "If I see 'em massing for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out > > of 'em." I only regret having said that for the same reason that the wikipedia article on LeMay is shockingly incomplete. There is no picture of him brandishing his cigar or even clenching one in his teeth. The above quote loses much of its force without the cigar, and the proper flourish before and after the statement. > > Notice that he did not say "we", or "the U.S.", but rather "I will > > knock" said shit out of the Soviets. > > It was the cold knowledge on the other side that there were a number > > of Americans in very high places that very probably staved off > > total war. > > Do you think that the existence of similarly motivated loose cannons on > the Soviet side would also have been a good thing? Evidently not; because when the U.S.S.R. collapsed, it only did so because they perceived (correctly) that the U.S. was not going to take undue advantage of the situation. And they were right. If we had *true* war- mongers in charge in America in the 80's, the Soviets could never have braved such reorganization. And of course they *did* have such "loose cannons" in place. The Russians are no dummies and they were (and evidently still are) extremely brutal. Andropov was a KGB guy, after all, and so is Putin. Lee From randall at randallsquared.com Sun Apr 29 18:09:44 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 14:09:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, In-Reply-To: <009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> <009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On Apr 29, 2007, at 1:14 PM, John K Clark wrote: > What it means is that you got a bunch of atoms to interact in the > same way > as an original group of atoms, and then you changed the > organization of the > original group of atoms (for example blowing up the original man > with a > stick of dynamite). You claim there has been a HUGE subjective > difference > (even though the person in question can detect no subjective > difference!), Uh... let me point out that the person in question could detect no subjective difference even if you just did the dynamiting part. -- Randall Randall "Everything's stolen these days. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. " - Jamie McCarthy From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Apr 29 18:37:54 2007 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:37:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/29/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 4/28/07, Jef Allbright wrote: > OK, but the important difference between this and MPD or separate > individuals is that neither the systems of behaviour dominant at different > times nor the larger system consider the parts as "other", mainly because > thoughts and feelings are shared. I would agree that none are considered "other" in the sense of intrinsic identity, but I would argue that there is no such thing as intrinsic identity and all we have to work with is recognition of patterns which we do tend to identify, with varying degree of effectivity, as individual personalities. It appears that you disagree with the standard notion of MPD, seeing only a single intrinsic identity exhibiting multiple patterns of behavior. I disagree with MPD, seeing no intrinsic identities at all, and only various patterns of behavior. > > It seems that our difference comes down to our difference in > > understanding the nature of subjective experience. You seem to > > believe that subjective experience is fundamental or primary in some > > important way (it is, but to apply it to "objective" descriptions of > > the world entails a category error), while I see "subjective > > experience" very simply as a description of the perceived internal > > state of any system, as perceived by that system. > > I'm not sure how to respond to this, because I don't see the disagreement. It seems to me that the essential difference is that your view seems to assume the existence of an additional ontic entity representing the subjective self. Thus your descriptions seem to me to include distracting Ptolomeic epicycles. > That there is some subjective experience associated with certain physical > processes is surely undeniable. For all I know, there may also be a some > tiny subjective experience when a thermostat responds to a temperature > change, or even when the thermostat just sits there. The "perceived internal > state of any system as perceived by the system" is as good a description of > this as any, and captures the fact that there is no separate consciousness > juice at work here. Would "as good as any, and..." imply "better than many, because..."? > As to whether the subjective experience is part of an > objective description of the world, that might just boil down to be a matter > of linguistic taste. Did I just write that sentence because I wanted to, or > did I *really* write that sentence because the matter in my brain, a slave > to the laws of physics, made me do so? Either can be equally valid, within context. But one of these is preferable per the heuristic of Ockham's principle of parsimony. > > The recursive > > nature of this model tends to throw people off. [Any progress yet on > > IAASL?] > > I'm only about a third of the way through. The first few chapters do deal > with the notions of reductionist versus higher order explanation, and of a > hierarchy of conscious experience depending on the system's complexity. It > all makes perfect sense so far. I'll have to get back to it soon. I got about two thirds through, and found nothing intellectually stimulating other than Hofstadter's enjoyable multilayered word play. > > > > It's not completely clear here, but it appears that you're claiming > > > > that each of the parts would experience what the whole experiences. > > > > >From a systems theoretical point of view, that claim is clearly > > > > unsupportable. It seems to be another example of your assumption of > > > > subjective experience as primary. > > > > > > Would you say that the two hemispheres of the brain have separate > > > experiences, despite the thick cable connecting them? > > > > No doubt you're aware of very famous split-brain experiments showing > > that if the corpus callosum is cut, then the existence of separate > > experiences is clearly shown. With the corpus callosum intact and > > feedback loops in effect, then the "subjective reality" of various > > functional modules of the brain is driven in the direction of a > > coherent whole, but (if one could interrogate individual brain modules > > individually), one would observe that each module necessarily reports > > its own internal state ("subjective experience") in terms relevant to > > its own functioning. > > But the crucial point is that all the functional subsystems in the brain are > normally in communication, creating an integrated whole, or the illusion of > an integrated whole if you prefer that qualifier. Okay so far, with the understanding that the "illusion of an integrated whole" is "experienced" at the level of the whole. > If I am linked to another > person so that I experience his thoughts, feelings, memories and he mine, How could two individual components of a system have the same experience? I know there's plenty of science fiction providing such scenarios, but in terms of actual systems theory it's incoherent. I'm not sure how to frame this concept effectively for you; I think your background is more in the "softer" humanities side than the "harder" sciences and engineering side of C.P. Snow's Great Divide. My preference would be to refer to efficiencies of information flow, or dynamics of feedback loops, but such analogies don't carry over very well here. You know those science fiction stories where there's a "ripple in time" or a "glitch in the matrix" and the person embedded in that reality claims to have experienced some strange feeling as if his Self was something not completely embedded in that reality, thus providing some invariant reference for the experience? Does that bother you? It sure bothers me. ;-) > then the he/me distinction will vanish even though in reality there are > still two distinct brains and bodies. The original "me" will not have a > preference that the other "me" experiences pain because the original "me" > will experience that pain as well. Experience is necessarily in terms of the system doing the experiencing. If multiple brains and bodies were interconnected effectively as a hive mind, then the higher-level hive mind would experience richer sensory input than any of the individuals, would interact with its larger environment in richer ways than any individual, and would process more abstract models of its "reality" than any of the individuals. > The original "me" will not be able to > even consider himself as separate as mental exercise, because the other "me" > will inevitably have the same thought. It would be like trying to think of > your left hand as alien even though you are neurologically intact. This is key. System-level thoughts are not spread throughout the elements of the system, they are "emergent" as the higher level behavior of the system. From an engineering perspective this is just so obvious I don't know what else to say within the limitations of this medium of email. But I remain motivated to work together toward a mutual understanding. > > It might be informative to consider the distinction between > > "subjective reality" and "subjective experience" above. > ? In an effective hive mind, as with a human mind, the functional components couldn't possibly, even in principle, work with the infinite complexity of unfiltered reality. The very process of "making sense" (extracting, selecting, and encoding regularities) of the environment creates a "subjective reality" that is "subjectively experienced." > > > > > The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, > resemble > > > the > > > > > collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. > > > > > > > > It seems clear to me that the behavior of the collective would display > > > > characteristics *not* present in any of its parts. This is > > > > fundamental complexity theory. > > > > > > Yes, I suppose that's true and the fact that the parts are in > communication > > > would alter the behaviour of the collective. However, even the > disconnected > > > parts would display emergent behaviour in their interactions. > > > > Stathis, I repeatedly detect either unfamiliarity or discomfort with > > systems thinking in your world view. What could it possibly mean to > > say that "...disconnected parts would display emergent behavior..."? > > Emergent behavior is meaningless in regard to parts, it can refer only > > to systems of parts. > > I like to think of reductionism as the "true" theory explaining the world. A > hydrogen atom behaves differently from a proton and electron, but really, it > is *no more* than a proton and electron; it's just that we're not smart > enough for the behaviour of a hydrogen atom to be immediately and > intuitively obvious when we contemplate its components, so we call it > emergent behaviour. I used to strongly believe the same way. At some point I realized that reductionism is an idealization that ultimately fails due to the utter inability of any system to form an objective model of its world. Consider the three-body problem as part of the explanation. (As a self-referential aside, a complete explanation is of course impossible here or in any other context.) > To give another example, we normally don't consider that > two marbles sitting next to each other are any more than, well, two marbles > sitting next to each other; and yet it is possible to assert that they > actually form a system, namely a pair of marbles, which is somehow different > to, or greater than, either marble individually. I would point out that your system of marbles is meaningless outside the context of an observer, and that a fundamental definition of "system" might be based on the notion of the emergent property of dividing the universe into an inside and an outside, thus requiring at least three elements forming a conceptual tetrahedron. (Credit to Buckminster Fuller, and possibly C.S. Peirce.) > It would be crazy to go > around thinking of every object and interaction in the world in terms of > subatomic particles, but that's what it actually is. Probably not in any way that matters at the level of abstraction of our present discussion. > With regard to my point, I originally asserted that multiple individuals who > are joined might end up making similar decisions to the same collection of > separate individuals voting or trying to arrive at a consensus. This is > probably an unwarranted assumption, as being joined is a new factor which > might change the net behaviour. In other words, there are more subatomic > particles in the joined than in the individualist collective, namely those > particles forming connections between individuals, so the two collections > would be expected to behave differently. An interesting observation would be that any system is defined *entirely* in terms of its "connections", but while profound, this may be leading us off track. > When I said that disconnected parts would also display emergent behaviour, I > meant that the disconnected parts when interacting would display emergent > behaviour as compared to disconnected parts on their own. This is by analogy > with the hydrogen atom: the proton and electron together will display > emergent behaviour in that it was not evident when they were widely > separated. However, with both people and subatomic particles, the > foundations for the emergent behaviour were already clearly present in the > parts, it's just that we weren't knowledgeable and bright enough to > immediately see it. > > > > > > The > > > > > equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out > some > > > > > undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the > > > advantage > > > > > that no-one actually gets hurt. > > > > > > > > This sounds nice, but it's not clear to me what model it describes. > > > > > > In a society with multiple individuals, the Cristians might decide to > > > persecute the Muslims. But if a single individual is struggling with the > > > idea of whether to follow Christianity or Islam, he is hardly in a > position > > > to persecute one or other aspect of himself. The internal conflict may > lead > > > to distress, but that isn't the same thing. > > > > As I see it, clearly one of those conflicting systems of thought is > > going to lose representation, corresponding to "dying" within the mind > > of the person hosting the struggle. > > > > Maybe here again we see the same fundamental difference in our views. > > In your view (I'm guessing) the difference is that no one died, no > > unique personal consciousness was extinguished. > > Yes; the part that "loses" the battle lives on in the consciousness of the > whole, and might even reassert itself at some future point. It's a matter of > who gets hurt or upset, and how complete and irreversible the process is. I strongly disagree. The configuration of the system necessarily changes to reflect the outcome of the conceptual battle. Although it sounds nice in humanistic terms to think that each conceptual entity is somehow fully preserved, I don't see how this thinking can be warranted. If the human brain or hive-mind were a closed system, then this could argued on the basis of conservation of information, but that is far from the case. > > In my view, a person > > exists to the extent that they have an observable effect (no matter > > how indirect); there is no additional ontological entity representing > > the unique core of their being, or subjective experience, or whatever > > it is called by various peoples for the thousands of years since > > people became aware of their awareness. > > I would agree that a person cannot exist without having an observable > effect, and that this observable effect is necessary and sufficient for the > existence of that person. However, the observable effect is only important > to the person themselves insofar as it does give rise to this feeling of > personhood or consciousness. That is, if the same effect could be reproduced > using computer hardware, or by God in heaven, or whatever, that would be > fine with me. I am somewhat hopeful that the thinking in Hofstadter's _I Am A Strange Loop_ will help clarify this. > > You will of course recognize the implication of an unfounded belief in > > a soul in the above, and most likely reject it out of hand since you > > are a modern man, well-read and trained in science and most certainly > > do not believe in a soul. Obviously Jef doesn't really know who he's > > dealing with (thus this paragraph.) > > > > But my point is that despite any amount of evidence or debate, even > > with belief in the heuristic power of Occam's Razor, the subjective > > experience of subjective experience tends to hold sway. As I > > mentioned above, it has the advantage of being (subjectively) > > complete. > > > Computationalism contains the idea of multiple realizability, which means > that the mind can survive destruction of the substrate on which it is being > run. Okay so far. > This has striking similarities with the concept of an immaterial soul > and the possibility of resurrection after the death of the body. Yes, but thinking along those lines leads to conceptual cul-de-sac. > The modern > advance over dualism is that the need for a separate soul-substance is > obviated. Yes, but belief in mind-matter dualism is quite distinct from substratism. On this discussion list nearly all posters express a belief in substrate independence, but most continue to bump into the "paradoxes" of a worldview that struggles with overcoming mind-matter dualism while preserving belief in a discrete Self. - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Apr 29 16:19:05 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:19:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War In-Reply-To: References: <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427124007.0465bbc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070427183950.042a2270@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20070428134420.03fc0dd0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <082b01c78a02$58f8da60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070429121343.04111cc8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:47 AM 4/29/2007 +0100, you wrote: >On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > > > P.S. I'll get around to Professor Gat's paper presently, and start a new > > thread if it seems appropriate. I will also respond to some very > interesting > > but snipped parts of your post that aren't actually germane to this thread. > >You don't get off that easy! ;) > >The paper was published in 2000. > >Gat has since updated his research by publishing 'War in Human Civilization'. >Hardcover: 848 pages >Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 23, 2006) > The book is excellent, I am reading it now. But the material backing up an EP model of war is covered in the short (9000 words) paper. If you read 600 wpm, that's 15 minutes. Keith >Book Description >Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late >cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental >developments in the history of human civilization? And what of war >today - is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? In >this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to >find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel >the 'riddle of war' throughout human history, from the early >hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the >twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an >astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major >aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a >wide range of disciplines, from anthropology and evolutionary >psychology to sociology and political science. > >There are three enthusiastic customer reviews. > >A less enthusiastic review is here: > > > >This wikipedia article discusses the many causes of war >(incl. references to Azar Gat) > > > >BillK >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 19:01:35 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 14:01:35 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> At 03:41 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > microsecond 0-1 Randall is frozen > microsecond 1-2 Randall is copied atom for atom > into Randall 2 > microsecond 2-3 Randall 1 is vaporized > microsecond 3-4 Randall 2 is moved to exactly > the same place > >that Randall 1 was > microseconds 4-10000 Randall2 thinks his Randall-squared > type thoughts > >and experience his Randall^2 life Stop there. *Obviously* Randall2 thinks (or at least feels) he's continuous with the original. Surely nobody disputes this. It's part of the definition of "perfect copy." The only matter at stake is whether R1 should object to being obliterated and replaced by R2...n. I would, even in such a preposterously rigged and probably physically impossible procedure. I'm pretty sure Randall would. And having reached this conclusion and its contrary (for the 2nd...nth time), I suggest we all stop blathering about it. Damien Broderick From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 19:39:44 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 15:39:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > > in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are > > often said loosely [sic] to be the "same book". > > Loosely? That *is* the common way of speaking, and > if I say that my fiancee and I found upon meeting that > we had read the same book, no one would suppose > that we merely read the same particular copy. > > The book analogy is pretty good actually. > > Lee > > _______________________________________________ > 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 robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Apr 29 20:29:13 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:29:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/27/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > To defend John Clark (who needs defending about as much as > a sting ray needs a BB gun) No, no, no... The range for sting rays & BB guns is very short range (though BB guns exceed string rays -- but less so in water -- because of the delivery method John's range is potentially much longer. > > in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are > > often said loosely [sic] to be the "same book". > > Loosely? That *is* the common way of speaking, and > if I say that my fiancee and I found upon meeting that > we had read the same book, no one would suppose > that we merely read the same particular copy. God Lee, Damien didn't tell you... Due to publisher funding restrictions, Damien only had half a million monkeys to assemble the pages -- he authored the words but the paragraph and page assembly was done under contract. They had to have a bunch of gamestations pick up the slack. So I am not so sure that you two may have read the same book. They could have been quite different books but given enough similar impressions and you could have manufactured a *belief* that you read the same book. But you did not verify it. So you may be both be operating in false delusion driven realities. Sad, very sad, to see fine extropian individuals being driven into such situations. Robert P.S. sorry for any previous non-content containing posts -- problem due to trying to do an email and chat at the same time. (Bad bad bad -- I'm too old for these modern technological systems)... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Apr 29 21:35:05 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 14:35:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] rosie! help! In-Reply-To: <08ae01c78a84$b6271800$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200704292135.l3TLZGHs000289@andromeda.ziaspace.com> A fuel tanker overturned up the street in Oakland this morning. The fire was so intense it caused the freeway overhead to melt and collapse: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/29/highway.collapse.ap/index.html But Rosie Odonnell and the truther movement assured me that a fuel fire like this one is not hot enough to melt steel. Freeway overpasses have steel supports. Which means the explosives must have been in place *before* the tanker truck arrived to stage the "accident." And a bunch of Jews who would have ordinarily been on the freeway were nowhere to be seen! An inside job, we can be sure. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Apr 29 23:26:20 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:26:20 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> At 10:25 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: >Likewise if someone demonstrated that ESP works. That has been done sufficiently already. > Why didn't evolution seize upon it? Evolution probably did seize upon it. >Why aren't the very gifted few already at work cleaining out >the casinos in Las Vegas? Why aren't really gifted card sharps and other grifters cleaning out casinos? >What are the physical laws that account for it? Good question, perhaps akin to: what, in 1900, were the known physical laws that accounted for dark matter and energy and the accelerated continuing expansion of the universe? >Do ESP influences travel faster than light? The question implies a model that might be inappropos. Certainly there are observed correspondences between what seem to be "responses" and what seem to be "stimuli" outside their lightcones. >If so, what happens to relativity theory? Good question. What happens to relativity theory with nonlocal quantum connectivity? There are answers to the latter, but not everyone is happy with them because they mostly look like dodges. >And on and on and on. Back to square one all over again. Not at all. Why? Did relativity take *everything* "back to square one"? No, but it took some fancy dancing to accommodate earlier understandings. Damien Broderick From ben at goertzel.org Sun Apr 29 23:50:37 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:50:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Stem cell based Japanesification Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704291650j4842ed91h7fc16961869c42fa@mail.gmail.com> Now available commercially... http://zebradillo.com/Shoppeproducts/Japanesifier.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 00:23:45 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:23:45 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, In-Reply-To: References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com> <200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> <009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Randall Randall wrote: > > > On Apr 29, 2007, at 1:14 PM, John K Clark wrote: > > What it means is that you got a bunch of atoms to interact in the > > same way > > as an original group of atoms, and then you changed the > > organization of the > > original group of atoms (for example blowing up the original man > > with a > > stick of dynamite). You claim there has been a HUGE subjective > > difference > > (even though the person in question can detect no subjective > > difference!), > > Uh... let me point out that the person in question could > detect no subjective difference even if you just did the > dynamiting part. That's true. Every night you go to bed, you die, and just as Heartland says it's only a fraud that the guy who wakes up the next morning thinks he is you; the real you is utterly oblivious because he doesn't exist any more. However, this is a fraud that everyone is perfectly happy with. If you blow them up and don't replace them, there is not even the fraudulaent appearance of continuity, and that's a bad thing. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 00:43:28 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:43:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <08ff01c78ac1$04a19cd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > If I-now think I've survived as a continuation of I-before, > then that's what matters in survival. Is that objective or subjective? There is an *objective* claim that you are making, namely that he is the same person as so-and-so, or is the same person who occupied spacetime coordinates X,Y,Z,T at some point in the past. But he may be simply mistaken. You at this moment are possibly not the person who wrote all those posts; so little of your true personality is revealed by them that it is marginally possible that they were written by someone with your name (and a few of your memories), but then that person indeed was killed and replaced by you. It all depends on how much *factual* overlap there is in memories. > Both sides appear to be utterly blind to the necessity of an observer > function, to any discussion of meaning. Does the statement "Many people have been to Hawaii" require an observer to have any meaning? I say no! I say that when we *talk* about Hawaii, we *refer* to something outside ourselves and outside of all sentient observers. What we say may be true or false *about* that thing, and the truthity or falsity of the statement stands on its own. > "What is personal identity" doesn't have a clear answer; I say the answer is quite clear: although it's a continuum, of course, it amounts to memories. Lee > the best I can come up with in an attempt to be clear and consistent is to say that there is no objective self persisting through > time, but that this is a construct from separate moments of observerhood, which usually but by no means necessarily originate in a > single brain. "What do we mean by personal identity" is best answered by asking what matters in survival, as above. < _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 00:45:57 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:45:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <076e01c78912$efda8280$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <00f201c789b9$31dcfdb0$59074e0c@MyComputer> <07c201c789c7$a16f6d80$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <090001c78ac1$04ca3370$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > What if you > > are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor > > they've paid to imitate John K.Clark. The person acts like you do, > > and since (say) you're a recluse, no one notices (he has studied > > your emails carefully). What if, to make it convincing, they also > > somehow hypnotize that actor to actually believe that he is > > the person he's imitating? Then *you* are dead, regardless of > > your phony criterion of "subjectively". > > > > Subjectively he thinks he's you. Does that make him you? OF > > course not! > > If it's done perfectly, then you would have to say that the actor is you, > wouldn't you? Yes, because if it's done perfectly then all your memories are recreated in him, and all of his are discarded. So you have survived. Lee > The converse situation is that the gangsters don't kill you, but knock you around and brainwash you so that you forget everything > about your past and identity, and instead have false memories implanted. In that case, the gangsters have done almost as good a > job as killing you outright - and I say "almost" only because there may be some hope that the procedure is reversible. < From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Apr 30 01:16:25 2007 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:16:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] rosie! help! In-Reply-To: <200704292135.l3TLZGHs000289@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <08ae01c78a84$b6271800$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20070429211317.04179a20@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:35 PM 4/29/2007 -0700, you wrote: >A fuel tanker overturned up the street in Oakland this morning. The fire >was so intense it caused the freeway overhead to melt and collapse: I would be very surprised to see an open air gasoline fire melt steel >http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/29/highway.collapse.ap/index.html > >But Rosie Odonnell and the truther movement assured me that a fuel fire like >this one is not hot enough to melt steel. Freeway overpasses have steel >supports. Right. But I do expect the steel supports to reach red heat, at which point they soften to the point they can't support the weight. Keith From Thomas at thomasoliver.net Mon Apr 30 00:54:12 2007 From: Thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:54:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <46353E34.106@thomasoliver.net> Jef Allbright wrote: >[...] > >If this debate ever develops from "what is personal identity" to "what >do we mean by person identity" then it might get interesting. > >- Jef > > I've certainly been guilty of assuming everyone agreed on my definition of a vague term. Remember our frustrating discussion of "coercion?" But can polling for a probablistic consensus save us from being wrong? In considering the heap paradox it occurred to me that it could be resolved by defining a sand heap as a minimum of four grains of sand with three grains forming a stable platform to elevate and support a fourth. Perhaps the observer function constitutes the minimum property of personal identity. I'll give it more thought when I get the time. -- Thomas From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 30 01:40:33 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:40:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <08ff01c78ac1$04a19cd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Stathis: >> If I-now think I've survived as a continuation of I-before, >> then that's what matters in survival. That doesn't matter at all. Why should it matter? Is there an argument for why this should matter? If it exists, I would love to read it. Stathis: >> Is that objective or subjective? Of course it's subjective so it's not valid evidence at all. H. From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 03:27:48 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:27:48 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] fermionic light Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429222715.021ab8d8@satx.rr.com> Bright future for ?solid light? [ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 4 30 April - 14 May 2007 ] By Rebecca Scott When photons interact they can behave like a solid. Researchers from the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge have unveiled a new theory that shows light can behave like a solid. ?Solid light will help us build the technology of this century,? says research team member, University of Melbourne physicist Dr Andrew Greentree. Dr Greentree and School of Physics colleagues Jared Cole and Professor Lloyd Hollenberg, with Dr Charles Tahan of the University of Cambridge, made their ?solid light? breakthrough by studying light with tools more commonly used to study matter. ?Solid light photons repel each other as electrons do. This means we can control photons, opening the door to new kinds of faster computers,? says Dr Greentree. ?Many real-world problems in quantum physics are too hard to solve with today?s computers. Our discovery shows how to replicate these hard problems in a system we can control and measure.? He says photons of light do not normally interact with each other. In contrast, the electrons used by computers strongly repel each other. The team has shown theoretically how to engineer a ?phase transition? in photons, leading them to change their state so that they do interact with each other. Mr Cole describes a phase transition as a change in the state of something ? ?such as when water becomes ice?. ?Usually, photons flow freely, but in the right circumstances, they repel each other, and form a crystal.? He says phase transitions are important in science and technology, but only the simplest examples are as yet understood. Dr Greentree says the solid light phase transition effect ties together two very different areas of physics, optics and condensed matter ?to create a whole new way of thinking?. ?It is very exciting for the University of Melbourne and its international collaborators to be leading the world in this new area,? he says. The team?s work has been reported in Nature Physics and New Scientist. Funding has come from international and national sources, including the Australian Research Council, Australian Government, US National Security Agency, the US-based Advanced Research and Development Activity, US Army Research Office and US National Science Foundation. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 04:55:36 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:55:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Type vs. instance with respect to identity acrosstime (a reply to Jeffrey) References: <20061102062735.57668.qmail@web52612.mail.yahoo.com><015601c7010a$6a7d5d50$450a4e0c@MyComputer><008101c701b4$37b35870$250b4e0c@MyComputer><3C5E9884-5CD8-46CC-9841-28C6980CE600@randallsquared.com><059a01c701f8$841e1670$bb0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <092401c78ae4$1892f810$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Slawomir and Jeffrey discuss identity. > A B: >> You say that it is a unique trajectory through space >> and time that specifies an identity. (Correct me if >> that is not a fair or correct representation).On the >> face of it, I actually don't disagree with you. >> Another way to describe that is that two different >> trajectories are different precisely because they are >> separated both in space and time (which are both >> intertwined entities as far as I know). But this, in >> addition to other "factors" is why I believe it is >> appropriate to believe that no "self" continues >> through time, and that we are in fact "dieing" >> continuously (and it's not a big deal). It is not a big deal, I guess you to mean, because we are so accustomed to it. Almost anything that happens to us each Planck interval can't be as alarming as, say, Muslim fundamentalism. In fact, several people here, following Derek Parfit's lead, do emphasize that survival is what counts. We all of us *do* want to survive (except the poor souls who are very depressed, for instance). I choose to define "self" and what "I" am in a way that is more consistent with the above daily facts of life. That which does not change sufficiently from ordinary day to ordinary day is what I happen to be. Now sure, if tomorrow you put me in an unbelievably intense Army existence, where I lopped off other people's heads every day in some medieval setting, and my best friends were crude barbarians who spoke only an archaic version of Swedish, then I probably would not stay me very long, no matter *how* continuous and uninterupted my process (a la Heartland). Why isn't it better to change the meaning of these very, very, very common words like "me" and "I" and "self" to accomodate to this reality---so that our sentences make sense legally and in daily life---than to kling to [excuse me] idiotic redefinitions of what everyone else means, so that I am a bit string that changes every femto-second. It's just a useless way of talking in my NSHO. Slawomir: > Suppose we reduce a person to a string of bits (that is, "person=pattern of > bits"). Tomorrow or even a second later that person-representing string will get > longer or shorter (as new memories are being created and old ones evaporate) while > the bits that make up the string change also so that the pattern of bits is almost > certainly different at different times. If so, then each of these strings at > different times must be assigned different identity according to Leibniz's law and > if we still assume that persons are nothing but strings, we are forced to conclude > that people die constantly. This is all philosophy. It's impractical. We should focus on what it is about us that we treasure. None of us is really interested in how my bit string varies from moment to moment, or from year to year. We are interested in survival. Philsophy should be *prescriptive*. What good is all this talk of uploading if we can just wait around until it happens and then decide if forking is okay, memory erasure is okay, and so on? Good philosophy should be about *decisions* that you would make. Would you teleport? Would you let your EEG go flat for a second if a certain cancer cure demanded it? And so on. Lee > However, we are more like minds and processes rather than brains and patterns. I > claim that "person=instance of process" is the only model that can accurately > reflect the dynamic nature of our minds in contrast to static patterns. > > So how does this "person=instance of process" model performs with respect to > identity across time? Unlike patterns, processes are undefined in time intervals > equal to 0. It simply does not make sense to say that there is such a thing as > process-at-t3 and process-at-t789. Instead, any process is necessarily defined > across *all* ts in the interval equal to the duration of an instance of that > process. Because processes are defined across time, it is impossible to find a > single property y of an instance of the process at any t1 in the interval with a > value that is going to be different from a value of property y of this instance at > t2 (because these values will refer to the same exact instance). > > Leibniz's law applied to "person=instance of process" model suggests that I'm still > the same person (instance of process) I was yesterday. > ---- > > Even though the above analysis was done with respect to time, the same analysis > also applies to space as processes are necessarily defined across space. This is > why I still claim we don't die as we glide through time and space. > > Slawomir From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 05:08:20 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:08:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com> <009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <093701c78ae6$33d42200$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark had earlier written attacking the High Priest of Atoms in words like these: > According to him the whole ball game is something that is > impossible to detect subjectively but nevertheless (for reasons > never explained) I should be very concerned about it, > subjectively. To say this is silly is a vast understatement. And I thought that he also threw around the word "you" carelessly, and so in effect simply was not correctly aiming at Heartland's true beliefs. So I said: >> Can't you see that you keep begging the question? And John said > No I can't see that, I can't see that at all. Well, okay, since I can't find exactly what set me off, I withdraw that particular charge. (But see my last paragraph rchere.) Having missed John's *online* comment I wrote back to him as follows: >> What if you are killed tonight by some gangsters, and replaced by an actor >> they've paid to imitate John K. Clark. > > But I am also an actor, playing the part of John K Clark of yesterday, and I > am such a good actor I think I'm him. I am not in distress, I feel fine, so > I see no reason to be unhappy if the same thing happens to me again > tomorrow. I would say that we could familiarize someone with all that is known about Napoleon (which is far, far short of what the actual historical Napoleon knew about himself), then hypnotize this actor to believe that he is the real Napoleon. But then we would *not* have resurrected the real McCoy. > And another thing, you lambasted me for saying the High Priest thought atoms > were sacred, but in your above quotation you throw around the word > "replaced" as if the meaning were obvious; but what is actually being > "replaced"? I meant it in the same way that reader's of a detective SF novel would take it: You are replaced (even by your exact duplicate) if your historical collection of atoms are physically seized and terminated, and replaced by something or some one. E.g., you might be replaced by a dog. Where you and I agree (and peculiarly, so many people do not due, I think to certain things they learned before age 1 that they have not been able to overcome), that if you (your present collection of atoms) are replaced in the sense that I just said by an exact duplicate, then it does not matter. I go further than you; I claim that if your present instance (i.e. collection of atoms) is replaced by the John K. Clark of yesterday, and $10M is now in JC's bank account, that this has been very good for JC, and for every near copy of JC (such as the collection of atoms now reading this). In order to define "replace" in the sense that everyone uses, I have had to resort to language that including talk of atoms. I hope that you read the preceding paragraph carefully enough to see that I am in *no* way whatsoever attached to my atoms. It is just to explain what "replaced" means, as you requested. Okay, now that you asked what I meant by "replaced", you offer your own definition: > What it means is that you got a bunch of atoms to interact in the same way > as an original group of atoms, same atoms > and then you changed the organization of the > original group of atoms (for example blowing up the original man with a > stick of dynamite). You claim there has been a HUGE subjective difference > (even though the person in question can detect no subjective difference!), > but what has actually changed? We now use different atoms, that's it, atoms > the Scientific method can find no difference in. Of course, atoms are not the issue. If Heartland thought they were, I would not have lambasted you. But I think that what you are saying here I addressed with my Napoleon story above. Or am I missing your point here? To be clear, again, not only do I not care if you replace me (I defined "replace" above) with other atoms having the same LeeCorbin pattern, I don't even care much if you replace me with a frozen copy (of course made out of different atoms) that you made yesterday, (for some reasonable monetary reward, say, like a few extra days vacation or something). > So don't tell me I'm being unfair to call it the sacred atoms theory. I don't get it, John. That guy has said over and over that the atoms are not the problem, and I believe that because from your point of view and mine his problems are much deeper and much worse. *Even* if the same atoms are kept, any cessation of process is equal to death to him. The atoms thing seems to me to be a red-herring. Suppose that we (you, Stathis, Eugen, etc.) prevail by some miracle, and he starts to see that live/dead is not quite black and white, and so he allows an itty bitty amount of freezing or halting of his instance. That is, he concedes that he can be interrupted and then resume living. If we ever get him to *that* point, then we can discuss swapping in new atoms on him and see how it grabs him. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 05:17:51 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:17:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will He Who Loves His Atoms Please Stand Up? References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <093801c78ae6$e7e193e0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > At 03:41 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > >> microsecond 0-1 Randall is frozen >> microsecond 1-2 Randall is copied atom for atom into Randall 2 >> microsecond 2-3 Randall 1 is vaporized >> microsecond 3-4 Randall 2 is moved to exactly the same place >> that Randall 1 was at >> microseconds 4-10000 Randall2 thinks his Randall-type thoughts >> and experiences his Randall-type life > > Stop there. *Obviously* Randall2 thinks (or at least feels) he's > continuous with the original. Surely nobody disputes this. It's part > of the definition of "perfect copy." Right. > The only matter at stake is whether R1 should object to being > obliterated and replaced by R2...n. I would, even in such a > preposterously rigged and probably physically impossible > procedure. I'm pretty sure Randall would. But you are changing each nanosecond anyway. And the point that several of the rest of us make is that what do you care if one of your carbon atoms were surgically replaced by an entirely "different" [har har] carbon atom? What do you care if instantaneously 10^23 (less that one cc) of your carbon atoms are instantaneously replaced? We don't see how you can object to having *all* your carbon atoms and *all* your oxygen atoms, etc., instantaneously replaced. Unless you want to wrest the title "High Priest of the Atom" away from Heartland (who doesn't deserve it anyway). But it's John's to anoint you, not me. :-) Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 05:27:59 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:27:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <094401c78ae9$02d40190$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert writes On 4/27/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > [someone wrote] > > > in the same way that two copies of _The Spike_ are > > > often said loosely [sic] to be the "same book". > > > > Loosely? That *is* the common way of speaking, and > > if I say that my fiancee and I found upon meeting that > > we had read the same book, no one would suppose > > that we merely read the same particular copy. > > God Lee, Damien didn't tell you... Due to publisher funding > restrictions, Damien only had half a million monkeys to > assemble the pages -- he authored the words but the > paragraph and page assembly was done under contract. But if the content is the same, surely the book "really is" the same book. I mean, Damien will sue the bejesus out of anyone else's name on his books, even if the paragraphing is redone a bit badly. www.bejesus.com > They had to have a bunch of gamestations pick up the slack. > So I am not so sure that you two may have read the same > book. They could have been quite different books but given > enough similar impressions and you could have manufactured > a *belief* that you read the same book.But you did not verify it. The *whole* question REALLY DOES hinge on how *similar* are the two books! You haven't really said explicitly enough for me whether or not a sensible Judge---upon reading both books ---will with his common sense decree that they're the same book. It sounds as though they are. When I am uploaded, it'll be me iff the similarity is sufficient. If the "paragraphing" is done a bit differently---maybe some neural equivalent tracks are replaced by virtual connections that are more efficient, it simply does not matter. What matters is if I act rather indistinguishably from the old Lee Corbin. You will even be able to tell by talking to me, and also getting testimony from all the people who know me. I'll settle even for that, (since I think that no mortal actor, however skilled, could really imitate me sufficient well to fool my friends and relatives). Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 05:34:00 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:34:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien writes > At 10:25 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > >>Likewise if someone demonstrated that ESP works. > > That has been done sufficiently already. When will someone make some money out of an obviously incredibly powerful faculty? >> Why didn't evolution seize upon it? > > Evolution probably did seize upon it. Where? We just don't see it at all, except in very peculiar and highly statistically suspicious experiments done by a few scientists. >> Why aren't the very gifted few already at work cleaning out >> the casinos in Las Vegas? > > Why aren't really gifted card sharps and other grifters cleaning out casinos? I've seen on TV how they watch *everybody* for conventional cheating, using all sorts of spying cameras. But if I had ESP, why couldn't I just know when to fold when playing 21, or something? What could they do? Here is what would happen: the casinos would simply begin throwing out people who were "too lucky", with no other explanation. I haven't heard of this, have you? And the casino ownership would be putting huge money into how this "cheating" was occuring. I don't think they are. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 06:01:00 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:01:00 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> At 10:34 PM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > > >>Likewise if someone demonstrated that ESP works. > > > That has been done sufficiently already. > >When will someone make some money out of an >obviously incredibly powerful faculty? Whoever said it was incredibly powerful? Actually almost all the extant evidence says that it's weak and intermittent (when used intentionally). > >> Why didn't evolution seize upon it? > > > > Evolution probably did seize upon it. > >Where? We just don't see it at all Fish don't see the sea, we don't see the air. > > Why aren't really gifted card sharps and other grifters cleaning > out casinos? > >I've seen on TV how they watch *everybody* for conventional >cheating, using all sorts of spying cameras. But if I had ESP, >why couldn't I just know when to fold when playing 21, or >something? What could they do? > >Here is what would happen: the casinos would simply begin >throwing out people who were "too lucky", with no other >explanation. I haven't heard of this, have you? Yes, I'm amazed you haven't. "Card counters" don't use equipment, but out they go. Damien Broderick From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 06:04:28 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:04:28 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: References: <17645.97982.qm@web37413.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <08ff01c78ac1$04a19cd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Heartland wrote: > > Stathis: > >> If I-now think I've survived as a continuation of I-before, > >> then that's what matters in survival. > > That doesn't matter at all. Why should it matter? Is there an argument for > why this > should matter? If it exists, I would love to read it. The problem I have is with your definition of death. Suppose the traffic authorities decreed that drivers who exceeded the speed limit would die whenever photographed by one of their special cameras, as a deterrent. People would argue that in fact nothing has happened, but the counterargument would be that something has happened, and the post-photograph person only thinks he is the same as the pre-photograph person. There might be lab results indicating that all the cell membranes of volunteers giving their lives for traffic safety research go into a particular conformation when zapped by the cameras which for a nanosecond disrupts transmembrane ionic fluxes, and which the researchers insist is incontrovertible evidence that death has taken place. Would you have an argument to show that they are wrong? If so, why couldn't a similar argument be used against your criterion for death? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 06:30:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:30:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Damien Broderick wrote: >Here is what would happen: the casinos would simply begin > >throwing out people who were "too lucky", with no other > >explanation. I haven't heard of this, have you? > > Yes, I'm amazed you haven't. "Card counters" don't use equipment, but > out they go. I always wondered about that. How do they know that someone is counting cards rather than just lucky? Is it just the ones lucky at blackjack that they pick on, or do they also throw out the ones who do too well at roulette or the poker machines? Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moulton at moulton.com Mon Apr 30 06:24:56 2007 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:24:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Changing Other Poster's Minds In-Reply-To: <04EC18B1-A3AC-4C5B-A8B6-15B53E51D25E@randallsquared.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <04EC18B1-A3AC-4C5B-A8B6-15B53E51D25E@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <1177914296.3449.262.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 13:58 -0400, Randall Randall wrote: > On Apr 29, 2007, at 8:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > On 4/29/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > > I had the good fortune while I was a > > Christian conservative... > > > > Really? > > In case it's the presence of former Christians on > this list that astounds you, let me add that I, > too, used to be a Christian conservative (grew up > fundamentalist). As far as I know there has not been a study of the religious background of participants on this email list. However I would not be surprised that there would be quite a few from fundamentalist backgrounds. And I think there is a reason for this. My hypothesis is that fundamentalist religious movements often have a strong emphasis on be doctrinally correct and thus place a high value on study of the text of that religion. Which sometimes works to keep the person religious but can also get them so focused on being correct that they start looking at other books. First thing you know there is some philosophy, some science and then no longer fundamentalist, however the trait of being interested in ideas often hangs on. There is an interesting case of a fundamentalist minister Dan Barker who switched to being an atheist in his mid 30s. He has written a book about it. Or you can listen to him on a podcast. He is working with the Freedom from Religion Foundation and they have a weekly radio show that they make available for download and on one of those he tells part of his story. Also if someone is really interested they can read the book by Hunsberger and Altemeyer (two Canadian professors) who wrote a book titled Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers. The book is based on questionaires completed by San Francisco Bay Area atheists. It is a very interesting read. Fred From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 06:53:45 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:53:45 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430014708.021be348@satx.rr.com> At 04:30 PM 4/30/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: >How do they know that someone is counting cards rather than just lucky? What does "lucky" mean? I imagine they have a well-honed sense of the statistics of these "games" and boot out anyone who egregiously violates the bell curve. And don't forget the hunched psionic mutant hidden downstairs in its jar of nutrient fluids, tipping them off to the psychokinetic and precognitive scammers. >Is it just the ones lucky at blackjack that they pick on, or do they >also throw out the ones who do too well at roulette or the poker machines? My many contacts among the Mafia are close-mouthed about such intricacies, but I wouldn't be surprised. Especially in the age of microminiaturized gadgets. (Recalling *The Eudaemonic Pie*, by Thomas A. Bass.) Damien Broderick From pgptag at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 07:32:17 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:32:17 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Yesterday's Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life Message-ID: <470a3c520704300032k7921415bm841865662a983990@mail.gmail.com> http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_h_and_religion_in_sl/ Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life Sunday, April 29, 2007, uvvy island in SL The event was organized by the Second Life Chapterof the World Transhumanist Association . Speakers: Giulio Prisco , Executive Director, World Transhumanist Association(yours truly). I summarized my article/book precis Engineering Transcendence . Extropia Dasilva, Fascinating and Mysterious Virtual Personality. Extropia is a "transhumanist avatar" who writes some of the best mind expanding stuff about first and second life, the universe and everything. Her talk Climbing Technological Mount Improbableis available online. James Hughes , Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies . James presented his paper "The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future" (link ). Lincoln Cannon, President, Mormon Transhumanist Association . Lincoln presented the fascinating blend of Mormonism and Transhumanism developed by the MTA. My presentation started, as usual, with a personal introduction slide where I said that I am with the WTA but am now speaking on behalf of Giulio Prisco, Giulio Perhaps (my avatar in SL), Yours Truly, the Fat Ugly Guy here (my avatar again) and Myself. I presented my own views on transhumanism and religion, which are not and cannot be represented as official WTA views. I think the "cosmic" part of transhumanism *is* an alternative to religion, firmly based on the scientific worldview, but able to provide much of what most people search in a religion. My conclusion: "Our Manifest Destiny: our species will spread to the stars, merge with its technology, and acquire god-like powers. Uploading technology will permit cybernetic immortality with the safeguard of backup copies. With "future magic", we may find a way one day to bring back all persons who have ever lived. This can be an alternative to religion, based on science, rationality and humanism. I am very interested in the current experimental activities to memetically engineer transhumanist alternatives to religion, based on science, but still able to offer hope in "another life" even for those who are already dead". Extropia gave, as usual, a very thoughtful and challenging presentationof current trends towards a Singularity and beyond. Her conclusion: "If the technological Singularity is not the summit of Mount Improbable after all, one might ask what is. Will science reveal the answer? Or maybe philosophy? Perhaps theology? Or should we conjecture that these are all manifestations of a grander overarching conceptual framework that we currently cannot comprehend, but may come to appreciate as we ascend to a state that might appropriately be defined as 'God'? I like to think so!". James had a monster presentation of interfaces, similarities and differences, and possible cross-talks between transhumanism and religions. James is, of course, a smart politician who knows better than trying to be too explicit on whether transhumanism can or cannot be an alternative to religion. His conclusion: "Transhumanism is potentially compatible with many metaphysics, theodicies, soteriologies and eschatologies. Religious will incorporate the H+ project into their faiths to create trans-spiritualities. The future religious landscape will be much more interesting". This concept of infecting religions with transhumanist memes is not so different from my concept of engineering religions based on transhumanism, and basically similar to an equivalent strategy, often discussed on the lists, to develop a transhumanist memetic presence in political movements. Lincoln affirmed the basic compatibility between Mormonism and Transhumanism. He stated that the views of the MTA are received "with interest" by the larger Mormon community. His conclusions: "We believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable such exaltation, including realization of diverse prophetic visions of transfiguration, immortality, resurrection, renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end". This is, I believe, a perfect explanation of why, despite what fundamentalists may say, transhumanism is not at all incompatible with religion but, on the contrary, each of the two sets of sensibilities can boost the other in a positive feedback loop. This was a very good event and I was especially pleased to see some of the newcomers join the Second Life Chapter of the WTA. Technical notes: All speakers with the exception of Extropia used audio streaming for presentations and answers to questions from the audience. James Hughes and Lincoln Cannon used the Shoutcast plugin for Winamp to stream to our Shoutcast server, and I used Nicecast on a Mac to do the same. The technical challenge was the coordination of sound streams coming from different remote locations (basically, the previous speaker has to stop broadcasting, the next speaker must start broadcasting, nobody must start broadcasting at any moment different from the scheduled moment, and an occasional restart of the Shoutcast server may be required). Audio worked very well for James and Lincoln (their voices were crystal clear). It worked very well also for me but with some interruptions (I had to restart broadcasting several times). This was due to a combination of other speakers starting their broadcast while mine was still on and the fact that my Internet connection was not so reliable yesterday. About 60 persons attended, with a peak audience of 45. There was not too much lag despite uvvy island being only a Class 4 sim. Extropia's talk was disturbed by a griefer who, of course, was kicked out and banned from the region. He may even have been (you never know) one of the well known outspoken enemies of transhumanism. I can see his point - our ideas *are* a danger for the narrow, fundamentalist mentality they represent. This page on the uvvy wiki has more pictures and will be updated with pictures, links, transcripts, audio and video clips as they become available. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 08:10:44 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:10:44 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430014708.021be348@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430014708.021be348@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 04:30 PM 4/30/2007 +1000, Stathis wrote: > > >How do they know that someone is counting cards rather than just lucky? > > What does "lucky" mean? I imagine they have a well-honed sense of the > statistics of these "games" and boot out anyone who egregiously > violates the bell curve. And don't forget the hunched psionic mutant > hidden downstairs in its jar of nutrient fluids, tipping them off to > the psychokinetic and precognitive scammers. > > >Is it just the ones lucky at blackjack that they pick on, or do they > >also throw out the ones who do too well at roulette or the poker machines? > > My many contacts among the Mafia are close-mouthed about such > intricacies, but I wouldn't be surprised. Especially in the age of > microminiaturized gadgets. (Recalling *The Eudaemonic Pie*, by Thomas > A. Bass.) > The obvious solution is to claim that anybody who is successful at anything is using unsuspected psi powers. Unsuspected because is many cases the psi is so weak that it just gives him a slight edge over non-psi people. And this edge accumulates over time. Or maybe the psi power just came into play once, when he had to make a major decision which led to all the future success. A claim which you can believe, but no one can disprove. It's the best! BillK From scerir at libero.it Mon Apr 30 08:45:08 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:45:08 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><46349D88.3010102@pooq.com><08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com><094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070430014708.021be348@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <003401c78b03$e2aa8fe0$52971f97@archimede> Damien wrote: > My many contacts among the Mafia are close-mouthed > about such intricacies, but I wouldn't be surprised. > Especially in the age of microminiaturized gadgets. Now I understand why sometimes funding is so difficult ... http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/310821_quantum09.html From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 10:01:15 2007 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 06:01:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Bigger carbon nanotubes... Message-ID: Here is a URL [1] for a University of Cincinatti report about methods for growing "long" (18mm) carbon nanotubes in quantities that would seem to be considered the early stages of commercialization. This is interesting one can imagine a whole set of industries that could be significantly altered by inexpensive nanotubes -- if nanotubes have ~60x the tensile strength of steel with atoms that weigh only 25% as much it looks like one could significantly reduce the 1700+ lbs (770 kg) one finds in the average automobile. Robert. 1.http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=5700 (the pictures are pretty cool...) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 13:24:39 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:24:39 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only? In-Reply-To: References: <582857.3532.qm@web51903.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Jef Allbright wrote: It appears that you disagree with the standard notion of MPD, seeing > only a single intrinsic identity exhibiting multiple patterns of > behavior. I disagree with MPD, seeing no intrinsic identities at all, > and only various patterns of behavior. It's the difference between the multiple patterns of behaviour being aware of each other and feeling they "own" each other's actions, or else time sharing the same body as separate patterns of behaviour, with some of the patterns of behaviour being completely unaware of the presence or actions of the others. (Although the latter makes it into DSM-IV as Dissociative Identity Disorder, its existence as a real clinical entity is controversial, but we can nevertheless consider it as at least a theoretical possibility.) You can describe the difference as I just have, or you can describe the "normal" case as a single integrated identity and the MPD/DID case as multiple identities in the one body. > > It seems that our difference comes down to our difference in > > > understanding the nature of subjective experience. You seem to > > > believe that subjective experience is fundamental or primary in some > > > important way (it is, but to apply it to "objective" descriptions of > > > the world entails a category error), while I see "subjective > > > experience" very simply as a description of the perceived internal > > > state of any system, as perceived by that system. > > > > I'm not sure how to respond to this, because I don't see the > disagreement. > > It seems to me that the essential difference is that your view seems > to assume the existence of an additional ontic entity representing the > subjective self. Thus your descriptions seem to me to include > distracting Ptolomeic epicycles. I must keep missing the mark with my terminology here, because I don't actually believe in any such additional ontic entity. It's just often easier to refer to person, identity, self, etc. as a collective term, like "football team" is a collective term for individuals who play football and tend to cooperate in particular loosely-defined ways during a football match. The players, coach, team colours etc. can change over time but there is still a sense in which in which it is the "same" team, mainly because the changes are gradual and the players and supporters consider it to be the same team. But I don't think this entails that there is a separate ontic entity representing the team. Then there is the quite separate issue: what almost everyone naively means when they refer to "themselves" is *important*. This has nothing to do with philosophical considerations but is just a statement of value. The sun still feels warm on your face irrespective of whether it is a nuclear reactor or a ball of fire dragged across the sky by Apollo in his chariot. > That there is some subjective experience associated with certain physical > > processes is surely undeniable. For all I know, there may also be a some > > > tiny subjective experience when a thermostat responds to a temperature > > change, or even when the thermostat just sits there. The "perceived > internal > > state of any system as perceived by the system" is as good a description > of > > this as any, and captures the fact that there is no separate > consciousness > > juice at work here. > > Would "as good as any, and..." imply "better than many, because..."? It's better than any descriptions postulating a separate ontic entity, for a start. > As to whether the subjective experience is part of an > > objective description of the world, that might just boil down to be a > matter > > of linguistic taste. Did I just write that sentence because I wanted to, > or > > did I *really* write that sentence because the matter in my brain, a > slave > > to the laws of physics, made me do so? > > Either can be equally valid, within context. But one of these is > preferable per the heuristic of Ockham's principle of parsimony. I didn't think that Ockham's razor says anything about how verbose you can be in your explanation. Two explanations can be equivalent even though one is longer than the other, and both might be preferable to a shorter, but wildly improbable explanation. > But the crucial point is that all the functional subsystems in the brain > are > > normally in communication, creating an integrated whole, or the illusion > of > > an integrated whole if you prefer that qualifier. > > Okay so far, with the understanding that the "illusion of an > integrated whole" is "experienced" at the level of the whole. > > > If I am linked to another > > person so that I experience his thoughts, feelings, memories and he > mine, > > How could two individual components of a system have the same > experience? I know there's plenty of science fiction providing such > scenarios, but in terms of actual systems theory it's incoherent. Imagine doing the actual experiment. You walk up to someone and effect connection between your brain and his brain. Suddenly, all your sensory inputs double, you seem to remember stuff that you know you always knew but somehow couldn't quite access until a moment ago, and you seem to understand and conceptualise things which you couldn't quite grasp before (OK, it probably wouldn't work at all because the two brains' internal wiring will be completely incompatible or something, but it's a SF scenario). So there wouldn't be two entities with shared experiences, there would be one entity with the shared experience of the original two entities. On the other hand, if the connection worked but was low bandwidth, I think there would be a sense in which individuality could be maintained. You would observe your counterpart wincing in response to touching a hotplate with his right hand, and then a few moments later you would see your own #2 right hand touching the hotplate and experience the pain. You might even consider severing the connection if you thought the pain was going to be bad enough, although that might be like having a stroke affecting one side of your body. I'm > not sure how to frame this concept effectively for you; I think your > background is more in the "softer" humanities side than the "harder" > sciences and engineering side of C.P. Snow's Great Divide. No actually, I grew up playing with electric circuits and making explosives. It's a wonder I survived to adulthood. System-level thoughts are not spread throughout the > elements of the system, they are "emergent" as the higher level > behavior of the system. From an engineering perspective this is just > so obvious I don't know what else to say within the limitations of > this medium of email. But I remain motivated to work together toward > a mutual understanding. Sure, I understand that. I don't "see" in the neurons of my visual cortex, even though those neurons fire when I look at something. Only in certain neurological diseases do the various functional subsystems become dis-integrated. > > It might be informative to consider the distinction between > > > "subjective reality" and "subjective experience" above. > > ? > > In an effective hive mind, as with a human mind, the functional > components couldn't possibly, even in principle, work with the > infinite complexity of unfiltered reality. The very process of > "making sense" (extracting, selecting, and encoding regularities) of > the environment creates a "subjective reality" that is "subjectively > experienced." OK, but it's sort of strange to think of subjective reality without also automatically thinking of it as subjectively experienced. > I like to think of reductionism as the "true" theory explaining the world. > A > > hydrogen atom behaves differently from a proton and electron, but > really, it > > is *no more* than a proton and electron; it's just that we're not smart > > enough for the behaviour of a hydrogen atom to be immediately and > > intuitively obvious when we contemplate its components, so we call it > > emergent behaviour. > > I used to strongly believe the same way. At some point I realized > that reductionism is an idealization that ultimately fails due to the > utter inability of any system to form an objective model of its world. > Consider the three-body problem as part of the explanation. (As a > self-referential aside, a complete explanation is of course impossible > here or in any other context.) The three body problem can be solved by computer simulation using nothing more than the laws of classical mechanics. It's just luck that the single body problem has the solution x=vt which provides us a computational shortcut. I don't see why one explanation is called reductionist and the other not. In any case, reductionism does involve an idealization because it assumes the observer is outside of the system under consideration; but this is just a practicality, like getting sufficiently accurate starting parameters to predict the behaviour of a chaotic system. > > > In a society with multiple individuals, the Cristians might decide to > > > > > persecute the Muslims. But if a single individual is struggling with > the > > > > idea of whether to follow Christianity or Islam, he is hardly in a > > position > > > > to persecute one or other aspect of himself. The internal conflict > may > > lead > > > > to distress, but that isn't the same thing. > > > > > > As I see it, clearly one of those conflicting systems of thought is > > > going to lose representation, corresponding to "dying" within the mind > > > > of the person hosting the struggle. > > > > > > Maybe here again we see the same fundamental difference in our views. > > > In your view (I'm guessing) the difference is that no one died, no > > > unique personal consciousness was extinguished. > > > > Yes; the part that "loses" the battle lives on in the consciousness of > the > > whole, and might even reassert itself at some future point. It's a > matter of > > who gets hurt or upset, and how complete and irreversible the process > is. > > I strongly disagree. The configuration of the system necessarily > changes to reflect the outcome of the conceptual battle. Although it > sounds nice in humanistic terms to think that each conceptual entity > is somehow fully preserved, I don't see how this thinking can be > warranted. If the human brain or hive-mind were a closed system, then > this could argued on the basis of conservation of information, but > that is far from the case. Then I would return to the naive, non-philosophical stance and point out that, as a matter of fact, if I have an opinion and change my mind about it, I am at worst only a little upset, whereas faced with the prospect that my opinion will be wiped from the collection of individuals by means of homicide, I will be very upset. > > In my view, a person > > > exists to the extent that they have an observable effect (no matter > > > how indirect); there is no additional ontological entity representing > > > the unique core of their being, or subjective experience, or whatever > > > it is called by various peoples for the thousands of years since > > > people became aware of their awareness. > > > > I would agree that a person cannot exist without having an observable > > effect, and that this observable effect is necessary and sufficient for > the > > existence of that person. However, the observable effect is only > important > > to the person themselves insofar as it does give rise to this feeling of > > personhood or consciousness. That is, if the same effect could be > reproduced > > using computer hardware, or by God in heaven, or whatever, that would be > > fine with me. > > I am somewhat hopeful that the thinking in Hofstadter's _I Am A > Strange Loop_ will help clarify this. Could you specify a chapter? Thank-you, as ever, for your careful consideration of my posts. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no Mon Apr 30 14:08:58 2007 From: sondre.bjellas at intellifield.no (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:08:58 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org><20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org><084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><46349D88.3010102@pooq.com><08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4249F7D5E13BF24C9BA37E6ACC55B8B624BF9F@webmail.sensetech.no> The reason you never read about the Casinos throwing the ("lucky") people out, is because they hire the people to be dealers, in which they win every single time. I know this, I have been to Las Vegas! Seriously, psi-power does not exists today and will probably not evolve naturally. It's like religious people claiming that there is a god or higher power. People can believe whatever they want, but the burden of proof is on their shoulders. Regards, Sondre -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin Sent: 30. april 2007 07:34 To: ExI chat list Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. Damien writes > At 10:25 AM 4/29/2007 -0700, Lee wrote: > >>Likewise if someone demonstrated that ESP works. > > That has been done sufficiently already. When will someone make some money out of an obviously incredibly powerful faculty? >> Why didn't evolution seize upon it? > > Evolution probably did seize upon it. Where? We just don't see it at all, except in very peculiar and highly statistically suspicious experiments done by a few scientists. >> Why aren't the very gifted few already at work cleaning out >> the casinos in Las Vegas? > > Why aren't really gifted card sharps and other grifters cleaning out casinos? I've seen on TV how they watch *everybody* for conventional cheating, using all sorts of spying cameras. But if I had ESP, why couldn't I just know when to fold when playing 21, or something? What could they do? Here is what would happen: the casinos would simply begin throwing out people who were "too lucky", with no other explanation. I haven't heard of this, have you? And the casino ownership would be putting huge money into how this "cheating" was occuring. I don't think they are. Lee _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ********************************************************************** This e-mail has been scanned for viruses and found clean. ********************************************************************** From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Apr 30 14:25:52 2007 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:25:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] fermionic light References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429222715.021ab8d8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <096e01c78b33$f68a7310$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Hi Damien, the link below doesn't work. Is "The" supposed to be the last part of it? Thanks for copying the text---I guess all of it--- from the link. Also, did you see my post "Will He Who Loves His Atoms Please Stand Up?". It was directed to you. No problem if you did, just wanted to make sure that you knew it was not towards Heartland or John Clark, etc. Lee ----- Original Message ----- From: "Damien Broderick" To: "'ExI chat list'" Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2007 8:27 PM Subject: [extropy-chat] fermionic light > > > Bright future for 'solid light' > > [ > The > University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 4 30 April - 14 May 2007 ] > > By Rebecca Scott > > When photons interact they can behave like a solid. > > Researchers from the universities of Melbourne > and Cambridge have unveiled a new theory that > shows light can behave like a solid. > > "Solid light will help us build the technology of > this century," says research team member, > University of Melbourne physicist Dr Andrew Greentree. > > Dr Greentree and School of Physics colleagues > Jared Cole and Professor Lloyd Hollenberg, with > Dr Charles Tahan of the University of Cambridge, > made their 'solid light' breakthrough by studying > light with tools more commonly used to study matter. > > "Solid light photons repel each other as > electrons do. This means we can control photons, > opening the door to new kinds of faster computers," says Dr Greentree. > > "Many real-world problems in quantum physics are > too hard to solve with today's computers. Our > discovery shows how to replicate these hard > problems in a system we can control and measure." > > He says photons of light do not normally interact > with each other. In contrast, the electrons used > by computers strongly repel each other. > > The team has shown theoretically how to engineer > a 'phase transition' in photons, leading them to > change their state so that they do interact with each other. > > Mr Cole describes a phase transition as a change > in the state of something - "such as when water becomes ice". > > "Usually, photons flow freely, but in the right > circumstances, they repel each other, and form a crystal." > > He says phase transitions are important in > science and technology, but only the simplest examples are as yet understood. > > Dr Greentree says the solid light phase > transition effect ties together two very > different areas of physics, optics and condensed > matter "to create a whole new way of thinking". > > "It is very exciting for the University of > Melbourne and its international collaborators to > be leading the world in this new area," he says. > > The team's work has been reported in Nature Physics and New Scientist. > > Funding has come from international and national > sources, including the Australian Research > Council, Australian Government, US National > Security Agency, the US-based Advanced Research > and Development Activity, US Army Research Office > and US National Science Foundation. > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 14:07:26 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:07:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:30:39 -0400, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > I always wondered about that. How do they know that someone is counting > cards rather than just lucky? I spent almost an entire year of my misspent youth (circa 1984) counting cards at the blackjack tables in Nevada, during which time six casinos barred me from play (three in Las Vegas, two in Reno and one in Carson City). Many pitbosses and some dealers are trained to count cards, as are many of the 'eyes in the sky' (the hidden security personnel who watch the gaming tables on closed circuit tv). These casino employees look for players who increase their bet size when the deck is rich in aces and high-valued cards -- exploiting conditions which favor the player -- and who play their cards in sophisticated ways. Casinos don't especially care whether the counter is winning or losing. A casino in Carson City barred me even while I was down quite a large sum! Grrr. But of course winning is a sure way to attract their attention. Counting is a matter of skill and ought not be considered illegal or unethical, so a group of indignant counters once sued the Atlantic City casinos for barring them from play. The courts ruled rightly in favor of the players. The casinos in Atlantic City countered by simply changing the rules of the game to thwart the counters. :/ -gts From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 30 15:28:32 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:28:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> > > > I always wondered about that. How do they know that someone is counting > cards rather than just lucky? Is it just the ones lucky at blackjack that > they pick on, or do they also throw out the ones who do too well at roulette > or the poker machines? > > Stathis Papaioannou > Actually, since I know how to count cards [though not all that expertly], I would know how to spot a blackjack card counter by looking at them play through a video camera. For one thing, a blackjack card counter has got to look at every player's hole cards, in the instant between when they're turned over and when they're collected by the dealer. A good card counter is good at not revealing that they are looking at these cards, but it's hard to cover up all the signs (of your eyeballs shifting, etc.). Also, if you're the dealer and YOU can count cards even primitively, you can tell if a player is systematically tending to increase their bets when the count is favorable and decrease their bets when the count is unfavorable. (But of course, a good counter will randomize their bets to some extent, to make the recognition of their betting pattern harder.) -- Ben Goertzel (who lived in Vegas from 89-93 ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 16:15:22 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:15:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?, References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com><009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer> <093701c78ae6$33d42200$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <008001c78b42$cae8df30$41074e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > I would say that we could familiarize someone with all that is known about > Napoleon (which is far, far short of what the actual historical Napoleon > knew about himself), then hypnotize this actor to believe that he is the > real Napoleon. But then we would *not* have resurrected the real McCoy. A good thought experiment should only investigate one thing at a time or things become too muddy to be useful. Up to now we have investigated a perfect copy, or at least as perfect as Mr. Hinesburg allows. But now you start talking about a crappy copy, a very crappy copy indeed. There are lots of days the original Napoleon remembers being him that the crappy Napoleon does not, in fact nearly all the days the original Napoleon remembers the crappy copy does not. I don't recall if I specifically said that the copying process must be done with some skill before I was comfortable with it, but it was certainly implied; and although I agree that survival is not an all or nothing matter this copy is so bad the survival value must be very very very close to zero. Me: >>you lambasted me for saying the High Priest thought atoms were sacred, but >>in your above quotation you throw around the word "replaced" as if the >>meaning were obvious; but what is actually being "replaced"? You: > I meant it in the same way that reader's of a detective SF novel would > take it You are unlikely to be enlightened on the nature of identity by reading detective novels. > You are replaced (even by your exact duplicate) if your historical > collection of atoms are physically seized and terminated, and replaced by > something or some one. Read the above again, it says you are replaced if you are replaced. While I certainly agree that is true I don't find it terribly useful. > Where you and I agree (and peculiarly, so many people do not due, I think > to certain things they learned before age 1 that they have not been able > to overcome), that if you (your present collection of atoms) are replaced > in the sense that I just said by an exact duplicate, then it does not > matter. Huh? Then what are we arguing about? > now that you asked what I meant by "replaced", you offer your own > definition: "Replaced" means exchanging something with something different, exchanging something with an exact copy means absolutely positively NOTHING has happened. This is not empty rhetoric, it is the key idea behind "exchange forces", one of the foundations of modern Physics. For more Google "Identity Of Indiscernibles" or "Leibniz". > In order to define "replace" in the sense that everyone uses, I have had > to resort to language that including talk of atoms. In the macroscopic world we live in that has not yet developed Nanotechnology we can afford to be fuzzy and cavalier in talking about "replaced" because up to now nobody has seen 2 macroscopic objects that were identical, but in the world of atoms you need to be much more careful because atoms do not have scratches on them to tell one from the other. > I don't get it, John. That guy has said over and over that the atoms are > not the problem True, Heartland has said over and over that atoms are not the problem, and he has said over and over that atoms are the problem. Then he took a different tack and said the problem is discontinuity in the thought process; but only objective discontinuity is important, the fact that it would be imposable to subjectively detect this objective discontinuity is irrelevant to subjectivity. Let me repeat that, according to Heartland subjective experience is unimportant to subjectivity! And that my friend does not make one tiny particle of sense. > any cessation of process is equal to death to him. And so going to the dentist is a death sentence to him. > I can't find exactly what set me off You said it on 4-28. Apparently what set you off was when I said: " According to him the whole ball game is something that is imposable to detect subjectively but nevertheless (for reasons never explained) I should be very concerned about it, subjectively. To say this is silly is a vast understatement." John K Clark From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Apr 30 14:59:49 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:59:49 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] [wta-talk] Yesterday's Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life In-Reply-To: <470a3c520704300032k7921415bm841865662a983990@mail.gmail.co m> References: <470a3c520704300032k7921415bm841865662a983990@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070430095856.0406eac8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 02:32 AM 4/30/2007, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/seminar_on_h_and_religion_in_sl/ > >Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life This is great and congratulations. I look forward to more of your seminars on topics where transhumanism is not quite accepted or there is potential for misunderstanding. Best wishes, Natasha Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 16:34:09 2007 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:34:09 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] fermionic light In-Reply-To: <096e01c78b33$f68a7310$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070429222715.021ab8d8@satx.rr.com> <096e01c78b33$f68a7310$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On 4/30/07, Lee Corbin wrote: > Hi Damien, the link below doesn't work. Is "The" supposed to be > the last part of it? Thanks for copying the text---I guess all of it--- > from the link. > Works fine for me. You're not using one of these old steam-powered browsers are you? It takes you to the The University of Melbourne Voice page. The light article is half-way down: Best wishes, BillK From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 17:12:00 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:12:00 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com > References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> At 11:28 AM 4/30/2007 -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: >if you're the dealer and YOU can count cards even primitively, you >can tell if a player is systematically tending to increase their >bets when the count is favorable and decrease their bets when the >count is unfavorable. (But of course, a good counter will randomize >their bets to some extent, to make the recognition of their betting >pattern harder.) Suppose someone *did* have an ESP capacity applicable to such card games (leaving aside such miraculous powers as being able to change one card into another or derandomize the shuffle etc). Would it operate differently from card-counting? Would she make advantageous bets at times a card-counter would not be able to, or something? That is, is the only difference between using ESP and skill that the former might be done with the eyes closed? Damien Broderick From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 30 17:24:59 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:24:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704301024t39164490y21fd82338135951@mail.gmail.com> Hi, ESP could provide a blackjack advantage quite differently from card counting, yeah. The essential approach to card counting consists of -- playing the "basic strategy" for blackjack, which leave the house with a roughly 0.5% edge over you -- then, keeping track of how many cards have been dealt so far in the "2-6" range, versus how many have been dealt so far in the "10's, face cards and Aces" range. -- Basically, you then want to bet more when a lot of "10's etc." have been dealt, and bet less when a lot of "2-6"'s have been dealt. Because you are more likely to get screwed when hit with a "10 etc." than with a "2-6" -- Also, of course, you can bias your play a bit (choices of when to take a hit) based on whether you know there are very few "10s etc." left in the deck or not More sophisticated versions of card counting involve team play, where different members of the team count the number of cards in different ranges, and send each other messages involving the count via signals like the angle of rotation of a chip sitting on the table. If someone had ESP they wouldn't necessarily be seeing future patterns involving: Probability(next card is a 10, face card or ace) - Probability(next card is a 2-6) Rather, they might see, e.g., what the exact next card was going to be, but with a certain (presumably high) degree of error. Getting a noisy, error-prone picture of the **exact next card** would give a quite different pattern of behavior than card counting. As a simple example, card counting gets more and more accurate as the deck is dealt down so that fewer and fewer cards are left in the shoe. I don't see why ESP would be likely to obey this same pattern. Anyway, blackjack is difficult to study as the records of games are stored only on video. If one wanted to look for evidence of psi in gambling, I would focus on looking for evidence of precognition in slot machine or video poker play. Regular gamblers log onto the slot or poker machine by sliding their "slot club card" into the machine, so there is may well be a recorded log of the exact sequence of choices made by each player. (For a slot machine the choice is just how much to bet each time; poker machines are more interesting because the player can make more choices.) If one could get ahold of these logs, one could test whether there were any particular players who tended to be way luckier than would statistically make sense... This would be a pretty straightforward data analysis job, but it would require a casino owner being willing to share their data for this purpose. -- Ben G On 4/30/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 11:28 AM 4/30/2007 -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > >if you're the dealer and YOU can count cards even primitively, you > >can tell if a player is systematically tending to increase their > >bets when the count is favorable and decrease their bets when the > >count is unfavorable. (But of course, a good counter will randomize > >their bets to some extent, to make the recognition of their betting > >pattern harder.) > > Suppose someone *did* have an ESP capacity applicable to such card > games (leaving aside such miraculous powers as being able to change > one card into another or derandomize the shuffle etc). Would it > operate differently from card-counting? Would she make advantageous > bets at times a card-counter would not be able to, or something? That > is, is the only difference between using ESP and skill that the > former might be done with the eyes closed? > > Damien Broderick > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 30 17:49:34 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:49:34 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430014708.021be348@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430123208.02429f80@satx.rr.com> At 09:10 AM 4/30/2007 +0100, BillK wrote: >The obvious solution is to claim that anybody who is successful at >anything is using unsuspected psi powers. Unsuspected because is many >cases the psi is so weak that it just gives him a slight edge over >non-psi people. And this edge accumulates over time. Or maybe the psi >power just came into play once, when he had to make a major decision >which led to all the future success. This is exactly right. It's similar to the way people flourish who have a particular skill, often one they are unconscious of, for detecting inadvertent signals of deceptions etc in those they're making deals with. >A claim which you can believe, but no one can disprove. Not at all. Such claims have a corollary, that such marginal effects will probably reveal themselves--at the usual small scale--if suitable lab tests or simulations are contrived. But the tests obviously have to replicate the salient features of real-world application, and many traditional ESP tests have failed to do that. Tests that start out being interesting and novel, and tending to elicit liminal abilities for that reason, turn into extinction paradigms when repeated relentlessly. "In the wild," such abilities presumably operate far more naturally/situationally. Is a casino an instance of life "in the wild"? Perhaps not. My pal Dr. Edwin May, former scientific director of the research end of he US government project Star Gate, comments: "If hitting a baseball were really possible, then batters would have hitting averages greater than 900! "One other point is information transfer bit rate. Roughly it appears to be in the millibit/sec range. So if you compute how many bits of info it take to win the lottery, you discover you are many orders of magnitude off. Thus you cannot win the lottery by just sitting down and being psychic. "(By being clever with coding you can trade bit rate accuracy for time. Ryzl working with Stepanek "sent" by ESP 400 bits of info without a single error! But it took 9 months.)" Dr. Milan Ryzl's repeated guessing/majority vote work is discussed in my 1992 book THE LOTTO EFFECT, where I showed that I could enhance his successful results even more by using elementary information theory. Damien Broderick From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Apr 30 14:52:37 2007 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:52:37 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] META: "Killthread": Is it censorship or sensible? Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20070430092816.04586720@pop-server.austin.rr.com> It was called to my attention that there have been some problems on the list. Since I am not a moderator I have not followed the thread on this and since I have been travelling for several weeks, I did not know there was a problem. But because we share this list as a venue to discuss and challenge ideas, I think that we all need to take a look at this: From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:53:25PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote: > >John Grigg wrote: > > > > Attempting to impeach the current president is not a realistic plan > > > > Why would you think that? > > Folks, killthread. This is completely off-topic for the list. Brett responded: "Eugen, just so you and I are absolutely clear. If you kill this thread, or call for it to be killed again. If your are that censorious, I will remember it and hold it against you whilst you and I live. I would oppose your reanimation. I will regard you as in the aggregate an entropic vector. I am willing to be censored off the list, it is a private list after all, but actions (like censorship) are facts that shape reactions. Being a person in a world of persons, I take things personally. Fair warning. If I am censored off the list I would take that as diagnostic of the degeneration of the list. It is one thing to take issue with a persons arguments and say so. It is another to stop other people from hearing those arguments and expressing their reactions which may include opposition to them. I regard censorship as a form of killing - as do you by the use of your word killthread. You are yourself a transient information thread that the universe has yet to rule on." Like Brett I do not like being censored. But there is a difference between being censored and being sensible. The extropy list does have rules and guidelines and list members are required to follow them in order to post on this list. Whether or not Brett's thread is on topic for this list is one issue at stake. Now, there are many variables involved that can add one way or another such as a post may be a topic the list members want to engage in but it is not a transhumanist topic per se. Or, it can be a topic that is curious for list members but the way in which it is presented to the list, or the language used or implications of the meaning of the posts can cause a moderator to request that the thread be put to rest. These variables are important to pay attention to. Further, and not totally unrelated, I was censored from the Cryonics list when I was being an activist to help a fellow cryonicist. Now this was truly strange and frankly made me think much less of cryonicists than I had prior. But I also understood that it touched a nerve with other list members and I did not take it personally, retaliate, or blame them. I belive that I was in the wrong for not paying attention to the feelings of other list members. I was too busy to read responses, and that was also my mistake. I was so driven to do something worthwhile that it backfired on me. I see what you (Brett) are doing as something different but sharing some similarities. You posted on a topic that you are passionate about. The difference with you and me is that you are blaming and making accusations and insulting list members. I would not do this because even if people do not agree with me, I do my best to accept the differences. You are also different than me in the way you handled this. Instead of approaching the topic from a constructive inclusive manner, you made assumptions and accusations. This never sits well with list members. And, finally, I do not like is the content of your (Brett) response to the list moderator (Eugene) requesting that the thread be killed. You made a threat and does not sit well with me and I'm sure others. But putting that aside, what do other list members think of this thread? Lastly, I do think this is a topic that warrants objective examination and search for resolution. I invite you to think about this. In hopes of resolution rather than slamming doors, Natasha Natasha Vita-More PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture Advisory Committee, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium 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 gts_2000 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 17:58:59 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:58:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <3cf171fe0704301024t39164490y21fd82338135951@mail.gmail.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704301024t39164490y21fd82338135951@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:24:59 -0400, Benjamin Goertzel wrote: > -- Basically, you then want to bet more when a lot of "10's etc." have > been dealt, and bet less when a lot of "2-6"'s have been dealt. Because > you are more likely to get screwed when hit with a "10 etc." than with a > "2-6" You have it exactly backward, Ben. :) The card-counter increases his wager when a lot of low cards and non-aces have been dealt, because the odds favor of the player when the deck is rich in high cards and aces. Two basic reasons why this works: 1) A preponderance of high cards in the deck works against the house because the dealer must hit to reach 17 or better on a stiff hand (12 thru 16), likely busting with a high-card, while the player can avoid going over 21 by standing on a stiff. 2) A preponderance of high cards + aces in the deck works in favor of the player because of the increased probability of someone at the table getting a blackjack. It could be the dealer who gets a blackjack, but blackjacks favor the player over the dealer because of the asymmetry in the payoffs: blackjacks pay a player 1.5 x the original bet only 1x for the dealer. -gts From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 18:05:40 2007 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:05:40 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:12:00 -0400, Damien Broderick wrote: > Suppose someone *did* have an ESP capacity applicable to such card > games (leaving aside such miraculous powers as being able to change > one card into another or derandomize the shuffle etc). Would it > operate differently from card-counting? Yes. An infallible clairvoyant would know the dealer's hole card and the next cards in the deck and have a huge advantage, probably on the order of something like 30%, whereas the card-counter has an advantage of only about 1% to 1.5%, depending on rules and other conditions. The clairvoyant would need to lose purposely on a large fraction of hands to avoid suspicion of being an out-right cheat. The typical casual player plays with about a 4% disadvantage. -gts From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 30 18:51:20 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:51:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704301024t39164490y21fd82338135951@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704301151y2cfce883iff4389da19ae5856@mail.gmail.com> yeah you're right ... I guess you can tell I haven't played blackjack for about 17 years!!!! On 4/30/07, gts wrote: > > On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:24:59 -0400, Benjamin Goertzel > wrote: > > > -- Basically, you then want to bet more when a lot of "10's etc." have > > been dealt, and bet less when a lot of "2-6"'s have been dealt. Because > > you are more likely to get screwed when hit with a "10 etc." than with a > > "2-6" > > You have it exactly backward, Ben. :) > > The card-counter increases his wager when a lot of low cards and non-aces > have been dealt, because the odds favor of the player when the deck is > rich in high cards and aces. > > Two basic reasons why this works: > > 1) A preponderance of high cards in the deck works against the house > because the dealer must hit to reach 17 or better on a stiff hand (12 thru > 16), likely busting with a high-card, while the player can avoid going > over 21 by standing on a stiff. > > 2) A preponderance of high cards + aces in the deck works in favor of the > player because of the increased probability of someone at the table > getting a blackjack. It could be the dealer who gets a blackjack, but > blackjacks favor the player over the dealer because of the asymmetry in > the payoffs: blackjacks pay a player 1.5 x the original bet only 1x for > the dealer. > > -gts > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 30 19:49:48 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:49:48 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430143128.02366818@satx.rr.com> At 02:05 PM 4/30/2007 -0400, gts wrote: >Yes. An infallible clairvoyant would know the dealer's hole card and the >next cards in the deck and have a huge advantage, probably on the order of >something like 30%, whereas the card-counter has an advantage of only >about 1% to 1.5%, depending on rules and other conditions. The clairvoyant >would need to lose purposely on a large fraction of hands to avoid >suspicion of being an out-right cheat. I blame science fiction for this absurd counterfactual of an "infallible clairvoyant." The general notion that skeptics are quick to ridicule is of the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. Telepaths in THE DEMOLISHED MAN, Alfred Bester's classic ESP novel, read each other's thoughts as if listening to speech, but in addition detect and weave wonderfully elaborate multi-sensory patterns. There is absolutely no known real world basis for this sort of thing. In ordinary life, and in the lab, as mentioned, probability of success is modified by a few bits per 10,000. This can be enough to tip the choice between one stray mental option and another, enhancing the effectivity of the process, but obviously training and rigorous protocols of interpretation will help wring as much as possible from this meager trickle. The notion that a gambler could sit down and make one correct guess after another is not only psychologically implausible but too ambitious. When Joseph McMoneagle or other trained remote viewers do a remote viewing exercise, they usually spend 20 minutes or half an hour in a carefully prepared state of watchfulness, annoting various elements of their imaginal field: colors, shapes, number, relationships, all manner of binary oppositions, and slowly accrete a composition. But, of critical importance, it is usually the double blind judge who assesses which of the possible targets best matches this composite. The mind has an inescapable tendency to chunk cues and imagined elements into a provisional gestalt, and half the process of learning remote viewing (I'm informed) is mastering this impulse on premature foreclosure. "In the wild" where the dangers are more or less known, an excellent psychic soldier might well register the presence of a tiger or a Tamil Tiger in time to counter the threat--but I don't suppose he'd be especially likely to notice the ten ton safe falling out of a passing blimp... until it hit him on the head. Damien Broderick From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 19:54:35 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:54:35 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <003f01c78b61$674a7550$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> "Damien Broderick" > *Obviously* Randall2 thinks (or at least feels) he's continuous with the original. Surely nobody disputes this. It's part of the definition of "perfect copy." Agreed. > The only matter at stake is whether R1 should object to being obliterated > and replaced by R2...n. I would I know you would object, and so would most members of this list and virtually all members of the general public; but I also know one other thing, you would not object if you didn't know it was happening, and unless I was foolish enough to tell you you'd have absolutely no way of knowing it had. Note to cryonics advocates: Forget about the elaborate instructions on how you wish to be revived, If Mr. Jupiter Brain can think of a reason he should bother to bring you back at all it will be as an upload, and there are no ifs ands or buts about it. If he knows you're superstitious about that sort of thing and is kind he just won't tell you. And another thing, Damien, in your above statement you didn't specify exactly what was being "replaced"; but no matter, I already know what it is, atoms. Tell me, every time you take a piss do you get all nostalgic over all those lovely little atoms of yours going down the toilet. I am absolutely certain I'm right about this, but of course being certain is no guarantee of being correct; but in one sense it doesn't matter. As I said before right or wrong my way of thinking is that of the future, your way will be extinct in 50 years or less. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 20:16:45 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:16:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org><084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><46349D88.3010102@pooq.com><08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com><094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com><3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <005a01c78b64$840e5230$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Traditionally ESP advocates have said that for it to work you must truly believe in it, but it would be much more elegant if they took the exact opposite position. Suppose the only people who have ESP are those who think it's total BULLSHIT. This would explain ESP's elusive nature. The skeptic has an amazing ESP experience, becomes a true believer, and every last trace of his ESP vanishes completely and he is unable to duplicate his results. What's this, I can't believe it, it's real after all, I just levitated that rock! John K Clark From randall at randallsquared.com Mon Apr 30 20:53:36 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:53:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <003f01c78b61$674a7550$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> <003f01c78b61$674a7550$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On Apr 30, 2007, at 3:54 PM, John K Clark wrote: > "Damien Broderick" >> *Obviously* Randall2 thinks (or at least feels) he's > continuous with the original. Surely nobody disputes this. It's > part of the > definition of "perfect copy." > > Agreed. I also agree with this, to be clear. >> The only matter at stake is whether R1 should object to being >> obliterated >> and replaced by R2...n. I would > > I know you would object, and so would most members of this list and > virtually all members of the general public; but I also know one other > thing, you would not object if you didn't know it was happening, > and unless > I was foolish enough to tell you you'd have absolutely no way of > knowing it > had. As I've pointed out repeatedly, exactly the same is true of any death. Dead people don't know they're dead, because they don't know anything. There are all kinds of things going on relating to my body any brain all the time that I have no subjective awareness of. That doesn't mean they aren't happening. -- Randall Randall "Everything's stolen these days. The fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. " - Jamie McCarthy From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 21:06:54 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:06:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <00ba01c78b6b$b62ccf60$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> "Damien Broderick" My apologies, Damien brought up one other issue I failed to address in my previous post: > even in such a preposterously rigged and probably physically impossible > procedure. Damien, can you explain why it's physically impossible, can you explain why intelligently designed Nanotechnology would be unable to make a duplicate of you when random mutation and very stupid natural selection obviously has managed to bring you into existence? Why does randomness and stupidity beat intelligence? John K Clark From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 30 21:11:32 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:11:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com><009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer><093701c78ae6$33d42200$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <008001c78b42$cae8df30$41074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: Lee: >> I don't get it, John. That guy has said over and over that the atoms are >> not the problem John K Clark: > True, Heartland has said over and over that atoms are not the problem, Shouldn't that be the end of it? John K Clark: > and he has said over and over that atoms are the problem. It is impossible that I said that because I never believed that replacement of atoms used in a process had any impact on identity of that process. Would you keep telling people that I believe in Jesus too, if you saw me discussing ancient methods for producing papyrus that bible text was written on? John K Clark: > Then he took a > different tack and said the problem is discontinuity in the thought process; I've been saying something similar to that from the beginning. John K Clark: > but only objective discontinuity is important, the fact that it would be > imposable to subjectively detect this objective discontinuity is irrelevant > to subjectivity. Let me repeat that, according to Heartland subjective > experience is unimportant to subjectivity! And that my friend does not make > one tiny particle of sense. It's only your usual bizarre interpretation of what I said, not a summary of what I actually said. (What the heck is "subjectivity" anyway?) But I think I have figured out your motive. You simply enjoy playing "telephone" and are just trying to find someone to play along. Cool strategy, I must say. Thumbs up. :) Subjective opinion about who you think you are is utterly worthless in determining who you are. Example: From now on I may post under John K Clark's name and pretend to know something about Heartland's argument. According to you, this is enough evidence to give me the title "John K Clark." But if so, then we should share the same access to John K Clark's bank account number, right? So right now I would like to officially declare that I am John K Clark and demand you share with me our bank account # and all the passwords (send it privately, of course)! If you really believed in what you say you believe, you should have no problem sending me (John K Clark) this info. But I have a gut feeling you won't be sending anything. I (John K Clark) guarantee it. John K Clark From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Apr 30 21:29:03 2007 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:29:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] What should survive and why? (was Type vs. instance...) References: <20061102062735.57668.qmail@web52612.mail.yahoo.com><015601c7010a$6a7d5d50$450a4e0c@MyComputer><008101c701b4$37b35870$250b4e0c@MyComputer><3C5E9884-5CD8-46CC-9841-28C6980CE600@randallsquared.com><059a01c701f8$841e1670$bb0a4e0c@MyComputer> <092401c78ae4$1892f810$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Lee: > Well, not John Clark, IIRC, would go to the extreme that > I, Robin Hanson, and many others would, namely, an > instance of us would choose vaporization so that a recent > duplicate frozen in the next room would get $10M, and > we would be making that choice for *entirely* selfish > reasons. Frankly, that scares me, Lee. Please do not get offended by the analogy I'm about to make but I can't help but think that if we replace "$10M" with "opportunity to board alien spaceship hiding behind Hale-Bopp comet" the choice you would make, it seems to me, would be equally unwise as the choice made by 39 members of Heaven's Gate a decade ago. Lee: > This is all philosophy. It's impractical. It's all practical. Your decisions will be different depending on which philosophy you adopt. Lee: > We should focus on what it > is about us that we treasure. None of us is really interested in how > my bit string varies from moment to moment, or from year to year. > We are interested in survival. This *is* about survival. Why would I care at all about any of this if it wasn't about survival? If you believe that preservation of memories = survival, and memories are nothing but strings, why shouldn't you be interested in how a string varies from moment to moment? How can you expect to know how to survive if you're not interested in conditions necessary for survival? I don't get it, and I don't need to. What I would like to learn from you, above all else, is why you think memories should matter so much? There are so many other things you could be focused on preserving into the future. Why memories, let alone your memories? H. From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 21:31:46 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:31:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com><003f01c78b61$674a7550$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <00e701c78b6e$fb087f50$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> "Randall Randall" > As I've pointed out repeatedly, exactly the same is > true of any death. Indeed you have pointed that out, many many, many many times. So how do we determine who is right, you or me? I don't know but what the hell, let's try that wacky new thing they call The Scientific Method. Using this (admittedly new and untried) method can you produce any unsatisfied parties? No. Can I produce nothing but delighted participations? Yes. But then again who cares about this newfangled scientific method, it's not in The Bible. John K Clark From randall at randallsquared.com Mon Apr 30 21:53:56 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:53:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <00e701c78b6e$fb087f50$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com><013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer><38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com><076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com><083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com><003f01c78b61$674a7550$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> <00e701c78b6e$fb087f50$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <4ED803A7-A5DD-401D-8812-226E93C830D0@randallsquared.com> On Apr 30, 2007, at 5:31 PM, John K Clark wrote: > "Randall Randall" >> As I've pointed out repeatedly, exactly the same is >> true of any death. > > Indeed you have pointed that out, many many, many many times. So > how do we > determine who is right, you or me? I don't know but what the hell, > let's try > that > wacky new thing they call The Scientific Method. Using this > (admittedly new > and > untried) method can you produce any unsatisfied parties? No. Can I > produce > nothing but delighted participations? Yes. Now *this* is begging the question. :) > But then again who cares about this newfangled scientific method, > it's not > in The Bible. When it's been pointed out that your debate opponent is non-religious, it's probably not helpful to insist that they are, John. It certainly tarnishes the perception that you're arguing in good faith. -- Randall Randall "This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3 because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8." - Scott Aaronson From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 22:00:53 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:00:53 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430143128.02366818@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <20070428090423.GO9439@leitl.org> <084d01c78a46$fe3ccdd0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <46349D88.3010102@pooq.com> <08a601c78a84$01c3e500$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430143128.02366818@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430165437.023ad610@satx.rr.com> At 02:49 PM 4/30/2007 -0500, I wrote: >I blame science fiction for this absurd counterfactual of an >"infallible clairvoyant." This comment might have had the unfortunate effect of deterring the knowledgeable from further comments that might help disambiguate cheaters from psychics in such games. Please don't be put off! Meanwhile, I posed the same question to several people with long experience studying what's dubbed, in our current partial understanding of the phenomena, "the paranormal". Here's one response; I'd welcome any comments by gts or Ben or others (but knee-jerk, semantically empty cries of BULLSHIT might as well stay at home): ============== Nothing dependent on outside observation of card play can disambiguate a psychic from a cheat who's managed to secretly mark the cards. This holds for all card games, not just blackjack. Aside from this, however, patterns of play depend on what wild (or mundane) talent a player is exercising. A card-counter, according to most of the card-counting strategies I have seen, plays the optimal strategy at all times; sticks the minimum bet most of the time and increases it minimally when the odds favor winning. Since the optimal strategy is known it can be observed that the player is following it; he profits only because he places higher bets during his winning streaks. A psychic, on the other hand, may get cues that cause cardplay to deviate from the optimal strategy: Behavioral clues that a player is a "clairvoyant" who can reliably "see through" one thickness of pasteboard: -Always buys the "insurance" side-bet if the dealer actually does have a hidden blackjack, and never buys it otherwise. [Optimal strategy never buys insurance -- lacking inside information, it's a sucker bet that increases your overall loss rate.] -Never busts when requesting another card. [This may cause him to decline a card when the optimal strategy calls for one.] -Doubles down whenever his third card brings him to 21, or to a number that will beat the dealer's initial hand of 17 or better (standard rules require the dealer to stand on such a hand). [This will almost certainly produce double-down bets when the optimal strategy says otherwise.] -Keeps initial bet at a constant level. [Inconsistent with card counting.] Less than 100% reliability will turn these absolutes into tendencies, while the ability to see more than the very next card (and dealer's face-down card) will allow more impressive stunts during play. Behavioral clues that a player is a "precognitive" who gets a short-term warning only of good or bad outcomes, without details: -Bets the lower limit most of the time, but unpredictably raises bet to the upper limit, and is always dealt a blackjack when this happens. [Inconsistent with card-counting. Over the long run, probably also inconsistent with dealer's sanity. I am assuming that the precog gets immediate feedback on the outcome of one decision or event at a time, and winning on a dealt blackjack is the only *immediate* good outcome possible when deciding whether to play another hand.] -Shows same behavior as clairvoyant with regard to "insurance" bets. -Does not show clairvoyant's immunity to busting. (Sometimes the sequence of undealt cards is such that you will bust if take a card, and lose if you don't. In these cases the precog's good/bad signal gives no guidance since it returns "bad" no matter which option he considers.) -Does not show clairvoyant's knack for knowing when to double-down (that decision requires more than 1 bit of information). -Will unpredictably stand pat with a poor hand contrary to optimal strategy, and wins these hands because dealer busts. As in the previous example, less than perfect reliability will turn these absolutes into tendencies. For plausible levels of psi talent (i.e. comparable to levels seen in controlled experiments), extended observation would be needed to identify any of these patterns, although even a small edge over the house will allow a player to profit consistently in the long term. Of course, whether the ongoing stress and distraction of a game of chance is consistent with psi operation *at all* is a completely separate and open question. =================== Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Apr 30 22:09:20 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:09:20 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?. In-Reply-To: <00ba01c78b6b$b62ccf60$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <640411.85381.qm@web37402.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <013c01c788f3$06c458b0$f60a4e0c@MyComputer> <38A94159-536C-45C8-81E5-DDA4DFE9FC25@randallsquared.com> <076f01c78914$571c6b60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <07a201c78995$38a5c970$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1A7A74FD-3240-435A-B117-6F3B0B522232@randallsquared.com> <083c01c78a08$a753b1c0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <086701c78a4b$33d7cef0$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429135619.0236cb40@satx.rr.com> <00ba01c78b6b$b62ccf60$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430170213.023ad358@satx.rr.com> At 05:06 PM 4/30/2007 -0400, John K Clark wrote: >Damien, can you explain why it's physically impossible, can you explain why >intelligently designed Nanotechnology would be unable to make a duplicate of >you when random mutation and very stupid natural selection obviously has >managed to bring you into existence? You left out "decades of extremely detailed interaction with a Vastly complex environment, plus stochastic changes to body/brain." These factors combined produced the sorry specimen writing this email, and would never be able to replicate it unaided. >Why does randomness and stupidity beat >intelligence? In the general sense, because they had 4 billion years and a whole planet of competing organisms to work with. In the specific sense, they can't--as argued above. And I thought the claim was that a perfect copy could be contrived and swapped in instantaneously. Nano couldn't do that. I suppose some as yet unknown form of machine-implemented magic field resonance might do it. I have grown a bit impatient with thought experiments based on [what seem to us in our present partial knowledge of the universe] extreme improbabilities or such absurdities as "if god can do X, then..." Damien Broderick From ben at goertzel.org Mon Apr 30 22:11:20 2007 From: ben at goertzel.org (Benjamin Goertzel) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:11:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] About ESP, etc. In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070430165437.023ad610@satx.rr.com> References: <20070427102544.GA9439@leitl.org> <7.0.1.0.2.20070429181651.022df8b0@satx.rr.com> <094a01c78ae9$b6e89f60$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430005641.023829a8@satx.rr.com> <3cf171fe0704300828u5c7d492qf53b9c8e5d18eea4@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430120621.02428758@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430143128.02366818@satx.rr.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070430165437.023ad610@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <3cf171fe0704301511q630cb731r2c6b1177e5f0db60@mail.gmail.com> Nothing to add, but the comments you forwarded seem sensible to me based on my dim recollection of counting cards at blackjack too many years ago.. Ben On 4/30/07, Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 02:49 PM 4/30/2007 -0500, I wrote: > > >I blame science fiction for this absurd counterfactual of an > >"infallible clairvoyant." > > This comment might have had the unfortunate effect of deterring the > knowledgeable from further comments that might help disambiguate > cheaters from psychics in such games. Please don't be put off! > Meanwhile, I posed the same question to several people with long > experience studying what's dubbed, in our current partial > understanding of the phenomena, "the paranormal". Here's one > response; I'd welcome any comments by gts or Ben or others (but > knee-jerk, semantically empty cries of BULLSHIT might as well stay at > home): > > ============== > > Nothing dependent on outside observation of card play can > disambiguate a psychic from a cheat who's managed to secretly mark > the cards. This holds for all card games, not just blackjack. > > Aside from this, however, patterns of play depend on what wild (or > mundane) talent a player is exercising. > > A card-counter, according to most of the card-counting strategies I > have seen, plays the optimal strategy at all times; sticks the > minimum bet most of the time and increases it minimally when the odds > favor winning. Since the optimal strategy is known it can be observed > that the player is following it; he profits only because he places > higher bets during his winning streaks. A psychic, on the other hand, > may get cues that cause cardplay to deviate from the optimal strategy: > > Behavioral clues that a player is a "clairvoyant" who can reliably > "see through" one thickness of pasteboard: > > -Always buys the "insurance" side-bet if the dealer actually does > have a hidden blackjack, and never buys it otherwise. [Optimal > strategy never buys insurance -- lacking inside information, it's a > sucker bet that increases your overall loss rate.] > -Never busts when requesting another card. [This may cause him to > decline a card when the optimal strategy calls for one.] > -Doubles down whenever his third card brings him to 21, or to a > number that will beat the dealer's initial hand of 17 or better > (standard rules require the dealer to stand on such a hand). [This > will almost certainly produce double-down bets when the optimal > strategy says otherwise.] > -Keeps initial bet at a constant level. [Inconsistent with card counting.] > > Less than 100% reliability will turn these absolutes into tendencies, > while the ability to see more than the very next card (and dealer's > face-down card) will allow more impressive stunts during play. > > Behavioral clues that a player is a "precognitive" who gets a > short-term warning only of good or bad outcomes, without details: > > -Bets the lower limit most of the time, but unpredictably raises bet > to the upper limit, and is always dealt a blackjack when this > happens. [Inconsistent with card-counting. Over the long run, > probably also inconsistent with dealer's sanity. I am assuming that > the precog gets immediate feedback on the outcome of one decision or > event at a time, and winning on a dealt blackjack is the only > *immediate* good outcome possible when deciding whether to play another > hand.] > -Shows same behavior as clairvoyant with regard to "insurance" bets. > -Does not show clairvoyant's immunity to busting. (Sometimes the > sequence of undealt cards is such that you will bust if take a card, > and lose if you don't. In these cases the precog's good/bad signal > gives no guidance since it returns "bad" no matter which option he > considers.) > -Does not show clairvoyant's knack for knowing when to double-down > (that decision requires more than 1 bit of information). > -Will unpredictably stand pat with a poor hand contrary to optimal > strategy, and wins these hands because dealer busts. > > As in the previous example, less than perfect reliability will turn > these absolutes into tendencies. For plausible levels of psi talent > (i.e. comparable to levels seen in controlled experiments), extended > observation would be needed to identify any of these patterns, > although even a small edge over the house will allow a player to > profit consistently in the long term. > > Of course, whether the ongoing stress and distraction of a game of > chance is consistent with psi operation *at all* is a completely > separate and open question. > > =================== > > Damien Broderick > > _______________________________________________ > 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 austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 22:23:30 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:23:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Continued Energy for the Infinite Future In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <827188.48767.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I stole this snippet directly from the Wiki page on Conservation of Energy. It gives me a glimmer of hope that we'll eventually find a way around the problem. "One of the biggest problems with conservation of energy is that nothing in the universe is isolated except for possibly the universe itself. So the conservation law would have to be extended to say total energy in the universe is conserved, or rejected entirely." The reason I have hope is that I believe that it is beyond dispute that the Universe did "create" energy/mass when it was born (okay, maybe not totally beyond dispute ;-) ). Even if this is an offspring Universe, some Universe either had to be first or concurrent. But, maybe not. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jonkc at att.net Mon Apr 30 22:35:56 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:35:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? References: <7.0.1.0.2.20070427155653.0230c178@satx.rr.com><200704290451.l3T4ppht015948@andromeda.ziaspace.com><7.0.1.0.2.20070429113755.02274c98@satx.rr.com><009601c78a81$f49eca90$d9074e0c@MyComputer><093701c78ae6$33d42200$6501a8c0@homeef7b612677><008001c78b42$cae8df30$41074e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <027b01c78b78$203aa880$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > I never believed that replacement of atoms used in a process had any > impact on identity of that process. BULLSHIT! For dozens of posts you tried to convince me that atoms had some sort of magical individuality that had a relation to our own individuality. But I don't want to be too harsh about this, on a few very rare instances even I have been wrong, when I was I admitted it, and I then I expected to hear no more about it. And to the Extropians eternal credit I didn't hear any more about it! If you say you were wrong about atoms I will not say another word about it. Until then I will hold your feet to the fire. > What the heck is "subjectivity" anyway? Huh? Who is asking the question? Who are you expecting to respond? > I have figured out your motive. You have seen through me at last! I am one of the warlords of Mars who has a despicable and insatiable desire for shapely young teenage Earth girls in bikinis John K Clark From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Mon Apr 30 22:54:03 2007 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:54:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future? In-Reply-To: <027b01c78b78$203aa880$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <180589.60362.qm@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> "I am one of the warlords of Mars who has a despicable and insatiable desire for shapely young teenage Earth girls in bikinis." You mean there's another? ;) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Mon Apr 30 23:01:21 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:01:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Back to putting it to rest (was How to be copied into the future?). In-Reply-To: <00e701c78b6e$fb087f50$dc0a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <80511.15042.qm@web37202.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- John K Clark wrote: > But then again who cares about this newfangled > scientific method, it's not in The Bible. See, this is exactly what I was talking about. You are using Religion as ridicule. Is that all you could come up with as a rebuttal? Did you know that newfangled scientific methods came into existence through men such as Isaac Newton, who was religious and believed in God? He wrote a paper on "The prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St-John". He must have felt some connection to the words written such as Daniel 2:17, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom: and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. Have you even read the Bible? He must have been some "idiot" to have believed in something without proof yet funny how he managed to come up with the Three laws of motion. One can be scientific and a believer. If you don't want contradiction and rebuttal, I suggest you leave Religion, the Bible and God out of your posts. (I don't believe in God so don't go off with insults about religious fanatics.) I respect it and take the Bible for what it's worth. Thanks for your understanding and have a great day. Anna:) Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 20:30:17 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:30:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Comic Relief Message-ID: <79323.81059.qm@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> With the Virginia Tech shootings and Damien's farmhouse burning down, I thought you could all use a little laugh. The universe may be a dangerous place, but it certainly has a sense of humor. :-) Note: forwarded message attached. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In Emptiness exists Good but no Evil. Wisdom is Existence. Principle is Existence. The Way is Existence. The Mind is Emptiness." - Miyamoto Musashi, Kyoto period Samurai. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Stuart LaForge" Subject: Fwd: Fw: Fu***** funny Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:16:08 -0700 Size: 357767 URL: