From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Mar 1 00:27:28 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:27:28 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <16670941.105721172708846550.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Anyone read this yet? PJ http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-lloyd18feb18,0,5286691.htmlstory?coll=cl-bookreview BOOK REVIEW 'The Human Touch' by Michael Frayn Do we in some sense create the universe? By Seth Lloyd February 18, 2007 The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe Michael Frayn Metropolitan Books: 506 pp., $32.50 Michael Frayn is known as a playwright ("Noises Off," "Copenhagen") and novelist ("Headlong," "Spies"). But this prolific British author is also a philosopher, having studied philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s. "The Human Touch" is a profound, personal account of his work on a range of topics, beginning (and ending) with the philosophy of consciousness and passing through the nature of physical law, the problem of free will, the relationship of language and thought to reality, and the origin of the universe. These difficult ideas are effortlessly dealt with, leaving the reader with a sense of mild intoxication. Frayn's exultant prose entices and ultimately overwhelms you. Reading his arguments, I felt as though I were floating down a warm river, caught up in its playful, whirling eddies. "The Human Touch" is beautifully written. Is this a problem in a book of philosophy? Philosophical arguments are often hard to follow. There's little danger that (for example) Hegel will convince you of his thesis by his sheer eloquence. On the contrary, one must have strong inducement (a cattle prod, maybe?) to extract it from the dense tangle of his writing. Within Frayn's joyous prose, by contrast, one can lose one's grip on the underlying reasoning about, say, the nature of cause and effect. As I was borne along, delighting in his tropes, some part of my brain would feebly assert itself. ("Wait! There's a simple refutation of this point. I remember it from school ? what was it?") Then I'd sink back into the flow. To be fair, Frayn claims that "The Human Touch" is not a work of philosophy, but given the topics he covers, this seems disingenuous. As an author, he has always gravitated to deep questions of existence; he is too modest in disavowing philosophical intent. "The Human Touch" opens by raising a fundamental anomaly: The universe apparently has an objective existence independent of the presence of observers (like you or me). Yet the universe-as-perceived is a unique product of our individual ways of seeing and thinking: When you die, the universe dies with you. How can its objective and subjective natures be reconciled? This is an ancient question, still unanswered; that Frayn begins his book with it betrays his high philosophical ambitions. To address this conundrum, he turns to an analysis of the natural world. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed that even the most permanent of objects ? rocks, trees, planets ? were manifestations of the underlying flux of microscopic events. Frayn refashions this 2,500-year-old picture into a contemporary account of the objects of this world arising from the "traffic" of elementary particles. So far, so good: That a tree is constructed out of a buzz of elementary particles is something on which we can all agree. But what makes a particular buzz of protons and electrons a tree and another buzz a human being? True, the particles take on different patterns in a human and a tree, but at bottom, Frayn writes, it is human perception and human language that identify one pattern of particles as "tree" and another as "Donald Rumsfeld." Despite the apparently objective nature of trees and people as the "traffic" of fundamental stuff, their existence depends crucially, for Frayn, on their trafficking with our human senses. According to playwright-philosopher Frayn, humans emerge front and center on the stage of existence. But a natural scientist (like this reviewer) might argue that protons and electrons themselves possess an objective reality, enshrined in the laws of nature, that transcends human involvement. Well, says Frayn, just what are those laws of nature anyway? The chapter in which he deconstructs the notion of the existence of objective laws of nature is delightful ? even if one disagrees (as I do) with his conclusion that such objective laws do not exist. In a flurry of footnotes, he documents the hopeless muddle scientists and philosophers have got themselves into by trying to construct a precise concept of a natural law. But although scientists may have only a fuzzy idea of the true meaning of, say, the standard model of elementary-particle physics, that doesn't mean they can't use it to calculate what happens when two protons collide. Philosophical muddle-headedness doesn't imply that laws of nature don't exist; it simply implies that we don't understand them very well. Being muddle-headed about philosophy may well be a precondition for a scientific career: A scientist who worries about the ontological status of the second law of thermodynamics will do much worse science than one who explores the second law's implications for heat flow. Frayn's discussion of causality and chance is illuminating, and his treatment of time reflects his extensive knowledge of physics ? notably quantum mechanics, whose physics, let alone its ontological status, is highly confusing. (An electron can be here and there at the same time.) The evolution of a quantum-mechanical system is in some funny sense both deterministic and probabilistic. Quantum mechanics makes even the simple notion of a number indeterminate: Two plus two equal four? Guess again! Here, Frayn's gift for exposition and explanation is a godsend. His effervescent style, which nibbles at a subject from all sides until it is helpless to conceal its secrets, perfectly matches the elusive nature of the quantum world. Frayn's style also stands him in good stead when he analyzes human agency. Consciousness, like quantum mechanics, is notoriously hard to fathom. How and why, for example, do we choose to spread marmalade rather than honey on our breakfast toast? (That cozy condiment analogy brands Frayn as an adherent of the Anglo-Saxon school of philosophy.) What goes on in our minds when we make such a choice? I don't know, I just make a decision. Why? Because I'm the decider. Frayn disentangles our thoughts and actions as we make choices and shows us our decisions from inside and out. Interestingly, his style is less suited to the philosophical treatment of words than to that of the natural world. As 20th century philosophy showed (to the chagrin of 20th century philosophers), attempts to pin down the relationship of words to objects often crash and burn; it may be the circular nature of using words to describe how words describe things that causes the trouble. The first time Frayn unravels what seemed a substantial fabric of reasoning to show its flimsiness, you're impressed. When he goes on unraveling fabric after fabric, it becomes less thrilling. It was cute when the kitten demolished the first sock, less so the seventh. OK, the socks weren't indestructible, but they were warm. Similarly, our attempts to construct models of nature or language are imperfect ? but they're better than nothing. Where "The Human Touch" makes an important contribution to 21st century philosophy is in clarifying our understanding of the truth or falsity of assertions about the world ? such as "tonight the moon is full" or "a penny is covered in copper." Although such statements seem straightforward, generations of philosophers have shown that their exact relation to reality is problematic. Frayn argues that to understand the role of factual statements, one must look at the role of analogous statements in fiction. The book's core analyzes the role of assertion in Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin": The assertion "Onegin shot Lensky" has no factual content in the real world; there it is neither true nor false. But in the context of Pushkin's poem, it is patently true. By detaching the status of assertions from their relationship to the real world, Frayn shows that truth or falsity is to be understood in the context of a narrative. This is a powerful insight: It frees us from the illusion that we can utter the truth independently of the context in which we speak. One of the wonderful moments in the book occurs in a footnote, where Frayn provides his own translation of those stanzas in which Onegin fires and Lensky's life, together with the universe constructed by Lensky's perception, ebbs away. The rendering of rhyme and meter (Pushkin is no pushover to translate) echoes the beating and failing of the human heart. Frayn's brilliant insight into the relationship of utterance to reality returns us to the place of humans in the universe. Meaning arises along with narrative. Human narratives differ in crucial ways from those offered by entities such as animals or computers. It is the ability to describe and make sense of things that distinguishes human language from other forms of utterance. When are we most human? "The Human Touch" tells us: It is when we are talking quietly with each other, or sitting in peace, conscious of nothing in particular, or gazing up at the night sky at that eternal universe and making it our own. Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum-mechanical engineering at MIT, is the author of "Programming the Universe." From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Mar 1 00:57:12 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:57:12 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <16670941.105721172708846550.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <16670941.105721172708846550.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070228185407.025b2258@satx.rr.com> At 07:27 PM 2/28/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >Anyone read this yet? PJ >http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-lloyd18feb18,0,5286691.htmlstory?coll=cl-bookreview >BOOK REVIEW 'The Human Touch' by Michael Frayn >Do we in some sense create the universe? By Seth Lloyd By a stroke of luck: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe By Michael Frayn Faber, 483pp. A thick philosophical treatise by an English playwright and novelist? Not quite the done thing, old chap. Not even sure if a drama or a novel dealing with ideas is really proper, don't you know. Good enough for those French and Germans -- Being and Nothingness, The Magic Mountain -- or Poles or Czechs like Lem and Kundera, but really, aside from oddballs like Aldous Huxley and John Fowles and perhaps A. S. Byatt, it just isn't cricket. If we must have that kind of thing declaimed from the bally stage in English, we can import Tom Stoppard, and toss the chap a knighthood for his troubles. Now those scientists, different kettle of fish. Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking. Don't they do some sort of philosophy? Natural philosophy, or something? Michael Frayn, though, was something of an exception to the rule, right from the start. He was a witty columnist in the '60s, an excellent mimic, ready to parody the preposterous and the pompous. His novels were best read as satire, a sort of extension of the Angry Young Men like Kingsley Amis. His fullest flowering has come within the last decade with richly inventive plays, most notably Copenhagen -- German atomic physicist Heisenberg confronting Danish atomic physicist Bohr and his wife Margrethe in the depths of the Second World War over the vexed topic of imminent nuclear guilt -- and Democracy, exploring West German politics in the 1980s. His interest in formal philosophy is no belated turning to eternal verities (Frayn is 73 this year), but an extension of that probing mind bubbling always beneath the surface of his fictions. Indeed, his Cambridge degree was in Moral Sciences, an archaic term for philosophy, as Natural Philosophy is an archaic term for the sciences. His studies were pursued at the height of the Cold War, and followed two years of military service in which he specialised in Russian, developing an interest in language that fitted well with what has been called the linguistic turn in western philosophy (away from positivism and the grand theories that preceded it). Now he returns to those old stamping grounds, conducting a long, long, unremittingly long tutorial under the benign virtual gaze of his own favourite Cambridge tutor, Jonathan Bennett, former professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. I was relieved to see Frayn's admission that Bennett rejected, as I did, "most of all the central argument, which he regards as `anthropocentrism run amok'." The trouble with Frayn's ambitious book, or lay sermon, which I began at a high pitch of excited anticipation (as I had many years ago with Douglas Hofstadter's G?del, Escher, Bach), is twofold. Its polymathic ambition is preposterously over the top. And the paradox with which it struggles for nearly 500 pages isn't one. Unlike the implied Colonel Blimp of my opening paragraph, I am all in favour of intellectual ambition and reckless connections soldered between firewalled disciplines -- but it really is a bit hard to take seriously a philosopher at home who wishes to unsettle us on the topics of grammar (Chomsky is not only wrong but laughably so), quantum theory, the status of scientific laws in general, the mysterious nature of number, whether reality is any more definite than fiction, and what is fiction anyway, dreaming, deity and faith (believers are not only not believers but laughably so), causality... Oddly enough, the one topic that isn't tormented to within an inch of its epistemological life is moral science, assuming there is such a thing. The repeated refrain ? the reFrayn, therefore -- is what he dubs our "traffic with the world", and the supposed paradox that our part in the creation of the (or a) universe is entirely crucial, even though we are nothing but froth on the surface of an otherwise meaningless spume billions of years old. Oh no! Not that "You create your own Reality" New Age drivel? Well, no, of course not. Frayn is an intensely intelligent adult. He is not going to fall into that trap. Or... is he? Can the moon be there when nobody is observing it? A proposition apparently embedded in quantum mechanics, that question tormented Einstein, who thought, as you and I do, that it was ridiculous. Yet quantum mechanics turns out to be right, and Einstein wrong, although not necessarily about the independent reality of the moon, luckily. Frayn seems to have got his foot stuck in the same tar, and he happily winds himself tighter and tighter in its sticky bondage, conducting a relentless Socratic dialogue with an imaginary partner whose answers he provides. Sometimes the partner appears to be his wife, sometimes an old friend, or his grown child or perhaps grandchild, sometimes the "astute reader" writers tend to invoke when they've just pulled a swifty. This quick and intelligent Other fires back all the smart ripostes we also wish to offer, but Frayn is always there up ahead, smarter still, winning all the arguments. You can't blame him, after all. If his imaginary opponent came up with a better reply, he'd be obliged to grab it himself. This is a search for truth, you know. But wait -- what do we mean by "truth"? And what do we mean by "mean"? And what do we mean by "we"? It's all the fun of a Philosophy 101 course, spiced up with Broadway-grade whimsy and bon mots. The astute reader will have noticed that giveaway phrase in Frayn's subtitle: "Our part in..." Is it an accident that Frayn is a playwright, that all world's a stage, that his interest in performative language (the sort of language usage that enacts what it states, like the Queen declaring the Games open) blends linguistic philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein with a play script, all snappy dialogue and present tense abbreviated descriptions? No accident at all, but you can be sure that Frayn is there ahead of you. "You smile that sceptical smile of yours. You have read somewhere that I write fiction for a living, so my announcing that fiction is the archetype of truth sounds suspiciously like an armaments manufacturer insisting that war is the way to peace." Quite. Caught. Still, there it is. The starry immensity spreading outward for billions of light years did not spring from a stage director's instruction, nor do the actors give it shape except for their own small purposes and those of the audience, actors in their turn. It's not at all clear that Frayn disputes this chilly but bracing truth. "The truly mystical thing... is our consciousness, and the standing of the world in relation to it; and that is indissolubly a part of how things are in fact disposed." Reality has no meaning without a meaning-giver, a truth universally acknowledged. Frayn stands with us at the end of the biblical Day Six of creation, and sees that "the arrival of man and his dominion finally brought the long darkness of Day Zero to an end." For all we know, of course, the galaxies might swarm with other minds. Each will hold a special affection for its part in the creation of a universe. Perhaps that is what Frayn is telling us, and perhaps we need the reminder. But keep an eye out for that sticky tar -- it can get everywhere. ============= [and as a bonus:] Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos By Seth Lloyd Jonathan Cape, 221 pp Back when making an urn out of mud was hi-tech, sages taught that the universe had been turned on a potter's wheel, life shaped from damp soil by the deity's hands. In a yet more earthy image, ancient peoples supposed that heaven and earth formed from the sprayed semen of some lusty god; later, splattered milk from a sacred cow did a more decorous job. With the rise of literacy and the oil lamp, creation became text written upon the void: "Let there be Light!" Machines put in their appearance, and before you could say "Newtonian physics" everyone figured the world resembled a big steam engine. Sir James Jeans, an early cosmologist, declared that the universe was more like a Great Thought. Today, there's a computer on every desktop and in every cellphone, so it's not surprising that the Great Thought starts to look like... pure information. And not your father's information, the sort in the library. This is information with a vengeance: qubits, quantum information from parallel worlds. A bit describes a single choice with two mutually exclusive answers. Yes or no, boy or girl, alive or dead. It's the basis of science. Does theory A match the experimental results better than theory B? It's also at the root of everyday decisions. Shall I take that path, or this? But wait, perhaps four or five choices are available? True, but once you've chosen one path, all the others collapse into "the roads not taken". Quantum physics makes that quite literal, in an odd way that goes beyond our usual experience. When a particle of light darts from a lamp to this page and then back to your eye, it always takes the path of least action, the shortest possible route. But in doing so, according to quantum theory, it actually took all possible pathways, which scrunched together to create that single shortest trip. What's difficult to grasp about this bizarre perspective is that everything in the cosmos functions by those quantum rules. Underneath the everyday stolid sensible world, true reality is this hissing, seething fury of alternatives jammed on top of each other. To describe it, physics needs not just bits, the yes/no, one/zero binary choices of arithmetic and computer science, but qubits, units of information that contain both yes and no, one and zero. So what can you buy with these strange new tools of thought? For Seth Lloyd, a distinguished theorist of computation and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, and a pioneer of quantum computing, it's crucial that everything in the universe is made of qubits. Every atom, every elementary particle, is a tiny quantum computer that registers information, processes it, passes it along not as a stream of crisp binary code but in a blur of superimposed but tightly constrained possibilities. Is this any more than a fancy way of saying the same thing? Yes, insists Professor Lloyd, because quantum computers can scratch itches that ordinary digital computers can't reach. As yet, in labs, only very limited quantum computers have been built -- but they do exist, so we know that they're not just somebody's clever but unlikely brainstorm. With a quantum computer, you can explore simultaneously all possible answers to a given question, and see the correct answer instantly fall out as the incorrect answers obliterate each other -- like out-of-phase sound waves in a first-class passenger's noise-reduction headset. But if the universe is not just a regular computer, but a cosmic quantum computer, what is it calculating? Seth Lloyd offers an inevitable answer: it is calculating itself. The universe is no longer a book written by a divine author, scribbling and discarding multiple drafts. It is a colossal computation in which all those drafts come into existence at once and, in the jargon of physics, interfere constructively and destructively with each other. In the end, what you see is what you get, but it's just the faintest after-image of the compressed multiplicity of its computation. "In this picture," Lloyd says, "the universe embarks on all possible computations at once." For us, a computation is a sort of strictly organised thought. Might we, therefore, imagine the universe not as the thought of God (an old idea) but as thinking a kind of God into existence, as process theology used to claim? "Some of the information processing the universe performs is indeed thought -- human thought... but the vast majority... lies in the collision of atoms, in the slight motions of matter and light... Such universal `thoughts' are humble: they consist of elementary particles just minding their own business." Yes, but as the universe expands and cools, Lloyds foresees life reaching "to encompass first stars, and galaxies, then clusters of galaxies, and eventually, it would take billions of years to have a single thought." Such cosmic vistas can be remote and terrifying, as well as awe-inspiring, but Lloyd's treatment of the computational cosmos is laced with charming and sometimes deeply moving anecdotes: his gauche encounter with the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges, who first depicted in literary imagination a universe of infinite pathways; the tragic death of his no less brilliant physics mentor, Heinz Pagels, who crashed down a gully while they climbed Pyramid Peak near Aspen, betrayed by a childhood polio injury. "While he lived, Heinz programmed his own piece of the universe. The resulting computation unfolds in us and around us." Abstract consolation, but profoundly felt. Meanwhile, the cosmos continues its immense and star-blazing computation. Perhaps, since we're part of it, carrying our memories forward, that computation is not finally meaningless. ============= From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Mar 1 03:30:01 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:30:01 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <16409170.121771172719801399.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >By a stroke of luck: > >The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe >By Michael Frayn >Faber, 483pp. > >Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos >By Seth Lloyd >Jonathan Cape, 221 pp Hey, Damien. Did you write those reviews? PJ From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Mar 1 04:02:54 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:02:54 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <16409170.121771172719801399.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <16409170.121771172719801399.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070228220132.02329748@satx.rr.com> At 10:30 PM 2/28/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >Hey, Damien. Did you write those reviews? Yes, & posted here in response to yr question >Anyone read this yet? From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Mar 1 04:05:34 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:05:34 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] HEADS UP: despres/frappr In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200703010423.l214N7c1020300@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I received those notices too. I saw my pushpin was in Santa Clara, ignored it. If anyone here is buddies with Jonano Despres, please contact him offlist and ask him to desist forthwith on the presumptuousness, thanks. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Davis > Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 11:15 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [extropy-chat] HEADS UP: despres/frappr > > Jonathan Despres has created a frappr map entitled "futurismo, school > of the future". I just got and email telling me that I had joined > frapper and that I was on said map. But I hadn't joined. J. Despres > had apparently created my frappr account, perhaps merely by putting me > on his map... Best, Jeff Davis From pj at pj-manney.com Thu Mar 1 05:04:32 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:04:32 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <13199703.128081172725472101.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >>Hey, Damien. Did you write those reviews? > >Yes, & posted here in response to yr question Whoa. I ask and I really DO receive! Thanks! I have to say, however, that the contrast between your and Seth Lloyd's opinions of Frayn's work is... fascinating... to say the least. Apparently the non-storyteller has a higher opinion about the connection between reality and narrative than the storyteller does! PJ From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Mar 1 04:57:28 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:57:28 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] The reverse Turing Test In-Reply-To: <45E5A1A6.8080000@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <200703010511.l215BT5b012722@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Alex Ramonsky ... > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The reverse Turing Test > > ...Punfight at the O.K. corral? > Be there at noon, Sherrif Spike, the heck you bet I will : ) > Bring your sixgnus. Meet me outside the bra... What? Who told you about my bra Alex? That comment is outrageous! Oh, uh... Never mind. Wordplay. OK, I was mistaken, the comment was withinrageous. So what if a comment is exactly on the borderline between outrageous and withinrageous? Do the prefixes cancel each other and the comment is rageous? spike From amara at amara.com Thu Mar 1 07:22:01 2007 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 08:22:01 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] HEADS UP: despres/frappr Message-ID: Spike: >I received those notices too. I saw my pushpin was in Santa Clara, ignored >it. If anyone here is buddies with Jonano Despres, please contact him >offlist and ask him to desist forthwith on the presumptuousness, thanks. Writing him nicely won't work, Spike. He has a torrid history of doing things like this. Someone will need to contact frappr and have them shut him down. http://www.frappr.com/?a=feedback I suspect that all of those 'visitor' people who are the ~120 members are unwilling participants in his 'school'. 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 sentience at pobox.com Thu Mar 1 07:56:05 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:56:05 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <13199703.128081172725472101.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <13199703.128081172725472101.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <45E68715.7040205@pobox.com> pjmanney wrote: > > I have to say, however, that the contrast between your and Seth > Lloyd's opinions of Frayn's work is... fascinating... to say the > least. Apparently the non-storyteller has a higher opinion about the > connection between reality and narrative than the storyteller does! That's no more surprising than that a magician should be less enchanted by his own artifice than the audience. Anyone who writes stories knows that they are constructed to be unreal; the reader, by design, is wrapped only in the enchantment. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From pgptag at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 08:08:35 2007 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 09:08:35 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism as a reality based religion Message-ID: <470a3c520703010008o4bb79f56m610cee1affd35e31@mail.gmail.com> http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/transhumanism_as_a_reality_based_religion/ Wesley J. Smith says: "Hughes believes that humans will one day be made immortal and that we will all be able to upload our minds into computers where we will spend eternity enjoying group consciousnesses with our fellow post humans. Of the two of us, I hardly think I am the one who is reality challenged? Transhumanism is religion. And it definitely isn't reality based". My comment: Who is reality challenged, one who believes in science or one who believes in Santa Claus? I have never been able to see any fundamental difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus. In both cases, one is believing in something for which there is no evidence. Sure, I am not able to prove that Santa Claus does not exist. But the existence of Santa Claus would be so strongly against our scientific knowledge that I think the safest assumption is that Santa Claus does not exist. Same for God. Mind uploading is a future technology that does not exist yet, and will not be developed next year. My best guess is that developing operational mind uploading technology will take 30 years. But even if mind uploading technology does not exist yet, it is perfectly compatible with our scientific knowledge. The history of science and technology demonstrates that is something can be done (in the sense of not being a violation of scientific laws), sooner or later it will be done. So Wesley yes, I think you are the one who is reality challenged. Is transhumanism a religion? I do not think "religion" is a very appropriate definition of transhumanism. We do not share the self-righteousness, closed mindedness, bigotry and intolerance found in most religions. You say that the religious right opposes the genocide at Darfur, but History and CNN say that the religious right mentality (in many religions) has been and continues to be directly responsible of many genocides all over the planet. And of course, transhumanism is not a religion because it is not based on revelation without evidence. Transhumanists only believe in a heaven that we can build, if and when we develop the necessary capabilities. But "religion" has also, in my opinion, positive connotations. It is about transcending our current limits and becoming more, much more, than what we are. It is about hope and happiness. In this sense I am willing to accept the label "religion" for the transhumanist worldview. A transhumanist religion, if such a thing existed, would be a kinder, tolerant, inclusive and forgiving religion based on science and humanism. From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Thu Mar 1 15:23:22 2007 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 07:23:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism as a reality based religion In-Reply-To: <470a3c520703010008o4bb79f56m610cee1affd35e31@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <698870.51334.qm@web56505.mail.re3.yahoo.com> If you're going to call transhumanism a religion, would you also call modern medicine a religion? Computer use? I wouldn't. Making positive things happen in reality has nothing to do with religion. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070301/b8c21d1e/attachment.html From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Mar 1 22:25:22 2007 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 14:25:22 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Slight variation on a theme that has been making the rounds. {8-] After reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, I want to live life in reverse, as a cryonaut from Tralfamador: You start out frozen solid, but then you thaw. You are still dead of course, so you get that unpleasantness out of the way right up front. Then you wake up alive in an old age home which really sucks at first because you are sick and frail, but your hearing and vision steadily improve, aches and pains go away and you are feeling better every day. Eventually you get kicked out for being too healthy. You enjoy your retirement and regularly give back your pension checks, which actually increase in buying power over time because of deflation. Then you start work with a big party where they take away your gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You go to college, hang with the lads, drink excessively, party, you're generally promiscuous. Any consequences of this dissipated lifestyle disappear as if by magic. You go to high school to prepare for the past, then primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have fewer and fewer responsibilities, then none at all. Your parents take care of everything. They look marvelously healthy and sturdy these days. Then you become a baby, and then you are born. You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in calm luxury, in spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... You finish off as an orgasm. From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 02:39:15 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:39:15 +1100 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 3/2/07, spike wrote: > Slight variation on a theme that has been making the rounds. {8-] > > > After reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, I want to live life in > reverse, as a cryonaut from Tralfamador: > > You start out frozen solid, but then you thaw. You are still dead of > course, so you get that unpleasantness out of the way right up front. > > Then you wake up alive in an old age home which really sucks at first > because you are sick and frail, but your hearing and vision steadily > improve, aches and pains go away and you are feeling better every day. > > Eventually you get kicked out for being too healthy. > > You enjoy your retirement and regularly give back your pension checks, > which actually increase in buying power over time because of deflation. > > Then you start work with a big party where they take away your gold watch > on your first day. > > You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You go to college, > hang with the lads, drink excessively, party, you're generally > promiscuous. > Any consequences of this dissipated lifestyle disappear as if by magic. > > You go to high school to prepare for the past, then primary school, you > become a kid, you play, and you have fewer and fewer responsibilities, > then > none at all. Your parents take care of everything. They look marvelously > healthy and sturdy these days. > > Then you become a baby, and then you are born. > > You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in calm luxury, in > spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... > > You finish off as an orgasm. I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with philosophy, but there is no difference between living your life forward and living your life in reverse, provided that each expereince is exactly the same at each moment in each case, e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It is like imagining that you swap places with George Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then something interesting has happened, but if you instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your body and mind, then no-one will notice any difference, and in fact it could have happened while you read the last sentence. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/f52c1cf4/attachment.html From sentience at pobox.com Fri Mar 2 03:58:15 2007 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:58:15 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: References: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <45E7A0D7.8090302@pobox.com> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with philosophy, but there is no > difference between living your life forward and living your life in > reverse, provided that each expereince is exactly the same at each > moment in each case, e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. > It is like imagining that you swap places with George Bush: if you > remember being you when you are him then something interesting has > happened, but if you instantaneously swap over his body and mind for > your body and mind, then no-one will notice any difference, and in fact > it could have happened while you read the last sentence. Hear hear. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 04:40:21 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:40:21 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: <45E7A0D7.8090302@pobox.com> References: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45E7A0D7.8090302@pobox.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301223903.02453e68@satx.rr.com> At 07:58 PM 3/1/2007 -0800, Eliezer wrote: >Hear hear. Or, more strictly, Hear . raeH From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Mar 2 05:15:38 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:15:38 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <28002571.234111172812538359.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> >Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: >That's no more surprising than that a magician should be less enchanted >by his own artifice than the audience. Anyone who writes stories knows >that they are constructed to be unreal; the reader, by design, is >wrapped only in the enchantment. I think that's a facile, but unsatisfactory answer, given the tone and content of Damien's review. I was hoping to get Damien to expand on it with my baiting, but I accept that his review is his last word on the subject. He wrote enough. In comparing the two reviews, I suspect it comes down to a disagreement on the underlying theories of language Frayn relies upon (I did note Damien's violent dismissal of Chomsky. I only begin to grasp Chomsky at the most superficial level, linguistics not being my thing, and Damien is more than welcome to his opinion. It is certainly shared by others.), as well as matters of writing style and structure (Damien found it annoying; Lloyd found it seductive) and the crucial objective vs. subjective reality question and what philosophies underlie your tendency to lean to one side or the other of the debate. In fact, I'd say your statement is backward, or at least many writers would think it so. (Perhaps Damien does. Or he doesn't.) In my experience, people are wrapped in the enchantment when something at the heart of a story touches on truth, not unreality. As Damien knows (and Frayn discovered in his 'sticky tar') the truth may be out there, but it's damned messy. Stories often bring us closer to the feeling of truth than the analytical exploration, because stories embrace the messy, the contradictory, the obtuse nature of existence. That is part of 'truth' they excel at. Analysis, on the other hand, fails when too messy. And I don't know about you, but I know quite a few magicians. And they're pretty damned impressed by the great performances of fellow prestidigitators (Penn and Teller not withstanding...). In this case, it seems Damien expected to be wowed -- and wasn't -- by Frayn's performance. PJ From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 05:30:11 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:30:11 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <28002571.234111172812538359.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <28002571.234111172812538359.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301232544.0255c250@satx.rr.com> At 12:15 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >(I did note Damien's violent dismissal of Chomsky. No no NO. *Frayn's* violent dismissal. I'm summarizing his attitude in that parenthesis, as in the one about religion, as I was summarizing/impersonating/pillorying the attiude of olde fogeys in my opening par. Look more carefully: < it really is a bit hard to take seriously a philosopher at home who wishes to unsettle us on the topics of grammar (Chomsky is not only wrong but laughably so)... whether reality is any more definite than fiction, and what is fiction anyway, dreaming, deity and faith (believers are not only not believers but laughably so), > Damien Broderick From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Mar 2 05:42:54 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:42:54 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <10798780.235581172814174941.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Damien wrote: >No no NO. *Frayn's* violent dismissal. I'm summarizing his attitude >in that parenthesis, as in the one about religion, as I was >summarizing/impersonating/pillorying the attiude of olde fogeys in my >opening par. Look more carefully: > >< it really is a bit hard to take seriously a >philosopher at home who wishes to unsettle us on the >topics of grammar (Chomsky is not only wrong but >laughably so)... whether reality is any more definite >than fiction, and what is fiction anyway, >dreaming, deity and faith (believers are not only >not believers but laughably so), > So sorry to put words in your mouth! (Although re-reading it, it's still confusing.) [Does that mean you disagree with his disagreement with the often disagreement-provoking Chomsky...? ;-) ] PJ From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 05:49:39 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:49:39 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301232544.0255c250@satx.rr.com> References: <28002571.234111172812538359.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <7.0.1.0.2.20070301232544.0255c250@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301234715.02457bb8@satx.rr.com> At 11:30 PM 3/1/2007 -0600, I wrote hastily: >No no NO... Look more carefully: Ahem. That verges on the rude, if not well over the verge. Of course, it's the journalist's job to be clear, so berating the reader for not "looking carefully" is shifting the blame. Sorry about that. Damien Broderick From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Mar 2 05:54:50 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:54:50 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <30213712.236121172814890851.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Damien wrote: >Ahem. That verges on the rude, if not well over the verge. Of course, >it's the journalist's job to be clear, so berating the reader for not >"looking carefully" is shifting the blame. Sorry about that. No worries, mate! PJ From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 06:00:36 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:36 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <10798780.235581172814174941.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <10798780.235581172814174941.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301235138.023f4f18@satx.rr.com> At 12:42 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >re-reading it, it's still confusing.) [Does that mean you disagree >with his disagreement with the often disagreement-provoking Chomsky...? ;-) ] There's no way to tell from that paragraph: I'm just summarizing the great, even absurd, plenitude of the domains he takes in, and his unfashionable (e.g. contra Chomsky) or apparently paradoxical (e.g. believers are not really believers) stances. I might as well add that after my piece appeared in an Australian newspaper I got a very pleasant letter from Frayn's old Cambridge philosophy tutor (who is profoundly and repeatedly acknowledged in the book), who commented that he'd eagerly read all the reviews he could find and regarded mine as the only one "that has put precise fingers on the two central defects of the work - its tackling far too much, and its being organised around a non-existent 'paradox'." FWIW. :) Damien Broderick From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Mar 2 06:11:42 2007 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:11:42 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn Message-ID: <19521893.236861172815902860.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Damien wrote: >I might as well add that after my piece appeared in an Australian >newspaper I got a very pleasant letter from Frayn's old Cambridge >philosophy tutor (who is profoundly and repeatedly acknowledged in >the book), who commented that he'd eagerly read all the reviews he >could find and regarded mine as the only one "that has put precise >fingers on the two central defects of the work - its tackling far too >much, and its being organised around a non-existent 'paradox'." FWIW. :) I LOVE that! (But if Frayn is in his seventies, then how old is his tutor and can I have some of whatever he's having!) PJ From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 06:39:05 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:39:05 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn In-Reply-To: <19521893.236861172815902860.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <19521893.236861172815902860.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302003715.024feec0@satx.rr.com> At 01:11 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >(But if Frayn is in his seventies, then how old is his tutor and can >I have some of whatever he's having! Read about Jonathan Bennett and his remarkable work in making the philosophical classics intelligible to modern readers without dumbing them down at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_jfb.html "Having retired from teaching in 1997, Jonathan Bennett now (2007) lives with his wife Gillian on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where he is much occupied with preparing more of these early modern philosophy texts." From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Fri Mar 2 04:03:16 2007 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 23:03:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It >is like imagining that you swap places with George >Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then >something interesting has happened, but if you >instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your >body and mind, then no-one will notice any >difference, and in fact it could have happened while >you read the last sentence. Memory plays a huge function between how many things one remembers as being a positive or negative "interesting things that happen". Do you have a philosophy as to why many people choose to keep in their memory all the negative "interesting things that happen" instead of the positive? >I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with >philosophy, but there is no difference between living >your life forward and living your life in reverse, >provided that each experience is exactly the same at >each moment in each case.. I enjoyed your example but i'm not really clear by what you mean. Could you explain? Thanks, just curious:) Anna __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From kevinpet at gmail.com Thu Mar 1 06:59:50 2007 From: kevinpet at gmail.com (Kevin Peterson) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:59:50 -0800 Subject: [extropy-chat] The war on aging... Message-ID: <70c6596f0702282259i61fc59ecmd332efd624adf1fd@mail.gmail.com> Robert Bradbury wrote: > Some of you may have already seen the online petition for "Indefinite Life > Extension". > ... Are you kidding? You want the government involved in pursuing life extension research? First, it opens everything up to the whims of the electorate. Secondly, individual life extension is not in the best public policy interests of the country. Show me a petition that says "stay out of our way, let me engage in responsible germline human genetic engineering, and start modifying policy (such as social security) to be compatible with significantly extended lifespans" and I'll sign it. A "war on aging"? FDA declare aging a disease? This is not the Apollo program, it is far too long-term to be carried out by a democratic government. (It might be possible for a non-democratic government to carry out such a program, but you probably wouldn't want to live under such a government.) Personally, I don't see the emphasis on life extension. Life extension to the point of a healthy 100 years will be easily attainable within a few years of letting go of our qualms about the techniques. And by the time those who benefit from the first, easy steps in that direction get old, it'll be easier to just upload yourself. Kevin From citta437 at aol.com Thu Mar 1 01:43:10 2007 From: citta437 at aol.com (citta437 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:43:10 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why did the big bang happen? Message-ID: <8C929BA1A73F26B-16C8-2D74@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> "Why did the big bang happen? Where did this thought come from? Psychologically, it is a projection of a desire for satisfaction. In physics, the theory of the big bang is a working hypothesis for the time being until proven wrong by further scientific tests using a objective device besides critical thinking. ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Mar 2 08:10:04 2007 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:10:04 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> References: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302020442.023b7760@satx.rr.com> At 10:38 AM 2/28/2007 -0500, someone wrote: >The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there >something rather than nothing? Good dog in heat, I get so tired of this fake question. What makes anyone suppose that "nothing" is the default physical or metaphysical condition, or even an intelligible construct? Nobody has ever seen "nothing", just the displacement of one something from here to there or even out of sight, leaving behind another something. Get over it. If the question is "why are there gradients rather than universal smoothness?" there are answers available. Damien Broderick From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 09:15:06 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 01:15:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Critical and Positive Thinking In-Reply-To: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <616154.8085.qm@web60523.mail.yahoo.com> --- citta437 at aol.com wrote: > The question remains in our universe of thoughts, > why is there > something rather than nothing? OM. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." -Mark Twain ____________________________________________________________________________________ Food fight? Enjoy some healthy debate in the Yahoo! Answers Food & Drink Q&A. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545367 From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 10:23:13 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 21:23:13 +1100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 3/2/07, Anna Taylor wrote: --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > >e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It > >is like imagining that you swap places with George > >Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then > >something interesting has happened, but if you > >instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your > >body and mind, then no-one will notice any > >difference, and in fact it could have happened while > >you read the last sentence. > > Memory plays a huge function between how many things > one remembers as being a positive or negative > "interesting things that happen". Do you have a > philosophy as to why many people choose to keep in > their memory all the negative "interesting things that > happen" instead of the positive? It has partly to do with mood and personality. Depressed people tend to remember and ruminate about all the negative things, or view neutral or even positive things in a negative way. Cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressant medication help to change this way of thinking. Manic people, on the other hand, are the opposite: they dismiss bad things and turn everything into a cause for optimism. Mood-stabilising and antipsychotic medication is the usual treatment for mania. >I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with > >philosophy, but there is no difference between living > >your life forward and living your life in reverse, > >provided that each experience is exactly the same at > >each moment in each case.. > > I enjoyed your example but i'm not really clear by > what you mean. Could you explain? Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but they could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without being provided with external information, when or for how long your program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate of your implementation. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/4119a7c5/attachment.html From eugen at leitl.org Fri Mar 2 10:48:04 2007 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 11:48:04 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: References: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20070302104804.GO31912@leitl.org> On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:23:13PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be > seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but they > could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were But you would have to run the computation, to compute the sequence of trajectory frames before you can start reshuffling anything. > part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any > point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another > computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without No problem, as long you have a last state to resume from, which continues the trajectory. > being provided with external information, when or for how long your > program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether > the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your How can you compute things out of sequence? The nearest analogon is hash Life (building a hash table of recursive light cones, using the fact that conformation distribution is very far from random, which allows very large speedups, at least on older sequential), and I'm not at all sure what this cause to in-world embedded observers (Life is an all-purpose computer). If you're a process, and you do some fancy nonlinear things in the trajectory computation, even though the target state is the same, I'm not buying the first-person observation is ok. > program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate of > your implementation. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/ed95c4a4/attachment.bin From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 11:16:14 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 22:16:14 +1100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: <20070302104804.GO31912@leitl.org> References: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20070302104804.GO31912@leitl.org> Message-ID: Suppose there are two programs: program A is my life on 1st March 2007 and program B is my life on 2nd March 2007. Granted, the programmer needs to know all sorts of details about my past life before he can write the programs, and in particular he has to know what is going into program A before he can write program B, but we assume that he has done his job properly. Now here I am, and it's the 2nd of March by my calendar, so it must be program B that is running. I certainly remember yesterday as being the 1st of March, but does this give me any information at all as to whether program A was run yesterday, has not yet been run, is being run simultaneously on a separate machine or process, or any details at all about its implementation? Stathis Papaioannou On 3/2/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:23:13PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be > > seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but > they > > could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were > > But you would have to run the computation, to compute the sequence > of trajectory frames before you can start reshuffling anything. > > > part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any > > point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another > > computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without > > No problem, as long you have a last state to resume from, which > continues the trajectory. > > > being provided with external information, when or for how long your > > program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether > > the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your > > How can you compute things out of sequence? The nearest analogon is > hash Life (building a hash table of recursive light cones, using the > fact that conformation distribution is very far from random, which > allows very large speedups, at least on older sequential), and I'm > not at all sure what this cause to in-world embedded observers (Life > is an all-purpose computer). > > If you're a process, and you do some fancy nonlinear things in > the trajectory computation, even though the target state is the same, > I'm not buying the first-person observation is ok. > > > program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate > of > > your implementation. > > -- > 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 > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFF6ADkdbAkQ4sp9r4RAlC7AKCRLB0Z3+9/q7BDGEEjN+zTEYCxlACeJrMQ > ttLOn51tcw1jL518Dgq3LJk= > =aAFG > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > 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: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/d74d2190/attachment.html From asa at nada.kth.se Fri Mar 2 12:31:05 2007 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:31:05 +0100 (MET) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302020442.023b7760@satx.rr.com> References: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070302020442.023b7760@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <1107.163.1.72.81.1172838665.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Damien Broderick wrote: > At 10:38 AM 2/28/2007 -0500, someone wrote: >>The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there >>something rather than nothing? > > Good dog in heat, I get so tired of this fake question. What makes > anyone suppose that "nothing" is the default physical or metaphysical > condition, or even an intelligible construct? I often ponder why there is something rather than everything. My usual answer is the anthropic principle, but outside our neat little domain lies all the other Tegmark Level 4 possibilities. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 15:20:07 2007 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 10:20:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: References: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20070302104804.GO31912@leitl.org> Message-ID: <62c14240703020720x777237d8y10d9d6226247101f@mail.gmail.com> On 3/2/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Suppose there are two programs: program A is my life on 1st March 2007 and > program B is my life on 2nd March 2007. Granted, the programmer needs to > know all sorts of details about my past life before he can write the > programs, and in particular he has to know what is going into program A > before he can write program B, but we assume that he has done his job > properly. Now here I am, and it's the 2nd of March by my calendar, so it > must be program B that is running. I certainly remember yesterday as being > the 1st of March, but does this give me any information at all as to whether > program A was run yesterday, has not yet been run, is being run > simultaneously on a separate machine or process, or any details at all about > its implementation? Suppose your life/program is represented as a high dimension manifold, then it would be possible to compute a given moment by selecting a point this object's the surface. The memory/state information would be relative to that point, but not necessarily require iterative calculation. I've thought about this using the frames of a film - each 1/24 of a second contains stateful information about it's placement in the sequence. For a movie you know well enough, you could probably resequence a random pile of film clips from these clues (within some threshold of accuracy: 1/24 of a second doesn't allow a great deal of variation from frame to frame) From jonkc at att.net Fri Mar 2 17:20:41 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 12:20:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] A movie recommendation References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070226110417.0408ee80@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><001601c75a46$078a4060$fa0a4e0c@MyComputer> <6B76408D-E6E9-46B9-B2E9-E02C82D25765@randallsquared.com> Message-ID: <007b01c75cef$23db6b30$a50d4e0c@MyComputer> If you have not already seen the great movie The Prestige do yourself a favor and see it immediately, but don't read any more of this message. "Randall Randall" > As for the movie supporting your view of copies, I don't think it did. > The makers clearly wanted us to see the the copykiller as a bad person - But it was the original Angier who did the first killing, shooting his poor copy the first time he used the machine just a few seconds after he created him. My favorite line was when Angier said " It took courage to walk into that machine every night, not knowing if I'd be the man in the tank drowning or the man in The Prestige". Of course he was both. As for Borden, he had no copy, just a natural clone better known as a identical twin. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Fri Mar 2 17:39:32 2007 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 12:39:32 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] The world's smallest transistor References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070226110417.0408ee80@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><001601c75a46$078a4060$fa0a4e0c@MyComputer><6B76408D-E6E9-46B9-B2E9-E02C82D25765@randallsquared.com> <007b01c75cef$23db6b30$a50d4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <009401c75cf1$c1cdc430$a50d4e0c@MyComputer> The world's smallest transistor has just been made, it is only one carbon atom thick and less than 50 atoms wide. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070228170340.htm John K Clark From randall at randallsquared.com Fri Mar 2 18:32:17 2007 From: randall at randallsquared.com (Randall Randall) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:32:17 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] A movie recommendation In-Reply-To: <007b01c75cef$23db6b30$a50d4e0c@MyComputer> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20070226110417.0408ee80@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><001601c75a46$078a4060$fa0a4e0c@MyComputer> <6B76408D-E6E9-46B9-B2E9-E02C82D25765@randallsquared.com> <007b01c75cef$23db6b30$a50d4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <26126E25-C034-493D-950C-9F0802B10E95@randallsquared.com> On Mar 2, 2007, at 12:20 PM, John K Clark wrote: > If you have not already seen the great movie The Prestige do > yourself a > favor and see it immediately, but don't read any more of this message. > > Leaving spoiler space intact. > > > > > "Randall Randall" > >> As for the movie supporting your view of copies, I don't think it >> did. >> The makers clearly wanted us to see the the copykiller as a bad >> person - > > But it was the original Angier who did the first killing, shooting > his poor > copy the first time he used the machine just a few seconds after he > created him. Yes, it was (some) Angier I was referring to. The reaction that those I watched it with was horror, not "oh, that was a neat trick which didn't harm anyone!", as I imagine you'd say. > My favorite line was when Angier said " It took courage to > walk into that machine every night, not knowing if I'd be the man > in the > tank drowning or the man in The Prestige". Of course he was both. On the face of it, it seemed that the original was the one killed every night. -- 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 scerir at libero.it Fri Mar 2 19:11:16 2007 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 20:11:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing References: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4@WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20070302020442.023b7760@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <000501c75cfe$8ea4c4c0$45921f97@archimede> citta437: > The question remains in our universe of thoughts, > why is there something rather than nothing? Avantguardian: > OM. Odyssey of the Mind? Oh Man? Anders: > I often ponder why there is something > rather than everything. Making that question a bit more physical, there are papers, like 'Computational complexity of the landscape' [1], in which people try to solve general toy problems, like 'how to get the minimal (or zero) vacuum energy, given a collection of fields at choice', etc. But it turns out that computational complexity theory cannot say anything about (the hardness of) individual instances, and these toy problems seem to be intractable in general [1]. How did the universe do this or that? We usually say that the 'multiverse' did it. But some problems are too difficult even for the multiverse to solve in polynomial time. (See also 'anthropic computing' [2][3]). [1] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0602072 [2] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412187 page 1 [3] http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=181 (Reading these papers I did not understand 'everything', I only understood 'something'). From citta437 at aol.com Fri Mar 2 17:30:43 2007 From: citta437 at aol.com (citta437 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:30:43 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Three questions about the vision re:Mission of ExI Message-ID: <8C92B07A41180DD-15FC-7D06@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> "The Mission of ExI in its transformational change is to serve its members by developing a core group to encourage and support the furtherance of the Proactionary Principle. Vision: Our core group uses the most advanced decision-making and forecasting methods to promote critical and creative thinking about emerging technologies. We advise the public and private sectors on policies and initiatives to better manage risks and maximize benefits and opportunities arising from emerging technologies. Our passion is helping others to improve decision-making about these technologies, especially those presenting challenges without precedent?sometimes even affecting the human condition itself. _______________ Hi, who comprised this so called core group, are they politically motivated group? Are they leaning towards a bipartisian or no particular party on issues about the war in Iraq? How do you improve decision making by this present administration or the governing party in war-torn nations? Need specific details on how this vision can be implemented without the use of force. Terry ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. =0 From citta437 at aol.com Fri Mar 2 16:27:56 2007 From: citta437 at aol.com (citta437 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:27:56 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] There's entropy in extropy. Message-ID: <8C92AFEDE7B64D1-15FC-795F@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> There's no extropy without entropy in our world of thoughts. In the cosmic universe, who cares what we think? We like to think that the human species thinks intelligently. Actually, this desire to think is driven by evolution {natural selection/survival of the fittest or diversification processes}. The random process of diversification is entropic in character so desiring to escape entropic thought we dig deeper into the cause so as to organize our world of thoughts towards extropic ideas { i.e. philosophy of Transhumanism}. Paradoxically, thoughts beggets thought as desires expand to no end. Perhaps finding our place in the universe would lead us to satisfying fulfillment of all desires? Terry ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. From citta437 at aol.com Fri Mar 2 15:15:35 2007 From: citta437 at aol.com (citta437 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:15:35 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Metaphysical construct In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8C92AF4C3174813-15FC-74EC@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> "The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there >something rather than nothing? Broderick's reply: " Good dog in heat, I get so tired of this fake question. What makes anyone suppose that "nothing" is the default physical or metaphysical condition, or even an intelligible construct? Nobody has ever seen "nothing", just the displacement of one something from here to there or even out of sight, leaving behind another something. Get over it. If the question is "why are there gradients rather than universal smoothness?" there are answers available." __________________ Hi, this metaphysical construct arises from a hungry mind {a philosophical mind} due to interactive processes, an exchange of information. If Transhumanism is a philosophy, it is a thought bordering to a belief of immortality/eternalism. I'm not saying that thought of immortality is right or wrong. Humans feel a need and a Transhumanist thinks this belief can fulfill that need if so then it can slide into dogmatism/fanaticism. However if its not a religion, as some say, because it is open to critical thinking and to scientific process of investigation why add more thoughts or philosophy in its pursuit of immortality rather than using the energy/funding to the advancement of science? REgards, Terry {Terry's Column in Zen Buddhism.org} ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 08:22:01 +0100 From: Amara Graps Subject: [extropy-chat] HEADS UP: despres/frappr To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Spike: >I received those notices too. I saw my pushpin was in Santa Clara, ignored >it. If anyone here is buddies with Jonano Despres, please contact him >offlist and ask him to desist forthwith on the presumptuousness, thanks. Writing him nicely won't work, Spike. He has a torrid history of doing things like this. Someone will need to contact frappr and have them shut him down. http://www.frappr.com/?a=feedback I suspect that all of those 'visitor' people who are the ~120 members are unwilling participants in his 'school'. 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 ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:56:05 -0800 From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45E68715.7040205 at pobox.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed pjmanney wrote: > > I have to say, however, that the contrast between your and Seth > Lloyd's opinions of Frayn's work is... fascinating... to say the > least. Apparently the non-storyteller has a higher opinion about the > connection between reality and narrative than the storyteller does! That's no more surprising than that a magician should be less enchanted by his own artifice than the audience. Anyone who writes stories knows that they are constructed to be unreal; the reader, by design, is wrapped only in the enchantment. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 09:08:35 +0100 From: "Giu1i0 Pri5c0" Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism as a reality based religion To: wta-talk at transhumanism.com, "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <470a3c520703010008o4bb79f56m610cee1affd35e31 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/transhumanism_as_a_reality_based_religion/ Wesley J. Smith says: "Hughes believes that humans will one day be made immortal and that we will all be able to upload our minds into computers where we will spend eternity enjoying group consciousnesses with our fellow post humans. Of the two of us, I hardly think I am the one who is reality challenged? Transhumanism is religion. And it definitely isn't reality based". My comment: Who is reality challenged, one who believes in science or one who believes in Santa Claus? I have never been able to see any fundamental difference between believing in God and believing in Santa Claus. In both cases, one is believing in something for which there is no evidence. Sure, I am not able to prove that Santa Claus does not exist. But the existence of Santa Claus would be so strongly against our scientific knowledge that I think the safest assumption is that Santa Claus does not exist. Same for God. Mind uploading is a future technology that does not exist yet, and will not be developed next year. My best guess is that developing operational mind uploading technology will take 30 years. But even if mind uploading technology does not exist yet, it is perfectly compatible with our scientific knowledge. The history of science and technology demonstrates that is something can be done (in the sense of not being a violation of scientific laws), sooner or later it will be done. So Wesley yes, I think you are the one who is reality challenged. Is transhumanism a religion? I do not think "religion" is a very appropriate definition of transhumanism. We do not share the self-righteousness, closed mindedness, bigotry and intolerance found in most religions. You say that the religious right opposes the genocide at Darfur, but History and CNN say that the religious right mentality (in many religions) has been and continues to be directly responsible of many genocides all over the planet. And of course, transhumanism is not a religion because it is not based on revelation without evidence. Transhumanists only believe in a heaven that we can build, if and when we develop the necessary capabilities. But "religion" has also, in my opinion, positive connotations. It is about transcending our current limits and becoming more, much more, than what we are. It is about hope and happiness. In this sense I am willing to accept the label "religion" for the transhumanist worldview. A transhumanist religion, if such a thing existed, would be a kinder, tolerant, inclusive and forgiving religion based on science and humanism. ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 07:23:22 -0800 (PST) From: Anne Corwin Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhumanism as a reality based religion To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <698870.51334.qm at web56505.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" If you're going to call transhumanism a religion, would you also call modern medicine a religion? Computer use? I wouldn't. Making positive things happen in reality has nothing to do with religion. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!" - Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time" --------------------------------- TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070301/b8c21d1e/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 10 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 14:25:22 -0800 From: "spike" Subject: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse To: "'ExI chat list'" Message-ID: <200703012238.l21McIhv018465 at andromeda.ziaspace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Slight variation on a theme that has been making the rounds. {8-] After reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, I want to live life in reverse, as a cryonaut from Tralfamador: You start out frozen solid, but then you thaw. You are still dead of course, so you get that unpleasantness out of the way right up front. Then you wake up alive in an old age home which really sucks at first because you are sick and frail, but your hearing and vision steadily improve, aches and pains go away and you are feeling better every day. Eventually you get kicked out for being too healthy. You enjoy your retirement and regularly give back your pension checks, which actually increase in buying power over time because of deflation. Then you start work with a big party where they take away your gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You go to college, hang with the lads, drink excessively, party, you're generally promiscuous. Any consequences of this dissipated lifestyle disappear as if by magic. You go to high school to prepare for the past, then primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have fewer and fewer responsibilities, then none at all. Your parents take care of everything. They look marvelously healthy and sturdy these days. Then you become a baby, and then you are born. You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in calm luxury, in spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... You finish off as an orgasm. ------------------------------ Message: 11 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:39:15 +1100 From: "Stathis Papaioannou" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 3/2/07, spike wrote: > Slight variation on a theme that has been making the rounds. {8-] > > > After reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, I want to live life in > reverse, as a cryonaut from Tralfamador: > > You start out frozen solid, but then you thaw. You are still dead of > course, so you get that unpleasantness out of the way right up front. > > Then you wake up alive in an old age home which really sucks at first > because you are sick and frail, but your hearing and vision steadily > improve, aches and pains go away and you are feeling better every day. > > Eventually you get kicked out for being too healthy. > > You enjoy your retirement and regularly give back your pension checks, > which actually increase in buying power over time because of deflation. > > Then you start work with a big party where they take away your gold watch > on your first day. > > You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You go to college, > hang with the lads, drink excessively, party, you're generally > promiscuous. > Any consequences of this dissipated lifestyle disappear as if by magic. > > You go to high school to prepare for the past, then primary school, you > become a kid, you play, and you have fewer and fewer responsibilities, > then > none at all. Your parents take care of everything. They look marvelously > healthy and sturdy these days. > > Then you become a baby, and then you are born. > > You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in calm luxury, in > spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... > > You finish off as an orgasm. I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with philosophy, but there is no difference between living your life forward and living your life in reverse, provided that each expereince is exactly the same at each moment in each case, e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It is like imagining that you swap places with George Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then something interesting has happened, but if you instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your body and mind, then no-one will notice any difference, and in fact it could have happened while you read the last sentence. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/f52c1cf4/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 12 Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:58:15 -0800 From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45E7A0D7.8090302 at pobox.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with philosophy, but there is no > difference between living your life forward and living your life in > reverse, provided that each expereince is exactly the same at each > moment in each case, e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. > It is like imagining that you swap places with George Bush: if you > remember being you when you are him then something interesting has > happened, but if you instantaneously swap over his body and mind for > your body and mind, then no-one will notice any difference, and in fact > it could have happened while you read the last sentence. Hear hear. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ------------------------------ Message: 13 Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:40:21 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301223903.02453e68 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 07:58 PM 3/1/2007 -0800, Eliezer wrote: >Hear hear. Or, more strictly, Hear . raeH ------------------------------ Message: 14 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:15:38 -0500 From: pjmanney Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: Message-ID: <28002571.234111172812538359.JavaMail.servlet at perfora> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 >Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: >That's no more surprising than that a magician should be less enchanted >by his own artifice than the audience. Anyone who writes stories knows >that they are constructed to be unreal; the reader, by design, is >wrapped only in the enchantment. I think that's a facile, but unsatisfactory answer, given the tone and content of Damien's review. I was hoping to get Damien to expand on it with my baiting, but I accept that his review is his last word on the subject. He wrote enough. In comparing the two reviews, I suspect it comes down to a disagreement on the underlying theories of language Frayn relies upon (I did note Damien's violent dismissal of Chomsky. I only begin to grasp Chomsky at the most superficial level, linguistics not being my thing, and Damien is more than welcome to his opinion. It is certainly shared by others.), as well as matters of writing style and structure (Damien found it annoying; Lloyd found it seductive) and the crucial objective vs. subjective reality question and what philosophies underlie your tendency to lean to one side or the other of the debate. In fact, I'd say your statement is backward, or at least many writers would think it so. (Perhaps Damien does. Or he doesn't.) In my experience, people are wrapped in the enchantment when something at the heart of a story touches on truth, not unreality. As Damien knows (and Frayn discovered in his 'sticky tar') the truth may be out there, but it's damned messy. Stories often bring us closer to the feeling of truth than the analytical exploration, because stories embrace the messy, the contradictory, the obtuse nature of existence. That is part of 'truth' they excel at. Analysis, on the other hand, fails when too messy. And I don't know about you, but I know quite a few magicians. And they're pretty damned impressed by the great performances of fellow prestidigitators (Penn and Teller not withstanding...). In this case, it seems Damien expected to be wowed -- and wasn't -- by Frayn's performance. PJ ------------------------------ Message: 15 Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:30:11 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301232544.0255c250 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 12:15 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >(I did note Damien's violent dismissal of Chomsky. No no NO. *Frayn's* violent dismissal. I'm summarizing his attitude in that parenthesis, as in the one about religion, as I was summarizing/impersonating/pillorying the attiude of olde fogeys in my opening par. Look more carefully: < it really is a bit hard to take seriously a philosopher at home who wishes to unsettle us on the topics of grammar (Chomsky is not only wrong but laughably so)... whether reality is any more definite than fiction, and what is fiction anyway, dreaming, deity and faith (believers are not only not believers but laughably so), > Damien Broderick ------------------------------ Message: 16 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:42:54 -0500 From: pjmanney Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: Message-ID: <10798780.235581172814174941.JavaMail.servlet at perfora> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Damien wrote: >No no NO. *Frayn's* violent dismissal. I'm summarizing his attitude >in that parenthesis, as in the one about religion, as I was >summarizing/impersonating/pillorying the attiude of olde fogeys in my >opening par. Look more carefully: > >< it really is a bit hard to take seriously a >philosopher at home who wishes to unsettle us on the >topics of grammar (Chomsky is not only wrong but >laughably so)... whether reality is any more definite >than fiction, and what is fiction anyway, >dreaming, deity and faith (believers are not only >not believers but laughably so), > So sorry to put words in your mouth! (Although re-reading it, it's still confusing.) [Does that mean you disagree with his disagreement with the often disagreement-provoking Chomsky...? ;-) ] PJ ------------------------------ Message: 17 Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:49:39 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301234715.02457bb8 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 11:30 PM 3/1/2007 -0600, I wrote hastily: >No no NO... Look more carefully: Ahem. That verges on the rude, if not well over the verge. Of course, it's the journalist's job to be clear, so berating the reader for not "looking carefully" is shifting the blame. Sorry about that. Damien Broderick ------------------------------ Message: 18 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:54:50 -0500 From: pjmanney Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: Message-ID: <30213712.236121172814890851.JavaMail.servlet at perfora> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Damien wrote: >Ahem. That verges on the rude, if not well over the verge. Of course, >it's the journalist's job to be clear, so berating the reader for not >"looking carefully" is shifting the blame. Sorry about that. No worries, mate! PJ ------------------------------ Message: 19 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:36 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070301235138.023f4f18 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 12:42 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >re-reading it, it's still confusing.) [Does that mean you disagree >with his disagreement with the often disagreement-provoking Chomsky...? ;-) ] There's no way to tell from that paragraph: I'm just summarizing the great, even absurd, plenitude of the domains he takes in, and his unfashionable (e.g. contra Chomsky) or apparently paradoxical (e.g. believers are not really believers) stances. I might as well add that after my piece appeared in an Australian newspaper I got a very pleasant letter from Frayn's old Cambridge philosophy tutor (who is profoundly and repeatedly acknowledged in the book), who commented that he'd eagerly read all the reviews he could find and regarded mine as the only one "that has put precise fingers on the two central defects of the work - its tackling far too much, and its being organised around a non-existent 'paradox'." FWIW. :) Damien Broderick ------------------------------ Message: 20 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:11:42 -0500 From: pjmanney Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: Message-ID: <19521893.236861172815902860.JavaMail.servlet at perfora> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Damien wrote: >I might as well add that after my piece appeared in an Australian >newspaper I got a very pleasant letter from Frayn's old Cambridge >philosophy tutor (who is profoundly and repeatedly acknowledged in >the book), who commented that he'd eagerly read all the reviews he >could find and regarded mine as the only one "that has put precise >fingers on the two central defects of the work - its tackling far too >much, and its being organised around a non-existent 'paradox'." FWIW. :) I LOVE that! (But if Frayn is in his seventies, then how old is his tutor and can I have some of whatever he's having!) PJ ------------------------------ Message: 21 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:39:05 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] book review: The Human Touch by Michael Frayn To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302003715.024feec0 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 01:11 AM 3/2/2007 -0500, PJ wrote: >(But if Frayn is in his seventies, then how old is his tutor and can >I have some of whatever he's having! Read about Jonathan Bennett and his remarkable work in making the philosophical classics intelligible to modern readers without dumbing them down at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_jfb.html "Having retired from teaching in 1997, Jonathan Bennett now (2007) lives with his wife Gillian on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where he is much occupied with preparing more of these early modern philosophy texts." ------------------------------ Message: 22 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 23:03:16 -0500 (EST) From: Anna Taylor Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <299149.28706.qm at web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It >is like imagining that you swap places with George >Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then >something interesting has happened, but if you >instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your >body and mind, then no-one will notice any >difference, and in fact it could have happened while >you read the last sentence. Memory plays a huge function between how many things one remembers as being a positive or negative "interesting things that happen". Do you have a philosophy as to why many people choose to keep in their memory all the negative "interesting things that happen" instead of the positive? >I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with >philosophy, but there is no difference between living >your life forward and living your life in reverse, >provided that each experience is exactly the same at >each moment in each case.. I enjoyed your example but i'm not really clear by what you mean. Could you explain? Thanks, just curious:) Anna __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Message: 23 Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:59:50 -0800 From: "Kevin Peterson" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The war on aging... To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <70c6596f0702282259i61fc59ecmd332efd624adf1fd at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Robert Bradbury wrote: > Some of you may have already seen the online petition for "Indefinite Life > Extension". > ... Are you kidding? You want the government involved in pursuing life extension research? First, it opens everything up to the whims of the electorate. Secondly, individual life extension is not in the best public policy interests of the country. Show me a petition that says "stay out of our way, let me engage in responsible germline human genetic engineering, and start modifying policy (such as social security) to be compatible with significantly extended lifespans" and I'll sign it. A "war on aging"? FDA declare aging a disease? This is not the Apollo program, it is far too long-term to be carried out by a democratic government. (It might be possible for a non-democratic government to carry out such a program, but you probably wouldn't want to live under such a government.) Personally, I don't see the emphasis on life extension. Life extension to the point of a healthy 100 years will be easily attainable within a few years of letting go of our qualms about the techniques. And by the time those who benefit from the first, easy steps in that direction get old, it'll be easier to just upload yourself. Kevin ------------------------------ Message: 24 Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:43:10 -0500 From: citta437 at aol.com Subject: [extropy-chat] Why did the big bang happen? To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <8C929BA1A73F26B-16C8-2D74 at WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed "Why did the big bang happen? Where did this thought come from? Psychologically, it is a projection of a desire for satisfaction. In physics, the theory of the big bang is a working hypothesis for the time being until proven wrong by further scientific tests using a objective device besides critical thinking. ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. ------------------------------ Message: 25 Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:38:56 -0500 From: citta437 at aol.com Subject: [extropy-chat] Critical and Positive Thinking To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <8C92965B18935D0-16C8-AB4 at WEBMAIL-RD12.sysops.aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Thank you to Extropy Institute for giving me an access to their site. As a student of Zen Buddhism, I found the philosophy or discipline of extropy similar to the practice of Zen which is a quest for truth. For instance, which comes first, critical or positive thinking? Its not that same question about the chicken or the egg issue. In Zen, first there's the mind{ in entropy}, then in the process of critical thinking, this entropic mind is gone and what remains is a positive process or an extropy of behavior/an organized growth with no end in sight. A Hindu might ask where did this entropic mind come from in the first place except from a god called Shiva? The historical Buddha did not reply. That silence can be a symbol of emptiness or the state of potentiality. Its like a natural cycle of the forces of nature in equilibrium where there is really no beginning nor end. The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there something rather than nothing? >From Terry's Column{Sungag/Zen Pursuer.org} ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. ------------------------------ Message: 26 Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:10:04 -0600 From: Damien Broderick Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302020442.023b7760 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 10:38 AM 2/28/2007 -0500, someone wrote: >The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there >something rather than nothing? Good dog in heat, I get so tired of this fake question. What makes anyone suppose that "nothing" is the default physical or metaphysical condition, or even an intelligible construct? Nobody has ever seen "nothing", just the displacement of one something from here to there or even out of sight, leaving behind another something. Get over it. If the question is "why are there gradients rather than universal smoothness?" there are answers available. Damien Broderick ------------------------------ Message: 27 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 01:15:06 -0800 (PST) From: The Avantguardian Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Critical and Positive Thinking To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <616154.8085.qm at web60523.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 --- citta437 at aol.com wrote: > The question remains in our universe of thoughts, > why is there > something rather than nothing? OM. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." -Mark Twain _________________________________________________________________________ ___________ Food fight? Enjoy some healthy debate in the Yahoo! Answers Food & Drink Q&A. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545367 ------------------------------ Message: 28 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 21:23:13 +1100 From: "Stathis Papaioannou" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 3/2/07, Anna Taylor wrote: --- Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > >e.g. you don't remember being 40 when you are 20. It > >is like imagining that you swap places with George > >Bush: if you remember being you when you are him then > >something interesting has happened, but if you > >instantaneously swap over his body and mind for your > >body and mind, then no-one will notice any > >difference, and in fact it could have happened while > >you read the last sentence. > > Memory plays a huge function between how many things > one remembers as being a positive or negative > "interesting things that happen". Do you have a > philosophy as to why many people choose to keep in > their memory all the negative "interesting things that > happen" instead of the positive? It has partly to do with mood and personality. Depressed people tend to remember and ruminate about all the negative things, or view neutral or even positive things in a negative way. Cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressant medication help to change this way of thinking. Manic people, on the other hand, are the opposite: they dismiss bad things and turn everything into a cause for optimism. Mood-stabilising and antipsychotic medication is the usual treatment for mania. >I probably shouldn't spoil a good story with > >philosophy, but there is no difference between living > >your life forward and living your life in reverse, > >provided that each experience is exactly the same at > >each moment in each case.. > > I enjoyed your example but i'm not really clear by > what you mean. Could you explain? Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but they could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without being provided with external information, when or for how long your program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate of your implementation. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/4119a7c5/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 29 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 11:48:04 +0100 From: Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <20070302104804.GO31912 at leitl.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:23:13PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be > seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but they > could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were But you would have to run the computation, to compute the sequence of trajectory frames before you can start reshuffling anything. > part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any > point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another > computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without No problem, as long you have a last state to resume from, which continues the trajectory. > being provided with external information, when or for how long your > program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether > the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your How can you compute things out of sequence? The nearest analogon is hash Life (building a hash table of recursive light cones, using the fact that conformation distribution is very far from random, which allows very large speedups, at least on older sequential), and I'm not at all sure what this cause to in-world embedded observers (Life is an all-purpose computer). If you're a process, and you do some fancy nonlinear things in the trajectory computation, even though the target state is the same, I'm not buying the first-person observation is ok. > program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate of > your implementation. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/ed95c4a4/attachment-0001.bin ------------------------------ Message: 30 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 22:16:14 +1100 From: "Stathis Papaioannou" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Suppose there are two programs: program A is my life on 1st March 2007 and program B is my life on 2nd March 2007. Granted, the programmer needs to know all sorts of details about my past life before he can write the programs, and in particular he has to know what is going into program A before he can write program B, but we assume that he has done his job properly. Now here I am, and it's the 2nd of March by my calendar, so it must be program B that is running. I certainly remember yesterday as being the 1st of March, but does this give me any information at all as to whether program A was run yesterday, has not yet been run, is being run simultaneously on a separate machine or process, or any details at all about its implementation? Stathis Papaioannou On 3/2/07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:23:13PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be > > seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but > they > > could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were > > But you would have to run the computation, to compute the sequence > of trajectory frames before you can start reshuffling anything. > > > part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any > > point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another > > computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without > > No problem, as long you have a last state to resume from, which > continues the trajectory. > > > being provided with external information, when or for how long your > > program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether > > the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your > > How can you compute things out of sequence? The nearest analogon is > hash Life (building a hash table of recursive light cones, using the > fact that conformation distribution is very far from random, which > allows very large speedups, at least on older sequential), and I'm > not at all sure what this cause to in-world embedded observers (Life > is an all-purpose computer). > > If you're a process, and you do some fancy nonlinear things in > the trajectory computation, even though the target state is the same, > I'm not buying the first-person observation is ok. > > > program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate > of > > your implementation. > > -- > 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 > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFF6ADkdbAkQ4sp9r4RAlC7AKCRLB0Z3+9/q7BDGEEjN+zTEYCxlACeJrMQ > ttLOn51tcw1jL518Dgq3LJk= > =aAFG > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > 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: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/d74d2190/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 31 Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:31:05 +0100 (MET) From: "Anders Sandberg" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <1107.163.1.72.81.1172838665.squirrel at webmail.csc.kth.se> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Damien Broderick wrote: > At 10:38 AM 2/28/2007 -0500, someone wrote: >>The question remains in our universe of thoughts, why is there >>something rather than nothing? > > Good dog in heat, I get so tired of this fake question. What makes > anyone suppose that "nothing" is the default physical or metaphysical > condition, or even an intelligible construct? I often ponder why there is something rather than everything. My usual answer is the anthropic principle, but outside our neat little domain lies all the other Tegmark Level 4 possibilities. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat End of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 42, Issue 2 ******************************************* ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. From citta437 at aol.com Fri Mar 2 14:50:11 2007 From: citta437 at aol.com (citta437 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:50:11 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nihilism Message-ID: <8C92AF136C80689-15FC-7393@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> ""Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." -Mark Twain ______________ Hi, Stuart, I am one of Mark Twain's fan so to speak but the above quote sounds so unlike his wisdom/the understanding of the human behavior. Everyone suffers in this world due to such ignorance {nihilistic thought/beliefs}. When you harm yourself by your behavior, you and others suffer too. Terry's Column at Sungag.Buddhism.org ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. From moses2k at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 20:26:21 2007 From: moses2k at gmail.com (Chris Petersen) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 14:26:21 -0600 Subject: [extropy-chat] Metaphysical construct In-Reply-To: <8C92AF4C3174813-15FC-74EC@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> References: <8C92AF4C3174813-15FC-74EC@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <3aff9e290703021226m571dd4a1i2782253367bf4d3d@mail.gmail.com> On 3/2/07, citta437 at aol.com wrote: > > > Hi, this metaphysical construct arises from a hungry mind {a > philosophical mind} due to interactive processes, an exchange of > information. > > If Transhumanism is a philosophy, it is a thought bordering to a belief > of immortality/eternalism. I'm not saying that thought of immortality > is right or wrong. Humans feel a need and a Transhumanist thinks this > belief can fulfill that need if so then it can slide into > dogmatism/fanaticism. > > However if its not a religion, as some say, because it is open to > critical thinking and to scientific process of investigation why add > more thoughts or philosophy in its pursuit of immortality rather than > using the energy/funding to the advancement of science? > > REgards, > > Terry {Terry's Column in Zen Buddhism.org} > > > Speaking of dogmatism... -Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/affcbe21/attachment.html From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 21:18:05 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:18:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Nihilism In-Reply-To: <8C92AF136C80689-15FC-7393@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <558643.15629.qm@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- citta437 at aol.com wrote: > "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at > least I have always > so > regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting > with it, it is I who > suffers, > not the state." -Mark Twain > ______________ > > Hi, Stuart, I am one of Mark Twain's fan so to speak > but the above > quote sounds so unlike his wisdom/the understanding > of the human > behavior. Everyone suffers in this world due to such > ignorance > {nihilistic thought/beliefs}. When you harm yourself > by your behavior, > you and others suffer too. I am certainly not a nihilist, Terry, but if I see Mark Twain, I will pass it on. Incidently, suffering gets a bad rap from Buddhists in general. Without suffering there is little impetus for progress. It is the hungry that plant crops, the thirsty that dig wells, and the desirous that go to work and grow the economy. Without Samsara there could be no Dharma. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." -Mark Twain ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/ From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 21:33:01 2007 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:33:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [extropy-chat] something rather than nothing In-Reply-To: <000501c75cfe$8ea4c4c0$45921f97@archimede> Message-ID: <588058.48987.qm@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> --- scerir wrote: > citta437: > > The question remains in our universe of thoughts, > > why is there something rather than nothing? > > Avantguardian: > > OM. > > Odyssey of the Mind? > Oh Man? Hi Seraphino, It was my answer to a self-professed Zen Buddhist's question about the meaning of existence. OM as in "Om mani padme hum" a Buddhist mantra. Which is the same OM that is also the first word in all of the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads. It is the sound form of the generative principle of the universe and the shortest answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" > > Anders: > > I often ponder why there is something > > rather than everything. Then next shortest explanation is that the big bang seems to demonstrate that *nothing* is incredibly unstable. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." -Mark Twain ____________________________________________________________________________________ Want to start your own business? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index From jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com Fri Mar 2 23:22:13 2007 From: jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com (Jose Cordeiro) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 15:22:13 -0800 (PST) Subject: [extropy-chat] 2007 Tech Museum Awards Call for Nominations In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20070302181000.03dd7df0@igc.org> Message-ID: <20070302232213.57961.qmail@web32801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> The Tech Museum Awards is currently seeking nominations for innovators from around the world who are using technology to benefit humanity. The Tech Awards is an international awards program honoring individuals and organizations that are applying technology to benefit humanity. Twenty-five Laureates will be honored at a Gala event in Silicon Valley, CA, and five Laureates will share a cash prize of $250,000 USD. The deadline for nominations is March 26, 2007. Nominations may be submitted online at www.techawards.org. Self nominations are accepted and encouraged. We invite you to forward this message to your network of contacts to encourage nominations from around the world. If you would like any further information, please feel free to contact me. Thank you in advance for helping us recognize innovators who are making the world a better place. Sincerely, The Tech Museum Awards Staff Tech Museum Awarding $250,000 in Cash Prizes Global Call For Nominations of Innovators Using Technology to Benefit Humanity Nomination Deadline: March 26, 2007 www.techawards.org The Tech Museum Awards is a unique and prestigious program that honors and awards innovators from around the world who use technology to benefit humanity in the categories of: Education Equality Economic Development Environment Health Reward those making a difference and nominate today. A simple nomination form can be found at www.techawards.org. Self-nominations are accepted and encouraged. Individuals, nonprofit organizations, and companies are all eligible. Program details, including judging criteria, can be found at The Tech Museum Awards website listed above. Each year, 25 Laureates are honored at a gala dinner, invited to participate in press and media coverage, and introduced to a network of influential advisors. An inspirational and unforgettable event, the black-tie celebration will be held at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose , California , on November 7, 2007 . One Laureate in each category will be granted a $50,000 cash prize. Gillian Caldwell of WITNESS, 2003 Laureate in the Knight Ridder Equality award category and cash prize recipient, called The Tech Museum Awards "...a truly remarkable program that has given WITNESS acclaim for using technology to document human rights abuses. I was deeply honored to be recognized along with 24 other innovators from around the world who are working to improve human life through technology. The exposure generated from receiving this award and the $50,000 cash prize will surely lead to expanded services, awareness, and improved solutions for ending violations of human rights." We encourage you to forward this email to any contacts you have that may be interested in nominating a candidate for this award. Thank you for your support. Tech Awards Partners & Sponsors PRESENTING SPONSOR IN ASSOCIATION WITH GLOBAL OUTREACH PARTNERS AWARD SPONSORS ENVIRONMENT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION HEALTH KATHERINE M. SWANSON EQUALITY AWARD The Swanson Foundation GLOBAL HUMANITARIAN -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070302/035ff49e/attachment.html From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Mar 2 23:57:01 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 10:57:01 +1100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse In-Reply-To: <62c14240703020720x777237d8y10d9d6226247101f@mail.gmail.com> References: <299149.28706.qm@web37214.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20070302104804.GO31912@leitl.org> <62c14240703020720x777237d8y10d9d6226247101f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 3/3/07, Mike Dougherty wrote: On 3/2/07, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Suppose there are two programs: program A is my life on 1st March 2007 > and > > program B is my life on 2nd March 2007. Granted, the programmer needs to > > know all sorts of details about my past life before he can write the > > programs, and in particular he has to know what is going into program A > > before he can write program B, but we assume that he has done his job > > properly. Now here I am, and it's the 2nd of March by my calendar, so it > > must be program B that is running. I certainly remember yesterday as > being > > the 1st of March, but does this give me any information at all as to > whether > > program A was run yesterday, has not yet been run, is being run > > simultaneously on a separate machine or process, or any details at all > about > > its implementation? > > Suppose your life/program is represented as a high dimension manifold, > then it would be possible to compute a given moment by selecting a > point this object's the surface. The memory/state information would > be relative to that point, but not necessarily require iterative > calculation. > > I've thought about this using the frames of a film - each 1/24 of a > second contains stateful information about it's placement in the > sequence. For a movie you know well enough, you could probably > resequence a random pile of film clips from these clues (within some > threshold of accuracy: 1/24 of a second doesn't allow a great deal of > variation from frame to frame) There is a crucial difference between an external observer resequencing and an internal observer resequencing. The external observer could do it but it would take a lot of knowledge and effort, and as you suggest the smaller the time slices the less difference between them and the more difficult to place them in order. The internal observer, on the other hand, does not have this problem. No matter how small the time slices and how thoroughly shuffled, subjectively OM2 cannot help but feel that it follows OM1 and precedes OM3. One very thorough way of doing the shuffling is to have a computer generate all programs via a Universal Dovetailer. If the computer runs long enough, it will generate OM1, OM2 and OM3 and even though this is completely useless for an external observer - they are hidden in the background randomness - the internal observer will still experience OM1, OM2, OM3 occurring as if arising in what we consider the usual manner. One complication is that the UD will generate not only OM1, OM2, OM3 but every possible variation. Thus OM1 could experience as next moment OM2.1, OM2.2, OM2.3... each of which will have a distinct measure, or subjective probability. The effect of this is that although the UD is perfectly deterministic from the point of view of an external observer, from the point of view of the internal observer his future is indeterminate. In form, this matches the branchings in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070303/39c51128/attachment.html From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Mar 3 00:21:17 2007 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 11:21:17 +1100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nihilism In-Reply-To: <8C92AF136C80689-15FC-7393@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> References: <8C92AF136C80689-15FC-7393@FWM-D08.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: